30 MINUTES THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

INTRODUCTION

DISLAIMER: That part of this world and those characters you've seen before belong to their Creator: JKR. The rest is mine - although I cannot quit my day job as I make no $$$ from this…

DETAILED SUMMARY:

AU. This is a time fic wherein the entire work of Canon is assumed as the base timeline, including the Epilogue. But, as a time flick, we can also ignore all of that, can't we.

Thanks for the reviews.

The reason he is called Sensei will be explained.

I chose this "time machine" (the Avatar) because I always had issues with the more common plot devices. Sending a physical being back in time bothers me for some reason. I think sending energy back makes more sense. (Sensei is, for all intents and purposes the greatest achievement in Pensieve magic). I wanted some kind of interaction, but also do not like the older person taking possession of the younger one. Hence, the Avatar.

Although we can guess who these characters are, their names will not be revealed until it is necessary.

Harry will become OOC, but it will be explained.

CHAPTER TWO: FIRST CONTACT

The Avatar knew it had arrived at the right location the moment it saw the house. The Avatar was invisible for the moment and even if it could be seen, it was the size of a human cell. In that small space was concentrated and specialized energy containing all the thoughts, memories, hopes and dreams and collective experiences and learning of its creator: the Curator. Even in this form the Avatar could think and reason and had the ability to see, hear and even smell.

The house looked the same as in its memory. The Avatar knew it had not undershot its time window by too much. The planned arrival date was July 1, 1995. The Avatar knew this house would be destroyed on July 21, 1997. But the Avatar did know it had missed his arrival date by some amount. It could tell from the flowers. It guessed it was either late April or early May by the tulips and daffodils that were in bloom in the neighborhood. It felt pain knowing this neighborhood and all around would be gone in about sixty years or so, destroyed in a nuclear holocaust.

It had not expected that: feelings. It was a construct, not a real person and it knew that. But it also had memories of emotions and what they felt like and it knew it just had one: sorrow. It had no pleasant memories of this house or this neighborhood, but that did not justify what happened.

It contemplated it's it-ness for a moment. After all, as this was clearly the wrong month, there was a fair bet the target was not around at all. Why am I an "it?" I think, therefore I am, a philosopher once wrote, therefore I am. I exist. I am a construct of the male of the now dying human race - well "now" where I come from. All my memories and experiences are those of the male of the species, and one in particular. I shall refer to myself as me or he. Yes, that would be the correct pronoun.

He now wondered if it was even the right year. How far off was his reentry into the timeline? A couple months? Years even? He noticed there was no car in the drive, although that told him nothing. The owner did work for a living, or so his Creator believed. No. He thought. I believe. I know. I am my creator in every sense. Maybe even better because my "mind" is more organized. I can recall any event I have ever experienced with perfect clarity while he cannot, could not? Does he exist anymore? I am him in name, mind, memory, appearance - when I can be seen - and saddled with the same baggage. For example, I really don't want to go inside that house at all. Too many bad memories. I am me in all but body and soul and that may be all that is left of me. Time to end that point of confusion. I am the Curator, the Old Man, my own creator and the Sensei.

He decided he had to enter that house and have a look around. There would be clues, maybe only subtle ones, as to when in time he had arrived. While he could assume a human form, he lacked any physical substance. He had no way to physically interact with the world. There were disadvantages. For example, he could not pull a person out of danger by physical force or hug a person for comfort. There were advantages though. Closed doors were no obstacle.

He entered the house still invisible and listened. Ordinarily the woman of this house would be home and making some noise, even it it was only the sound of her favorite soaps on the telly. The house was silent so she was not home either. His disembodied essence drifted upwards to the spare bedroom on the upper floor. It was full of junk. That told him a fair bit. The room had been cleared out and turned into a Spartan bedroom in June 1992. So it was clear that the latest this could be was April or May of that year. One more place to check - two more, really.

He passed through the stairs into the space below. It was a cupboard designed as additional storage space. But as he could see, this cupboard stored a person. While it was empty, the plywood board with the thin mattress and thin coverings was clearly there. It was as he remembered it. There was a panel behind the pillow on the wall that led into a small void. The battered occupant had hidden something in this panel the last time he used this space as a sleeping quarters, something his Aunt and Uncle did not know he had. If it was there, then he had a fair idea of the date.

It wasn't. So, at the latest it was April or May of 1990.

One last place to look, he thought. His essence drifted into the parlor. As expected, the mantel over the faux fireplace was filled with photographs of a fat, young Boy. Not the one who lived under the stairs, but the son of the owner of the house and his wife. He inspected the photographs closely. They were updated by the doting parents who abused their ward mercilessly every month or so. Pity the gits did not time stamp the photos, he thought. Still it was a clue. The Boy was much younger than he would have been in 1990. He figured it was between 1986 and 1989 based upon the pictures. He could have narrowed it down further except the parents never displayed a picture that placed the fat Boy in some kind of scale with an object of known size.

Shows they at least knew subconsciously that their bully for a son was a fat tub of lard, he mused to himself. God how he - his Creator - hated this place. So was there any real information as to the date?

He drifted around the parlor. There on a coffee table was a newspaper with a date: Friday, 6 May 1988. He knew it was recent. The owners chucked their paper every day. It was either today's paper or yesterday's. Hard to tell, but he had certainly narrowed down the date. If it was today, perhaps the woman was off to the market which was not far away. That meant the son and his cousin - the Mark - were probably at school. Still the date bothered him.

His mind, far more organized and categorized than his model the Curator, processed the information. He was more akin to a computer in data access and organization than a human. His creator had tried to sort out the events of the Boy's life before school into date periods. May of 1988 was a significant one. He was certain of it - the three weeks in Hell the Boy would remember for the rest of his life. If he was right…

The mail slot clunked and letters fell to the floor. He hovered over them looking at them intently and hoping for a local letter with a date stamp. He was not disappointed. There was a water bill dated May 6. That meant it was no later than May 9th, the following Monday. Where was the Boy?

He knew. He knew the Boy's whole history - a hundred and sixty-eight years of it as if it all of it was yesterday. If the Boy was not here, then it was Saturday and the Boy was at the Library a mile away from this dump. He also knew the Boy was sick and severely injured and in terrible pain that he was trying to hide from the whole world. His guardians were the reason for all of it. The Boy's parents were murdered when he was an infant, although the Boy did not know that yet. For as long as the Boy could remember, he was told his father was a drunk and had been drunk the night his parents died in a car crash. He had barely survived and was sent to live with his useless trollop mother's only redeeming family member, his Aunt, her sister. Although he found that hard to believe even as a young Boy given how if it were not for his beatings he received from his uncle, his Aunt's would have been horrendous.

The Avatar remembered the days leading up to this fateful weekend and wondered if he was meant to begin the change in time here. Seemed logical. The Boy's Uncle's sister - a spinster fortuitously too old to replicate - had decided to pop by relatively unannounced and invite her family on a vacation to the Caribbean. All the family except the Boy who would be left behind, alone, at all of seven years of age, for three weeks. The Avatar remembered the Boy had been left with only about a week's worth of food for a person his age. The Boy would ration it and stretch it into two weeks. He was helped - if you could call it that - by a serious illness not days after his relations left that left him in a delirium from a dangerously high fever for days where he could not eat. It was a miracle he survived at all.

The spinster arrived that Friday. The day before, the Boy's Aunt had taken him to the barber for a haircut. Understatement, the Boy's older self would remember. The Aunt practically had his head shaved bald. The Boy hated it. To his delight and later dismay, he awoke the next morning with his hair just as it had been before it encountered the aggressive barber's shears. His Aunt freaked. His Uncle literally beat him to within an inch of his life. The Spinster arrived and laughed as her vicious bulldog took pleasure in using the barely conscious Boy's leg as a chew toy. The bleeding welts on his back from the belt lashing he received for kicking the dog would become infected and lead to his near fatal illness. The Boy was later surprised he did not catch rabies from that dog.

Later in life the Boy realized he had been left there to die. While in the Caribbean his Aunt and Uncle filed a missing person's report stating that the Boy had gone swimming and never came back. They were understandably furious - or at least the Uncle was - when they returned home to find him still alive.

Not this time around, the Avatar thought. He knew where the Boy was. The Boy had a refuge from the abuse - the public library. His guardians did not know he could read and his cousin didn't know what a library was. He had hidden there every chance he could since he was five. He was safe there. The Avatar knew where his target was and was there in seconds, even though he knew it had taken the Boy close to an hour to limp there.

The Boy was at his usual table, the Avatar noted. He was reading a book and had a notepad out. The Avatar knew that the notepad recorded the book, where it was shelved, and what page the Boy had reached for each visit to the library. The Boy had no library card and was not about to get one with his guardians.

The Avatar could see the Boy was injured. He knew what the injuries were. In addition to the dog bites and lash marks, the Boy's left arm was broken in two places and he had at least a couple of broken ribs. Even though the Avatar remembered this, he was amazed at the stoicism considering what had to be excruciating pain. The Avatar stepped off behind a serious of bookshelves and assumed a human form - that of the Curator - even though he knew only the Boy would see him.

It ends now, one way or another, the Avatar thought as he walked over to the Boy's table.

"Are you alright, Son?" he asked.

The Boy looked up and faked a grin. "Fine Sir."

"You don't look it. Maybe I should call your parents."

"No!" The Boy replied in panic. "Honestly! I am fine!"

"Sure fooled me. Is there anything wrong?"

He could see the Boy's mind racing, the Boy wanted to tell - needed to. Alas, the fear stopped him. "No Sir. Just reading a book."

The old man nodded. "Me too. Can I join you?"

The Boy shrugged.

The Avatar might be nothing more than energy and visible only by a strange holographic projection, but he could also create props. In this case it was a huge book. His plan was simple. He knew the Boy was nearing collapse from the combinations of his injuries and illness. He also knew the collapse would occur at the Boy's home unless he delayed the Boy's departure by as little as ten minutes. Were the collapse to occur outside and in public - history would change.

How was another matter entirely.

After several minutes the Boy looked up at the old man. "What are you reading?" he asked.

"You first."

"Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring," the Boy said.

"I always have liked that series," the Avatar said.

"And you?" the Boy asked.

"Not so much a book as a collection of essays - mathematics. Most I could care less about to be honest. But there are a few on Chaos Theory that have my attention."

"Chaos theory?"

"Very advanced stuff," the Avatar said. "Few real applications yet. The bare bones are easy to understand conceptually, but nasty hard when the math is involved."

"What is it?"

"The logical extension of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal, but with far broader potential applications."

"The what?"

"How old are you, Son?"

"Seven."

"Not sure I can teach you. Know I can't do the math. But… Imagine the smallest thing you can see. How small is it?"

"Very small."

"What is it?"

"A grain of sand or salt."

"Compared to the smallest thing there is, it's huge! The smallest stable thing known is called an atom. Combine them in the right way and you have a molecule. In the right combination that becomes your grain of sand, or maybe a protein itself part of DNA the building block of all life and so on.

"An atom contains equal parts Protons and Electrons. Protons are huge, electrons are tiny. It is that tiny electron that mucked things up and led to chaos theory. For you see, electrons are freaky. They behave like matter and orbit their proton companion, but they also behave like energy and radiate. A scientist can set up an experiment that shows they are matter or they are energy, but not both at the same time.

"Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal stated simply is this: for certain things - like electrons - you can see either where they are or what they are doing, but not both at the same time.

"Chaos theory is this: the greater the detail of your observation or calculation, the less predictable the result. Stated simply, the smallest event can create the greatest consequences. A butterfly flapping its wings can set in motion a series of events leading to a killer storm at sea.

"What's that mean?"

"Quite simply, the greater detail you study something, the less accurate your analysis."

"Oh," the Boy said. "OHHHHH!"

"What?"

"Well, I was thinking about the future, Sir," the Boy said. "I was wondering what it would be."

"Why?"

"'Cause my present isn't that good."

The old man nodded to the Boy as if understanding.

"Before you told me that, I was wondering if the future was fixed or if it could be changed. I want to change mine. I didn't know how."

"And?"

"I thought it might take a lot to change it. More than I can do anyway. But that chaos thingy says different, doesn't it?"

"Indeed, Laddie!"

"A small change - I do one thing slightly different than I would, could mean a whole new future, right? A better one?"

"Ah," the old man sighed. "One can hope. The future is unpredictable. But yes, one can hope."

The Boy suddenly winced in pain and paled noticeably. "Sorry, Sir. I really gotta go." With that, the Boy closed his book and left it on the table and limped off quickly towards the door to the library.

The old man watched him leave. In the original timeline, the Boy had left a half hour or more earlier. In the original timeline, he had not lingered to talk with an old professor about the enigma that was chaos theory. In the old timeline, he had gotten home just in time to collapse from his injuries and increasing illness, out of sight of any who might help him.

The original timeline is about to alter, the Avatar thought. The Boy will be lucky to make it out the door before the effects of his abuse overwhelm him. This time somebody will notice.

The old man - the Avator - smiled and slowly dissolved into his essence.