September 17, 2062

I do not know what is happening anymore. I no longer quite know who I am. If anything, call me Doctor Phantom.

The human race is trapped. We all are trapped inside this barrier city, and I am not sure how long it will hold out. Against what, you may ask? Against shadows of living things.

I know something that Aki, my young apprentice, does not. I have not told her for these long years that we have been working on our project, which I have not the heart or the courage to introduce to the Council. General Hein, I fear, will be the downfall of our race. He does not believe in our theory, and I'm not positive that anyone does, besides Aki and I.

The thing which I know, and has remained secret, haunts me day and night. Three secrets, in fact. I am positive that if you are reading this right now, I am in fact, dead, for this condemning information would never fall into the hands of anyone, had I been alive.

For the first, I know what the phantoms are. The hotheaded General Hein, and the rest of the surviving human race, believes they are an invading army of aliens. They certainly are damned convincing, as the way they kill is quite frightening. Feeling an alien presence in your body, pulling your soul forcibly away from you...it is not pleasant. I see the need to kill these...creatures.

But in reality, they are not creatures.

They are not even alive.

The phantoms are indeed aliens, from a huge planet light-years, I expect, away. At the time of the supposed invasion, in the year 2031, our technology was great enough to see the planet. We just made the folly of never looking.

I am not sure how this has all come to be, but the aliens are ghosts. It is my belief that their planet was in some way destroyed, by themselves or by an invading army. A chunk of their planet hurled through space to Earth, bringing with it a horde of deadly alien ghosts that, at first, we could not see or smell or touch.

So you see the need to destroy them. So do I. It is utter necessity to destroy these creatures yet I cannot help but feel pity. Not for the phantoms, quite, but for the... I am not sure quite what to call them.

I am sure that you know that there used to be wizards and witches living on the earth. Well, maybe you do not, but their existence is recorded in the annals of history, stored in the locked closets of our New York barrier city. I suppose no one wanted to know about this. For in the year 2025, a young wizard named Harry Potter, then about 39, made himself known as a wizard. Others slowly appeared from who knows where, revealing their existence. There was, of course, oppression, but the majority of people were surprisingly accepting. It could not last.

Six years later the meteorite struck. Phantoms, then unknown, slowly began destroying the human race. Not one week later, our technology found what was the disturbance. I and my colleagues found the energy force in the phantoms and, desperate to survive, slowly built the barrier cities. We herded the remainder of the human race into the cities. One-sixth of all humans had survived. Slowly, as we sent out the codes to other cities worldwide, countries built our barrier cities as well. If I am correct, there are five cities in the United States, one in New York City, one in St. Louis, one in Miami, one in St. Paul, one in Los Angeles. There are twenty-eight barrier cities worldwide. But I fear I'm getting off-track.

The wizards and witches, nearly all of whom were a proud, strong people, built one city for themselves. It was at the infamous Hogwarts castle. There were about two thousand of the wizards and witches left.

They built up a force, stronger than any. Armed with wands and magic, with the strongest wizards leading, Percy Weasley, Draco Malfoy, Viktor Krum, and Neville Longbottom, they lead an attack on the phantom crater.

They never came back.

It was a failed attempt that shook the human's foundations. Until then, the magical peoples had been their leaders, their saviors, their hope. Now they seemed to have none. All but one of the wizards had gone out to attack. I will tell you of him later.

I went to the phantom crater to investigate and barely came away with my life. But I had found exactly what I wanted to see and I was no longer sure if I wanted to know at all.

Everyone knew what happened to people that got touched by phantoms. Their soul was taken, dissipated. Some say, as I do, that they returned to Gaia, Spirit of the Earth. But they were simply no longer there. No one wondered if wizards were any different. But it turned out that they are.

Some of the phantoms that haunt the earth now are not alien. They are, or should I say, were, human. Magical.

The wizards of the 2038 Phantom Mission were not killed. They were transformed. Some of the phantoms that haunted the crater had a slightly different energy wave. This is when Aki was infested with a phantom, but what she does not know is that it is magical. A human. I shudder to think that it may be one of my old, school friends.

Have I not told you? I am a wizard myself.

It is true. I was the one wizard who did not go on that fateful crater mission. I had agreed to stay back in case anything happened, and spread the news about Gaia and the spirits within. I did not expect anything to happen.

I think it is time to tell you my name. If you are old, like I am, you may remember me. Perhaps when I die, I will not just be a phantom or a long-forgotten name on a scrap of paper in a deserted library.

I am Vincent Crabbe.

I do not know if that name has ever or will ever stir emotion in anyone. Now I go only by the name Doctor Sid.

Until I was eighteen I pretended to be a dullard. I had no special magical powers, and after a while I revealed myself to my friends that I was indeed smarter than they thought. That is why my friend, Draco, did indeed have faith in me and left me behind. Damn him! Damn him for dying and leaving me here. He had been my best friend. It was me who he told first when he fell in love with Harry. It was me who he confided in about his father. And he left me on my own, with this knowledge that I may be the cause of his second death.

Those are my secrets. I have not told even Aki, for fear she will leave me. She is almost like my child, and I could not bear to see her alone. She need someone besides an old doctor and the phantom living deep inside of the barrier in her. I cannot help but wonder if it is Draco. Or used to be.

I am sure that you have many questions still. My hand shakes with the need to get this all on paper, as I have had it for years in my head I fear that I will go mad if I don't relay it to something or someone. So let me tell you a story. It happened on a warm July day in 2031, as I was at Harry's house for Draco's birthday.

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"Happy birthday, Draco!"

A cheer rose up from the crowded dining room. Draco stood at the table next to Harry and Ron, a blush staining his cheeks. I was so happy that he had not turned to evil, like his father. The wizarding world was at peace with each other.

Harry's grin turned in to a smirk and he turned his head and kissed Draco full on the lips, in a kiss that was inordinately long and one that I thought maybe was a bit too much of a present for his birthday. Defiantly one that should not have been taken out of the bedroom.

Harry had become the captivating man that he had promised to be when he was fifteen. Then he had been whipcord slender, with a strange, awkward beauty. He had grown into his body, now, and even at thirty-nine still retained his youthfulness and sometimes looked like an angel. However, now, with his tongue in Draco's mouth, he seemed a little bit devilish.

Hermione cleared her throat. She had turned into a tall woman, pretty in a way, with bushy hair pulled into a ponytail. Still a know-it-all, I reflected with a grin. She wrapped her arm around Ron's waist and pulled him closer.

If you had told me twenty years ago that I would be best friends with three Gryffindors and that my friend Draco would be lovers with Harry, I would have hexed you on the spot. But right then, at the moment, maybe things were just to good to last.

Suddenly, a scream came from the living room. I rushed in, Draco hot on my heels, just in time to see Seamus crumpled in a boneless heap on the floor, a blue thing in the shape of him wavering in the air, held up by invisible hands. It disappeared in a cloud of blue smoke. I suppose we were too busy gaping at the empty air to pay much attention to the slight cloud of orange come out of Seamus's body.

"Oh my God!" Harry exclaimed in dismay, stepping forward uncertainly, reaching out his hand to Seamus. Ron grabbed him by the back of his shirt. I have never been so grateful of that man in my life.

"Get the hell back, you twit!" he shouted, panic and fear tingeing his voice. Tears streamed down everyone's faces.

Another yell cut short from the opposite side of the room and Goyle was down, his...spirit, I suppose, caught in the air. My mouth dropped open. This was not happening.

Hermione, always the thinker, pulled out her wand. Muttering a few choice words, sparks flew from the end and bounced off the walls. When the sparks hit something that had living energy, a faint glow was emanated.

Soon the room was full of these glows: not on us, but on strangely shaped beings, glowing and horrifying. I gaped.

They were huge, reaching up to the ceiling of the room, strangely menacing. I swear I could see their veins and their nerves, they were so see-through. One of them had long tentacles, I suppose, that reached out and waved through the room. We were too paralyzed with fear and cowardice that we didn't make a move. Suddenly, one of the long wavery tentacles struck out, punching through the stomach of Cho, grabbing onto something in her body and pulling it out. It was her spirit. There was a sickening crunching noise and her struggling soul was fully out of her body, blue and glowing. Slowly it disappeared. Her delicate body crumpled to the floor, and the ghastly alien seemed to look around the room. It was silent but for the muted sobbing of Harry.

"Bastard!" he screamed suddenly, pulling out his wand and raising it, uttering a curse that I hope to God I never hear again.

"Adava Kedavra!" shouted Harry through his tears, a powerful green light flashing from the end of his wand and hitting the phantom straight in the chest. It stumbled back a few paces, and its middle exploded, leaving nothing there in the space of a few seconds.

Harry snarled in triumph, lowering his wand. Suddenly he seemed to notice the horrified eyes of everyone else in the room. Slowly, he looked down, and fear dominated his beautiful green eyes when he saw the tentacles reaching through his chest. With another cracking noise, his spirit was violently ripped from his body. Draco let out an animalistic scream, his hand grabbing onto the spirit's hand, falling to his knees when the soul was gone.

Ron smiled strangely, an almost accepting look on his face. Lowering his wand, he stepped forward into the phantom's reach, only closing his eyes in pain as his soul was taken from him. His form fell to the floor. It seemed as if I had to hear that terrible curse once more that night.

Draco got up from the floor, a light of fury in his eyes. "ADAVA KEDAVRA!" he almost wailed, as the beam of evil green light tore the phantom in half. He fell to the floor, panting and sobbing in grief. I think that by that time, everyone was.

The room was silent for a few minutes. Finally, Hermione couldn't help but say, "What in Gaia were those?"

And that was the beginning of the resistance.

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From that encounter came barrier cities. It was Draco, Hermione, and I that discovered the way to create the energy force to keep the phantoms away. It worked for a while. The wizards walled themselves off from the humans, working up their resistance force. I hate to say this, even in writing, but Draco taught all the wizards the Avada Kedavra curse. We were armed to the teeth and ready to face the wizards.

And in the midst of all this there was still hope. For the wizarding world for years had been the carrier of the believing of Gaia, the Spirit of the earth. My inner circle of friends all knew there was a way to defeat the phantoms, not using force. But the rest of the world, wizards included, were too impatient to wait. So they left me behind to work on my research and marched off to kill. Or so they thought.

They met something that was beyond their comprehension. Two thousand wizards against thousands of phantoms. And this is my personal belief, but I believe that they met a force that they could neither kill nor hurt: a small piece of that world's Gaia.

This is all a theory. I know that if this diary is found, it will surely be the death of me. This is why I keep it secret, silent, hidden in my lab. For now, Aki and I have found the Third Spirit, and we are well on our way to the fourth. Things are going too well for anything to happen now. The Zeus Cannon is only in it's beginning stages, and I hope with all my heart that we finish before it is finished. I fear that if that machine is fired it will be the end of the Earth and humans, not just the phantoms.

There are footsteps down the hall. I hope that it is not General Hein, coming for me at last. I pray that I have a few more years to complete my plans. Aki is not strong enough yet to do this on her own. If it is the will of Gaia, let me finish.

It is September 17, 2062 as I write this. It has been 31 years since the ghosts landed.

Nothing has been the same.

And I don't think anything will.