FicWad

A/N: I would like to warn my readers that the last section of this chapter is a Lemon, or it might be a Lime, I cannot really tell the difference my self. In addition, this is the first sexual scene I have ever written so please do be kind and let me know how to improve.

Super-max security Psych ward, Bavarian State Hospital, Munich, Germany
0430 GMT (5:30 AM), 7 December 2001

Ginny Weasely was both a medical marvel and a psychiatrist's worst nightmare, as the staff of the Munich medical detention facility soon found out to their dismay and sheer bewilderment. The preliminary blood-work on prisoner #312-A, Ginny Weasely had just come back and it utterly perplexed the entire staff of psychologists and psychiatrists of the Munich facility. The readouts from the computers indicated that either her neurotransmitter precursor levels were off the charts or nearly non-existent and her hormone were as bizarre as the neurotransmitter levels. The level of L-DOPA, the dopamine precursor, was twenty times what they should have been, which should have either sent her into a permanent coma, or into the grave. The level of 5-hydroxytryptophan -the serotonin precursor- was only 2.14% of the average level of a comparatively hale and hearty adult female, which, once again, should have burned out her brain or killed her, neither of which were the case. If she ever woke from the drug-induced sleep, she would be a fascinating case study on the effects of extremely high and exceptionally low levels of neurotransmitters, a discipline that was severely lacking in original research. However, the most incomprehensible and disconcerting part of the information, was the level of adrenaline in her blood; a full sixty times the maximum amount ever found in any human, and yet her adrenal glands and heart tissues were perfectly fine according the MRI readouts. That much stimulant should have caused immediate heart failure, and yet her heart was, from all available data, completely normal and healthy, a medical impossibility that made cardiologists drool when they contemplated examining her heart, either living or dead. The resident neurologists were as mystified as all the other physicians were, as everything they had ever encountered in their field said that this woman should by all rights be a vegetable or deceased.

That morning she awakened from her induced slumber, with a deranged smile on her face, which chilled the very bones of the armed police and physicians watching her, although virtually as soon as they saw it, it had disappeared, making them question if it had really been there. She ate her breakfast very serenely, and she showed no signs of the insanity, which had caused the doctors to sedate her in the first place, which made them, question all of their previous diagnosis of her mental condition. Some of the psych staff was convinced that she was merely playing a part, the calm collected girl who had no business being in the maximum-security wing of a mental hospital, which would reinforce their diagnosis of her having an anti-social personality disorder. Others, who had recently been briefed on the advancement of the magic-users in 'organic and inorganic pseudo-chemistry', as it was called in the meetings, were sure that she was an unfortunate victim of circumstances, and posed no danger to the community. However ninety percent had no idea what to believe, and this was only further complicated when the psychologist assigned to her, Doctor Helga Brauenbaum, began a preliminary psychoanalysis. All the questions asked of the red head met with pleasant smiles and a calm voice, something that completely threw all those watching through the one-way mirror for a loop. When the doctor was interviewed later, she said that the girl showed no signs of any of the maladies that had been diagnosed when she was first brought in, and she thought that she was a very pleasant girl. The mystery that was Ginny Weasely further explored would prove exciting and at times nightmarish, but so far, they had no idea what went through that head under all that fiery red hair. Lucky them.

Ankara, Turkey
0619 GMT (8:19 AM), 7 December 2001

The smallpox epidemic had burned through the city extremely quickly, and its original purpose of leaving massive casualties and burning itself out in less than a week had been fulfilled, leaving 954,321 dead and 149,738 dieing in its wake. The rate of new cases had dropped as quickly as it had risen, but the amount of devastation was far beyond any epidemic the world had seen in the past century. The city's population decreased by almost 30% in six days, and within the next three it would drop another six percent, figures that would scare the hell out of any demographer. But with the end of the infection in Ankara, came an unwelcome faction, that of the socialist rebels, a movement that had inflamed the passions of the people with promises of more security, money and the continued magnanimity of the Republic of Turkey. Of course, like most revolutionaries, they might have said they were going to change things for the better, but when they found themselves actually succeeding in their quest to overthrow the government, the couldn't figure out how to do what they had promised. The people in Ankara had seen first hand how impotent the government and health care systems were when faced with a sudden crisis, and they were terrified at the possibility that the current government might remain in its state of paralysis when something even more serious came up. These fears compounded by rumors that the main governmental body had already left the country abandoning the people to their deaths at the proverbial hand of a silent killer, made the next sequence of action all that much easier.

The Black Sea Socialist Coalition had been a legitimate political organization since the early thirties, when the Mensheviks, ostracized by the general government of the Soviet Union, immigrated to the nations closest to the Soviet border. This was in the hope that should the people ever overthrow the autocratic Stalin and his merry band of followers, they could return to their homeland and seize control from the hypocritical Bolsheviks, and put Russia set to rights again. However as we all well know, this never happened, and by 1942, the BSSC had changed their focus to bringing Menshevik style socialism to the countries they now lived in. However, like what happened with the Marxist theory of socialism, the countries the Mensheviks had emigrated to were even less suited to socialism than Czarist Russia was, and the style of Menshevism changed. Ever since it is founding in 1932, the BSSC had had very few successes in campaigning for legislative positions or national leadership, mainly because most people equated Menshevik democratic socialism with Bolshevik autocratic communism, which is equivalent to saying hydrogen and plutonium are the same thing. However, in the early nineties, a new generation of socialist began to direct the BSSC with new more belligerent principles: the disgraced members of the German Democratic Republic and the other nations of the Soviet bloc, who had been thrown out by their own compatriots. With these new leaders, came new ideals, which were decidedly more 'grassroots' in both style and personality, the kind that would stir up a revolution at the worst possible time, with no regard for the consequences, excepting those that would bite the new leaders in the ass.

The people of Turkey had been unhappy even before the virus had hit and the various terrorist attacks had devastated the countryside, but all the misfortunes that had fallen in Turkey fanned the spark of unrest into an uncontrolled fire of open rebellion. Every day since the virus had been unleashed had seen the ire in the people's hearts blaze brighter as the government did nothing, gripped in the comprehensive horror brought on by confronting a situation never considered, not even in the most petrifying nightmares. Now the time was ripe for a strong leader to appear and promise prosperity, peace and above all else, a return to normalcy; the BSSC stepped up to the plate and knocked the ball right out of the park... and off the planet. A young man of Syrian origin, Abdul Shiraz, led the main rebel force against the barely functioning police forces in the capital city. The older socialists, who had seen the futility of this kind of revolution and knew the general destruction that it would invariably cause, attempted many times in the past few days to pacify the people, as a 1918 Leninist style revolution would benefit no one, but to no avail. The rage of the people was akin to one of the great oil fires started by the retreating Soviets in the Trans-Caucasian oil fields in 1942: relentless, completely uncontrolled and seemingly endless in its depth and magnitude. The socialists were telling the people everything that they wanted to hear, and they promised that it could all be possible for their silence and the unstated demand of their unspoken consent, two things that are easy to give, but near impossible to revoke. Within four hours of the revolution reaching Ankara, the general government was over thrown and the leaders executed for exploiting the peasantry and workers of Turkey. The children of the Turkish people would inherit the social, military, economic, and ecological consequences of a communist revolution, all of which would be unmistakable for decades to come.

Bristol, England, the United Kingdom
0922 GMT, 7 December 2001

What follows is an excerpt from an after-action report given by an officer of the 124th Armored Battalion, describing a battle in Bristol. This is included for their historical significance, as this was the first time in which the Dark Lord himself went up against the British Army, and this impressed the seriousness of the fight on the soldiers of the British Army. This also demonstrated the difficulties in non-magical versus magical combat, and made a very big impression on weapon makers.

"... We had just rolled into the suburbs of Bristol around 9:20 AM on our first sweep of the area of the city and surrounding countryside, when Lieutenant Goldman's tank erupted in flames. I radioed for reinforcements, and I received a message saying that it would be about ten minutes before the nearest combat unit could get to us. The tank to our left, commanded by Sergeant Fuller, radioed that they saw a force of approximately 200 persons clothed in what looked to be black cloaks, which matched the basic description of the enemy we were supposed to be on the lookout for. We traversed our turrets towards the enemy, who by then had begun to spread out quite quickly. One in the group we immediately thought to be the leader, as all those around him seemed to be in a half-bow of sorts, so I ordered my tank to make for him and told the gunner to keep a bead on him. When we got within 100 meters the gunner fired an APERSDU round straight at the supposed leader; the round hit dead on, and took out most everyone within five meters of the target. When the smoke cleared, the leader was still standing and it looked like he did not even flinch at the 120mm depleted uranium shell that should have been able to take a full infantry platoon at 200 meters. I ordered the gunner to reload with a HE round, and the driver put the tank into a slow reverse to maintain distance between them and us. As soon as the gun had been readied, our Challenger rocked back and forth from the gun recoil, and less than a tenth of a second later the shell hit the six-foot tall leader straight in the chest. The force in that explosive round should have been able to blast a three-foot deep hole into solid concrete, yet when the smoke cleared, he was still standing as if nothing had happened.

"As soon as I recovered from my shock at seeing this, I screamed into the radio to begin a full retreat, and then I called on the division net for an air strike to carpet-bomb the whole area. My requests were of course denied, and by then, almost half of my platoon was put out of commission by the magic-users, whose magic sliced through the Chobham armor of our faithful Challengers like a hot knife through butter. Sgt. Fuller's tank was on my immediate left, and he stuck to me as if he was attached with superglue, so when I got out of there, he was right behind me. Just as we cleared the wreckage of Goldman's tank, a bright flash of light hit Fuller's fuel tank dead on, and it looked like Bonfire night as a small volcano erupted out from his fuel stores immolating the interior of the tank. After only a few seconds, the ammunition blew sky high, and my tank was hit with a ricocheting piece of a HEAT round, which melted through the tread guards on the rear right side of the chassis and damaged the ventilation systems. We called division and told them that they had bloody well better put a full strike force on the job of clearing Bristol if they wanted to take the city with negligible losses. When all the damage was tallied up, we had lost eight out of nine tanks, 24 dead, 3 wounded, and five missing, which amounted to a loss rate of ninety-odd percent."

Colonel Jason Tavington was commanding the only tank to escape the ambush that lay at the Bristol outskirts, and the strike force he requested arrived the next day. The full might of the 26th Mechanized Infantry Battalion swept into Bristol like a hurricane into a sleepy harbor, and in its wake, there was a swath of scorched earth where once stood homes, businesses and factories. Bristol turned out to be one of the most costly offensives of the British campaign, with more than 5500 men lost in the battle for the downtown area alone. More than 1200 soldiers are still unaccounted for, and presumed to have died in POW camps in Ireland, although there have been several reports of partisan resistance groups lead by these persons.

Pusan, Republic of Korea
1640 GMT, 7 December 2001 (1:40 PM, 8 December 2001)

The DPRK had pushed the South Korean and American forces back to a small line of defense around the city of Pusan, recreating the Pusan perimeter from the early segments of the Korean War. From here, the ROK would fight for every inch of land as if their very lives depended on the owner of the land they stood on, which in all probability was the truth. The sheer force with which the KPA struck the American and South Korean forces holding the 38th parallel was staggering, especially when one considered that, the North Koreans had launched two major offensives in less than a week. They smashed through the demilitarized zone like a sledgehammer through wet tissue paper, and not even the near constant air strikes from various Southern airbases could serve as even a marginal deterrent. Most of the heavy field pieces in the southern armadas were captured when their operators just left them to keep up with the quickly retreating frontlines, and according to records, most were in working order. These towed field pieces were on average thirty-five years old, and some had even seen the first Korean War, but whether old or new, they would soon be firing upon their former masters. Even as the noose tightened around the city of Pusan, a massive evacuation of the city was taking place, and with the waterways clogged with all sorts of crafts, it looked like an Oriental Operation Dynamo and evacuation of Dunkirk. For as far as the eye could see, ferries meant for cars loaded with halftracks and APCs clogged the waterways, and more than 2200 privately owned boats from Japan were taking care of the infantry, loading from the docks and anywhere the boats could pull up. The evacuation took place in the dead of night for a very specific reason: the chances of accurate artillery fire lessened considerably, and on civilian transports with little to no armor, the martial forces needed every advantage they could get.

With the evacuation came a bit of 'good' news: the DPRK had issued a statement saying that their military forces would advance no further, if and only if the nations of the Coalition acknowledged that the North was the one, true Korea. However, the consequences implicit with agreeing to this demand were entirely unacceptable to the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan. They had spent billions of their respective currencies on protecting the South from the communist hoards, and sending up the white flag here would open them up to years of criticism for being a fair-weather friend, the worst kind of ally. Just having the label of a fair-weather ally could cripple nation's military endeavors for years, if not decades to come, and in this new war, a collaborator could be worth their weight in platinum. Within minutes of the ultimatum, the Embassy in Pyongyang received the last incoming transmission from USSATCOM that they would ever get in that location: Reject all auth. of NK gov't; Recall to US ASAP, via Japan, elim all Con and above docs. With that, the US said the gloves were off, and they were off for good, and the United States had committed themselves for the long haul in the Far East Asian sector. Japan, the UK and many other Coalition nations sent similar messages to their respective Embassies, and within the hour huge towers of smoke came from the furnaces deep in the belly of the Embassies as all documents rated Confidential and above were burned, along with computer hard drives and all CDs containing information. When the Korean State Security Services noticed the columns of smoke, it was only a matter of time before the Embassies became occupied in the name of the security of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.

Southern California Coast, the United States
2118 GMT (1:18 PM PST), 7 December 2001

Hurricane Priscilla had decided that she needed to visit the south California coast, much to the dismay of the Navy, Coast Guard and local police forces, whose jobs, problematical as they were, intensified by Mother Nature. The small hurricane had been a category one storm only a few days ago and had even dropped into the tropical storm class for about nine hours, making most meteorologists believe that it would dissipate before it ever made landfall. However about 150 miles offshore from Los Angeles, a huge field of very warm seawater had popped up directly in Priscilla's path. The water field caused the storm to intensify rapidly to Category Five in barely sixteen hours, the minimum pressure was a new world record at 867 millibars, and sustained wind speeds set an additional world record at 244 miles per hour (392.68 KPH). Terminal Island was completely submerged by the waves kicked up by the storm, and the buildings that once lay on the island became nothing more than thousands upon thousand of pieces of driftwood and debris, most never to be seen again. The storm surge from Priscilla reached a maximum of 28 feet high, and it penetrated more than a mile inland, straight into downtown LA flooding the streets and overwhelming the storm sewers with more than 300000 gallons of harbor water. Most of the businesses within range of the storm surge shattered into thousands of pieces of driftwood and broken metal, making recovery a nightmare of epic proportions and the economy would feel the effects for years. The storm surge was most definitely the worst part of the cyclone, for it beached several ships over 150 meters from their moorings in San Pedro, although a couple were found almost 300 meters inland.

Some of the ships found farther inland were military warships and a few oil tankers that had not finished unloading the crude from their holds before the Port Authority shut the harbor down in preparation for the storm. The Crown Royal/, an Israeli-owned vessel just in from Qatar struck a large decorative statue which pierced its double pressure hull and sent its viscous ebony cargo oozing onto the city streets, clogging the nearby storm drains and slicking the pavement. As the surge passed, almost 30000 barrels of oil went along with it, contaminating the financial district and almost everything in the area between the coast and Yucca and Vine. The second oil tanker that spilled its glutinous payload onto the avenues and boulevards of Los Angeles was a Pakistani owned tanker, nearly 40 years old and just about falling apart at every seam. The hull had so many patches that not even the crew what the original paint color had been, but now it was deep uniform rusty red, a tribute to the long voyages over the seven seas the /Pride of Islamabad had seen. The Islamabad was the only civilian ship to come to rest actually in the City of Angels, but it was by far the most costly of any beaching caused by Priscilla, namely due to what brought it to a sharp and sudden stop. The 35000-ton ship slammed straight into a high-rise apartment complex, toppling the massive structure and the people inside had no choice to come along for the ride into freezing cold water and several tons of rubble from what used to be their shelter.

Several military warships also washed up out of the harbor, and this came only when forces around the world needed them the most in places thousands of miles away and in a very short amount of time. The Ticonderoga class cruiser USS Saigon washed up in Harbor City, ramming into a large and extremely sturdy crane used to load and unload forty-foot long containers on super-large cargo ships, completely demolishing the bow and severely damaging the bridge and conning tower. Debris from the Saigon flowed into the city, creating a huge security breach where anybody and his brother could pick highly classified military equipment off the streets, and considering how many gangs there are in the city they scared the hell out of many police district chiefs. The SPY-1C phased radar array broke off the hull in one solid piece, and ended up on the sixth story of a parking garage, although exactly how it ended up twenty-five feet above the crests of the largest waves still baffles investigators as it violates most laws of physics. A Los Angeles class nuclear submarine, the USS Dallas/, smashed up against the side of its dock, crushing the spherical bow sonar array and nearly decapitating the sub, vis-à-vis the conning tower almost totally sheared off from the main body of the sub. By the time the storm was over, the /Dallas looked like a gigantic crumpled beer can in its sub pen, and the HY80 steel had splintered in more than a dozen critical areas, including the torpedo room, the main control center and the reactor compartment. When the reactor shielding shattered, more than one thousand gallons of highly radioactive water drained into the floodwaters, exposing most of San Pedro Harbor and the surrounding ocean to nearly 200 curies of radiation. In the coming years, the fishing industry around LA would decline sharply, and sea-life in the area would die off in droves, but some of the more resilient species would mutate into much stronger forms, such as a local species of shark, which became 20% larger and more aggressive.

The last ship we are going to visit is the USS J. Robert Oppenheimer/, an America class battle cruiser, which was a true testament to the power of Hurricane Priscilla and the massive waves that slammed the southern California coast. The Oppenheimer was in dry-dock when the storm surge lifted it straight off of the scaffolds and sent careening through the naval base, eventually coming to rest on what used to be one of the base administration offices. The main superstructure struck one of the many super-heavy-duty loading cranes that dotted the area of the docks and harbor, and crushed the entire bridge into a wreck of twisted metal. Before the Oppenheimer came to rest, the ship rolled over twice, allowing one of the three colossal gun turrets to take leave of the ship, and the turret wound up near Hollywood Blvd. and Vine Ave. Most of the equipment on the main deck was lost when the ship went into the first roll, and during the second roll, debris from the wrecks of nearby buildings battered the exterior of the ship, ripping the more sturdy equipment straight off the hull leaving jagged gaping holes. The landed on its port side, looking like a toy someone had taken a crowbar to, the propeller blades bent in towards the shafts, and wearing more dents than a new car after a major hailstorm. The eighteen-inch thick hull had been punctured dozens of times by high strength steel I-beams, which had struck the ship at more than 140 MPH, making them little more than 2000-pound torpedoes on a straight trajectory and a target the size of a city block. When the damage inspectors evaluated the damage done to the three military vessels, they reported that the Navy shipyards could repair the /Saigon and the Oppenheimer/, but the /Dallas was a complete loss and would have to go to the scrap yards.

As the storm passed over the city, rain came in torrents, filling the streets, saturating the ground and mixing with pure oil, creating a grotesque noxious muck that clung to anything that it came into contact with, making clean-up efforts a living hell. Quite a bit of the crude drained slowly into the ocean, creating an oil slick twice the size of the Exxon Valdez spill, and eventually the oil contaminated over three hundred forty miles of beaches and coastal land, shutting down one of California's most popular tourist attractions. The Los Angeles city area had received more precipitation in three days then it usually received in a span of two and a half years, which caused immense flooding in the area of the Yucca Corridor and Hollywood Hills, nearly ruining several movie studios. The downtown area looked as if an 8.3 earthquake had struck; some of the skyscrapers and high-rise hotels no longer had their top stories, only the jagged remnants of their former glory, standing as testimony to the power of the storm. Most of the city was knee deep in a gelatinous muck made from water, vast amounts of soil, various petrochemicals and about four dozen carcinogenic substances released from the industrial district when some storage tanks burst after hit by flying wooden joists. This odiferous slime would take nearly two years to completely remove from the city; mostly because once the damn stuff dried, it became harder than cement, although it unfortunately did not lose its nauseating stench. The death toll from hurricane related damage came to approximately fifteen thousand dead, eleven thousand missing, and three hundred thousand left homeless in the Los Angeles area alone, and almost 33.8 billion US$ in damages.

A small hotel in the suburbs of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the United Kingdom
Circa 2230 GMT, 7 December 2001

Gabrielle Delacour was almost floating on air because of one simple undeniable fact: she had found her soul mate alive and well. From the moment she had come within twenty feet of him, it had felt like she had found joy and contentment made tangible, and they wrapped themselves endlessly around her heart and whispered reassurances to her. When she met with Harry, the first thing she did was to devour his lips in a fiery kiss, and as soon as their lips met, she was lost in a sea of passion, the depths of which have never been fully probed by man or woman. Very soon, they had to release each other to take breath, but loosing the feeling of his slightly chapped lips on hers was almost too much to bear, but she consoled herself with the knowledge that soon they would be as close as one can be to another person. They quickly moved to the room assigned to them by the hotel staff, and there they began a sacrament as old as time itself, and as miraculous as any other force of this universe. As soon as they arrived at the room, they met again in a soul-searing kiss, which stoked the flames of their arousal into an inferno of unimaginable size and intensity.

Gabby slowly stripped herself for her fiancé, starting first with her outer jacket that before had protected her from the cold English night, and even the act of slipping the heavy coat off her shoulders was an aphrodisiac to Harry's senses. Harry sat semi-calmly on the bed watch the erotic display his future wife was giving him, and although he already knew what the layers of cotton and silk hid from others prying eyes, each time he looked upon her body if was as the first time, always discovering something new and tantalizing. Every soft curve revealed to him he looked upon with pure love, desire and utter devotion, but every square millimeter of velvety, perfect skin fed an animalistic yearning in him, one that could never truly be denied, only appeased for amounts of time. As she slowly removed her satin blouse, she mesmerized him with the sight of her perfectly formed 38DD breasts and the four-centimeter wide areolas, already pebbled in sweet seductive desire, barely restrained as they were by her lacy scarlet brassiere, which only inspired him to new heights of sexual desire. When she finally removed her cotton panties, he was almost ready to go off like a volley of rockets, but by sheer force of will alone, he staved off completion until he was sure they would both find it meaningful. He quickly joined her in the freedom of nudity, and he slid down her body, moving toward her Venus mound and the glistening lips there, just begging with the entirety of their being to be kissed. He gently kissed the trimmed landing strip of pale blond curls, and then he set to work, tonguing her outer labia while searching for the one spot that would make squeal in delight and sheer pleasure. He found her clitoris and gave it the third degree with both his lips and tongue, and very soon, she gave a breathy moan as her orgasm rolled over her with all the intensity of an avalanche.

They then preceded to the higher forms of sexual arts, which they have refused to divulge to this author, much to his great disappointment, and I am sure to yours as well.