The Daily Prophet

-Family Notices

Article by Sienna Caine

--Daughter Cassanova Eve Morency was born today of parents Cassiopeia and Leo Morency. Cassanova was born pre-mature (ten weeks) and is in critical condition. She was born paraplegic (paralysed from the waist down), her lungs were not fully developed, and she has white hair. The healers do not believe she will make it through the night. If she does, she will immediately be sent home, as healers say there isn't much they can do for her, and so she can spend her remaining time with her parents and older brother, Cepheus. Healers say it will be a miracle if she makes it through the next week.

It's a wonderful life, eh?

Cassanova, or Nova as she preferred to be called later on, did indeed make it through the night. The healers said it was a miracle when she made it to a year old in stable condition. The hospital provided her with a wheel chair, which came in handy later, when she was old enough to reach the wheels.

Nova had an older brother, Cepheus, who was a Squibb. Cassiopeia, a pure blood witch, and cousin of Mrs Black, was a die-hard pureblood. No Squibb's for her, or cripples for that matter. But she needed someone to continue the family line, unfortunately there was no known cure for being a Squibb, which led Cassiopeia to send Nova to an experimental medical institution when she was three, and keep hoping that one day Cepheus would just come out and say it was a practical joke.

Cassiopeia gave her permission to the institution to do whatever experiments they wanted on her daughter, so long as they 'fixed her,' she said. Meaning making Nova able to walk, of course.

None of the experiments to make her walk ever worked, however some of them were very dangerous and could have killed her.

Then when she was five, and still at the institution, something happened which made her life harder then it already was. She was back in critical condition from an experiment gone wrong, when the institution got a letter from Cassiopeia. She had just given birth to a baby girl, named Andromeda.

Cassiopeia was an awful woman, and apparently as heartless as she seemed, because despite knowing her other daughter was in critical condition she told the institution that she would not be paying for the experiments to make her daughter walk any longer, so then the institution could not use Nova anymore, and sent her home, without being able to help stabilize her.

Cassiopeia, however, had finally gotten a successful heir out of her new daughter, who had nothing wrong with her. So Nova and Cepheus were kicked out, and would have died on the streets but for their Aunt Lucinda, who had gotten shunned from the family years ago for her role as a muggle rights activist.

Years passed at Aunt Lucinda's house, she had gotten a Healer in to stabilize Nova, who had gotten a new wheel chair. It was a very convenient wheelchair, unless muggles were around, because Aunt Lucinda had put in a few special features.

This wheel chair could be controlled normally or by joystick, there were two of them on the arm of Novas' chair. One controlled direction and speed, the other was for one of the chairs special features. After going to several places that Nova could not get into due to her chair, Aunt Lucinda made sure this chair could fly.

There were only two other features, one was that it, and the person in it, could go through walls, so Nova got access to places muggles also went without breaking wizard law by flying through the door in front of the Muggles.

The other one, was that, after a few horrible muggle children, the chair was modified to shock anyone who kicked it. It was not a pleasant experience for the kicker who, more often then not, went running after their mother crying about the mean girl who had electrocuted them.

Nova made it past the healers predicted year, then the five years, then ten, until they finally admitted that there was little danger of her dying from being born in such a bad condition anymore. She made it through Hogwarts, with barely more then the average number of trips to the Hospital Wing, though during the winter she found it harder to breathe because of the cold weather.

At fourteen years old, right before her fourth year, she got tired of the looks she got from having completely white hair, so she dyed it pitch black. Except for her bangs, which she kept white, so her friends would still recognize her.

After Hogwarts, Nova got an internship in the Department of Mysteries, the department she had been aiming to get in since her third year. Aunt Lucinda, who worked in the Rights for Magical Creatures Department, had a friend who was an Unspeakable (a worker in the Department of Mysteries), this friend owed Aunt Lucinda a favour, so he talked to the department head to get Nova an internship there, under the understanding that she wouldn't do any atrocities and make him look bad for recommending her.

"This door is always kept locked. Always. Only the department head knows how to get in. In this room, is a force that is both more terrible then death, and more wonderful then human intelligence, or the forces of nature, and any number of other things. It is perhaps one of the most mysterious things we study here, it's a power that everyone - except the most horribly self-mutilated - posses. And at the risk of sounding terribly corny and completely ruining my little speech, I will just say that it is the power that muggles have associated with the heart all these years."

It was orientation for the new interns. Nova was one of them, another was a middle aged man with greying hair and a humpback, the other one was a woman slightly younger then him with a heart shaped face and curly red hair. The assistant to the head of the Department of Mysteries was leading the interns around the Department, giving them a tour. Her name was Ms Chambers. She had one blind eye, muggle tattoos occupying almost all her visible skin, black and purple hair, and an eccentric behaviour.

They were in the room that immediately followed the door entering the Department of Mysteries. When the three interns had entered, alone, to find that the room spun around, the flames from the candles on the wall burning their retinas, and effectively making sure they could never find their way out, well, they had been nervous to say the least. Then, enter Ms Chambers. The room she had come from was an eerie blue-ish colour, and it was sort of... glittering, but before anyone could really see what was in there, the door had been closed.

"The rest of the rooms, you will get a less in-depth introduction to," she continued, "but we think it best to be more specific about the locked room, to get rid of any curiosity about it. Only the very highly ranked Unspeakables ever go in that room. All the other rooms, you will lean about in time, provided you don't get fired too quickly." said Ms Chambers with a half-smile as she led them to another door. The wall had spun once again when Ms Chambers had entered the room, it didn't seem to matter to her which door they went through.

The room they entered looked like an amphitheatre and the other interns and Ms Chambers walked over the benches toward the middle of the room, Nova stayed on the top landing, even with her wheelchairs flight mechanism it wouldn't be easy to balance on one of those stairs.

"This is the veil room." and Ms Chambers left it at that. It was easy to see why it was called that, as there was an ancient looking arch in the middle of the room with a ripped black veil hanging in it. There was a strange feeling in the room, Nova decided, as the others grouped around the veil. She could hear a sort of... whispering in it. She realized it was whispering just as the red headed intern asked:

"Whose doing that? Stop it, it's creepy."

"It's the veil." said Ms Chambers shortly.

There were no doors leading off from that room, except the one back to the entrance room, so they went back through there. The circular wall spun once again, Nova closed her eyes to spare them the streak of blue light being imprinted on them. And as she did, she wondered why the veil room had been so empty in the middle of a work day.

The next door Ms Chambers opened was a spacious room, with no particular shape. It seemed to Nova that the room had a slightly Egyptian vibe, the light was just that shade of yellow, and the air was very dry, and the climate was very hot. "This is the legends room," the walls were covered in ruins that even Nova, with her O in ancient ruins class, could not decipher. They looked to be cut into the walls, and were glowing, which is where the yellow light was coming from. In the middle of the room was a pyramid, adding to the Egyptian vibe, it was also covered in ruins.

There was another door in the legends room the room that led to was thin, but went on for a very long time, around the perimeter of the room were bookshelves. Thousands of books were in the room, there wasn't a single spot open for any more. Nova spotted The Tales of Beetle the Bard, and countless other books she had read before.

"Hey Chambers!" A man off in the distance waved at the assistant head once they had re-entered the legends room. Ms Chambers waved back at him through all the hustle and bustle that this room had. There were so many people, all of them circled around something or other, the pyramid was the only thing that was even slightly visible through the mass of bodies.

The legends room didn't have any other rooms leading off from, so the group exited back into the entrance. By the end of the trip they hadn't even made a dent in the list of rooms they had to visit, and Nova's head was spinning from all that she had already seen, there was some really amazing looking stuff. Orientation continued the next day as well, when they went through the clock room, which had a million other doors leading off from it, which resulted in orientation continuing for much longer then you would ever guess if you had just seen the entrance room.