I think that's a very, very solid setup that really captures the imagination. It's a really good hook. As a Plot Bunny, it's perfect. If you were going to write it, you'd need to take it a bit further and say, "okay, so now there's this big Thing. Can Harry do anything about it? How can he solve this problem, and what obstacles stand in his way?" Basic "plot" stuff.

I'd definitely give any fic with this setup a chance, though. Sounds fun.

 

Now that I've calmed down about it, I have a few riffs to add in.

[] The ability to see Dementors is the first canon hint of the deeper truth.

[] Harry can see wisps at first. It's only after casting another Unforgivable or three that his vision begins to clear.

[] There should be a reason why only a rare few wizards see these things, even though all the Death Eaters are fully corrupted. Does Snape see them?

[] Luna is not pleased to find out Harry is seeing the wraiths

Also, just a side note- this feels like it takes the best parts of Out of the Night and Ectomancer and puts them to work.

 

Yup exactly. And the underath of the cloak is not pleasant at all. Those souls of kissed crimianls haven't left yet.

It is not so much as spit out Unfogivable and no more enchantment. It is a instictieve thing suplemented by Hogwarts training. So more like breaking the habit. He will see things out of the corner of his eye and if he ignores it long enough he can return to his normall life eventually. If Harry were to go hospital wing he would get a nice potion that would make him forget and ignore all about it.

But since we are talking about Harry who likes doing things himself well, it will be a one hell of downward sprial.

Death Eathers very few. Death Mark makes it "safe" for Death Eathers to cast Unforgivables without getting a nervus break down as often case. Aurors who used unforgivables on the other hand had to drink lots of mood stabilizing potions.

Snape is a special case as Dumbledore did reveal everything to him in order to make him usefull as spy. Voldemort doesn't think any of his followers can see his dealings with the inhuman forces so he doesn't hide them very well.

Also Moody's constant vigilance line makes sense doesn't it. He didn't drink his potions.

She tires to warn him to not look. To ignore but Harry will do as Harry does.

Not that is his fault. That scratching sound he used to attribute to Crookshanks was loud enough to keep a bloke awake especially that night since he saw Hermionie lock her to her box.

And the massages/pictures on the walls, they keep changing.

He never looks up tough. She hates being seen.

Whoa high praise.

 

3spooky5me

But seriously, why hasn't this been done yet? Combining Harry Potter and Creepypasta.

 

It's more of a Cthulhu thing, but The Eyes sorta has a similar premise.

 

I've had this idea rolling around in my head for a while, about a series of short, episodic stories, all coming under the title 'Aurors'.

Basically, the Auror department is the absolute elite of wizards, like it's said in the books. While good grades are one way to enter, they're also invited in by the current people in the office, having achieved something or the other in the different fields of magic. In my head, the aurors are a rather eclectic group of magicians, who work with the Ministry, instead of for the Ministry, and deal with the absolute worst of cases and wizards. I do have some rough notes, even though they'll barely amount to anything.

And all of them use special types of magic, while being competent wizards overall (not always. Some are limited in their skills). Unique skills include:

- Divination. Harry's initially skeptical about the resident diviner, of course, but is forced to change his opinion when his colleague accurately predicts the next dates a serial killer is going to strike using a drop of blood, some centaur droppings, an eagle feather and copious amounts of weed. (Must have some sort of terrible side-effect - perhaps accelerated aging or blindess - which prevents it from being a repeatable trick)

- The ability to talk to birds, and a ridiculous affinity for animals. I'd originally assumed this character would either have Druidic roots or would be a tribal, who is based off a Warg from ASOIAF, except one who specializes in avians.

- An Arithmancer, who constantly clashes with the Divination expert, and who's always muttering calculations under his breath to find the most favourable outcome in any event. Is banned from Friday night card games. The character must be slightly neurotic, since he has to brush off the detail that his calculations often fail before the human factor, especially when he attempts to use it on members of the opposite sex.

- A necromancer. A person seeking refuge from a different country, probably. I wanted to make him Chinese because I wanted an Auror with the ability to travel on clouds. Possibly female? Reanimates small creatures for a while and is able to control them, similar to the Imperius. I also envisioned a fear of fire for him/her, as a side-effect of their specialization.

- The black character, who has an affinity for natural magic, in that he can listen to the vibrations of the earth and figure out what magic has been performed recently. Can make small plants grow with extreme concentration, even though it's a pretty useless skill.

- A history buff, inspired by Shaun from the Assassin's Creed series. The guy who's a fount of knowledge, but nobody knows how he ended up in the department, or how he survived Voldemort. The aurors at this stage are a ragtag group of wizards who managed to live through the second war, many of them coming out of retirement.

Other ideas include telekinesis, a witch with multiple animagus forms, a person with a talent for animation charms that even extend to giving the magicked objects a personality.

It's a jumbled mess in my brain right now, and one I'll probably never give shape, because with the amount of effort this would take, I might as well make a few tweaks and write it as an original piece, about a ragtag group of wizards who save the world every week.

 

I've had thoughts of a Wild West Wizarding World in America. Gunfighters- or spellslingers as the case may be, Indian Shamans, Dark wizard gangs terrorizing Villagers, the whole nine yards.

It would all surround the completely wizarding town of Clearlake Wyoming. The conflict would surround a Magical Marshal sent in from Kansas City, and his efforts to rid the town of the gang that has taken control. I think I'd have the main character be a more modern wizard, skilled at things like transfiguration, while his enemies would be classic curse throwers. It'd be a deconstruction of the wizard duels as gunfights idea that has been so prevalent in HP fanfiction.

 

One Riot, One Auror?

 

Sounds pretty cool. But have you considered taking it purely original with enough diversity? I'd read it, especially if you're already introducing original characters.

 

Post-Apocalyptic Plot Bunny:

Basically a Reign of Fire fusion. Voldemort had one last desperate contingency on the eve of his defeat and meddles with forces no sane wizard ever would have dared touched. The shackles put down by Merlin are broken and true Dragons from below the deeps have taken to the skies again.

20 years later, humanity is an endangered species at the whim of the new apex species: dragons. Harry Potter and Charlie Weasley command one of the few human settlements left in Scotland, the Statue of Secrecy a thing of the past.

Cue plot and wizard/muggle vs Dragon shenanigans.

 

Cinder Spires and TheWiseTomato 's effort have reminded me of an AU I'd been thinking of.

Lily is described as being excellent at charms and cast the Fidelius on their home, something that would have taken skill to develop. What if she took a different approach to hiding, that their house itself would be gone?

Basically they'd have avoided Voldemort's attack and wizarding homes would now commonly be drifting through the sky. It makes them all far more secure, you can't attack something you can't reach so Voldemort's terror raids petered out. The world would be mostly the same, Diagon Alley would still be there but ordinary wizards would just floo in from their homes hovering somewhere over the ocean. It's an excuse for a more overtly magical world and you can get away with Voldemort still being around even as the Potters all live.

I don't really have a plot to go with it, I just like wizards having flying homes like Columbia, Death Gate or Netheril.

 

I would leave the 20 years later part away. Make it one or two years. Muggles are faced with the real possibility to become extinct and are contemplating the use of their nuclear arsenal to prevent the dragons from spreading from the UK. The Wizarding world doesn't have the man power to uphold the statute of secrecy and protect themselves at the same time so they don't bother anymore.

Now you have Dragons vs. Death Eater vs. The Order vs. The Ministry vs. Nuclear attack on Britain (unknown to Wizards).

 

When Voldemort went to kill Harry on Halloween, he didn't kill James, just put him in some kind of coma, but he killed Lily and then Harry reflected the killing curse, destroying his body with it. When Voldemort began to flee he noticed James body and decided to posses it.

So either a James/Voldemort mix raising Harry, or a simple Voldemort molding Harry with James sometimes taking control.

Dunno...

 

Rayndeon: I love it, but I also have a cheesy love of Reign of Fire so that might be interfering with my objectivity. Such a fun movie. How did it not have eighteen sequels by now?

But on point: Why Merlin? And how would Voldemort know about it? Just some questions to flesh out the idea a little more. OR maybe the creatures are creations of Herpo the Foul—long-forgotten prototype basilisks that have bred and grown large in the thousands of years since the Greek dark wizard was doing his breeding experiments. It makes more sense, to me anyway, given that Herpo bred the first basilisk and created the first intentional horcrux; obviously Voldemort's going to do some research into the guy. During that he may very well come upon some other secrets the guy had up his sleeve. Just an idea, anyway.

 

So there's two ideas that I've been kicking about recently but that I'm not actively working on:

1) Potter a la Reluctant Fundamentalist:

No, that seat's not taken. Please, do. Excuse me, my friend, a drink for this poor man, if you could.

He shouldn't be more than a moment. It's hard work that has you out at this time day, what do you do? Ah, confidential contracting then, or something like it, I take it. Oh, no, none taken.

Myself? I suppose you could say I do something similar,

An unreliable narrator Harry talks to a faceless man, whose responses and behaviour you can ambiguously figure out from Harry's 'speech'. Harry's an older gent in a place that's remote and he affably tells his post-epilogue story, how he became estranged from family, left the auror corps and became a private 'ghostbuster' - hunting dark wizards, poltergeists, vampires and the like that make a nuisance of themselves in places or a manner that isn't easily dealt with. The retold story deals with how Harry came to make peace with the fact that his demons are of his own making and he'd rather have them than change. The metastory is the possibility that the man, the 'you' he's talking to is a dark creature of some sort that's about to get ganked after 'you' leave or whether it's as Harry's asserting and there's nothing sinister about this conversation at all.

2) Less developed, this came to me the last couple of days after seeing the martian:

- The moon landings were faked. . . not because it wouldn't work, but because wizards co-opted the idea. There's a number of wizarding settlements in space, on the moon and on mars. And it's a forty year old culture that's coming into conflict with certain factions on earth.
- Harry is a young man, his parents alive and healthy and they all live in space

I've got tons of ideas about the premise, but less about the plot, and this would be a skitterleap level change to the setting.

There are two ways I could see the plot progessing:
- A firefly type, multicultural wizard on wizard confrontation which could be interesting to play out (you're above us, so you'll obey our laws - with the natural wizard tendency to say no).
- Voldemort in space! He's conquered England and he's looking upward. A voldemort-resistance story where the POV was actually in the resistance could be interesting.

 

The story of the First War with one difference - the Ancient and Noble House of Black didn't buy Voldemort's rhetorics and oppose him. Black and their allies create a third side in that conflict (the first two being Voldemort and Dumbledore's followers).
The major differences:
-) Bellatrix isn't Voldemort's right hand; on the contrary, she is legendary by the number of Death Eaters she killed.
-) Regulus isn't pushed to join Death Eaters.
-) Sirius is still a black sheep in the family for following Dumbledore but he was never disowned because the Head of the Black family felt he can be useful, even if to provide the information from Dumbledore's camp.

 

Vulcan

Wow, that's a really interesting concept. I've always found the House of Black fascinating, and was kind of put out in general that pretty much every major Dark Arts user / family just parades around under Voldemort's banner.

It seems more realistic that "good guys" are able and willing to work together than users of the Dark Arts. Potential AUs with multiple factions and wizards strong enough to matter besides Dumbledore and Voldemort being two near-invincible overlord titans are appealing to me.

 

Blorcyn: the end of your moon-resistance one just put me in mind of a 1984-esque story. The protagonist lives in Voldemort-run England, which is 'at war with' the wizards on the Moon - but he has no way of knowing if they even exist or not.

 

Lovecraftian HP story featuring memory charms. To give some background, in the Lovecraft mythos there are these horrible beings that just looking at will fuck you up. In the RPG you'll have to do sanity checks if you meet them and if you fail, you'll get some random fetish/phobia or something else.

I haven't actually played the game, so I'm not 100%. Either way, these add up fast until you're a gibbering wreck.

So to counter this, I figure, the wizard could use memory charms on themselves, to remove the memory of ever having seen whatever horrid tentacular abomination they ran into. If they're not completely gone by the time they perform the spell, they might keep most of their sanity, even if some tiny effects still linger.

That's where this story starts up. It would probably be best suited for horror, with the main character being kept in the dark, partially by himself, while the reader knows just what lurks behind the next corner.

Thoughts?

 

I think this is because most Lovecraft stories happen in years like the 1890s or 1920s.

In those days, people reacted differently to things like gore and disturbing imagery.

Unless you were in the military / fought in the war, you'd rarely see things like that.

In modern times however, we see horror movies for fun. We see lots of crazy shit, people being torn to shreds, terrifying monsters and abominations are just entertainment to us.

For example, in the story Rats in the Walls a character goes insane because he sees lots of dead bodies / mutilated corpses. Today that's nothing, you'd see that shit in Friday the 13th (and that was in the 80s).

Today we have things like the Human Centipede or Saw or Hostel. We are so desensitized and numb to violence and gore and monsters that realistically Lovecraft stuff would have nothing on us.