Chapter 1: I think I'm your sister.
"Harry," a voice said above him. "Harry, you have to wake up. I think something's happened."
Harry just rolled over in his bed. It was way too early for anybody to be bothering him in his room. There was no reason for anybody bothering him either as he was currently spending his summer at the Dursleys'. Vernon had stopped trying to pawn off all of the chores on him a couple of years ago, probably because of what Harry had accidentally done to his sister. And the Dursleys couldn't even be bothering him right now because they were currently away on vacation, presumably to avoid Harry as much as they were able to. So, knowing that, Harry just settled back into bed knowing there was no good reason for any of the Dursley's to be trying to wake him up.
So why was there a person in his room again?
Harry shot up in his bed the second his brain had caught up enough to recognize the peculiarity of the situation. His nostrils flared and his eyes darted around the room to try to take in as much information as he was able to.
His room looked exactly as it had when he had gone to sleep. White walls with no decorations, his trunk packed away in one corner, Hedwig's cage tucked away in another, and a woman he didn't recognize sitting on the end of the bed.
Wait what?
Harry's attention zeroed in on the unfamiliar woman. She had curly black hair that settled in around her shoulders and was wearing what looked to be a simple tunic and trousers with rough boots. She looked like she had just come from a day out in Diagon Alley for all intents and purposes. After a second glance, Harry noticed that she seemed to be about his age. In fact, she looked strangely familiar in a strange, twisted way that Harry couldn't quite put his finger on, because at that moment he was sure that he had never seen this girl before.
"Who the hell are you?!" Harry exclaimed. He tried to crawl his way out from under his blankets as fast as he could and stumbled to the bedside table with his glasses and wand, but in his hurry he ended up falling flat onto his back on the floor.
The girl looked down at him with a curious expression. Harry had to blink a few times as he noticed how vividly green her eyes were.
"You don't recognize me?" The girl asked curiously. Harry quickly shook his head from side to side and the girl seemed to go deeper into thought at that. "Well that's curious. Well I'm going to go down and fix us up some tea while you get dressed."
With that the girl left the room and after a few seconds Harry could hear footsteps going down the stairs. When he heard the flickering of the stovetop going off, he took that as his cue to scramble up and grab his things. He grabbed his wand and tripped over the bed frame on his way to pull on the boots he kept near his bed.
After stumbling down the stairs, he found the girl putting a kettle on the stove. She noticed him looking at her and gestured to the stools at the table. Harry didn't move and kept his wand at the ready. She rolled her eyes and made a show of taking her wand and placing it dramatically on the table, out of her reach.
"Will you take a seat already?" the girl asked impatiently. "If I wanted to kill you I wouldn't have woken you up in the first place. You can't really be this dense all of the time can you?"
Harry flushed at the comment, but after a few more tense moments, he finally made his way to sit at the table. He made sure to keep a hold of his wand under the table, but from the way that the girl looked at him, he had a suspicion that she knew what he was doing.
Silence fell as they waited for the kettle to boil. Harry thought that he could cut the tension in the room with a knife, but the girl just leaned up against the wall nonchalantly. Minutes passed as Harry stared daggers into the girl while she did her best to pretend that she didn't notice what it was that he was doing.
Eventually, the kettle whistled and the girl set about pouring the two of them a cup of tea. The girl grabbed her cup with both of her hands and blew cold air across the surface. She took a slow slip and put the cup back onto the table.
"So I'm sure you have a lot of questions," she said finally. "And quite frankly I'm not exactly sure where I should start."
"How about you start with who you are?" Harry said acerbically. The girl just smiled at him.
"See I don't think that is even the best place to start," the girl explained. "I feel like if I try to tell you who I am I think you wouldn't believe me."
"Try me."
"My name is Elizabeth Potter," she said, tilting her head. "And I think I'm your sister."
Harry stared across the table at the girl with a black expression on his face. Who did this girl think she was to assume that he would fall for such an obvious lie?
She just snickered. "I can tell by your face that you don't believe me. So let's try something to try to prove it." She leaned forward across the table. "Tell me something that you think that only you could know. Something that you would never let anybody else know."
Harry just continued glaring across at her for a long moment before caving. "When did I first learn what my name was?"
Elizabeth seemed to wilt at that question and Harry could've sworn that he could see a long forgotten pain in her eyes. "It was the first day of primary," she said as Harry felt his veins turn to ice. "You had thought that your name was Freak and I had thought that my name was Girl. We used to call each other by those names when we needed to get each other's attention."
Harry's eyes narrowed at that. "What are you talking about? I don't have a sister!"
Elizabeth sighed. "I figured I would screw this up somehow," she said before pausing to take a deep breath. "We're at the Dursleys' yeah?" Harry didn't dignify that with any emotion. "Well of course we are. The only problem being that to my knowledge neither of us has come back here in years."
"I've been here every summer," Harry said, rolling his eyes.
"See that's strange," Elizabeth said. "Because I distinctly remember us spending that summer with Hermione in France. And that time we followed the Weasleys to Egypt. Oh and the fact that we were currently in India with the Patils when I last went to sleep?"
"Why would I be with the Patils?" Harry asked.
"Because you wanted to meet your girlfriend's parents?" Elizabeth asked with a raised eyebrow. "Oh! Unless you never started dating Padma in this world?"
"Wh-what?" Harry asked. "Dating Padma? Why would I date Parvati's sis- Wait a minute! This world?"
"Oh, uh yeah," Elizabeth said while reaching up to mess with some of the locks of her fringe. "That's my current theory for what's going on here. I think that I'm from a different world and somehow I got sucked here by accident, or something along those lines."
Harry just looked at her with a slack jawed expression before a blinding light exploded on the other side of the room.
He shot out of his seat and turned around to see that there was something standing in the middle of the living room. The figure was draped in white fabrics and held an incredibly intense aura that made looking in their direction incredibly difficult. So difficult in fact, that Harry physically couldn't bring himself to look into the eyes of the being in front of him. Everytime that he brought his eyes up in order to look at their face, his eyes were forcibly turned downwards against his will.
"You are partially correct, Elizabeth Potter," the figure said with a feminine voice. "You have been pulled from another universe, but it was by no means an accident."
"Who are you!?" Harry asked incredulously. He was getting tired of strange women appearing in the middle of the night.
"I, Harry Potter, am called Fate," the figure said. "I am a being that determines the fate of all beings across all universes."
"Are you what brought me here?" Elizabeth asked in an agitated voice.
"Yes, I am."
"Why?" Elizabeth asked. "Not that I'm complaining yet, but I would like to return to my own world at some point in the future."
"Fear not, Elizabeth Potter," Fate said. "Nothing will have changed about your universe by your being here. I have not taken you from your original reality, merely copied you and placed said copy in this universe here."
Elizabeth took a step back at that.
"But as to your question of 'Why?' that answer is easily explained," Fate said. "This universe was rapidly approaching its stagnation and I took it upon myself to stop that from happening. So I decided that I would create an experiment of sorts. I would take counterparts from disparate realities and bring them together into the stagnating universe in order to have them compete for a prize."
"What?" Harry asked.
"What is the prize you ask? Well that too is easy to explain. It is simply to ask anything of me and I will grant it to you. I will be able to change anything about your original universe as rewards for competing and succeeding in this competition that I have created."
"What are you talking about?!" Harry screamed. Fate stopped its explanation and seemed to bear its gaze down on Harry. "I don't have any idea what in the hell you are talking about!"
"I WILL NOT WASTE MY TIME ON EXPLAINING MINUTIA TO YOU DISAPPOINTINGLY UNORIGINAL MORTAL CREATION."
Harry was knocked off of his feet and flew backwards into the cabinets from the force of Fate's exclamation. He fell onto his knees with a rough cough and barely stopped him from slamming his forehead into the floor. He blinked a few times and by the time the stars had left his vision, the being known as Fate had already left.
"Harry!" Elizabeth yelled, coming to his side immediately. "Are you alright? You didn't hurt yourself, did you?"
"Ahh. No I'm fine," Harry said, slowly turning over to sit on the floor. "I think so anyways." He looked at Elizabeth. "If I'm dreaming I would very much like to wake up now."
Elizabeth just laughed. "Sadly I think the both of us are disappointingly conscious at the moment."
Just then, the front door of the house burst open and Harry had to suppress a groan at the noise. Elizabeth shot to her feet with her wand extended in front of Harry to protect him.
"Harry!" A familiar voice called out.
"Sirius?" Both Elizabeth and Harry asked at the same time.
The aforementioned man soon burst into the kitchen. He took in the room in a glance, his gaze quickly resting on Elizabeth. "Oh not here too."
"Sirius, what's going on?" Harry asked as he staggered to his feet.
"Something unprecedented," a new voice said, one strangely familiar. Harry looked past Sirius to see what looked like an exact copy of himself across the kitchen. And behind that there was another exact copy. And behind that there was a version of himself that looked like he was twenty years older than himself.
A/N: Whoa that's nifty isn't it? Anyways, the inspiration of this story comes from fate/stay night, Re:Creators, and a fic in the RWBY community called Arc Royale. From those inspirations you could probably guess where I'm going with this. Basically I wanted to make a battle royale style tournament between various versions of Harry Potter, with each of the alternate versions of himself being representations of different fanfiction archetypes.
I want this story to kind of turn into my love letter to fanfiction, and why I think the medium as a whole has a lot of merit. I want to explore how characters would deal with the idea of countless versions of themselves existing.
I've introduced the first of the alternate Harry's, and I have about a dozen planned in my head ranging from a Wrong Boy-Who-Lived, to a Voldemort sympathizer, to a No War universe. Elizabeth herself is representative of just the idea of Harry having a sister. Main inspiration being Lorena Potter from To Be a Slytherin by Morgana Deryn.