[1991 Pt.1]

[July 2, 1991.]

[12 Kennington Road, London.]

Nathan's bedroom was dark and dim as the water hit the glass of the windows with a tapping sound. Nathan himself was lying in his bed, with his eyes open and fixed absentmindedly at the only source of light for his bedroom, the street lamps of Kennington Road. One of the lamps with a Victorian-era design was also twinkling. Nathan mused that the thing had probably finally croaked due to its old age and the rainwater from the storm.

Nathan moved his bored gaze from the lamp and towards the only other occupant in his room- Tsar. The raven was sleeping comfortably on the perch that Nathan had bought when he had purchased him.

Seeing no change in his pet's posture after the fifth time Nathan was looking at him, he moved his gaze towards the clock that his grandfather had gotten him recently. The previous one had broken in one of Nathan's experiments with one of the simpler temporal spells that he had crafted alongside the spatial ones.

He scowled in annoyance as the clock's hour hand pointed at three. It was too early in the morning for breakfast and Nathan was getting frustrated with his lack of sleep which was accompanied by a craving for food, especially since he had to go out to the summer club in the afternoon.

Nathan tried to get some sleep despite his sudden insomnia for about thirty minutes more before he finally gave up on sleep and rose up from the covers of his blanket to sit at the edge of his bed facing towards the window.

"Yeah, I don't think I will be able to sleep tonight," Nathan knew that his lack of sleep was a direct result of his worry about something he had missed until now.

It was 1991 and he was going to the USSR soon. The Cold War was at its peak and any English man or woman visiting the nation would be pretty bad, especially if said visitor had no travel records because the Ministry of Magic did not bother with mundane records.

"And the worst part is that the USSR is going to split soon."- Why was Nathan so bothered by this, especially seeing as the event had happened relatively peacefully in his time? Because Nathan was sure as all hell that the CIA and other NATO allied intelligence groups had something to do with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He just couldn't stomach the idea that there was no interference from such groups during perhaps one of the most significant events in modern history.

The official records be damned, Nathan refused the idea that NATO wasn't somehow the cause of Mikhail Gorbachev causing both the rise of Nationalism and Pro-democratic sentiments. It just seemed too beneficial to be merely something that just happened.

All such intelligence groups were also probably aware of magical people, and Nathan was sure as all hell that magic was probably going to be playing a role in the fall of the Soviet Union in some way. The event was just too significant to not involve a few philosophers and new-bloods who wanted things to go their way.

Nathan shook his head to clear the thoughts. These things had nothing to do with himself or his family and getting involved in things like this wouldn't be good for his future plans. He would just have to go to Kaliningrad, meet a representative of the Vinci Club, finalize a deal and leave the bloody place with his parents as quickly as he could.

"I should still prepare if things do go sideways," Nathan said to himself before pushing himself off the edge of his bed and towards his study table.

His lightsaber which was sitting idly on the table had gone from using fiendfyre to protego diabolica primarily. Nathan over the months had given up on effectively using the hellish crimson flames as a controlled weapon. Yes, they were very destructive, but they also burned through the spatial dichotomy ward too quickly to use them for prolonged periods safely. So Nathan had placed another enchantment on the gem that controlled the magic of the saber, allowing Nathan to choose between both Protego Diabolica and Fiendfyre.

"Would this make me both a Jedi and a Sith or would this just make me someone that both sides aspire to murder?"

Probably the latter, Nathan decided a second later with a wry smile before he sighed and summoned his wand to himself with the flexing of his will.

Warmth flooded his right hand and chest as the familiar feeling of using his wand rose up in him. Nathan smiled before holding his wand up to cast a spell.

The warmth increased massively as Nathan incanted the spell's incantation briefly within his mind and he felt his magic flow into his wand before it left its tip and rewrote reality in the same manner as the spell's syncographic models predicted.

The nothingness in front of the tip of his wand shimmered before a small white handkerchief morphed into existence from non-being and replaced the nothingness.

Nathan smiled at the successful conjuration, despite being a little unnerved by how easily a wizard could break one of the most fundamental laws of Physics. He had seen it hundreds of times by this point, but it still clawed at his throat to accept what he had witnessed as an engineering student.

Shaking his head off the distracting thoughts, Nathan focused on the handkerchief that was falling to the group and flexed his magic wandlessly to hold the white handkerchief up in front of his wand and cast another spell silently. The cloth rippled once from the spell before its size started increasing rapidly.

It turned quickly from a palm-sized cloth to a large cloth which Nathan could probably cover himself with.

"This should be large enough," Nathan nodded to himself in satisfaction before he gently dropped the cloth on his study table and picked out a small metal pen from the small toolkit that was at the upper edge of the table.

Nathan did not like drawing runes on rocks or clothes using blades and ink brushes, since both were pretty aggravating to use, so he created a special tool with the help of his father as something that he considered one of his best time-saving tools.

The complete metal body pen uses chicken blood mixed with grounded flowers of magical Nightshade as ink to engrave runes upon any surface by the use of a gouging enchantment at its tip that Nathan can control the strength of with the use of linking the enchantment to a small conjured fake emerald as the end tip of the pen.

Nathan was about to start writing the first runes down before he hesitated and frowned in thought. He was faced with a choice between using Elder Futhark, Old Egyptian and Heian-era Japanese. He could use a combination of the three, but that would make the runic arrays and diagrams more complicated to write in a single sitting.

All runic languages acted mostly the same when he used them for bestowing effects upon articles, but as Nathan slowly mastered ancient runes he noticed certain pros and cons of using different languages. Some had words and effects that were unique to them in that no other language had a word with a similar meaning, while some were broader in what could be described by the engraving of a single symbol.

"Didn't I make a Heian-Era Kana script-based runic diagrams sometime back?" Nathan frowned before flicking his wand and summoning the papers he had initially drawn the runic diagrams for the array on.

Nathan quickly went through the papers to recheck whether the mostly finished diagrams would be of any use in the plans and what he saw satisfied Nathan.

"Samsara- the cycle of constant birth and death, and Karma- The Hindus and the Buddhists really came up with some pretty cool concepts. Learning Sanskrit, Japanese and Enochian scripts were perhaps the best thing I did over the last seven years. All of them supplement the standard Elder Futhark pretty nicely."

It would take some time, but Nathan was sure that he could cannibalize some of the diagrams from the papers and create a good protective piece of enchanted clothing for himself that might help him if things got hairy in Kaliningrad.

"If things do go fine there, then well, the robes can be used after the fifth year."

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Author Notes:

Happy new year! Did you like the chapter? Show you appreciate by writing a glowing review for the fic in the comments.

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