The Lair of the SlowFox

Castle Fox interwebz are still best characterised as 'sporadic'. Hence why I wasn't able to post Ch 27 of the OotP re-read until just now.

'tis at least a nice day outside - washing currently drying, by which readers may have deduced that my reassemblage of the washing machine doesn't seem to have been as immediately disastrous as any number of worst-case scenarios might have played out. Am still treating the object with a fair degree of caution, though.

P and I are about to head into town - 's been a quiet morning, mostly. Couple of dog walks, reading the paper (albeit skipping quickly over the footie results) and such like.

OK, this is the sequel fic to Potions, a 6th year AU fic which features Ron/Hermione and Harry/Parvati. Obviously, since it's a sequel, it's beneficial if you read the first instalment before proceeding...

To whet your appetite for the cut, Harry, Parvati, candlelight. Aw - what more could you want?

( Potions - Chapter 2: Detention )

TTK:Reloaded is finished. 90 chapters, 350,000 words and many, many deaths.

That was a long slog of an edit, but am glad it's done.

Chapter Thirty-Three: Fight and Flight (contd.)

"I don't understand," worried Harry, as he looked wildly about the Forbidden Forest. "Jo said that she'd write in some Thestrals to get us to the Ministry so that we can rescue Sirius..."

"Well where are they, then?" asked Ron, looking nervously around, not happy at the imposed requirement of trying to spot invisible objects in a dark forest.

"I can't see any, either," offered Neville, apologetically.

Luna, on the other hand, had her arms wrapped around a nearby tree as she observed, in a dream-like voice: "This place is absolutely crawling with plotbunnies..."

"With what?" asked Harry, irritated at the diversion.

"Oh no!" gasped Hermione, wringing her hands nervously. "No, no, no, no, no..."

Alarmed, Ginny asked, "What is it?"

Hermione looked at the party with eyes full of grave concern: "We're in.... we're in fanfic," she wailed in a voice full of distress.

Oddly enough, this seemed to settle Ron's nerves remarkably. "Excellent! Well," he offered hopefully, casting an appraising eye over his female companions (and possibly the male ones too), "let's just agree that what happens in the fic stays in the fic, right?" He started to loosen his robes.

"Ron!" admonished Hermione, crossly. "Not all fanfic is about... about... about 'sex'," she finished, uncomfortably.

"It isn't?" gasped Ginny, incredulously.

"What fic have you been reading?" asked Ron of Hermione, bewildered.

"We have to get to the Ministry of Magic!" Harry reminded them in tones of near frantic urgency. "They've got Sirius! We've got t..."

Neville suddenly interrupted The Boy Who Lived: "Hey! What's in this box?"

Their attention drawn, the six stalwarts of Dumebldore's Army gathered around the large crate. The words 'SLOWFOX QUALITY BALLOONS' were stencilled in large letters on the wood. Somebody had tried to cross the word 'QUALITY' out: an arrow pointed to the edit, annotated with the words 'Not Bloody Likely'.

Ginny looked at her brother slightly guiltily: "Isn't that your handwriting?" she asked.

Ron was considering the crate, brow creased deep in thought, and looking very much like he thought he knew what this all meant, but couldn't quite place the memory.

"So we're going to take a hot-air balloon to the Ministry of Magic," announced Luna, happily, as they spread the crate's contents about the clearing. "Daddy says they're perfectly safe, as long as the Damphysimbians holding you up are happy," she added, unperturbed.

I'm up to Chapter 42 of the edit, now. Just another 48 to go.

My, I, certainly, liked, my, commas, Back, In, The, Day, didn't, I?

It's quite a slow process - I've got the fic in a single .html file open in Firefox in one window, and the source file in vim (best text editor on the planet, bar none) in the other.

None of the story's changing - I have truncated a couple of scenes, and changed some of the dialogue. Trying, also, to get to grips with consistent capitalisation: Portkey, Apparate, House Points and so on.

Odd things strike me: I Sorted Seamus' little sister into Ravenclaw, but then have her hanging out in the Gryffindor Common Room... how come no-one mentioned that in their reviews (OK, there's like 50-odd chapters between mentions, but still...)?

I'd love to try and make Malfoy more in character (I think, of all the voicings, I'm furthest off with him, at least initially), but I just can't do that and still keep the plot the same. Same goes for some of the scenes - I thought about cutting the lakeside party for Hermione that the Twins throw, but you need that so that the betrayal bites harder later on.

It's amazing, to me, that the fic even remotely echoes its summary:

Well, we’re back after the GoF, and things have taken a turn for the darker. Sword fights, apocalyptic battles, new kinds of magic coming right at you! We’ve got love, betrayal, angst. Doing the right thing, doing the wrong thing, and doing it in style. A Muggle-style beach party by the lake, a Yule ball and the full Quidditch season! See Azkaban! See Fudge on a power trip! Debate where Snape’s loyalty really lies. See what really prompted Slytherin, Gryffindor, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff to establish the school. This is dark - expect deaths, and a PG-13ish rating.

I wrote that hostage to fortune (apocalyptic battles! Modest, much?) *points up* after uploading the prologue and the first three chapters - all I had was a vague idea about where things were going, and then I discovered that the characters didn't agree at all with what I was asking them to do, and were intent on doing things their own way. Which was a large part of the fun.

The bad points? Apart from character death, wholesale-stylee, Harry ended up waaaaaaaaaay too powerful (even if it did all come at a cost), which had never really been the intention. I'd much rather the fic had been more Harry/Parvati than Harry/Cho... way too many skeletons (sorry Cedric) in the latter. OTOH, the Harry-Parvati interaction through the middle of the fic I quite like (particularly when they're at Blackrock).

So here's the thing - what if, rather than being Tom Riddle, it had been a Time-Turnered Harry who Frank had spotted skulking outside the Riddle House that day 50 years previously?

What if the whole Time-Turnering concept in Prisoner of Azkaban had been foreshadowing to prepare us for the time-hopping to come?