September 25, 1988
England, Little Whinging, 4 Privet Drive
"Aunt Petunia, need any help?" I asked, peeking into the kitchen on Sunday morning.
"Yes, Harry. Help me mix the batter for the waffles," Aunt Petunia nodded. "Start by grating the potatoes."
I washed several large tubers and began peeling them. English food was rather funny. They ate very little rice here and added potatoes to almost everything, though the local variety was somehow not sweet at all.
The primary school Dudley and I were attending now gave me mixed feelings. I had been very surprised to learn that Harry had started going there at five, and after finishing at eleven, you had to enter secondary school, where they taught children from eleven to eighteen. And under local law, you were required to study until sixteen.
The final two years of secondary school, which went beyond compulsory education, were considered 'university preparation'. After that, you could study even more and learn some kind of profession so you could earn money.
By my calculations, that meant people here studied who-knew-what for a full thirteen years, and only afterward chose what they wanted to become. There was very little continuity between generations, too. A potter's son, for example, could become a cook! But even an idiot could see that such a cook would probably be mediocre—unless he had some unimaginable natural talent, or his mother came from a family of cooks. Take Teuchi-san, owner of Ichiraku. He came from a family of great cooks, and his daughter Ayame-chan was also an excellent cook, while his brother Teyaki-san made the most amazing dango in the world. What if Teuchi-san had decided to become a potter and ignored generations of experience accumulated by his family? Then I wouldn't have been able to eat the best ramen in the world. Ah, now there was a dish I missed terribly!..
In my world, the son or daughter of a farmer or townsman could become a shinobi too, but there was one enormous 'but'. Back home, any farmer or townsman knew how to fight, and some townspeople in Konoha were excellent at taijutsu. Take Rock Lee—he came from just such a family. His chakra-circulation system wasn't developed enough to perform ninjutsu by releasing chakra from his body, but he trained by saturating his muscles with chakra from within. And he achieved astonishing results. Especially with a body built like his. Even so, it would only be in the next generation of such ninja that a child might be able to rise above the level of genin.
The potatoes were peeled and washed, and then I grated them into mush on a special grater.
It looked very much as though the magic school 'Hogwarts' was a secondary school where I would enroll specifically as a wizard. I should have asked Sensei how many years students studied there. When Harry and I met, he had said something about being in his fifth year, and he was about to turn sixteen. So either he was approaching his final year then, or he still had another two years left. Hmm... Assuming his status as the 'Chosen One' even allowed him to study properly.
I really ought to write down everything I remembered from his story. After so many years and events, I might forget something important.
Lessons in the local school were peculiar. Some things were interesting, while during certain subjects I nearly fell asleep. If I wanted, I could become a genius here, especially in mathematics. Our education back home was more intensive and harsher, I suppose. Here, I didn't understand what half the subjects were even for. Back there, I knew that if I made some stupid mistake, I might simply not survive it.
When we were in London, I begged Aunt Petunia to buy me steel nibs on penholders and some ink. Since I couldn't get bird quills, I decided I'd learn to write with those instead. The teacher graciously allowed me to do English work with a dip pen rather than a ballpoint after being satisfied with my explanation that I wanted to develop beautiful handwriting. Besides, that would explain the change in my handwriting if anyone ever found Harry's old assignments and compared them.
Yeah, Mr. White had quite the expression on his face when he saw my first dictation. I hadn't known that I was even spelling my own name wrong, putting an 'i' instead of a 'y' at the end. And then there were all those squiggles—commas, periods, dashes, exclamation marks, question marks. You had to put them in during pauses, at the end of a thought, or when asking something. And there were capital and lowercase letters. In short, a pile of stupid rules that didn't make life any easier at all.
So in the end I decided that even though I could already speak English perfectly well, learning its grammar properly wouldn't hurt.
The thick batter was mixed, and Petunia-san heated the waffle iron. The kitchen filled with the delicious smell of crisp waffles.
After I returned to the Dursleys, they gave me a room on the second floor. It had previously been used to store broken toys and miscellaneous junk. Now all of that had either been moved to the garage or donated to an orphanage. I agreed with Aunt Petunia that I would use the room for homework, reading, and training. It had windows and good light. I would continue sleeping in the cupboard so there would be open space in my room. Without a bed, there was much more room, and I certainly wouldn't outgrow the little couch in the cupboard before eleven. The weather in England was pretty miserable, and the farther autumn advanced, the more rain, damp, and fog there was. Dudley and I needed somewhere indoors for exercise and stretching.
My cousin had also decided to train with me after I demonstrated the 'trick' of breaking a board with the edge of my hand. We'd seen someone do it on television at the Polkiss house in early September, and I said I could do it too. I could, of course. I knew the trick—we'd played around with that sort of thing at the Academy. Piers, on the other hand, badly bruised his hand and nearly broke it. Dudley decided Snape-sensei had taught me such 'cool stuff'. I didn't correct him. Instead, I suggested we train together and told him 'in confidence' that you didn't have to be a wizard to break boards; it was simply a special training method.
Over the past three weeks, Dudley had even lost a little weight and now showed off his biceps to everyone at school. Uncle Vernon grumbled at first, but then installed an iron pull-up bar for us in the garage. So Dudley and I were the only ones in our class who could do pull-ups. Piers had decided to start training with us last week too.
"Go wake Vernon and Dudley," Aunt Petunia asked me. "I'm almost finished."
I ran upstairs. Uncle Vernon was already dressed and coming out of the bathroom, but my cousin was still sprawled in bed. The seventh day, Sunday, was the weekly day off. We went to school on Saturdays too, though usually for much shorter hours than on weekdays, and Uncle Vernon didn't work that day.
"Hey, sleepyhead, get up," I said, shaking my cousin awake. "Breakfast time!"
"I'm getting up," Dudley mumbled with a yawn. He jumped out of bed, and a minute later he was yelling in the bathroom.
We had decided to 'harden ourselves'—which was what people here called dousing yourself with cold water. Shinobi sometimes had no choice in the matter, and besides, cold exposure was used to affect the chakra-circulation system and blood flow. I had no idea how it interacted with magic, but given the disgustingly cold climate here and the lack of chakra for keeping warm, I decided experience from my previous life could help me in this one too. Dudley wanted to 'harden himself' with me and was enduring it so far. Aunt Petunia had tried to talk him out of 'torturing himself', but my cousin showed some backbone and dug in his heels.
I went downstairs and helped set the plates.
"I know it's good for his health, but he screams so loudly it makes my heart clench," Petunia-san confided in me.
"It's just easier that way, on the exhale. With Dudley it comes out as a yell," I shrugged. "But it is good for you. Look how rosy he is." I nodded toward my cousin, who had taken his seat at the table.
"And he woke up immediately," Uncle Vernon snorted, looking up from his newspaper and glancing at his son. "You can see it yourself, Tuney. Dudley's gotten stronger. Harry too."
"Ha! I can do thirty push-ups in a row," Dudley boasted. "Nobody else at school can do that except Harry and me, not even the kids a year older."
"Eat while it's hot," Aunt Petunia ordered, and we all fell silent, devouring breakfast with appetite.
* * *
"I always suspected that crazy cat lady, and her cats were always weird," Dudley whispered to me.
We were peering through the green hedge at Miss Figg, the same woman who had asked Aunt Petunia where I'd disappeared to in August. We passed her house every morning on the way to Little Whinging Primary. It stood two blocks from ours, on the opposite side of Privet Drive. At first glance, the old woman looked harmless. According to my cousin, Aunt Petunia used to leave me—or rather, Harry—with her on weekends sometimes.
Several points supported the theory that Arabella Figg was the one watching me.
First, Miss Figg rarely went anywhere. Nobody saw her at the shops where ordinary mortals were supposed to buy food. Apparently nobody visited her either, though sometimes voices could be heard from behind her thick fence. That looked a lot like magical deliveries and travel through fireplaces.
Second, Miss Figg had moved onto our street right after the abandoned little wizard appeared in Little Whinging, while Aunt Petunia, a sensible and very neat woman, had for some inexplicable reason immediately taken a liking to the lonely old cat lady and entrusted Harry to her care. It was obvious that if the old woman lived alone with nothing but cats, then perhaps she'd never even had children. And Harry, with his uncontrolled magical outbursts, might easily have done something strange. When I asked Aunt Petunia about it, Petunia-san fell into deep thought. She couldn't clearly explain why she hadn't been afraid the old woman would raise the alarm or gossip to the neighbors if it was discovered that I was a wizard. Even considering that people in Little Whinging thought Miss Figg was 'not all there', rumors could have made the Dursleys' lives very difficult, and yet Aunt Petunia had still left Harry with her.
And third, with every fiber of my soul and every cell of my new body, I could feel someone's attentive gaze. That had never happened even when the Third Hokage watched me through a special long-range artifact. His grandson Konohamaru had blabbed about that to me. Here, it wasn't an artifact but a very much 'living' gaze, and sometimes I even sensed several gazes at once. Only after three weeks, after reading a couple of books about magical creatures, did I understand how Miss Figg was doing it. Her cats weren't cats at all, though they looked like them. They were half-Kneazles, produced by crossing Kneazles with ordinary cats. The identifying features listed in the book matched. The old woman was keeping watch, clearly receiving information from her animals.
The only question was: who was she watching the 'famous' Chosen One for? Why had none of the adult wizards taken any interest in Harry Potter's living conditions? Where was his magical guardian, and where was the money for supporting the 'Hero'?
My suspicions fell on Headmaster Beard-Bells, who had strongly influenced Harry as far as I remembered from his stories.
Which meant... I needed to think carefully and decide what to do about all this.
"Let's get out of here before she notices us," I tugged Dudley away. "We'll go to the sports ground. We should call Piers too."
I had promised Aunt Petunia I wouldn't practice magic in the house, but I didn't want to anyway. My sixth sense told me that doing it at the Dursleys' was a bad idea. A couple of accidental magical outbursts were one thing. Systematic training was another. I had no idea what charms or alarm barriers might be placed on the house. Besides, Harry had mentioned a system for monitoring underage wizards.
So at the moment, I was also looking for a suitable 'training ground' where I could continue practicing magic. Or... maybe I could try to build one myself. I already had a few ideas. And now, after identifying the spy, it was finally possible to begin the conversation with Aunt Petunia about the magical world that I'd been postponing...