It was raining…and he ran through it…dashing down the sidewalk in a large city, looking back every so often to see if anyone pursued. Still at a dead sprint, he burst out onto a crosswalk, cutting across a street. A horn blared and he looked to his right, seeing a car headed straight for him, neither could get out of the other's way in time.

For a moment, the world seemed to go into slow motion, the car coming straight for him, the blaring of its horn, the screech of its breaks, and the rush of his own breath. He exhaled heavily; only to notice that, despite it being summer, he could see his breath billowing in front of him, a shimmer of blue lit his vision, and the temperature around him plummeted. Around him, the rain crystallized and ice spread across the ground at his feet, instantly crossing the distance between himself and the oncoming car.

A loud bang was heard as the ice coated the tires, freezing them to the ground, the force of the sudden change in speed shredding the rubber. Now skidding in its rims, the car kept coming for only another moment before the rims themselves froze and the metal shattered. A mere second later, the car came to a stop, solidly frozen to the ground.

The world went dark, only to sharply be illuminated by a pair of oval orbs of pale blue light, the only thing visible in a vast expanse of darkness.

He looked up at the blue lights, glaring at them, "Why did you insist on showing me that again?"

A voice spoke, deep, gravely, and cold, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once, "You still have never thanked me for that, kid."

"Why would I thank you for doing yourself a favor?"

"True, I suppose, it would be quite inconvenient for you to die on me."

"Yeah yeah, that's nice…now shut up and let me sleep in peace."

"I would, but it is time for you to wake up."

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Pale blue eyes slid open, staring up at the ceiling of his room and a long sigh came out of his mouth. The sun was just cresting the horizon, shedding light into the guest room he slept in. A moment of lying in bed later, the young man rolled to the side and swung out of his bed, walking towards the bathroom.

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

"I don't care for the situation, Albus, what is the point of the ministry sending a mage to Hogwarts, it's not like he can learn our spells." A woman, with a sharply pointed hat and a stern look about her, spoke, talking to the headmaster of the school, Professor Albus Dumbledore.

"I understand your concern, Minerva, but from my conversations with Mr. Finch on the matter, it seems that he is more concerned, not with seeing that Mr. Jeremiah be in school, but to ensure that he is kept somewhere where he can be watched closely, and taught to value the things that the Wizarding World in general values. I'm sure that you have, at least, a working knowledge of the history of mages."

The woman nodded, "Yes, I am aware of how violent their history was, but this boy seems to be peaceful enough."

"Yes, that he does, but if you remember certain stories of the past, even a seemingly harmless mage is capable of great destruction when angered. And quite unlike a wizard, a skilled mage can unleash his power at a thought, not needing to draw a wand and prepare an incantation. In short, the ministry is afraid of him; his magic is untraceable by current means, and they fear that he will some day live out the same path that so many mages before him have. They sent him here so that they could know where he was at all times, and so that should something happen, he won't be out on his own."

"And you agreed to this?"

"Yes, but not for their reasons, Hogwarts is a place for underage magic users to learn how to use their powers, a difference in method of magic makes no difference to me. He is here as a student, and will be treated as such."

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

"So he froze a piece of the Black Lake to save you from falling in?"

"Yeah, he did."

"Wow, so what're you gonna do to Pole to get her back?"

"I've got some ideas I want to try mixing up."

"Oh, not going to just hex her?"

"Nah, subtlety is way more fun."

Eva sat in her usual spot at the Ravenclaw table, waiting for dinner to appear. She was interrupted from conversation with her friends as, from the faculty end of the Great Hall, Dumbledore rose to his feet and spoke, "Students, if I could have your attention for a moment…" He strode forward from his seat to where a stool sat on the raised platform, most people just then noticing the beat-up old wizard hat that sat atop it.

"As I mentioned a few days ago when talking about our new guest, Kale Jeremiah, we plan to sort him into one of the house until such time that he departs from our company. We will have him sorted in just as First Years are sorted; Kale, if you could come forward please."

All eyes snapped to the back of the room where the mage, Kale, leaned against a pillar. Without a word, he pushed off the pillar and walked forward.

Dumbledore motioned towards the stool, lifting the old hat off of it, "Please have a seat."

Kale complied and the hat was plopped on top his head.

The moment it contacted his head, the hat stirred to life, shifting slightly atop his head. For a few moments, all was silent, the students waiting for the verdict from that old hat.

Finally, it shouted out, "Best put you in…Ravenclaw!"

A moment of awkward silence passed among three of the four tables, none of the other houses having expected that decision, figuring he'd be placed in Slytherin. The Ravenclaw table too, was silent for a moment, then clapping started, from one person, but quickly spread through the table, until the usual cheering that was associated with the addition of a new house member joining quickly erupted.

A tiny smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, Kale got up from the stool and walked towards the cheering table.

For the briefest moment, Eva sat still, then she hopped up and trotted up to Kale, "Hey, come sit with us, you'd be in our year, right?"

He tilted his head to the side a little, "Fourth?"

"Yep, come on!"

The little smile spread a bit and he let himself get tugged over to where several people his age slid apart on the long benches to make room for him to sit down. For a moment, everyone around where he sat down was quiet, then Eva slipped over the bench, sitting next to him, "Everybody, this is Kale Jeremiah, Kale this is Susan Integra," a long-haired brunette with gray eyes hidden behind a pair of glasses that nodded at him from behind a book, "Michael Farris," short red-hair and dark green eyes, he waved, his mouth full of chicken leg, "and Jennifer Harrison," a short girl with blonde hair about to her shoulders and brown eyes who smiled up at him before reaching for her cup. "And if you don't remember, I'm..."

"Eva Rayburn, right?" he finished for her.

She paused a moment, then smiled, "You did remember."

He let out a little laugh, "Yeah, guess I did, anyway, nice to meet all of you."

A chorus of agreement came back from the three students.

"We're all fourth years, so we should have all the same classes together, wait...are they putting you in classes?"

"Some of `em, anything that requires magic I'm exempted from."

"So that'd be Charms, Transmogrification, Divination, and Defense Against the Dark Arts?"

"Close, but I'm still in Defense Against the Dark Arts for some reason, even though I can't use any of the magic that you do."

Eva huffed, "Well that's fine then, it's not like we actually DO any magic in that class, we just memorize things."

Kale's eyes narrowed, "A class called Defense Against the Dark Arts, and you don't put any defensive things into practice? That seems a little...dumb."

"Exactly! How in the world can we possibly hope to even pass our OWLs when we get to them, there's a practical section to them!"

The red-haired boy, Michael, cut in, "I think you're missing the point a bit there, forget OWLs, how are we going to learn to defend ourselves? Especially with all this talk about, well...You Know Who returning."

The blonde, Jennifer, spoke up, "That again? The only evidence that there is to support that is the testimony of that Harry Potter, and we all know what the Ministry has been saying, along with the Daily Prophet."

Eva cut back in, "Regardless, I've done some research, the only thing that could have killed Cedric Diggory like that is the Killing Curse. Even if it wasn't...Him, someone used that forbidden curse against Cedric, which means that there IS something out there that we need to be able to defend ourselves against."

Silence for a moment, everyone thinking that through...right up until Kale spoke, "Sorry, what's going on? What's all this about killing curses, defending, and this 'you know who'?"

Everyone stared at him, then the girl with the glasses, Susan, spoke, "You grew up around ordinary Muggles, didn't you?"

"Um, I wouldn't really call all of them ordinary, but yeah, I did."

"Then I guess you wouldn't know, sixteen years ago, before we were born, there was a dark wizard that nearly destroyed the entire wizarding society, he killed countless people, but was defeated when one of his killing curses rebounded off a baby named Harry Potter, that's the skinny kid with messy hair sitting right over there." she pointed over at the Griffindor table to where said boy was talking to his friends.

Kale nodded, "Okay, I'm following so far, big bad wizard nearly destroys everything, then gets killed by his own curse...pretty undignified way to die if ya ask me...so what's the big deal?"

The girl pushed her glasses up her nose, "Well, last year this school hosted a Wizard Tournament, Harry Potter was one of the contestants, and at the end he appeared back in the starting zone with one of the other contestants, Cedric Diggory, who had been killed by the Killing Curse, Avada Kadavra. He claimed that the Dark Lord had been reborn and had killed Cedric. And, up to now, the Ministry of Magic has been denying any possibility that He is back and have been black-balling both Potter and Professor Dumbledore."

Kale looked up at the artificial sky of the Great Hall for a moment, "I don't suppose this dark wizard's name was...ah, what was it...sounded like some kind of field rodent...Vole-something or other..."

Eva turned to look at him, "You've heard of him?"

"Only through a friend, he told me about some Dark Lord that trashed stuff up pretty bad and was the reason for some of his research."

"A friend? You were friends with a wizard growing up?"

"Well, you'd call him a Muggle, but he's a scientist...the scary kind, some of the stuff he's made still blows my mind."

"Wait, if he's a Muggle, how did he know about all of that?"

Kale shrugged, picking over the food on the table, and taking a bite of chicken, "Dunno, he always seemed to know more than he was supposed to, about everything. Once the ministry found me, he contacted me and made me promise to keep quiet about who he was though...said if his identity got out some wizard would come to try and erase his memory, then that wizard would end up getting hurt, and it'd all just go downhill from there. Maybe I'll call him up about this, see if he knows anything, it'll have to wait until I can get off Hogwarts grounds though."

"Why? Is your friend that worried about secrecy?"

"No, Muggle technology doesn't work here, and that's my way of contacting him."

Susan peeked back up from behind her book, "Muggle Technology? What kind?"

"Um, I don't actually know what it's called, he made it...went on for a while about how it was a 'portable unit transmitting exclusively to him in a secured, self-randomizing encrypted channel that would take the best cryptologist in the world a couple years to decode a single message'."

Everyone just stared at him for a moment, "Oh, I don't have a clue what that actually means, just that when I talk to him on that thing, it's private. He really is kind of a mad scientist, half the time I have no idea what he's talking about."

Jennifer spoke, looking a bit confused, "Mad?"

Kale let out a little laugh, "Not mad angry...more like, crazy. Most the stuff he makes is pretty destructive, and he kinda gets a kick out of when stuff blows up."

Jennifer's eyes went wide, "He sounds a little...dangerous."

"Oh, he is...but he's good at what he does, and I guess that's what counts."

Eva chipped in, "So is he like...really dangerous? Like, being around him is a bad idea?"

"Well...I guess that depends. It's easy to get hurt being around him...but its always an accident. But as long as you listen to him, and when he tells you to stay somewhere and do something, you do it...it isn't a problem at all."

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Elsewhere...

A young man standing over a workbench that held some unidentifiable mass of technology, a steel welding mask obscuring his face cut short in his work, "My ears are burning..."

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

Michael let out a little laugh, "Well, at the least, he seems like an interesting guy...but enough about someone that we'll probably never meet, how `bout you, where are you from?"

Kale leaned forward, reaching for a roll, "All over England really, I've bounced foster home to foster home most my life...mix in a bit of living out on the streets the times I ran away, and I'd say I've lived across a good portion of the country."

"Foster home?" asked Jennifer, her mouth falling open, "Oh, I'm sorry."

Kale waved her off, "Don' worry about it, I never knew my parents...and most of my foster home bouncing was because my magic tended to freak out anyone who saw it...but they wouldn't tell anyone else about it because if they did, they couldn't get rid of me. I think my record was two days before a foster parent was trying to give me back."

Three of the four people stared at him sympathetically...Susan seeming too engrossed in her book to notice.

"Oh come on, don't look at me like that...it doesn't bother me at all, anyway, where are you all from?"

"Worcester," "York," "Bristol," "Holyhead," came the replies from Eva, Jennifer, Michael, and Susan respectively.

Silence for a moment, as Kale nodded and munched away on his roll, then Michael asked the question that he knew was coming. "So, could you tell us more about your magic? I mean, if you want to."

Kale looked over at him, mouth full of bread, then finished chewing and swallowed the bite, "Not sure what ya mean, it's just somethin I can do."

"Well, like...how do you cast spells, we use wands and incantations, how do you do it?"

Kale rubbed the back of his head, "Um, I still don't quite follow, it's not like I 'cast spells' to use my magic, it's just something that I can do. I mean, how does your heart keep beating, how do you move your hands...it's on the same level for me, natural. I don't learn spells, I just figure out new ways of manipulating the power."

Eva spoke for the rest of them, "Okay, I guess that makes sense...so, what all can you do?"

"Well, you about saw my limit yesterday with the amount I can freeze, and right now I can only freeze things that I am physically touching. But I know I can freeze things at range, I just can't figure out how to do it."

"But if you've never done it before, how do you know you can?"

He let out a little laugh, "I never said I hadn't done it before, I just said I don't know how I did it. It's like my body knows how to use magic in ways my brain doesn't, so it kinda reacts reflexively in ways I don't understand, only ever happens when I'm in danger though."

"In danger? What kind of danger?"

"Well, like...getting hit by a car or something...that's how wizards first found out about me, I almost got hit and reflexively froze a whole bunch of stuff, right in front of a wizard. He kinda freaked out and started yelling something about underage magic or something, and it just kinda went from there." Kale took the last bite of his roll and looked around at everyone else, all of them done eating, "So...where do we live?"

Michael stood up, "Ravenclaw tower, come on, we'll show you the way."

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

The group of people came to a stop after a long walk up many a winding staircase, standing in front of a heavy wooden door. Eva walked forward and knocked on it. Almost instantly, a voice came from the door, "Topic: Muggle Studies, What is the specific name of the device that powers Muggle automobiles?"

For an instant, the group looked at each other, all of them thinking, then Kale posed his question, "Um, what's going on?"

Eva looked back at him, "This is the door to the Common Room, to get in you have to answer whatever academic question it asks."

"So, wouldn't the answer be 'Internal Combustion Engine'?"

"Correct." came the voice from the door, and it swung open.

The other four looked over at him and he shrugged, "Hey, I grew up a Muggle, remember? If I didn't know stuff like that, something's wrong. But, was that really a hard question?"

Susan replied, "Most wizards don't know very much about Muggle technology, since they live with magic and have no use for it."

Jennifer giggled as they all walked through the door, "Between the four of us, Muggle Studies is the one thing that the door can stump us with, Eva is our potions and herbology master, Michael's best at all the spell stuff, like Charms and Defense Against the Dark Arts, Susan loves all the history and anything else that involves reading, and I like all the theoretical and numbers stuff."

Kale didn't reply, looking around the large room, decorated in the silver and blue of Ravenclaw. He looked very much in awe of the large chairs and other luxuries that were simply scattered around the room.

Michael nudged him, "Come on, boy's dormitories are up this way."

Still seeming a bit shell shocked, Kale nodded, "Okay..."