4 Chapter 4: Pre-teen

With a self-satisfied grin, he had waddled off downstairs, and Harry had shaken his head, wondering why he had even bothered asking.

Pulling his mind back into the moment, he looked back into his reflection's eyes and took a deep breath, pushing down all his fear into the depths of his mind.

Bottling up one's emotions wasn't a particularly hard art to master, especially for a pre-teen, and soon a veil of complete calmness fell on his mind.

'Alright, I shouldn't panic. I need to think through this logically,' he thought to himself. One thing was for sure. Last night's dream wasn't a dream. And if it wasn't a dream, it had to have been some sort of hallucination.

It certainly wasn't a bad explanation, Harry decided. It could be some sort of drugs, or even one of those weird mushrooms, causing his hallucinations.

Perhaps they had somehow made his way into his food or water, or perhaps they had been airborne. It was possible. Definitely possible.

A strange image of a man wearing a cinema projector on his head suddenly flashed into Harry's mind, and bemusedly, Harry took a moment to consider the strange idea that something could actually be projecting a screen in front of him.

But as soon as that thought made it into his mind he immediately dismissed it. Aunt Petunia and Dudley hadn't noticed anything on him, nor any projections.

Another strange thought floated into his mind.

He could see those boxes clearly without his glasses, and that implied only one thing. That he wasn't seeing something real.

That whatever was happening, it was happening inside his mind.

An odd, almost insane thought drifted to the front of his mind… one that had occurred to him last night, but that he had discarded in the heat of the moment.

'My life is a game.'

"No…" he thought with a rising amount of panic. These strange… weird… out of ordinary ideas that he was thinking of… they were not something that he would have thought of by himself.

He was a fairly reasonable kid and this was too far out for him to have thought up on his own. Something was definitely influencing his mind…

'Drugs,' he thought with a spike of panic, 'It has to be drugs!'

Thankfully, there was a quick and easy way of testing that. Being Harry in the Dursley house meant you only got to eat and drink the bare minimum needed to survive.

That meant he could easily check everything that he had consumed in the last few days. Quickly pulling on fresh clothes, Harry ran down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he opened the fridge and grabbed the remaining few loaves of bread that were remaining from the package he had stolen from last night.

They were the only thing he had eaten in the last 3 days, and if there was anything in his body that had gotten in there with his mouth, it would've been through these.

Checking to see that Dudley; who was seated at the table; wasn't looking, he crumbled the bread into dust, dropped it into Dudley's juice, and used a spoon to stir it in. He then took it over and handed it to Dudley.

The boy took it, gave it a dainty little sniff, tossed a smirk towards Harry, and downed the entire glass before letting out a loud burp. He then jumped off the chair and waddled off upstairs. Throughout it all, Harry watched him with keen eyes.

Nothing.

No reaction at all.

This, combined with the fact that the rest of the house drank the same water as him, ruled out his little theory of drugs.

Harry stilled, and his mind went into overdrive, completely of his control, making all the connections for him.

The Gamer under his name last night, the status screens, the text he'd seen above Aunt Petunia's head, and the lack of anything else that seemed even a close enough probable reason for his… condition… it all left him with only one possible explanation he could cling on to his current situation.

It wasn't ideal and he wasn't anywhere near convinced, but it was all he had.

"When you have eliminated the impossible," he muttered to himself, "whatever remains, however improbable… must be the truth."

On his way downstairs, Harry slipped into Dudley's second bedroom. After a good amount of ruffling around in the dust and old toys, he found what he was looking for.

A small booklet about the role-playing board game things that Dudley used to play with Piers Polkiss before he first got his computer. He quickly stuffed it into his pocket and rushed downstairs, fearful of his Uncle's wrath.

As he absentmindedly cooked breakfast for his relatives, Harry had some time to give some calm thought to his situation.

Since he had decided to settle on this… Gamer theory, for lack of a better term, for his condition until he had a better idea of what was going on, he had a plethora of questions that he needed to ponder upon.

Had he been like… this… all his life, or had something turned him this way? Strange things had always happened around him, something he had always thought was the reason his relatives liked to call him a 'freak' but turning Mrs. Cole's wig blue had nothing on this full-blown reality reboot thing.

Despite that, Harry couldn't help but think that there was a relation between the two.

And perhaps there was, because after all, in most cases the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

For thinking about this new ability in relation with Occam's Razor in mind, you have gained +1 WIS.

Harry blinked.

'Really?' he thought, 'It is that simple? And what in the world is Occam's Razor?'

Just to make sure, Harry intoned once again, "Status," and there it was, on his profile's list of statistics.

WIS-2

"Matter over mind," Harry muttered bemusedly. Reality was shaping his character in the Game, and the game was giving his traits in real life a quantified presence.

It was as if someone had put a new operating system on… him. Harry promptly decided to give it a test, and after a quick look at his Uncle to make sure he wasn't looking, tossed and flipped the hotcake he was making.

---------

If you want more chapters faster do add this to your library