Finally, someone busts Harry's over-inflated ego and sets his arrogant ass aflame. Go Dumbledore!
Unfortunately, the point didn't get across, but considering your characterization, that was to be expected. A scene well done, and I'm hoping it'll have some bearing on future chapters.
The scene with Susan was just awesome, very realistic. Not so with Ginny. That one seemed... hollow. No feel to it, if you know what I mean.
The borderline Necromancy thing is a good twist. I wonder if you're setting Harry up for the old "power corrupts" path. That'd be an interesting read...
All in all, nice chapter that sets the pace pretty well. Looking forward to your next update, and I hope it'll have some action in it. When's Harry gonna go after the Cup, by the way?

 

Pretty cool chapter, though not all that much happened. I have to agree with ArseNick: it was a nice change to see Harry taken down a peg by Dumbledore, as opposed to him pwning everyone since coming back to Hogwarts. The Ginny scene sucked, but I have a feeling that shit isn't completely hashed out between the two of them anyway.

As for the borderline Necromancy thing, I dunno: I honestly think that with the way you've characterized Dumbledore, he might be down for using such a substitute. Use the 'Blood bag" and raise Harry himself, y'know? I guess I'm saying that you're introducing something that Dumbledore should've thought about himself IMO, so it seems weird that he would balk at it if Harry and Bill go through with the ritual.

 

If I understand correctly, blood sacrifice is needed and Dumbledore probably ignored all rituals involving dead babies, as it is a school after all.

Good chapter, I laughed at the Hagrid/Hack part.

 

This isn't really relevant to TML, but just thought I'd ask here anyway.

What's the possibility of this happening, jbern?

And will the "Inner Eye of Harry Potter" be a H/Narcissa fic, or are they two separate ones?

@Dethklok: Fuck the Kobol shit, you mean. BSG does nothing for me.

 

Fuck the 'Inner Eye' shit. That might be interesting, maybe, but there is one idea that jbern tossed out which I have to see.

Harry Potter/Battlestar Galactica. The new one.

jbern calls this story idea 'The Lords of Kobol' (I think) and as a rabid nBSG fan, I have to see how exactly jbern will make such a concept fly.

 

I say jbern needs to do a nice pre OotP Harry/Cho fic.

 

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who is worried by Harry's whinyness in the lastest few chapters here. I think there is currently far too much angst and confrontations and far too little Troll action/action action.
The Hack scene was by far the best in the update.

Why is there the need for Harry and Dumbledore to go at it every 5 seconds?
I'd find a way of getting Harry out of Hogwarts quickly (and I hope this is what the Necromancy dead baby is for - because if it's not then I don't like it)

 

I guess I am the only one here that is confused on how exactly Dumbledore managed to get away with casting a spell on Harry. Seeing as that is just me alone, could someone politely inform as to how the fuck he gets away with breaking a magical Oath?

 

He didn't give us the exact wording to the oath, so perhaps it just says that Dumbledore can't use harmful magics on Harry. The old man probably just convinced himself that it was for Harry's own good and proceeded from there. Since all of the magical oaths I've read about seem to be based on intent, if he tried hard enough he might have been able to delude himself into a loop-hole.

Edit: The oath seems to just cover Obliviations and Love potions, so he's not violating it when he turned HP into a foot stool.

 

A nice filler chapter, but still just a filler chapter. Hack and Hagrid's drunken carousing and footstool!Harry was worth it, though. "It's all the same in the dark!" LOL. The scene with Snape was an interesting development. The thing Harry has to worry about is which debt will win out in the end? The Life Debt, the Dark Mark, or whatever oath Snape owes Dumbledore?

The scene with Ginny was just like any confrontation with an ex after a bad break-up: weird, awkward, and leaving at least one side with need to bathe. It will be interesting to see how Ginny's friends react to her using love potions and memory charms on Harry. I have this feeling that Ron's comments in an earlier chapter about it being OK to most Wizards and Witches won't fly when you use them in combination with memory charms.

General Custer, if it was really that easy no one would bother with stunning and disarming spells. Remember what McGonagall said in PS: Transfiguration is the hardest to master and is dangerous if you don't know what you are doing. We've seen plenty of examples of teacups with mouse tails and pincushions that roll up when you poke them. Humans are much more complex than mice and hedgehogs, so turning a teenager into a ferret or a footstool would be very difficult for most people. However, Dumbledore is a master of Transfiguration and Barty Jr. had to be competent and powerful to overcome the Goblet of Fire, so they can pull it off. Most people are going to stick to stupefy, expeliarmas, and incarcerous (spelling?, meh).

As for the Oath, we don't know the exact wording (most likely intentional on JBern's part) so who knows what mental gymnastics Dumbledore did to enable him to pull it off. Dumbledore did say that Harry should be able to reverse the transfiguration in about 30 minutes. Apart from some much deserved humiliation Harry was never in any real danger.

All in all a good update. As usual you leave us wanting more JBern!

/shakes fist

 

Is it just fannon convention that claims being an animagus would allow you to counter transfiguration? I know Slughorn turned himself into a chair (or was it just him hiding in the chair). Changing yourself and then being unable to change back when you wanted would be rather annoying. If used in a duel it would win every single time. Even if you mangled the spell the effect would be bad enough.

Maybe Dumbledore beat Grindewald this way. Transfigured him into a pair of socks. His 'thing worse than death' could be being transfigured into underwear.

 

If Grindelwald was gay too it may not be that bad for him.

 

The earlier post about Dumbledore being a Master of Transfiguration is what I was basing his ability to do this off of.

Think about this - at the end of OOTP it states that Dumbledore incapacitates the remaining Death Eaters after Voldemort fled. Basically, that sounds like a massive can of whupass got opened.

On the surface, Harry knows Dumbledore did it because.

1. He could.
2. To remind Harry that while Harry is capable of "running with the Big Dogs" the old mongrel still controls the "dog pound".
3. ? Harry's not certain of other motives.

More importantly, Harry has caught on to the fact that Dumbledore rarely does things only based on surface intentions. The deeper motivations are what Harry is more interested in figuring out.

 

I'm personally waiting in anticipation as to what Dumbeldores true motivation was to doing this.

You have fashioned a great Manipulative!Dumbledore, and I know whatever that underlying reason is... it's going to be Emperor Palpatine Level.

 

One point I forgot to mention is that Dumbledore's oath didn't prevent him from doing that to Harry. It was just a little harmless Transfiguration among friends right?

Anyway to answer questions about future stories, Inner Eye is a straight humor piece along the lines of Baja B's Almost a Squib - meaning 1 chapter covering every year. I only plan for each chapter to be at most 5000 words. It's a Harry mentored by Sybil T. from an early age. He shows up at Hogwarts with an appreciation for the real magics of Divination, Arithmancy and Runes - not that foolish wand waving or ingredient mixing. I have a couple of chapters mostly done (1,2) and another (4) started. My goal is to have the whole piece done before releasing any of it.

The Harry/Narcissa piece would also be somewhere between 20 and 30 thousand words. I don't really have an outline other than in my head yet. The plot involves Narcissa ending up at #4 for her own protection and becoming Harry's tutor in Occlumency. Well see where it goes when I start writing it.

The Harry/Hermione piece also isn't outlined, but came out of a rant I had about Hermione during TFtCD. It's an AU book 5 with the premise that instead of trumping up charges and allegations against Harry, Fudge imprisons Hermione in Azkaban for the kidnapping and coercion into a magical oath of Rita Skeeter. Hermione's "treatment" conincides with how well Harry and by extension Dumbledore stay under Fudge's thumb. I thought it would be interesting to see what a book 5 would have looked like minus Hermione. (There's always the notion that Hermione and Ron couldn't really be friends without Harry in the picture. An interesting question is could Ron and Harry?)

The crossover with BSG would be my attempt of Harry sent through the veil and ends up ________ type of story. In this case at a corresponding archway on Caprica several years before the Cylon invasion. The premise here is that the original Lords of Kobol were extremely powerful mages and that magic "faded" away several thousand years ago. Harry shows up not speaking the lingo and ends up in some kind of halfway house until he gets his bearings... The story really starts from there.

I've also got a few one shots roughed out. One is a Lord Voldemort story about him attaining a valuable founder's object and the wizard he murders to turn it into a Horcrux. Basically, I missed writing the Lord Voldemort from Darkness so much that I wanted to write that level of ruthlessness again.

The other one shot I have lurking in my mind right now is a riff on that Kevin Costner movie For the Love of the Game - featuring Ron Weasley as a washed up second string keeper looking for one last bit of glory. I normally relegate Ron to the bench in most of my stories, so I thought it would be intersting to really get into his head several years down the road say in his late thirties to mid forties just barely hanging on with a string of bad marriages and broken friendships behind him.

 

Win

I'll wait till you actually post to give my judgement on it.

 

Oh puh-leaze! Harry gets his ego busted on (and recognizes just why it's happening) more in jbern's stories than any others. The old man doesn't need to step in and try to modify Harry's behavior (hello love potion).

As I said, jbern's Harry is well aware of when he's fucking up and doesn't usually need anyone to tell him when he's doing it. Like with Ginny, he realized that castigating her 'just wasn't on' and even admitted to Luna that it was a bad idea, without any prompting. That's pretty damned big of him, considering he has every right to be furious with the youngest Weasley. He's much more mature than people are giving him credit for.

Dumbledore is an overreaching user and a manipulative bastard who is possibly more full of himself than Harry (supposedly) and Snape combined.

His little show with transfiguring Harry, sticking his stinking feet on him and then letting Fawkes shit on him serves no purpose other than to piss Harry off and make him harder to work with. In short, it was childish, and more so than anything Harry's done so far in TML.

An important thing to remember is that Harry is a sixteen year old who has been beat on, lied to, used, and betrayed his whole life and has the fate of the world on his shoulders. Dumbledore, on the other hand, is over a century old and, though he may think he's got the whole world in his hands, could pass the buck to someone else on a whim if he really couldn't take the strain anymore. Harry hasn't got that luxury.

So, despite being more than 100 years older than Harry, Albus routinely makes just as many fuck-ups and on a larger scale. And, courtesy of his 'lesson' in this chapter, he's capable of just as much immaturity. Taking all of that into consideration, Harry, though he could be excused for some occasional attitude problems, seems to be 'behaving' himself better at 16 than Dumbledore is at over 100.

Dumbledore has always been a good one for believing that there is a different set of rules for him than for everyone else. Self righteous old prick needs the taste knocked out of his mouth, right after he gets his ass kicked hard enough that his head pops back out of it.

Holier than though lessons on proper conduct from the man who was proven to be a petty thief, conspirator, and accessory to sexual assault fall a little flat. If Dumbledore gets his (permanent) comeuppance before the end of this series, I'll be happy. Barring Harry showing once and for all that Albus isn't God, maybe the old cunt could just get himself killed (pointlessly, not heroically). Call it my second choice.

Good chapter, save for my Dumbledore frustration. For some reason, jbern's Dumbledores (pick any of them) irritate me until the bile tries to creep up my throat. They make me hate the old man more with each story.

Also Note: Dumbledore did not get the better of Harry or get the drop on him. Harry already knew the headmaster was out in the hallway waiting for him and knew that it really was the headmaster, because of the map. Harry was going to go out and talk to him like a civilized human being and the old man decided to hit him with a cheap shot. Could Albus take Harry in a straight up fight? Most likely, yes, but that doesn't mean that this was an example of that.

I don't really buy that 'big dogs' stuff either. They're supposed to be allies, it was Dumbledore that fucked that situation up, not Harry. Dumbledore, and others, should remember that. As far as his object lesson on still being immature in your twilight years having a deeper meaning for Harry; maybe the old fuck could stop pissing off Harry and wasting time, and just talk straight.

Bah. As I said, jbern's Dumbledores always piss me off. Personally speaking, they come about a hair's breadth from spoiling things for me entirely. It's a testament to how much I enjoy the rest of the story that I actually keep reading despite Albus.

 

I know I've said it before but I think that would be a *brilliant* story. I hadn't even thought of the differences that might happen in the Ron/Harry dynamic. Ron being Ron - i.e. lazy and content with the status quo - he could very well not be bothered to going to the pain of trying to help Hermione, and might be at odds with Harry (I'd hope!) because of that. In the past I've always had the impression that Harry typically stuck with Ron against Hermione's nagging, but if she were out of the picture maybe he'd realise her friendship was more valuable to him than he'd thought. And you'd have his 'saving people thing' kick in, of course, particularly since her imprisonment *would* be largely because of him.

The idea of how 5th year would turn out without Hermione is intriguing too, given that it was Hermione who 'saved' Harry from Umbridge, it was her idea and drive which kicked off the DA and so forth. She even helped Harry out on dating Cho, I think?

But most of all I'd love this story for the possible core relationship and drive it might give the tale; you could possibly (please!!) put the (evolving and deepening?) bond between Harry and Hermione right square in the centre of the story. Unlike TFtCD or Bungle which had the plot-driven battle against the bad guys as the primary focus, this new story, back in a canon-like 5th year - when Voldemort only makes his appearance at the end - would instead concentrate on Harry trying to get Hermione out? Hermione trying to help him even from Azkaban?

Okay, next chapter of TML, have Voldemort apparate to the Ministry in the first paragraph and surrender, so you can wind it up and move on to this H/Hr tale instead!

 

If you want a story involving some minor angst, (Hermione in Azkaban), estranged Ron, no appearance of death eaters nor Voldemort and romance up the bazoo, visit portkey.org and stay away from TML and the lie.

 

Hear hear!

Of course, if what was just outlined isn't what you were looking for, please feel free to clarify.