I mean, I guess they can close it if they want?

I hadn't intended to change the relationship Snape and Harry had in canon. I just thought that Potions was a logical area of specialization if I wanted Harry to have a specific 'talent' that would allow him to potentially offset a lack of power in other areas. I don't see why Harry being talented at Potions would make Snape like him any more.

 

I would read Founders. Kinda reminds me of that Superman fic where he crosses over into this world post-9/11. Got a bit preachy, but was interesting nonetheless.

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I'd go with alchemy more than potions.

 

I like that a lot, actually. Hmmm... with an alchemy angle, it's tempting to try and wrangle Nicolas Flamel into the mix. It also handily avoids the entire expectation that comes along with a Harry that does well in Potions.

I suppose the Stone could easily be a catalyst for an interest in alchemy -- maybe Harry sees that the Stone can do something people thought was impossible and grant immortality, and his mind jumps to thoughts of raising his parents from the dead. He'd be a first-year, but if he was driven to learn about alchemy, a subject that doesn't seem to be touched on much at Hogwarts, it could be pretty easy to build a story around his quest for knowledge. And at the end of the year with the Stone fiasco, Flamel could be written in.

Thanks for the input!

 

Is anyone thinking about or trying to write a good serious Harry/Fem! Tom Riddle? Because I've just read Thunderstorm and loved it and the pairing.

 

Remember that Dumbledore was a student of Nicolas Flamel as well. He'd be the go to choice for answers about alchemy.

 

Just found this on an old flash drive. Might as well post it.

----

Draco Malfoy finds a genie in a cursed dark artifact, he's allowed only one wish. At the time, he's pissed at Potter, so...

"I WISH HARRY POTTER WOULD DIE BEFORE COMING TO HOGWARTS!"

Harry dies in a car accident several weeks before his Hogwarts letter would have arrived.

Everything goes to hell.

Quirell gets the Stone from Gringotts and restores Voldemort's body.

With the Dark Lord up and going, the Boy-Who-Lived missing, the Prophecy is invalidated and Voldemort is free to take over everything.

Voldemort orders Lucius to give the Diary to Weasleys and Ginny opens the Chamber. The Basilisk begins murdering muggleborn students.

Sirius escapes Azkaban during a mass breakout, but is eventually hunted down.

The Triwizard Tournament doesn't take place.

Voldemort takes over the Ministry and creates a puppet government.

The Dark Lord changes the locations of his Horcruxes after he finds out that Dumbledore is hunting them. He then has the old man killed.

Several years pass, muggleborns are eradicated and Voldemort takes over the muggle government using the Imperius.

From there, the spread of his power expands. First his forces invade France, then Germany and rest of Europe.

Many years pass, entire decades. Eventually Voldemort rules the entire world.

Fuck you Draco, you dick.

 

So before Draco has even met Harry, he's angry at him for something? Or can this genie affect the timeline?

 

I read it as Malfoy got the wish after having met and interacted with Harry for some time thus changing the timeline but I could be wrong.

As wishes go it's a bit weirdly worded and much more specific than I would think is reasonable. Nor do I think that Voldemort would order Lucius to use the diary on the Weasleys. For one thing without Harry Potter the Weasleys aren't necessarily the same threat they were in the books. And while it is the purpose of the Diary to open the Chamber it is probably not as needed if Voldemort had returned to a body.

 

The genie can affect the timeline.

 

Plot bunny has besieged me.

Dumbledore is defeated in the Department of Mysteries in 5th Year, but before he dies, condenses his consciousness, memories, and abilities, and basically shoots Voldemort with it. Voldemort, tempted by all the fresh magical knowledge, lets it pass his barriers. It was stronger than he expected, and effectively undergoes a mental takeover, the Dumbledore side taking a foothold through the element of surprise and digging into Voldemort's consciousness.

The sudden split in control of the main body effects all Horcruxes, sending a fresh burst of Dumbledore memories and pieces into every Horcrux. Harry, being the nearest Horcrux around, absorbs the most of it, triggering the part of Voldemort's soul and undergoing a giant clusterfuck in his head.

The Death Eaters fall into confusion as their leader, later evacuated from the Department, basically locks himself in and tries to fight Dumbledore within his primary body.

However, the Horcruxes do not simply waste these new memories. Ravenclaw's Diadem in the Room of Requirement stimulates these memories and amplifies them, and using the pieces of Dumbledore's soul, starts powering magic of its own through the 6th year to generate a makeshift body and wand with all the junk around the RoR, and slowly takes control of the Room.

The Cup within Lestrange's vault starts releasing a subtle persuasion to the Goblins. The Cup itself, possessing a Hufflepuff's ideal of friendship and diplomatic negotiation to the drinkers, and used for countless negotiations between organizations as a symbol of peace, has its powers corrupted into a tool of control. The Goblin Rebellions seem to be beginning, and the Ministry is not happy.

The Ring took a human body and through much use of Polyjuice, infiltrated the Ministry as a politican and researcher. It searches for a way to counter the withering curse placed on the Ring itself, so it may control a single body for more than a few months without it withering it away.

The Locket in the cave takes command of all the Inferi, and unleashes a march of death upon the living realm.

The Order of the Pheonix, demoralized by the disasters being released(or at least, the Inferi and Voldemort's return, which is those that they have knowledge of, as well as the goblin rebellions), discovers the Prophecy.

Harry, who is put into a coma by the sudden influx of stuff, wakes during the Burning Dead of St' Mungo.

 

The locket should be in Grimmauld Place, not the cave.

 

Well that ruins the plot of my plot bunny :3 I forgot about that little detail.

Perhaps slightly more AU by saying Kreacher died before he got the locket?

 

I don't see why you can't just ignore the whole 'the locket was taken from the cave' piece of canon. Why stick to it when you can just say the locket was never taken from the cave and end up with an awesome fuckin' zombie death march?

I like the idea a lot, it'd be really interesting to see somebody tie all of those conflicts together into a glorious collage of shit-gone-pear-shaped.

 

Because the divergence would have to be explained to the reader. That explanation would either have to happen in the narrative and would sound odd, like a character justifying the facts of their world to a fourth wall, or in an author's note, which is just clumsy storytelling.

 

It appears you've made the horcruxes at least partially sentient.

Just have the piece of soul in the locket raise Regulus' and Kreature's bodiesfirst, and find it ironic that the ones to try and destroy it would be the first tools in its arsenal.

 

No, you really wouldn't. You literally just say 'one Horcrux was in a cave, Harry, and it raised a zombie army'. From that the reader can easily infer that part of your AU is that Regulus didn't take the locket from the cave.

Nothing happened with the locket until HBP, so since this diverges before then there's no reason you can't easily just change things around. Sure, they found a weird locket in the Black house, but there are probably millions of weird lockets in the wizarding world. It's easy to write that one off.

It's patently ridiculous to change the fact that Horcruxes can't, in canon, command Inferi or influence goblin rebellions, then get hung up on a silly little detail like the locket.

 

... and you consider this an example of good story-telling?

 

I generally consider that I don't need to write out the entire story when I'm posting in a forum thread. I really can't tell what it is that has your panties in a bunch here, but I'll try to explain what I am saying.

To put it more clearly: Harry would eventually have to stop this zombie outbreak. Thusly, he would need to learn where the Horcrux is, I would assume, in order to destroy it. In the course of his research into Voldemort's past or however you would prefer to write this section, he discovers it is in the cave. The Horcrux, when he goes to the cave, is then in the cave. This is all the explanation that is needed. It is perfectly acceptable storytelling.

Nothing past book 5 exists as canon in a universe a where a divergence happens before book 5 until the author establishes it as such. If the author says the locket is in the cave, the locket is in the cave because it has not yet been established as being anywhere else. This is the entire concept of an AU.

 

Except the author isn't saying the locket is in the cave. A character thinks the locket is in the cave... just as they did in canon.

The automatic assumption on the reader's part will be "Harry's wrong! The horcrux isn't there and he's heading into a trap!". Their expectations will be set up in a certain manner, then when the horcrux is there they'll be left going "Huh?". Sometimes surprising the reader is good, but in this case they're being surprised for all the wrong reasons -- not from authorial cleverness, but rather authorial neglect.

They'll then likely leave a review reminding the author that the horcrux was taken by Regulus, assuming the author forgot. The very fact that the author is using the idea of horcruxes, the cave and all the other locations of the horcruxes (not revealed until DH) indicates to the reader that the author is following the canon framework with the divergence of a single event.

When you make a divergence from canon (in this case, "what if the horcruxes received a meal like the Diary fed on Ginny Weasley, thus giving them the ability to manifest?"), people generally assume that all aspects of canon unrelated to your divergence remain unchanged. That's the whole point of writing a divergence. If you start arbitrarily writing random, unrelated changes, the reader has no idea where they stand. It's perceived as cheating on the author's part, as it gives them the power to arbitrarily ret-con things according to their convenience. "Oh, by the way, Harry actually learnt occlumency back in OotP."

 

I can see what you mean when you say that, but I still feel that there is no reason that it couldn't simply be written around. Changing this detail from canon doesn't have to be done in a heavy-handed manner, and could be done in such a way that the reader isn't confused, as you are concerned about. Perhaps the way Harry discovers the cave is through Regulus himself. Harry, in his research into the history of Voldemort and the Death Eaters, is led to an unmarked grave. If he already possesses the Resurrection Stone by this point in time, he (depending on your take on the mechanics of the stone) might be able to summon the spirit of the man buried there, Regulus Black, who explains that he had discovered where Voldemort hid a Horcrux, but was killed before he could do anything about it.

This results in the reader learning of the Horcrux' continued presence in the cave from Regulus himself. While there might still be underlying doubt that this was a trap set up by Voldemort, when Harry actually goes to the cave and the Horcrux is there, that doubt is resolved rather than exacerbated; it functions simply as a confirmation that Regulus was telling the truth about his different backstory.

This isn't nearly a difficult enough plot point to explain that the idea of the undead army should be abandoned, in my opinion.

I think that a lot of times I expect people to infer a lot more about my thought process than is fair, so I apologize for not being more clear in my earlier posts; I'm not encouraging authorial laziness, but rather trying to point out that with a bit of effort what initially might seem like a stumbling block could be turned into an interesting story point.