Mashadarof402
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Hmm, the first half of this chapter was a lot of tell rather than show. An outsiders narration rather than people's POV in the scene.
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Enter the Dragon (Harry Potter/Shadowrun)
- Thread starter Dunkelzahn
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The Unicorn
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Nice description, although I'm wondering if she's unbuttoning the top buttons of her shirt, why didn't she roll down her stockings? Is that something she considers more revealing/immodest?
Is all this talk about how Harry is going to develop needed in the story now? It doesn't seem to serve any purpose, you could have left it at how Harry currently feels, and that would have let you greatly reduce the amount of narration, even more if you chose to show Harry's reactions to Abigail rather than just talk about them.
The rest of the Hermione scene works very well, however since this makes it clear she's aware of what's going on it raises the question of what Hermione was doing for the several hours there wasn't any spellfire going on, while Harry watched Abigail sleep?
Very hermione reaction, I wonder if a hypothetical comittee would be impressed by an encyclopedic knowledge of hundreds of variations of a spell, or for that matter if there's anything useful from learning so many variations of a spell?
I get the point, but I think you're over doing it. If it's standard for a young wizard to eat a dozen plates of food in a meal, then even if Harry's eating binge at the start of First year was greater than normal it would not have been noticeable. If you cut it back to half or less, then given that 11 y/o would eat less than 16/17 y/o it becomes a lot more reasonable that harry's binge was noticed.
I'm glad she doesn't know him immediatly, that certainly helps explain him getting away with things for so long.
I take it that unlike fanon Flitwick never trained anyone in dueling and would make a terrible trainer if he tried, given that it took him that long to come up with that advice.
That seems unlikely. Unless this is a question that a normal wizard couldn't answer I'd expect given how common and basic the spell is, that the question was asked and answered many times. I can see Flitwick not knowing the answer without looking it up, and/or using it to teach Harry about developing an experiment protocol (think something like an Undergrad/High school science project, not a PHD thesis)
LOL!
Interesting. Not sure where this is going, but I'm looking forward to finding out.
Edmond G. Bertrand
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You said, "The fact remained, though, that Harry was not mature enough that the appealing sight of his older friend in her current state could command his undivided attention."
I spent some time this evening thinking about this and realized a couple of things: (1) at 11 & 12, I definitely wanted to snog the hell out of some girls I knew (and cared about).
(2) I knew that I very definitely felt something for them beyond friendship (though I was still working out that part) and (3) I knew that if they went out of my life, I would be very,
very sad. They did, and of course, I was. I had to spend several more years pinning down what-all girls really meant to me (beyond the carnal).
I spent some time this evening thinking about this and realized a couple of things: (1) at 11 & 12, I definitely wanted to snog the hell out of some girls I knew (and cared about).
(2) I knew that I very definitely felt something for them beyond friendship (though I was still working out that part) and (3) I knew that if they went out of my life, I would be very,
very sad. They did, and of course, I was. I had to spend several more years pinning down what-all girls really meant to me (beyond the carnal).
GladiusLucix
Versed in the lewd.
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That's all assuming that Harry's maturing at a rate that one-to-one corresponds with normal human maturation. (EDIT: And that you were sufficiently average in your own maturation.) In addition to that, as was mentioned multiple times in the chapter, Harry is only human shaped; when he turned into a pigeon, he was not attracted to other pigeons. So, due to species differences, Harry is much more likely, IMO, to experience Romantic Attraction than Sexual Attraction towards any of his Damsels, and the Romantic Attraction will almost definitely occur sooner.
The Unicorn
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Even before you take into account that Harry isn't human, some people mature later than others. It is quite plausabile for an 11/12 y/o to not have figured out he wants to kiss girls.
Doghead13
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Bear in mind that you grew up human, while this Harry is very distinctly not.
He is, at the end of the day, a member of a very alien species and his resulting physiological development (and the development of sexuality is very definitely a part of that) isn't the same as it would have been if he had remained a member of his birth species. His development happens in fairly-wide-spread bursts instead of steady progression of a human child, and may even be partially determined by how much magic he is exposed to - I'd had him undergoing significant growth spurts in reaction to releasing the major nodes, though whether Dunkelzahn will go with that one I of course couldn't say.
The way I read the scene is a pretty good expression of the stage I was at roundabout age nine, where I was just starting to register that there was some not-yet-defined something appealing there without having started to get a handle on what it was or what I wanted to do with it, or for that matter it having become prominent enough to really cement my focus onto it. That tallies pretty well with his physical size in all honesty. People often forget that James Potter was described as being quite tall.
Edmond G. Bertrand
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OK - what I don't understand and what's not clear because this is a cross-over story, is just what rules govern Harry's development. Remember, on Earth, most reptiles are READY TO BREED at age
18 to 20 months (max.) This story is going forward without the authorial editorialization that would describe the "background" of these damn dragons - and it leaves us wondering just what rules you're using to craft the story - because it looks like you're making it up as you go along. That would be fine, of course, but nothing is being explained and it leaves readers wondering _why_ you're doing what you're doing.
The Unicorn
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The same applies to most mammals, so what? The more complex and long lived a creature, the longer it takes it to mature. This is why rabbits take 4-7 months to mature, while elephants and humans only reach sexual maturity in their teens, and generally don't have sex for several years after they are physically capable of it.
And that's if you (for some bizarre reason I can't comprehend) insist on fantasy creatures having life cycles similar to RL animals.
Doghead13
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What the hell does a reptile have to do with a creature made out of iron, hot-blooded to the point of 'hot enough to boil lead', and aptly described as 'a living blast furnace', whose body flat out doesn't run on the same laws of physics as the rest of the universe? Do you seriously think Snape's vernacular is anything more than a creative insult?
And hadn't you noticed the way that the cast - the protagonist included - learning about how the protagonist's body works is one of the core plotlines? What, you expect the first chapter to start with a massive infodump titled 'SPOILERS'? You're damn straight nothing is explained, even the cast themselves don't know the explanation yet.
Oh, and while I'm at it, why are you responding as if I'm the author? I abandoned this fic nearly ten years ago, and I couldn't explain the ins and outs of how the central character's body works if I wanted to - I could explain roughly how he worked in the original, but this is not that: Dunkelzahn has already made it quite clear he's running on a different ruleset to what I was working with. Hardly surprising; the original never actually got written down.
The Unicorn
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I'd note the amount of explanation already in the story has people commenting on it being a bit too much
Edmond G. Bertrand
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:::Embarrassed::: Sorry. I was venting and it went to the wrong person. I apologize!!!!!!!!!!!!
Dunkelzahn
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I hadn't actually considered the stockings, aside from the general visual. Let's go with it being too immodest, which would also fit well with Slackhammer's commentary on wizard's being old-fashioned in their dress sense (compared to his own late Victorian styling). Going back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, revealing a bit of the decolletage would be much less immodest than showing too much leg.
His state of development is pretty important for a number of reasons in the upcoming story, the most immediate of which has to do with Abigail's coming graduation. I needed to make it clear that he's maturing (as regards romantic relationships, anyway) a lot slower than an equivalent human.
That said, from the comments, it's obvious that the first two segments were a lot more awkward in presentation than I thought they had been, so I'm probably going to rework them heavily.
I had intended the first and second scenes to be different days, so that's probably another casualty of muddy writing. Might add a short interlude scene in between to provide separation or maybe change the order of the existing scenes. We'll see.
It's probably a little bit much --- I'll go with halfway, then.
Flitwick is an excellent teacher. Flitwick is an excellent duelist. Flitwick is not, however, an excellent teacher of dueling --- he doesn't do too much of it. It's not an uncommon failing among people who are really talented at something --- if you just get something, how do you figure out how to explain it to someone who doesn't? A lot of times the best teachers are those who had to work hard to understand the material.
That ties into the nature of spell development in the wizarding world. Wizarding spells are essentially configurations of magic which cause an effect to happen. The wizards have developed general methods for shaping magic into arbitrary configurations (wand-work, runes, etc.); however, they have not developed a general system for determining what configuration will have a given effect. Thus, wizard spells generally trace their lineage back through a long history of incremental modifications to some accidental discovery (all too often rooted in childhood accidental magic). The classification of the spell is therefore made based on what it is observed to do --- or, in rare cases where they can manage the math involved, by comparing the geometry of the resultant structures, such as the equivalent formulations of transfiguration and compulsion-charms targeted at the world at large.
The snake-conjuring charm is one in a line of temporary animal conjurations, including the bird-conjuring charm among others --- the original may or may not have been a pony conjured by a young witch through accidental magic --- which bring an animal temporarily into being. The critter then sticks around until the spell fails, at which point, it dissipates in a way essentially identical to all other conjurations --- a catastrophic loss of form and substance as it dissipates into a puff of rapidly dispersing magic. Due to behaving much like every other known conjuration, it and its siblings were quite understandably considered to be conjurations --- if it looks like a duck... --- consistent with Flitwick's first impression. There was no need to inquire further into their nature beyond dissecting them to attempt further modifications and development of the spell line.
In the scene, Harry brings to the table a new piece of evidence contraindicating that classification. A non-parselmouth caster conjured snakes which could speak parseltongue, information that could not have been provided by the caster, even subconsciously. This shouldn't have happened according to the accepted understanding of conjuration, ergo there is the opportunity for genuinely new research into the nature of the spell and possibly into the nature of conjuration itself --- hence, it is potentially very serious business, academically, and Flitwick is understandably quite excited.
It's also important for the story because Harry's results on this project will provide another hook for the yet to be revealed third crossover.
This is essentially the situation, though the reasoning I'm using for the unsteady maturation speed is a little different.
In this one, Harry's maturation is going full out all the time because he's got plenty of food and already has enough magic stored to run at that rate for years due to Avebury and Stonehenge, but there's a lot more to that development than meets the eye. All sorts of internal structures need to grow and develop further --- the bits for handling and storing the tremendous amounts of magic he deals with, the bits to handle astral projection and senses, the bits to handle the full draconic language suite, the changes associated with the continued hardening of his form against external magical attack, the bits which will allow Harry to continue using his magic externally despite that hardening, and so on and so forth. Thus, his development will have short periods of fast, blatantly obvious growth and development interspersed with long stretches where nothing outwardly visible seems to be going on. Even during those apparently quiet times, however, his innards are busily humming along doing their own growth and development. Until that internal development is far enough along for Harry's body to say "okay, I think we've got everything in place to start thinking about having kids", his sexual development will remain prepubescent and his understanding of such things will remain intellectual at best.
Had Harry been growing under normal conditions (that is, half-starved for nutrients) he'd have spent about a century developing in the egg before hatching, about two centuries between hatching and the beginning of adolescence, about a hundred years or so of adolescence, followed by another century or two before he was developed and established enough for any females of his species to find him attractive. He's currently growing at a breakneck pace for a dragon, but it's still not as fast as human norm.
For reference, Shadowrun canon (technically from an Earthdawn source, but they're the same setting in different Ages) would have him reaching adulthood after entering a cocoon and undergoing a metamorphosis --- a complication I've not included here --- between 250 and 300 years after hatching. Also, during the last 50-100 years of that before the metamorphosis (the adolescence), he'd have been driven nearly mad by his developing urges and acted much like a the Harry Potter canon dragons. I'm skipping that bit on account of my main character descending into an animalistic fugue state for a century not being a story I'm interested in writing.
Also, as for Harry's development seeming to be made up as it goes along, as Doghead13 has since pointed out, that is mostly intentional. Remember, no one involved in the process knows what to expect for Harry's development --- no one at Hogwarts even knew great dragons were a thing before he transformed into one. They are trying their best to extrapolate from what they do know, but it is treacherous going, and they'll be making mistakes all the way, some more serious than others.
The Unicorn
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The impression I had was that you were talking about modernish school skirts (knee/mid calf length), and the mention of a cardigan reinforced the idea of modern dress and sensibilities. If the Wizarding world had 17th century standards of dress and modesty then I'd be wondering why Abigail didn't take off her blouse (Although I'm not actually sure the lack of taboo about female breasts was true in 17th century england).
I was asking about the way he will be developing in the future, not his current state of development.
It makes perfect sense, I was mainly referencing all the super!harry stories that have Flitwick teach Hary to be an amazinf duelist in a couple of hours (okay over stating that, but not by much).
The Wizarding world not knowing why spells work, is reasonable, you an even have them only have vague understanding of how they work, but given the scientific study of magic you've described for potions, Alchemy and rune work them not knowing what a basic and fairly common spell does seems unlikely.
There is almost never an objective need to "inquire further", that doesn't stop humans from doing so, and given all the other scientific magic you have the lack of anyone doing so for this spell seems odd.
Mashadarof402
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A quick google of Victorian era fashion indicates that low necklines tended to be a thing. Square cut rather than V.
The Unicorn
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1)Victorian fashion has nothing to do with the discussion. Queen Victoria was a prude and as a result fashion and formal behavior during her reign (and due it's length after it) became much more prudish than before.
2)Formal fashion of any sort if not relevant to the discussion, the question is if 17th century English society had a taboo about a woman showing bare breasts like modern society does, or if they were more like their counterparts in central Europe.
Mashadarof402
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When I say Victorian, I mean the era, which is circa 17th century.
And if people can walk around in dresses with a lot of cleavage on display whether in formal occasions or day to day life, then there wasn't a taboo against it. Engravings from the era depict dresses that either cover up or reveal a lot of cleavage.
I'd say that already answers your question. But if you don't like it, you'll have to say so.
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TenMoreMiles
Your first time is always over so quickly, isn't it?
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Please tell me the third cross isn't Naruto
Gaming Geek
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Hey if you want to talk about useful spells - Remember there is a reference to miscasting a spell and summoning a livestock. Not creating, summoning to you.
Can we say free food?
Can we say free food?
MutantRancor
[Suspected Sithspawn]
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Hey if you want to talk about useful spells - Remember there is a reference to miscasting a spell and summoning a livestock. Not creating, summoning to you.
Can we say free food?
"Never forget the wizard Baruffio, who said F instead of S and wound up with a buffalo on his chest," is more than a bit vague as to whether said buffalo is conjured or summoned. And, for that matter, what spell Baruffio was trying to cast in the first place.
Still, it might be worth testing-- if you can get a type of buffalo that's not an endangered species, and it's solid enough to stick around after eating, it could be beneficial to Harry to master that miscast spell.
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I really enjoyed this story when I first read it on FFN some many years ago now, and put a lot of effort into finding out if it was continued somewhere. Are you the original author?
EDIT: Oh, no, there he is; silly question. Serves me right for not reading.
EDIT: Oh, no, there he is; silly question. Serves me right for not reading.
Dunkelzahn
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It is the standard Hogwarts uniform skirt. I was just thinking out loud as it were, after you mentioned modesty as a potential reason for the choice.
As for the not inquiring further point, the issue was that there was no apparent question to ask. Wizards already had a perfectly good explanation of how the spell (and the rest of its development line) behaved --- it was a conjuration, and as far as they knew, it acted exactly like other conjurations --- so why would they think to look further into it trying to verify that it was, in fact a conjuration? Harry then --- in the unusual position of a person who could speak parseltongue (rare) faced with conjured snakes set on him by someone else who could not (exceptionally rare) --- came across new information which cast doubt on that earlier assumption (the supposedly conjured snakes could do something their conjurer had no way to instruct them how to do). Now they have a question to ask.
Imagine if you found a small creature walking by a pond. It looks like a duck, acts like a duck, sounds like a duck, some hunters killed a few and they tell you it even tastes like a duck, and so you could be reasonably assured that it is, in fact, a duck. An ornithologist might look into more detail and try to classify exactly what kind of duck it is, but there is no need for nor interest in verifying that it is in fact a duck rather than some other sort of animal in disguise just pretending to be a duck. Then, years down the road, some new situation came along, and the critter suddenly started climbing trees and storing nuts for the winter, now it's suddenly an interesting question to examine. Is it a duck that acts strangely sometimes? Is it a squirrel that for some reason likes to pretend to be a duck? If so, why does it taste like a duck, too? Is it some new manner of creature never before catalogued? Now there's information that doesn't fit the established understanding, so investigation ensues.
Before that new information came to light, there was no reason to challenge the earlier assumption that the snake summoning charm was simply a particular kind of conjuration. Now there is.
The third cross isn't Naruto.
Spartan3909
Know what you're doing yet?
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So Boruto then?
The Unicorn
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Victorian means 19th century, NOT 17th century.
It being acceptable to show cleavage in public, and it being acceptable under some circumstances to show bare breasts are two very different things, and I don't see why you believe that one being acceptable indicates anything about the other.
"It's generally accepted to be a conjuration, but this new evidence makes me question that"
is VERY different from "I was under the impression that it was a conjuration, but I don't know if anyone has asked that question before,"
freakytiki34
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I'm torn between being terrified of that crossover and morbid curiosity what Dunkelzahn would do with it.So Boruto then?
ConsiderableHat
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There's another possibility: Flitwick is toning the story down for a class full of eleven-year-olds.
My own headcanon is that Baruffio was engaged by a farmer to cast charms to help milk yield along - Mozzarella being a critical strategic supply for Italy, of course - and after a long day of banging out spell after spell, up to his knees in buffalo shit and baking his brains out in the Campanian sunshine, he fluffed a spell.
He may or may not have had buffalo on his chest.
He definitely had one on his conscience.
Carrow
Your first time is always over so quickly, isn't it?
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I love it! I remember reading the original posting on FF.net and I'm extremely glad to see it continued here!
It's a fun story with a good blend of gritty realism and fun lighthearted escapism. Eagerly awaiting the next chapter!
It's a fun story with a good blend of gritty realism and fun lighthearted escapism. Eagerly awaiting the next chapter!
Edmond G. Bertrand
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Does anyone else read Minerva as a "Rev. Mother Superior" kind of character?
RichardWhereat
Aia airëa Fëanáro.
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In Harry Potter there never seems to be any lack of magic, it's just there for being used.
Also, in the UK and commonwealth, it is spelt aluminium, not aluminum.
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Cutesquid
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Perhaps the Wizarding World is more respectful of the discoverer of aluminum than the UK. I mean it's not impossible.
Doghead13
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Unlikely. Dunkelzahn is American; this is far from the only blatant Americanism in his version of the fic. The first one I noticed was use of the word 'fall' to describe autumn.
At some point I may go through Britpicking the entire thing, but I'm not sure I can be arsed.
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