Hello everyone. This is my first time writing fanfiction so constructive criticism is very appreciated. I chose to advance the time 5 years to get Harry some familiarity with gaming elements. Harry will be abused in this story. There will be an outside POV in the prologue, but it will be switched to Harry's POV later. At the moment I plan to have a manipulative Dumbledore, but not necessarily evil, but it might change. This first chapter is just a prologue and my attempt to explain how he acquire the power of The Gamer.

Disclaimer: All characters and locations belongs to J.K Rowling.

Warning: Mentions of heavy abuse.

Prologue: The changing fate

31st of October, 1995, Little Whinging, Surrey

In a small town known as Little Whinging, in Surrey, England, we find a small idyllic neighbourhood. When we look on the surface we find nothing out of the ordinary, we have the usual gossiping ladies and a couple of children playing in the neighbourhood park. But when we look under the surface we find that not every household is as normal as they would like to pretend. One household in particular is especially noteworthy.

In this household we find our hero, Harry James Potter, the boy-who-lived, the champion of the British magical world. Our hero is currently in quite a bit of pain. He had been caught reading one of Dudley's game manuals while cleaning Dudley's room. Vernon Dursley, the father, had been enraged that the boy had dared to touch one of Dudley's belongings for a purpose other than cleaning it and had told Dudley to get some practise with his new boxing gloves. An excruciating 20 minutes later Vernon had thrown him inside his cupboard, resulting in several more bruises.

That is correct, our hero lives in a small cupboard under the stairs, even thought there are two spare bedrooms (Dudley's second bedroom and the guest room). You see, the Dursley family, the neighbourhood paragon's of goodness and normality, were ironically enough quite the twisted freaks themselves, not that they would ever think that themselves. In their point of view they were not only in their right to, as they say, "Beat the freakishness out of the boy", but they were doing him a favour.

The main perpetrator behind the abuse was one Petunia Dursley, former Evans, Harry's mother's sister. She is best described as a spiteful woman whose personality leaves much to be desired. Her appearance has a striking resemblance to a horse-faced giraffe with brown hair. By spewing her vitriol and jealousy-induced hateful comments about the unnaturalness of all that is magic she had coloured her family against it as well. While she only rarely got physical with the punishments, most noticeably with a skillet, she always seemed to have a hateful comment to spare. Not that they needed all that much of a push to be bigoted idiots.

Her husband, Vernon Dursley, was quick to anger and it was not unusual that he got physical as soon as his temper got away from him. Like Petunia he has a striking resemblance to an animal, but sadly for him his resemblance was to that of an overweight walrus with blond hair. He made sure to air his views about Harry's freakishness and how much of a burden he was on their family as often as possible.

Then there was their son Dudley, who was the same age as Harry, who weighed at least double his weight. And let's just say it wasn't muscles that weighted him down. His looks were inherited from his parents as he looked like a walrus with brown hair, instead of Vernon's blond hair. He took great joy in tormenting his cousin. The torments included hitting him, a game known as "Harry Hunting" where he and his gang would try to catch him and hit him as much as possible before repeating it all over again, and other similar activities.

Then there was our hero, Harry James Potter, also known as Freak in the Dursley household. He was 10 years old and small for his age due to not getting enough nourishment. He had the most striking green eyes and messy black hair. He wore a pair of glasses that did not help his vision (Vernon had bought an old pair of mass-produced glasses for a couple of pounds when the school informed him that Harry needed glasses). He bore his iconic lightning bolt scar on his forehead, but otherwise had fewer scars than you would think. His "family" had realised that scars were bad since they might raise questions about his homelife, so they aimed for broken bones instead. He still had several scars from various sources thought.

Quite frankly, if it were not for his magic, he would most likely be dead by now. His magic would drain itself trying to repair his broken bones and burst blood vessels after his "loving" family had a go at him. But even if he retained the ability to stay alive, the situation was becoming untenable. Harry was coming closer to a breakdown and as he laid there in his cupboard as the night slowly fell, his subconscious realised his plight and reached out for his magic to once again solve the problem.

It is said that magic is a strange and interesting force, but the subconscious is not without its quirks either. Harry would never know just what happened that night, but he would carry its result for the rest of his life. His subconscious was trying to come up with a way to fix his breaking psyche and was searching for whatever positive influence it could find. It would be a lie to say Harry's life was full of happiness, but even then there was small smidgens of it, both conscious and subconscious. The most recent it found (and thus the first major influence) was ironically what had caused that last push that resulted in this situation, basically the time spent dreaming while reading a game manual. Harry loved reading topics based on fantasy since they allowed him to more easily forget about his own situation. He had stood there reading and dreaming about being a great warrior, the skilled rogue or the grandmaster magician. His subconscious seized a hold on that dream even as it reached out for his second major influence, the sacrificial love based ward from his mother and father.

Lily's title as the brightest witch of her age was not just for show, and more importantly she had the work ethics to go with it. Thought no one knew for sure and only a few suspected it, she was the real reason Voldemort failed that night. A loving mother in defence of their child is a frightening thing. A desperate loving mother in defence of their child should really cause the attacker to have some second thoughts about attacking them. A desperate loving mother who was hailed as a genius and who had had over a year of time to come up with ideas for protecting her baby boy should really have clued Voldemort in on that this was a bad idea. She had many contingency plans, many of which were useless since she did not have her wand, but she made do without it. She went straight for the plan which would leave her baby boy the safest, a ward.

This ward was based on an old baby ward that would protect the baby from harmful magical diseases. Lily picked it apart, reconstructed it with a different purpose, disassembled it again and repeated until she had a ward based on parental love for their child and the parents willingness to stare death in the eyes to give their child a chance to survive. And on that fateful Halloween 9 years ago both Lily and James stood in front of certain death to protect their child. When Voldemort had killed them and turned his wand on their child, he unknowingly activated the ward. The ward took the curse and returned it with vengeance, lashing out at the threat to its ward.

It was ironical that it was the same day, 9 years later, that would be the day of his next major change in life. His subconscious took the happiness from his days as a baby in the Potter household and infused his magic with it, soothing his frayed nerves, cracking psyche and his hurting body.

Had it been any other day of the year, this would probably have been all that happened, but alas, it was all hallows eve, and the spiritual world was as close as it gets to the physical world. Had the ward been established properly and feed from the love of a living family the effect would have been negligible, but Harry had in the first 15 months of his life got more love from his parents than he had from his relatives (with a wide margin). Thus the ward was still more attuned to the love of his parents than his relatives and as the clock struck midnight, the ward received a power boost when the original source of its power was temporarily closer than normal. The ward, boosted from the power, twisted and changes his magic into something new based on the thoughts it was infused with. It was still the same power, but its shape was different. It took so much magic to do this that the ward was almost destroyed, surviving with the barest of margins.

The subconscious, satisfied with what it had accomplished, settled down once more and let sleep claim it. His magic, still reeling from the changes done to it, slowly settled down. Had he still been awake, he would have heard a ping and seen a blue screen appear in front with the following words on it.

[Class Change]

Class changed to The Gamer. Choose Yes to retain the class and No to reject it.

You have 3 hours 59 minutes and 59 seconds to reject the change.

Yes / No

AN: And done, hope you like it. Not sure if I made it clear enough or if it confused you. The next chapter will mainly deal with the tutorial, since the game system is a complex and might be hard to understand unless you got the whole picture (which you sadly won't get since some parts won't appear until triggered, and let's just say that might take a while), so I will do my best to explain it.

And don't worry, there won't be much more abuse in this story. There will still be some but much less than it was hinted at previously, since I will make it part of quest rewards.

Hope you enjoyed it and please leave a review.