Lightwavers
Purple Noodle
- Pronouns
- they/them
[X] Susan Bones
Harry Potter and the Scabbard of Excalibur [AU]
Rolen von Keng
Sleeping Green Bear
- Location
- The Wilderness
[X] Theodore Nott - He's got every single potential trait attributable to Salazar Slytherin and then some: he's been known to practice Parseltongue as a past-time, is amazingly clever, and he's a strict, ambitious individualist with no strongly personal connections to any gangs or cliques, but enough charisma to know the latest tittle-tattle.
- Location
- USA
[X] Susan Bones
- Location
- California
Yeah, I missed the fact that the thefts had been going on for at least one year. Makes it much less likely to be a first-year, and more likely to be a second year.
Voting
[X] Susan Bones
accordingly, though going down that secret passage is a good later step.
So most of the votes right now are just guesses- some judgement involved, but not enough to be even close to sure.
Testing their blood is probably a reliable way to distinguish the Slytherin heir but checking is a bit invasive- are there any other ways to pick them out? Maybe also seeing if there's a reaction to the Slytherin ring? Getting a snake in front of them to check for Parseltongue?
Testing their blood is probably a reliable way to distinguish the Slytherin heir but checking is a bit invasive- are there any other ways to pick them out? Maybe also seeing if there's a reaction to the Slytherin ring? Getting a snake in front of them to check for Parseltongue?
Aww yiz! It's gonna be good.
BECOME THE TRUE OTP!
NO FOOL!
It's the contraction of: Hermes numbah 1!
Now the true question is, is it a an epitath to aspire to?
Or is it a designation of a Hermes Genderbending Clone project gone wild?
Or worse… A self propagating family of Hermeses! No wonder then, of her genius when it was Hermes Trismegistus all along, Now as herself!
[X] Send the Rat Horde to infiltrate the Salamander Thief's base. Have them deliver a payload of subtle marking runes so that Harry recognizes them in class. Reward the horde with extra cheese on a successful mission.
Cheese tactics!
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We're voting on doing an astrological reading to [target] with apparently mostly one target that kind of fits the bill from all the information we acquired astrologically so far.
If we test Parseltongue or the Ring, then we'd have to do a write-in that focuses on a single person like we're doing with Astrology. So, in the end, we would have to find a target too, unless we do it in a way that enables to check multiple targets.
There's also the option the others (so Hermione) could have more clues or know someone that feels off. We could ask Hufflepuffs for suspicious first years (which ones have more talent than they should, like Harry, Neville, and Hermione) without talking about the rings (or say we help for the House cup and divine the fortune of Hufflepuff in general if they trade in info).
- Location
- Poland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Susan Bones
OctarineShrike
Avatar of Mandos
We got the RWBY themed voting options of questionable utility or the choice of not taking one for our house fealty perk. Choosing to remember our dreams and the associated mental trauma won.
Black Skies with Magicka Primeval basically had no downsides except a minor decrease in magical power that was more than covered for by Singularity. Hardship would have stacked well with our upcoming trauma too. Not being able to get optimised builds is 😔
Muttered spellcasting and reduced wand movements alone. Also no Sprout interaction unlock I guess.. Sirius it is, for our Patronus tutor.
Muttered spellcasting and reduced wand movements alone. Also no Sprout interaction unlock I guess.. Sirius it is, for our Patronus tutor.
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HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
Wait, we didn't also get MP?
Sadly no all things must die barely overcame Forfeiture and nothing else won
Hundred Evil Dancing Dragon Flames
Birdsie
Sharp Talons Cleave The Worthy
- Location
- Poland
Hundred Evil Dancing Dragon Flames
It was settled, and their search for the last bearer was ready to begin. Harry, Neville, and Hermione secretly gathered on the next Friday, several minutes prior to breakfast, in the antechamber in front of the Great Hall. It was mostly empty at this hour, only a handful of early risers and industrious overachievers swarming in at an unsteady trickle.
They didn't know much about Susan Bones. She was the prime suspect on their list; a diligent student in their year, she fit the bill for Slytherin excellently: she had Ministry connections, most of them in her family, and seemed to be headed in that career direction. She was known to be uncannily resourceful and very independent for a Hufflepuff, which opened up the idea that maybe she'd selected the wrong House to be sorted into. Or maybe there was a level of deliberate judgment in that? Optics, perhaps?
As breakfast started, Hermione conjured a snake for Harry at his request, then all of them approached Susan with confidence.
"Hey, Susan," Harry said, holding the timid corn snake in her direction. "Can you talk to this snake?"
She turned around and screamed. "Wh-What is this?!" Susan winced away, practically arching her back around the table. "Get it away from me!"
"I just want to see if you can talk to snakes," Harry replied casually.
"Is this some kind of new harassment strategy?!" Susan asked in between ragged, fearful breaths. "Please, take it away!"
"Sorry. I guess-" As Harry was moving his extended arm away, Snape raised his wand from across the Great Hall. He was the only Professor to be seated at the faculty table at the moment, having arrived earlier than even the Deputy Headmistress.
"Vipera Evanesca!" A quick bolt of distorted, fiery orange energy hit the corn snake. Its body scattered into ash, briefly lighting up, then fading away right as fast, with not even a moment for a dying hiss. "Potter, Granger, Longbottom - five points from each of you, and ten more from Potter. Sit down at your tables and stop bothering other students!"
They complied with the Professor's barked orders. As minutes passed - with Susan occasionally sending Neville and Harry withering, mean glares - more students flooded into the Great Hall, and then several more teachers. Glumly, disappointed by their failure and the lost points, Harry snacked on a chicken drum that restored its mass after every bite, turning it over in a dish of garlic sauce before digging in with his teeth.
Nothing else of note happened at first during breakfast. The Weasley twins got some points taken away for 'covertly' jinxing their older brother, a prefect; several Hufflepuffs stood up in vocal protest of 'teachers mistreating students,' and then some riots began and mostly ended before everyone could dig into their second course.
As Harry was eagerly picking away at his favorite cookies, his ear twitched, overhearing a sound from below the table.
"Master! Human master Harry Potter! We have a problem!" one of his rats, Lucy, said. She was breathing raggedly, as though she'd just run a marathon.
Harry looked around surreptitiously, then leaned under the table and fed Lucy a bit of cheese from his pocket, hoping that nobody noticed - he didn't want a reputation as the kid that carries around stripes of cheese and feeds rats, even though it was true.
"Describe the problem."
"We've detected the suspicious man you told us to look around for," Lucy replied, then added, with panic, "He's headed over here!"
Oho? Our Azkabanite friend approaches. I hope he enjoys the preparations we've been making.
"Last known location?" Harry asked tensely.
She considered. "U-Um, see-through walls, plants..."
"Greenhouses, got it." Harry fed her another string of cheese, then resurfaced, to the odd looks of several Hufflepuffs next to him.
Immediately, Harry pulled out the Codex Intervallum, flipped it open to the first page, and began to furiously scribe across its length. Soon, Ron, Hermione, Neville, and Daphne began to accumulate notice of his actions and glanced into their individual journals to see what the problem was.
'An enemy is approaching,' Harry explained.
'Enemy?' Ron answered with a question.
'No time to explain,' Harry wrote back. 'I need you to gather up the pocketstones and put them next to the doors. Seize them by force if necessary. Damn the point loss.'
'On it,' Neville answered, and stood immediately after, while the others hesitated.
Another rat came into the room soon after, reporting, "Next to the, uh, Big Quilly Rooms!" Exam Rooms. Less than a minute away.
'Harry, what is this about?' Hermione asked with calm penstrokes.
'Again, no time to explain. Just do.'
In order to not waste time, he answered using an ink-making spell, pasting the response into the page in a single release of black tusche.
As soon as Harry was done with that, he cast a Gouging Charm on the corner of the table, to the shock of several students as the wood exploded away in a spray of fragments like a landmine. A single, excellent plank that survived was now sticking out, directed up at an angle towards the ceiling. Harry came closer, then clutched it with both of his hands and pulled as hard as his muscles could afford. A second later, it came away, with the noise of splintering wood groaning and finally cracking and releasing its hold.
"Potter's gone mad!" someone in Hufflepuff cried.
"Hey, my pocketstone! I paid six Galleons for that!" a Slytherin complained.
"Mr. Potter, that's vandalism!" shouted McGonagall in a thick, Scottish brogue. "I'm taking twenty - no, thirty points! Potter, what are you doing with that? Make it forty, and I'll keep increasing the penalty, young man!" she corrected when she noticed he didn't appear to care in the slightest about her points. A person nearby - either a student or a teacher - attempted a Disarming Charm on him, but Harry simply used his dueling holster to return the wand as it was flying away, then unholstered it once again to continue his work undisturbed, turning away to absorb any other jinxes and hexes with his own back.
He was too busy ensorcelling the plank he'd loosed from the table to even care as McGonagall and several other teachers stood; he twirled his wand, laying Charm over Charm on the wooden plank, then pulled out his knife and carved a rune on it.
"What the bloody hell's happening?" someone else muttered.
After yet another moment, the runic plank was finished. Harry gently tossed it up into the air, cast a fast Levitation Charm before it could begin to fall, then moved it above the entrance door to the Great Hall. Another Charm made it stick there, as though glued to the stone walls. At this point, the teachers had stood up and were making their way over to physically restrain him, and Harry couldn't let that happen - he was fine with losing his wand, but that would preferably not happen either.
"Headmaster!" Harry shouted across the room, at such volumes and emotional desperation that even Professor Sprout - already ten steps away - stopped in her tracks and froze for a second. "Did you receive my letter? It's now! It's right now!"
Headmaster Dumbledore stood with a silent nod and began incanting spells of protection over the Great Hall. A colorful array of lights and fields appeared over the walls, ceiling, floor, and several other places; partitioning the room. It stopped the teachers, confused by Dumbledore's abrupt and trusting reaction. Everyone was confused.
"Everyone, be ready!" Dumbledore declared. "Students, come over here! Away from the doors and windows!"
Harry glanced over to the Great Hall entrance and saw as Neville dumped an entire armful of pocketstones right next to it. A second later, Ron came over, with a slightly lesser amount, then Daphne with only a handful, before they moved to stand over next to Harry. Only Hermione was unmoved and didn't act, looking around uncomfortably.
It wasn't long - not even a couple of seconds - before Harry started to feel a keen, probing soreness over his scar, that soon expanded into full-on pain, coming in unexpected waves and radiating down almost to his neck, accumulating in intensity as the unknown man approached.
A second later, the massive Great Hall entry doors were blown inwards by a cursed mass of darkness, that spread over the floor and consumed half the pocketstones like an acid, then stopped promptly at the outermost of Dumbledore's wards. The Azkaban prisoner waltzed in, arms open and voice spreading laughter. His eye was missing still, from where he'd lost it, not even replaced with a magical prosthetic - maybe he couldn't make one, for lack of materials, or maybe didn't know how. It didn't matter.
Harry whispered a spell and triggered the remaining touchstones. Their networking runes collaborated to form a field where the efficacy of every stone was pooled together and multiplied, creating a flash-blizzard centered on the unexpecting man. There was nothing over there but a mass of snow, frost, and thick gusts of mist, like gaseous, diaphanous milk; so frighteningly cold that even several dozen meters away, the resultant drop in temperature could be felt and soon caused people's breaths to mist over.
"I-" Professor Sprout, next to Harry, stuttered uncharacteristically; her ironclad personality dropped for a second. "I-?"
A light appeared deep in the mist and then condensed until the frost was like an icy star, converging and spinning inwardly in a suckling spiral. A second later, the cold fog was blown away with enough force to ruffle their robes, and the Azkaban prisoner was in the middle, standing in a prim manner, wand upraised like a questioning finger to reveal a spark of furious, flaring blood-red flame dancing at its point, its light spreading over the hall and blinding the eyes of anyone who looked, like the antipode of the sun.
He was one of the students closest to the doors of the Great Hall. Harry looked around in alarm, and saw a nearby table, then dove for it. As soon as he noticed his dire position, Snape moved over and began to cast spells on the table, and Harry felt as it grew bigger and heavier.
"Fiends..."
"Protego Maxima!" Dumbledore declared loudly - as several other professors made defensive spells of their own, casting out large prismatic shields, and pure-white orbs of light that spread out to become floating medieval bucklers, and hexagonal patterns with translucent energy fields filling the lines out.
"...be free."
And then, the spark of fire moved out like a gushing, hateful jet of rufescent flame, and encountered resistance as it spread into a cone of bloodred fiery doom and washed over the shielding charms like the spray of an evil firefighter's hose. It shattered the first of the protections that Dumbledore had laid, and the Professors moved to the edges, firing hexes and curses at the prisoner, but he simply muttered some incantation and whipped his wand to the left and right, releasing a pair of wolves made from the bloodred flames to battle and distract them.
Harry felt an indescribable heat prominently surging over his back and into his spine, making him feel sick to the core, as though some cancerous disease had pierced him down to the marrow - penetrating even through the magical shields, even through the wood, and slowly eating away at his life.
What can we do?
But Geist didn't speak, and Harry's heart started to beat with tension. Of course, he'd forgotten - the presence of the prisoner disrupted their connection somehow, and Harry was alone on his own again, facing an indescribably dire threat.
Painful memories came dashing back through the fog-veil of childhood, shaped in equal parts from his own tortured thoughts, and the wisps of bloody inferno dancing above and around him. Memories of being utterly powerless and helpless, surrounded by men in robes fighting other men in robes, casting spells beyond their reckoning and handling, beyond ordinary power; unaware of their own strength, uncaring for potential consequences. And he was, right now, as hopeless as he was back then, in that small, dark bedroom on Privet Drive. Hatred followed, soon; a wave of simmering, unbearable anger at the world for shaping circumstances in this way.
Why am I always powerless? No matter how much I learn, how much I advance, will I always be outclassed in the end?
Harry looked across the Great Hall, slightly over his impromptu cover. He saw Hermione and Neville hiding somewhere to the side of Dumbledore, behind a chair that someone had transfigured into a marble pillar to provide a hiding place for as many students as possible. They were safe, but for how long?
Harry looked at Sirius, desperately throwing water Charms at one of the wolves in order to focus its attention on himself, then launching himself away and back when the beast charged at him. His wand made sufficient amounts of enchanted water to extinguish houses, but the flame of the wolves didn't abate. He wasn't safe, even figuratively.
Harry grit his teeth.
I'm done hiding. I can't hide anymore. I don't want to hide and run away from people who want to hurt me and my friends.
He peeked over the cover, and immediately regretted it. Harry saw a pair of draconic wings made of blood and darkness and then felt an increasing, steadying numbness; followed by a stinging, painful sensation over his skin, and then a spine-arching torment once he understood the depth of agony he was feeling. A dragon of blood-red flames had breathed its deathly substance directly over the magical shield in front of him, and motes of that flame, alongside gusts of smoke, washed over his skin and body.
He stumbled away, coughing and screaming, and once more, it was Professor Snape who noticed him; cursing and disengaging from the downhill battle against one of the spectral wolves. He sprinted towards Harry and slid to a stop next to him, then started casting healing spells; the pain abated slightly, but not fully.
"Potter, you utter fool! Stay hidden!" Snape turned around and cast a Knockback Jinx as a wolf leaped at him. It barely changed trajectory, and Snape was forced to push Harry away to the side, as he accepted a flaming claw swipe to his face and fell over, the beast on top of him. His blood boiled as it came out in a spume, steaming in an instant into a red mist. It was right then that McGonagall came in to save them both, transfiguring the ground underneath Professor Snape into a moving treadmill of stones that carried him rapidly away to safety elsewhere in the Great Hall.
She then cast a second spell that made the ground underneath the growling, magical monster into a box of steel that rose around to confine it. It began to redden almost immediately as the metal heated up, and parts of it began to distort, but McGonagall cast a Levitation Charm and fired it through a distant window.
Across from them, Dumbledore had engaged the massive Fiendfyre dragon, casting hexes and spells that seemed to almost bend space, or slow down its movements, before launching a spear of pure, dazzling white light into its chest and causing it to lose a good portion of its mass.
It was the last thing Harry saw before losing consciousness.
---
At the moment, you've got 8.25 Gnosis.
[ ] Ancient Dream - For what must be the first time in his entire life, Harry dreams consciously. It's not a good dream to have.
[ ] Awaken Calmly [7 Gnosis] - Instead, Harry wakes up in the hospital wing unproblematically, his comatose state having rendered his mind too tired and inoperable to even dream. As a result, he wakes up several days later than normal but is otherwise unaffected.
[ ] Another Dream [14 Gnosis] - Instead, you may receive another visitation from the mysterious dark specter that once came to you. Maybe it can speak a little bit more clearly to you now about what's going on? Also, Harry wakes up much sooner, and is less hurt by the overall attack.
On the bright side, immediately following this horrible scenario, you'll begin summer vacation! Let's hope your second year at Hogwarts ends on a better note, hm?
Anyway, you'll have to wait until Harry awakens in order to be debriefed on what happened afterward, but I assure you Harry survives with only minimal (physical) scarring. However, given the potential compounding results of his impending dreams, the mental trauma might be another barrel entirely - and that's not to mention what happened to the other students. All hopes in reserve that all your favorite and important people survived... (Or that Neville died, if you're one of his haters.)
Don't fault yourselves for this event, by the way - although you could've helped more with this scenario had you chosen to help Dumbledore more over looking for additional ring-bearers, drastically altering or even fully preventing it would've required an entirely different kind of build. It's fortunate that you managed to be good enough at Astrology to predict something would happen to Dumbledore, though (this was an attack on his person, after all,) which lent you just enough credit with him to get him to prepare the Great Hall for a full-scale attack. It saved a lot of lives - imagine if nobody was aware that something was coming in your direction!
(Having a rat network up and running also helped tremendously, for a similar reason.)
Overall, your efforts as a thread are rated [Exceeds Expectations], and you receive +10 Gnosis to spend on the vote above as you please. If you choose not to spend any Gnosis on the choices above, you'll instead receive 5 Gnosis to do with as you please in the future.
You've unlocked the Heartbroken Attainment, now available for 50 Gnosis as a study booster, or in other such appropriate circumstances.
It was settled, and their search for the last bearer was ready to begin. Harry, Neville, and Hermione secretly gathered on the next Friday, several minutes prior to breakfast, in the antechamber in front of the Great Hall. It was mostly empty at this hour, only a handful of early risers and industrious overachievers swarming in at an unsteady trickle.
They didn't know much about Susan Bones. She was the prime suspect on their list; a diligent student in their year, she fit the bill for Slytherin excellently: she had Ministry connections, most of them in her family, and seemed to be headed in that career direction. She was known to be uncannily resourceful and very independent for a Hufflepuff, which opened up the idea that maybe she'd selected the wrong House to be sorted into. Or maybe there was a level of deliberate judgment in that? Optics, perhaps?
As breakfast started, Hermione conjured a snake for Harry at his request, then all of them approached Susan with confidence.
"Hey, Susan," Harry said, holding the timid corn snake in her direction. "Can you talk to this snake?"
She turned around and screamed. "Wh-What is this?!" Susan winced away, practically arching her back around the table. "Get it away from me!"
"I just want to see if you can talk to snakes," Harry replied casually.
"Is this some kind of new harassment strategy?!" Susan asked in between ragged, fearful breaths. "Please, take it away!"
"Sorry. I guess-" As Harry was moving his extended arm away, Snape raised his wand from across the Great Hall. He was the only Professor to be seated at the faculty table at the moment, having arrived earlier than even the Deputy Headmistress.
"Vipera Evanesca!" A quick bolt of distorted, fiery orange energy hit the corn snake. Its body scattered into ash, briefly lighting up, then fading away right as fast, with not even a moment for a dying hiss. "Potter, Granger, Longbottom - five points from each of you, and ten more from Potter. Sit down at your tables and stop bothering other students!"
They complied with the Professor's barked orders. As minutes passed - with Susan occasionally sending Neville and Harry withering, mean glares - more students flooded into the Great Hall, and then several more teachers. Glumly, disappointed by their failure and the lost points, Harry snacked on a chicken drum that restored its mass after every bite, turning it over in a dish of garlic sauce before digging in with his teeth.
Nothing else of note happened at first during breakfast. The Weasley twins got some points taken away for 'covertly' jinxing their older brother, a prefect; several Hufflepuffs stood up in vocal protest of 'teachers mistreating students,' and then some riots began and mostly ended before everyone could dig into their second course.
As Harry was eagerly picking away at his favorite cookies, his ear twitched, overhearing a sound from below the table.
"Master! Human master Harry Potter! We have a problem!" one of his rats, Lucy, said. She was breathing raggedly, as though she'd just run a marathon.
Harry looked around surreptitiously, then leaned under the table and fed Lucy a bit of cheese from his pocket, hoping that nobody noticed - he didn't want a reputation as the kid that carries around stripes of cheese and feeds rats, even though it was true.
"Describe the problem."
"We've detected the suspicious man you told us to look around for," Lucy replied, then added, with panic, "He's headed over here!"
Oho? Our Azkabanite friend approaches. I hope he enjoys the preparations we've been making.
"Last known location?" Harry asked tensely.
She considered. "U-Um, see-through walls, plants..."
"Greenhouses, got it." Harry fed her another string of cheese, then resurfaced, to the odd looks of several Hufflepuffs next to him.
Immediately, Harry pulled out the Codex Intervallum, flipped it open to the first page, and began to furiously scribe across its length. Soon, Ron, Hermione, Neville, and Daphne began to accumulate notice of his actions and glanced into their individual journals to see what the problem was.
'An enemy is approaching,' Harry explained.
'Enemy?' Ron answered with a question.
'No time to explain,' Harry wrote back. 'I need you to gather up the pocketstones and put them next to the doors. Seize them by force if necessary. Damn the point loss.'
'On it,' Neville answered, and stood immediately after, while the others hesitated.
Another rat came into the room soon after, reporting, "Next to the, uh, Big Quilly Rooms!" Exam Rooms. Less than a minute away.
'Harry, what is this about?' Hermione asked with calm penstrokes.
'Again, no time to explain. Just do.'
In order to not waste time, he answered using an ink-making spell, pasting the response into the page in a single release of black tusche.
As soon as Harry was done with that, he cast a Gouging Charm on the corner of the table, to the shock of several students as the wood exploded away in a spray of fragments like a landmine. A single, excellent plank that survived was now sticking out, directed up at an angle towards the ceiling. Harry came closer, then clutched it with both of his hands and pulled as hard as his muscles could afford. A second later, it came away, with the noise of splintering wood groaning and finally cracking and releasing its hold.
"Potter's gone mad!" someone in Hufflepuff cried.
"Hey, my pocketstone! I paid six Galleons for that!" a Slytherin complained.
"Mr. Potter, that's vandalism!" shouted McGonagall in a thick, Scottish brogue. "I'm taking twenty - no, thirty points! Potter, what are you doing with that? Make it forty, and I'll keep increasing the penalty, young man!" she corrected when she noticed he didn't appear to care in the slightest about her points. A person nearby - either a student or a teacher - attempted a Disarming Charm on him, but Harry simply used his dueling holster to return the wand as it was flying away, then unholstered it once again to continue his work undisturbed, turning away to absorb any other jinxes and hexes with his own back.
He was too busy ensorcelling the plank he'd loosed from the table to even care as McGonagall and several other teachers stood; he twirled his wand, laying Charm over Charm on the wooden plank, then pulled out his knife and carved a rune on it.
"What the bloody hell's happening?" someone else muttered.
After yet another moment, the runic plank was finished. Harry gently tossed it up into the air, cast a fast Levitation Charm before it could begin to fall, then moved it above the entrance door to the Great Hall. Another Charm made it stick there, as though glued to the stone walls. At this point, the teachers had stood up and were making their way over to physically restrain him, and Harry couldn't let that happen - he was fine with losing his wand, but that would preferably not happen either.
"Headmaster!" Harry shouted across the room, at such volumes and emotional desperation that even Professor Sprout - already ten steps away - stopped in her tracks and froze for a second. "Did you receive my letter? It's now! It's right now!"
Headmaster Dumbledore stood with a silent nod and began incanting spells of protection over the Great Hall. A colorful array of lights and fields appeared over the walls, ceiling, floor, and several other places; partitioning the room. It stopped the teachers, confused by Dumbledore's abrupt and trusting reaction. Everyone was confused.
"Everyone, be ready!" Dumbledore declared. "Students, come over here! Away from the doors and windows!"
Harry glanced over to the Great Hall entrance and saw as Neville dumped an entire armful of pocketstones right next to it. A second later, Ron came over, with a slightly lesser amount, then Daphne with only a handful, before they moved to stand over next to Harry. Only Hermione was unmoved and didn't act, looking around uncomfortably.
It wasn't long - not even a couple of seconds - before Harry started to feel a keen, probing soreness over his scar, that soon expanded into full-on pain, coming in unexpected waves and radiating down almost to his neck, accumulating in intensity as the unknown man approached.
A second later, the massive Great Hall entry doors were blown inwards by a cursed mass of darkness, that spread over the floor and consumed half the pocketstones like an acid, then stopped promptly at the outermost of Dumbledore's wards. The Azkaban prisoner waltzed in, arms open and voice spreading laughter. His eye was missing still, from where he'd lost it, not even replaced with a magical prosthetic - maybe he couldn't make one, for lack of materials, or maybe didn't know how. It didn't matter.
Harry whispered a spell and triggered the remaining touchstones. Their networking runes collaborated to form a field where the efficacy of every stone was pooled together and multiplied, creating a flash-blizzard centered on the unexpecting man. There was nothing over there but a mass of snow, frost, and thick gusts of mist, like gaseous, diaphanous milk; so frighteningly cold that even several dozen meters away, the resultant drop in temperature could be felt and soon caused people's breaths to mist over.
"I-" Professor Sprout, next to Harry, stuttered uncharacteristically; her ironclad personality dropped for a second. "I-?"
A light appeared deep in the mist and then condensed until the frost was like an icy star, converging and spinning inwardly in a suckling spiral. A second later, the cold fog was blown away with enough force to ruffle their robes, and the Azkaban prisoner was in the middle, standing in a prim manner, wand upraised like a questioning finger to reveal a spark of furious, flaring blood-red flame dancing at its point, its light spreading over the hall and blinding the eyes of anyone who looked, like the antipode of the sun.
He was one of the students closest to the doors of the Great Hall. Harry looked around in alarm, and saw a nearby table, then dove for it. As soon as he noticed his dire position, Snape moved over and began to cast spells on the table, and Harry felt as it grew bigger and heavier.
"Fiends..."
"Protego Maxima!" Dumbledore declared loudly - as several other professors made defensive spells of their own, casting out large prismatic shields, and pure-white orbs of light that spread out to become floating medieval bucklers, and hexagonal patterns with translucent energy fields filling the lines out.
"...be free."
And then, the spark of fire moved out like a gushing, hateful jet of rufescent flame, and encountered resistance as it spread into a cone of bloodred fiery doom and washed over the shielding charms like the spray of an evil firefighter's hose. It shattered the first of the protections that Dumbledore had laid, and the Professors moved to the edges, firing hexes and curses at the prisoner, but he simply muttered some incantation and whipped his wand to the left and right, releasing a pair of wolves made from the bloodred flames to battle and distract them.
Harry felt an indescribable heat prominently surging over his back and into his spine, making him feel sick to the core, as though some cancerous disease had pierced him down to the marrow - penetrating even through the magical shields, even through the wood, and slowly eating away at his life.
What can we do?
But Geist didn't speak, and Harry's heart started to beat with tension. Of course, he'd forgotten - the presence of the prisoner disrupted their connection somehow, and Harry was alone on his own again, facing an indescribably dire threat.
Painful memories came dashing back through the fog-veil of childhood, shaped in equal parts from his own tortured thoughts, and the wisps of bloody inferno dancing above and around him. Memories of being utterly powerless and helpless, surrounded by men in robes fighting other men in robes, casting spells beyond their reckoning and handling, beyond ordinary power; unaware of their own strength, uncaring for potential consequences. And he was, right now, as hopeless as he was back then, in that small, dark bedroom on Privet Drive. Hatred followed, soon; a wave of simmering, unbearable anger at the world for shaping circumstances in this way.
Why am I always powerless? No matter how much I learn, how much I advance, will I always be outclassed in the end?
Harry looked across the Great Hall, slightly over his impromptu cover. He saw Hermione and Neville hiding somewhere to the side of Dumbledore, behind a chair that someone had transfigured into a marble pillar to provide a hiding place for as many students as possible. They were safe, but for how long?
Harry looked at Sirius, desperately throwing water Charms at one of the wolves in order to focus its attention on himself, then launching himself away and back when the beast charged at him. His wand made sufficient amounts of enchanted water to extinguish houses, but the flame of the wolves didn't abate. He wasn't safe, even figuratively.
Harry grit his teeth.
I'm done hiding. I can't hide anymore. I don't want to hide and run away from people who want to hurt me and my friends.
He peeked over the cover, and immediately regretted it. Harry saw a pair of draconic wings made of blood and darkness and then felt an increasing, steadying numbness; followed by a stinging, painful sensation over his skin, and then a spine-arching torment once he understood the depth of agony he was feeling. A dragon of blood-red flames had breathed its deathly substance directly over the magical shield in front of him, and motes of that flame, alongside gusts of smoke, washed over his skin and body.
He stumbled away, coughing and screaming, and once more, it was Professor Snape who noticed him; cursing and disengaging from the downhill battle against one of the spectral wolves. He sprinted towards Harry and slid to a stop next to him, then started casting healing spells; the pain abated slightly, but not fully.
"Potter, you utter fool! Stay hidden!" Snape turned around and cast a Knockback Jinx as a wolf leaped at him. It barely changed trajectory, and Snape was forced to push Harry away to the side, as he accepted a flaming claw swipe to his face and fell over, the beast on top of him. His blood boiled as it came out in a spume, steaming in an instant into a red mist. It was right then that McGonagall came in to save them both, transfiguring the ground underneath Professor Snape into a moving treadmill of stones that carried him rapidly away to safety elsewhere in the Great Hall.
She then cast a second spell that made the ground underneath the growling, magical monster into a box of steel that rose around to confine it. It began to redden almost immediately as the metal heated up, and parts of it began to distort, but McGonagall cast a Levitation Charm and fired it through a distant window.
Across from them, Dumbledore had engaged the massive Fiendfyre dragon, casting hexes and spells that seemed to almost bend space, or slow down its movements, before launching a spear of pure, dazzling white light into its chest and causing it to lose a good portion of its mass.
It was the last thing Harry saw before losing consciousness.
---
At the moment, you've got 8.25 Gnosis.
[ ] Ancient Dream - For what must be the first time in his entire life, Harry dreams consciously. It's not a good dream to have.
[ ] Awaken Calmly [7 Gnosis] - Instead, Harry wakes up in the hospital wing unproblematically, his comatose state having rendered his mind too tired and inoperable to even dream. As a result, he wakes up several days later than normal but is otherwise unaffected.
[ ] Another Dream [14 Gnosis] - Instead, you may receive another visitation from the mysterious dark specter that once came to you. Maybe it can speak a little bit more clearly to you now about what's going on? Also, Harry wakes up much sooner, and is less hurt by the overall attack.
On the bright side, immediately following this horrible scenario, you'll begin summer vacation! Let's hope your second year at Hogwarts ends on a better note, hm?
Anyway, you'll have to wait until Harry awakens in order to be debriefed on what happened afterward, but I assure you Harry survives with only minimal (physical) scarring. However, given the potential compounding results of his impending dreams, the mental trauma might be another barrel entirely - and that's not to mention what happened to the other students. All hopes in reserve that all your favorite and important people survived... (Or that Neville died, if you're one of his haters.)
Don't fault yourselves for this event, by the way - although you could've helped more with this scenario had you chosen to help Dumbledore more over looking for additional ring-bearers, drastically altering or even fully preventing it would've required an entirely different kind of build. It's fortunate that you managed to be good enough at Astrology to predict something would happen to Dumbledore, though (this was an attack on his person, after all,) which lent you just enough credit with him to get him to prepare the Great Hall for a full-scale attack. It saved a lot of lives - imagine if nobody was aware that something was coming in your direction!
(Having a rat network up and running also helped tremendously, for a similar reason.)
Overall, your efforts as a thread are rated [Exceeds Expectations], and you receive +10 Gnosis to spend on the vote above as you please. If you choose not to spend any Gnosis on the choices above, you'll instead receive 5 Gnosis to do with as you please in the future.
You've unlocked the Heartbroken Attainment, now available for 50 Gnosis as a study booster, or in other such appropriate circumstances.
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[X] Another Dream [14 Gnosis]
- Location
- Between dreams and reality
Keep in mind we only have 8.25 Gnosis. Is it a good idea to go -7.75 in debt? How would that affect us?
- Location
- California
[X] Another Dream
They said to seek them out again, and we are woefully under-informed. We haven't even found the Heir.
They said to seek them out again, and we are woefully under-informed. We haven't even found the Heir.
- Location
- California
We got 10 free Gnosis on this vote, or 5 if we don't spend any.
Well damn.
All in all, a bit of a shame but not irrecoverable.
Plans for summer should include getting a therapist, an international trip to research the Hermes Trismegistus bit, and grinding magical training at home.
We need to grind Gnosis like crazy though, both to get a good therapist and to improve our other efforts as well.
As it stands, I think that some exposition is in order.
[X] Another Dream [14 Gnosis]
All in all, a bit of a shame but not irrecoverable.
Plans for summer should include getting a therapist, an international trip to research the Hermes Trismegistus bit, and grinding magical training at home.
We need to grind Gnosis like crazy though, both to get a good therapist and to improve our other efforts as well.
As it stands, I think that some exposition is in order.
[X] Another Dream [14 Gnosis]