I never found a story where Harry learns by summoning Dumbledore or Voldemort. To use the story, Harry should go back to the forest to find the stone. Searching for a small stone in a forest is a fools quest.

 

There's this nifty little thing called the summoning charm that can be used to summon it.

 

Once you summon Voldemort's shade, he's gonna agree to whatever cockamamie demands you make for tutelage and then immediately try to find a way to possess you. Or worse. Summoning Voldemort - Very bad idea.

 

Not if you summon Dumbledore as well and use his advice to counter any plots Voldemort might have.

 

This is beginning to sound like a crossover with Jerry Springer.

"On our next segment; the Dark Lord and the Leader of the Light, here to discuss the ways they ruined the world and the life of Harry Potter."

 

That's assuming it'd be possible to summon Voldemort at all.

 

wordhammer: Not a bad idea for a crackfic. I'd read it, and probably laugh.

Honestly, if you were going to use the resurrection stone to bring someone back, there are way better options than Voldemort. Dumbledore I could see, especially if Harry, or Ron and Hermione needed his help, but then you have his painting in the Headmaster's office so it's kind of a moot point. Merlin is an obvious choice, along with Nicholas Flamel.

Imagine if Harry became the Master of Death, then learned the secret of transmutating gold and lived for hundreds of years.

As far as a reasonable plot goes, you'd have to make the stone have more than one caveat against using it or Harry would get massively overpowered very quickly. There should be a cost everytime he uses it, and a small window that he can use it in, so that he can only get a small amount of very important information at a time. For example, asking Merlin how to transform into multiple animagus forms instead of just the one...

I could see a story where the portrait of Dumbledore doesn't give them the answers they need, and they are desperate, so they use the stone to bring him back for a few minutes. Only problem is it becomes more difficult the more you use it, to the point that whoever brings him back is experiencing memory loss and migraines, as well as psychotic tendencies. Hermione begs Harry not to do it anymore, but he tells her it is all for the greater good...

Might even make a decent post-Hogwarts, Dark!Harry fic.

 

Coming Back Late does this fairly well by

Spoiler

giving shades some semblance of free will (which, if I remember correctly, Harry can try to overpower because he's the Master of Death, but doesn't control them by default

.

 

I assumed that you could only call back a 'shade' if they had passd beyond one of the Veils.

Voldemort, or rather what is left of his main self/soul, is in limbo - he hasn't passed over into the land/realm of the dead, and it's likely he's never going to, either.

 

Something I came up with out of boredom.

The second war with Voldemort goes horribly bad, so Neville attempts to send a letter to his parents to the past.
However, instead of sending it to 1981 as he planned, he accidentally sends it to 1971 when Frank was starting Hogwarts along with James Potter.
(I don't know if Frank is older or younger than James, I'm assuming they are the same age)
Here is the letter.

Dear Alice and Frank, I know what you'll read will be very hard to believe, but I am your son Neville, writing to you from the future.
I have sent this letter back in time, using an experimental time-bending spell.
If my calculations are correct, it should arrive in your hands on October 28th 1981,
exactly three days before Lord Voldemort kills Lily and James Potter.
Their location was revealed to them by one Peter Pettigrew, who betrayed his friends.
After the Dark Lord killed the Potters, he attempted to kill infant Harry as well.
However, because Lily sacrificed herself to save Harry, Voldemort's curse struck him instead, leaving Harry alive.
With the Dark Lord gone, Harry was hailed as a hero, the boy who lived.
Blinded by grief and anger, Sirius Black attempted to kill the traitor Pettigrew.
However, Peter managed to fake his own death using his animagus ability and transform into a rat.
He then framed Sirius for betraying the Potters which resulted in Black being sentenced to life imprisonment in Azkaban.
Not even a day after Voldemort was defeated, Bellatrix, Rodolphus, and Rabastan Lestrange, and Barty Crouch Jr. attacked you.
They tortured you into insanity using the Cruciatus curse, sending you to St. Mungo's forever.
I was raised by gran Augusta in your absence.
However, Voldemort eventually returned thanks to certain things called Horcruxes (he made 6).
We only found out what some of them are.
One is Tom Riddle's Diary, held by Lucius Malfoy.
Second one is the Gaunt Family Ring, protected by powerful curses and stored at the Gaunt Shack in Little Hangleton.
The third one is the Slytherin's Locket, stored at Grimmauld Place 12 by the Black Family.
The fourth one is Hufflepuff's cup, stored at the Lestrange Vault at Gringotts.
I have no idea what the other two might be.
The second war went much worse, Voldemort eventually killed Harry and many of my friends.
He took over the ministry and later started a war to take over other magical nations, such as France and Germany.
He was successful and now rules over Magical Europe.
I am writing this in the ruins of Longbottom Manor, with hope that things will go differently this time.

With love, your son Neville Longbottom.
October 28th 2011.

 

What does sending it to the wrong time do?

As eleven year olds, they'd be a bit naff at doing anything important. Lots of the information will be wrong, as it is just too early. It'd be like reading (and I did, once) a time travel fic where Harry loses his memory of the future and relies on 'gut feelings'.


Also, why would they believe it? There needs to be non-critical, yet secret, information in the letter, otherwise they would likely think the thing a hoax.

 

If I were to write that, I think instead of going the obvious route by telling the story from 11 year old Frank's point of view, I'd have the future literally change around Neville after he sends the letter. Would make for a veritable cornucopia of interesting time-travel shenanigans.

 

Inspired by the footnote discussion in the The Well Groomed Mind thread, what about a post-canon fic done in the style of Ciaphas Cain, Hero of the Imperium. For those who don't know, the Ciaphas Cain books star Ciaphas Cain as an Imperial Commissar in the 40k universe. They claim to be the autobiographical writings of Cain as edited by his long time acquaintance Inquisitor Amberley Vail. Amberley Vail makes much use of footnotes in the books to make observations and provide additional information which Cain either ignored or forgot. They can also be quite funny.

The kicker behind the whole series is Ciaphas Cain's status as an unreliable narrator. Principally, Cain thinks of himself as a coward and tries to explain everything in terms of this. He might claim he only killed the ork while trying to run away from something else, for example. The Imperium at large and Vail, on the other hand, think he's a big hero.

My suggestion? The post canon adventures of an AU-ish Harry Potter as edited by Hermione. Harry will try to cast his action as just a coward trying to stay alive while Hermione provides snappy commemorator in the form of pre, post and foot notes.

 

That's already been done...in the exact same way

 

It would actually be far more awesome the other way round.

Picture, if you will, an over-the-top memoir-style narrative from the perspective of a Flashman-esque Harry Potter, a recounting of an obviously tweaked canon HP saga, told in the first-person by a Harry who's a Magnificent Bastardly Coward, replete with complete fabrications of how things went down as he survived, truly, thru sheer dumb luck and by always being happy to let someone else die in his place.

The footnotes and clarifications would be an exasperated and slightly jaded Hermione trying to set the record straight, having pieced together a very good idea of what really happened and how. Bonus points if Ron ended up taking one for the team and Harryproceeded to honor that sacrifice by siezing the chance and bedding Hermione while she was grief-stricken and vulnerable.

I don't always read about dickhead protagonists, but when I do, I prefer they be lecherous and unapologetic...

 

The only problem with a fic like that is finding a good place to leave the footnotes. In the actual Flashman books, GMF could just use the back of the book as a place to store them all, but unless you're going to write the entire fic, then post it, you aren't going to be able to do that.

You could keep them at the bottom of every chapter, but then the reader has to scroll down to the bottom of the page every time there was a footnote, and then back up to where they were, which can quickly become annoying.

I've tried doing that sort of thing before, with MLP fanfiction, and in the end I had to leave out the footnotes altogether.

 

The only time I've ever seen footnotes work well was in a piece of MLP fiction - Whom The Princesses Would Destroy. All the footnotes were collected in a single chapter at the end, and opening in a new tab is much quicker on fimfiction than fanfiction.

Also, they were all short, played for comedy, and didn't change the story at all. You could either have it in another tab whilst reading, or flick back through at the end.

Whereas if you have footnotes added in constantly, extra chapters wouldn't work. And, as Whooves said, putting them all at the bottom of the chapter is irritating.

You could try putting them at the end of the scene, or square brackets in text, or at the end of the paragraph. But footnotes just don't tend to work online.

 

That sounds dope. Neville as main character... then he has to put together the pieces as to why the hell this happened. Only he remembers the life he lived. It would be awesome if the changed future was just as bad as his present, where everything was flipped: Harry grew up with his parents, Peter is dead, Neville's parents in jail for murdering him prematurely, Voldemort never died because he moved the horcruxes... there are a lot of changes you could make.

Then again, Neville is rarely used as a main character because, well... he's boring.

 

Haven't you heard? Ever since Matthew Lewis's astounding transformation in the last movie, Neville is the new hotness.

I mean, sure, people read the book and said, "Oh, he killed Nagini... way to go, Neville."

But that reaction seems fairly minimal compared to the reaction to Lewis in the last movie, which was more along the lines of, "Oh my god, I SO want Neville in my vagina! ...but Draco can still knock on the back door. *wink*"

 

Harry Potter/Hunger Games crossover.

None of the Hunger Games characters or world, just the concept.

Voldemort won the first wizarding war and rules Britain with an iron fist with Muggleborns as second class citizens. Hogwarts remains open, but it now bears a closer resemblance to Durmstrang.

Every year, each Hogwarts house must provide one student to take part in a public gladiatorial game.

The winner receives the honour of being marked as a Death Eater - an all-access pass into the ruling elite.

The other three die.

Harry Potter, son of the executed war criminals James and Lily Potter, is picked for Gryffindor house.