Summary: With his life turned into a Game, Harry now has to raise a Phoenix, uncover the Founders' darkest secrets, deal with political manipulations and live through Hogwarts all while trying desperately to not swear too much.
Link: https://m.fanfiction.net/s/11950816/1/
Word count:363k
Chapters:45
Book 1: Press Start
Prologue:
Harry Potter was a brilliant runner. For all the running he did, he had to be.
Sometimes he would run from things like his Uncle and Aunt...their reprimands...their resentment...even their anger. Other times, he'd run from his freakishness, for whatever Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia said about him being a completely normal delinquent, the freakishness was always there, haunting him like creeping wisps of mist under his skin. Sometimes, it showed...sometimes turning someone's wig blue and sometimes closing a cut on Harry's hands in mere seconds. And even other times he'd run from the dreams that haunted his nights, bringing out flashes of memories of a red-haired woman and a sickly green light filling his vision. He'd throw his best shield up against all those problems; sarcasm, anger, dry wit; trying to slow them down.
And he'd run.
Harry Potter was a brilliant runner after all.
"C'mere Potter!"
Right now, he was getting in his fair share of practice running from his overstuffed pumpkin of a cousin Dudley 'Duddykins' Dursley, a rather obese boy who looked like he could drape his many flaps of stomach fat over his hips and never need to wear any pants again. Well, one could call it running, but it was more of a slow jogging, or perhaps even a lazy ambling. Considering the massive bulk that Dudley sported, the youngest of the Dursleys would have trouble outrunning a dead snail. Harry grinned at Dudley, taunting him, and took off running towards the park in the Surrey area.
It was there that he was caught in an ambush. Dudley's friend and Harry's co-tormentor Piers Polkiss was waiting for his victim near the park gates!
Harry, instead of panicking, dashed right towards Piers. Swiftly dodging the punch Piers threw at him, he rushed into the park and started running in earnest. If Dudley had brought Piers, then the rest of his gang would be nearby. And while Harry was fast, he wasn't fast enough to escape an all-out ambush by the entire Duddikins Army.
Sure enough, all but a few moments later, Malcolm, Redgie and the rest of the gang had him surrounded. Dudley jogged over to his caged prey, panting heavily.
"We...we got you now...Potter!" Dudley said in between heaving breaths.
They cracked their knuckles and prepared to pummel Harry with punches when suddenly, a familiar voice cracked across the near-empty playground.
"WHAT is going ON here?!"
Harry turned towards the direction of the voice and groaned when he recognized the source.
It was their Chemistry teacher, Ms. Roemmele. The tall and rather strict looking teacher was a master of reprimanding and punishing students, yet while in class, she spoke with a voice so devoid of enthusiasm that to Harry it seemed as if she had given up on life and like most teachers in the day's economy, was hoping for a quick and painless death. She would have been sad to look at, had she not been so utterly terrifying.
"MISTER Dudley Dursley!" she snapped, and the little knot in Harry's stomach uncoiled a little. The she-devil wasn't here for him. Slowly, he shuffled along towards the nearest cover, a swing set, hoping to hide out the storm and leave unharmed.
"I come to your home for a teacher's visit," Ms. Roemmele continued, "Only to find that not only did you not inform your parents about my coming, but also that you're fooling around and hassling people in parks! And you Mr. Polkiss! Rest assured your parents will be getting a visit from me about this. The rest of you can count yourself in for that as well! Now scram!"
They all stood frozen on their spots.
"SCRAM!"
The entire gang disappeared from the park in seconds, running as fast as they could.
With the rest of her targets gone, she turned to look at Harry, who was slowly trying to get away unnoticed. "And you! Mr Potter! Come here!"
Harry sighed. His desperate attempt at what he assumed was a sideways moonwalk was all in vain. He sighed, before he walked over to her, "Ah...yes ma'am"
"Come," she said, surprising Harry with her quiet tone, "I will drop you off at your house."
A bit wary of what was to come, since teachers taking special notice of Harry had never quite ended well, he started walking towards Number 4 Privet Drive with the strict teacher walking by his side. Through the corner of his eyes, he caught her staring at his forehead. Harry's hand went up automatically and self-consciously brushed against his scar. Ms. Roemmele seemed to catch herself and looked away.
Perhaps she was wondering how he got such an oddly specific lightning bolt shaped scar, Harry thought.
"Have you prepared for the test on the historical and archaeological evidence of the origin of modern chemistry?" she asked after walking in silence for about five minutes.
"Er...no ma'am." he truthfully replied. He rarely studied for any test these days, since the Dursleys had a tendency to get pissy any time he outscored Dudley.
She set him with a piercing look. "I expect better of you Mr. Potter. Haven't you understood how important these so-called 'history lessons,' as your classmates have taken to calling them, are to your future education."
Harry shrugged, "I'm sorry Ms. Roemmele, but weren't we supposed to do the periodic table, last class? It's going to be in the finals and if I don't score well then Aunt Petunia won't be very happy about it."
Ms. Roemmele shook her head, and keeping her gaze on the street in front of her, spoke, "Exams aren't everything Mr. Potter. History teaches us many things. Roman paintings discovered in the 1600s tell us that people then believed in dragons and somehow had knowledge of reptilian biology that the Western World hadn't discovered till the late 1900s. People who believed in Alchemy, like the French Nicholas Flamel inspired most of the modern nuclear chemistry we see today in our lives. That is why we need to learn about these stories Mr. Potter-to understand where we come from, and what stories influenced the great people who built our world."
Harry stayed quiet, but it was fairly obvious to anyone watching that he wasn't so sure about that.
"But Ms. Roemmele," Harry said, gaining a little bit of confidence in his voice, "these are just stories. Fairy tales..."
"Don't be too sure Mr. Potter."
At that very moment, two entities, one male and one female entirely undetectable to the world around them, were idly following the student-teacher duo.
Just as Ms. Roemmele finished her ominous warning, the man clicked his fingers, and the world around them slowed down to a standstill. The birds froze mid-flight, and the leaves falling from the trees stilled in mid-air. Time itself crawled to a stop, holding everyone but the two mysterious entities completely frozen. The two entities made their way over to the boy frozen beside his teacher. The man looked him over curiously.
"He doesn't look as bad as we had thought he would," he commented. The woman flicked her hand. Various parts of the boy's body lit up yellow in their vision.
"Dozens of broken bones, damaged nerves, excessive blunt force trauma, lack of appropriate nutrition...looks can be deceiving"
"Indeed" the man muttered, retracting his previous statement. He gave another flick and the yellow light vanished, replaced by a pulsating blue aura around the boy's head. The man closed his eyes as he cocked his head to the right as if listening to what the pulsating light had to say to him, before with a wave of his hand, he made the light disappear.
"I sensed various issues in the mental structure in his mind...he's incredibly close to breaking," the man said quietly.
"He has the enormous weight of his destiny to uphold. And those broken shoulders will not be able to carry them." the woman stated with absolute certainty.
"Then fix them," the man said fiercely, "Fix him."
"We are not to interfere in the activities of wizardkind anymore," the woman warned, "You know the rules."
"We made the rules," the man insisted.
"Which is why we cannot break them! The others will not take well to hypocrisy."
"The others will not take well to utter and complete annihilation either," the man angrily snapped, "It's either this or doing nothing"
The woman seemed to have wanted to debate the point even more but held herself. Instead, she said, "We will have to fix his mind. His mind is his greatest tool, but its broken, and on the brink of falling off the edge."
"His guardians fear him. And that mindless fear of those who they believe to be better than them gives rise to hatred. Blinded by that hatred, they do this to him. Coupled with what happened to him on the night he was orphaned...well...I'm not surprised that his mind is in the condition that it is." noted the man somberly.
"We will need something to hold it together and keep it from breaking"
"Easily done," the man snapped his fingers, and Harry's head was enveloped in a luminescent red membrane, which then sunk into his brain.
"You should not have done that," the woman admonished disapprovingly, "That ability is dangerous. Even we won't be able to control his mind now and someone with magic that powerful being out of our control will not sit well with the others"
"The boy needed it. It'll keep the dangerous memories away and hold his psyche together. The others won't know about this. And there are ways to control a man other than to control his mind"
"Oh really? So enlighten me," the woman snapped, waving her hand, trying to undo whatever the man had done, and failing.
"Addiction."
The woman froze, "Keep talking."
"We give the boy power, and then we get him addicted to that power. So deeply and inherently addicted that he would be willing to give his own life to not lose his power. That, not some primitive carrot and stick method that the others will suggest is what will ensure his loyalty."
"So your solution to keeping a powerful being under control is to...give it more power? Hand him an even more powerful weapon? Genius really." the woman mocked.
"No. Not a weapon." said the man, "Something more. Something that will be all-consuming. Something that will alter his very perception of the reality around him."
"So what you are thinking of..."
"Indeed." the man answered the unasked question, before raising his hand, which was now holding a glowing orb fully composed of a gently pulsating fractal light.
The woman hesitated for a second before she nodded, and the orb of light lifted from the man's hand, just as invisible to the world around it as the entities that summoned it, spinning and bathing its surroundings in a gentle rhythmic purple as it slowly descended down into Harry, permanently altering his true nature beyond anything that mankind or wizardkind could ever even comprehend.
Within the blink of an eye, the two entities vanished from their spots, and time resumed its normal flow.
Harry's head suddenly spiked with a sudden burst of unimaginable pain, and his knees almost buckled under him. But before he could even get his hand up to his head, the pain disappeared just as instantaneously as it had come.
Frowning, Harry massaged his head, wondering what in the world that pain was.
"Is there anything wrong Mr. Potter?" Ms. Roemmele asked, noticing his frown.
"Erm...No, ma'am. I'm fine," he replied.
And so they went off to Number 4, where Ms. Roemmele gave Harry a generic speech about bullying and adults and responsibility that went into Harry's one ear and flew right out of the other before she turned around and walked off to who knows where. After staring at his teacher's steadily disappearing back for a few more seconds, Harry had headed into Number 4 to no doubt face his Aunt's reprimands, completely oblivious to what he had become.
The rest of the day passed in a whirlwind of chores and 'BOY!'s, and by the time he had finished up all his chores and was putting away all the silverware that the Dursleys for some reason insisted on eating with, Harry was more tired than he had ever been after a regular day of work. So he stole a few slices of bread from the fridge and devoured one of them before he jumped onto the half broken cot in his cupboard and fell straight asleep. As he drifted into the realm of sleep, a ringing bell rang in his ears, but he was too far gone to wake up and see what it was.
The next day, after an unusually peaceful night of sleep, Harry blearily opened his eyes and stretched his arms as well as he could in the very limited space that he had. Feeling very refreshed, Harry yawned, before he suddenly caught sight of what was in front of him.
He blinked.
And he blinked again.
A translucent blue box hovered about a foot away from his head. There was some text in it.
You have slept in your own bed, HP and MP have been restored 100% each. All ailments and negative status effects have been cured.
Harry blearily looked at the glowing screen before he reached out to touch it, and the box disappeared instantly.
Had that actually happened?
No.
No. It couldn't have.
It was probably the light from the cracks of the air vent of the cupboard or something. He didn't have his glasses on, so he must have imagined it or something like that. Maybe it was just his head telling him to stop staring at Dudley playing video games. He'd have to make sure not to mention this in front of his Uncle or Aunt, lest they finally get an excuse to dump him at some electro-shock-happy mental hospital.
Shaking his head, Harry absentmindedly moved to get off the bed and like the truly graceful little beast he was, slammed his head right into the low roof of the cupboard in the process.
"Ping!" he clearly heard, and this time, he clearly knew that it was definitely not his imagination. He had definitely heard that. He rubbed his eyes and put on his glasses, before he stared disbelievingly at what was floating in the air in front of him.
Skill created!
Skill: Physical Endurance, Lv-1 (5%)
Your Body's durability increased and you take less damage.
3% less damage from physical attacks.
The text was immune to relative displacement, Harry concluded, as he moved his head about and saw the text remain unmoving in relation to his head. That it was intangible was something he discovered the moment he tried to touch it, only to see his hand go through the screen, leaving nothing but some barely visible ripples.
'What in the-?' Harry thought to himself, thoroughly puzzled out of his mind.
His mind sifted through ideas and discarded them at an incredible rate, and he found no possible explanation to how in the world could any of this crazy stuff be happening. Whatever it was, it looked real, felt real, and was very much like a game screen he'd seen in one of Dudley's old game-sets.
Harry took a deep breath and let it out, calming himself.
'Think about this logically, Harry' he told himself, 'If this is a game, there would be commands. And if there were commands, then there would be some sort of way to enter those commands.'
He didn't have some keyboard or controller to input those commands, and touch seemed to do nothing but move it around, so it had to be something else. Write it on the ground? Make weird hand motions? Voice control?
Deciding to try out the least crazy one of his hypothetical theories, he then opened his eyes and with all his determination, intoned, "Main Menu!"
Nothing.
"Character Sheet"
Nothing.
"Status."
Suddenly, a box appeared before him, and it read,
Harry Potter
Health-100/100
Mana-50/50
The Gamer
Title-None
Level-2 Exp-30/400
Race-?
STR-2
VIT-1(+2)=3
DEX-2(+2)=4
INT-1
WIS-1
LUC-3
POINTS-0
MONEY- 0£/0G0S0K
Harry Potter is a ?, the son of Lily Potter and ?. He has bad eyesight making it difficult for him to do well in class. His ? has gotten him trouble over the years in various schools. Strange things seem to happen around him. Harry is unaware of who he is, and wishes to find meaning in his life. Harry hates the Dursleys.
Status- ? giving Harry - +2 VIT, +2 DEX and the ability to?
Harry stared at the floating screen for another split second, before whatever strange little cocktail of curiosity and willpower that was holding him together in this strange and lucid dream snapped, and the green-eyed boy fell back down into his cot fully unconscious.
Link: https://m.fanfiction.net/s/11950816/1/