The Scientist.
In a year, Harry Potter had changed greatly, and it was thanks to the discoveries he'd made in a house in Richmond, discoveries that would shape his life in the future. Harry had spent days wandering around London, looking for places to stay, to scavenge food and water, sometimes from restaurants and delis dumping stale bread loaves out the back, and it was like fate was leading him by a leash, he arrived at Richmond, and came across a house that had been boarded up. Asking around, Harry found that the house had belonged to a reclusive scientist, and that he'd vanished one day and his friends, the Filbys, had bought it but they didn't let anyone buy or live in it.
Since there was no one to stop him at the time, Harry had broken in at night and stayed the night. As he explored the house, he came upon a laboratory where there were books and journals detailing the experiments the scientist had made. The scientist, George, had been working on a time machine. Harry's eyes had widened in shock when he'd seen it, and he duplicated an experiment precisely, and sent a beam of light into the future.
George had, according to his notes, been given a medicine bottle filled with a green powder, which the man wouldn't identify but told him to study nonetheless, but George named the substance after his strange name when he'd finally gotten the name from the mystery man. Gottfried Plattner. Platternite sent light into time, and Harry grabbed the books in excitement. He also searched the house, looking for anything he could sell to buy the technology to build a working time machine. Harry stole a small fortune George had left behind, and in the night he fled the scene, never to be seen again. With him was a small fortune in gold and diamonds, and the platternite bottle and notebooks, every notebook detailing the experiments and the principles the scientist had come up with, Harry left and headed off into the world, excited at the prospect of creating a time machine. Such a thing had existed in his dreams for years, thanks to watching Back to the Future in Mrs. Figgs when the senile old hint let him, and reading science fiction novels. Scientists had also tried building a time machine, but Harry had the practical knowledge, and he'd witnessed it with his own eyes.
A few days later he appeared on the doorsteps of an orphanage. Harry claimed that his family had died, and he was the only one left, that he was desperate for shelter. Luckily for him, the orphanage staff had been kind hearted people, and they'd had no problem with him. Harry only carried a few essentials, with the platternite and the diamonds safe inside his bag. Everyday, he checked on them and found no one had touched them, which was lucky because of how nosy some of the kids were. It was a risk, but Harry had found something interesting about himself that made him wonder what the Dursleys had known in the first place, and if that had been the reason behind the abuse. All his life there had been incidents involving turning a teachers hair blue, appearing on the top of the school roof etc, and Harry remembered only too vividly the abuse and the beatings that followed. Harry had noticed that he had the power to make people...forget, do things, and he experimented with these powers. He also discovered he had the power to make illusions, to stop people from touching something. Harry had discovered it when in London, he'd tried to escape a gang of thieves with knives, who threatened to kill him, slice him up, but Harry had thrown his hands over himself, and willed them to stop and forget him. The next, and most surprising things was, they obeyed. They simply turned away and left him alone. That incident had been the reason he'd gone to the orphanage in the first place, persuaded that if he could will people not to touch his things then they wouldn't.
But he needed to be sure that what had happened wasn't a fluke, that the gang had decided that the kid wasn't worth it. Harry had gone out, and he'd personally walked up to a restaurant in broad daylight, and willing the customers and the waiting staff to not see him, Harry stole enough food to keep him going for two days. For three weeks Harry experimented with his newfound power, and constantly working on improving his powers. He found that he could levitate objects from the power of the mind, make people forget him, and he found that he could jump, teleport, through space and travel to anywhere he wanted, providing he pictured it inside his mind.
Harry also found that his abilities gave him the power to plant illusions in peoples heads, plant suggestions, and he used that power on the orphanage staff to make them take him in, although he could see they were truly kind people. Keeping the platternite and the books and diamonds inside the room without him being there when he was at school was a risk, but Harry used the name Plattner instead of Potter as a disguise.
Going to school again was a life changing experience; with no one to say anything about his past, with no Dudley to fuck up his chances, he found that he was able to excel at last. Harry quickly became a star pupil in maths, science, especially science, and art and ICT. He found a gift with computers, and he studied computer science in greater detail, and started planning on buying a computer when he left school. Harry also excelled in playing a piano and violin, but he didn't like taking part in orchestras, he just liked playing his own stuff. He also enjoyed writing short stories and poetry, and he even published one or two of them.
Harry read and reread the experiments detailed in George's notebooks, and started following them but not wasting the plattnerite since he had no idea where the stuff had come from and if it were natural or not. As Harry experimented with the platternite, he studied the sciences many associated with time travel, one of them was quantum mechanics, and he created a plan for a computer system that would stop the platternite from allowing him to travel into other realities without his approval. If he wanted to, Harry could travel into alternate realities. With that option, Harry knew that he could truly go...anywhere he wanted.
For four years, Harry carried on his experiments, basic and mundane as they were, but he was already designing a time travel device that was smaller and more sophisticated than the one George had created, but he needed money to carry on with his experiments, and he desperately wanted to escape from the orphanage, but he had no choice but to stay. On his 13th birthday, when a convict called Sirius Black broke out, Harry wondered what prison he'd come from, but he'd shrugged and he just got on with his life. Harry got a job as a cleaner, not the best job but one nonetheless, and he started saving up on money. After getting three different cleaning jobs, Harry's bank account rocketed, but he still kept the money and diamonds stolen from George's home in Richmond until later. Harry's work didn't affect his schooling, since one started at 6 in the morning, giving him roughly a couple of hours to get to school and grab a bit to eat along the way, the second was afterschool, and the third and final one was in the evening. He worked 5 days a week, earning 6 pounds an hour. Harry's job inspired the orphanage staff to encourage the other kids to do their own work, and to make them get jobs and earn responsibilites.
At the age of 15, Harry went out and bought an Apple iPhone, and he modified it with platternite and a computer system that converted it into a time machine. The iPhone contained the platternite inside a special cell that fitted neatly inside it, and the destionation app, and the alternate app and stabiliser Harry had discovered. Importantly the time machine was small, easy to hide, so Harry wouldn't need to build a massive machine. The iPhone was unique in having another function. Inside, another cell of platternite was connected to the computer and stored information gathered on during time travelling, with this fuction Harry could tell mundane things, what so and so did and what a certain snail did in his day. The most obvious thing was that when the time machine returned then the information stored would be uploaded into another computer, a Mac PC. As Harry grew more used to time travel, and started making short hops into the future, he gathered information about money making, lottery numbers. When he returned, Harry would jot down the winning numbers, and when the day came he would claim a winning, but he would always stock the money in his bank account, and not breath a word to a living soul, but he did make a generous donation to the orphanage once or twice, but generally he kept it all to himself. Some may call Harry selfish, but he didn't care.
As Harry's researches into time increased, so too did his plan to enter the future and see what mankind had done. The money was just a means to an end.