PencilMonkeyGaiden: Mr. Headphones Guy was listening to a Walkman and looking at stuff on a microfilm machine. The first draft said that explicitly, then I realized that my mental picture of the scene meant Hazel couldn't see the Walkman, and she probably wouldn't necessarily recognize a microfilm reader on sight. Mr. HG wouldn't be thinking of these things, either, so she wouldn't know from his thoughts, but I liked the opening too much to scrap it.

dvorkam: See below for the answer to one of your questions. As for the concern of starting the story too early to the point nothing happens for a while, I actually have fairly sold-ish plans for a bunch of stuff that happens between now (December '89) and July '91 when she gets her Hogwarts letter. It's at the point that if I started with the letter, everyone would be immensely confused or assume I'm talking about an OC.

Guest: This IS the start of an adventure. The adventure of learning about magic and the magical world without the guidance of any canon character, exploring parts of the world that canon never dwells on. That should be obvious looking at the summary and what's happened so far. Of course, if you think the last two chapters are "dark and hopeless", then obviously you've never read anything else I've written and probably won't like my style in general. I don't write stories where everything is sunshine and rainbows and nothing bad ever happens. Characters who don't have challenges and conflicts to overcome aren't worth reading about.

"Everyone's being so mean to Hazel!": Yes they are. Unfortunately, it's common for 'normal' people (at least according to statistics) to be wary and distrustful when they run into other people who are obviously homeless and destitute. Hazel has only been homeless for one night, but thanks to the mention in canon of Harry having ill-fitting and worn-out clothing, it gives her a head start on looking homeless. Her acting jumpy and not answering questions when people talk to her (because the first assumption anybody makes, in fiction or real life, is NOT going to be "oh, obviously she's mute") feeds into the assumption a few of these minor characters have already made, that she's homeless and therefore untrustworthy.

In terms of the librarian specifically, her behavior was not with the active mindset of "I shall make this child freeze to death, mwa ha ha!". It was subconscious, where most prejudices reside, and more along the lines of "You're homeless and dirty and your kind doesn't belong in here. You can find somewhere else to stay warm where we don't have to look at you". Which fits back into the comment I made in the AN of chapter 1 about Hazel dealing with some of the challenges that runaway youth face in real life.

As many (most?) of you probably know, while I may be a fanfiction author by night, I am a physician by day. You can guess then that the last several weeks have been… stressful, shall we say. I haven't had a whole lot of free time, and even when I did I wasn't in the best mindset to write. My stories will continue, but I ask for a little patience.

There is a lot of information and misinformation floating around on the Internet and the airwaves about COVID-19, and I won't turn this into a full lecture, but I do want to stress the most important thing you need to know: This virus. Is. Deadly. Old, young, and everywhere in between; people have and are dying.

Don't be stupid. Don't think only about yourself. Keep your distance from other people, tell your loved ones how much they mean to you, and above all else, just be careful. We can survive this, just as humanity has survived pandemics in the past, but that will only happen if we all use a little common sense.

And on that oh-so-cheerful note, let's continue with the story.

Chapter 3
The New Me

The sun had long since set when the head librarian slid the last book into its proper shelf. Whistling to herself at a job well done and thoughts filled with images of the meal her husband said he would prepare tonight, she flipped the lights off and walked out the back door so she could lock the library up for the night. Confident that all would be as she left it when she came back first thing in the morning.

Hazel waited five minutes after all noise in the library had stopped and she could no longer hear the librarian's thoughts before she poked her head out of the boiler room.

Once she was satisfied no one was around, she crept the rest of the way out. The borrowed torch was in one hand, and she quickly clicked it on to light up the dark stacks. In her other hand, she held a tin of Spam and a plastic spoon she had found in one of the back rooms of the library. It was probably the librarians' lunch room if the microwave and coffeepot were anything to judge by. Hopping up onto the top of a nearby table, she sat with her legs crossed beneath her and peeled open the tin.

Her eyes roamed over the bookshelves in front of her while a faint frown settled on her face. It was probably getting close to time for her to move on. Partly because she had been living in this library for the better part of a week, which meant she was running out of the food she had taken from Privet Drive. Partly because what she had found so far was… less than helpful.

She started her search in the obvious place: the nonfiction section. Hazel had not expected to find anything there, and she had not been disappointed. No books about how to access hidden magical talents. No history books talking about witches as though they were real. Magic truly was something that had been lost and forgotten.

Lost, not imaginary. She had found one section in the nonfiction section that provided some support for her assumptions: the folklore section. Celtic fairy tales, stories by the Brothers Grimm, even tales from the Americas or Africa. Folk tales were full of fantastical creatures and spellcasters, but in modern times they vanished. The books said it was because magic was just an explanation ancient cultures used to explain what they did not understand, and thanks to science the theory of magic was no longer needed and could be safely abandoned.

Hazel had a different conclusion. She knew magic was real; that she teleported to this library was proof enough of that. If magic used to be common knowledge and later was forgotten, that meant something had happened. Maybe a war between witches and normal people that the former lost. Maybe a disease that wiped out most of the families capable of magic. Maybe whatever power flowed through her and her mother's veins had been diluted or weakened and needed centuries upon centuries to return.

No matter the explanation, her worries seemed to be confirmed. Her mother probably had to explore the limits of their ability all on her own, which meant Hazel would, too. A thought passed through her head, and she mulled over it for a moment. If she had inherited her magic from her mother, and her mother had presumably gotten it from one of her and Aunt Petunia's parents, why had that parent not taught what they knew to her mother? Why would Aunt Petunia consider it so unnatural if she grew up with it?

She shrugged, putting the question out of the front of her mind and into the mental box that contained all the other questions she had that she knew would never be answered. Maybe if she could figure out how to summon her mother's ghost – because that was something that showed up way too often in folklore not to be true – she could ask, but otherwise there was nothing more she could do about it.

The problem with trying to emulate magical beings in folklore was that none of them were the kind of people she wanted to be. Most of the witches the stories were about talked about them cursing people or brewing up poisons or doing something else horrible. They were the cause of everything bad that happened, and when they were killed life for everybody else went back to normal. That seemed to be the moral behind them all: kill the witch as quick as possible, or else things would go from bad to worse.

Not that human witches were the most dangerous things in folk tales. That would be ignoring the vampires and evil spirits and massive beasts that grand heroes had to do battle with. And the less said about the absolutely terrifying fairies in Ireland, the better. She had quickly resolved never to go there, even if the Troubles did calm down.

Once she had decided that the vast majority of the nonfiction section was worthless to her, she moved her attention to fiction. Hazel smiled at that thought. Normally anybody looking for advice in fantasy books would rightfully be laughed at, but what she as looking for there was different. She was not looking for hints on the 'hows' of magic. It was obvious she would have to come up with that on her own. She wanted ideas for the 'whats'.

If she was stuck experimenting to learn anything useful about magic, she might as well have ideas to work with. She could and would come up with her own, but there was no reason not to start with a list ready-made.

She would have been even happier with that plan if fiction had been more help, but sadly it was not. In order to get as many ideas as she could, she had been skimming more than sitting down and really reading, so it was possible she had missed something, but from what she saw witches and wizards generally fell into the same categories as they did in folklore. Either they were the villains who had to be defeated before they could destroy the world, or they were the old men and women who gave a trinket to the sword-swinging hero that would help him on his quest. No mention of how they did what they did, and the few times wizards did go on adventures, they always vanished halfway through only to pop up again at the end of the book.

Maybe it was because so many wizards in stories were based off the wizards in fairy tales? That would explain the consistency.

Licking the tin and the spoon clean, she tossed the can in the air a few times as she pondered her situation. There had to be a reason the folk tales focused on the items, and she did not think it was a lack of imagination. Could it be that the toys themselves were the real power at hand? She would be the first to admit that she knew almost nothing about magic. She could teleport, and with effort she could lock and unlock doors, but that was it. Could the reason so many magicians had magic items on hand be that there was only so much she could do with her willpower alone, so witches of yore would make these things to do more than they could by themselves?

It would explain why the stories always showed the wizard having the right tool for the job. They were already using those tools in their own lives, so when the boy hero of destiny came to them for help defeating whatever evil was threatening the land, their own trinkets were the only help they could realistically give. Thinking it through a second time, she nodded. That made far more sense than wizards being terrible packrats who just collected a bunch of junk.

It also meant she was stuck in a bad spot. She hated arts and crafts. She had never shown any natural talent for the arts, and she had heard that same opinion for too many years from too many teachers whenever they were given some artsy project for homework. Unlike the other kids in her class, she had no parent who would help her or do the entire thing for her like Theresa's mom always did. Aunt Petunia would not deign to do that, and Dudley had taken so much pleasure out of ruining the first project she was ever assigned that from then on she had to work on her homework late at night when the other Dursleys were asleep. Working on drawings with glue and glitter in almost complete darkness was not conducive to marvelous works of art.

Hazel shook her head and put those concerns to the side. If she had to make stuff to use her magic the most effectively, she would deal with it later. Right now she still had things she wanted to try out. Setting the empty tin onto the table, she returned briefly to the boiler room. When she came out her hands were empty of the spoon but now held three paperback novels.

Of all the books in the library, these were the ones that were the most interesting. While most of the books she had found depicted wizards as allies and sidekicks, these had wizards as the main characters, albeit in space and dealing with aliens and laser guns. Because the wizards were the most important people, the books actually went into a little bit of detail about how they supposedly used their spells. The space wizards seemed relatively limited in her opinion – none of them could teleport, for instance, and while they could sense emotions to some degree they could not hear thoughts like she could – they did have a couple of tricks that looked useful. Clouding people's minds was a skill she could see applying to way too many problems.

But that was something to play with later. Tonight, she had two other things she wanted to try.

She closed her eyes and took a big breath, then let it out. One of the key features of the space wizards' magic was that they did not run it off their emotions. They actually claimed that using anger and fear was the road that led other magic users to become evil villains like in the other stories. Instead they were all about peace and calm, using something called meditation to 'calm their minds'.

A dictionary, an encyclopedia, and then a couple of random self-help books had told her what meditation actually was, and from there she had her next test. She could all too easily remember how many times she failed at her teleporting because she was not angry at the right thing. If she could be calm but still be in the right frame of mind to use her magic, that would make everything that much easier. Getting a spell right one time out of three or four was not a sign of a talented magician!

More deep breaths came and went, and with each one she tried not to think about anything at all. It was far from simple, but the self-help books had all said that she did not need to have a completely blank mind. She just needed not to dwell on any of her thoughts. If they poked in, she let them flit away again and focused on the calm feeling she wanted.

This was the second night she had attempted this method. The night prior, she had not quite gotten it down by the time the sun was cresting the horizon, but she felt like she was close. Now it was a new night, and she wanted to get this right!

Three times she had to hop off the table to go to the lavatory or drink a glass of water, and another time she made herself a peanut butter sandwich, but late in the night she could feel her mind relax. It was almost like she was drifting off into sleep, but she knew she was still fully awake. Instead nothing could bother her. Not here.

Opening her eyes, she looked at the tin that was still sitting on the table. Move, she ordered.

The tin just sat there.

A moment of frustration threatened to bubble up, but in this calm place it was easy to prick it and let it disperse into nothing. Go away. Back up. Up?

Still the can did nothing, and she tilted her head and looked for a different way to get what she wanted. When she teleported, she had to think about where she wanted to go and how much she wanted to be there. The few times she had tried locking and unlocking a door, she imagined a key turning in the keyhole. The second option, the key, felt right to her. Maybe she could imagine something lifting the tin instead of the tin just floating up into the air all by itself.

That thought triggered another, and she hopped off the table to go back to one of the bookcases. In her search for answers, she had found a book that did not tell a story but instead was a rulebook for some complicated board game. It talked about different characters the players could be, and some of them had magic spells, including a spell to move things. Sure enough, as soon as she flipped to the pages about the wizard character, she saw the description for a hand that would move around and touch things.

That might just work.

Back to the table she went, and she closed her eyes and focused. This time she was not thinking about nothing. One of the same books that taught meditation mentioned being mindful about the movements of her body. To create a magic hand, she needed to know how her own hand felt.

She had no way of knowing how long she sat there, curling her fingers first one by one, then two in tandem, then three. Closing her fist before opening it up again. The skin on her palm and the back of her hand stretching and curling as the bones and muscles she imagined she could feel shifted with every movement. Her fingers wiggled, sending a rippling sensation from the pinky side of her palm to the thumb side.

Hazel's eyes opened, and she closed her hand one finger at a time before opening them all at once and imagining what she wanted.

A single pinprick of light appeared above the can, and it unfurled like a flower in the spring. A flower that glowed a pale blue and had only five petals, four on one side and the last off at an angle. The petals thickened and became round, and then the new fingers relaxed.

She clicked the torch off, but the light from the ghostly hand shed no light onto the stacks. It just sat there, the only thing in her sight until she turned the torch back on with a nod of acknowledgement. It was not there for real. It was a picture in her mind, just like the key that would unlock doors. That would be fine so long as it did what she needed it for.

She crooked her index finger in an almost 'come here' gesture, and the index finger on the ghost hand did the same. A small smile came to her. That made things easier. The hand moved with her own, dropping faster than her fleshy hand, until it was only a couple of centimeters above the can. Her fingers closed as if she was holding something, her hand lifted back up...

...and the ghost hand rose up with the can firmly in its grasp.

Another gesture, and the ghost hand tossed the tin into the air and caught it as it came back down. Dropping the can so she could take it to the rubbish bin, she let the hand in her mind disappear in a puff of shimmering smoke and her smile grew into a grin and a silent laugh bubbled up in her chest. So what if she had to use a workaround? She could now move things with her mind!

That was enough success for tonight. She had found a few books she wanted to read for fun, and she was going to do that until she went to bed. Tomorrow she could start with the last thing she needed to say goodbye to Greater Whinging.

Her sleep that night was deeper than she had intended, and when her eyes finally opened she cracked the boiler door open to take a look out she could see that it was late in the afternoon, though there were still plenty of people in the library. Unlike every day prior, this time she actually wanted to have people around. There was no way to know if what she was about to do would work if no people were around to try it out on.

She knew her clothes were not pretty or nice, and especially not when she needed to wash them in the sink because she only brought a few sets. If she wanted to visit other libraries, she would need some spell that would keep anybody from paying attention to her and throwing her out like the librarian here had the first day she arrived. That way she could go in and out and do whatever she liked, and no one would care!

Hazel scoffed to herself as that thought fully sank in. Back in Little Whinging, she had been ignored whether she wanted to be or not, and now she had to make people leave her alone. That was just typical of her luck.

Oh well. It was what it was. If nothing else, she had plenty of experience being ignored.

More than a little thought had been put into this idea, and the success in creating a magic hand the previous night had bolstered her confidence. She could do this. She closed the door and then her eyes. Her breathing slowed, and with not effort but intent she pushed her anticipation away. She had to get this right. She was going to get this right.

Once she found her mind in that same calm state as she had before, she slowly and carefully called up memories of when she was ignored. One by one she looked at them, ignoring the frustration and anger and sadness that came with being overlooked and instead focusing on that nebulous feeling of being completely alone despite all the people who were around her. Like being in her own little world, she passed through crowds without eyes doing more than flick towards her for a moment before moving on.

Her chest hurt from the feeling of being so bloody isolated and alone, and tears stung her eyes. Opening them up, she released all those feelings with a great exhale and a tiny silent sob.

What emerged from her lips was not air. A cloud of smoke came out, and she watched it wrap around her like a blanket that tried and failed to offer the slightest bit of comfort. She reached out a finger to try stroking it nonetheless, and just like she had the crowd, her finger slipped through the smoke without the faintest hint of resistance.

She dashed the tears from her face and shook her head. It was a picture in her mind, like the hand she made, and that was all it could ever be. Right now, it was time she got a move on. Slinging her backpack over her shoulders, she opened the boiler room door and stepped out to walk around other people for the first time in a week.

When the first person, a harried-looking woman trying to corral a trio of little kids, looked her way, Hazel could almost feel her heart skip a couple of beats in sudden worry. Her flash of fear settled back down when the woman's eyes skipped over her and she went back to the kids. A grin appeared on her lips as she walked away from the family. Here she was, wearing ratty old clothes and dirty socks, but despite all that the woman did not see anything wrong with her at all.

She was the most uninteresting thing anyone had ever seen, and she was going to take advantage of that for everything it was worth!

Hazel all but skipped the rest of the way to the front door, and a glance behind her showed that the same librarian who had chased her outside the first day she was here was once more sitting at the desk. The older woman could not see her, but Hazel nonetheless stuck out her tongue and waggled her hands on either side of her head.

Her good mood carried her as far as the door, but as soon as she opened it a gust of wind hit her and drove her back inside with a shiver. The snow on the ground had mostly melted, but it felt like it was colder now than it had been on the night she arrived! She looked down at her clothing with a mental groan. There was no way this would do her any good whatsoever to protect her from the winter winds. If it was this cold already, she could only imagine how much worse it would be tonight.

But I can't exactly stay here, either, she thought, hiking her backpack up again and feeling the lack of weight. I don't have a whole lot left in the way of food, so I need to get some of that, too.

Guess I'm headed for the Tesco.

Bracing herself this time, she opened the door and pushed herself into the terrible winds. She eventually found the main street, and from there it was relatively easy to find the familiar blue and red logo of the supermarket. This would be her one-stop shopping destination. It would have everything she needed, and more importantly she was already here and could get out of the cold.

Her concentration on her 'ignore me' spell broke on the way to the store, and when she got there she ducked around the back and huddled up beside a dumpster so she would have protection from the wind if nothing else. Out here in the cold, it was far harder to try to fall into meditation, but her desperation appeared to worked just as well as anger or fear. A stream of smoke came from her lips and wrapped around her, at least, and that was all that really mattered.

Freshly ignorable, she hurried into the store and sighed in relief at the warmth within. Clothes first, she decided. The food she could get after.

Nobody else was visible in the clothing section, but she still moved quickly to grab several pairs of jeans in a couple of sizes, just as many shirts, and a new jumper. The shoe racks were between her and the changing room, so that was a quick stop to grab a pair of trainers as well. Dashing into the changing rooms, she shut the door, locked it, and slumped against the wall. Even knowing she was effectively invisible, there was still an element of panic. She had not felt it when she was in the library, probably because she was already leaving, but getting thrown out of the store before she had everything she came here for would be a disaster.

A bit of trial and error was all it took to figure out which size of clothing she really fit into, even if the fact that the clothes were still loose on her was a bit disappointing. She knew she was smaller than everyone else in her class and that all Dudley's clothes were several sizes too big, but she did not think it was this bad. Now clad in her new outfit and looking like a real girl, she pulled the tags off the clothes and took a look at the prices listed with sinking feeling in her stomach.

She pulled out her notebook to run the sums, then she pulled out the wad of notes she had taken from Aunt Petunia's purse and counted them out. Even if she stuck only to a single outfit plus the trainers, she did not have enough, and that was not counting the coat and gloves she would need as well. Nor the food, which she absolutely could not do without.

Now she wished she had grabbed more money before she left. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon owed her warm clothes that actually fit, at the very least, not that they would have ever spent that money on her.

The thought had been one that came from a fit of pique, but the more she thought about it the more it made sense. How they treated her her entire life was the reason she had to run away in the first place. If they had been willing to give her even a fraction of the love and care they showered on Dudley, she would have been perfectly happy staying with them.

They didn't want to spend money on me? She tore a sheet of paper out of her book and angrily scribbled out a note for whoever found the pile of clothes she was leaving behind. Fine. They can make up for it now.

Please contact Vernon Dursley for payment for the clothes.
His address is Number 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey.

Looking at the note again, she added the phone number for the house, and a moment later added, "And the food I'm taking, too." That should cover everything she needed.

Her aunt and uncle would be furious when they heard about this, but right now she did not care. They did not want her in their home? Fine.

The least they could do was cover her expenses now that she was out of their lives forever.

Far to the north, in a place Hazel never could have imagined, stood a squat castle that had been a school of magic for near a thousand years. It was a place of wonder and danger, of beauty and dark deeds. The room at the peak of one of the shorter towers of this castle was the location of the office of the headmaster for this school, a room with squishy furniture, portraits that moved of their own accord in their gilded frames, and a wide number of knickknacks that served functions entirely mysterious to anyone except the headmaster himself.

Right now, in that room, one of those gadgets came to life for the first time in eight years. It spun like a top upon its shelf and let out a shrill whistle loud enough to wake the dead from their graves.

The previous headmasters in their frames slapped hands over their ears and screamed at each other as if one of them was responsible for the ear-rending sound. The current headmaster, the one who had set this device to monitor the status of a very specific ward and alert him if anything happened to it, would have been eager to know that his alarm was going off. Unfortunately for him, he was currently off on the Continent in the middle of a meeting of the International Confederation of Wizards, just one of the many roles he bore. For two days he had been gone, and he was not to return for another five. His phoenix, having just undergone a burning day, was sitting in his pocket in the form of a chick.

For a solid minute the device shrieked and squealed, until finally it went quiet once again. The portraits slowly uncovered their ears and sighed at the return of blessed silence, and they went back to whatever they had been doing before the onset of the noise. Sleeping, for the most part.

Portraits, it must be said, did not have the best recollection. They could remember what they knew when the memories used in their creation were added to the paint, and if bound to a specific task, they could recall what was needed to complete it. Otherwise, the goings-on of the living humans around them tended to stick in their minds for only a few hours at a time before being lost. When the headmaster of this school returned, none of the portraits would recall the alarm going off at all.

How unfortunate.

Hazel set the note down next to her clothes, and as she did she could almost feel her heart becoming lighter in her chest. It felt good, in some way, to make this break with the Dursleys. They did not want her back, and she had no intention of ever seeing them again. She was free.

Free was not the same as prepared, of course, and she popped out of the dressing room to grab a thick puffy pink coat, gloves, scarf, and several changes of socks and underwear. The tags and bags for all of these were added to all the other things she was leaving behind, and she wrapped herself in the smoke that made her unnoticeable. Her next stop was the food section; despite the three changes of clothes in her bag, she still had plenty of room for more cans and loaves of sliced bread. Batteries were next, to provide electricity to the torch she was borrowing long-term from the library.

With that, she strolled out the door of the store with no one the wiser.

The wind was still freezing cold, but bundled up as she was she could barely feel it. Instead she struck out towards the setting sun until she found a set of railroad tracks and shifted course, following the iron road as she pulled a map from her backpack. Once unfolded it revealed several dots marked on it in blue ink, the nearest of which was just two counties over.

Her time spent in the library had not been solely for skimming through fantasy books, and despite what she had found she could not entirely give up on the idea of finding some kind of teacher to help her discover everything she could do. A quick search through a few travel guides had given her a list of several sites that were supposed to be magical in some way or another. If anybody was left who could teach her, these would be the best places to look.

First on her list was of course the most classic site, one she was sure was known the world over.

It was time to visit Stonehenge.

Telekinesis is a fun trick, and one I would dearly love in real life. Some of you might have noticed that the way Hazel is using it is very different from the almost-effortless skill Jen had. Different mental frameworks will change how people look at the world, and this seems fun to try out in a story format. Canon witches have one framework, which influences their assumptions and creates the limitations they work under; Hazel will have a different framework, but one that comes with its own limits in what she can do and how.

Silently Watches out.