Chapter 1: Grain of Sand

You all know about the proverbial grain of sand in a clock-work mechanism. Here it is not the matter of one grain, but of a handful – of drug-powder that is, but I digress a little here. So let's start from the beginning.

It was the morning of 31 October 1981, and in the apartment 2B the movers had just finished bringing the stuff of their client, a pleasant old lady named Mrs Prince, who in joyous mood was checking once more if all was in its place in her new West End apartment.

"I know what you want, I've got what you need. I'm always there if you need some speed…" (her singing with the music from the record she was listening to).

At the same time in the apartment 2C, a notorious party animal Sirius Black was waking up after having spent the previous evening getting drunk to utter stupor. Actually what woke him up had been the pain stimulus from the bracelet which signalled that his god-son Harry Potter needed to be fed.

"Who the fuck listens to Small Faces at… 11h a.m.?... What?! Already?!... Alright Harry I'll be right there!"

Now, if you wonder why the parents of young Harry had left him in the care of such questionable character, the answer is simple: they were finishing putting Fidelius Charm on their hiding place.

As Fidelius Charm is ancient, powerful and very tricky piece of soul-magic which locks and hides the secret firmly inside the heart (the soul) of the secret-keeper, which essentially makes it a very dark magic, the Wizards don't like to leave their children around where they perform the said Charm. Therefore, the Potters had left Harry in the care of Sirius so that the god-father could say good-bye to his god-son before the latter would enter the hiding place and be erased from Sirius' mind together with the rest of the only family Sirius had ever known, for Merlin knows how long, which is the reason why Sirius had felt the need for drinking.

Here Sirius performed the usual routine. After short trip to the bathroom and splashing his face with cold water, he entered his rarely used kitchen and went to the cooker. He levitated and positioned a pot on the cooker, poured the milk, made it warm, and then he conjured (to come from its place in the house) baby-food powder and mixed it with warm milk to make a sort of porridge for Harry.

This is school-example why a Wizard should not practice magic unless completely sane and sober. Because of his fogy mind creating only a generic mental picture of some whitish powder, this in turn resulted with Harry's milk not being mixed with baby-food, but with some powder coming from the apartment 2B.

The mixture behaved in the usual way, and Sirius served the porridge to Harry, who apparently enjoyed the taste and ate all of it.

I won't go into details what was exactly in the powder, suffice to say that the pleasant Mrs Prince was the grand-mother of that charming fellow Severus Snape, was maker of the true philosopher's stones and was known throughout Alteran galaxies as "Linea the Destroyer of Worlds", and that her life's work had been human enhancement and building what she called "the proper body for proper ascension". That handful of powder was pinnacle of her work. Also, the following day, while the Wizards were celebrating, the Scotland Yard was investigating gruesome execution of the team of movers.