... So much fail, compressed in a single paragraph.

Still, I lol'd. Definitely a guilty pleasure fic. It achieves just what it was written to achieve... it achieves the status of massive win.

 

Good idea, poorly executed. Slight insanity was well shown. 3/5

 

Actually, according to the SRD, there is are very specific reactions when you put Bags of Holding into Portable Holes, and vice-versa:

 

Ouch, looking back at that paragraph now makes me cringe. Sorry about the poor writing. I whipped it up in about 2 hours without a beta. I did write a second aftermath chapter, but looking at it makes me realize that it's written even worse than the first one.

I guess if there's enough demand, I'll make an attempt to rewrite and post it; or if anyone wants to gouge their eyes out as a beta, feel free to drop me an email.

I forget what story I got the ward cascade failure idea from. It might have been 'HP & the Impossibility of Time Travel', but I'm not sure. I just liked the name and concept and tweaked it to work like I wanted it to.

Oh well, thanks for the win and I'm glad you enjoyed the little guilty pleasure storylet I wrote.

 

The only problem with a cascade failure is that they typically happen when there are multiple systems attached to one another and one system overloads another, which in turn over loads yet another and so on. Even assuming that wards even exist (they're not canon, as the only thing close to it is the anti-apparition charm that seems to cover the whole of Hogwarts, and that's the only one we know of).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure

Now, if we assume the existance of wards, a good example of a cascading failure might be as follows.

We could assume that wards require something to maintain them: ward-stones, for example, which absorb the magic of wizards and other magical plants and creatures in the area and convert that magic into wards via a series of special runes and arithmantic equations. It might also be possible that connected to these ward-stones is the very magic that ensures that buildings that stay upright via magic, well, stay upright. We can even assume that such buildings also depend on said ward-stones to maintain the magical services (remember the charmed windows in the Ministry? How about the elevators?).

Harry creates a divice that has two expanded spaces. One is essentially a Bag of Holding, and the other is essentially a Portable Hole. They're not touching . . . yet, but the divice is set on a timer to jam the Portable Hole into the Bag of Holding at a precise time, or when certain conditions are met. He shrinks the divice and sends finds a way to stick it next to the ward-stones, or people he wants to get rid of.

For example, using his invisibility cloak and a broom, he flies down to London, sneaks into the MoM, and drops the divice next to the ward-stone(s) of the MoM. At a certain time, this little sand-grain-sized divice goes off and sucks the ward-stone into the astral dimention, and BOOM, total system failure of the MoM's magical systems. The building above it, being held aloft by nothing more than magic collapses down into the MoM trapping and killing everyone inside, or at the very least, anyone who didn't apparate away. However, even if they got away, the entire ministry is funcionally useless until they can get a new one running, and that could take YEARS.

Since the Floo Network is connected through the MoM, that could effectively destroy the Floo Network.

That, in itself could cripple the British Magical world. Furthermore, have these little grains of sand (devices) scattered throughout the bank and have large portions of the bank sucked into the astral plane - like all the doors of the vults. Maybe not even the money, just the vult-doors.

Basically, rather than making people go SPLODY, you just get them sucked into the astral plane with no way to return.

Actually, you wouldn't even need wards. You could just have Harry send letters with these little grains of sand glued on them to people he wanted to make dissapear.

"Dear Cornelius Fudge,

By the time you finish reading this sentence, you might notice that you are no longer in your office, and I will never have to deal with you again." *WHOOSH-SUCK* Fudge looks up and finds himself on the astral plane, unable to affect the material plane ever again.

 

Yes, but making people go SPLODY is much more amusing than just sending them to another plane. Maybe if it was infested by rapid chipmunk-creaturess that would chew them to death over the course of a millennium or so then yeah, otherwise no.

Aekiel

 

Heh, nibbled for eternity by gibbering chipmunk-things from the Astral plane. A fun time for all.

Actually the way I envisioned it, rather than the D&D explanation of both the bag and portable hole send each other and anything nearby to another dimension, I just had both explode with a factor of 2 and a chance to be amplified by any wards the explosion affects. Each additional bag, hole, or ward will increase the factor of the explosion. So if a bag of holding explodes with an arbitrary explosion size '2', a bag and a portable hole will explode with an explosion size '4', but a bag, a ward, and a portable hole will have an explosion size of '8' instead of '6'. 4 things exploding would be '16', and so on...

The other (possibly more canonical) way I envisioned of making people asplode in the HP world would be to tranfigure something into anti-matter. It should be simpler than changing a match into a needle or whatever, since you're not changing organic and inorganic compounds that look the same, but just the polarity of the protons and electrons in the atoms of whatever. I think I read somewhere that a loaf of bread worth of anti-matter could toast a city. All ideas in a simple physics book.

But anyways, it's magic. And magic can do what you feel like telling it to do. Because it's magic. If you want Harry Potter to magically vibrate a chinchilla until it opens a portal to another dimension, blows up the sun, or makes tasty cakes; I say go for it.

 

I like the anti-matter idea best. You're not using D&D magic, and I bet it wouldn't be that hard for Harry to find a way to transfigure matter into anti-matter (though, keep in mind that wizards wouldn't even think to do it in the first place since they don't know what anti-matter is). Still, maybe there's a spell that makes a magnet reverse polarity and harry figures out how to make it work on the atomic level.

 

Heh, I had an idea on the bus while I was reading a Culture novel about how many ways magic could be used to destroy a world, and this kind of reminded me of it.

The main one I was thinking of was taking an atom of super dense material (possibly Osmium, which is the densest element apparently) and setting a charm on it to spin in place and another charm to continually accelerate. It would lead to it becoming a larger source of gravity despite its smaller size and eventually collapsing into a black hole... or accelerating to the speed of light and doing something I can't even begin to imagine.

Lots of fun . Miniature black holes for everyone! And without all the bother of those particle accelerators them muggles keep insisting on using.

EDIT: Come to think of it, I've just thought up a perpetual motion machine >_>.

 

Heh, nice. Although, it'd seem to me that unless there were charms preventing it, the spin would eventually overcome the, um.. strong or weak forces (I forget which) keeping the atom together and the thing would explode in a burst of alpha and beta particles.

But yeah, a portable magical mini black hole launcher is great fun this side of time lord regulations. Heh.

 

Awesome.

It could have been done better, but it is still pretty full of win.
4/5

 

Even if it did become a black home, it would evaporate due to Hawking Radiation less than a second after it becomes a blackhole. Oh, it might release a small amount of xrays and radiation, but it wouldn't be much. Not with only a single atom.

No, you'd need something much bigger to get a truly usable effect in that manner.

 

Not well written, but it is always funny to see stuff blow up.

3/5