I'm not interested in ordinary people. But if anyone out there is a time traveler, ninja, or wizard, then please come see me. I live in the attic above the stairs at 4 Privet Drive in Little Whinging, Surrey in the year 1990….

Hariya Potter clicked her heels together three times.

"There are no places like home," she whispered to herself. "There are no places like home."

Before she opened her eyes, she held herself still, hands clenched tight. For a moment all that existed was the breath caught in her nose and her fingertips rubbing against her palms, and it was still possible that the universe was obliterated and recreated anew and far more interesting.

Hesitantly, she opened her eyes.

Nope. Same old Privet Drive. Same old identical houses lined up neatly, identical cars parked out in front. Indistinguishable individuality in the gardens, choice of flowers and so on. Deathly, deathly dull.

It was the normalcy of it all that got to her. She was convinced that somewhere out there was a world of ninjas, aliens, hardboiled detectives with a genetic immunity to concussions, wizards, gods, superheroes, and absolutely no Privet Drives. So many books had been written about such worlds that it didn't seem right that so many grown-ups could have systematically lied to little girls.

She wasn't stupid. She just knew right from wrong, and ninja wizard aliens were right, and Privet Drive was boring.

Her uncle was watching from inside the house. "Hariya! No magic!"

No magic? For someone who was so obsessively mundane, who wouldn't even let Hariya watch Uri Geller on the TV, Uncle Vernon went out of his way to punish any attempts at magic. Uncle Vernon believed that magic wasn't real as strongly as Hariya believed it was, and they were each equally determined to prove they were right. She held up her fingers and snapped them just to make him angry.

"No magic, girl!" Uncle Vernon said. "Go to your room!"

Hariya strutted indoors, her nose stuck up in the air, and headed up to the attic above the stairs where she slept. Like being sent to her room was a punishment. Like there was anything interesting to do outside in Privet Drive.

But inside her attic…

Hariya squeezed past the small bed and pushed on the heavy wooden frame leaning against the wall. Grunting and heaving, she moved it out of the way, revealing what looked to be just another part of the wall. She fitted an expired credit card she had stolen from her aunt's purse between a thin crack running up the wall and carefully pushed. Part of the wall swung open, revealing the Shrine Of Interesting Things.

There was a poster of Einstein, stolen from the school library, and images of Captain James Cook, Theodore Roosevelt, and Neil Armstrong. There was every book of The Dark is Rising (What she'd give to be a mundane British girl suddenly thrust into a world of fantasy, instead of merely a mundane British girl), also stolen from the library, worn with use, stacks of Nancy Drew novels and paperbacks by Asimov and Pohl, newspaper clippings about NASA and the moon landing, and everything about new planets and the potential for alien life. Pictures of Eratosthenes, Robert Falcon Scott, and not Doctor Manhattan (she hated Watchmen). And on and on, the walls covered with articles and images, stacks of fantasy, mystery, and science fiction novels piled high…

Hariya picked A Wrinkle in Time out of the mountain of books and lay back on her bed, legs dangling over the end, and she started to read.

It should perhaps be noted at this time that the Shrine Of Interesting Things was the only thing keeping the world from being destroyed.

Hariya was an unusual girl. She was right-handed but left-footed, she could read, write, and do math at a ninth grade level even though she was due to start sixth grade when summer ended, and she was God, able to manipulate reality as easily as breathing. Hariya was unable to use her power deliberately. Perhaps this was fortunate, since her maturity, her teachers swore, was not at a ninth-grade level, regardless of how well she did on tests. In fact, she was entirely unaware of her power, and it manifested itself subconsciously. One time when chased by other children she wound up on the roof of a house with no explanation, sometimes she could tell when people were lying, she had talked to a snake once...things like that.

And God was bored. So, so bored, of her boring life in boring Privet Drive, where everyone looked and acted the same, and no one aspired to do anything more exciting than work a respectable job from 9 to 5 and come back home to eat dinner, watch TV, and go to bed. Bored of her image-conscious aunt and uncle, her fat, piggish cousin, her life trapped in this attic, bored of everything.

Hariya wanted one thing in life, and that was to explore, to discover, for exciting things to happen and the boundaries of the world to fall away like the hull of a ship passing over the horizon.

Privet Drive was a fortress built to stand against all things interesting.

And God was impatient. Restless. Wishing things weren't as they were.

Although God didn't know it, reality worked as God willed it. And if God willed reality otherwise, then all the laws of reality would follow like sheep.

The Shrine Of Interesting Things, the tabernacle of everything that held God's interest, was all that kept God from sweeping our reality aside like table crumbs and replacing it with a world of ninjas, magic, and adventure.

The school library was small. Its budget shrank every year.

Hariya Potter was running out of books.

"Girl! Girl!"

Someone banging on the door. Uncle Vernon. Hariya opened her eyes.

"Girl, you haven't set the table yet! Dinner's almost begun!"

Hariya glanced at the small hole in the wall of the attic she used to tell time. It was dark.

Her eyes slid down to the book, resting by her hand.

Oh, no.

The door burst open. Uncle Vernon strode into the room.

"You, girl, did you fall asleep?" He was a large, fat man, balding and permanently angry with her. Then he saw the Shrine, which Hariya had not closed.

His eyes bulged, his face turned a nasty shade of purple, matching the vein that throbbed in his temple. His tongue spluttered incoherently, his throat choked on his own rage, and then he bellowed, "WHAT THE RUDDY HELL HAVE YOU DONE TO MY WALL, GIRL?" His feet pounded the floor like a pair of irate elephants as he made his way to the Shrine.

"No!" she cried, clutching her book and dashed protectively in front of the shrine. He grabbed her arm harshly, ripped the book out of her hand, and threw it across the room. He yanked on her arm, leaning down, his small eyes glaring at her.

"This is my property!" he spat. "I took you in when your good-for-nothing parents died, and this is how you repay me? Forgetting your chores and ripping up my wall! You should be grateful that I let you eat!"

He pushed her away and turned to the Shrine. He pulled down the pile of books, kicked and stamped on them, ripped down the pictures and newspaper clippings. Panting, dripping with sweat, his thick hands and sausage-like fingers defiled the Shrine of Interesting Things, tore down the altar, cast aside the icons, trampled the holy texts, destroyed everything God cared for in her life.

"No!" Hariya shrieked, grabbing at his sweater. "Stop it!"

He spun and pushed her away, shoving her back several feet.

"You go set the table RIGHT NOW!" he thundered. "While I deal with this vandalism."

Hariya set the table. She sat across from her fat cousin, Dudley as usual. His mother, Aunt Petunia, talked about something she had seen one of their neighbors doing through the window. They were occasionally distracted by the sound of hammering. Fifteen minutes later, Uncle Vernon came down, red-faced and damp, with a satisfied smirk on his face.

"That's all taken care of!" he said loudly. "Won't have any more trouble like that around here!"

Hariya spooned soup into her mouth. Later, when dinner was finished and she had cleared and washed the plates and silverware and cleaned the table, she went back up to the attic above the stairs.

Wood boards were nailed to where the Shrine had been. The books, pictures, and newspaper clippings were gone.

Nothing remained of value to God in our reality.

The next day, two things of note occurred. The first was Hariya's eleventh birthday. There were no presents, of course, and no party, not that Hariya wanted one. Aunt Petunia was a bit less careless and cruel, Dudley and Uncle Vernon unchanged. The second was that a golden necklace appeared under Hariya's pillow that morning.

Hariya fished it out. It was light and beautiful, and on the necklace hung a perfect circle inside a perfect circle, and within the smaller circle was a thin disk, with an hourglass inscribed on the surface. Hariya slipped it on and hurried down to make breakfast.

Later that day, Hariya sat outside, looked around carefully to see if any of the Dursleys were watching, and took out the necklace. She peered carefully at the disk with the hourglass. She poked it. The disk wobbled, as if it could rotate, and so did the world.

Hariya looked around in shock. Had everything really just...? She poked it again. Yes, a wobble, almost as if the entire earth was deciding whether to flip upside down.

She took a deep breath and flicked the disk hard, and it rotated around, one, two, three, four, five, six times.

The world blurred, flickered, vanished at the same time that it came into focus. Concrete and asphalt became grass and tall trees, houses and cars disappeared, and so did the people, and suddenly Privet Drive was a long expanse of bright green grass and nothing else.

"Whoa," Hariya said. Had she just teleported? Or traveled to a different world? Amazing!

Hariya stood up, looking around at the long stretch of green in all directions. She breathed; the air was different, cleaner and purer, and smelled different, and a wild excitement rose up inside her. Her imagination spread out its wings and took flight.

Finally!

Hariya ran ran through the grass, which sloped gently upwards, until she stood high on a hill. She looked down as the world dropped away from her, her mind racing to fill up the space, and she threw back her head and laughed with pleasure. Down below, in the distance, Hariya could see lights. People? A town? Wizards?

Hariya dragged her feet as she made her way through the trees. She could see a lot farther in the clean air, and the town was much farther away than she had realized. The hills fell down toward a steep cliffside. Trees interspersed the houses in the valley where the town lay. A mountain loomed over of the far side, faces staring out like the picture she had seen of Mount Rushmore in one of her books. Was this America?

It was taking so long! She wasn't sure how she was going to descend the steep cliff. Her feet ached, and her hands were wrenched painfully behind her, her head pushed forward and down, and a knife was at her throat.

Before she could so much as scream she was bound, blindfolded, and trundled along. Whoever had tied her up wasn't speaking, and wasn't even making a sound as it raced along with her in hand. The sounds of the town grew closer, and a few minutes later whoever was carrying her jumped, once, twice, and they were off again. They carried Hariya for a while, in the air as much as on the ground as best as she could tell, and then they stopped.

"What's this?" a voice said.

"My team captured her alone encroaching on our borders in the forest," a male voice said.

Team? There's more than one? I didn't notice!

"A spy?" the first voice said. It sounded excited.

"Probably," the second voice said, the one holding her. It sounded bored.

"Fine, hand her over for interrogation."

Hariya was pushed forward and then dragged, as if the hands holding her had changed.

"Come on, kids, let's go pick up our payment," the second voice said.

"Man, I feel great!" a younger, boyish voice shouted. "We caught a spy, like real shinobi!"

"We are real shinobi, moron," another young voice said, more serious in tone.

"Yeah, exactly!"

"Never mind, dumbass."

"I get it, Sasuke," said a third voice, higher pitched and eager.

"Only that idiot wouldn't have," the second voice said, and the retort was lost as Hariya was pulled away like a sack of potatoes. Whoever it was pulled her along for awhile, handed her off to someone else, and so on until she was dropped unceremoniously on a hard stone floor. There was the sound of a metal gate slamming shut. Her gag was torn away, and she sucked in air loudly.

"Ow! What is going on here? Who are you people? Where am I?"

Someone began removing the blindfold, and blots of blurry grey stone fell into view for an instant.

"She could have an eye jutsu!" a voice snapped, and the blindfold was put back in place.

"Hey!" she shouted. "I'm just a girl, I'm not a spy. I turned eleven today, for crying out loud!"

"Young enough to have a bloodline limit," the voice said.

"What the heck is a bloodline limit?"

But there was no answer.