I can't believe this is actually popular. Kaleido Star was created by Junichi Sato and written by Reiko Yoshida while HP belongs to J.K. Rowling.
"Oh crap" is thoughts or memories.
'...right, never mind me,' is speaking.
'I loathe the way you do that.' is epenthesizing the word "loathe"
"Dear, whoever you are," is reading something either website or letter.
"programme" is Australian.
"program" is American.
Edit: I've now changed 10 pounds with 10 quid and a tenner as thanks to a British slang site has said that no one says pounds and instead call pounds 'quid' or if it is a 10 pound note it is a 'tenner'. I should had really done my research there as well OTL.
Chapter 3
Not many people realise the significance of dates until a day has already happened and you try to think back to yesterday's date. Time is just a never ending blur that the human brain dimly notices through the change of seasons and sun. Though it can also be measured with a clock if set right.
The date for today was 19th of July, 1996.
It was a Friday and night-time.
'Harry! Don't forget your childhood dreams. Maybe it will take your mind off of things if you think about what you can do towards your dream than anything else. You should go for your dream,' said Hermione as she walked out of the platform 9 and 3/4, which was odd because she usually would have had given a speech about school work than following dreams.
Perhaps she thought that I needed high grades to achieve my dream?
It was officially the end of the 1995-1996 Hogwarts year and most significantly, for Harry, another day back at the Dursley's fresh from the train.
The welcome back from the Dursleys: awkward.
The crowd in the train station: busy.
The car ride to the Dursley's home: cramped.
The letter from Professor Dumbledore to the Dursleys: delivered.
The packing away of all the luggage: exhausting.
The grade that the Dursleys would give his effort so far?: failure.
Then again they'd have given him a failure anyway just for coming back to their home.
The parting words from Hermione were ringing through his head, especially the last part.
It was another day, or rather night as the Hogwarts Express took the day to get back into London, at the Dursley's.
It was also going to be mind numbingly boring at the Dursley's home, there were only chores to do and the whole family was probably going to avoid Harry as if he was a leper in the 6th century.
He was right.
He couldn't even get Dudley to give him milk that night anymore.
He has always been able to get Dudley to give him his milk since the time he made Dudley think that he hated milk after a teacher at his old school told him milk was for strong people.
Maybe he should go for runs or something to get back into the shape he used to have before he stopped training for his dream, before he was brought into the Wizarding World.
Yeah I can do that. It shouldn't be a problem if I use one of the trees in the park like I used to and train on them. I wonder when is the auditions for Kaleido Stage?
Not that Harry was planning on going over to America but…
Just once Harry would at least like to try out. Maybe if he doesn't die first at least.
Because that whole dying thing really put a damper on trying out for Kaleido Stage.
Oh but if I do try and want to go over to America I'll have to renew my passport. Wait…what? Where did that thought come from? thought Harry as he was getting ready for bed. It was late and the Dursleys didn't want to give him anything to eat.
He'll probably get a slice of bread and banana since it seemed Aunt Petunia was still trying to get Dudley on that fruit diet of hers.
I'll need to give some bread to Hedwig or at least convince Aunt Petunia to let Hedwig out so she can hunt.
That night all he could remember from his dream was vague sensation of flying, fire, a crowd shouting for him and Sirius in that crowd cheering him on.
The next morning however was different, more so than any other time he was with the Dursleys. Harry didn't know if it was him who was different or if it was the Dursleys.
Uncle Vernon seemed to be glaring at him more than usual rather than reading his newspaper and steadily going to the purple colour that Harry had been accustomed to through his years at the Dursley's but he hadn't started to yell yet which was the odd part.
Aunt Petunia was also acting weird by the way she pressed her lips together until they were almost white and didn't respond to Dudley's pleading for bangers, eggs and bacon. That was another odd thing as she would had usually done something to make her dear sweet "Duddikins" anything he wanted.
Dudley didn't seem to be acting anymore than usual but he too was acting weird by the way he kept looking over at Harry and clenching his jaw, making it look like he was trying to resist to smile but the tightening of his lips ruined that action hence the clenching of his jaw.
'Is…is there something wrong?' asked Harry quietly, knowing his uncle liked Harry to be as silent as possible during meals. Actually he liked Harry better when he wasn't speaking at all so he could pretend Harry wasn't there.
'Shut your mouth, boy,' said Uncle Vernon as he glared harder at Harry, not even trying to pretend that he was reading his newspaper.
'Mum, can I have 10 quid? I want to go out with the guys today,' said Dudley in a whinging tone. His voice breaking the tension temporarily as before it rose again.
'Of course Duddikins,' said Aunt Petunia as she flashed a warm smile at Dudley and excusing herself to go upstairs for some money.
'Dudley, how about you and me go out for a while. We can have a father-son bonding time away from your mother. In fact I'll tell her right now,' said Uncle Vernon towards Dudley.
'Can I still have the tenner?' asked Dudley, his beady eyes staring towards his father to see if he could still get the money.
Uncle Vernon just laughed heartily.
'That's my son, always knowing what he wants from the world,' said Uncle Vernon before getting up, patting Dudley on his shoulder and walking out of the kitchen. Probably off to tell Aunt Petunia about the sudden change of events.
There were no words spoken from the two teenagers. What could they say? What could they even talk about?
Nothing, which is the amount that they have had spoken to each other since yesterday.
Harry could hear the voices of his uncle and aunt around the front door, no doubt talking about Dudley and how he was growing up. Silently Harry took the plates off of the table, side stepping the foot that Dudley had left out on purpose with ease.
Perhaps I could train again; I mean it would be beneficial for me to train at least to run from Voldemort…
The rest of the morning Harry was in a daze. Apparently Aunt Petunia didn't want him outside at all these holidays, not even for chores. This meant Harry suddenly had a lot of free time and no way to spend it on.
How long can this go for? I mean Aunt Petunia is very conscious of the garden going brown like the next street over's gardens have due to the drought thought Harry as he wondered back upstairs to lie in his room or do something.
Stopping by Dudley's room he saw that his door was open and there on his desk was his computer and minicomputer. Harry vague remembered that it could be called a Powerbook but he wasn't too sure.
Walking inside Harry had to marvel at what the muggles did while Harry was off at Hogwarts and didn't that sound Malfoy of him? Of course muggles were going to advance but Harry didn't think it would have had been so soon that they were leaving him behind.
Don't they have a research thing from all over the world called the Intinet that Dudley was once was talking about last year? That sounds wrong. Intevet? Invasnet? How do I know its starts with "I" anyway, it could be Enternet for all I know thought Harry.
Harry looked around for Aunt Petunia as Dudley was out with Uncle Vernon on a father-son bonding thing again. Harry was going to presume that Aunt Petunia was doing the washing but he wasn't sure.
Sneaking into the room he got onto the computer and turned it on after a minute or two for searching for the 'on' button which was located at the front, the massive metal rectangle was already on according to the sounds it was making. A blue colour was dominating the screen while the computer turned on the other colours.
Dudley must have had forgotten to turn it off.
On the screen there was a game of reversal set up with all the red and blue dots on a board and on the left of it was a lot of icons that overwhelmed Harry before he noticed a blue 'e' with a yellow line on it and the name "Internet Explorer" under it.
Harry ever so slowly moved the mouse to click the 'e' and waited a few minutes for the programme to load.
Looking at the internet programme Harry realised that he had no idea of how to get onto Kaleido Stage internet thing so he could have a look at what has happened to it so far.
Noticing the white bar on the top with a 'I' flashing from it he hesitantly typed Kaleido Stage though he had to figure out where the space button was as it wasn't named unlike the letters and shift key.
Luckily for Harry the computer did its job and transferred him to a site called Yahoo! where the first search for Kaleido Stage was a website for it. Harry clicked on it.
It looked great. It was full of reds, pinks and oranges and had words about what Kaleido Stage was about and how to register and had pictures of the actors and actresses.
Wait a moment, how to register? They put how to register in the site.
Harry clicked on the words "Registration" when it lit up and took everything in as much as he could.
"To be able to register all registerers had to audition in California where Kaleido Stage was. The audition takes place on the 22nd of August this year. All participants must be there by 10am to register. Any domestic registers must have their home address and any international registers must have birth certificate, home address and passport. Any registerers from under the age of 18 years must have parental or guardian permission to be able to register and work at Kaleido Stage."
That's it. The 22nd of August is pretty soon and I can attend if I work hard. What the name of Merlin am I thinking?! I can't go there! I can't even join since the Dursleys wouldn't let me go and I have Hogwarts to go back to. I also have a death to look forward to.
Harry sighed and clicked the 'x' button on the website before pressing the screen button to turn off the computer again. He sat there in Dudley's room thinking and imagining.
He was imagining what life would be like if he could join Kaleido Stage and just never come back.
Too bad that's impossible what with Hogwarts and people would probably try to track me down before dragging me back into the Wizarding World but if I could just try out I think I would be happy knowing that I did try out for my dream.
The front door slammed open. Harry jumped before remembering he was still in Dudley's room. I'm so dead if I don't get out soon!
Harry was already on his feet and running out of Dudley's room before even the first foot touched the staircase, he was safely back in his bedroom before Uncle Vernon was at the top of the staircase.
Harry stayed in his room for the rest of the day trying to do stretches and practicing how to do the splits again. His thoughts straying towards Kaleido Stage and only stopping when he thought his body was going to break in two from pain.
'Dinner!' shouted Aunt Petunia from somewhere downstairs, most likely the kitchen.
When Harry came down from his room he noticed that the Dursleys were just started to eat their dinner. A plate was set out for him with around the same proportion of food that Aunt Petunia had.
Dudley let out a grunt when he noticed Harry sitting down but kept on eating his dinner.
'Boy, you will only be here for 2 weeks. The headmaster of your school will be picking you up,' said Aunt Petunia putting as much loathing into her voice as she possible could.
'2 weeks?' said Harry quietly. 2 weeks was a long yet short time.
In two weeks it will be around the 4th of August but that is…
…
I don't want to go. I don't want to go with Professor Dumbledore thought Harry, surprising himself with how much he actually wanted to audition for Kaleido Stage but he couldn't get there and had no way of getting the Dursleys to sign the form allowing him to audition.
'What if I don't want to go?' asked Harry to no one in particular.
'What? You mean that you want to stay here with us having to take care of you?' said Aunt Petunia more than a little shocked.
'Ha! Did they kick you out for being such a freak?' said Dudley from his spot; his mouth was covered with that night's "healthy" dinner.
'Is this about Cedric, your boyfriend?' taunted Dudley adding more fire to the pan.
'What! Homosexuality in my household! I should have had left you at an orphanage when we found you! This is how you repay us! With this-this sinning?' said Uncle Vernon, his voice bellowing over the table as his face turned a purple colour very quickly.
'What? No! Cedric wasn't my boyfriend! I saw him die!' said Harry quickly knowing that if he didn't get his word in first then he never would. His body tense as if ready to run away.
'What? You didn't kill him did you?' said Aunt Petunia horrified that she could be sitting next to a killer. She shifted her chair away from Harry's place as if the distance would help her escape if he nephew really was a killer.
'No! I didn't kill him. It was an accident. He was never supposed to follow me and then he got murdered,' said Harry looking down into his dinner, his fork playing with the vegetables by making them move from one end of the plate to the other.
'Did you murder him?' asked Uncle Vernon very seriously, staring down into Harry's head.
'No, someone who was trying to kill me murdered him,' said Harry. This had to be the first time that he had spoken to his relatives about Voldemort or even hint about Voldemort before.
'How was he killed?' said Dudley eagerly to hear about the dirty details. He had never known a person who had seen another been killed before.
'The same way my parents were killed,' said Harry, finally stop playing around with the food on his plate to quickly eat it all up to have something in his mouth so he could stop talking.
The atmosphere was tense at the table once more. No one spoke another word about Cedric or murders and instead had gone to talking about the Summer Olympics and cloning for the rest of the night, meaning that Uncle Vernon did most of the talking to fill the silence.
There was nobody not normal at this dinner anymore.
The need to know:
Harry thinks he's dying because of the prophecy that he recently learnt of (the prophecy from the Order of the Phoenix about how one lives while the other dies). So I guess he's making a bit of a bucket list for before he dies. At the top of that list is try out for Kaleido Stage.
Bangers is sausage in British slang, once we hit America I'll go to American slang.
The two older Dursleys are awkward around Harry due to the letter he had delivered for Professor Dumbledore while Dudley is awkward due to the year before and how Harry saved him.
£10 back in 1996 then was a fair bit. You could have had almost bought an adult passport with that money as passports back then for the UK were only £18. (Here is the reference for the £18 passport, it is near the bottom of the page but it is under Passport Fees. This will come up probably in next chapter along with money system of galleons to pounds and back. isn't working so the reference will be on my page if you want to look at my sources.)
Whinging is whining in British slang, hence why the Dursleys live in Little Whinging, Surrey.
Dudley is a bit stuck in 5th book mode of bully but I promise he will get better. He's one of the characters that I think I will get some character development towards especially as he has just found out about Cedric's death and experienced a Dementor last year for him. He's still pretty childish but we all have to mature at some point.
I actually had to research about when the end of the school year would be for Hogwarts as it never did say but I went off of normal school holidays in the UK which from my research is about 6-7 weeks for the summer holidays and placed it at 7 weeks. I also realised later that I screwed myself over as 2 weeks after that, canonly, Professor Dumbledore shows up to collect Harry and they never go back to the Dursley's for the summer holidays. So I'm going to need to rush the passport process, which normally I would have liked for it to be as real as possible but since we're on a time limit of now 12 days (this fanfic wise) I'm going to need to speed it up so that Harry actually makes it to America without anyone really knowing.
The computer at Dudley's desk would have had been a Windows 95 as it would had still been new and possibly connected to the internet but would have had required a password and didn't want to get into that I merely made Dudley turn off his screen. The "computer" that Harry is constantly referring to is actually a screen (or monitor if you will) while the "massive metal rectangle" is actually a computer. Internet thing is a website but Harry doesn't know it what with him not being born in at least 1995 to know.
I remember having a Windows 98 and man was it slow especially as my school had better computers than I did. I think if I used it now I'd probably die especially as it kept asking for the password to the internet when I wanted to play on the internet. Then I got a laptop and I was all happy.
The "minicomputer" is actually a laptop. A Macintosh laptop to be exact, as in an Apple Mac computer, which is called a second generation of PowerBook which means that it has inbuilt speakers, a trackpad and a built-in Ethernet connection. It came out in 1994. Pretty fancy for 1996 I would think and exactly something Dudley would want even if just to brag.
Also guess what? Google wasn't invented at the time of 1996 which is why I used Yahoo! instead of google as Yahoo! was actually invented at the time. Google came out in 1998 (which was the year of the Battle of Hogwarts).
Kaleido Stage is said to be set in California despite all the background scenery and I found out that the trick used by Yuri when he was in charge of Kaleido Stage in 1st season of Kaleido Star, which could have had been holographics or Pepper's Ghost trick or even 3D filming, could have all been real in 1988 where I am saying Harry went to attend a Kaleido Stage performance which is pretty great for me that everything ties together.
On the 5th of July, 1996 Dolly the Sheep was cloned which is why it came up as a topic of discussion and it was fairly recent topic for them, about a week before Harry arrived. The other topic was the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, USA which became fairly famous for something that I'm going to mention in the next chapter.
I was originally going to make Dudley go to the movies in this chapter, hence the money, but when I realised that while Mission: Impossible did come out in 1996, it came out in April 1996. Luckily in this year DVDs also were launched (though only in Japan). This meant that no, Dudley won't be going to the movies to see Mission: Impossible unless there was an cinema in the area that played Mission: Impossible non-stop throughout the whole year as Dudley is at a boarding school around the same time Harry is.
Also the Dursleys never knew any of the troubles with Harry in canon. In this I'm going to change that a bit as somehow I've gotten it in my head that Petunia would make a great classic tsundere towards Harry (in the platonic sense of course) and this also changes the way Dudley acts around Harry as well, ever so slightly as he matures. I picture Vernon as a god-fearing Anglican Christian of an old church that doesn't allow same-sex couples hence the sudden homophobia but this fanfic will possibly have same-sex couples as a minor pairing/s so sorry if that makes you feel uncomfortable but I believe in love is love type of thing and some couples are just adorable together.
Thanks to:
everHermione, animefangirl0219 and KazzyFreax for either favouriting or following!
Now to go write another chapter and see where I can go from here. I am also thinking of minor pairings such as Kalos and Sara from Kaleido Star as they're practically canon but it won't be explicit and won't be a major thing. I will probably put minor pairings in but later so it'll be a surprise. Harry won't have a pairing though it will be hinted a bit for something but will never happen as most of the cast of KS is over the age of 21 by now and according to US law it can be considered as sexual relations with an underaged person. Of course there won't be sex in here as it is T rated. I might have to bring in OCs to fill in the gaps of the previous KS cast. Though I am reluctant to do so as I know I'll turn them into Mary Sues and Gary Stus.
Speaking of which if you ever feel as if Harry is turning into a Gary Stu please warn me immediately so I can avoid such a thing happening and give me reasons of why you think that so I can see where you're coming from. Thank you. Though Harry might be a little bit Gary Stu for this part as I need him in America and in Kaleido Stage ASAP.