Chapter 1: Here comes the sun
Cynthia Von Doom relaxed in her brand new kitchen sipping from a cup of tea with just a pinch, well alright, a generous amount of scotch. She sat on a chair admiring the modern technological marvel that were the cooking appliances that surrounded her. She was particularly enthralled by the burnished steel front of the electric oven and the milky white door of the refrigerator. And of course there was the washing machine, oh marvel of marvels, which could do by itself what usually took a whole morning of arduous and exhausting effort. The salesman had vowed on his own mother's grave that she'd never have to use a washing board again. Yes it truly was a modern marvel of luxury.
She'd burn it all down in an instant, just to get her Werner back.
She felt the all too familiar grief brought up by old memories, clutching at her heart like cold, icy fingers, threatening to overwhelm her. No, she was Cynthia Von Doom and she was made of sterner stuff, she would be strong, if only for Victor.
The memory of her only child helped to dispel the terrible images that her husband's fate at the hands of the baron conjured. Yet, her gloomy mood was exchanged not with calm, but anxiety, when she realized that the boy had been missing for a while now. Where had that rascal gotten to?
She stood and walked out the kitchen into the house's backyard, the moment she set foot outside, the sound of power tools coming from her shed gave away her son's location.
She walked towards the rickety structure, initially it had been a mere wooden cupboard for storing tools: it had been expanded by successive additions until it had become a fully functional workshop. Cynthia opened the door and saw the apple of her eye, her eleven year old son, working with a rotary saw on a piece of complex metal tubing.
"Victor, what are you doing?" she screamed over the din of the power tools.
The boy gave no indication of having heard and continued working on the piece of metal he was cutting until he was satisfied with it. Only then did he put down the saw and turned around while pulling his safety goggles off his eyes and letting them rest on his forehead.
"Putting the finishing touches on my magnetic containment unit, mother." And with that he turned around again, pulled the heavy duty goggles back over his eyes, grabbed an acetylene torch and resumed his work, "I expect it to be finished today."
"Oh, okay, just try not to make too much noise, we don't want the neighbours complaining; again."
"Science can occasionally be a noisy mistress mother, And I refuse to cater to the whim of simpletons who fail to recognize the sounds of my workshop symbolize the march of progress."
"Alright Victor but, please, try to avoid any further explosions this time. I don't want to deal with the police; again." She said, saddling the last word with a weary tone that was meant to convey just how displeased she would be if that indeed actually happened.
"I assure you mother, that incident was due to a completely unpredictable error, my calculations were perfectly accurate, the detonation was the result of faulty manufacturing processes over which I had no control."
"Very well Victor, just, don't lose yourself in your work, we're having tea in an hour. Don't make me come fetch you," and because the universe has somewhat of an unhealthy fetish for rules of three she finished the sentence with another, "again."
"Don't worry mother, I expect to be done within that time period," the boy said while soldering the metal tubing before him.
Cynthia sighed and after closing the workshop's door walked back to the kitchen. The boy could be a handful, but there was no denying his intelligence. What had that doctor called it, a 'polymath' was it? Whatever the term, Victor was a gifted child, before he was two he'd taught himself to read and now he was devouring college level textbooks about things called 'kwon-tum' physics and mechanical engineering and anything else he could lay his hands on from the public library.
And he was always building things, tinkering with whatever caught his fancy. At first it had been cute, he'd been working with gears and clockwork, it had seemed harmless enough and she'd encouraged him, buying him a set of precision screwdrivers and the like. He'd been four then. Now Victor was working with bubbling chemicals and power tools and blowtorches and it didn't seem so harmless anymore.
She sat and resumed sipping her tea. How far away their old life seemed now. The days of travelling through the Latverian countryside on their wagons with the rest of their roma family. It seemed to her like memories of days long gone by.
It hadn't even been two years since they had been forced to flee Latveria from their failed insurrection against the baron. Her husband Werner had been arrested and identified as one of the leaders of the revolution and the baron had sworn to make all of his family suffer. Cynthia and her son had to flee their homeland, skulking through the border like criminals in the night, which to the baron's eyes they pretty much were. After a few months of wandering through Europe they'd finally found asylum in England.
It had been hard at first, settling down, finding a place for them. Money was hard to come by, but Cynthia Von Doom was a strong willed and resourceful woman, and beyond even that, she had some unusual abilities which she was able to monetize after a period of time.
For you see, Cynthia Von Doom was a witch of unusual power and talent.
Not that she really needed her powers. She'd used them at first, a mental suggestion here, a seemingly coincidental occurrence there, but once she got the ball rolling, word of mouth had got around and made her mysterious gipsy fortune-telling business a success. She told her customers vague prophecies over a crystal ball and sold colored water as love potions to lovesick men and women.
Well, there was a little bit of magic involved, like that time he'd seen a glimpse of Mr. Flax's injury in the tea leaves at the bottom of the cup he'd offered him (the crystal ball was bunk, the tea leaves was were the real fortune telling was at, but it was expected of her to have a crystal ball, so she obliged), and advised him to take a few days on holiday leave, which saved him from losing a limb when a piece of heavy machinery malfunctioned at work. Or the salve she made for poor old Henry Bailey, who suffered from a most insidious and itchy rash. Admittedly the salve had very little magic, just a mixture of wild herbs concocted under moonlight. But it still worked better than anything he could buy at the pharmacist.
Which had brought her into direct conflict with the British Ministry of Magic. Apparently, her little rash salve and other little things she made were magical enough to be considered a breach of the statute of secrecy. The accusations were ludicrous of course, but she happened to be a real witch, and she was openly telling the muggles that she was doing magic, even if technically there was no real magic involved. Things started to get heated and it seemed like she was going to face deportation, until the night one of those death eater cultists decided to sneak into Cynthia's neighbourhood with plans of executing a massive muggle culling in the name of his Dark Lord. After she was finished with him, what was left of the idiot had a new Dark Mistress to fear.
After that incident, the ministry had no desire to bring attention to the embarrassing incompetence of their aurors. So they cut Cynthia a deal. They would turn a blind eye on her gipsy fortune telling schtick and she wouldn't go to the press with her story of how an immigrant witch had stopped, on her own and without a wand, a much feared death eater and prevented a muggle massacre while the aurors sat on their thumbs.
She was finishing her tea when she heard the flap of wings approaching her kitchen, and grimaced. Probably another letter from the ministry, those busybodies just couldn't let it go and had resolved to make her life as bureaucratically difficult as possible.
To her surprise it wasn't the usual owl, but a large tawny one that landed on one of the kitchen chairs before handing over its letter. She took the letter and gave the bird of prey a piece of chicken gizzard she kept in the fridge for just such occasions. The owl hooted in appreciation before taking flight and leaving the way it came.
She looked at the letter and was dismayed when she saw the sender's seal emblazoned on the envelope.
"Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry? Oh no!" She ripped open the envelope and read the parental notice informing her that now that she was a registered resident, she was subject to the same rights and privileges as any native wizards, Including of course her child's education. The letter informed her in a gentle and friendly manner that now that her son was about to come of age, he was eligible to start his magical training at Hogwarts. The rest of the letter went on to describe the many benefits of attending such a prestigious institution but Cynthia didn't bother reading on, It was all a load of crap to her. All of a sudden the memories from her three years at Durmstrang, came back in full force. She had hated every minute of it, the sexism from being one of the very few girls there, the constant harassment from being a 'filthy mudblood', the casual way dark magic was taught and used and last but not least, the constant cold, chilling her bones everyday. If Hogwarts was anything similar, she had no intention of sending her only child to such a place.
Plus, the idea of what a fully trained Victor could do with a wand scared her.
No, she would not send her only son to a boarding school hundred of miles away so that he could learn to wave around a fancy stick and transmogrify people's hair into worms. He was much better at home, with her, learning science from the library books and…
She was interrupted from her contemplations when a frantic Victor entered the kitchen as if the devil himself was at his heels.
"Mum, take cover!"
Cynthia knew something was terribly wrong when he'd called her mum. He only did that when he was too nervous to feel embarrassed by the term. She remained sitting on her chair, perplexed, as Victor pulled her to the floor in a flying tackle.
A moment later a massive flash of light followed by a surge of incredible heat struck against her kitchen from the outside. The noise from the deflagration arrived a split second later and the windows shattered under the force of the shockwave. The explosion left her rattled for a few seconds until she collected her bearings enough to sit up and ask her son.
"Victor, was that your workshop?"
"Uhm well mum… you see; there seems to have been some sort of problem with the magnetic containment unit of my homemade fusion reactor. Quite fascinating really…"
She blinked, on second thought, a boarding school hundreds of miles away didn't seem so bad right now.
"What am I being punished for?"
"Victor, you're not being punished for anything, this is a great opportunity for you."
"I am not an idiot mother."
Cynthia pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration. "Very well, Victor, if you must know; you made a miniature sun in our backyard and then it exploded."
"I told you that wasn't my fault, the ferromagnetic qualities of the steel tubing used for the containment unit weren't up to specifications. The magnetic field destabilized and…"
"Victor, stop! You built the dam… darned thing, it was your responsibility. Even if the equipment you used wasn't up to par, it still was your fault, you should have checked it more thoroughly."
Victor mumbled something about philistines getting in the way of progress and Cynthia sighed tiredly. She knelt down to look her son in the eye.
"Victor, listen, consider this an opportunity, I know how bored you get at school, how frustrated you were because I didn't agree to send you to university, I was afraid of what it'd be like for you with such a large age difference." Cynthia's mind conjured up images of university parties full of alcohol, drugs and for some reason, a gentle looking hippy girl strumming a guitar. And smack in the middle of it all, Victor, half drunk, wearing a lampshade on his head, while somebody challenged him to build some sort of death ray within the hour.
She shuddered and smiled ingratiatingly at her son. "But look at it this way, you're going to be learning magic with children your own age."
"Children my own age are stupid mother."
"Everybody's stupid compared to you Victor." She leaned forward, hugged her little boy and kissed him on the cheeks. He made an embarrassed face at first, only to return the hug a few seconds later. "Just promise me, no more thermonuclear experiments when you're there, ok?"
Victor made a face as if she was asking him to cut off his own foot with a rusty knife, but still promised her mother in the end.
"Good, now get on that train and have a great time at school, dear."
Victor walked towards the train waiting at platform 9 and 3/4, pulling his school trunk behind him. The train that would carry him to the Hogwarts school of magic.
Cynthia kept waving all the way until he disappeared from her view through one of the train's doors. She dabbed at her eyes with a hankie from time to time.
"First time to Hogwarts dear?" asked a plump woman with a kindly face who had noticed her rather emotional state.
"Yes."
The woman smiled reassuringly. "Don't worry dear, Hogwarts is a great school, the teachers will take great care of him, No need to worry over your boy."
"Oh I'm not worried about him." Cynthia replied "I'm worried about everyone else."