Chapter 1: You're a Scientist, Henry
Henry Porter was a normal ten year old boy, though he had an odd, pinprick-shaped scar on his forearm. Raised by his magically talented aunt and uncle, who spent a lot of time casting hexes and jinxes on him for things he did not do, Henry hoped that he would one day manifest accidental magic like his cousin Dougie, who had already figured out how to levitate small objects, mostly at his head.
One day, however, a letter came in the mail, which was odd, because it was not delivered properly by owl, as letters were supposed to be delivered. Henry grit his teeth together when he heard his aunt's shrill voice call out his name from the magically enlarged front hallway.
He poked his head out of the tiny room that was more storage closet than proper living space and stared at the precisely typed writing on the envelope.
The letter was addressed to him.
Aunt Chrysanthemum pulled out her wand, dangled the offending letter from the tips of her fingers like a particularly odiferous garden gnome and incinerated it.
"Hey! That was mine!" Henry cried, scowling at her.
Still more letters came, all delivered by a strange small man wearing a mailman uniform. The Dirtleys scoffed at the audacity of a mailman coming to a magical home, but no matter what they did, the mailman would not stop delivering the letters.
Finally, one day, the doorbell rang. Uncle Verne answered the door wearing his best pointed wizarding hat, his walrus-like mustache heaving from the effort of getting up from his chair.
"Listen you!" he snarled as Henry poked his nose out from his tiny room under the staircase. "You will stop this terrible….mundane way of delivering the post! It's simply...not done!"
With that, he slammed the door on the old man, who Henry saw wiggling his mustache back and forth curiously before the door shuddered on its hinges and was locked by a particularly strong ward.
Finally, Uncle Verne got so angry about the repeated delivery of letters that he Apparated the entire family, including Henry, to a small cottage in the middle of nowhere on a tiny deserted island.
One day, they heard a strange flapping noise in the air, and Henry looked out the window, not believing what he was seeing.
A giant helicopter hovered in the air above the cottage, and the small man descended from a wiggly ladder.
"Nothing stops the mail!" he said victoriously as the Dirtley groaned.
It was then that the man, Mr. Onestein, told Henry the truth.
"Your parents did not die in a freak magical storm," he said gravely, "They were scientists, and so are you. You see that scar on your arm? That's from the experimental vaccination they used on you to defeat a seriously deadly virus that was being injected in children by the unscrupulous Dr. Morty, who believed that he could create immortal life through the proper recombination of virii."
"How dare you talk of empiricism!" Aunt Chrysanthemum shrieked, covering Dougie's ears. "My son has never been touched by your disgusting vaccines and he is as healthy as a horse!"
"Madam, if I may be so bold, perhaps he would be slightly less horse-sized if you stopped feeding him so much," Mr. Onestein said, looking over his glasses at the obese blond boy who was in the process of stuffing yet another cookie into his mouth. "Though, it's quite possible it could be an endocrine disorder. Have you considered taking him to a doctor?"
Uncle Verne went scarlet and nearly cast an Unforgivable, so Henry went off with Mr. Onestein, whose helicopter apparently had something called "autopilot" that he'd salvaged from his computer when he'd been expelled from the Academy for trying to create an artificial intelligence system.
"I must say, I do have quite a fondness for Internet trolls. They're quite harmless if you know how to handle them," he admitted, winking a wrinkled blue eye, as Henry wondered if said trolls were a newly-discovered species. He hoped that they were small.
Henry touched the small pinprick scar on his forearm and grinned, thinking about how he would finally see the exclusive science academy that his parents had attended and follow in their footsteps.
"Where are we going?" Henry asked, as they flew off into the sunset, nervously looking back out the window every so often and hoping that the Dirtleys weren't trying to follow them on brooms.
"Why, we're going to the Academia Scientifica, my dear boy," Mr. Onestein said, smoothing his wild white mane, which just stuck back up after he was done, "but first, we need to get you a computer with wifi and a lab coat."
"A...what?" Henry blinked. "...and a what?"
"Don't worry, you'll see once we get to Fry's Electronics."
Henry's belly rumbled with hunger, and as he sat back in the plush helicopter seat, he wondered if fried electronics would be tasty.