Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or Mass Effect. All rights belong to their respective authors/publishers/studios. I write as a hobby as I'm definitely not good enough to make a living from it.

Author's Note: This is the first and probably only time you will see an AN in this story at the top of a chapter.

This story is an idea I came up with. I'm not sure how long I would see it running for, nor am I certain of how I would progress it beyond the ME2 arc as I've not played ME3. It's likely that it would go extremely AU towards the end of the ME2 story but I would maintain a lot of canon throughout ME1/ME2.

This chapter is a prologue, a taster, a toe dipped into the water to see how much interest it arouses. If you want to see more of the story review or PM me and let me know as I will otherwise only work on it as and when the mood takes me. If people want to read it I'll be more motivated to work on it properly.

The basic premise of the story is that the Protheans somehow seeded magic on Earth as part of an attempt to create a civilization that would not be reliant on ME technology. It didn't quite work though and Harry is the last magical alive, kept so by the hallows which are actually a form of Prothean tech not based on Eezo or the mass effect. Should the story go ahead, Harry will be drawn into the events of the ME story line and I will see how it plays out.

No decision yet on potential pairings or likely powers. The prologue establishes that ME tech and magic can work together but that magic can trump ME tech in certain circumstances. I don't know to what extent this will be a factor, it may just be a coincidence and only useful on a small scale, or it could become a major plot point.

Anyway, please feel free to read the prologue below and let me know what you think and if you want more. If I do carry on with this there might be a chapter or two of events pre-ME1 but it would really all start with the attack on Eden Prime. I'm confident I can do a decent job on the ME1 arc and most of the ME2 arc.

Prologue:

In 1998, the magical world celebrated the defeat of the dark lord Voldemort, or Tom Riddle to those that knew the truth. Most of the victors believed that his defeat would herald a new era of peace and equality, and idealism flourished. Happy that the worst was over, they returned to their quiet lives trusting that of course someone would now come along to lead them properly for a change.

How wrong they were.

After Kingsley Shacklebolt's short term as minister, things returned to the status quo from before the second war. Blood purists again rose to dominate the wizarding world. Harry Potter and Hermione Granger were hardly surprised by this. As with so many other things the key factor was money. The blood purists had all of it and thus they had the power. The two childhood friends decided early on that they had done enough. If the people of the wizarding world chose to be sheep rather than fight for their rights, so be it. They both secured employment in the Department of Mysteries, ideal since all DoM employees were anonymous, and spent the next several decades researching magic. Between them they collected rare books and built up a combined library to match that of Hogwarts, and they started to notice something odd.

They had each studied in the muggle world as well as the magical one, and had a number of degrees, masters and even a few doctorates between them. Having a deeper understanding of muggle science and history than any other witch and wizard they identified a major discrepancy in the ancient history of the magical world.

Knowing the full history of the mundane world, they expected to find fossil evidence of magical creatures dating back to similar periods, it was after all highly unlikely that even the most well concealed creature would remain so for thousands of years after death). This was not the case however. It was frankly unbelievable that not a single fossil pointing to a dragon would have ever been found, as the species surely should have dated back eons.

On the contrary, there was no evidence of any magical creature existing before approximately fifty thousand years prior to their time. It was as if all magical creatures had simply come to exist, rather than evolved. To witches and wizards this wouldn't pose any problem at all, magic does after all encourage a distrust of logic, but to the two researchers it was beyond unbelievable. This set them to studying the nature of magic itself more deeply than any before them.

They had noticed by this time that Harry appeared to be aging extremely slowly, if at all. This pointed somehow to the deathly hallows being involved, being the only reasonable outside stimulus. This train of thought led to a breakthrough on their part. Breaking down the myth and legend surrounding the hallows they realized that the story was older than any had suspected, dating back almost to the beginning of magical history. Working from the assumption that some outside force had been responsible for all magic suddenly appearing roughly fifty millennia ago, they came to the conclusion that someone must have been responsible. Devoting their research towards the field of genetics, and gaining access to labs that would enable them to analyse their own DNA, they finally unlocked the key to magic in the late twenty fifties.

They each shared a genetic strand that was not shared by a major proportion of the world's population, coincidentally the proportion that was non-magical. The DNA also exhibited in varying strengths, finally answering the question of why Harry Potter was such a powerful wizard. Surreptitiously collecting and comparing DNA samples from other wizards proved it, Harry's genes exhibited the strongest magical genes by a long way.

From there, analyzing the actual methods by which magic worked became simple, but time consuming. Technology tended to malfunction around high concentrations of magic and Harry's magical strength made that even worse. They did identify that the three hallows acted as an amplifier of Harry's normally prodigious power, and from there they found evidence of this boosted power continuously regenerating his genetic structure, extending his life and maintaining his youth. Attempting to achieve the same effects with Hermione sadly failed as her magical gene was simply not strong enough, she likened it to trying to start an engine with a watch battery compared to Harry being a car battery, the amount of magic required to activate them was simply too large.

They could not however break down just what the hallows were, as they resisted all attempts at analysis. They did succeed in finally ridding themselves of the notion that wands were necessary for magic. They acted as an amplifier, nothing more, and they believed that modern wands were in fact based on the elder wand, though far less powerful.

By the beginning of the twenty second century Hermione was reaching a grand old age, and the two had plumbed the depths of magic almost to its limits. While they were doing this the magical world was in a sharp decline. The population sagged as fewer and fewer mundane-born entered the magical world - instead being allowed to flounder in the muggle world with no idea of what they were capable of - and the extremists became ever louder as the population dwindled.

Harry and Hermione had considered publishing their findings to the mundane world but were convinced that to do so would be disastrous. With the magical world in its current state it would certainly not be receptive to advances from the mundanes and the likeliest outcome would be a war between the two. In the end it made no difference when the extremists finally got a member elected as minister of magic, and his first act was to call for magicals to take over the mundane world.

Several things became clear during the long war between the magicals and mundanes. First, the magicals grossly underestimated how capable the mundanes were. Second, a lot of mundane-born witches and wizards died at the hands of angry mobs. Third, you do not piss off Harry Potter when he is wielding the three hallows. This last became clear when, at the beginning of the first pitched battle between magical and mundane, Harry implemented a ward within which no magic could be used, stripping the magicals of their weapon and defense. The battle did not last long and there were no casualties on the mundane side.

Harry's saving-people-thing had come to the front once more. Despite their fear of the reaction from the mundane world he and Hermione agreed that if either side had to lose, it was the magicals. By this time Hermione was a very old woman and nearing the end of her time. Harry spent all of his time with her as they planned for his future, hoping to find some trace of the aliens that had been responsible for the creation of all magic.

Harry couldn't be everywhere of course, and many mundanes did die at the hands of the magicals, until something happened which changed the balance of power completely. The discovery of technology using an unknown element to generate fields which would control mass was dubbed by the mundanes the "Mass Effect", and was quickly harnessed in the traditional means for new technologies. The mundanes created weapons using the new technology and practically annihilated the magicals in a series of engagements and attacks taking less than five years. Scanners based on the technology could penetrate wards and orbital strikes by mass drivers obliterated pureblood manors in a spectacular demonstration of power.

Harry and Hermione though finally had the answer they were looking for, or so they thought. Whatever race had created the mass relays must have been the same race that created the foundations of magic. What they still didn't understand was why, magic and mass effect seemed to have little or nothing in common, except that they both manipulated matter and energy though in completely different ways.

In the aftermath of the war the magical world ceased to exist in a meaningful sense. The dangerous magical creatures were wiped out or caged, smaller ones went into hiding. Populations collapsed and died and Harry and Hermione wept as they watched the magical world burn.

When Hermione died, shortly before the first contact war, Harry finally had nothing holding him to his old life. He felt no bitterness towards the mundanes, they were after all defending themselves, even if human nature had led them to be callous and aggressive. When the first biotics were discovered among humanity he feared that the witch hunts would start again and prepared himself for the worst, but it was not so. Biotics were accepted as part of society, albeit not trusted fully due to their impressive powers, but there were no calls of "Witch" or "Sorcerer" as there had been during the troubled times.

As a scientist, Harry could not turn down the opportunity to study this new technology and was surprised when he discovered that Eezo (as Element Zero was now called) did not suffer from the usual failures around his magic. Experimentation on this revealed that he could prevent Eezo based technology from functioning if he chose, but it was generally inert to magic.

Not content to merely research the technology, he also studied its uses, and to that end mastered the various weapons, vehicles and ships that were based on this new technology. Living now in the mundane world (he supposed there was little point making a difference between the two any more) he had to take care to move around so as to avoid anyone taking note of his longevity. Thus, he studied, lived and moved on from place to place until a colonization advert caught his eye.

Weighing up his options, he made his decision. He and Hermione had looked everywhere they reasonably could for proof of their theories and found none, perhaps out in the wider galaxy he might find something. He packed up his research and collections of artifacts, and boarded a ship for the newly established colony world of Eden Prime. The last magical departed Earth seeking knowledge and understanding on a new world.