A/n: Premises: In which Harry falls through the Veil (because it's always the damn Veil) and lands in Manhattan. The kicker is: he was directly infected by everyone's favorite virus. He just doesn't know it yet.

Chapter 1: Fragile Glass

Harry found out the hard way that it was agony to have your existence torn asunder by an ancient and mysterious artifact. See, when one breaches the veil between realms, nature tends to take exceptional attention and consideration to make the instigator not do so ever again.

Thus, Harry's agony; pain is the most effective teacher, however inconsiderate it may be.

Sire, it's true that Harry wouldn't die in the process, but that just meant there was a wider range of learning that could be done.

In order to understand why Harry was undergoing the most excruciating pain in existence, a rewind must be used.

When Harry had finished the war off by cutting a snake's hear (Voldemort as the head of the Death Eater snake), he had went back to study at Hogwarts and finish his education.

It turned out that he was a pretty good student, too, when he wasn't under constant fear for his life. Hermione was ecstatic.

Hermione wasn't the only one that'd noticed, too, as his NEWTs had gone out to various prospecting employers. Such an employer was the Department of Mysteries.

Now, originally Harry had his sights set on becoming an Auror. However, under the assumption that an Auror was like a police officer, he understood that an Unspeakable was more like an Agency like MI6. Where one would deal with the visible threats and therefore gain recognition for it, the other would bring down the threats that needed to stay under cloak and dagger, and thus not garner any more recognition for it. Well, publicly, anyway.

He chose the latter.

It turned out that Harry was inordinately efficient in his chosen career. Considering his unique and constant threat-filled upbringing allowed him to envision various innovative uses for spells not normally suited for the task at hand, he flew through the magical training sections. Weather Harry liked it or not, he was used to leading others, thus had quickly climbed the ranks to handle more and more responsibility. He had taken the skill of delegation like a fish to water, so he was never too busy that he cracked under pressure, and had a stubbornness to complete any task with some problem solving skills thrown in, in case he had to be directly involved in a matter.

It was no surprise it didn't take long for him to rise through the ranks, all the way to the top, gaining the title of Director of the Department of Mysteries.

Now, as a side note: the Director of the DoM was the only position in the DoM that required the outside to place a name to a face. However, to maintain ultimate independance, the Director's name never changed unless the Director, in official capacity, died publicly. As it was, they had only ever gotten to the third letter of the Alphabet in the 500 years of operation excellency.

Now, to get back to why Harry was in excruciating pain; he had become disturbingly interested in the Veil of Death in his career.

Duch was the unhealthy obsession (as Directors are want to have) of an intelligent wizard that he began experimenting with it. Now, unfortunately, Harry Potter, AKA Director Croaker, had increased much. Not bad luck, nor good luck, just luck.

He ended up slipping, and fell into the Veil of Death. Luckily he shouldn't die from it due to the types of experiments being done, but still it was embarrassing.

Thankfully it was only an intermediately long amount of time before the pain stopped. Abruptly, Harry was aware that his entire right side was cold, he could feel cold air on his flesh, and that gravity was pulling him hard to the right.

So he was laying on the floor, and he was naked. Not to mention that he was either too heavy than he remembered, or gravity decided it was a grand idea to suddenly increase.

Joy.

The next thing he noted, as he gradually rose from his shivering fetal position, was that the place he had woke in was a facsimile of a hellhole. For a brief moment, Harry considered that perhaps the catholic hateful views of his long-dead 'family' was true.

He scoffed; as if!

Applying his analytical mind to the situation at hand, he figured that the veil had dropped him in a random time and/or place. From the way the walls were painted in an unmistakable red hugh, it was a hostile one at that.

Harry reflexively went for his wand to cast a few Unspeakable detection charms, only to be reminded that he was still naked and therefore had no place to carry said wand.

He sighed; his wandless charms were never his strong suit.

What came back from the endlessly cast charms was disturbing to say the least. Instead of the forensics report that'd normally accompany the charms' completion, there was something more and at the same time, less.

There was a lingering feeling of something sinister with the addendum about the blood (as it was definitely blood) being infected with an unknown pathogen, long since dead.

Even then, 'dead' didn't' feel like the right word to describe it. It was more like 'dormant', as if it could come back in force, given any opportunity.

Harry had the sudden urge to be somewhere else.

With a sudden foreboding feeling, Harry spun on his heel to fire off a lightning fast sniper's hex where he expected a head to be. Such a foreboding feeling deserved nothing less than fatal.

He was right to think so, as his eyes registered a hulking beast of flesh pounce towards him, claws extended and frighteningly sharply filled maw wide.

It didn't take a genius to figure that the beastie wanted a piece of Harry, nor to put 2 and 2 together in that it was likely responsible for the mess on the… everywhere. However, Harry did find it exceedingly disturbing that the beast didn't make any noise in its preparation to strike; it was only due to Harry's practically preternatural instincts that saved him. It didn't growl in threat to incite fear, nor have any faint heartbeat, breath draw, or the sounds of clawed feet scraping the floor to give it away.

Quickly discarding the thoughts as unimportant - even momentarily - Harry still had a heavy-looking corpse to contend with.

Without thought, Harry dropped into a tactical rool to the side to avoid the sharp-dead-wrong projectile. After popping up to a ready crouch, Harry eyed what he thought to be a dead flesh-body stumble to its feet with a gaping hole in its chest.

Apparently its head-height was a lot taller than the average human's.

With muted horror and grim determination, Harry calculatingly eyed the cannonball-sized absence in its chest. He could clearly see a heart that was not contracting start to function under a facsimile of a ribcage.

Then it roared!

Despite the stable footing of his chosen combat form, Harry couldn't help but to stumble. The light from overhead lights flickered, life seemed to drain of colour for a moment, and worst of all, there were three distinct answering roars, with a possible fourth.

Giving a growl of his own, Harry brought both his hands together, palms facing forward.

With a snarl, he funneled his frustrations through his arms, and then with a smirk of an old memory of an older story he let forth a vicious bolt of intent and power.

Not many things could live without a head, right? Even ghosts tended to go a bit mad if they lost their mind somewhere their body couldn't find.

With a faint, "Off with their head!" the newly dubbed Hunter thudded onto the floor.

However loud the fallen Hunter might have been, even louder still was the yapping and yowling of three to four mighty beasts barreling to his position from different directions.

With a sigh and a 'dark' flying curse later, Harry donned a mushy cloak and huddled uncomfortably close to the foul-smelling corpse.

Hopefully the Hunters weren't cannibalistic.

It didn't take long after that the called allies found their way to the combat site.

Taking their positions in, Harry quickly came up with a strategy for the large (but still babylike sized version of the dead one) human-shaped creatures.

Among a disguised palm at the head of two sniffing beasties, Harry cast a Sniper's hex at each, effectively taking them down. Having gained the attention of the remaining one, he threw stealth to the wind and flipped himself behind the skinless Hunter for cover, however brief.

The plan worked as intended, as the Hunter had jumped over their fallen comrade rather than through, leaving them open for Harry to snap off one more head-bound hex, finishing the impromptu battle.

Taking a breather, Harry continued to take stock of his current situation as he remained ware of more creatures.

Once the heat of battle was over, though, he noticed that he had taken damage on his side simply from his nerves politely protesting his movements. When he inspected the wound, he noted that it both wasn't consistent with what the beasties would inflict, even glancing, and that there was some glittering still in the open wound.

Using his magic, he directed his nerves to report more than just their discontent.

The feedback was basically that he'd managed to take shards of glass into his body.

Considering that he was in what looked like an abandoned and infested subway station, it didn't really inspire too much confidence in the odds of the glass being clean. For all he knew, it could be anywhere from a broken bottle to a broken test tube.

Given Harry's brand of luck, it was probably a test tube with something nefarious inside.

Wilson was going to kill him after he healed him of his newest malady.

Harry always did have a knack for making medical professionals overly stressed, even if they were high-ranked unspeakable ones.

His face twisted into a reflection of the utter horror he felt, before morphing into a fit of righteous anger. One did not simply mess with a wizard's beard. He had spent one hundred years on that groomed beauty! He would rather be kicked in his old saggy balls than that!

He rose his hand to feel where his sorrow would exist in its bare entirety, but had paused with his hand halfway to his face.

He didn't have any wrinkles on his would-be spell-worn hands, no liver spots from late-night firewhisky indulgence, but at least he still had the joke tattoos of the deathly hallows on each hand, gained from said nights of firewhisky.

Even if they didn't float and change position magically like they used to.

Quickly giving a check over his (still) naked and obviously teenage-ish body yielded the result that he was now completely scar-free.

His attention returned to the gouge in his side. He just had to get a new body only to get it scarred again. From the way his magic had taken an interest in the area and started to push back against the area, it'd be a curse-scar and not able to be healed completely.

Harry sighed; what was with him and scars, anyway? Sometimes he really considered that his life was solely set up to entertain some deity somewhere.

He hated his life, sometimes.

A/N: I hope you enjoyed the first chapter of the new story, DRP. Please, do review as it does tend to become chapter-fuel. Oh, and I made the Grimoire stuff up on my own. I'll probably use my own spells unless I'm being lazy that day and decide to use 'cannon' spells.

The Grimoire:

Sniper's Hex: essentially acts like an exploding sniper round that penetrates armor. Not many things can survive it, not even a dragon. A spell of Harry's own design, based off of a sniper round.

Bolt of Intent and Emotion: Raw magic given a vague focus, and gaining semi-sapience from feeding off the emotion to accomplish the goal. Think patronus charm, but requires more power because the intent wasn't specified in the spell and can use any emotion depending on the need. It tends to have a leak of what the spell was made from. Again, like the patronus charm giving off a feeling of serenity, the case that Harry used gave off a line from Alice in Wonderland, because that was what gave him the idea of the intent. Very obscure branch of existing magic, and gives Arithmancers headaches for days.

The Flaying Hex: Technically a dark hex because it was once used as capital punishment until the infamous Dark Lord Obern The Ferocious used the hex in protest against the capital when used against his later-proven innocent brother. The last legal use of the spell (other than Unspeakables torturing people for information, where they'd use it with deliberately too little power put into the spell for only small strips of skin removed) was on Obern himself for his crimes against the Crown. Before it was used as capital punishment, it was used to defeather chicken and skin animals for their hide. That's the current publicly legal use, and the only widely known use for it, thankfully.