SinghSong: yep, alchemy is going to play an important part. There are mentions in Pottermore of the alchemical process that is going to eventually make an appearance in this story. Also, Voldie's homunculus is an alchemical achievement as well - life alchemy can get really dark. Of course, Valeria is not nearly knowledgeable enough to make a new Stone or even use it, and won't be for some time.
ro781727: To misquote one of my favorite older movies; "Light side, dark side, you judge too rashly". More on the Greengrasses in chapters to follow.
adm-frb: Whoa, how did I miss that? Thanks for pointing it out. I'd make a Dumbledore joke on my few mistakes being proportionately much greater but I doubt I got the intellectual capacity to back it up (or the limited number of mistakes for that matter).
We never did see in the books how any of the muggleborn students interacted with their families. Didn't all those parents have anything to say about magic or even the downright terrifying situations their kids found themselves in? Not that Valeria's family is any more typical than Harry's was...
Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to JK Rowling. Had it belonged to me, I'd have done a far poorer job of putting in so much horror under the radar.
...
"...and then the Dark Wanker fled Hogwarts in wraith form and we won the day." Valeria finished her story and Claude very nearly choked.
"Namecalling at its worst. And from such a sweet and innocent witch, too!" her brother said with a groan. "What's the world coming to?"
"Well, Dumbledore was right in at least one thing, from what Harry shared of their conversation." She responded pensively. "Fear of the name does promote fear of its bearer. Since I couldn't find his real name anywhere, and as a human I reserve the right to name the nameless, wanker it is."
With their parents away on business for the day, the two siblings were holed up in Valeria's room discussing her first year in a magical boarding school. She'd shared a lot of it with her whole family already but some details she wouldn't trust anyone with, other than her brother. Besides, a fifteen year old nerd could understand things about magic a trained diplomat or someone in her father's line of work would not.
"I still can't believe you went to an actual dungeon crawl - inside the school, no less!" Claude exclaimed for the upteenth time.
"Why, brother dear, is that envy I hear?" she said with a grin. Spending the last few hours going through those events in minute detail had finally helped her understand what Claude saw in those games of his. Of course, she found facing actual dark wizards more on the terrifying side than fun, though she wouldn't turn down the loot. Even a hint at the secrets of everlasting life and endless wealth was something many would gleefully kill for and she had a bit more than a hint. Now, if only she knew how to use it...
"Prat!" Claude declared her and gave her a mock punch in the shoulder. Then he frowned and checked his notes. "The first trap was Hagrid's Cerberus. And both you and Harry are good friends with him?"
"Yep. He's a nice guy, for a towering half-giant." She smiled fondly. "Fascinated with monsters, but a bit naive. Doesn't see that a mild inconvenience to him would be mortal peril for most of us. Then again, our classes are not exactly safer. A minor potion mishap can melt metal, let alone flesh. A minor charms mishap can set someone on fire."
"Uhuh." Claude said, not paying attention. "Second trap, a killer plant. That Neville boy easily recognized it, no?"
"Of course! He's the best in our year in Herbology."
"As Harry is in flying and the Weasley brat is in chess, from what your best friend told you..."
"Claude, what's up?" Valeria asked, seeing her brother's deepening frown.
"The sixth trap you beat with a simple charm and from what Harry told you, the headmaster himself gave him that invisibility cloak and told him how that mirror worked." He paused again, his expression that of intense concentration. "Do you see what I see?"
"You can't mean..."
"The traps were pretty much tailored to your group's abilities. In a game we do it all the time to give players a challenge but still expecting them to win in the end." He shook his head. "I have no idea why your teachers would do that to you. In fact, I wonder if you and the girls were supposed to be there at all."
"Oh come on! Now you're talking out of your backside." she protested, jumping off her seat. "We really helped. You think the other three would have managed without us?"
"Did you, really?" Claude wondered. "Had Neville not come to find you, he'd be there from the start. He'd have told them how to get through the killer plant. Harry would have gotten the key, as before. An uninjured Weasley could have won the game with only three pieces to protect, and a faster victory would have allowed them to proceed before the troll recovered. And the fire trap... maybe it was an honest riddle. After all, Quirrel went through it without melting the archway." He shook his head. "All things considered, you and the girls made it all harder, not easier."
Valeria was speechless for the first time in recent memory. It couldn't have been a huge set-up like Claude described, could it? In retrospect, it did appear as if everything fit that assumption but... why would anyone do that? Approaching senility though Dumbledore might be, he wouldn't endanger students. Unless... what if he'd wanted the Stone endangered, so as to convince the Flamels of the need to destroy it? And not make a new one as well, while their supplies of Elixir lasted... Nicolas' letter had hinted he could have recreated it but was persuaded not to. Did the Stone pose that much of a threat to the headmaster's worldview? If yes, Valeria had to be very, very careful from now on.
"I... it seems you're right, Claude." she admitted, thinking all events of the past ten months under a new light.
"I'm always right, sis." He claimed pompously. "We get our brains from the same source you and I - and I have a few years on you."
"As if that means anything!" she huffed, crossing her arms. "Everybody knows girls mature much faster than boys."
"Prat!"
"You know what?" she asked as their laughter subsided. "Enough with the heavy stuff, let's do something fun!"
"An excellent idea, sis." He agreed, gathering all his notes. "How about you help me turn your impossible school into a gaming scenario?"
The young blonde witch groaned. It was going to be a long day.
...
"Sit."
It was an order, delivered in a tone that brooked no argument, so Valeria complied. The short but wide-shouldered man with the short black hair, neat beard, and eyes like two pieces of flint stared at her from behind his austere mahogany desk. The room around them, a small library full of old and expensive but unopened tomes, authentic Renaissance paintings, miniature models of machine-assembled DaVinci designs, and a state-of-the art computer station, would press on any visitor with the weight of its age, tradition, sophistication and expense, often putting them on the edge with its utter lack of personality or emotion; an apparently perfect reflection of its owner.
"Explain."
The man, his hard, anvil-like, many-lined face giving the barest hints of anger and distaste, indicated the tomes occupying his desk with a sharp gesture. The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts, A Brief Overview of Modern Wizarding Britain, The Charter of the International Confederation of Wizards, Hogwarts: a History. Valeria considered carefully how to follow the second order. She'd expected something like this confrontation for over a week now - ever since she'd gifted her questioner those very books. After all, it paid to be on the good side of one's own father.
"It's all true, daddy." she confirmed. "Or as much of the truth as history and political books ever are."
"An international coalition with millions of members all over the world that nobody has ever heard of?" Behind his harsh exterior, Owen Campbell loved his daughter very much. He might not understand the strange gift she called "magic" but he'd fully supported her decision to understand and develop her strange abilities. The small glimpse she'd gifted him with the year before had proven extremely useful after all. But what he did not suffer lightly was foolishness or being made a fool, not even for his princess. He'd considered the matter carefully, did a bit of research and come to the conclusion the number of "wizards" and "witches" couldn't be very high. A few hundred perhaps, certainly no more than a couple thousand. Any more and their movements alone would have caused ripples in society that could be observed; economic and social ones at the very least, even if they entirely avoided public displays of their "magic". No matter how good the conspiracy, the larger the number of members, the more mistakes they would make; the laws of averages and unintended consequences played no favorites. Millions of witches and wizards? Even higher numbers of magical creatures? That his daughter believed him so gullible was infuriating.
"Daddy, I went to school by train." she said, giving him a strange look. It wasn't worry, or anger, or exasperation, or even fear of her hoax being discovered. Whatever it was, he didn't like it much.
"Yes, what of it?" he demanded sharply.
"A six-hundred-mile trip, on uninterrupted train tracks." she continued as if making a point. She didn't give him time to think about it though. "And those train tracks? There were in no map of Britain I could get my hands on. The portion of King's Cross station we departed from? Not only it isn't there on any building plan but if you measure the station's external dimensions, you can't account for it - I checked. Of course, that's not very hard to imagine."
"How so?"
"It's a magical space, like this purse." She pointed at her own pouch hanging from her belt. "If a cheap trinket can fit two hundred pounds of baggage in something that fits in the palm of my hand, what could be done with as much work as a construction company would put in a building?"
Valeria could see her father was having problems coming to terms with what she was saying. That was all right; despite having grown using minor magic as far back as she could remember, she'd needed months in a magical environment to grasp just how extensive magic's capabilities were and she was far younger and less set in her ways than her father. He was trying to rationalize things, trying to fit them in his previous worldview; it was what adults did. Fortunately, she'd come prepared for just that; she opened her purse and took out of it a pewter cauldron, a ceramic cauldron, a thin metal rod, a common copper ring, and a long piece of parchment.
"Here daddy." she said, taking the smallest drop of liquid she could out of the ceramic cauldron and dropping it to her forearm. Wincing a bit at the pain, she saw a fairly impressive boil already growing. "This is a simple corrosive potion; it will melt through dead organic matter and deform the living in seconds. That's a lot faster than natural chemical reactions and nothing mundane would discriminate between living and dead matter like that. And now, watch this." She used the same silver spoon to drip a good dozen drops of the contents of the pewter cauldron on her inflamed and bloated forearm. The swelling subsided rapidly and in about a minute nothing was left behind than unblemished skin.
"Magic can heal in seconds what in our hospitals could take months. But there's a lot more it can do." She wore the ring then, and concentrated. The color-changing charms she'd enchanted it with altered her hair into a soft brown, darkened her skin by several shades and turned her eyes into a dull grey. That done, she took up the metal rod and looked at her gobsmacked father.
"The safe is still behind that professional copy of the Mona Liza, isn't it?" Without waiting for an answer, she walked up to the far wall, pushed the painting aside to reveal the thick metal door and tapped it once with the rod. The most sophisticated lock money could buy for a safe that size clicked open and Valeria now had access to the safe's interior. She helped herself to several bricks of large-denomination notes, promptly disappeared them into her purse, and returned to her seat. "There, robbery managed. I could raid just about any house or business you could name and as long as they were empty I would never be caught. What's the point of cameras and alarms if one can be in and out before security arrives, nobody can find the loot however well they search, and the thief's appearance changes on a whim?" She shrugged, returned the money to her father and passed on the ring and rod as well.
She gave her father a minute to digest the implications, then indicated her tools. "In the wizarding world, these are just parlor tricks. The unlocking and color-changing charms are some of the first we learn as first-years; every wizard knows them. It took me a couple weeks' worth of work to enchant the ring and rod with them and the only reason I did is that the ministry of magic can detect spells near underage wizards but not magic items. The potions were an hour's work each and I'm giving the boil-cure to Claude. Maybe it'll help him get a girlfriend." She finally gave the parchment she was holding to her father.
"This is a list of the core Hogwarts curriculum, the basics as taken from my textbooks in Potions, Transfiguration, Charms and Defense. The good things are towards the end." She nodded at the bottom of the list containing the hundred most common spells and potions taught to British wizards. "Sixth year has a potion that transforms you into someone else for hours, a potion that compels anyone to answer questions truthfully, charms that erase and modify memories, charms that repel specific people, objects or effects according to the caster's intention, how to conjure and vanish objects and animals, a curse that can turn a wall to dust and a shield that can defend from such attacks. Seventh year has charms to turn you invisible, potions that can make people believe you're their best friend or lover, transfiguration that can animate statues to do your bidding or turn people into animals, a blasting curse that could level this house, and enchantments to protect entire buildings or areas."
Owen Campbell was not a stupid man. There was always a chance his daughter was pulling his leg but he doubted it. If eleven year olds were taught skills that would make them a veritable nightmare for normal authorities to deal with, older wizards being capable of what he'd read in the books Valeria had given him was not out of the question. That Grindelwald fellow and his supposed influence on the second world war was what had made him doubt everything in the first place; how could one man have so much power over the world at the time? But if the list of what wizards and witches were taught in that school of theirs was accurate...
"So this secret war really happened?" he asked, flipping through the pages of The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts. "The whole country owe their lives to this Boy-Who-lived fellow?"
"I am not sure." his princess said. "The whole thing is very fishy. The wizard who stopped the previous Dark lord from conquering Europe pretty much by himself? He's our headmaster. He also happens to be the Chancellor in the wizard's parliament, our representative to the International Confederation of Wizards - and its elected leader, not to mention he's widely believed to be the most powerful sorcerer in the world." That same strange look plagued her face and Owen recognized it now - it was remorse. "That's why I've been trying to explain the magic world to you, daddy. There's wars and terrorists and medieval politics on top of the magic; I needed some help to working through everything."
"Don't worry, princess. We'll get to the bottom of this." Owen reassured her but wasn't any more certain of it than she was. He knew war; it was his job, after all. But a war where even civilians could hit as hard as tanks and had unlimited mobility and access to all sorts of tricks... no wonder this Voldemort fellow resorted to terrorism. And the good guys looked like a personality cult to him - the books treated Dumbledore as if he could do no wrong. The whole situation seemed keyed to blow up spectacularly at any moment, taking the whole country with it.
And his daughter was caught in the middle...