DISCLAIMER: 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 $$$

A/N: This story, like it's predecessor, is rated T. I hope to keep it that way. If I upgrade, I hope it will be for violence (see last chappies of last bit for WHY) or language, although only the violence may be really necessary and even C.S. Lewis could get a little dark and graphic (Tolkien as well). I use them and a few others as guides. No R rated or worse stuff, safely teen. A little R on rare, rare occasions - and then only violence - safe.

"Adult Language and Content" … okay, I get the "Content" bit, but Language? I could cuss like a sailor when I was six! (Wasn't one until about twelve or so years later.) Didn't learn it from parents but from classmates and the writing on the walls in the bathroom at school… Also had no idea what those words meant until sometime later. Just knew they were naughty and sounded cool. And you were supposedly to use them when you stubbed your toe or something. OW! *******! ******! *******! (However, that is not plot forwarding so… No ****'s that I can foresee. Okay, maybe an occasional "damn!" - or "Bloody" which is totally inoffensive here, but our cousins across the Pond say is right up there with *****!")

This story is the continuation of "30 Minutes That Changed Everything." It begins a few days after the last one ended. It is now August 1991 and our main characters are about to go to Hogwarts. The story should cover the period at least up to the outbreak of War (1995 at the earliest).

For those of you who have not read the first story, I will try to write this so that you are not totally lost. However, there are a lot of details from that story and arcs that will continue and will not be explained in nearly as much detail. For that, I apologize in advance.

For those who have followed along, this first chapter is a quickie summary of the 54 (½) Chapters and 370,000+ words of Book I, but does have more of Sensei's back story and his point of view as to what happened. I know I suggested Diagon Alley would be next, sorry. It's next to next. No, not EVERYTHING is in here. (Otherwise, Chapter I would be at LEAST 50,000+ words and I'd leave myself with nothing to play with…)

30 MINUTES II: THE GATHERING STORM

CHAPTER ONE: THE AVATAR

SUNDAY, AUGUST 4th, 1991 – POTTER HOUSE, LONDON, U.K.

He was born Harry James Potter on July 31st, 1981. However, now barely eleven years later, he was known by another name. Sensei's real age was hard to truly fathom even for him. Sensei was at least 172 years old, for he had seen at least that many "winters" or seasonal cycles. But the reality was that through manipulations in time, he was much, much older and had given up trying to figure out just how old he was long ago. Or at least that is what he remembered.

Sensei was not a physical being, although he clearly remembered being one once. He always found that intriguing. In reality, he had come into existence about 164 years from the present. His real experiences, the ones he could attribute to himself and not the memories of another, were only of the last three years or so. His first truly independent recollections were of his creation or activation a mere minutes before he was transferred from his original time to the first Saturday in May of 1988.

Sensei was an avatar. It was a word from the ancient Sanskrit that meant a being sent from another plane of existence to help or guide those in this one. In the West, the most analogous term might be an angel, but as that term was also associated with a divine deity, it did not truly apply to him. God did not create Sensei, Harry Potter did. Or at least a Harry Potter did, a Harry Potter that Sensei knew no longer existed.

Sensei's "being" was not human. To the few who could interact with him, he seemed human, looked human and probably acted human. However, there was nothing physical about him. A person could pass right through him without knowing he was even there. He could not pick up so much as a single grain of sand. Sensei was a purely magical entity. His Creator – the other Harry Potter – described him as an amalgam of coherent magical energy designed to be stable and capable of projecting an image into the physical world. He was a hologram, an interactive pensieve, a compilation of data and memories, a magical binary representation and coalescence of the lifetime of knowledge, memories and experiences of his Creator. He could also be described as a "cheat." Not in the sense that he was a cheater, rather that he was created to cheat the laws of physics, time and magic. He was created for time travel, and not just for time travel, but to change time itself.

The other Harry Potter was acutely aware of the dangers associated with time travel. Any alteration in the past course of events could have absolutely unpredictable and potentially disastrous consequences. Even in his time now some 157 years into the future, time travel was still only truly possible through magic, at least on the scale that was attempted. There was reason to believe that with enough energy, a subatomic particle might be sent backwards or forwards in time, maybe something a little larger. But to send something as massive as a human being required far more energy than was reasonably prudent or available. Wizards had learned how to manipulate time with magic some time ago. But even then, consequences aside, there were limitations.

The most common time manipulations were spells or magical fields that altered the forward progression of time. Sensei knew these quite well as both the other Harry Potter and the current Harry Potter had experienced that form of magic. Those fields would either slow the progression of time within them or speed them up. Time Compression sped up time inside the field so that someone within the field would experience days or weeks or more while real time advanced only hours. A modified form allowed one the advantages of extra time without incurring the cost – namely they would age at the normal time rate. This time buffer, however, only worked upon a person who was magically stable. Pregnant women and very young children were not stable, insofar as the buffer was concerned and would age at the accelerated rate until they became stable. (In the case of pregnant women, it was the unborn, unstable child that created the instability.) But, for a child over the age of five or six, they would not mature magically or physically at such an accelerated rate.

Travelling back in time was another matter. Some wizard had invented something called a time turner. Everyone knew it worked, but no one had really figured out how. The device was worn by the time traveler and could send him or her back hours, days, even a few weeks. But it could not send someone back decades or even centuries, which was the other Harry's conundrum. The events he wanted to change had happened at least a hundred years ago to him when he made the first attempts at changing them. He had invented something that could send a person back that far, at least on paper. He had sent two people back, and nothing happened. He never learned why. It was possible they were killed by the process or their memories erased. It was also possible they exercised their free will and did not do what they were sent back to do. There was no way to know for certain.

Sensei could only guess as to what happened, but he was fairly sure his guess was close to the truth. The other Harry had sent two very young assistants back, one after the other had clearly failed. Each knew what they were supposed to do and the consequences if they did it right. The world they knew would no longer exist. For them, the target date was long before they were born. If they succeeded, the events that led to the invention of the magical machine that sent them back would never occur, hence the machine would never be invented and they would never be sent back in time, thus they might no longer exist. They may also have known that the future they were sent to prevent might very well be the only one where their parents met. Thus to change that would mean they could never be born in the first place. Sensei believed that if they had in fact survived the time travel, each may have reached the conclusion that the safest thing to do was nothing.

The other Harry reached a similar conclusion. The other Harry knew that the best candidate for the mission was himself. He had lost so much over the years of the horrible timeline that he was not concerned with the consequences of changing it, even if he himself would never live to see the changes. The problem was, neither of his assistants could possibly continue his work without him, at least not for some time. He also did not see them as motivated as he was. The other Harry knew of a better time, they did not. They were born into a hell on earth. Harry was born before that hell had even begun and knew it did not have to be that way. He also knew why and when it had all begun to fall apart.

When the two assistants had been sent back, the world was a very different place than the one Sensei now inhabited. Sensei was now in London, and it was the thriving city of the late twentieth century, bustling along as it had for centuries and unaware that within about eighty years it would be wiped from the face of the earth in a hail of thermonuclear warheads along with every other major population center on the planet. When the two assistants were sent back, they very well may have represented two-thirds of the entire human race that was alive at that time. They lived with the other Harry Potter in a cave in a far and remote corner of the world. It was a laboratory, library, living facility, a home of sorts. It had many names. At that time it was called The Redoubt. The assistants both knew that once their vast food supply ran out, that was it. They both knew that if the complex air filtration system ever broke down beyond repair, the lethal radiation would claim them as well. Not even magic had found a cure for that. But it was the only world they knew which may well have affected their ability to alter it.

The assistants had been the second try. The other Harry would have conceded it was an act of desperation. He had tried something similar over thirty years earlier a couple of years before the second to last war in history. It too had failed. He had tried in part because his assistants asked and in part because his other plan – a magical avatar – seemed like it would never amount to more than an idea. The other Harry had not been the genius who thought up the avatar. That had been his best friend and arguably the one true love of his life. Practically from the day they first met – which in that timeline was a little less than a month away – they had been close. She had always been there for him, even when everyone else had turned their backs. Yet they had never truly been more than friends. She died in 2055.

They both saw that the world was spinning out of control and that mankind was moving in a direction that made self destruction inevitable. They both saw this years before it became a reality. She saw the reason. Events only a few years in the current future, seemingly of minor importance at the time, started a chain of events not unlike the lighting of a slow burning fuse: a fuse that at some point could not be extinguished. It was his idea to go back in time and stop it before it started. She knew all too well the dangers of time travel and to his surprise had agreed. Had it been solely to make their own lives better, and neither of their lives to that point had been what either would have wanted, she would never have agreed. But this was not about two lives, or even hundreds. This was about everything and that made it a worthwhile idea.

The other Harry was the one in the partnership who tended to think "outside of the box." His Hermione was the one who could turn a hair brained idea into a reality. She was the theoretical engine and organizational genius. The other Harry came up with the idea for the Redoubt, his Hermione made it a reality. The other Harry came up the with idea for the temporal displacement chamber – the device that could send a person back decades. His Hermione made it into a reality. Together they made a Redoubt to work on their time experiments and which could survive what they knew was coming. Even they, however, did not truly know the full extent of the looming holocaust.

Sensei remembered The Day just as the other Harry would have. He was working in the Redoubt on the initial stages of the Avatar Project. His Hermione had travelled to London to download who knows how many terabytes of data from the electronic archives and to check on a shipment due to be sent through magical means to their Redoubt that week. The other Harry always worried about her and had devised a magical communications device that allowed him to talk to her whenever and wherever she was in the world, as well as to check on her safety. Suddenly, his device went dead. The other Harry knew what that meant but not why. His Hermione was gone.

He left immediately to find her or find out what had happened. Using magic, he tried to travel to London but could not get through. He wound up over forty miles away in an open field. Before him, the massive mushroom cloud was climbing into the stratosphere, the funeral pyre for over two million lives including the one that meant everything to him. It was not the only one, but it was the only one that mattered to him.

He later found himself on a lonely moor far to the north, far from those horrible clouds of smoke and flame. It was a place he and his Hermione had spent in a tent years and years ago during another dark time, but a time where there had been at least a glimmer of hope. It had been a good place to think back then which might be why he found himself there.

He had no idea how long he sat there. To be honest, that Harry had come to that place to think of her and await the end. It was more than a day or two, but as to how much more, he had no idea. It was just after dawn one day when he saw them. Ghosts, he first thought, for whoever had attacked Britain to destroy its wizards had done a very thorough job. Two small figures approached at what seemed to be a slow pace. It seemed to take them forever to arrive.

It was a boy and a girl. They were maybe four years old. He asked them where their parents were and they said that people like them had no parents. He asked them who they lived with and they said their "Masters." He asked them their names and they said "Boy" and "Girl." They were clearly magical children; a young witch and wizard. He knew about how far things had gone wrong and suspected they were "servants-in-training" to some Muggles, no better than slaves, a fate that was not uncommon in those dark times. He asked them what happened and they said there was a bright light and terrible fire and wind and then they were under the sky. That Harry suspected it had been accidental magic that brought them from the gates of hell to somewhere on the moor. He could tell they were not brother and sister, but they had lived with each other in a closet for as long as they could remember.

Something happened. That Harry was not about to let those two children pass away. He would try to change things if only for their sakes. He gathered the two dirty, scared and hungry children to him and took them with him back to the Redoubt. He became their mother, father, teacher and friend. They, in time, became his assistants. Secure in the Redoubt, they survived the last war. The surviving Muggles had made powerful machines designed to make sure the prior wars would never happen again. The machines worked, although not as designed, for they wiped out what was left of mankind about ten years after The Day. So far as that Harry knew only he and the two children survived. The boy he named Neville and the girl he named Luna after two other friends who had died decades before in another senseless war. He could not bring himself to name the girl after his best friend.

It was Neville and Luna he sent back in time. Neville went first. The boy had been with that Harry for twenty-one years. He was sent back to July 1995 to a small town southwest of London. When the past clearly had not changed, Luna went back. Sensei thought about those two and wondered just how far gone that Harry was at the time. Then again, there was no real future for Neville and Luna in the Redoubt. While there was enough food to last the three of them more than a couple of lifetimes, they had already determined that the damage "up top" would mean it might be centuries before anything larger than a microbe could thrive outside the Redoubt. And yet they had gone back and the hell that was earth remained.

Sensei feared they might have met their end. So many things could have gone wrong. Any mistake could have been fatal. And even if the transport had not been a disaster, there were the magicals of that time – of this time – to consider. Time travel was illegal except without special permission. Time travel with the intent to alter the future was a capital offense. Had they been caught… But the other Harry and Sensei always believed they had made it back and somehow avoided that fate. They were a couple by then and Sensei believed they found each other in this past and made a life for themselves possibly in the hopes that the other Harry would be able to change the future by other means.

Maybe, Sensei thought, maybe one day he would see those two again.

Sensei was that other means. He was pure magic. As such he did not need air or food or anything else to sustain himself. The ambient magic all around did that. He knew everything the other Harry knew, which was far more than the assistants had known. He was also very non-human. The artificial intelligence the Muggles made to protect themselves and which ultimately destroyed them all was not that dissimilar to him, except he controlled no weapons. Like a computer, he was programmed and that programming suppressed human free will. The assistants had that for better or worse. He had it to an extent. But his free will was limited. His mission trumped any other considerations. It was his reason for being and without it he was irrelevant.

The other Harry and his Hermione had traced the mistakes back to a single point in the past. Neither of them were pleased with the result. Everything came down to the interactions of three people, all wizards.

One was named Tom Riddle. He was evil personified and was consumed with a megalomaniacal need to rule the world; a world he hated. The rest of mankind was to have no will except that which he dictated. While he preached of a ruling elite, in reality he wanted a world of slaves with one master – him. He was so obsessed with his vision, he had delved into the deepest and darkest magics he could find to make his dream a reality. It would not do for such a ruler to be a mere mortal. Thus he had learned the ancient and very dark magic known as the horcrux. This was an enchanted object into which the evil wizard placed a fragment of his soul. So long as the object was intact and the soul fragment so encases, the remainder of that wizard's soul was anchored to this world. The body could die. It could be destroyed, but the soul would remain unable to pass on and so long as it remained, its owner could be restored to some semblance of life. Voldemort had made six of these objects.

The other was named Albus Dumbledore. He had been the other Harry's mentor in that time, and that Harry believed he was the personification of good. While perhaps not truly evil, that wizard was not good either. Whether the man consciously thought it or not, he had behaved as if he and only he knew what was best for the magical world. Only Dumbledore's vision mattered, although Sensei seriously doubted whether the man truly had a vision aside from that of a static, peaceful and unchanging society. The people within such a society, however, were merely tools to be used and when necessary disposed of to achieve such ends. Perhaps the only thing Dumbledore had been right to believe was that Voldemort had to be destroyed.

The other Harry, and be extension Sensei, had learned a thing or two about philosophy and theology over the decades. One thing was certain. No version of God was ever as arrogant or as certain of his absolute right to control man as those two men. Perhaps the greatest mistake of fate in history was to allow two such men to live at the same time. And it came to pass that Dumbledore was not as all knowing and all wise and as correct in all things as he would have believed. His mistakes and oversights combined with Vodemort's determination to crush the world he hated led not to what either saw, rather it led directly to the end of all things.

In the middle of this madness was born a somewhat ordinary boy who would otherwise have stood out from others only because he was a wizard. True, he was ultimately more magically powerful than most, but not all powerful. Under other circumstances, he would probably have had a slightly more than ordinary life for a wizard, as he was smart and gifted that way, but otherwise would not have been what others made him out to be. A prophecy changed all of that. Like most all prophecies ever made, it meant nothing without context and no one could ever honestly know the true context, not even those who specialized in such things. Unfortunately for the boy, there were two men who believed in such folly and believed he was the key to everything.

The prophecy essentially presumed there would be a very powerful Dark Lord who would ultimately be defeated by a person born at a certain time to certain people. Voldemort presumed he was the Dark Lord in question. He had taken extraordinary measures to ensure he could never be defeated and never die and to learn that the fates said otherwise was a bit of a shock to say the least. Dumbledore knew the entire prophecy and believed that the person would have to die as well to see to it that the "Dark Lord" was removed from this world permanently. From the moment they each had learned of this prophecy, they each were looking for "The One" and both believed "The One" was one Harry Potter. Voldemort wanted the boy dead. Dumbledore wanted him to live if only to be molded into the ultimate weapon to destroy Voldemort. However, Dumbledore suspected Voldemort had made at least one horcrux and further suspected it was the boy. Thus, in the end the boy had to die if only to destroy the horcrux. Neither of them, obviously, cared a wit about what that boy might want. Then again, neither of them believed in free will, except their own of course.

The three lives clashed dramatically on Halloween 1981 when Harry was a little over a year old. Dumbledore had sent his parents into hiding before he was born, yet wanted to know who "The One" was as two boys fit the description, thus he set them both up. He changed the security arrangements on the Potter hiding place such that its location was now known to a traitor. On that night, Voldemort killed Harry's parents and then something happened. No one could ever say for sure what, but Dumbeldore made it known that the baby Harry had somehow destroyed Voldemort. For Harry's safety, he was placed with his Aunt and Uncle. There could be no doubt that those two were the absolute worst possible choice for the boy. Left to their tender mercies, he grew up abused and a virtual slave at least until such time as the magical world came calling for him again. Dumbledore would be the caller, "rescuing" the boy from that fate and ensuring that Harry would be forever grateful and forever trying to make it up to Dumbledore, thus easily molded into the little martyr Dumbledore believe Harry needed to become for The Greater Good.

Harry was not nor had he ever been a horcrux. In the other Harry's timeline, the other Harry had believed that he had been one as well. He believed it because Dumbledore said it was so and Dumbledore was never wrong. But he was. There was another horcrux, one Dumbledore never learned about and the other Harry learned about too late. The other Harry destroyed Voldemort in 1998, only to see him return some decades later. The second return led to the bloodiest magical war in history, one which the muggles could not ignore. The other Harry finally destroyed that final horcrux and this time it was another who killed Voldemort for good, something Dumbledore would not have believed possible. The problem was, it was now too late. The muggles (the non-magical world, as in most everyone) saw the magicals as a threat and the third war, the one that destroyed London and over a billion lives followed.

The easiest way to set things to right would have been to destroy Voldemort early, certainly before he made his first horcrux, ideally when he was still Tom Riddle and preferably before the Muggle raised Tom Riddle ever learned that magic was real. Short of that, preventing the prophecy from being uttered might work as well as Dumbledore would not be fixated on the import of some boy and might devote his intellect to actually destroying Voldemort himself. The problem was that time magic did not seem to allow a person in control of such magic to send anything or anyone back to a date before he was born. The other Harry could send his assistants back to before they were born, but not to before he was.

This strange restriction had caused both the other Harry and Sensei some concern. But the other Harry pressed forward within those restrictions. Harry Potter was the key person, the one thing that could be changed that might change all things. Change the boy's life, break him free from both Dumbledore and Voldemort and things would be very different. Neither the other Harry nor Sensei could know how, but anything was better than what had happened.

The plan was simple enough. The other Harry picked a point in his life where the sequence of events need only change a little to have a massive impact years in the future. The target date was late June or early July 1995. Harry Potter would be fourteen then having finished his Fourth Year of magical school. The target location was the town of Little Whinging, Surrey, southwest of London where Harry lived with his Aunt and Uncle. The boy's home life should have landed his care givers in prison long before then, but that had not happened. The avatar was activated, the machine set and it was agreed that if they erred in targeting, they would err in favor of overshooting the planned arrival date.

That is indeed what had happened. Sensei arrived not in the summer of 1994, but in early May 1988 when Harry was seven years old. It was the Saturday after the worst beating the boy had received in his life, a beating that well could have killed him. Sensei found the boy at the local library reading, knowing that at that age the boy went there quite often as it was a refuge from the hell in which he lived.

Sensei knew that Harry Potter could see and hear him. While most of the time Sensei existed as a microscopic point of concentrated magical energy, he could project himself into an exact replica of the other Harry, the 168 year old one. True, he had no physical substance, but so long as no one tried to test that point, he appeared as real as anyone provided that the viewer was part of his programming. Harry was. Harry would always be able to see and hear Sensei.

The seven year old Harry Potter knew nothing about magic, aside from the magic he read about in books. That magic was fiction, a point his Uncle made very loudly all the time for no apparent reason whatsoever and usually punctuated with a beating. Thus, when an old man asked to join Harry at a table in the library, that Harry could not know that the old man was a magical projection. Sensei managed to get the boy to talk to him. It was a simple experiment on Sensei's part wondering whether the boy would respond and knowing the boy's fate in the other timeline later that day. In that timeline, the boy passed out not long after getting back to the Dursleys. If he could delay the boy, maybe this time would be different.

Sensei succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. All he did was talk to the boy for about an hour or so, delaying the boy's departure by about thirty minutes. The boy passed out in the middle of the street right in front of the library and right in front of a family from Essex on a weekend drive. Instead of laying on a floor for days in delirium, the boy was transported to a hospital. The authorities immediately knew abuse when they saw it. He was removed from the Dursley's care that day, even though they had no idea who the boy was or who his family was and even though the Dursley's had left the country on holiday, perhaps in the hopes that the boy they considered the bane of their existence might conveniently die while they were away.

But then, things really began to change. The family who had seen Harry pass out and saw to it he was sent to the hospital were the Grangers. It was a family of three. The daughter's name was Hermione Granger. In the other time line, this was the same Hermione the other Harry was not destined to meet until September 1st 1991 and the Hermione who became his best friend and the love of his life. This was the Hermione who died in London when London was destroyed. The Grangers became Harry's new family weeks before he even left the hospital.

The Dursley's, on the other hand, died in a house fire shortly after their return (and arrest), a house fire the other Harry had prevented in the other time line. This changed even more events. The magical world thought Harry Potter died there as well. The famous Harry Potter was no more and now an anonymous Harry Potter was recovering in the Muggle hospital.

Then Sensei learned something he had never known before. He had always believed Hermione was a Muggle Born. He was certain she was and was certain she died believing she was. She was not. She was the daughter of Erin Ryan and David Puckle, not Robert and Rose Granger. Her birth parents were sixteen and students at Hogwarts when Hermione was born in a Time Compression Chamber reserved for under age witches who became pregnant, an unfortunately common occurrence at that school for a variety of reasons none of which made any real sense. Ordinarily, the birth parents would have all memories of the pregnancy and child erased as soon as the child was born. The child would be adopted by a Muggle couple in almost all cases and raised and classified as a Muggle Born, while their parents would live their lives ignorant of their son or daughter's existence. Except in this case, for Erin Ryan was the granddaughter of the Deputy Headmistress, Minerva McGonagall, who for reasons of family heritage ignored the law at least in regards to memories. Erin and David would be allowed to be a part of Hermione's life if not as "parents" then as godparents. One day, Hermione would be told the truth.

That day never came in the other time line. In both times, Erin and David did marry, but were murdered by Voldemort's followers around the time of Hermione's second birthday. The Grangers planned to tell her when she was eighteen, but when she was seventeen and another war was raging, Hermione altered her "parents" memories and sent them off into hiding. Hermione was a brilliant young witch, but memory magic is tricky at best and to try to alter over seventeen years worth of memories as one's first memory charm was rash. It is one thing to make a person forget what they just ate for breakfast and then find they are unable to reverse the Charm completely, this was a typical first time problem for memory magic trainees, but a whole lifetime as one's first attempt was another matter. Hermione was able to restore most of her parents' memories, but the memories of her true origins were lost and, because Hermione never knew that, there was no way she knew they were missing. One could only guess why Minerva never told her in that timeline, although a fair argument could be made that Hermione was quite happy being who she was.

When the other Harry was about twenty, he finally went to Gringotts to look into his inheritance. His parents' will stunned him. It left the Potter estate to Harry James Potter, born July 31st 1980 in Godric's Hollow and Clarice Lillian Potter, born July 12th 1981 in Godric's Hollow. He had a "baby" sister! Naturally, he tried to find her. It took years. Clarice had been adopted by a Muggle couple in November 1981 named Jameson, yet when she was admitted to magical school at age eleven in 1992, the school records indicated she was in foster care. The records classified her as a Muggle Born. Clarice Jameson attended St. George's Academy of Magic in London and was apparently a good student. But there was no record of her finishing or sitting for her N.E.W.T.s.

Deep in the Archives of the Ministry of Magic, Harry learned why. On October 15th, 1997, not long after starting her sixth year, she was convicted of "Stealing Magic" by the "Muggle Born Registration Committee and sent to Camp Salazar. It was not possible to steal magic, but the policy of the new Voldemort government was that all Muggle Borns were abominations. She was processed in as "Detainee 2107" on October 21st, 1997 and detailed for "Magical Experiments" on March 3rd 1997. Her file "Closed" three days later, meaning she was one of thousands who died in the Camp before that War ended.

In this new timeline, even that changed rapidly. A couple of weeks after Harry arrived and about a week after he met Hermione and they became instant best friends, a girl was brought into his room one day. It was Clarice. Her adoptive father had died about a year earlier, probably from cancer. She and her mother had been driving to her school in London a few days before when their car was broadsided by a Lorry. Her mother died and she wound up injured, scared and very, very alone in a hospital. Somehow, they discovered she and Harry were actually brother and sister and reunited. When Harry finally left the hospital, he left to live with the Grangers, his best friend and his long lost sister.

Sensei was struck with the amount of import luck or fortune or whatever one might call it played in the events following his brief meeting with the Harry of this time in that Library. Only fortunate circumstance explained why it was the Grangers, Hermione and her family, who found Harry that day. The Grangers lived about two hours away in Loughton, Essex when motorway traffic was taken into account. Only luck could explain his reunion with his little sister. And, perhaps it was as much luck as design which explained how quickly Sensei could interact with others not named Harry Potter. His design protocols were such that supposedly only those who were trusted implicitly in both timelines would be able to see Sensei and interact with him. This did not explain Clarice or Hermione's parents and, while Minerva McGonagall was trusted and never betrayed said trust in the Other Harry's time, she could see Sensei immediately. At the time, Sensei feared the boy was too trusting, a problem the other Harry had to his detriment and harm. But time had proven this was not truly the case. These people would stand by this Harry through anything and against anyone. And it opened up opportunities for change Sensei and the other Harry never truly envisioned.

In the other time, the closest man to a father to Harry was Sirius Black, his godfather and a man he only knew for two years. Sirius in both times was framed for the murder of Harry's parents and imprisoned without trial. Even the most vile of Death Eaters got a trial. In the Other Time, Sirius languished in prison until 1993 when he escaped, but he remained a fugitive until his death in battle against Death Eaters in 1996. Days after the current Harry met Minerva, who to this day he called "Aunt Minnie," and armed with information from Sensei, Minerva uncovered the true criminal: Peter Pettigrew. Sirius was out of Azkaban days later and exonerated. In the few years since, he married Sophie Tomkins, who was a Healer-in-Training while he spent close to two months recovering from the effects of that prison and now had an almost one year old daughter Emily and Sophie was expecting again. The other Sirius never had that.

The scandals that erupted from the events following Harry's escape from the Dursleys shook the wizarding word to its core, but proved a boon to Harry and his new and growing circle of family and friends. By reuniting with Clarice, the Blood Wards Dumbeldore cast upon Harry as a baby hit full strength and The-Boy-Who-Lived passed from memory of all but those he let into his life. The-Boy-Who-Was-Abused, however, was another matter. Between the attempted murder of a magical child by their Muggle caretakers and the flagrant abuse of law and justice in the case of Sirius Black, it was a miracle (or thousands of Galleons and called political favors) that Dumbledore kept any of his lofty positions. He kept them, but he lost any credibility in the magical community.

The abuse scandal was initially a murder investigation, one which would reunite Harry with a long lost Uncle (his mother's half brother), introduce him to more magical children (his cousins, the Greengrass sisters and others) and in a way provide him with a government that would act in his best interest. His Uncle was a Muggle who married a witch and had eight magical children. He also worked for MI-5, an organization tasked with the internal security of Muggle Britain and specifically Office W, the division that dealt with MAGICAL security. It turned out the Muggle probably knew far more about the magical world than the Magicals knew about the Muggles. Office W also employed magicals. Soon, its rolls would include Remus Lupin. Lupin was another friend of the Potter family who, in the Other Time, was mostly unemployed due to the fact he was a Werewolf and magicals did not consider him either safe or human. Not so the Muggles, apparently. He was hired by Office W within days of meeting two of its Agents who had decided to meet Harry. He was hired BECAUSE he was a Werewolf. Once Sirius recovered (and returned from his honeymoon) the former Auror also joined MI-5.

By September 1988, Harry, Hermione and Clarice had also befriended two others who, like they had been, had been lonely and friendless: Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood. Neville had been believed a Squib, a non-magical born to magical parents, and had been kept out of society by his Gran for that reason. His parents were supposedly insane following a Death Eater attack, so in a way he was an orphan just like Harry, Hermione and Clarice. Luna had but one friend in her life - Ginny Weasley - but Dumbledore had put a stop to that in order to begin grooming Ginny as a future mate for Harry. That plot died the day the new Blood Wards formed, but Luna was still friendless. She met Harry, Hermione and Clarice on her eighth birthday and, along with Neville, they were fast and close friends.

The results of which in the next couple of years were astounding in many ways. In the other timeline, Luna's Mum died in a magical accident and she saw her Mum pass. In this timeline, Luna's new friends were there soon after it happened and Jasmine Lovegood, while seriously injured, survived. Clarice was by then a fully trained healer and while Harry, Hermione, Luna and Neville got Jasmine out of the burning lab that should have claimed her life, Clarice saved her life as Jasmine was critically injured. But not even Sensei saw the further outcome. It turned out Jasmine was pregnant with twins. Harry Theodore Neville Lovegood and Hermione Sophia Clarice Lovegood were born seven months later, quite healthy and, as Luna would say, quite noisy.

Having arrived years before scheduled, Sensei had originally planned to teach Harry what he could at least until Harry was old enough to attend Hogwarts. Even that plan fell quickly to the wayside. Within weeks of leaving the hospital, Harry, Hermione and Clarice were enrolled in the Summer Sessions at the Watanabe School of Magical Studies in Kyoto Japan. Sensei had mentioned this to the kids and Grangers and Minerva, but did not really think anything would come of it. He could not have been more wrong. Minerva had seen to it immediately after claiming her rightful place under the Will of James and Lily Potter as Harry and Clarice's magical guardian (she was already Hermione's.) That school admitted children as early as age six. It taught magic banned in Britain (banned for a host of reasons, few if any of which made any sense.) It also operated under Time Compression for the Summer International Sessions.

They spent thirty days there each summer for the last four summers, at least it was thirty days for anyone not on that campus. For them, it was 1500 days with five 300 day Sessions, each session being equivalent to one academic year. The school taught "Mind, Body and Magic." In addition to magic, they also took non-magical courses. They had just completed their fourth summer. They now each had completed all the formal magical education offered anywhere in Britain, as well as attaining at least three advanced magical Masteries each, the equivalent of magical college degrees. They also had their non-magical college degrees as well up through and including their doctoral degrees. Hermione had her Ph.D. in Political Science and Magical Masteries in Defense, Transfiguration and Spell Crafting (a six "year" course of study. Most Masteries were three "years".) Clarice had her Ph.D in Economics and Masteries in Defense, Charms and a Basic and Advanced Mastery in Healing. Harry had his Ph.D. in Chemistry and Masteries in Defense, Curse Breaking, Warding and, to Sensei's great amusement, Potions. (The other Harry hated potions, but that may have been due to his teacher at Hogwarts.)

That school resulted also in the removal of the Voldemort soul fragment from Harry. He was not, as Dumbledore had believed, another horcrux, but the unstable and dormant fragment was a threat. The kids also learned ancient magics that allowed them to destroy two true horcruxes already, thwart the Blood Ritual Voldemort used in the last timeline to return in 1995 (as all the bones of his ancestors were now ashes) and restore Neville's parents to their right minds.

But what had happened when Harry, Hermione and Clarice first returned from Japan in August of 1988 stunned even the aged Sensei. They had learned wandless and mind magics, both of which could be passed on to young people without being discovered by the Ministry for Magic. Their friends told their friends who told their friends. In the summer of 1989, ten more children traveled from Britain to Japan for their educations. A year later, thanks to funding both from a Foundation the Potter Family had established years ago and from the Muggle Government, another 444 joined them in Japan. This past summer, a total of 927 children and young people ranging in age from seven to twenty and from all of the six magical schools in the British Isles had gone. All, technically, in violation of the British Magical Law and custom. And yet this education revolt had hundreds of adults in support including at least two senior Department Heads within the Ministry of Magic, a few members of the Wizengamot and faculty members from all six schools.

That thirty minute delay Sensei had engineered was now far beyond what he and the other Harry had expected. The primary mission was on track. Voldemort would not come back a second time if things continued apace and with Sensei's knowledge, they would. But the other Harry never thought beyond that, probably hoping that the rest would sort itself out. Sensei now saw that destroying Voldemort without more was a good move, but would only delay the hell. So long as Magical Britain remained the Pureblood dominated, insular society that it was, sooner or later another Dark Lord would arise and present the same threat not just to the magicals, but to mankind itself. Now, however, there were the first stirrings of real revolution. All the few revolutions that really took hold and survived the chaos of change began not unlike this. Adults were whispering in coffee shops and taverns and speaking aloud in parlors. And here, children were learning more than their adults had and were, probably almost to a person, not about to go back to the past nor deny their children the opportunities they had.

Thirty minutes had changed everything. Sooner or later, Magical Britain was in for a very rude shock and even now, Sensei thought, the Oligarchs were dead. They just didn't know it yet.

Dumbledore wanted a malleable pawn in Harry Potter. He was about to find a lion.

The wizarding government wanted everything to remain the same "as it always had been." They were about to find themselves facing an irresistible force they could neither control nor defeat if they tried.

Voldemort wanted his Death Eaters to take over this world. He had counted upon passive acceptance and magical inability on the part of the populace and Dumbledore's deluded belief that war does not mean killing. Sensei now knew Voldemort's time was short. This Harry was trained in Combat Defense. This Harry and hundreds like him knew that sometimes killing was necessary. And this Harry and hundreds like him knew how to kill. None of them had killed. In Muggle parlance, they were all "green" and had yet "to see the Elephant." But they knew that war was different and war meant killing the enemy. This time, maybe, being a Death Eater would not be a path to long life.

As Sensei watched his young charge, he knew his mission was now secondary. He would continue to guide Harry towards the final and total defeat of Voldemort. But that was not the end, it was only the beginning. And the beginning of the beginning was about to come to pass.