Arthur Weasley was nothing if not a family man; hence he had had six children with his wife Molly even though they were a rather poor family. It was his love that had allowed him through it, but things had changed when his finale child was born. The child was a girl by the name of Ginny. She was a beautiful little thing with red hair that was even more striking than him, her mother, or brothers, but even as lovely a child she was she was destroying the family.

They had been poor before, but they had been able to survive by giving their children hand me downs, but with Ginny being a girl it meant they would have to buy her new clothes and other necessities that they boys did not need, and it was slowly driving the family to ruin. The culmination of this came when they had only five galleons left in their vault.

"Arthur..." Molly began one night as they were setting Ginny down for bed. "We can't afford to keep living like this."

Arthur gave his wife a thoughtful look. "I know that but what is there for us to do?" He had expected this conversation sooner or later. It had been harder and harder for him to provide for them, and it was getting to the point that Molly nearly needed to take up a job.

"Arthur! We are near starving! I've been barely able to get Ginny the things she needed, and little Ron! I haven't given him a proper nappy since Ginny was born!" It had been a hard week for her. She had become used to having to save as much money as she could; but lately it had gotten to the point that no matter what she did there was nearly nothing left.

Arthur thought for a moment about what his wife's words. They were starving, and at the rate they were going they would not last long. As he thought about it he remembered something that was rarely spoken of between wizards, and only the older families remembered anything of it.

"There is something that we could do, but I won't do this lightly." His voice was grim, and the expression on his face was even more so, but Molly nodded. The only thing that she could think of was taking a loan, and she knew that they had no means of paying one back.

"Alright… I'll write a letter to the goblins to negotiate the price."

"Price for what?" As far as she knew they had nothing that the goblins would be willing to pay for.

"Ronald." Molly's face turned to one of abject horror as she realized what he meant.

"We can't sell our son to those monsters?! They'll kill him!" Arthur turned to his wife a fire in his eyes.

"Don't you think I know that?! We've got no other choice!"

"But why Ron, why not the others?" the question was not something that he had expected of her, but he understood her concern.

"Fred, George, and Percy are too old; the experience would traumatize them should they survive, while Bill and Charlie are either attending Hogwarts or are about to start. We've had sons, but we've never experienced the joy of a little girl."

Molly did not respond to that. Though she knew that everything he had told her was the truth; it was still a hard pill to swallow, but sometimes the need of the many outweighed the need for the few, she just hopped that this was truly one of those times.

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Hermione Granger was a girl unlike most her age; she was highly intelligent, to the point that at the age of three she was already reading better than more ten year olds. It was this love of reading that allowed her to understand how to use the computer that her father had bought.

She mainly used it to browse the internet (though that took forever with how slowly the pages loaded), but one day her father brought home a game. The game was called The Elder Scrolls: Arena. The game was an RPG that allowed the player to explore a fictional empire located on the continent of Tamirel on a Planet called Nirm.

The game was unlike anything that she had played. In fact she had played tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, but it was entirely different to see the world that she was being submersed in visually. It might have been crude and unwieldy, but it was better than nothing.

A year later her father graced her with the second game in the series Daggerfall, and once again she was immersed into the world of Elder Scrolls. This time she was given more freedom. In the first game she was not allowed to choose the race of her character, but with Daggerfall that choice came. She chose to be a Khajiit which was a race of bipedal cat people.

The Khajiit were endowed with grace, speed, and dexterity in an attempt to emulate their quadruped relatives; as a Khajiit Hermione loved to disregard the main quest and engage in all manner of other activities, but two things always seemed to ensnare her attention: Magic and stealth. Magic seemed for some reason to resonate with her. The destruction wrought by flames spells, the wittiness of alteration, or the manipulation that came with illusion… it all just seemed to call to her, while the ability to defy the law, or sneak up on one's enemy felt just the same.

Hermione played the game until she had beaten it several times over and knew the quests like the back of her hands before she could no longer make herself do so. She loved the game with all of her being, but there was something she yearned for, and the game could not provide it.

It took her a while to come to a conclusion on what that thing was, but it came to her one night as she slept. In her dreams she was that Khajiit assassin that specialized in magic. She killed her enemies from behind with a dagger, and she used magic to stalk her prey, and when things went to hell she would hurl a fireball.

When she awoke from that dream she was frustrated. She wanted nothing more than to make those dreams come true, but the rational side of her told her that it was not to be. The world of Elder Scrolls was nothing more than a fantasy for people to enjoy; there was no reality to it, and there never would be, but she defied that part of her mind. She got out of bed and went to the back yard. She had no idea of what she was doing, but she put the doubt aside clenched her fist and focused.

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Harry Potter was awoken abruptly from his sleep by the sound of the door to his cupboard nearly being ripped off the hinges. He was greeted by the sight of his Uncle Vernon. The man was smiling, and that set the five year old on edge, because although he was quite young and barely able to understand the world there was one thing that he excelled at, and that was survival.

From the moment he had stepped foot in Number Four Privet Drive he had had to teach himself to survive. His Aunt and Uncle were inhuman pigs that treated him as if he was nothing more than an unwanted diseased parasite that was bleeding them dry.

They shoved him into the cupboard under the stairs, they forced him to do chores the moment he could so much as lift the broom, and they gave him only just enough to survive. It was a pitiful existence, but Harry had learned to deal with it, and one of the things that helped him deal with his situation was knowing how to read his Uncle's face. When the man was angry his face turned puce, when he was happy he smiled, but never smiled at Harry, so when the boy saw his Uncle looming over him with a delighted smile on his face he could not help but think of the worst.

He was proven right in his assumptions when Vernon grabbed him pulling him roughly from the confines of the cupboard that had been his home for four years. He held back a scream that had found its way into his throat; things would surely worsen if he struggled or even made it seem as though he planned to do so.

Vernon was rather disappointed when his nephew made no noise or struggle. He had thought that he would be forced to hurt the boy (something that he would relish), but he had not be given that chance. The boy had come quietly, and even he could not bring himself to harm the boy (well bodily at least) with what he was already about to experience.

The beefy man deftly picked the boy up, and carried him out the door to the drive where his car sat idly. He took a few moments to fish around his pockets for his keys, and after finding them he opened the door and shoved the boy onto the backseat. In no time at all he was on the road traveling in a (what to Harry was) a random direction, but truly it was all but random.

Vernon had been planning for this day for a while, so he had done some research; he had been trying to find the most remote forest in all of Britain, of course that was a bit too much for him as there were several that were just too far for him to travel to quickly and without notice, so he had settled for a forest closer to home.

There were quite a few foreboding patches of greenery that one would call forest dotting England, but Vernon settled on the Epping Forest. The reason being that A it was only sixty miles from Surrey meaning that he could be there and back in less than three hours, and B it had been the site for several murders giving it an almost haunted feel, which suited his needs perfectly.

Harry did not dare do more so than breath as the car moved at breathtaking speed down the road. He could see outside the window a myriad of trees, bushes and other shrubbery; during the day such nature would be quite beautiful and enchanting, but as they moved through desolate road by moonlight Harry could not help but notice how sinister everything seemed. He swallowed thickly when the car came to a stop in a spot where there were no streetlamps, but there was a dirt path.

Vernon turned the car down that path and drove for nearly twenty minutes before turning into the forest itself. There was neither road nor path, and the forbidding branches of the trees blocked the moonlight from hitting the ground giving the area a ghoulish feel.

Vernon stopped the car slowly relishing the panic that filled his nephew's face as he looked through the rearview. When the car completely halted he turned to face the boy. "Get out of the car boy."

There was a calmness in Vernon's voice that Harry had never heard before; it was a shocking contrast to the vehement anger that he normally saw, but there was also an air of command. It may not have had the same "heat" that Harry was used to from his Uncle, but he knew that there was no choice before him: to defy the man would bring pain, so with trembling hands Harry opened the door to the car and stepped out. Immediately he was assaulted with the sounds of the forest and panic spread through his very being, only to be amplified as the man that was his Uncle drove away.

In the darkness of the forest Harry could barely breathe as fear overtook him. He had been alone before, but that was in his cupboard where he knew there was nothing but him, but at that moment he knew that there were other creatures in the forest, things that could likely kill him.

When the thought of death came to him his self-preservation instincts came to the forefront, and all he could think of was where to hide. Night was the worst possible time for a child to be lost anywhere, but in a forest where they were completely defenseless it was much worse, because for a large predator they were easy meals.

Harry frantically looked around. He did not want to move because he was not sure of where he was going, and he did not want to run into something that could hurt him, because even he knew that if he got injured surviving would be much more difficult.

As he looked around in the darkness he was barely able to spot a tree with a small hallow at its roots. Quickly as though there were an ocean of lava on the ground he scrambled to it. It was a tight fit, but he was able to squeeze into the crevice. It reminded him somewhat of the cupboard that he had called home, but the opening left him no comforts, but it had to do. It had to protect him until morning.