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Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Unabridged, Unvarnished & (Mostly) Uncensored
~Chapter Ten~
AN: So, I think I lost my beta. Which sucks, because he was awesome. Damn deployments. I *do* leave again soon, but it's supposed to be for only 3 weeks, so hopefully it doesn't get extended and I'll be back within a month to start writing more.
AN2: Harry is acting more trusting than most of you expected from the beginning AN. There is reason for that. So far, everyone he knew who treated him like crap was involved with the Dursleys somehow. His teachers worked at his school, where Vernon donated money generously. He had no friends, and the few people who were nice to him were strangers. For this reason he is guarded, but willing to give people the benefit of the doubt (in his mind at least). You'll see more "angry Harry" as the story goes on and he gets "betrayed" (some real, some only in his personal perspective) by people who have not been exposed to the Dursleys at all. I don't plan on having him become as dark as some might like though. Just a nice shade of grey with dark and light moments.
AN3: Harry's cloak of invisibility. In the books, it's a deathly hallow, different from most cloaks because they only last a few years at most, not generations. Which is how they knew his was the cloak of invisibility. Because it was his father's and it still worked. Now, I'm going to treat the story of Death and the brothers as real. Many don't in their fics because they like using science. They say no supernatural spirits, no sould, etc. Fine. Except that this isn't the real world. Spirits, souls, gods, all are valid (even without scientific proof!) and can be real here; after all, magic is. As such, Harry has the cloak of invisibility and neither Dumbledore nor Moody's eye can see through it. You know, since it can hide someone from Death itself. Remember that.
AN4: I was reading (well, trying to read) other Harry Potter fics and it reminded me of two more overdone clichés that don't make sense. I am just going to quickly state what else won't be in this story.
1. Harry is not going to be physically "built" from playing quidditch. He rides a broom; leisurely most of the game at that, and only really has one chase for a short time when he sees the snitch. It doesn't "build" anything. He's more like a horse jockey, small and scrawny as can be. The smaller and scrawnier the better. Confused? Look up horse racing and horse jockeys and you'll learn the whys of it. The same reasons apply to seekers. Usually. The most physically "built" members of a quidditch team (and I say that very sarcastically as even they wouldn't need to be built) are usually going to be the beaters. They actually do some work. Like baseball, but on a broom. So not much. Less that real baseball, because they don't have to run, only swing.
2. Harry will not be a sexual god. His first time is going to suck for whoever it's with. This is self-explanatory for anyone who has ever had sex. For you younger guys, if you girl said you were great your first time, (your first time, not necessarily you first time with her) three possibilities exist: 1) She was a virfgin too and so didn't know any better, while also managing to break he hymen sometime earlier in life whether from her own explorations or physical activities like sports, so there wasn't a lot of pain. 2) Her previous partner(s) were… extremely lacking in skill. 3) (And most likely.) She lied to make you feel better. Women tend to do that. Especially for guys they like, but even for the ones they don't if they're nice.
~Pay attention to ANs 3 and 4 if nothing else!~
~Lord Harrison~
Sitting in my favorite wooden chair at my writing table, I close the heavy volume with a sigh and set down my quill. It is finished. Finally, it is finished. My life's work. The True Chronicles of Harry Potter. The world needs this story.
I have been watching this world for the last 500 years and I have seen the signs. Dark times are approaching once again. The great enemy rises. It is always a slow rising with this one. It knows how to invade the minds and hearts of humanity, magical and muggle alike. There are whisperings of a hidden cult that promises wealth and power to those who will join. Greed as ever, is the easiest weapon for our enemy to start with. But I am an old man now. All I can do is hope that one of our youth will rise. Someone powerful enough to face this evil, as has been done time and time again in the past.
Humankind has come farther than it ever has before, save the time of the Firstborn. Magical and muggle live together in peace, though we are still careful not to intermix too much lest we breed out the trait of magic. To think that mages once far outnumbered those without the power, but that is no longer so. Only now, in this era of techno-magic do we learn that magic is a recessive gene, a mutation, (which explains muggle-born) and that without proper care being taken, it will be bred out of humanity entirely. Part of me wonders if the ancients knew of this, and that this was the original intent of only breeding with other mages. If the fear of magic dying out is what started the hatred towards those without magic. If that knowledge was twisted through time, and started the prejudices that plagued my ancestor's era.
But such thoughts do not matter in this telling of things. Whys matter not, only the whats and the hows. Whys can only be speculated, and are best left to philosophers. What matters is that the enemy of all is returning. It must be strong already for me to have noticed the signs, even here where I have been lost in my work. But this book, this final piece of history; may provide the key that will save us all. I must get this information out to the world. We have come too far to be destroyed by the enemy again.
I take the books and slide them into a small sack, ensorcelled to be feather-light, ever-filling and self-organizing. Who would have thought that the idea for this precise mixture of enchantments originally came from muggle games and the bags the heroes of their D&D runs carried with them? I reach out and my staff responds, floating from the corner of the room to rest in my hand. The tool of training that I used in my youth before I learned to touch magic without a focus, now reduced to a simple walking stick.
It is then that the front door to the house slams. Strange, no one in town would so rudely barge into my home without knocking and awaiting permission to enter. I hobble towards the front room. There must have been some emergency in town. Perhaps they need magical assistance. I open the door dividing this room from that one, and before I can get a single word out of my mouth, a sword slams into my chest, and I can feel its dark magicks draining the very life from me.
~Harry's Time~
Harry had seen fit to do some exploring with his new cloak and learn more about the castle. There were many places that were "off limits" other than the third floor corridor. Dumbledore had only mentioned the corridor and the obviously forbidden forest, (as if the name wasn't enough of a clue) but there was an entire list of off limits places that the prefects of each house was expected to inform all new arrivals about.
There was a stairway that led to nowhere supposedly. The result of an experiment gone wrong by the original founders who tried to build a real "stairway to heaven". It would go up forever, never reaching anywhere, and of those who tried to walk back down, only a few ever actually made the return trip, often arriving years later than they had started; though only days had passed for them. From the stories they told, the best people could guess was that the stairway somehow interacted with another plane of existence, and that only the lucky few would go down the steps at the correct time to re-enter this plane, causing the others to be lost forever. Harry wasn't trying those stairs.
There were rooms that ate whoever went inside them, at least it was assumed they were eaten since no remains were ever found of anyone who went into them. Other rooms held doorways to other planes of existence, where things that shouldn't exist ran wild. Most of these dangerous places were sealed off and only the headmaster, keyed into the castle as its current master could enter within. Unfortunately the rooms and stairs and even floors (above the 6th floor) would change at will, so not every room was blocked off. Exploring above the 6th floor was strictly forbidden for the safety of the students and the staff.
'But they never said not to explore anything from the 6th floor down.' Harry thought to himself. He'd been getting bored and about to return to his dorm when he found the mirror. It had immediately attracted his attention because it was the only thing in the room. A room that had only a single mirror standing right in the middle of it? It had to do something.
The mirror of Erised. Harry approached the mirror cautiously, not sure if it would do something dangerous, like spit out an evil copy of himself, or all kinds of other fantastic but harmful things. 'Whatever it does, it can't be too dangerous or they wouldn't keep it on the lower floors.' With this thought, he screwed up his courage and stood in front of it.
Nothing. There was nothing in the mirror at all. It was then that Harry realized his mistake. He still had the cloak on! Shaking his head at his own folly, he took off the cloak and placed it on the floor beside him, then looked back at the mirror. It was just his normal reflection. 'Maybe it takes a while to take effect.' he thought. After two whole minutes that due to his impatience felt more like twenty, he was about to give up when he felt a slight tingle in his head and the image on the mirror before him changed.
First Harry saw two people standing beside him. A woman with long red hair, and green eyes, and a blue eyed man with hair a dark as his own. 'Who are they?' he wondered. They were smiling at him, happy hugging him at times, others just looking at him. The woman was oddly familiar. Almost like a dream that you remember having but can't remember the details of. It was only after some thought that he realized who they had to be. His parents. It only made sense. It explained why the woman was familiar as well. He'd dreamed of her death during Voldemort's attack for as long as he could remember, although he only learned recently what the dream actually was. He'd probably seen her nearly every night in those dreams, though he couldn't remember her after.
Harry stood still for several minutes, transfixed by the image in front of him. Finally, he slowly walked to the mirror and reached out, touching his mother's face, but all he could feel was cold hard glass. Then he heard Filch, the janitor walking towards the room talking to his cat, Mrs. Norris. Turning away from the mirror, he snatched up his father's cloak, fastened it around his shoulders, and disappeared from view; never consciously noticing that the image in the mirror had begun to change the moment he'd made physical contact with it. Eager to get away before he was caught and given detention, Harry ran as quickly and quietly as he could back to the boys section in the Gryffindor dorms and slept.
The next day Harry awoke, the last traces of a dream leaving his mind. There was something disturbing about the dream, something he wanted to think on more but he was excited to go back and see the mirror. Harry had never seen his parents, as his aunt had never kept any pictures that had her hated sister in them, let alone any with her "freak" husband so he wanted to etch their images into his brain. He was going back tonight.
~Hermione Jean Granger~
Wendy Moira Angela Darling. That was the name of one of the main characters in Hermione's favorite Disney movie: Peter Pan. She had been so obsessed with it that she'd gone looking to read the original story that the Disney movie was derived from. That was when she found out that Disney stories weren't all they were cracked up to be. Just like the legends of fairies, elves, dwarves, and other creatures; Peter Pan was not originally some friendly neighborhood creeper who was only at a young girl's window to hear her thrilling bedtime stories.
Peter Pan did indeed often go around gathering new boys to join his group, but they didn't stop aging once they reached Neverland. Like any other fae land of legend, once you were in, if you ate even a single bite of fae food, you'd age even faster. At least once you left. You'd age normally as long as you stayed inside. Only Peter didn't age there and that was because he was a fae. That's why the Indians had adults who had children, and why Captain Hook had a crew of grown men. There was a reason for them to hate Peter. The book didn't say, but she suspected they were once part of his group of lost boys who left and tried to kill Peter when they learned the truth. You see, Peter Pan would only let young boys into his group. So when the "lost boys" (who he'd actually stolen or enticed from their homes with their loving families) got too old, he'd kill them. If he was at Wendy's window then it was most likely to rape or eat her, if not some even sicker mixture of the two. Peter Pan was of the Fae. Fae weren't friendly, except when it was part of a clever trick or one random and rare moment of generosity that even the most brutal of tyrants can have on a sudden whim. Fae saw humans as toys or sometimes food (depending of the type) but always as beneath them, never on their level. Humans were no more than animals. A smarter ape, but still an ape. There was nothing wrong with keeping them as pets, beasts of burden, or hunting them as food.
This discovery had pushed Hermione out of her fairytale stage. She'd gone looking for other books after that. Books and movies that didn't lie to her. Facts and information. She started watching documentaries, things that while they wouldn't give her an in depth understanding and sudden knowledge of something like string theory, they could at least impart certain bits of general information about the subject that were actually interesting, without having to go through the classes necessary to learn how to discover such things for herself. This is how she came to respect teachers so much. They were givers of knowledge and knowledge was the gateway to truth. It was up to the student to make use of what a teacher gave to better themselves, but the teacher was the initiator. They opened the way. Her idols changed from Snow White to Sir Isaac Newton, Belle to Albert Einstein, Fantasy to History, and Science Fiction to Science. Then Professor Minerva McGonagall had come along and changed everything.
Magic was real. Hermione hadn't wanted to believe it at first, but seeing the professor change from a human into a cat and back again without so much as a word forced the issue. The child in her wanted to believe in all the fantasies she had read when she was younger, until she remembered that those fantasies had been severely cleaned up and made "child friendly". Their original intent as non-fiction horror stories had been to keep children safe by warning them about the dangers of the creatures that lived in the wild places of the world. The forests and marshes of the world held dangers that humanity could not have hoped to stand against in those times.
Of course, there were many things in those stories that were completely false. People in the past writing a book of non-fiction didn't have to prove that it was true. They were free to exaggerate, and being afraid of the dark places of the world they rarely got a good look at the things they were trying to write about. Fae creatures didn't like dealing with humans anyway for the most part (although there were exceptions) so if you added the time from when the stories were written, the exaggerations made by the original authors, not even counting their lack of real knowledge of the physical world (let alone the magical one) and you could understand why the real thing was so different from the well-known stories. That's what made things so frustrating for her.
When Hermione had first arrived at Hogwarts she had immediately spent a lot of her extra time in the library hoping to discover the truth of things. Elves, giants, vampires, were-wolves, phoenix, satyr, mermaids, harpies, lamia, brownies, demons, angels, and everything in-between. Except where the muggle libraries were completely wrong about magic, the magicals were completely wrong about the world! Several times in reading a book she'd read something that the author had attributed to the strange magical creature he'd encountered, when most likely it was a simple non-magical reaction. They blamed the huge explosions in Nagasaki and Hiroshima on the Japanese sun god, Amaterasu, and even when new muggle students tried to tell them about atom bombs they dismissed it as nonsense! How many other stories had misinformation simply because they didn't want to believe in the things muggle science had accomplished?
Alchemy may have come from the same foundation of modern-day science, but it split off before the scientific method had been invented. It also split off before scientists enforced the need to re-create the experiment before validating the results. Without the basic principles of science being taught to students as children, they just didn't know that it was necessary. Successful alchemists, doctors and spell crafters were forced to teach these basic principles to their apprentices on their own, which meant that in practically every other area of magical world had no such discipline! People believed whatever they read in the news, even though the news wasn't held to the same standard of muggle news, where it couldn't state things about people or companies as fact (it could only insinuate in certain ways) without proof for fear of being sued. Journalists didn't need sources to show them proof, the story that they told was enough. Hell, things were so backwards that even photographic evidence of man on the moon was dismissed, because if the picture didn't move it was "obviously" a fake! It was logic like this that led to Hermione's current problem.
Hermione was stuck on a stairwell.
Every time Hermione got to one end of the stairs, they would suddenly change their position and she'd need to cross another way. She could never go back because when it changed she was always in a position where her back was to a wall, forcing her to go forward.
Just which one of the founders thought that it was a good idea to let the castle change its configuration at random without putting in some way to keep the stairs and rooms from moving when you were using them? How many times had Hermione gone up a stairway only for it to lead to a different floor than it had five minutes previous? How many times had she entered transfiguration class on the second floor, only to exit it on the fifth? She was beginning to suspect that the real reason that the Slytherin rooms and Snape's potions class were in the dungeons was because only Salazar (and every Slytherin after him) had the sense to realize how much of a bad idea it was to let a building change its configuration freely, and so took the one area that they needed to keep stable in case they had any prisoners locked away.
That still didn't get her off the stairwell.
She was about to give up for the night and just sleep on the stairs; when she saw what looked like Harry taking off his cloak and going into a room she'd never noticed before. Before she could call out for help the stair reconfigured themselves again, only this time she could step back and off instead of going up. Jumping off the stairs before they could change again, she followed Harry into the room. She was still out and about after curfew because she'd gotten stuck. He didn't have any such reason.
