22 November, 2011
Just before 10 PM
The Space Room, Level 9

Distant stars twinkled all around, specks of white and blue and yellow light gleaming against the somber shroud of outer space.  Here in the Sol system, one shone brighter than all the others, but out here, floating somewhere just past Jupiter's orbit, that distant ball of bright light looked smaller than a Knut.

The strange, oblong asteroid seemed to be frozen in time and space, its fiery tail billowing out behind it, so hot it burned white.  In reality, it was moving far more quickly than could be easily comprehended -- traveling at speeds much faster than a Muggle spacecraft could ever go.  In a few short weeks, it had made considerable progress through the outer solar system, its momentum more than enough to carry it past the gravity wells that had claimed so many hopeful meteors in the past. 

Kaia sat cross-legged, floating in space near the asteroid, her curly hair splaying out all around her.  That was one of the hazards of working in the Space Room; every so often, a lock drifted into her field of vision and she swiped at it, annoyed.  In front of her, a series of glowing blue numbers and symbols hung in the air, changing rapidly, as they underwent a series of seemingly complicated calculations.

Space was silent.  Judging by many of the new trainees' complaints, many of them found the eerie silence of the Space Room just as disorienting as the lack of gravity and the way that scale and proportion didn't always seem to matter here.  Kaia found the stillness peaceful, especially when she took a late-night shift after the hubbub of the day had died down.  On evenings like this, there was nothing but mathematics all around her, as stars burned and the cosmos drifted and everything tugged on everything else with invisible strings.

The silence, though, made it easier to tell when she wasn't alone any longer.  It was usually the briefest hint of breeze that gave it away, when someone stepped through the quiet door and into the vastness of the Space Room.  As something rustled through her hair, Kaia looked up, tearing herself away from the magical calculations to see who had come to join her.

"Evening," she offered by way of greeting, flashing the new arrival a smile.  "Nice night for a space walk, eh?"

He allowed himself to fall as soon as he entered the chamber.

Not fall, really, but embrace the weightlessness that told his body there was no point to finding one's bearings in this room. The folds of his clothes lost their sense of form and his blonde hair drifted in a myriad of directions. Virgil carried a large book under his arm - it had thankfully lost its substantial weight here. His gaze flicked straight towards Arahanga. Her curls were stark against the starry black space.

"It's pouring outside, so, yes," he replied dryly as he waded his way towards her, upside down relative to her position. "I'll take a walk in here anytime."

Between this project, training, and watching the pentrals being exorcised, Virgil's hands were full. And he had to prep the Christmas youth troupe play, to say nothing of social obligations. This quiet was a welcome change. He tipped himself forward and drew his knees in, twisting around so that they were both oriented in the same way. "Just here to record trajectory changes," he pulled out a quill from behind his ear.

They had a predicted trajectory based on Rosier's calculations, using methods pilfered from ARTEMIS. The predicted trajectory had to constantly be compared to its actual trajectory so that they could take realtime changes into account.

"Yav says he's coming down in a bit, I think. Busy in the Death Chamber," he told Kaia as he crossed his legs and rested the great tome on them. "How is the mathematics going?" An effete nod at her incomprehensible numbers. "I hear it's landing somewhere in the highlands?"

Virgil glanced over his shoulder at earth. Home, tiny in comparison to the giants that were Jupiter and Saturn, and yet containing all they knew of life. Of magic.

It was Morgenthau's sprog, the blond boy who had practically become the Head of Department's shadow since his mentor started on Level Nine a couple of months ago.  Kaia laughed, shooting a bemused smile in the trainee's direction as he waded towards her, upside-down.  Carstairs had supposedly been sentenced to this project as punishment for something or the other a few weeks prior, but even in a place as secretive as the Department of Mysteries, it was clear to all of the Unspeakables that their Department Head wasn't above playing favorites when it came to his protege.

It didn't really flummox her any, though.  Carstairs tucked himself into a neat little spin, rotating so that their axes aligned.  "Yav says he's coming down in a bit, I think," he started, in his prim and proper British accent.

Here as a herald, was he?  Grinning, Kaia thought hard about Virgil Carstairs, his blond hair gleaming like an angel's, raising a trumpet to announce the arrival of their Department Head. A beat later, she laughed again, slanting a teasing smile in Carstairs' direction.

The glowing blue numbers continued to race through their calculations.  Pale gray lines began to arch out in front of the asteroid, shooting through space.  Quickly, they began to expand, then flatten and contract, showing the probabilities of its future course.
 
Kaia stretched out her right hand, as if digging her fingers into the fabric of space, and then twisted her wrist to the left.  Around them, the universe shifted too, as if zooming out considerably.  Now, they could easily see the forward path of the pale gray arcs: arcing past stormy Jupiter and its tiny moons, slicing through the Asteroid Belt, until they finally collided with a pale blue dot, gleaming brightly in the middle of black space.

Flicking her wrist in the other direction, she reversed the prior movement, as if pulling their target closer.  Now, the tiny blue dot seemed to race towards them, growing bigger and bigger until it hung in the blackness before them, a little bigger than a quaffle.  The familiar shape of its land masses drifted by as it rotated; they were all reversed from their usual position, as if the entire planet had been flipped upside down.  The gray lines seemed to end somewhere near the bottom of the green mass that resembled an upside-down Britain -- still flickering, which meant there was still some uncertainty, but more accordant than they had been even a few days prior.

"Looks like it, doesn't it?" Kaia asked at last, arching her eyebrows at Carstairs.  She nodded to the blue-and-green planet hanging before them, a smile tugging at her lips.  "Quite the coincidence, eh?  That asteroid has the whole universe in front of it, and it lands right here."

His sulky mouth relaxed into a silent laugh as the image in Kaia's mind found its way into his, the way these things always did, and Virgil smiled back at the witch. Holding a trumpet to his mouth was one of the more polite things he'd gleaned of himself from some of this lot on level 9. He liked Kaia - she had a sense of humour in place of an overwhelming (often male) ego, unlike certain Unspeakables.

The young wizard flipped open the tome in his lap, opening it to the most recent page: numbers were scribbled in the log, many of the entries in his neat and slightly embellished handwriting. He lifted his gaze to watch the starry space around them shifted farther and then closer.

You could almost hold the earth in both hands. "Quite the coincidence, eh?" his companion mused while he leaned in to observe their planet, fascinated by how gracefully she'd manipulated their surroundings.

"Coincidence or intent," Virgil glanced at her with mock menace, giving his quill a shake before he scribbled down the date and time in the Space Chamber log. "Of all solar systems, ours. Of all planets in it, ours. Of all waters...." he squinted at the oceans around their cosy little isle. It felt weird to think of it as theirs; they belong to it, not the other way around.

Who knew what they would find when the asteroid crashed? Probably not little green men in fashionable boots.

"Scotland might be coincidence. Imagine having to calculate that landing and take into account our rotations and angles and... but maybe it's easy for the muggles," he shrugged and arched a quizzical eyebrow at Kaia. "And it stands to reason it might be easy for another civilisation."

Level nine was abound with speculation about it. Even up in the Thought Room and down in their Labyrinth, everyone had an opinion or an implausible conspiracy theory. It was madness but it was great fun.

The Unspeakable laughed again, flashing another smile at Carstairs.  Most wixes in the United Kingdom had certain opinions about the regular folk that they called Muggles, and very few of those were respectful.  Here on Level Nine, where the boundaries between the different communities were crossed much more regularly, it sometimes seemed as if they'd found their own little pro-Muggle bastion safe from the wider world.  She wouldn't have expected a British wizard anywhere else to even consider that a Muggle space program might have been farther along than magic could manage.

"To be fair, the Muggles aren't sending anything quite as far as this little bugger has come," she said, flicking a hand back towards the asteroid that they'd left behind them.  "But they've landed probes on comets and asteroids.  The Americans have even got a space probe due to fly close by Pluto in a few years.  It's all mathematics, in the end."

Which was part of what made their soon-to-be visitor so intriguing.  Never before had Muggle or magical astronomers spotted something that was so clearly from outside the solar system.[1]  And yet, this particular extrasolar object seemed to have originated from somewhere far away, perhaps thousands and thousands of light-years beyond the Kuiper belt.  For it to come from so far and then to land so near... as Virgil Carstairs had put it, coincidence or intent.

"Well, at least we're lucky that it's landing out in the wop-wops and not the middle of London," she remarked cheerfully.   "Be a bit harder to explain, that would, and then we'd have to clean up the mess when it managed to smash through a neighborhood." 

She paused for an instant, then grinned at the trainee.  "Has Yav relayed any ideas about what he thinks we might find once it lands?"

1.	The first such object that will be known to Muggles, 'Omuamua, won't be identified until 2017.

            "It's all mathematics, in the end."

Virgil pulled a face, wrinkling up his elfin nose and shaking his head in a shudder. He had learned more mathematics than some wixes as a child because they lived in a muggle area and he found it easy to do sums in his head; here on level nine, he'd been asked to brush up on algebra and learn calculus. The horror! But this was basic compared to the kind of maths Kaia was doing, or the kind they'd learned from ARTEMIS to track trajectory.

"Yes, London would have meant having to involve level three in a big way, I suppose," he agreed with her, spelling out Kaia Arahanga in the chamber log. "Not that we might not need them anyway."

At least it wouldn't be to such a great extent if they did. Mysteries had their own Obliviators for confidentiality purposes but they didn't have enough to deal with a large mass of people or more explosive consequences in muggle populations. What if the meteor landed in or close to a highland town?

Virgil continued to scribble observations in the log but he smirked down at the page, hearing Yavin's shortened nickname in the Unspeakable's mouth. "I've been trying to get a straight answer out of him."

An impossible task.

"Every time I bring it up he says something different. Yesterday he told me that perhaps the meteor is a form of recon." Virgil glanced up, thoughtful, pushing out his bottom lip. "When I asked last week, he said there are caverns in Scottish lochs that nobody has ever laid eyes on. I think he was implying that there's something there acting as a beacon. I think he's just... trying to keep an open mind."

The idea that this meteor was 'coming home', however, had an eerie and anticlimactic feel. Virgil set down his quill and rested an elbow on the book to prop his head up in his hand. "Do you have any mad scientist theories?" he eyed Kaia with interest - her opinion held a lot of value in his eyes because she specialised in astrophysics.

The blue ball rotated silently in space before them, as wispy clouds drifted over its surface and the massive continents rolled by upside down.  Africa and Europe were turning away from her, giving way to the Atlantic Ocean and an inverted version of the Americas.  Somewhere up ahead in the South Pacific -- now at the top of the globe -- it looked as if a tropical cyclone was starting to form, with angry gray clouds starting to coalesce and rotate around a forming eye.

She stayed silent for a moment, considering the trainee's question as she watched the world turn.  Ever since the asteroid had first been spotted, that had been the question at the tip of everyone's tongue.  In a department that thrived on compartmentalized secrets and mysteries, it had left them with a thrilling target for mutual speculation.

"I think we've all got a mad theory by now, eh?" she asked, chuckling. 

Most of the wild ones that she had heard involved wixes from space or little green men visiting from the stars.  Morgenthau's apparent theory that the asteroid was returning to something on Earth, rather than coming to pay it a visit for the first time, was one that she hadn't heard before.  As fun as it was to speculate about invaders out of a Muggle science fiction movie, Kaia preferred to ground her predictions in observable phenomena as much as possible.

"It's probably not as fanciful as you're hoping for, but I think it's interesting how it doesn't appear to be rotating," she said after a beat.  "Most space bodies have some sort of spin to them, but this one has been coming straight at us like a bullet, without even a wobble after passing by other gravitational fields.  It makes me wonder if there's some sort of separate, denser interior core spinning inside it to keep it on its course."

Ever the watchful pupil, he turned his eyes towards the meteor as Kaia explained her suspicions. It really wasn't rotating - oblong shape aside it looked like any other space object from the outside. Was that part of its design? If another civilisation had sent this, did they mean the camouflage it? And if so, against whom? So many questions, so few answers. Perhaps they'd never be answered in his lifetime.

            "It makes me wonder if there's some sort of separate, denser interior core spinning inside it to keep it on its course."

"More intention than coincidence, then." Virgil tucked his quill behind his ear and released the book, letting it float in place while he drifted towards the miniature meteor. "So you think it could be carrying something inside, then?" he only barely stopped himself from adding 'or someone'.

They wanted to be prepared, not paranoid. He watched the subject of their conversation and sighed softly, like a child staring longingly into a sweet shop.

"I started having these strange dreams[1] a few months ago." Virgil reached out, idly running his fingers through the fiery white tail. "I'm on the moon and I'm looking at earth, and I can feel something watching me, at the back of my neck. But it's so quiet up there, impossibly quiet. I wonder if it's really like that."

He had checked into a muggle library and watched as many documentaries he could about muggle space travel, after those dreams. The moon landing had been fascinating - the idea of being that distant, a satellite of their own natural making. Virgil wondered if wizards could get up there too.

"Muggle ships use fuel and technology, don't they?" he frowned, one thought leading to the next, his mouth awkward around those words. "What about magic? In theory, something could propel itself through space with magic, couldn't it?"

1.	20th August - All the stars come down to my air

"So you think it could be carrying something inside, then?"

Kaia shrugged, flicking her hair back over her shoulder and sending her curls bobbing off again.  It was a constant struggle, having long hair in the Space Room: one that most of her male colleagues would never understand.

"Sounds a bit more mad when you put it that way, eh?" she asked, drawing her legs in to sit cross-legged. The motion made her start to drift slowly upwards in the zero gravity.  "Perhaps there's something inside.  Muggles like to speculate sometimes about building an artificial structure around a star; perhaps someone's done the opposite and put something artificial inside a meteorite."

Virgil gave a soft sigh, and then brought up something different -- a strange dream that he'd been having about sitting on the moon.  Kaia hesitated, a strange expression crossing her face as she listened silently.  The moon...as much as she loved to dream amongst the stars, that was one place that she'd rather not go.

"Yeah, sound can't travel in space," she agreed, using her hands to turn her body so that she was facing Virgil.  "No molecules in a vacuum, so there's nothing for it to vibrate.  Silent as the grave, it must be," she concluded cheerfully.

The question of magical propulsion -- could it happen, and if so, who had initiated it -- was one of the puzzles that had at least the younger generation of Unspeakables all in a tizzy with speculation.  Over the past few years, several magical research groups around the globe had been experimenting with how best to put a magical satellite into orbit.  But enchanting something so that it was capable of safe interstellar travel across astronomical distances was quite different.  Space was huge, vast, and not nearly as empty as one might think.

"Well, that's the trick, eh?"  She flashed the trainee a brilliant smile.  "Magic requires intent -- most spells end when the caster dies, unless they're carefully anchored in something, like an enchantment.  Setting up a spell that could carry something so far, to a place that you've never seen yourself, and still navigate all of the possible obstacles and gravitational forces along the way to travel and land so precisely..."

She shrugged, looking thoughtfully back in the direction of the tiny asteroid, a mere glitter against the darkness.  "I think that's more than any magic-user on Earth right now could manage.  Although," she added with a quick grin, "if that's what's powering our little mate here, then I'd like to shake the hand of the witch or wizard who enchanted it." 

They truly did sound mad - it was one of the things about level nine to which he was slowly becoming accustomed. Everyone was so bloody clever and equally insane; the longer they had been here the more outrageous their theories, as if every second spent in Mysteries was a second spent obliterating preconceived notions about how the world functioned. Or the universe, rather.

He glanced past the meteorite as Kaia turned to face him, a smiling giantess amongst planets. She confirmed the silence of outer space and Virgil was wistful for it now: complete and utter peace.

            "I think that's more than any magic-user on Earth right now could manage."

Virgil's mouth twisted into a sleepy little smile, nodding to himself. If they thought about it that way then it did seem entirely impossible. Enchantments were not easy and even some of the oldest enchantments on earth were still younger than the number of years it took for something to cross solar systems or galaxies. The blackness out there, it didn't encourage travel or the existence of life.

"If it was a witch or wizard. For all we know, it could be from a civilisation of sentient blobs," he shrugged, laughing lightly. "A species that understands and uses magic differently from us. I suppose we'll find out soon enough. It's going to be such a disappointment if all we find is a lump of rock, isn't it?"

A glimmer of starlight caught in his eye and Virgil cupped the meteorite in the palms of his delicate looking hands. "But I bet you it's going to be something exciting. Call it a seer's instinct" he leaned in to kiss the aura of light around their incumbent visitor before lowering his hands again.  "You'll be there, won't you, when it lands? Or after it lands, was it?"

He didn't know yet if they were going to be present for initial impact. Virgil thought it might be a dangerous event, something that size entering their atmosphere.

So their little blond-locked trainee was a Seer as well as a Legilimens.  Kaia grinned at his acting, filing that bit of information away.  It seemed that their Department Head's favorite trainee had all kinds of hidden depths to him beneath his apparent privilege.

She spread her arms and flicked them down to her sides, creating a burst of energy that propelled her closer again to both Carstairs and their soon-to-be interstellar visitor.  Moving through the Space Room was a bit like flying, but without having to worry about adjusting for gravity.  It took a different sort of movement to get around effectively, whether she was fully human or in feathered form.

The glowing blue numbers from Kaia's calculations were still running, but they were changing more slowly now.  The left-hand-most digit finally stopped shifting and locked into place, and then the one directly next to it, and another.  Ahead of the asteroid, the glowing line had stopped dancing and was now a solid, glowing blue.

"That all depends on what Yav decides, doesn't it?" Kaia asked, chuckling.  "Him and Rosier."

She tossed her hair back over her shoulders again as she turned to face the final calculation.  The numbers had settled into a pattern that resembled the greatest unit of time to the smallest, although the digit on the far right continued to steadily tick down.

"Well, that looks like 18 days, and, uh --"  She eyed the numbers on the right-hand edge of the countdown clock.  "Maybe just over three hours?"  It took a second to do the math in her head. "That puts impact sometime very early on the 11th of December.  What time's it now?" she asked, glancing at Virgil. 

His eyes focused on the trajectory line, watching it solidify as it cut through space in the direction of earth. Its current set course - from the looks of it, probably an accurate one. They were going to have an extraterrestrial visitor soon, sentient or not. There were so many things he wanted to try, even if it was just a rock. Scrying, for example.

            "That all depends on what Yav decides, doesn't it? Him and Rosier."

Virgil smirked at her emphasis of Yavin's nickname, shooting her a look. He didn't realise he had called him that. It was an impertinent habit but a harmless one if their department head didn't particularly mind. The wizard glanced at his wristwatch, which showed him the weather as well as the hour.

"A rainy ten in the evening exactly," he answered and was about to ask for her estimate margin of error when the door to the space chamber heavily swung open to reveal a set of long legs stepping through. Yavin was wearing bright yellow corduroy today, and a matching sweater He looked like he'd dressed to compete with the sun.

            "Just finishing up the log."

Virgil called across the chamber while Yavin let the door close behind him and began to slowly swim through the space, using his core strength to push forward towards the pair. Arahanga's diligence was clearly behind hindered by the trainee's playful verbal meandering - but sometimes that could be good, like keeping the brain muscles loose.

"So I, aha, I see." The older wizard stopped short of approaching the meteor, its white light reflected in his spectacles. "I just came from, hm, from Rosier. He's putting together a team for the, um, for the arrival."

A pause, as he looked over the numbers ticking away below Kaia's calculations, and a faint smile tugged at his lips. Oh yes. Closer and closer. This object or entity was not fooling around; they'd have to warn the other Ministries about that, if something were to happen to the United Kingdom as a result over a short course of time.

"I take it nothing, aha, nothing new has happened?" Yavin glanced from Virgil to Arahanga, wiggling his dark eyebrows. "You both look too, that is, too calm."

As if the third use of his nickname had cast a summoning spell, a door opened in the sky to admit the Head of the Department of Mysteries, bright yellow sweater and all. 

Since he had stepped into the leadership role on Level Nine a few months prior, Yavin Morgenthau and his remarkable sweaters had become something of a steadying presence to many of the Unspeakables, particularly those of the younger generation.  February's tragic happening in the Labyrinth had left the Department desperately without clear leadership.  Morgenthau had returned a strong hand back to the rudder.  Although Kaia had occasionally heard one or two of the older Unspeakables muttering about his motives, for the most part he'd seemed to strike a balance between curious and respectful, interested to learn about existing projects and eager to help steer them, but gracious towards others' expertise.

"Nothing new," Kaia confirmed.  She drew her legs in to sit cross-legged, and then gave a quick flick of her hand so that she started to drift to face the Department Head. 

"The abnormality is still continuing with its speed and heading.  Although I think we might have a more accurate estimation to its arrival time now," she said, with a quick hint of a smile.  "It appears we'll have touchdown on the eleventh of December just after two in the morning, give or take about thirty minutes."

            "It appears...eleventh of December just after two in the morning, give or take about thirty minutes."

Yavin clicked his tongue, impressed by the Unspeakable's confident precision. She called it an abnormality and she was right - but he saw the little flicker of a frown on Virgil's face, which quickly corrected itself. It was a word some people were more used to hearing in reference to beings rather than objects. The old wizard reached out a hand, into which the younger one placed the logbook.

"Two to three in the morning," he hummed as he looked down at the latest entry, into which the calculation details had been writ. "Not quite the, aha, the witching hour. We'll need to arrange for a containment team with, I mean, with level three, around the area."

That was going to be a fabulous conversation with Quill, probably. They'd have to make sure their staff didn't get too close to the landing site - getting other floors involved was on his agenda but he still wanted to be in control or what they did or did not know. Knowledge is power and, in the wrong heads, he knew it was a dangerous power.

"Well I know sleepy boy here is, hah, is gonna want to be there," Yavin handed the book back before fixing Kaia with a curious smile, "what about you? Signing up to, hm, to Rosier's investigative team?" In his tone, another question implied. A challenge do you think you have what it takes?