Hello everyone. I have wanted to write this story for quite some time now, but never quite had the motivation to actually sit down and do it. But at last I have decided to take a stab at it. Now a few things about the story. I will keep it mostly canon, however it only makes sense that if you throw an OC into the mix then things will change eventually. I am not sure what things will change and it wont be more noticeable until the later books. My OC's main purpose will not be to bring down Old Voldy; that is Harry's job. This isn't an SI where my OC just joins Harry and friends. At first he will have very little to do with Harry, however eventually we will see more of the trio. My OC will have his own challenges and story that happen to take place alongside Harry's. Lastly, the first chapter might be a bit boring because I don't want to just throw my OC into the story and completely copy the books; so please bear with me as I build my character. Now enough of my rambling, on with the show. Enjoy!

Disclaimer -

I do not own anything Harry Potter. All ideas, characters, places, etc. belong to J.K. Rowling

Chapter 1 – I'm a What Now?

Hello, my name is Jordan Bates and this is my recollection of how I, an eleven-year-old with no family, had my world flipped upside down, rebuilt around me, and then burned to the ground. It all started 7 years ago:

July 15th, 1991

Keilberg Foster Home For Children, Boston, Massachusetts

I was sitting in my bed reading when there was a soft knock on my door.

"Jordan, you have a visitor" Ms. Keilberg called a she swung my door open.

Assuming I had heard her wrong I merely replied, "Mhm" and continued to read. It wasn't until I heard a polite cough that I finally tore my eyes away from my story.

A tall, thin man who looked to be over a hundred years old was smiling at me from my desk chair. His silvery hair and beard were both long enough to be tucked into his belt. He was wearing long robes, a purple cloak which swept the ground and high-heeled, buckled boots. His blue eyes were bright and sparkling behind half-moon spectacles and his nose was very long and crooked, as though it had been broken a few times.

"Hello, Jordan" he said to me.

"Who are you?" I asked him.

"I am a professor at a school. A school made just for children like yourself" he responded.

"You mean kids with no family?" I asked him, getting annoyed. He wasn't the first person they had sent to try and talk to me. Even from a young age I was always a quiet kid, an observer. They thought there was something wrong me, but I just didn't want to talk to anyone.

"Oh no. It's a school made for people like you and I that have extraordinary abilities that normal people don't" he replied kindly.

"Abilities?" I questioned.

"Oh yes. Tell me, Jordan, have you ever done anything strange, anything abnormal? Anything that you couldn't explain when you were scared or excited?" He wondered.

I almost immediately replied 'no', but then I stopped myself. There were a few things that I have done in the past that surprised me, but nobody knew anything about that. How could he possibly know this?

He gave me a knowing look, but said nothing. Clearly he was waiting for me to respond.

"Yah, you could say that" I said.

Nodding his head, he reached into the pocket of his robe and pulled out a letter. He then handed it to me and waited. Looking down at it, it had my name and address on the front. On the back there was a red wax seal keeping the letter closed. Looking more closely at it I realized it was in the shape of a crest like they used to have at castles. It was a big letter H surrounded by a badger, snake, lion, and eagle.

I broke the seal and pulled the letter out. In neat cursive writing it read:

Dear Mr. Bates,

We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment. Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl no later than 31 July.

Underneath was another piece of parchment paper with a list of things I would need like a wand, an owl/toad, and eight books. One book called 'The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection' caught my attention.

"Witchcraft?" I mumbled aloud.

"And wizardry" the man finished for me. I looked at him incredulously.

"You mean that I'm a wizard? And you want me to go to this school to learn magic tricks?" I asked dumbfounded.

"Indeed. However you will learn about much more than just magic tricks at Hogwarts. You see, at Hogwarts we don't teach the kind of magic your used to. You wont be taught how to pull rabbits out of hats or how to escape from a box" he mused.

I wasn't quite sure what to say, so I sat there in stunned silence and waited for him to say something.

After a few moments he got up from the chair and said, "I will give you a week to think about it. Should you choose to accept and attend Hogwarts this coming fall, I will meet you outside in exactly one week".

I'd like to say that I spent all seven of those days heavily weighing what I was told. It sounded absolutely mad, but made so much sense. It made my head spin for the rest of the day. However, by midday the following day I had already made up my mind. Anything beat living in this orphanage for the next 7 years. After all, I had no family and no friends. I tended to ignore others and stuck to my books. They gave me an escape from life that I couldn't get anywhere else.

Exactly one week after he had left I was standing out on the corner in the middle of a humid summer day. I wasn't quite sure what to look for, or even what to expect, but the longer I stood out there the more I felt like an idiot. What was I expecting? Him to just walk up to me from seemingly nowhere and just disappear to some magical place with him?

"Beautiful day, huh?" a voice behind me said, making me jump and spin around.

The same man from a week ago stood there wearing the exact same outfit, looking down at me expectantly.

"Hello professor..." I said, trailing off at the end.

"Dumbledore, but I insist that you just call me Albus" he responded.

"Right. So where are we going?" I asked.

"London" he replied simply as he held out his arm, as if asking me to hold on.

Shrugging, I took hold of his arm. What happened next can only be described as uncomfortable. Suddenly I felt like I was spinning and being crammed through a tiny tube. Almost as quickly as it started, it suddenly stopped. I stumbled a little bit, but managed to catch myself before I fell. Dizzy and disorientated, I bent over slightly and leaned on my own knees for support. After a few moments of fighting to keep my lunch down, I managed to straighten and take in my surroundings.

We were standing in a dark, warm pub. A few people were seated at tables eating various kinds of foods and reading newspapers. From the light being cast by the fireplace, I swear it looked like the pictures in the newspaper were moving.

"What just happened?" I asked Dumbledore.

"Ah yes, I am sorry Jordan. Forgive me, but my old mind makes me forget sometimes. I should have explained before hand, but we just apparated. It is a form of travel wizards use in order to travel great distances very quickly" he explained to me. "This is The Leaky Cauldron. We use it as a gateway to the magical world".

He began to walk towards the back of the pub where he opened a door, ushered me in, and closed it behind us. He then approached the brick wall on the other side of the small room, tapped three bricks, and stepped back. For a moment nothing happened, but right as I was about to say something to him the wall began to split apart in the middle and fold to the sides. After a few moments we were able to walk through into a street and my jaw dropped.

Lining both sides of the street were a bunch of different shops, with families dressed in robes like Dumbledore mingling about. The street was so busy in fact that it reminded me of Faneuil Hall in Boston.

"Whoa" I breathed to myself.

"It is indeed quite impressive" Dumbledore said. He was watching me closely, as if he was afraid I might just turn and run.

"Where are we?" I asked.

"Welcome Jordan, to Diagon Alley" he replied with a smile and a sweep of his arm.

As we walked down the street I peered into the different shops and was amazed at what I saw. There was a shop to buy books, wands, robes, regular clothes, and even owls! I felt right at home in the hustle and bustle of the alley as we weaved through families. I wasn't really sure where we were headed until we came up to a big white building at the end of the alley. At the top in gold letters a sign read 'Gringotts'. We walked up the white marble stairs and passed through the bronze framed doors into a small hallway. A set of silver doors was located at the end of the short hallway, on them were the words:

Enter, stranger, but take heed
Of what awaits the sin of greed
For those who take, but do not earn,
Must pay most dearly in their turn.
So if you seek beneath our floors
A treasure that was never yours,
Thief, you have been warned, beware
Of finding more than treasure there.

The other side of the doors was a sight that simply took my breath away. The inside of this place was huge! The walls were ornately adorned with paintings and gold and were roughly three stories high. Hanging from the ceiling was a massive chandelier that looked suspiciously like it was made of diamonds. Along both walls was a counter that ran the entire length of the room. At the counter hundreds of, wait a minute, what are those?!

Short, fair skinned creatures with long fingers, pointed ears and nose, and domed heads sat at the counter studiously scribbling on parchment.

"Umm professor, what are those?" I asked curiously.

"Goblins, Jordan. They have protected the secrets of the wizarding bank for centuries. They are devilishly tricky, best you tick close" Dumbledore replied.

Swallowing hard, I followed him up to the counter where a bald Goblin asked, "How can I help you today?".

"Ah yes, Mr. Bates here would like to enter his vault" Dumbledore replied.

Nodding, the goblin got down from his stool and walked out from behind the counter and lead us to the other end of the hall. The goblin held a door open that lead to a narrow stone passageway lit with flaming torches. It sloped steeply downward and there were little railway tracks on the floor. He whistled and a small cart came hurtling up the tracks toward them.

After carefully climbing in, the cart speed off down the tracks for quite some time. It was like a maze of corridors down here and no matter how hard I tried to remember every turn and fork in the path there were just too many. What surprised me the most was that there was no steering wheel on this cart. It was driving itself!

After a few minutes, the cart came to a stop at the end of one of the passageways. We were in a sort of room, if you will, with the track in the center and on both sides was a platform to get off the cart. There were four massive metal doors that looked to be made of gears on both sides of the track.

We followed the goblin onto the platform and walked to the last door on the left.

"Key please" the goblin asked me.

Not knowing what to do, I turned and looked at Dumbledore for help.

He reached around in his robes for a moment before he pulled out a rather large silver key. The goblin took the key and opened up a small hatch that had about a dozen different sized key holes. He inserted the key into the second largest one and turned the key. All the gears on the door began to move as it slowly swung open. My heart beat sped up as I anticipated what was on the other side.

Dumbledore has said that this was my families vault, but I didn't have family members that I knew about. I'd have to ask him about that later on.

When the door finally opened my jaw definitely hit the floor. There was an ornate red carpet in the middle of the vault running from the entrance to the back wall. On both sides of the carpet were tables littered with gold, silver, and bronze coins, goblets, cups, bowls, and other sorts of items. Directly at the end of the carpet sat a table in the middle of the room. On it rested a bunch of moving portraits of people I didn't recognize. It took me a moment to grasp that yes the pictures were indeed moving but I thought 'Hey, im about a hundred miles underground in what is apparently my non-existent family's vault that is filled with piles of gold. So naturally pictures move'.

Shaking the craziness of the situation from my mind, one portrait caught my eye. It was a picture of a beautiful woman with golden blonde hair and brown eyes standing with a man about her age with short dark hair and startlingly blue eyes. In the woman's arms was a baby wrapped in blankets who was smiling delightfully at the camera. Underneath it a plaque read in fancy golden script, 'Demi and Lucas Bates, holding their newborn son Jordan'.

Tears started to form in the corners of my eyes as I picked the portrait up and studied it. I laughed quietly to myself when I realized I looked just like my father, except that I have my mom's blonde hair.

"I had never seen your mother and father so happy as they were the day you were born" Dumbledore said to me. Turning, I saw that he had been watching me from the entrance to my family's vault.

Choking on my words, I managed to ask quietly, "You knew my parents?".

"Oh yes. I daresay I was there headmaster when they were at Hogwarts. Your father Lucas was one of the brightest students I knew, he had such a thirst for knowledge. And Demi, my she was a free spirit. Not intelligent as your father, but certainly close to top of her year, she was always making people laugh or cheering people up. The only time I ever witnessed her sad was on the day your father was killed. Tore he up really. You were only a newborn then" Dumbledore recounted sadly.

"What happened to them?" I pleaded. Never before had I been this close to answers.

"Your father was killed in a battle during the war, protecting muggles from death eaters. Upon his death your mother sent you away to America, to get you away from all the blood shed. She died just a few weeks later during a raid on the ministry" Dumbledore answered. Though his voice remained calm, his eyes reflected the sadness of the story.

"War? Death Eaters? Muggles? I don't know what you mean" I responded, annoyed that there was still so much I didn't know.

"I will explain later, my boy. For now there are a few money pouches just over there. Fill them, I am unsure of when you will be able to return". Dumbledore pointed to the pouches and then the coins that littered the tables. He then stepped out of my vault and waited for me by the cart.

I quickly grabbed a few pouches and began filling them each with as many coins as they could hold. As I turned to leave the vault, I paused before returning to the table with the portraits. Grabbing the photo of my parents and I, I quickly exited the vault and headed to the cart.

Dumbledore walked me from store to store, making sure that I bought everything I would need. I asked him questions here and there. Some about the war, others about my parents, but mostly about things like quidditch and what Hogwarts is like. He answered most of my questions, though he was mostly very vague.

I really wanted to purchase a broom, but I guess I can't have one as a first year. The second to last store we visited was the book store. I first grabbed all the books for my classes before I looked around for a couple books to read in my spare time. I grabbed a copy of 'Hogwarts, A History', a book that I hoped would contain everything I needed to know about the school, a second book called 'Two Devastating Wizarding Wars', a book that described Gellert Grindelwald's Uprising and The Terrible Wizarding War, and a third book called 'Magical Family's and Their Lineages'. With the last book I had hoped to learn if I maybe had any cousins or extended family still alive.

Finally, we made a stop at Ollivanders. I was so excited to get my wand that I was practically bouncing with anticipation while I waited for the shopkeeper to appear with my wand.

"Here you go" he said to me as he opened a small rectangular box, "try this one out".

He handed me a thin, round stick which I took firmly in my hand. I stood there for a moment, not sure what to do.

"Well give it a wave" he said to me impatiently.

I gave it a quick flick, which ended up blowing up a flower pot in the corner of the room.

"Oh dear, definitely not" he said. He snatched the wand out of my hand and disappeared back into the shelves of wands. After trying out several more wands that ended in me blasting the windows of the shop out, giving him an unwanted haircut, setting my shirt on fire, and launching several hundred boxes from their shelves onto the floor; he finally pulled a wand out of a bright green box.

"Try this one. Eleven inches long, made of Pine, with a dragon heartstring core" he said as he handed me the wand.

The wand's handle felt perfect in my hand, wasn't very light like most of the wands I had already tried, but also wasn't heavy at all. A feeling of understanding washed over me as if I understood this wands feelings, and it mine. Giving it a quick wave, I somehow repaired the flower pot that I had originally shattered. Smiling to myself, I looked to Ollivander who was packing up all the other wands I had tried.

"That will be eight galleons young man" he said to me.

I paid the man, and then joined Dumbledore outside the shop.

"All set?" he asked me.

"Actually no, I wanted to get an owl as well" I said.

He nodded, and lead me towards the pet shop. Upon entering I looked around at the different owls. I wondered if picking an owl was slightly like picking a wand because most of the owls seemed to completely ignore me. All except one owl who was sitting in the far back corner of the shop. As I walked past him he hooted excitedly at me. He had jet black feathers except for around his neck and face, where they were slightly more brown than black. I reached out to pet him through the cage on the top of his head. He hooted happily, so with a smile on my face I paid the shop keeper for the owl and rejoined Dumbledore outside.

"Now that you have everything, you are going to stay here at the Leaky Cauldron until I send someone to collect you and bring you to where you will board the train to Hogwarts" Dumbledore informed me as we made our way back into the Leaky Cauldron. I paid the bartender, Tom, for the room and Dumbledore helped me lug my new purchases to my room.

"What about my stuff I left at the orphanage?" I asked.

"You will find that most of your belongings are waiting for you in your room" he responded.

When we reached my room Dumbledore looked at me sadly and said, "Well it has been fun Jordan. I shall send someone to fetch you when it is time. In the meantime, it wouldn't hurt if you started reading some of your books. And please don't leave the Cauldron or Diagon Alley".

"You got it professor. And thank you. For everything" I replied, holding out my hand.

With a smile, he took my hand, gave it a quick shake and then apparated on the spot. Signing to myself, I opened the door and got settled into my new home for the next month and a half.

Over the course of the next month, I read all of my books front to back. 'Hogwarts, A History' hadn't been as insightful as I had wanted it to be, but I at least knew what to expect. After learning about the last two wizarding wars, I finally began to grasp just how dangerous magic could be. To think, there is actually a branch of magic dedicated to the 'dark arts'.

I also learned from 'Magical Family's and Their Lineages' that I come from a very old and once powerful line of wizards. Unfortunately I was unable to identify any close relatives except for a distant connection to a family known as the Malfoy's. Apparently, they have a son my age who is considered my sixth cousin. Also included in the book was a thorough description of the different 'social classes' of wizards. The idea of pure-bloods being superior and on top, half-bloods in the middle, and muggle-born or 'mudbloods' at the bottom made me sick. I guess that pure-bloods thought that their magic was stronger and made them superior to everyone else. Despite my family's heritage labeling me as a pure-blood I would make sure to avoid anyone who thought pure-bloods are better.

After I read those books, I studied up on my books for school. While most of the books seemed to contain generally the basics, I am determined to learn everything I can and look forward to moving on to more advanced material.

After weeks of boredom, since I finished all my books after just a month, the night before I was to board the train to Hogwarts finally arrived. Filled with excitement and anticipation I dreamed of performing all kinds of magic and going on many adventures.

I know it's kind of short, but I felt that that was a good stopping point for the first chapter. I had originally had a lot more written, but I cut a lot of it out because most of it was just narrating and not much dialog or actual story telling. Anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed the first part to my story. It may be a while before I update. I want to get a lot of this written and planned out so that I can get ahead and update regularly. Thank you for your patience. See you all soon!