Author's Note
Before you read, let me explain a bit about the format of this fic.
You know those Choose Your Own Adventure books you read as a kid? The ones where you could choose what your character did, and you'd flip to some random page in the book to see what happened? This story's one of those - sort of. It's not CYOA in that there are multiple paths. I do not have that kind of time, much as it would be fun to give everyone a customized Hogwarts adventure.
Instead, this fic is something called a Quest. It's a type of story that's taken off in some parts of the Internet, for very good reason. In Quests, readers vote on choices provided by the author, who then writes the next update with the winner in mind. This lets readers shape the plot, focus on the characters they like, ignore what they think is boring, and have influence over parts of the story they'd otherwise have no say in. Having both written and participated in these stories, I can tell you that it is lots of fun, and I hope it continues to grow in popularity.
The first few updates are for character creation, and will be quite different from the standard update, but if you'd like to skip ahead to the actual story, start at Chapter 5. (Though the protagonist's background is greatly expanded upon in the first five chapters.) To provide an element of randomness to the story, I use dice and some tabletop mechanics to determine whether or not the main character succeeds, but don't worry - this is much more a story than it is a game. The first fifteen chapters of the Quest are already written, and thus the votes cannot be changed. I'm just including them for posterity's sake, and have marked the winners with an X. If you'd like to participate in this story as a voter, PM me and I'll provide you the link to the forum I use. If not, hope you enjoy it as another drop in the HP fanfic ocean!