Harry let out a long, heavy sigh, then shook his head firmly. "No. Just… no. I am not dealing with this drama."
He turned on his heel, already walking away from the street corner where he had arrived. Now that he had properly recognized his surroundings, this world seemed to grow more irritating, just thinking about it, thinking about the fact that he was now here.
This world was one that just seemed to be built on misunderstandings, unnecessary complications, and rash, emotional mistakes. Nearly everything that happened here occurred because the people involved simply couldn't help themselves, they lied to themselves and others to maintain a shred of moral high ground, all while disregarding the lives of anyone outside their immediate circle of obsession.
It was a carousel of "I did it for my family" and "I did it for love," usually spoken while standing over the cooling corpses of dozens of people who had absolutely nothing to do with their petty squabbles.
He was in New Orleans. He knew that for certain now. A worn-out billboard caught his attention, it featured a picture of a man who was clearly Vincent Griffith. The board looked cracked and faded, but the man's face was unmistakable.
He knew the face very well from when he watched the show, the man had been one of his favorites for a time, so it was not hard to recognize him.
That alone might have been a coincidence, it may just have been a multiversal thing, seeing a similar face, after all, he didn't remember Vincent ever having his face on a billboard, but it's not like the show showed everything about the city.
But with Harry's heightened hearing, it was easy to pick up the whispers of the city around him as he moved through with people chatting about.
"…Marcel beat Klaus…" "…drove the Originals out of the French Quarter…" "…King of the city…"
Harry groaned audibly, the sound echoing off. "Why this universe? Why this nonsense world?" He felt like banging his head into a wall.
The world of The Vampire Diaries and The Originals was not a universe he was fond of in the slightest. It was a place where the problems were almost exclusively caused by the same people who claimed they were the only ones who could fix them.
The witches were the worst offenders, they were the architects of their own misery, nearly 80% of everything that was wrong with the world could be traced back to them.
And then the start of the series starts the current mess by calling the Originals back to New Orleans to deal with Marcel, only to immediately make enemies of the very monsters they had invited in. They treated their Ancestors like gods, yet the Ancestors were just dead, bitter versions of the people currently making bad decisions.
The Originals themselves weren't much better. They caused death and destruction everywhere they went for over a thousand years, but the moment someone finally stood up to them, they acted as if a great sin had been committed against the "sanctity of family."
The sheer hypocrisy was breathtaking. They had spent a thousand years daggering each other and stuffing their siblings in boxes, but let a stranger touch one of them, and suddenly they were a united front of righteous indignation.
It also reminded him of Damon Salvatore in Mystic Falls, a man who created problems by thinking he was the only one 'dark' enough to solve them, only to make things ten times worse and then blame someone else while murdering a few dozen innocent bystanders to vent his frustrations.
Stefan was no better, hiding his "ripper" tendencies behind a mask of brooding martyrdom. Klaus was a man-child with a god complex, Elijah was a hypocrite in a tailored suit, and Kol was a petulant arsonist.
And then there was Elena Gilbert. She was the one he hated the most, he had never even in the entire series felt Elena among his top 50 favorite characters. She was just that annoying, a black hole of morality around which everyone else's common sense went to die.
It was sure a stupid thing with her. A girl so remarkably average that it was shocking that men with centuries of life experience decided to burn the world down just to keep her from having a bad day. What nonsense.
Luckily, he wasn't in Mystic Falls, and it seemed he had arrived in the Originals timeline. Based on the gossip of the local vampires, who he was certain were vampires, their magic felt cold. Marcel had already won. That placed this somewhere after the third season of that particular drama.
He was actually a little disappointed. If there was one person in this entire mess he'd actually been interested in meeting, it was the ultimate witch, Dahlia. That woman was a force of nature.
She had put the paws on every single person who stepped up to her, and it had taken nothing short of the "power of friendship" and family plot armor to stop her. She'd been seconds away from making the Originals permanent statues.
She actually understood power, how to take it, and how to use it without whining about her feelings every five minutes, and best of all, she knew what she was, an evil bitch, and didn't complain about it. The only thing she cared about was her power.
Harry scooped a generous spoonful of the ice cream he'd bought while sightseeing, savoring the cold sweetness.
"Still," he muttered, "there is the magic." The one thing that was interesting about this world.
As someone who lived for the study of the arcane, this world wasn't a total loss. The magic system here was a fascinating 'soft' magic, similar to his own world but flavored differently.
If he could find the grimoires of Esther or Freya Mikaelson, he could certainly add some interesting tricks to his repertoire. He wasn't going to go to the effort of finding the Necromancer's book, he didn't know where it was, nor did he care that much to search, and he certainly wasn't traveling to Virginia for Emily Bennett's notes, but a little local research into the "Expression" or "Ancestral" magic wouldn't hurt. They were interesting magic after all.
Eventually, Harry found himself in a dim, noisy bar in the French Quarter. He wasn't much for drinking, with his constitution, alcohol felt like flavored water, but it served as a way to pass the time while his power recharged for the next jump.
He sat at the counter, his senses expanding. Even through the music and the smell of stale beer, he could feel them. Dozens of non-humans. Even the bartender wasn't human, a vampire, if the cold thrum of magic he felt was any indication. Marcel had certainly turned this place into a great place for his kind.
He could sense the witches, too. They felt similar to the wizards of his home world, though there were very few around these parts, it seemed only on the farther side of the city were they more.
The few werewolves around felt different as well, reminding him of Remus.
Harry finished his first drink and felt the bartender moving behind him when he set another shot for Harry. He didn't bother turning around. He simply snapped his fingers.
Snap.
The empty glass disappeared into thin air and reappeared in his hand as he took a sip. He felt the bartender stiffen, the man's heart rate spiking in a sudden surprise. Harry ignored the man's stare.
A faint smirk played on Harry's lips as his eyes narrowed. He decided to test his new power, the Authorities he had gotten from the Greek pantheon. Killing Hyperion and Kronos.
His eyes suddenly gained a golden ring around them. Suddenly, the world around him began to accelerate. It was exactly like a YouTube video set to 2x speed. People blurred, their conversations turning into high-pitched chirping, their movements jerky and frantic. Then, with a thought, he flipped the switch.
Time slowed to a crawl. The dust motes in the air hung suspended. A drop of spilled beer stayed frozen on the edge of the counter, a shimmering globule refusing to fall. It wasn't a total stop, but it was close enough that even a hummingbird's wings would have looked like stationary fans.
This was his Authority over Time, gained from the defeat of Kronos.
He leaned back, admiring the stillness. It wasn't absolute control over time, but He could speed up his surroundings, slow them down to make every movement a crawl, stop time entirely for a maximum of ten seconds, a window in which he could end any fight, or rewind the last sixty seconds of reality. And, most importantly, he was now immune to time-based abilities from others.
He wouldn't be frozen again by anyone using time based powers.
Then, he focused on his other new acquisition, the Authority of Light. He got from killing Hyperion.
A faint, golden shimmer danced across his skin. He felt the cool air around him heat up as he watched people close to him start sweating without even realizing what was happening.
It was accompanied by a sudden, intense heat that he kept tightly reined in, he felt like a core in his chest, like a miniature sun resting beneath his skin. It felt amazing.
He had absolute control over light and heat now.
It was similar to his absolute power over the earth. So the power of light, combined with the power of Earth he'd taken from Geb, Harry was, in his own words, "stacked."
"Hey."
A voice snapped him out of his internal inventory. Harry took a long swish of his drink and turned his stool to see three men standing behind him. They were dressed in leather jackets and boots, glaring at him.
"What?" Harry asked lazily, his voice cutting through the bar's noise.
"Don't you know the rules, kid?" one of them growled, his upper lip curling to reveal the beginning of fangs. "No magic in this territory. This is vampire territory."
Harry raised a brow, completely unimpressed. "And why should I care about your rules?"
The one on the left snarled, his eyes flashing with anger. "You witches are always arrogant. Marcel may have allowed you to use magic more freely than before, but don't forget who the King of New Orleans is. This is vampire territory. No witch performs magic here without permission."
Harry took another slow sip of his drink, looking the vampire up and down as if he were examining a particularly dull insect. "I'm not from around here. Whatever deal you have with the local spell casters and herb-gatherers has nothing to do with me. If you value your lives, you'll mind your manners and go back to whatever dark corner you crawled out of."
The three vampires exchanged a look of sheer disbelief before the man in the middle scowled, his face shifting into a grey, veined mask of hunger. The "vamp-face" of this world was particularly ugly, Harry noted. somewhat cool, but still ugly in his opinion.
"Take him," the leader ordered, his voice dropping into a guttural rasp. "We'll teach him a lesson of what happens when you mess with the rules in the Quarter."
Harry downed the rest of his drink and set the glass on the counter with a deliberate, echoing clink. He looked at them with a glint of genuine, dark amusement in his green eyes.
"Oh?" he asked softly, a small, dangerous smile forming on his lips. "Is that so? You're going to teach me a lesson? I'm curious to see what lesson a glorified tick thinks he can provide."
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