Good evening, or, if you are a frozen chicken, good ovening. Here's a nice little unfinished one-shot for Harry Potter. For some reason my pea brain has me expanding this into the prologue for a Mass Effect (yawn) crossover where the Citadel crowd end up encountering magical humanity. So do the Reapers, eventually, I suppose. But it could stand on its own.

"You must be Mister Gaunt," the bespectacled muggle glanced up insultingly briefly from the papers on his desk. "Take a seat." A wand flourished briefly and the door closed behind his visitor. A wizard, then. Voldemort eyed him dyspeptically. A wizard very much out of place in this disgustingly muggle building.

"I want you to stay out of my way," the wizard informed the Dark Lord rudely, "I'm getting rid of the muggles within..." he shuffled paper. "A minimum of two or three of their generations."

That was what had drawn him here. Rumours of a strange wizard, espousing similar sentiments to himself and his Death Eaters, and apparently well advanced in unleashing whatever magic he was going to unleash. The sort of person that had to join or die.

"Before you explain your plan to me," Voldemort hissed, "you called me Gaunt. Why?"

"Because it would be suicide to use your muggle father's surname. You prefer to forget him, and romanticise your mother, one Merope Gaunt." Grey eyes regarded him dispassionately. "Not to mention the line of Gaunt is a more noble line, as you already know."

"Flattery," Voldemort decided aloud.

"Bait too. I knew you'd be intrigued and want to visit. I'd visit you, but I'm busy here, and also the odds were very high that I wouldn't leave your presence alive. These cultures won't mature and 'escape', quote unquote, into the wild by themselves." He paused, eyeing one particularly queer document, before scribbling something in the margin. "And if they did they'd most likely mutate into something we don't need for the work."

Voldemort turned those statements over in his head. This fellow feared him, which was good. But what were 'cultures', and why could 'mutating' impede the destruction of the muggle filth?

"What is this work?" he asked curtly, wand hand twitching. He wanted to simply legillimens the undoubtedly mudblood scum, but that could come later. Undoubtedly this Gryffindor-level-courageous idiot would feed him a line of rubbish, but the huge amount of books suggested Ravenclaw... interesting combination.

"I told you, the extinction of the muggles. They're just a transitional species, and we're their replacements." He looked at Voldemort. "My methods are slower, more covert, but they'll work. Unlike yours. One level-headed batallion of squibs and cough mudbloods cough and it'll all be over for you and the magical race."

Voldemort frowned and did a surface legillimency. The images were vivid, if a little overblown: dead wizards everywhere, the Ministry under muggle control, vague gloomy horror ideas of wizards and creatures being experimented on, discriminated.

"It's very simple, really," and the images shifted to something organic that the Dark Lord couldn't identify. "Gene therapy on a planetary scale. You know how viruses replicate?"

"Never heard of them."

"And wizards don't get colds. The common cold is caused by a virus. It latches on to cells in the nose, injects a little packet of RNA. Effectively turns the cell into a machine for producing more viruses until it bursts, then off they go, darling little droplet infections in every cough or sneeze. Yet technically they aren't alive. Simplified but fascinating."

A page from a magazine, false coloured, green plump objects, one torn open and emitting bright yellow fuzzballs.

"The muggles came up with the notion of gene therapy, you see. Modify a virus or retrovirus to target specific cells and inject an RNA packet that rewrites DNA. Effectively replace defective genes with more healthy ones, getting rid of some potentially nasty conditions. Such as lack of magical affinity."

"You intend to turn muggles into wizards?" Voldemort couldn't contain his disbelief.

"No." The man picked up a coffee, took a swig and grimaced at the lack of heat. "Their unborn children."

Voldemort just blinked.

"My pet virus is aimed at the gonads," he explained, "Ovaries and testicles. When those children are not even blastulas, their genetic code will be revised. Certain sections, so-called 'junk DNA' that muggle scientists don't know the use of, overwritten with patterns that every magical I've sampled has. And I have plenty of samples."

"You're the Blood-Letter," oh yes, Voldemort had learned about him from the Daily Prophet. Amongst the histrionic speculation about vampires and/or Dark rituals was useful information: the Blood-Letter targeted only magicals, always alone. Sometimes the victim was stunned, sometimes simply overpowered by brute force. Others, drunk, simply returned to consciousness with a small muggle bandage in the crook of the elbow. Those who remembered knew that a cloaked figure with a mask would take their arm and draw blood into a syringe, before applying a bandage and departing.

"A much nicer apellation than 'You-Know-Who', or 'Boy-Who-Whatevered', and accurate too." The man laned back in his chair. "Blood will tell. In my case, it told me of certain identical patterns in identical places in the human genome. Comparisons with muggles and one or two known squibs helped me work out what they were. Broken locks, releasing the gates of magic."

His eyes flashed and a pang of alarm crawled up the Dark Lord's spine. It wasn't the manipulating twinkle of that mud-lover Dumbledore. This was more the spark of fanaticism.

"So," he mumbled about another swig of cold coffee, "Unto the muggles, will children be born. Children with a once-latent, once incredibly recessive ability. All over the world. The ranks of the magical will explode."

"And I'm sure that the muggles will be delighted," Voldemort drawled sarcastically.

"There will be confusion, maybe a little panic," the Blood-Letter shrugged, "but what can they do? Exterminate their own children?" He snickered. "Believe it or not, these days there are laws against infanticide. And any country that attempts to legitimise it tends to be censured very strongly. But of course, that is where the wisdom of the noble and pure blood will save the day."

"What?" was Voldemort's only possible response.

The man leaned forward. "Don't be an idiot. You know as well as I do that the reason most purebloods are so magically weak is inbreeding - those 'mudbloods' you look down your nose at are stronger because of hybrid vigour - look it up. However, they have different and greater power. You know that." It wasn't a statement but a challenge.

The Dark Lord frowned at the infuriating, enigmatic man, then a lumos went off in his mind. "Knowledge!"

"'There is no knowledge without power'," was recited back at him, "They have access to centuries of magical knowledge. Knowledge which will only appreciate in value, and naturally should only be released in appropriate amounts." A smirk was accompanied by thumb-rubbing-finger gesture Voldemort understood at once.

It was a clever plan, Voldemort thought, but something was niggling at him. Several somethings, but he couldn't quite get a grip on... wait, there was one. "But we're talking about flooding the world with mudbloods!"

"So?"

There it was. Voldemort realised this was it: the immense gulf between him and the Blood-Letter.

"Modern wizarding society is stagnant and corrupt." The words were bitter. "Modern muggle society is dependent on unsustainable technologies. Unfortunately, those technologies, particularly in the realms of communication, are making it increasingly difficult - and in a decade or two impossible! - for the wizarding world to hide. And when it's eventually revealed, there's going to be a boatload of trouble.

"I'm not interested in watching some stupid war break out that we wizards cannot win. No - don't tell me none can prevail! The muggles have larger armies and better weapons, not to mention the armies are full of muggleborns and squibs who hold a grudge against the society that threw them away. They'd quite happily raze wizardry to the ground, I'm sure of it."

Voldemort's mouth tightened. However, he kept his silence; the Blood-Letter's eyes were becoming those of a fanatic. Sometimes silence was the best way to get information.

"The entire world can't turn on its children - or its grandchildren! Don't get me started on our dependence on fossil fuels. Can you imagine air travel becoming a luxury item, replaced by portkeys or even vanishing cabinets? I can! The air becoming sweet again, nobody homeless or starving, because of space expansion charms - among other magical blessings! We'll discover how to reach the stars without wasteful rockets, cure cancer, and... you think I'm full of it don't you?"

The Dark Lord looked at who he now knew was a madman, a madman, a mudblood, and a threat. With one spell, he could save the wizarding world.

"You'll see." The smile that crawled over the man's face wasn't nice.

"You've already released it into the world, haven't you? This plague," Voldemort growled. "You'll drown us in a sea of mudbloods."

The Dark Lord's hand closed on his wand.