"Yes, well, it probably wouldn't. The odds of you coming from the same Earth I'm from are…." the boy looked to the distance for a moment as he tried to calculate the odds.
Reed beat him to the punch however by simply stating, "One to the 10,000 percentile. The Negative Zone interacts with and overlaps nearly all 'real' realities. You're probably just from one of the others, which means that whatever crimes you committed, they wouldn't have any impact on your living on our Earth. You will have to explain those in depth later, if not to us, then to Agatha Harkness. She's our nanny for Franklin and a sorceress, so she knows about magical things."
"An excellent thought!", the man said. "Oh, you asked who I am. My name's Harry Potter, formerly known as the 'destined one' by people whose brains were much smaller than a match box. Pleased to meet you."
Warning, Prepare for an Info dump! Those who don't care about Harry's background need not read – fandom clichés galore
From the moment he returned to it, Harry Potter was never what anyone in the Wizarding World expected him to be. But it was thought by those that survived the Civil War and had known him at all, that it was Hermione Granger's death that truly threw him round the twist.
Harry was not a brave dauntless Gryffindor or even a loyal Hufflepuff, Savior of the Light. For one thing, Harry was intelligent, as in very intelligent. After he had made an agreement with the teachers to never share his grades with his relatives, who did not need another reason to hate him (they could made up reasons all on their own, thank you very much), he routinely scored in the upper one percentile in the nation on every test he took in school. It was only the need for parental permission that stopped him from skipping several grades, but this did not stop him learning.
Harry spent as much time as possible in the library learning and, as such, was known as the brightest kid in the school by every teacher that taught him. But the secret was well kept from his relatives. It almost became a conspiracy of silence in direct retaliation to what the teachers assumed was a conspiracy somewhere else. A few of the teachers had previously tried to help young Harry when they noticed fresh bruises and other marks on his body. Some of them had even noticed how underfed he always looked. However, they soon found that for some reason, something or someone was protecting his relatives from prosecution.
One of the teachers, in fact, had gone to two different social workers and found out later that both had been moved to different districts. The teacher himself would have forgotten about the entire thing if he hadn't found his notes on the abuse he had made over the school year on his computer. Another social worker had it much worse however and it was what happened to Mr. Palancy that really told Harry someone was out to keep him down.
Mr. Palancy was a social worker who lived in the area, and he tried several dozen times to do something about Harry. He would start proceedings against his guardians and even sometimes get Harry away from his relatives for a brief time. Then something would happen, and he would be left with nothing but his computerized notes of the events. As he kept on trying, the memory loss grew worse, and he was driven slowly insane.
Harry would later learn that this was done by Albus Dumbledore, who felt that the protection living with his blood relative gave the young boy was worth any price. When he found out about this, Harry disagreed … he disagreed most vehemently.
So, Harry came into the Wizarding World knowing not only that he had an enemy out there that was using magic, but also about magic itself. After all, you can only spend so much time in a library until you figure out that the strange occurrences happening around you all the time (bones healing in a night, cuts healing a little faster, living through having your head smashed by a frying pan, and teleporting away from your cousin when he's playing his favorite game of Harry Hunting with his mates) are magical.
From there it was a small step to trying to control what he could do with magic. Two years and more of controlling his magic and researching the effects bore fruit. Later, he was almost always able to perform spells wandlessly after a bit of practice.
But what really changed him more than his magical abilities was his relationship with the local librarian and those teachers who were in the know about what was going on. His teachers became his friends, the librarian his confidant, and his intelligence their secret pleasure to cultivate.
Yet, for all this, it was the events on the Hogwarts express showed the Wizarding World the mind that Harry had thus developed. Because it was here he met his first friend his own age in the person of Hermione Granger.
Harry knew of Hermione from their scholastic records; they routinely fought over the first position score in their grades in the country. Thankfully, it was a friendly competition and their recently begun correspondence had hinted that they would be meeting at Hogwarts, though, of course, neither of them had come out and said it. Their "So what is magic?" conversation, however, showed how analytical their minds were and eventually dragged in several dozen Ravenclaws who overheard their discussion.
One Ronald Weasley and one Draco Malfoy attempted to enter their compartment, intending to become friends or otherwise influence Harry Potter, only to be scared away by some of the terms the two were exchanging such as 'mass exchange', 'energy to matter', 'matter to matter conversion', and 'conservation' of said items, as well as 'atoms' and 'quantum'. When 'quantum' is mentioned most people run for the hills.
Their conversation continued all the way up until Hermione had to put on the Sorting Hat and, with it still in her mind, there was no way in hell the Hat would put her anywhere but in Ravenclaw. Hermione was a little disappointed by this, hoping to have gone into the same house as Dumbledore, but her disappointment didn't last long as Harry was sorted in with her.