It's been a while. My old laptop died, and its taken a while for me to get my hands on a new one. I'm also married, with a kid, have a full time job, and an addiction to video games. My time is all but gone, but I do still enjoy fanfiction...

Hopefully this'll be different enough to keep your attention. I dunno, I write mostly to entertain myself, and publish just in the hopes that it keeps you lot entertained too. I want to write something that's fast-paced and easy to follow, but doesn't hold your hand. Might fail at it, might not. Worth a shot, eh?

Disclaimer: Any material that could potentially be considered infringement of copyrights and trademarks should be considered the property of their respective creators or owners. You are reading this of your own freewill, so please refrain from doing so if you don't like graphic violence, fluff montages, explicit sexuality, cliches and tropes, dumb dad jokes, vulgar language, American Wordings, easter eggs, massive crossovers, polyamorous relationships, or usage of drugs.

A/N: In this story, first year students at Hogwarts are the same age as freshmen in high school. I have also decided to update the world timeline of Harry Potter by thirty years, bringing it into the 'present' day; I'm going to play fast and loose with the actual year though.

Act One: Awakening
Recommended Music: Old Friends by Darren Korb

It all started when he was but five years old, in a moment he would never, could never, forget.

His Uncle Vernon's hand was coming at him again, and he knew it would hurt when it landed on his face.

The world slowed to a crawl, and it felt like cobwebs cleared from his mind. It was like he could truly see and think for the first time, and every experience of his short life prior to this point had been... sub-par. Suddenly, he could see everything. Inaudible, ghost-like whispers crawled up his spine until one voice grew far louder than the others. Unbidden, it's voice flowed from his throat and mouth in one alien, powerful word.

"Sharingan."

He dodged the meaty fist, and watched as it crashed into the wall next to him. The world sped back up, and he knew he'd lost that ephemeral power. Vernon rounded on him again, a rictus of confused, quivering fury filling Harry's vision. Another blow came Harry's way, this one far wilder than the last.

"Sharingan."

And he escaped pain yet again, this time keeping that sense of speed, power, and clarity for a few seconds longer. He saw the widening of his so-called family's eyes in pure terror, and twin pinpricks of crimson reflected in theirs. His eyes were blood red. The realization filled him with an odd sense of emptiness, just before everything left him.

The world grew black around him, and he soon knew no more.

Harry Potter no longer needed glasses to be able to see like a normal, functioning human. His eyesight was perfect, or perhaps even sharper than average. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. His normal green eyes had grown stronger, sure, but they didn't have to stay normal.

He could transform his eyes.

In time, he grew to understand this power he wielded. Upon saying, "Sharingan," he could ascend into a rosy world where everything made sense, where he had true power to enact change.

His irises became a rosy molten red, bringing to mind fire and blood. His pupils shrunk to a pinprick. A single comma-like mark appeared in his right eye, lazily orbiting his changed pupils. He somehow knew from the very core of his being, in much the same way he'd been supplied with the name of his power, that this mark was a 'tomoe.'

It was but an indicator of his fledgling power.

His perception of time would halve when his Sharingan was activated. He could focus on everything in his line of sight simultaneously; he would never suffer from tunnel vision in a fight ever again. He could also notice the most minute details with ease, and remembered everything his Sharingan saw with absolute clarity forever afterwards.

The world his Sharingan unveiled was power incarnate, capable of delivering him from his puny self into a machine of efficiency and effectiveness. It was what separated him from the ordinary, weak people of the world. It was what allowed him to escape from pain and misery, and what allowed him to dole it back out to those who would harm him.

In time, his family stopped trying to harm him. In time, they stopped trying to tell him what to do, and how to do it. And in time, they decided it was best for him to be himself, by himself. All alone.

Eventually, a seven year-old Harry forcefully took his cousin's second bedroom, daring any in the house to oppose him. Neither Vernon or Petunia did so, and Dudley gave up his screeching in the face of his parents' impotent fear. They would do naught to the boy they feared was a demon, and they advised Dudley to do the same.

And to this, Harry smiled, for the first time in years.

A nine year-old Harry sat in the public library. He'd looked through every book, magazine, and newspaper he could find. Now he was craving more knowledge for himself, more stimulus to keep his Sharingan active and his mind growing. He could keep it active for hours now without any stamina issues, merely using sunglasses to hide them from anyone who might be paying attention to him.

One of the computers was open, and he decided to see what he could find on it. After all, the general consensus appeared to be that the internet was an information superhighway, and one of the greatest inventions of the modern era...

"Buy me a computer that can connect to the internet, Uncle, and I will stay out of your hair for the rest of your life."

"You already stick to yourself, boy. Why should I spend that kind of money on you?"

Harry's eyes flashed red. "I could always stop sticking to myself." In that moment, the single tomoe of his right eye split into two. "Maybe I could let it be known that I slept in a cupboard under the stairs until I was seven years old..." And then the orbit of thw two tomoe around his pupil suddenly accelerated a dizzying degree. "You wouldn't want that, would you?" He felt a pulse of intent well up inside him, before it somehow broadcast from his pair of Sharingan into his Uncle's mundane eyes.

Vernon eyed his nephew blankly, before stiffly nodding. "I suppose a cheap laptop wouldn't hurt..."

And so Harry learned how to compel and mesmerize those who met his gaze. His Sharingan had evolved and grown in power.

"Be nicer to me, Dudley."

"... Sure."

"... Also, you should try a bit harder in school. And work on your hygiene."

"... Damn dude, that kinda hurt my feelings. But yeah, makes sense."

...

"Leave me alone," he commanded, his eyes radiating his need for equality. "Provide me with food, clothes, and shelter, and allow me to do whatever I want; but otherwise, ignore my existence."

They balked at this compulsion, its very nature so diametrically opposed to their materialistic selves that they couldn't accept it even with magical aid. Then he repeated the command, fueled with far more anger and power. And they submitted to his desire.

He reapplied that command every few hours, at first. Then he only needed to do it once a day. As time went on, the compulsion only needed to be refreshed every other day, then every few days, then once a week, once a month, and so on and so forth, until eventually he no longer had to.

Harry Potter was homeschooled, while his cousin wasn't. The teachers in public schools noticed that he had memorized the textbooks... within the first hour of being in school. After being offered the chance to skip a grade, then another, and another, within less than a week, Petunia and Vernon thought it would be best to let him stay at home, learning from the internet.

Harry didn't mind this development, since he was so far beyond public school.

He was a genius, plain and simple. An eidetic memory combined with a slowed perception of the world and an insatiable curiosity about the world around him, as well as unrestricted and unlimited access to the internet... well, it all came together into a single, irrefutable fact: Harry was an intellectual force to be reckoned with. He no longer needed his Eyes to change the thoughts of others; his rhetorical prowess alone was enough for him to win any argument, and he exuded an electrifying sort of charisma when he truly became impassioned in a debate.

For an almost worryingly long stretch of time, Harry only left his room for meals or to use the restroom. All the rest of his time was spent learning untold amounts of things from the internet, copying any and all manual skills just by watching someone perform them, and his vast knowledge base allowed him to learn ever more complicated abstract concepts.

Then one day, he stayed in the living room, no longer staying cooped up in his room. His green eyes sparkled with a sense of confidence and ease that would never have attributed to him before his period of pseudo-asceticism.

When Dudley asked him what was different about that day, and why he was behaving the way he was... Harry smiled a soft, content smile.

"I'm done."

They were all confused by this response. "You're done?" asked Dudley, a soft tilt to his head as he stared at his reviled cousin. "What d'you mean?" It took a lot of mental effort for him not to add 'freak,' to the end of his question, but Harry's mental conditioning was certainly having an effect..

"I've finished learning. All that studying and research... I'm happy with what I now know. I might go exploring cyberspace again at some point, but for now... I'm content to take a step back and reevaluate."

This was met with a stunned silence, only broken after a few beats by Vernon. "So..." began Vernon, unsure of what to say to that, "What're you, ah, going to be doing, er, from now on?" The man was nervous with how much free time Harry would have now, after all.

Harry's smile grew a tad more lively. "Now... I think I'd like to begin, for lack of a better word... experimentation."

The household shuddered in trepidation at what that statement might mean for them, though they wisely held their tongues. They watched him walk out the front door with bated breaths, unsure of just what was going to happen to them in the near future.

Harry had memorized, analyzed, and cross-referenced almost everything worth knowing on the internet, which housed pretty much everything mankind had learned in all of recorded history. However, there were limits to what he could truly understand from the comfort of his office chair, and the safety of his screen.

Harry pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration, deciding to speak his thought process aloud, on the off chance that it might give him an epiphany. "It's like this: imagine you could fight like Bruce Lee, Mike Tyson, or Mohammed Ali. You can switch from one style to the next, and match each of those fighters exactly, but you can't... combine everything together neatly. A lot of the philosophies endemic to one style are incompatible with the those of the others. I want to be all three of those fighters at the exact same time. But I can't. It just doesn't... click."

He sat there for a few more moments in silence, before realizing that he needed to relax a bit, and jumpstart his imagination. And due to his lurking about the internet, Harry had a pretty good idea of what could help. "I gotta smoke some weed."

A twelve year-old Harry was eyeing the joint in his cousin's room warily. He was aware of all the stigma surrounding illicit drugs, and more than aware of how they impact a person physically and mentally, but it was an entirely different question altogether to experience it for himself, firsthand.

But that was the whole point of his 'Experimentation' phase, as Harry oh-so-cleverly pointed out to himself. Still, he felt a bit apprehensive, despite everything else. What if it made him paranoid? What if it made him stupid? What if-

"You sure about this?" Harry asked himself, almost amused at his own reticence. He had, after all, been totally in control of himself for the past several years. "You've never been the type to simply let go..."

He probably wouldn't have talked to himself like this, if anybody else was home right then. Luckily, Dudley was off at a boxing tournament, with both his parents there to show their support of him. If he didn't try this now, he likely never would drudge up the nerve to do it again.

Harry let out a slow, slightly unsteady breath, but his eyes were determined. "Yes, I'm sure." He turned the pipe over in his hands a few times, before nodding with a sense of finality. "I think I need to experience an altered mental state. Maybe it'll help me grow as a person, or maybe nothing'll come of this, but..." he trailed off, before shrugging, and bringing the joint up to his mouth, his cousin's lighter already flickering to life...

About twenty minutes later, his eyes a bleary, blurry red.

"Mmm. I need to eeaatt," he groaned, making his way downstairs to the kitchen. That night, he would end up eating half a pound of leftover lasagna, fifty pizza rolls, an entire pack of oreos, a bag of cheetos, a pint of cookie dough ice cream, two microwavable packs of mac n' cheese, and several packs of gummy bears. And he probably drank a gallon of water, at least. He also blasted some indie rock while watching adult cartoons.

He was finally relaxed for the first time in years. And as it turned out, altering his mental state truly did help his powers grow even stronger...

Harry grew a new tomoe in his left eye, which added a brand new dimension to his visual abilities. This advancement halved his perception of time again, which led him to believe that this increases in reaction times would be exponential until he eventually reached the peak of what his eyes could do. However, there was something entirely new that he was experiencing after this most recent improvement to his Eyes: when his Sharingan was active now, he could see a nonexistent light, for lack of a better word, that emanated from living beings.

At first he thought it might have been bio-electricity that he was seeing, but there were a few pieces of evidence that put a damper on that particular theory. The first was that he couldn't see ordinary electricity any easier than he could before, the second was that the light seemed to be vastly different from one thing to another, even being drastically different from one person to another, and lastly... it wasn't limited to living things.

He was seeing things that nobody else reacted to: a renegade bus that pushed other things out of its way as it zigzagged about the roadways of London, the occasional office buildings or houses that none of his family members could even percieve, and... a shimmering barrier that surrounded Number 4, Privet Drive, and was connected by a tether to Harry himself.

Petunia and Vernon seemed to know what it was that he was seeing, but they were not inclined to tell him just yet. That was fine, he decided, for the time being: there would be plenty of time for him to find out the answers behind the mysterious lights later...

"I have no clue what the Hell I'm doing," said Harry to himself, staring intently at the rock in his hand.

It seemed that there was something more to the mysterious light that only his eyes could see, beyond being just an additional source of illumination. He could control the light emanating from his body, to a certain extent. Through an embarrassing amount of trial and error, he came to the understanding that there was significant meaning to the manipulation of his own light.

He could make himself slightly stronger, marginally accelerate his rate of healing, and cause himself to instantly fall asleep or wake up. However, the most truly interesting effects of controlling his inner light came about when he pushed it out of his body.

It no longer behaved like a mere light. Rather, he could control it as if it were a mass of threads, or a pile of sand, or a puddle on the ground. But he could just as easily have it behave as a gas, or continue to use it as normal light. This bizarre combination of properties led to him mentally redubbing this psychoreactive not-quite-energy-but-not-really-matter-either as: Ether.

And when he pushed his ether into the rock in his hand, he could move it with his mind. "This is fucking telekinesis," he murmured to himself in awe.

He couldn't wait to show his family this talent that he'd developed.

Several months later, a fourteen year-old Harry was sitting lazily in his armchair, watching some random anime on his computer for background noise while simultaneously levitating two rocks in a lazy orbit around his head.

There was a tentative knock at his door. He paused the video, before swiveling to the door.

Dudley would've just barged in, and Vernon would just project his voice through the door. Must've been Petunia then.

"Yeah!?" he shouted, slightly in exasperation and curiosity, but mostly in annoyance at being interrupted.

"May I come in?" came his Aunt's tentative voice.

He rolled his eyes and flexed his ether, causing the door to swing open. "Whatcha want?"

She stared at the door for a moment, as if terrified that he'd telekinetically slam it in her face before turning to him. "You got some mail today," she murmured, her fingers trailing up and down an odd envelope of parchment.

"'Kay. Just lay it on my desk and I'll read it... whenever," he said, before turning back to his laptop.

"No, you don't understand. This... is a bit more important than you realize." That got his attention. He revolved his chair back around and looked at her. She knew that, in the moment he flashed those crimson eyes of his, he saw exactly just how uncomfortable (i.e. completely terrified) she was of having this conversation with him. And she knew that he could infer the origins of her feelings with frightening accuracy in almost the same amount of time.

He also noticed, finally, that there was a pile of mail all about Petunia, reaching up to her knees. And every single one of them was exactly the same: addressed to one Mr. Harry Potter, followed by a degree of specificity towards his residence that bordered on the disturbing. And they were all saturated in ether.

He took a moment to think, before gesturing to his bed. She sat on it, still playing nervously with his letter. He reached his hand out, silently, and she gave it to him while chewing on her lip.

"This will explain everything we haven't yet told you," was what her body language and micro-expressions were telling him.

His eyes flashed at it for a millisecond, and he frowned. "It's glowing." The statement held a question in it, one that Petunia refused to meet his eyes and answer. Harry narrowed his eyes and morphed them into Sharingan with a mere thought. "You know what my Eyes can see. You know what all of this means, even though you can't see it yourself. What is this, and why have you waited so long to tell me?"

She let out a shuddering breath, her gaze still on the floor. "I... you can see magic, Harry. You're a wizard, just like your parents, my sister and brother-in-law." Harry frowned at her, his Eyes flashing again though he made no comment. "And wizards... their society is hidden from outsiders. We didn't tell you because..." but she trailed off, her eyes pleading as she stared at her nephew.

The words that came out of her mouth didn't surprise him though. Actually, if anything, they seemed to be accepted at face value, and taken in the manner of somebody having their suspicions confirmed. Still, she felt like this long overdue revelation about the origin of his powers should have had far greater impact on him.

"So that's what it is, what it's been this whole time?" he mused, absentmindedly rubbing his chin as he appraised the envelope again with a more appreciating gaze. "Makes sense. The only thing I don't get though," he started, his eyes glittering with secret amusement which made her suspect he was merely humoring her expectations of how this conversation should go for the sake of dramatics, "-is why didn't you tell me I was a wizard? Obviously I'm not normal..."

She started wringing her hands. "I wasn't sure... if that's what you were. I thought that maybe there was a chance that you... were like me. Somebody that they wouldn't accept. Somebody who didn't fit in with their idea of how a person should be. I thought that you didn't have enough magic for them to want you, or that maybe... oh well, it doesn't matter."

"Come again?"

"Your mother, Harry... She got her letter in the mail when she was eleven, but there was something special about her even before then: she could force flowers to bloom with just a breath from her lungs, or launch herself from the swingset dozens of meters in a single bound. She had magical powers. She was born with magic. And I... wasn't." The bitter tears started falling harder now, as she relived her bitter past.

They sat in silence together, Harry staring blankly at her..

"She left our world behind. She went off to that school, made friends, trained her powers, and fell in love with that detestable James Potter. Her ties to our normal world dwindled, and her ties to that magical world... multiplied." Her frown deepened for a moment, before she continued, "Eventually, she severed contact with us altogether, after our parents died and I... was glad to be rid of her. That freak. I-"

Harry sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose as he ignored her hate-filled rant. "So you thought I would be a reject like you? That I wasn't magical enough for this other world?" She nodded primly at that, her lip curling into a deep grimace of hatred. "But it turns out that they just changed the starting age for going to magic school, and obviously you weren't told of this because you weren't a part of their society... though it makes sense for them to let people grow up at least a little bit before they're taught how to warp reality."

She snarled once before abruptly standing up and walking to the entryway to his bedroom, "I'll go back to pretending you don't exist soon enough, child. I hope that world sucks you in and swallows you up just like my sister. I hope that one day, when you leave for that school, you'll never come back."

His aunt stared at him with haunted, sadistic eyes, before finally leaving the room.

"Holy fuck she was pissed."

The moment was somewhat ruined by the constant fluttery-crunch of her feet exploring a path through the deluge of mail.

Harry groaned loudly at the mess, before firing off, "Why are there so many letters? Would a single letter not have sufficed? D'you think they're pranking us?!" His question got a rather unladylike bark of laughter out of his aunt, as if he'd reminded her of some private joke that he wasn't privy to. After chuckling softly at the noises of his aunt's struggle, Harry turned his attention to the letter, and perused it again at a much more leisurely pace, without his Sharingan. "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? Robes? An owl or a toad or a rat? A magic fucking wand? Where am I gonna bloody get all this!?"

Then an enormous thumping of the front door reverberated through the house. "You've got a visitor, Harry," came Petunia's voice, carrying far more goodwill to it than she normally would if someone banged on their door like that. She really was in a better mood, knowing that soon he would be out of her hair for a majority of the year.

"... And why, oh why," Harry continued his self-directed rant, "-do I get the feeling that this visitor will have an explanation for all these damned letters?"

A/N: So, I know, it's a new story altogether. Please don't kill meeee.

This story has been bouncing around in my head for a loooong time. It's majorly inspired by other fanfics, such as The Wizard of the Kaleidoscope, Harry Potter and the Blazing Goblet, A Cadmean Victory, Partially Kissed Hero, His Angel, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, The Lie I've Lived, Lightning Dragon's Roar, The Mind Arts, and Child of the Storm. There are others, but those are my inspirations from this fandom's fanfiction. Really, just look through my profile's favorites list and you'll get a pretty good idea of what I like.

If you have any comments, questions, or concerns you can leave a review or PM me. Also, if you would kindly review, favorite, follow, and/or share the story with communities, I would greatly appreciate it.