Origin of Magic

Prologue

By: Winters of Despair

Artemis' pale skin glowed bleach white in the light of his computer. A triumphant grin crossed his face. He had spent hours searching. Now, he finally had the results he wanted. All it had taken was one careless person on an open blog post.

The secrets of the human magical world lay bare for him to see.

He had needed a keyword. He had been searching for information about humans and magic on Foaly's database when he came across an encrypted file. In order to enter, you needed to know what you were looking for. The problem: Artemis wasn't sure what he was looking for.

So he ran an internet search.

If the magical people were out there, surely they had to be familiar with technology, perhaps even more so than the average human being. (Artemis had deduced a long time ago that it was scientifically impossible for any being to be more technologically advanced than Foaly – except, perhaps, himself.) Humans were far from perfect. If there was a slip-up to be found about their community, it would be on the internet.

Three days, four hours and twenty-six minutes later, he came across a hit.

It was an old MySpace conversation. The conversation was supposed to be private, but Artemis had no trouble hacking into the host account. It was littered with all the keywords he had put in, plus some he hadn't.

In it, two teenagers from a school called Hogwarts were complaining about their summer homework. They discussed potions class with a Professor Snape and wondered when they'd be getting their apparition license. Apparently they would be doing more advanced forms of human transfiguration with Professor McGonagall and would be learning who-knows-what with Merlin knew what kind of Defense teacher next year. At least they didn't have homework for that class.

It was a wonder that anyone had any kind of ambition to join the DMLE anymore, especially the auror division.

But didn't they know that Harry Potter wanted to be an auror? They'd probably let him straight in without having to go through the extra training.

On the other hand, he and Dumbledore were crazy. The Daily Prophet said so.

Artemis had unearthed a gold mine of information. Foaly's files were now open access to him.

---

Butler headed up the stairs after listening to the disjointed hum of the large printer for more than five consecutive minutes. Artemis printed things out for other people's convenience, namely his own.

His charge was planning something big again. Butler figured that it wouldn't be too out of line for him to remind Artemis that he had promised to drop the percentage of criminal business he delved in to.

He should also probably mention the family vacation to the Caribbean Islands that was coming up in two days. If Artemis wanted to go somewhere, it was going to have to wait three weeks.