Chapter One: Magical Me
Harry awoke to the sound of loud dull thuds battering on the stairs overhead as his cousin trotted eagerly over his stairway roof. With the dim light seeping through the stair-boards Harry Potter could just make out the fine dust float down from the battered and bruised stairs, landing on his unkempt mop of hair and extinguishing there golden glow.
His name was Harry Potter, his bright green eyes and the lightning curse scar marking his forehead was the favourite features about him. His eyes, he'd always admired for the way they seem to have an ethereal glow about them, along with their habit to pick up the most insignificant details, a fact that constantly vexed his aunt because he never needed to apply try during primary school. as long as he read the material his eyes would take care of recording the information.
His scar on the other hand was the same lightning bolt that would mark those favoured by Thor in ancient Norse Mythology. On several occasions he'd given his name as Harry Thorson to avoid the dislike that accompanied the name Harry Potter around the neighbourhood. Or, when he was feeling particularly annoying Harry Thor's Son.
He knew that his scar and his eyes were magical in nature (the way his aunt and uncle prattled on left no doubt that magic was real), but somewhat ironically, Harry would later realise that the feature's the Dursley's hated the most where his most useful ones. Like his ability to teleport, which he discovered in first grade when he teleported onto the school roof to escape Dudley's gang. After that, he spent the next year trying to replicate the feat, and in hindsight it would be one of the luckiest terms of his life. Unlike his other ability, one that he had known about most his life, but dared not use it, the memory of the pain on his back still ached and he still cringed whenever his mind wandered down that lane in his memory.
But Harry was cut from his musings by the nasally voice of his aunt as it thwacked against the cupboard door.
"UP, get up NOW."
She left as quickly as she came, Aunt Petunia was like that, she would avoid him completely if she could. Ever since he had begun his school courier at age six things had been looking up for him. Stretching his legs and moving from his small bed in one movement, the awkwardness of sleep quickly leaving his legs as blood began to circulate. He pushed the door open letting in the pale, hospital issue light of the Dursley home.
Pushing out from the cupboard and into the hallway, he quirked his lips slightly at his annoyed Adder, Balphazar, slumped in the corner behind the cupboard door in his usual lumpy mess.
"Stupid humans, one day I'll bite them and –"
But whatever his faithful familiar was going to say was lost by the morning complaints of his overly sized walrus of a cousin Dudley Dursley.
To describe his cousin was like describing a Manatee, the fact that they weighed roughly the same certainly didn't help when telling the two apart. Neither did the fact that they both seemed to move faster in water than on land. But Harry took solace in the fact that no sailor was ever going to mistake Dudley for a Mermaid. Just picturing him in a two piece bikini was enough to put him off his meagre breakfast.
Today it was Dudley Dursley's birthday and following the Dursley tradition Harry was expected to be as miserable as could be. Not that that was any different to how he always felt, but on Dudley's birthday they took to the task of trying to make his life even more miserable. If only it actually worked. He would be eleven soon, and was very much over the pultree attempts the Dursley's made at destroying any self-confidence in himself. Although Harry would be the first to admit that not everything the Dursley's had done to him had harmed him, rather unintentionally they'd force him to become self-reliant and self-sufficient. So much so that he suspected that if he released into the world he suspected that he would be able to provide for himself in a way that many students straight out of school couldn't do. Harry Potter was very much grown up in the ways of the world. You had to be, when you lived with three magic hating idiots.
Now that would usually deter Harry Potter, sometimes Thorson, but today was special (not the Birthday special), no today was when they had said they would come. To take him to Diagon Alley, and buy his school thins for Hogwarts.
Harry had known that he was magical for as far back as he could remember, although his misery went even further back than his discover of magic. And if it wasn't for his crafty Adder, curled up inside his cupboard the Dursley's would have found out about his knowledge of his magical self a long time ago.
From what Balphazar told him, Harry had come across him in the back garden of the Dursley's when he was four or five. The Adder took great joy in telling him that the only thing that stopped the one and a half metre fully grown Adder from impaling his fangs on him and digesting his, then small, body was the fact that he had (in that curious ease that all children possessed) talked to the Adder, asking it what it was doing hiding behind the flower beds.
Ever since then the two had been inseparable, Harry upon learning of his (fantastic in the mind of a child) ability to talk to snakes, quickly learnt about the magical world from Balphazar, which all snakes knew some detail about. He learnt so many things from the Snake, how he was what was called a Metamorphmagus and could speak the Noble tongue.
Along with knowledge the snake brought stories, of dragon's and unicorns, haunted castles and great magical wars. But if there was one single most important thing that Balphazar would tell him in the next six years, it was the story of the Boy-Who-Lived, his hero. Of the unnamed hero (because Balphazar would get sheepish every time names would come up) who performed the miracle and saved the magical world.
Two years passed and Harry turned six, his loneliness quickly turning into a hunger for knowledge of the magical world; and in those two years, when childhood bliss began to fade he grew more and more mature with each passing day, his childhood scars turning into a subtle confidence.
Six was the age that one began to attend primary school, and Harry, with a mind that could rival his mother's and a creativity of a marauder breezed through three grades inside his first year. so that by the end of the year the Dursley's tightly maintained image of a scoundrel quickly morphed into a misunderstood genius who could find no outlet for his intellect.
At the beginning of his second year he began fourth grade, and by his second years end he was completing his fifth grade exams, breezing through the syllabus. The following year he entered sixth grade, completing another three by the end of the year; so that when he would enter his fourth year, he would be in year ten, and if he continued on like his did now, he would by ten years old, his fourth year of schooling, have completed grade twelve, which he did, qualifying for the most expensive and prestigious Universities in the process.
In the final year before he attended Hogwarts, Harry spent most of the year at home, using it as a make shift gap year before he began his university courier. Secretly he used it to build his own Computer Platform, naming it The Thorson Mark I, and distributing it as freeware, which put a major bump in Microsoft's, Sony's and many other computer software companies.
It was also during that year that Harry Potter began to collect scraps of information on the Wizarding World in preparation for his Hogwart's courier.
What he found did not please him, of the Five Book's he found, Famous Wizards and Witches from the Seventeenth Century; Theory of Magic: the Revised Addition; Greatest Ever Quidditch Matches and the Player's that Played Them; The Tales of Beadle the Bard; and The Book of Shadow's: the Eighth Edition. All of them pointed to a pre-electricity society and almost medieval if those five books were anything to go by.
On his eleventh birthday he had his first meeting with the magical world.
His name was Severus Snape, and the look on Aunt Petunia's face when he showed up at the Dursley's front door was priceless. Never before had he seen anyone shock his giraffe of an aunt into silence as affectively as that man did. Only the equally shocked mouth on the man, Severus Snape, made the memory more pleasurable. But as soon as it was there it had morphed into something he had so often seen on his uncle's face.
Then he looked at me, and his face frowned in confusion.
Diagon Alley was great, the only bad part about it was that everyone kept staring at me, whispering behind me. I caught a couple of their words, "The-Boy-Who-Lived," they were comparing me to him, my hero. I didn't know whether to be embarrassed or pleased at the connection. Snape on the other hand knew just what to be, sneering at everything that moved and pointing out several times that they were gawking like, well, like something Balphazar's forbid me from mentioning. Nevertheless, the trip down Diagon Alley and into the Marble Palace at its head was my most delightful memory in my eleven year life.
The Goblins didn't exactly intimidate me; neither did the golden plark with a lot of fancy words at the front of the marble bank. Inside the foyer he encountered the same hushed whispers and obvious staring that occurred in the Alley, but he stopped himself from just changing his appearance, as since no one did it he thought it was not polite to do it in public. When we got to the front of the foyer, Snape introduced me to a Goblin named Obblygrubb. It was a short, angry thing that seemed to sneer and grunt at every chance it got. When Snape told him, it, she, the thing, my name, the Goblin asked, "Any relation to Charlus Potter."
Harry blinked stupidly.
As you could imagine that was not the first thing Harry was expecting to hear from a member of a different species (snakes don't count in Harry's opinion), he expected something like 'take me to your leader,' or 'live long and prosper,' you know, something more meaningful then 'any relation to Charlus Potter.'
But life isn't like that, Harry has marks to prove it, the Goblin was staring at me intently now, waiting for me to say something, but it was Snape who answered him, "I do not know of his relation to the Boy-Who-Lived, he is an orphan that lives with his relatives," Snape answered curtly, slipping me a frosty but silent look.
"Orphan from the war," the Goblin interrupted briskly, its eyes glancing at me in a way that made his stomach plummet, "well then we'll do a standardised Blood-Line Test to see if he has any other living relatives, if so well make the necessary arrangements."
It looked at the Professor stonily, "Your assistance is no longer required Mr Snape, if you would please wait here until we are finished with Mr Potter."
Curling his lip even more thinly, if that was possible, Snape replied, "very well, I will attend to my own business while Mr Potter is indisposed… if you could?" Snape asked, gesturing to one of the many Goblins waddling between booths.
"Certainly," Obblygrubb grunted, "Minafork," the dominion creature called, pointing his overly large nose towards one of the Goblins waddling around. "If you could see to Mr Snape…" the Goblins eyes flashed back to him, "while I see to our Mr Potter."
The Goblin that approached them was redder than the other one, taking on a sunburned appearance, if a Goblin's tough skin could be sunburned. "Certainly Obblygrubb," it replied, its eyes darting between himself and Professor Snape quizzically.
"Mr Potter with me," the odd creature said, scurrying away at a brisk pace.
Hurrying after it, Harry looked back towards the strange man that had escorted him into the Magical World. All he saw behind the well-constructed mask on Snape's face was pity.
Harry's considerable and abnormal genius, along with the last hour of accompaniment of Professor Snape (Harry never intended to call any of the teacher's Professor, they weren't anything close to that) was why Harry knew that the flash of pain, grief and pity that crossed his face wasn't the same as the usual ones he received from his teacher's when they walked into a room of sixteen year old hormonal boys and the eight year old Harry Potter.
It was this difference that made his stomach turn to lead and his gut churn as the Goblin Obblygrubb led him past the foyer and into the inner's of the Bank. The journey consisted of several long hallway's devoid of any sentient life, although there was plenty of paper airplanes carrying messages, which he thought were kind of cool, in a pre-radio-age-esk kind of way. Although he didn't voice this thought, he got the distinct impression that magical society as a whole regarded themselves somewhat more advanced than ordinary society.
God knows why, they were still using relics from the medieval age.
