Chapter 46:
***
"It has been mere hours since devastation met the city of London, but the reconstruction efforts are underway." Said the Muggle newscaster.
Rufus Scrimgeor, Minister of Magic for Britain, watched the television in an ear panic. He had been twitching and sweating all night as the entirety of the worlds governments ran around like chickens with their heads cut off. On both the Muggle and Magical sides.
Having the Prime Minister of the UK floo into his office instead of the other way around was a new experience.
He had tried a cold shower and a tumbler of scotch to calm his nerves. The latter sat, forgotten and useless, at the corner of his desk.
Now they sat together in the Prime Minister's office, watching the television.
"The official story is that a physics experiment led to a, and no I'm not kidding, a tear in the timespace continuum. End quote." The newscaster continued.
Well, that one wasn't a complete lie. Just a simplified explanation of it until the figured out how the hell they were all going to announce the existence of magic to the entire Muggle world. Speaking of.
"Okay, walk me through the main points of our announcement one more time." Rufus asked the Prime Minister.
He sighed before taking another sip from his coffee. Rufus could use a cup himself, but he was studiously avoiding the concoction as it tended to enhance anxiety. Neither of them needed more of that anymore.
"Magic is real. Wizards are real. They split off from the real world a millennia ago and have lived in their own separate, secret societies. We have always known about this and have respected each other's boundaries. Last night was a magical accident." The Prime minister summarized.
Right. And they should probably leave out all of the magical on Muggle – a word that would probably be considered a slur and need a replacement term soon enough – crimes in the past. And of course, the mountains of questions from conspiracy theorists on which of their obsessions was actually an act of magic but was covered. Answer? Almost all of them. Although a few of them were bizarre claims even by magical standards.
"No way was that a science experiment! There were witches out there man!" Some hippie on the newscast said.He looked outright homeless. The newscast was no longer on the reporter but showing reels of witness testimony. It switched then to another.
"Oh yeah, those were witches." Said a woman. "They had wands and robes and wizard hats and everything. They shot lights out of their wands like bullets and where they hit strange things happened. They were transformed or erased from existence and stuff."
It switched to another.
"Poppycock! Those were demons. They had skulls for heads and black capes and everything." Said an old man.
It switched to a teenaged girl.
"There were led by like, this really hot guy and his grandpa. The grandpa was definitely a wizard. Robes and had and everything. And they both used sticks." She explained.
Fortunately, nothing was caught on camera. But the witnesses were numerous. It was possible that people wouldn't believe them.
"Do you reckon there is any chance at all of us recovering from this?" Rufus asked, almost pleaded.
The television screen changed to a view of the London Zoo. There, a semi-truck with a flatbed was transporting what at first looked like a dragon lashed down with bright yellow straps. It was a dinosaur. T Rex maybe? He didn't know his dinosaurs beyond what he'd seem in museums as a kid.
The creature looked to have been tranquilized
"I think I can qualitatively answer that in the negative." Said the prime minister.
Rufus banged his head on the table. He had somehow forgotten about the displaced beings in time. There was also still the matter of that French legion they needed to identify and return to france to then be given off to their descendants and eventually incorporated into society. That alone would be a logistical nightmare and imminent threat to the statute of secrecy. One straining their available resources.
They had at least a dozen such emergencies at once with nowhere near enough manpower to handle. And then there were the traitor Unspeakables on the loose who themselves demanded all of their resources to counter and eliminate, but they had none to spare.
"Senior Undersecretary Bones." Rufus asked.
Madame Bones stood at attention.
"I don't care what it takes, get Dumbledore, Voldemort and myself in the same room. We need to work together." Rufus ordered.
Amelia broke her usual stoic demeanor and looked at him questioningly. But she did eventually shrug, knowing full well that these extreme circumstances required extreme measures.
"Would you like me to also include Morrigan in that meeting?" She asked.
Rufus looked at her confused.
"Who?" He asked.
***
"This is team pink, we ave arrived at Nantes." Fleur called into her communication link. "Continewing search here."
Sirius Black returned to his dog form and ran off to follow his nose with that one-eyed Auror following after him. By now he was thoroughly familiar with both Morrigan and Voldemort's scent.
Fleur got to work as well, with the Narcissa woman aiding her. Together, they apparated in a complete circle around the small French city, placing ward stones hither and tither. A Death Eater went with Narcissa, one she suspected of being her husband, while the woman's sprog accompanied him.
For some reason he had brought along dousing rods, and whenever they stopped for her to place the ward stone he searched around with them. Each time he did they merely spun in his hands uselessly.
"Why do you use zose things? Zey are nonsense." Fleur told the young Malfoy.
Her fellow blonde shrugged, surprisingly unfazed by her present.
"Professor Morrigan didn't seem to think so." The boy said. "He taught me more in the few months I've had him as a teacher than most of my other teachers combined. And he taught me about these. If he had faith in them, so do I."
Fleur was to flabbergasted by the kids faith in the man to argue the pointlessness of his actions. So instead she finished setting up the ward stones and retrieved the small plastic bag containing hairs. Hairs that were retrieved from Professor Morrigan's bathroom. His brush, his shower drain, his sink drain. They collected it all.
She retrieved one hair and held her wand to the end of it. It caught fire and evaporated into ash. The nearest ward stone, and all other ward stones surrounding the city, also caught fire. Flames that were cold and unburning. They faded almost instantly.
Morrigan was not in this city either. Onto the next one. At this rate her team was doomed to search all of France to no avail.
***
"This is team Orange. Ve have finished searching Rotterdam." Viktor Krum said into his communication badge. "There is no sign of either Voldemort nor Morrigan."
he had already search most of Bulgaria throughout the day, and now that evening was fast approaching, he was search the Netherlands with a hodgepodge team of extremists and weirdos. Followers of Voldemort and Dumbledore alike. He couldn't tell which he found more distasteful. Followers of the current Dark Lord, or followers of the lover of the last one. He was leaning towards disliking the latter.
He was starting to suspect he may have become friends with a budding Dark Lord in the form of Hadrian Morrigan. He struggled to imagine the man as such. Then again, Dumbledore had failed to see such in Grindelwald.
"Okay, let's try another joke." Said the redheaded boy. "I mean, it's not like we're gonna find him under a rock!"
His companion, another Hogwarts student, jotted his words down.
"Vat are those two doing?" Viktor asked the Death Eater on their team.
"According to Professor Morrigan, that boy is a seer." Said the death eater. "Ironic precognition. His jokes tend to come true. So he's trying to make a prediction."
Viktor blinked at the skull-masked man.
"So... he's trying to force a prediction." Viktor concluded. "That vill never vork."
They watched as the two Hogwarts students went around levitating boulders as if they genuinely expected to find Morrigan beneath one.
He sincerely hoped his was the craziest and or dumbest team, because if the others were half as bad they would never find the missing power houses.
***
"Ennervate." Warbeck said, resuscitating one of the dozens of students fast asleep.
The students had come to her with an idea. To try and dream up where Morrigan and Voldemort had gone. They quickly returned the werewolf shelter into barracks with the help of the Weasley Twins. The place wasn't getting any customers anyway, as the entire planet was currently in shock and not a soul in magical Britain was leaving their homes.
Now she was doing the unexpected job of casting sleeping and waking charms on students in the hopes of farming dream visions. They were grasping at straws, but everyone was desperate enough to grasp at anything.
"Miss Brown, can you recall your dream?" Madame Warbeck asked the girl.
She blinked wearily.
"I... I dreamed of a vast nothingness. Almost kaleidoscopic expanses of white and silver." She explained.
Hm. Sounded like a nonsense dream. Unless Morrigan was trapped inside of a broken pensieve.
"Was Morrigan or Voldemort there?" She asked all the same.
"I... I don't know." Brown said honestly.
Another dud then.
"Are you ready to go back under and try again?" Warbeck asked.
"No ma'am." She said with a yawn. "I think I can manage it myself."
And sure enough, she rolled over and went back to sleep.
They'd been going at it since noon, and it was already almost dawn. That left them another twenty four hours until they had to go back to the castle and class. Unless classes wound up having to be canceled.
***
Dumbledore watched as Ollivander leaned back in his chair, letting out a defeated breath.
"What?" Asked Bellatrix. "What was that supposed to do and what does it mean?"
Dumbledore was curious as to that too. Ollivander had retrieved an old, well-worn wand, placed int into a rune-carved bowl resembling an empty pensieve, and burned some herbs. Then the wand merely spun around randomly, letting out red sparks.
"Wands can be made to point at their partners." Said Ollivander. "This wand was Morrigans first and longest used wand. He traded it with me for a newer version."
Newer version. Albus looked closer and felt his eyes narrow as he recognized it.
"That one is a phoenix feather core. One from Fawks." Dumbledore accused. "You promised to tell me if it chose a partner."
"No, I promised to tell you if it ever left my possession. It didn't." Ollivander said cheekily. "Morrigan traded an older version of the wand for a newer one."
Both Albus and Bellatrix shared a glance. That was the first real proof anybody had shared that the man was a time traveler. Hell, it was the smoking gun, unless you counted the duplicate Elder wand, which Albus almost couldn't. It was possible that whoever made his made more, or one of the many wandmakers who had studied it throughout history had made a copy. Barely possible, but possible.
It made sense that Hadrian would come to Ollivander with that proof. Garrick wasn't the gossiping type and the chance to study time twin wands would be enough to buy his loyalty. Let alone access to the Eldar Wand. The chance to research such would be enough to get Ollivander to do anything. It was a last resort Albus kept in mind if he ever needed to force the wandmaker to work for him, if things ever got that dire.
"Does that mean Morrigan is out of the effective range of this search ritual?" Asked Bellatrix. "Or that he's dead?"
"No to both. The effective range is essentially infinite. And it works on finding dead owners of wands too. It means he doesn't exist, or his existence is masked." Ollivander concluded.
Masking ones existence? That sounded like something a head Unseakable of the Department of Mysteries might be able to manage. So they must have both been captured by the new enemy. That or they were outright erased from the timeline.
"We need Hadrian Morrigan." Dumbledore said dejectedly. "We need him desperately."
***
Romulus got up from the ritual circle.
Lily, James and Remus were all unconscious on their parts of the diagram.
He walked over to a mirror and admired his messy black hair and vibrant green eyes. He pulled back his bangs to see perfectly smooth skin on his forehead, and wondered when he would get the scar.
"Romulus?" He heard his real mother call out.
He turned around to see her just waking up. Her words roused his dad and his... his other dad.
"No mum. Not anymore." He said, turning back to the mirror. "You said you were going to name me Harry right? Before you swapped me to Mrs Remus' womb?"
He saw her nod in the mirror.
"Well, don't call me that either." He said. "My name is Hadrian now. And I suspect I have a lot of work to do."
***
BEHOLD! My masterpiece! I incorporated all of the lessons I've learned from reading JK Rowling on how to produce a proper twist, having constantly foreshadowed it.
I've left TONS of hints about Romulus being the Harry of this universe. To the point two people have guessed. I've even foreshadowed how he became Romulus in the first place. I hope the payoff was worth it.