Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.

Harry, Ron and Hermione starred at Adam Prince with the same expression people often wore when they looked at Harry.

"You mean you're the Half Blood Prince" whispered Harry

"The what?" said Adam loudly.

"You know" said Hermione "It's the name of this book. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince"

"What book?" asked Adam.

"This book that we're in right now!" said Ron impatiently "Look, there's this woman called J.K Rowling, you know who she is, right?"

"Er no" said Adam.

"How can you not know who J.K Rowling is!" shouted Ron "She made up all of this! Harry, Quidditch, Hogwarts, You Know Who! All of it!"

Ron was shouting so loudly that several people had turned around to stare at him. Professors McGonagall and Sprout swept past the Hufflepuff table.

"Weasley, five points from Gryffindor!" said Professor McGonagall.

"Now will you three sit down at your own table"

Harry, Ron and Hermione sat down near the end of the Gryffindor table. Ron was in a bad mood because of Professor McGonagall taking points from Gryffindor.

"Five points from Gryffindor, because some Hufflepuff's a complete idiot" he muttered.

Ron's mood did not improve when Adam Prince got up to leave the great hall. As he passed the Slytherin table, Malfoy said in a loud carrying voice so the entire hall could hear, "Even I know who Rowling is and I refuse to have anything to do with Muggles. You must be thick"

However, all the teachers remained at the staff table.

"I get points taken off me, but Malfoy doesn't. That's not fair" said Ron darkly.

Ron got up and stalked off. Harry and Hermione followed him a few minutes later.

"Now that I think about it, it seems a bit strange that the Half Blood Prince is a student" said Hermione "Especially one that doesn't seem to understand what's going on"

"Yeah it's weird" agreed Harry. "But Rowling'll have an explanation for it, won't she?"

"Yes I expect she will" said Hermione.

Harry and Hermione found Ron in the Gryffindor common room apparently absorbed in One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi. But on closer inspection, Harry saw that Ron's eyes weren't moving.

"Ron, pretending to read doesn't work for you" said Hermione sitting down next to Ron. "Look, Adam Prince doesn't know anything about these books. Gryffindor lost points, Slytherin didn't, but there's not much we can do about any of it"

Harry sat down on Ron's other side. The common room was starting to fill up. Most people were doing homework or discussing upcoming Quidditch matches. Hermione was working on a very difficult looking essay for Professor Vector. After an hour she declared that the common room was too noisy and went up to her dormitory. As soon as she had disappeared up the girl's staircase Neville, Dean and Seamus came over to sit with Harry and Ron.

"So, Ron, how'd it go with Hermione?" asked Seamus.

"It was OK" said Ron vaguely.

"What did you do?" asked Harry.

"Just looked in the shops and stuff" said Ron.

"Did she talk about S.P.E.W?"

"Not much. I think she may have given up on it" said Ron "She found out that none of them were taking her hats, except for Dobby. Hey, d'you reckon she'll give me my two Sickles back?"

Harry shrugged. It had been over two years since Hermione had pressured him and Ron into joining the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare.

"What else happened?" asked Seamus.

"Nothing" said Ron as his ears turned red. He got up and ran up the boy's staircase. Harry followed him.

"What's going on, mate?" asked Harry "What happened with you and Hermione today?"

"Well she wants to ask her parents if I can go to her house during the summer holidays" said Ron.

"What? For the whole summer?" asked Harry feeling slightly sorry for himself. His summer would be almost unbearable if he didn't get to see his best friends.

"It'll probably be for a couple of days" said Ron, and Harry relaxed. "But Harry, they're Muggles"

"So what?" said Harry shrugging. He couldn't see any reason for Ron to have a problem with Hermione's parents being Muggles.

"What if I do something wrong?" said Ron sounding half panicked "Like when I tried to use a fellytone"

"Telephone" Harry corrected him.

"See what I mean!" said Ron "I don't know how Muggle stuff really works."

"But your dad knows about that sort of stuff, doesn't he?" said Harry "I mean, he deals with it all the time at work". Mr Weasley was head of the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office at the Ministry.

This fact did not make Ron feel any better.

"Dad'll probably make me take notes on everything" said Ron. "If I go to Hermione's house, her parents are going to think I'm completely stupid"

"They won't" said Harry. "There must be a whole bunch of magic stuff that they don't understand either"

"What if they don't like magic?" said Ron. "Your Aunt and Uncle don't"

"If they really didn't like it, they probably wouldn't let Hermione come here, would they?" said Harry. "Anyway it's not possible for anyone to hate magic as much as the Dursley's."

"Must come as a shock for Muggles" said Ron "finding out that your kid's a witch or wizard"

"Yeah, could you imagine if my cousin was a wizard" said Harry starting to laugh. "The look on my uncle's face would be priceless"

Harry and Ron amused themselves for several minutes at the thought of Dudley being a wizard and imagining Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia's reaction.

"What if Dudley had got a letter from Hogwarts" thought Harry when he was in bed. Questions were forming in his mind. Would Dudley have wanted to come? Would his mother and father have let him? Which house would he be in? Would Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia treat Harry any better? If Dudley was a wizard, would he and Harry have become friends?

By Monday morning Harry had almost forgotten about meeting Adam Prince, so it came as a shock when he came down the marble staircase and saw Adam hurrying towards him.

"Harry! Ernie and Justin told me all about you!" he said excitedly "Is they're really books written about you?"

"Yeah" said Harry "There's a couple of movies too. I haven't seen them"

"And we're in one of the books right now?" said Adam.

"Yes. This one's called Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" said Harry. "And you're the Half Blood Prince"

"This is weird" said Adam "I didn't even know I was in a book, and now I suppose you could say I'm a fairly important character. Not as important as you of course..."

"Yeah I s'pose you could" said Harry "My friend Hermione reckons people would have skipped ahead to see who you were."

"I wonder what I'm meant to do" said Adam.

"Don't ask me" said Harry "I'm not writing this"

"But if you were, would you do anything different?" asked Adam.

Harry thought for a few seconds.

"Well I'd give the Weasley's more money" he said "And I'd make my Aunt and Uncle and cousin nicer. What else? Oh yeah. I would have made everyone believe me when Voldemort came back, and Umbridge wouldn't have been teaching here last year. If you could call it teaching. Did Ernie and Justin tell you about her?"

"Yeah. She sounds awful" said Adam

"She was" said Harry.

"So would you change anything else?" asked Adam.

Harry thought what he would like to change most about the books that J.K Rowling had written about him would be to let his parents live and he, Harry could have enjoyed a normal life. However, he did not say this to Adam.

"I'd get Draco Malfoy expelled, and Snape sacked" said Harry.

Over the next few days it seemed that Adam Prince's sole purpose was to pester Harry. He couldn't walk down a corridor without Adam running over to him and asking things like "Can you really talk to snakes?" "Did you really fight You Know Who?" "Were you really the youngest Quidditch player in a hundred years?"

"Here he comes" hissed Ron on Thursday afternoon as he, Harry and Hermione were leaving Professor Flitwick's classroom. Adam called out to Harry.

"Hey! Harry! Is it true that one of your old teachers had You Know Who sticking out of the back of his head?"

Harry finally lost patience.

"Look" he said through gritted teeth "if you want to know all this stuff, why can't you just go and read the books?"

"Or ask him" said Ron pointing at Colin Creevey who had just come around the corner. "He can tell you just about anything you want to know about Harry."