Felix died the first time when he turned 18 years old. A car had swerved into his lane and crushed both his freshly christened Ford and Felix, himself. It came as a significant surprise when he found himself reborn in the adult body of an unknown alien in a world different from the one he remembered. The surprise lessened when he was reborn after his second death one year thereafter. He almost counted on it when his hundredth death in, in total, 50 years came about.
Perhaps a thousand or ten thousand deaths later, he remembered little about himself other than that his true name was Felix and that he had once been human. The lives he lived came and went and they counted as long if he lived for more than 9 months, Earth time.
He had lived as multiple different humans, gnomes, aliens, monsters, abominations, whatever one might think of, chances were Felix had experienced being it. He had spoken countless different languages, some structured, some instinctual. He had plied countless different trades, had enjoyed some, had despised some. Curiously, he had never killed himself. If one were to ask, he‘d answer that he didn‘t see the point. He would die anyway, rather swiftly too, and even those experiences he despised he found valuable. In his many lives he had not once lived a life twice. Sure there were similarities but each and everyone was a unique experience, if a short one.
Felix had to admit he didn‘t particularly remember any specific lives except perhaps his first. But he could claim to get better at living. Even if the experiences were not distinguishable, the spirit, mind or soul they formed was rather formidable. Especially once another tens upon tens of thousands of lives went by. Looking back, Felix must have spent close to a hundred thousand years being flung from life to life before something anomalous happened.
Contrary to all other lives he had lived, except his first, Felix did not get reborn into the body of an established being. He was also human once again. In life number 253,457 he woke up in the comfortable embrace of his new mother‘s womb as an 8 month old unborn child. Felix found himself curious what made this life special.
Felix spent his time visiting memory lane in the time up to his birth. In part to experience with birthing and observations on birth itself. For humanoids, it was an agonising process in his experience though many methods existed to ease delivery. Perhaps he might also be cut out of his mother. Maybe he would never see the light of day. Those were the thoughts he turned over in his head.
When Felix did eventually part with his mother's womb, he did not entirely expect to part with his mother entirely in but a few weeks later. Little Felix's room was lit up in green as his mother's panicked cries died in her throat - as did her heart in her chest. Then a gloved hand scooped him out of his crib, stuffed in a basket and off he went. Judging by past experience Felix fully expected to make intimate contact with some new or familiar manner of death soon. He had to recalculate that expectation after he spent a year safely cared for in some underground facility.
The interior was dominated by a sterile white, broken up by the few darkly clothed guards he sometimes caught glimpses of. That is, he assumed they were guards in spite of them lacking any obvious armament to support their alleged duty. Every day an emotionless lady in a white nurses outfit would stop by his crib to take care of his needs. Most of them, at least, as the motherly warmth one should usually expect as an infant was not part of the care package.
After he had spent roughly one year at the facility, this routine changed as a man entered the room he shared with nine other infants and picked him up to carry off down several nondescript corridors. Felix gleaned his first bit of understanding of this life when instead of being led to his death in some shape or form he was instead placed in the middle of a complicated-looking ritual circle whereupon a middle aged man with a black mane of hair, a stormy beard and an ice-cold stare spent an estimated two hours chanting in a language that resembled Mirshgul or Ethlenod while making the circle light up.
Felix could reasonably conclude that he had landed in one of the worlds with an established magical tradition. Now, while he had no idea about the laws governing this world's magic, he did assume that this ritual was supposed effect something. Felix had no idea what. He felt no different than he had before. Over the years that followed Felix was subjected to all manner of magical experiments following some system he was naturally not privy to. He was taught to speak, read and write as well as some basic mathematics. All things that were familiar though this world's and perhaps time's English appeared to differ some from what he had last spoken.
The experiments also finally started to affect him. One very long and apparently powerful ritual made him remember his time as a bird of prey soaring through the sky, locating humans, and ripping out their skulls and spines to drink their marrow. The memory is replaced by the memory of a different life. Felix inhales and tastes blood in the wind. His paws drum on the soft undergrounds. He disregards the family's pleas as his fangs find their throats and his claws disembowel them. The blood is hot as it runs down his throat and the meat fills his belly.
Felix noticed that his senses seemed to have improved dramatically after that one as he listened to the footsteps outside the door and watched pores on his nurses face as they breathed. He also had to rein in an insignificant impulse to jump at her throat and observe the colour of her blood.
Over the next years Felix experienced five more such rituals- Each seeming to change his place in the world in different directions. He remembered sneaking through allies to scavenge for food, lording over lesser beings on the summit of Ragur's Teeth, diving into the gold beneath the Bank of Veres, hunting sentients across galaxies to consume their minds and eat their thoughts and many more lives which he had long forgotten. Along with the rituals came familiar impulses and great improvements to himself. Some were subtle like a feeling of authority and belonging in this world. Some were more obvious like the ability to feel the emotional coldness his nurse had every time he saw her. She was unchanging and unfeeling. Each of those rituals appeared supplemented by ten to twenty minor rituals, doses of different fluids, medicine or potions perhaps, and hundreds of diagnostic spells.
As the major rituals grew in number, his importance to the facility appeared to rise. Felix could guess that he was one of the few surviving the experiments in a serviceable state. Perhaps the only one. The infants, by now children, he had seen had mostly disappeared to experiments never coming back. A handful, perhaps 30, had made their way back to his ward. Of those, however, 20 odd children had suffered a violent collapse of their up to then seemingly stable condition and three were torn to shreds by their bed mates who, after a few hours of peaceful sleep, had turned feral and attacked anything and everything in sight.
Especially impactful had been when one of the ferals had collapsed like a doll with its strings cut off after one of the guards had bellowed "Avada Kedavra!", leveling a stick at the kid which shot a green lightning bolt. The shade of green led Felix to believe that his temporary mother had suffered the same spell. The spell's effectiveness did reinforce Felix's decision to coast the waves for now as he no idea how to avoid death by green lightning. And the child was indeed dead. The magic presumably rampant through its body quickly caused the body to turn to ash. Felix was unsure whether that was by design of the spell or a side effect of the failed ritual. Rituals, in his experience, were finicky things that could turn into something decidedly strange when done wrong.
What should be Felix's last and seventh major ritual occurred just after he had turned eight, by his calculations. He had learnt the process by now which is why he was considerably surprised to find himself standing in an empty void. Opposite him stood a small wrinkly creature with a spindly frame, a long, pointy nose, and elvish ears. Its large round eyes looked at him but the gaze was forlorn and empty of all that was usually there. Most curiously the creature imagined itself in this spiritual space wearing some revolting piece of linen and nothing else.
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Felix reached out a hand and opened his mouth to speak with the being. Instead he found himself flung into memories of walking in an overly large manor, being ordered and kicked around. A snap of his finger would arrange the dishes for his masters as he toiled away to serve them food just to feed on the dregs of their magic. Felix was not entirely certain but he felt confident it wasn't a memory of his though he did dimly remember living through similar circumstances. This particular flavour should however be the house elf's as he now knew it was called. The memories spoke of several other names for the species but Felix judged them to be mostly born of prejudice and superiority.
He spent as much time as he could consuming all memories offered to him as they, to some extent, offered him information on this world. It was just like living another life. With holes. The remnant of this elf appeared to have degraded severely since the house elf had been executed and harvested for his essence.
He now knew, however, that he likely lived in a country called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland whose magical community was governed by the Ministry of Magic. Magic was kept secret across the world and this ministry was in part responsible for ensuring that among others. Furthermore, there was magical aristocracy in the form of families who have consistently produced mostly magically able spawns and have successfully formed the ministry and regulations in such a way that they were significantly favoured by law. The most powerful of which were the so called Sacred Twenty-Eight of which this house elf served one family. This gave Felix some inkling of who his captors might be. Unfortunately names and identifiers were entirely eroded by the house elf's degradation of spirit but he didn't really care to find out who exactly submitted him to this experience. It was turning out to be rather interesting so far.
As Felix returned to the spiritual void, the figure of the house elf shattered, its shards merging with Felix's own representation. When his awareness returned to the material world, he found that he could quite clearly identify the lingering magic of the ritual and had the instinct that he might even be able to reach out and affect it. Felix refrained, keeping his hands on his knees as he knelt at the centre of the room. Showing no adverse reactions, he was swiftly escorted back to his room on the lead ritualist's whom he had by now identified as Orion. The staff of this facility appeared to take operational security seriously as all staff appeared to refer to one another by either what might be codenames or first names or by honorifics such as Sir or Madam.
Felix was woken up that night by distant rumbles. The ever-present guard inside the room stood alert. There was shouting down the corridor. Screams penetrated the walls. The rumbles could be identified as explosions as they neared his room. There were sounds of a scuffle in front of the door, then the lock shone a golden colour. His guard blocked Felix's view on the door for but a moment. A red light lit up the room for an instant and the guard collapsed, unconscious or dead.
A woman in office clothes stood in the doorframe holding a wooden, carved stick. Her eyes darted around, taking in the room. She was breathing heavily, Her head swivelled back towards the door as she approached his bed. Felix hadn't moved beyond sitting up.
"Who are you?", she asked, her voice tinged with a soft RP accent. "Doesn't matter. Get off the bed into the corner."
Felix complied. The woman waved the stick she carried - her wand, Felix supposed - and the beds in the room, remnants of his former roommates, slid across the floor and turned on their side. They formed a barricade around him. A few quiet words muttered by the woman and a shimmer layered itself across the barricade.
She opened her mouth once more, turned towards him, giving Felix a prime seat to witness her expressions. A male voice bellowed the familiar incantation, the woman's eyes widened, her mouth closing, her wand flicking, green light. A part of the wall moved to intercept the spell and the lightning split it into shards as it dissipated against the stone. The woman's wand was just starting to move when a torrent of fire swerved around the stone shield scorching her face and torso. The woman fell to the floor, laying still after a few weakened gasps.
The facility guard who had slain the woman was just rounding the jutting stone shield when another male voice from outside the room proclaimed his doom: "Diffindo!"
A near-invisible blade parted the guard's torso from his legs. The guard screamed and groaned until his halved body gave out. His attacker appeared to be occupied judging by the light show Felix could perceive between the gaps of the bed frames. Felix simply sat and waited for his or the conflict's end. So far he was pretty sure that this life wouldn't end for another few years now but one never knew.
It took maybe ten to twenty minutes of fighting for the noises to end. Felix wasn't able to observe much more as the bed frames and the skirmish in the room obscured his vision of the door and nobody else had entered his room after the facility guard died. Felix knew who had won when another woman in office clothes appeared above the barricade, gazing into his hideout. Her features were angular and her expression severe. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. Nary a hair out of place, Felix could only assume she had not been involved much in the fight.
A flick of her wand parted the beds. She gestured and Felix stood up and walked past her into the larger room. The bodies, he noticed, had already been covered with sheets of cloth. A hand on his shoulder gently but firmly guided him out of the door along the corridors past several other doors until he reached a room he had never seen before. It looked like an entrance hall. And, indeed, above a set of wide stairs there was an opening through which he, for the first time in this life - in eight years - Felix could see the sky. And it was a beautiful sky. Stars dotted the black vastness of space and white waxing moon shone down with gentle light. Felix noticed a trail of tears running down his cheek.
He was awoken from his stupor when the hand on his shoulder turned him around to face its owner. The woman who had found him fixed his gaze and her expression softened.
"My name is Amelia Bones, head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. You are safe now. You are free."
After proclaiming such momentous information, he was handed over to a team of what he would describe as medics. They were clothed, like everybody else on the side of law enforcement he'd seen, in office clothes but their questions, care and concerns betrayed their true professions. Several spells were cast on him, their results making him frown. He was informed, he was healthy but that there were some irregularities they would need to take a closer look at.
Felix didn't have to think hard to guess what might have stumped them so. It appeared that whatever magical alterations the facility staff, chiefly Orion, had achieved in him, had had lasting consequences on his physiology. Perhaps the rituals had been unusual? It had certainly appeared as though the facility didn't entirely know what they were doing.
All in all, it took three days for the interrogations and examinations on his person to finish. In the meanwhile he was assigned a lovely tent in the British wilderness. Apparently, the facility had been constructed as a large underground complex with really only the one entrance and exit as proof of existence on the surface. Magic allowed the architects to forego any of the usual vents and utilities mundane underground complexes typically required. Or at least, that's what one of the aurors had claimed when explaining some magic to the resident child.
Aurors was the term the law enforcement officers used to refer to themselves. Apart from them there were a number of different departments of the Ministry of Magic involved in this raid. And inter-departmental cooperation was not smooth, according to Ms Bones who had led most of the interrogations Felix had found himself subject to and had also checked up on him every so often between them. It was she who informed him after the aftermath was wrapped up of his new outlook on the future.
Since he was undeniably magically altered and to an extent that any muggle - non-magical human - doctor would easily discover and report, it would be impossible to place him in any ordinary orphanage. Fortunately, the ministry had a solution to this issue in the form of St. Caecilias Orphanage for Special Children. The orphanage was managed by a Mrs Coulper. Mrs Coulper belonged to the unfortunate number of children of magical households who did not exhibit magical abilities, so called Squibs. This made her ideal for the position as she was aware of the magical truth while having no vested interest in pursuing some magical venture. Along with being paid a ministry wage, which was apparently rather good, Mrs Coulper had subscribed herself to caring for those orphans who for some reason or other could not be left to muggles. Her husband, Mr Coulper, a wizard, had not approved of his wife's commitment, which had reportedly caused a number of domestics. The tension had eased when Mr Coulper had found his end during one of his potioneering experiments.
Felix was sure of one thing. When not in front of her subordinates, Amelia Bones was a gossip. She appeared to take visits to his tent as a form of relaxation during these tense few days of managing her people. She would have to find a different way to cope as on the eve of January 28, 1981, Felix found his new home in London in an orphanage.
