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Enter the Dragon (Harry Potter/Shadowrun)

Discussion in 'Creative Writing' started by Dunkelzahn, Jul 10, 2018.

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  1. megrisvernin

    megrisvernin Connoisseur.

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    Following the story, some particular passages that stood out to me.

    Wizard of oz reference.

    Regarding the Dragons going to war over a tenth of a percent, I suspect it was more an issue of precedent in some encroachment Wizards did.

    The biggest danger of the stone rings Snape and company found would be the risk of a domino effect. One detonating destroying the physical boundaries for the others, letting them release their energy. Now a purely random magical effect would be unlikely to trigger too many domineos, but given how large of a crater they describe if the energy was releasted into a blasting spell, that going off could easily trigger releases of other energy wells, leading to a dozen or more wild collapses.

    A child’s observation, though still poignant.

    Harry’s insistence that obviously he would choose another damsel eventually, and she would come with him thank you very much were a bit amusing. It reinforces the moments when he’s really a big scary dragon, and in the end they have to find a way to deal with the things he insists on. I suspect him carrying a gun with him. I find it hard to argue that Harry Potter being destined to fight Voldemort it isn’t a sensible notion. The fact that Harry really doesn’t actually need a gun to hurt someone he wants to, and it might provide a way to deal with threats without revealing dragonness is useful too.

    Being a Centaur really does let you carry a bit more than a person, at least with straps. More area to put spots to hold things. And more physical ability to carry them.
    Reminds me of Shadeversity’s videos over the guy on a Centaur’s back facing backwards. The Centaur is driving and doesn’t need need reins.

    You ruined his appearance Harry. I’m guessing Olivander likes appearing mysterious for his customers. Part of the store charm!

    Huh on a certain level I appreciate this, though I am mindful that fixed costs means you might need a certain amount of profit to keep things going. I suspect Snape has explained that bit to Harry.
    Very true Severus!
     
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  2. The Unicorn

    The Unicorn Well worn.

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    Not 10k wizards, 10k (or possibly 7k) Hogwarts graduates. That's not counting everyone who doesn't go to Hogwarts (Home-schooled, attending a different school then the best magical school in Britain, etc) and then you need to add all the other people who are part of wizarding britain.

    What I've read felt like a small town. When the cops (aurors) show up, it's always the same handful of faces.[/quote]
    1)the Aurors are supposed to be the Elite cops, meaning there is another group who aren't elite. I don't know of any small town that has a police department large enough to have a dedicated department of detectives or SWAT with half a dozen (mnimum given the characters we see) members.

    I wish. People like that get elected to run countries (please no one mention any names of living politicians).

    There are at least two newspapers and a niche market magazine (Daily Prophet, Lovegood's paper, Witch Weekly) and the last is much more indicative of population than the lack of a dozen different newspapers. Even if you assume the Daily prophet is the only major newspapaer that just shows how passive the Wizarding population is and/or how totalitarian the government is. Even in small towns you'll generally have multiple papers if only because someone disagrees with the politics of the first paper.

    False. There are at least two medical care facilities(and the reason those are the only known ones is that they're the ones Harry went to), there is only one major trauma hospital, and the fact that it's large enough to have multiple separate wards suggests it's a large hospital not just a 20-30 bed hospital which would provide all the needs of a 10,000 person community (IRL you generally have 2-4 hospital bets per 1000 people https://www.healthsystemtracker.org...-capita-many-comparable-countries/#item-start If we assume St. Mungo's has 100 beds, and ignoring the fact they'd need far fewer beds than an equivalent RL hospital, that would suggest a population of 30-50 thousand.

    Not how it works. If the effect was purely genetic with no environmental factor, and was determined by a single Mendellian Allele (with magic being recessive) then you'd get 100% of children born to a wizard and witch being magical, 50% of the children of a pairing where only one parent was magical and 25% of the children where neither parent was.
    If there are multiple alleles affecting things, or there is an enviromental factor it rapidly becomes more complex, but it's quite possible to design a set of conditions that would produce the random "1 in 1000 doesn't match" JKR described.
    Correction - Canon Harry doesn't have any other recreation. Even with just what Harry notices we know they have the radio, gobstones (which is popular enough that even Harry noticed the club for it), popular musicians that hold concerts, etc.


    The answer to all these is the same - Harry didn't pay notice them. I n the early books Harry was a young child and not expected to notice most of that even if he was curious about what is going on (and Harry very much wasn't). In the later books there's a war going on, and that affects what people will care about.
    Because it goes against everything the Wizarding society represents.

    I knew I remembered that.

    Not vs. a wizard with decades of experience - vs. dozens of wizards with decades of experience.

    One thing I would expect to see in this sort of setting is ghettos of muggleborns (using the original meaning, i.e walled/defensive communities banding together for mutual defense).
     
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  3. Doghead13

    Doghead13 Grumpy Old Scottish Biker

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    Consider the entire theme of the story: change.

    The Wizarding World is in a state of monumental population boom and has been since Krakatoa went up. Those circia 66,000 muggleborns? That's not the children of muggleborns, not 'halfbloods', that's wizards and witches with two nonmagical parents, many of them then going on to have 2.4 kids and a dog. The entire background is one of socieconomic change even more profound than our own industrial revolution. Griselda Marchebank can most likely remember Wizarding Britain with a population on the low side of fifty thou. They have been in a continuous state of full-on crisis for over a century. Grindlewald and Voldemort aren't even remotely close to the only Dark Lords in Dumbles' lifetime - they're just the famous ones. Go back to the time of the formalisation of the Statute of Secrecy and they did not have the numbers to take over: it's as simple as that.

    This fic is - or at least was when I was its author - about that crisis coming to a head, the culmination of those sweeping changes and, ultimately, a reformed pureblood-supremacist, a fanatical revolutionary, and an absurdly powerful kindhearted little boy coming together to make that culmination happen without becoming the absolute bloodbath with all the wrong people dead and the muggle world burning too that any one of the three acting alone would have resulted in.

    This is not a fic where one character solves everything.
     
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  4. AlternativePerspectives

    AlternativePerspectives Getting out there.

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    A lot of interesting discussion since the last story post.

    One thing that popped up, was the argument that not everyone is a AC20 wizard. And that is fine.

    But you don't need to be a powerhouse to apparate.
    And apparating to a brothel/cafe where rich people are meeting, and detonating a backpack filled with muggle explosives (that the muggleborn terrorist freedom fighter organization would know of and could potentially obtain with simple notice-me-not charm + walking into a military base), does not take fuck-you level of powers.

    Think IRA if they had teleportation.

    The take-away is that there may be reasons for diagon alley isn't blown up weekly, but so far I haven't seen them raised (just off the top of the head, the whole place is protected with intent based wards, but that doesn't entirely solve the issue of muggleborn with stolen guns ambushing purebloods in the countryside or setting mundane IEDs/mines outside their mantions. Unless everyone lives in paranoid terror and only travels in warded areas and only via floo/portkey/apparation to other safe places...)
     
    Last edited: Mar 27, 2019
  5. wichajster

    wichajster Away

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    Maybe while the worst parts are utterly horrible, but it is far from a typical fate of Muggleborns?

    Or maybe it can be explained by relatively small population that usually only extreme minority goes for terrorism/freedom fighting?

    Or both?
     
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  6. The Unicorn

    The Unicorn Well worn.

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    It was actually mentioned several times. The setting has Wards, and rich and evil people will inherntly have better wards than even Dumbledore could put up on his own meaning that actually getting the people you are after is effectively impossible.
    Someone could go with your plan (although I'll note explosives are much harder to use safely, and much less effective than most people imagine) and if they pulled it off might manage to kill a muggleborn and their family and couple of poor half-bloods who were in the area and injure a few other people (although with their healing magic that won't do any lasting damage. The next day a bill further restricting the rights of mugglebons will get passed, if the terrorist escaped his idiocy alive he'll be captured and made an example of and the only thing accomplished is made things better for the Slavers.

    While there are idiots who'd decide to do something that stupid, not caring about how counter productive it is the intersection between people so stupid/enraged not to care about this being counterproductive, people willing to kill themselves to strike back, and people able to think well enough to acquire the explosives and get them into place is fortunately non-existent.

    I imagine someone does periodically manage to attack one of the brothels or factories and is killed, sometimes managing to do some damage first, and life goes on for everyone else.

    On a different note Dunkelzahn thinking about groups of muggleborns banding together, I realized if they get enough money/power there's no reason they couldn't become one of the houses officially. Only question is if "enough" is in the range that is practical for them to achieve?
     
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  7. Dunkelzahn

    Dunkelzahn No one of consequence

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    Well-stated. While the exact circumstances aren't quite identical, the fact that everything is in flux at the moment is spot on. The current society isn't a long-term stable one, by any stretch.

    Teleportation, while useful, is also not terribly difficult to block, and most places of business block it as a matter of course, to reduce shoplifting, if nothing else.

    Diagon Alley, for instance, has a receiving location at which apparition and portkeys are permitted, everything else is warded (note that the bulk of Gringotts Bank is actually elsewhere, the storefront is a portal, much like the one at King's Cross, and as a consequence, the Bank has its own wards and access point which is where Harry usually passes through on his own trips to the Alley). Most other magical shopping, or even residential, areas are set up in similar fashion.

    This admittedly would make for a prime IED target, if you have people skilled with explosives, though it won't take too many of those before someone comes up with countermeasures.

    On the manor houses and such, one of the first defenses employed by everyone is secrecy --- the magic is very mature and very widespread, and they're used to thinking that way, having been accustomed to it by the secrecy policies for a very long time. Finding a manor house is a major effort, much less approaching one in secret and breaching the wards.

    As for living in paranoid terror... well, the travel protocol you described fits the profile of a paranoiac wizard well, but it also fits the profile of a lazy or hurried wizard pretty well too. Among those who can afford to line the pockets of the Malfoys by buying floo powder in bulk, a fair number have actually forgotten what their homes look like from the outside.

    Pooling resources is definitely something people might do, and the Houses don't actually have a set minimum for required wealth (though those resources are what is paying for your security, so take that 'no minimum' with a grain of salt). The Houses are hierarchical based on establishment, though, so a new House will not have all the rights and privileges of an older one (expeditionary rights are reserved to Ancient and Noble Houses, for example). The important ones for this purpose, though --- shared self-defense among the members and the legal safety net --- are available from the beginning.

    The main limiting factor to forming a new House that way is trust, really. In order to secure the legal defenses described earlier (the Weasley version of the Frank and Betty court scenario) you have to pass your right to freely enter into contracts off to your Head of House --- not just letting them enter you into contracts like a power of attorney, but actually passing the right over entirely so you can't do it anymore. Therefore, everyone signing on to be adopted into the prospective new House is signing over a lot of power to the prospective Head, and there is little to no recourse if it turns out that the Head was an unwise choice.

    It's one thing if you've got actual blood ties binding you together to smooth things, but that level of trust in what is essentially a business arrangement? Might happen, might not.
     
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  8. demonLord

    demonLord Your first time is always over so quickly, isn't it?

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    Instead of a house, what about a guild? That would be doable right? Guild by weird mix between democracy, talent and seniority. Wouldn't it be (not)-trivial for a bunch of muggleborn to bandy together and setup their own guild?

    The possibility of a pureblood supremacist like Malfoy coming down hard on them is always there but keeping a low profile until they have a sufficient number might keep them safe. Risk is worth the reward I think.

    The same magic that protects purebloods might also protect muggleborn, depending on how much access they will have to stuff like warding, fidelus etc post Hogwarts. I remember there was a fic where a muggleborn hoards as much knowledge as possible while in Hogwarts because there was no way to gain any decent magical knowledge post-hogwarts without being born into a old pureblood house.
     
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  9. Pinklestia

    Pinklestia Well worn.

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    You are forgetting the loses witches abd wizards had during magical WWII and then during both of Tom rebellions.

    Why do you think Hogwarts has so many unused classrooms?
     
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  10. ConsiderableHat

    ConsiderableHat Hot glue beard disaster.

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    Because Hogwarts is a castle. For whatever reason - and "It's the 10th Century and shit's always kicking off yo." is probably it - the Founders fortified the site of their school. And the point of a castle is that it is the local defensive retreat for quite a wide area of countryside. Quite a lot of that 'unused' space in the castle will turn out to be not so unused if there's suddenly a war on and the inhabitants of Hogsmeade turn up with all their livestock and extended families.

    That's not even taking in to account that over the years a lot of things will have been done/headquartered at Hogwarts Castle alongside the school and had buildings go up for them that, a couple of centuries later, are surplus to requirements but still kept. Castles attract that sort of thing.
     
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  11. MutantRancor

    MutantRancor [Suspected Sithspawn]

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    Historical castles were often quite small, just big enough for the castle's lord's family.

    A castle is any fortified building which is also a person's home (if it's not a home it's a fortress), which I suppose Hogwarts qualifies for at least most of the year, but Hogwarts is by no means typical of castles. For the more typical kind, imagine a family home, made of stone, with a wall around it, and you'll be fairly close.

    What you're describing sounds more like a walled village, compressed into a single building with a few associated outbuildings.

    Here's a video that explains what's in a typical castle.
     
  12. ConsiderableHat

    ConsiderableHat Hot glue beard disaster.

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    Uh, no. The original meaning of ghetto was ghetto. A place where a racially-defined minority was required to live by law, with sunset laws for them in the rest of the town. Venice had the first one called by that name - it still is, and is a tourist sight nowadays - and it was for the Jews. The practise is older, even in Venice - Venice had small-g ghettoes before they instituted the gapital-G Ghetto. (How it got its name is an ongoing etymological argument.)

    Motives for establishing a ghetto for your local minority range from 'we don't want them mixing with decent folk even if we need them around to shovel shit and similar during the day' to 'we keep them all in one place until their slot in the extermination camp's schedule rolls around.' Either way it's a thing imposed on the oppressed group, not a defensive retreat.

    If the muggleborns are establishing a secure haven away from the slavers, it will have to be *away* from the slavers or it's surrounded and functions as a ghetto regardless of the intentions of those within. There's been mention of an underground railroad with a safe retreat at the far end. Let's wait and see what that is.
     
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  13. inverted_helix

    inverted_helix Connoisseur.

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    So I just finished reading this story. I remember reading the original version by Doghead years ago, and I'm glad to see this continued.

    I've read little bits of the comments though not all of them. It seems like I'm a bit of an outlier though. I had little problem with most of the elements of the story, though I do think muggleborn terrorism, or just muggleborns leaving entirely to establish their own society would probably be more of a thing by now.

    My biggest issue with the story is the millions of years old dragons in hiding around the world. It just doesn't feel like it matches with the rest of the story. I mean this basically seems like it's a struggle of reforming a society that's corrupt to the core. However I can't help but keep thinking "soon ancient dragons will just obliterate/conquer everything, corrupt or not". Seeing Harry introducing industrial equipment to the wizarding world is cool. The economic elements of this story are some of my favorite parts. And I do wish we could see the impact on the muggle world of the Goblins selling these super materials.

    However I am concerned those elements just aren't going to matter at all when some 30 million year old dragon vaporizes the UK in a single shot later as collateral damage, probably barely scratching their actual target. Having such absurdities around kind of renders this whole thing pointless. The entire wizarding world somehow working together is a rounding error compared to something that's been gaining power since before primates were a thing. Those sorts of things lurking in the background kind of makes it hard to care about all the current characters. Which is sad because you've done a good job of making a lot of these characters interesting.
     
  14. Skjadir

    Skjadir Experienced.

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    You don´t need to worry about the dragons as much for several reasons.
    The business building that Harry does is something pretty much every great dragon seems to be doing in some way or another instead of obliterate/conquer nations.
    They are very much aware of their power and also like the world not being a magical wasteland.
    That doesn´t mean they are nice people, they just tend to keep their fights in the shadows.

    Edit: for the age of the dragons i don´t think any of the still living great dragons is older then 25k years (~first age) and i am only aware that the current great dragons that i know of are all maybe around 10k years old.

    Apart from that as this is a shadowrun cross there are enough things out there that are more then strong enough to get into fights with great dragons and win.

    Edit2: Some of the beings/things that can already came up in the story.
     
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  15. tenchifew

    tenchifew Well worn.

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    Shadowrun dragons are absurdly mighty.
    They are also born schemers. The successful ones, and these are the old ones, are very much aware that people can get lucky, thus going all out against the world is the last thing they would do. They gain (more) money, influence and followers.

    Actually Harry gathering his battle harem and beginning his financial enterprise will very much meet approval from most of the important ones.
    This said, most are not nice, but they are far more likely to see people (and Harry) as a resource to be used repeatedly, than something to crush maim burn.
     
  16. Doghead13

    Doghead13 Grumpy Old Scottish Biker

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    Not in hiding: asleep. The level of magic in the world is too low for them to be up and about quite yet - in that sense, Harry's running on the dragon equivalent of a jumbo-sized can of Red Bull courtesy of Avebury.

    They're from Shadowrun, their ages are in the low tens of thousands, and they're not that destructive for a variety of reasons - not the least being the existence of people, such as the sarcastic old pointy-eared asshole with the facepaint and the warped sense of humour recently seen examining the scene of Harry's actions at Stonehenge, able to play on their level.
     
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  17. EternitynChaos

    EternitynChaos Once there was a Maiden...

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    Yep, the big issue Harry should have to deal with when things start to roll on the Awakening and other Dragons join things, is a certain Great Wyrm who views all of Wales, and Basically all of the United Kingdom as there holdings, no matter what the silly little people who live there may think, and considering the way Rhonabwy wakes up and acts I don't think Harry will be all that willing to share territory with him
     
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  18. tenchifew

    tenchifew Well worn.

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    He was pretty low profile as far as I remember though?
    And not really active in Dragon politics either?

    This said, he did go on a small rampage just after awakening, although some Dragons did this and it seems like awakening can lead to such, before sentience kicks back in fully.

    He killed 100 or so people, mostly due to collapsing houses, but later apologized, paid reparations and financed rebuilding. Since it was 2012, after beginning of VITAS (2010, killed off a quarter of world population till 2012), Year of Chaos (2011 too many deaths to count, basically demolition man before cryo world wide) and multiple nuclear meltdowns (at least 20000 deaths just in England), as well as Feuerschwinge's rampage in Germany (a Great Dragon on a rampage for 4 months), not only did not anyone press any charges, all were very happy that this was another reasonable Dragon.

    Afterwards he retreated to Wales and bought some stocks in megacons.
    I do not know much more about him, admittedly.

    And yes, "fun" times are ahead. Shadowrun is not a nice world, at all.
     
    Last edited: Mar 28, 2019
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  19. Dunkelzahn

    Dunkelzahn No one of consequence

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    There are also some hints of a soap-opera-worthy draconic custody battle going on between him and the Sea Dragon over some eggs she claims he stole from her but of which he may or may not actually be the father.

    Anyway, I have some plans for Rhonabwy, the reasons for his rough wake-up (which tie in to him being on the Welsh flag), and his interactions with Harry after the Awakening.

    I also have plans for several of the other great dragons involving, among other things, a scheme one of Harry's more prominent elders has been working on since the second age that Harry manages to accidentally stumble into in the course of his own pursuits.
     
  20. Skjadir

    Skjadir Experienced.

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    There is also Celedyr how like Rhonabwy is currently sleeping in wales (to be noted the two are as far as the wiki goes on friendly terms).

    The one thing i am not sure about is if Harry is truely a great dragon at this point as he seems lacks one of the definding features that they have (the ability to have children), when we see him make the transition from dragon to great dragon and how he will look after it*.

    *it is noted that the one transition from dragon to great dragon in shadowrun came with noticeable physical change to the dragon(Masaru).
     
    Last edited: Mar 28, 2019
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  21. inverted_helix

    inverted_helix Connoisseur.

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    So yeah. That's a thing, and kind of blows up your speculation on them. Dragons that are millions of years old are going to be a whole different paradigm from ones less than a percent their age.

    To reiterate:
    They aren't shadowrun dragons limited to merely a few ten thousands of years. They're orders of magnitudes older.

    Now granted on the hiding vs sleep thing I was being a bit misleading with word choice. I meant as in the fact no one knows they're around. Though they aren't all asleep either:
     
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  22. tenchifew

    tenchifew Well worn.

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    Well, I think such old dragons would be extremely removed from day to day hustles of the world, I expect most of them to perceive millenia as years.
    Short of a full blown Horror invasion I doubt they would bother to interfere.

    You do not live such long lives if you take regular risks, after all.

    They would be like Xianxia "Venerable Elders" or "Great Spirits", more background than plot devices.
    This said, all above is purely my personal speculation.
     
  23. Dunkelzahn

    Dunkelzahn No one of consequence

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    Those are elements I added to the setting as a logical extension of my treatment of the great dragons as beings who get monotonically stronger with age. The idea is that they eventually reach a point where their ability to survive increases faster than the likelihood that they'll encounter something strong enough to kill them, so you'd expect the population dynamics to include such a Methuselan population segment. It's a bit of flavor I added to my background material for internal consistency which is irrelevant to the story as a whole.

    However, sensible part of the setting or not, I didn't want to have them be a major part of the plot, so I added some tendencies among really old dragons that make them mostly irrelevant to the world at large (also discussed in the post you quoted). Old dragons tend to descend further and further into an isolated hermitage in which they focus on some inconsequential obsession --- it's sort of the same logic as the vampire stories that talk about older vampires descending into obsessive-compulsive counting and such things. Interfering in the world at large in any significant way is a young dragon's game (with 'young' stretching up to about a hundred thousand years). There might be little hints and Easter eggs about hidden things in secret places --- if I think it would be amusing --- but they're not going to pop out of the woodwork and annihilate a city.

    As for the secret society thing, (while also a bit of private humor I hadn't originally thought to share) the mechanism allowing it in-setting is a sort of dream-walking mediated by astral projection. In my current interpretation, astral projection barely sips at energy reserves for a dragon, and so as long as they prepare before going to sleep, a sufficiently talented dragon doesn't have to be awake and active to do it --- it's like a magical form of lucid dreaming. In this setting, one of the canon dragons has been doing that for the entirety of the fifth age --- though his efforts have actually been focused on a task in the astral demiplanes, rather than in manipulating human dreams. Dragons don't do it often because you have to wake up to turn it off, and being stuck for an entire Age with nothing to do but watch the world go by, unable to physically interact with anything, is no one's idea of a fun time.

    In short, the really old dragons are a throw-away setting flavor piece which won't be relevant to the story as a whole.

    I freely admit that my knowledge of the Shadowrun setting is incomplete, and I filled in details and, intentionally or not, altered some things along the way. The normal dragon to great dragon transition/metamorphosis was an element I hadn't seen before I'd already worked out the broad strokes of the plot, so I didn't include it.

    In this setting, I'm treating great dragon status as an individual innate trait which results in some dragons growing to adult size and then stopping (normal dragons), and some dragons exhibiting an indeterminate growth habit (great dragons). Formal acknowledgement by dragon society is a different matter, of course --- one which won't happen for Harry before the end of the story, as he will remain very much the scrawny new kid on the block for the next few millennia --- but I'm not planning a sharp biological metamorphosis at this point.
     
  24. inverted_helix

    inverted_helix Connoisseur.

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    Their continuous growth is actually what would do them in. The bigger they get the more food they need. At some point they can't possibly get enough food fast enough to sustain their size, even with magic. If they shut off their growth at some point, then they're no longer growing stronger with age.

    Another option of course is that their perceived agelessness is really more a lifespan on the order of tens of thousands of years. No human would ever notice significant deterioration over their own life, so it could easily be viewed as agelessness. In most fictional settings supposedly ageless species don't have members more than a few thousand years old, but no one really takes note of that.

    Older vampires descending into compulsions is the sort of thing that tends to happen after a few hundred years, and you rarely hear about vampires tens of thousands of years old.

    Though if we're talking psychological problems dragons committing suicide from boredom because it's literally the only thing they haven't done yet seems like it would be a pretty serious diminishing factor on the high end population.

    Isn't this interfering with the world at large? Things like setting up secret societies on the scale of the illuminati do have major impacts on the world.

    It's kind of weird given you have dragons in this setting being a result of an intensive self engineering program for there to be any 'random' advantage like this. They've engineered all of their other traits, so why wouldn't every dragon be a great dragon?
     
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  25. megrisvernin

    megrisvernin Connoisseur.

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    A rather insightful remark by the hat, I’m impressed.

    My respect for dobby just went thru the roof. Felt I had to say this was a very clever take on why Dobbie insults him even knowing he’ll be punished.

    This makes a lot of sense. Fae are not something to be crossed, and House Elf magic is quite potent from what we can see in canon. Nice to know things get worse also implies things getting their comeuppance like Malfoy. I really, really like this Dobby.

    Hah. This is a fun almost allusion to canon, and something a younger sister with a herocrush on someone would say.

    Nice day in the life moment. Helps give perspective to the changes Harry is making. Then I remember this is a Shadowrun crossover, and oh boy! Changes are coming!
     
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  26. wichajster

    wichajster Away

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    Magic in canon Harry Potter has FTL*, confirmed existence of souls, magic that shows no regards to conservation of energy, conceptual magic with ongoing rewrite of perceived reality (Fidelius charm), arbitrary limitations and no indications that magic reached some fundamental limits.

    Feeding dragon is not going to be a problem.

    *Yes, canon Harry Potter has confirmed FTL, though unusually short range one. No, it is neither floo, nor portkeys nor apparition. Yes, in books, not later fanon by Rownling.
     
  27. RedX

    RedX Not too sore, are you?

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    [Citation Needed]
     
  28. Gaming Geek

    Gaming Geek Tired of the random default stuff

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    The Map is one.

    No information transission lag/delay. It's realtime, and apperently without limit.

    The Orb in Book 1, that had LITERALLY the entire Milky Way displayed inside of it. I think that was the one being referenced?
     
  29. nyanaeve

    nyanaeve Your first time is always over so quickly, isn't it?

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    That is plan A, the B is simply bulldoze down the building a build a new one :confused:
     
  30. Doghead13

    Doghead13 Grumpy Old Scottish Biker

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    I don't know about this fic, but what I built out for my current stuff is, because at the time the castle was constructed Hogwarts was the first modern-style school of magic in western Europe, possibly hands-down the first ever - the catchment area at the Founding included most of Scandanavia and possibly even parts of continental Europe, and as a result the school taught in multiple languages, many of them now dead or entirely lost (at least to muggles) such as Pictish, with a resulting need for far more classrooms than the modern school has a use for despite its actual student numbers not having changed in any particular measure. This may be a good fit for Dunlezahn's background about the gradual slide into hiding predating the Roman Empire - that could very well have led to resistance to teaching in Latin (the language used for education all over Europe right through the Middle Ages) and some dozen different languages were spoken in Britain alone at that time.

    On a related note it's also worth highlighting how huge a deal the castle itself was at the time of it's construction.

    In the ninth century castles were built out of wood, in the style known as a motte-and-bailey: nothing even remotely like Hogwarts had been constructed since the fall of Rome and its like would not be built for centuries after - for the first roughly three to four centuries of its existence it was hands-down the mightiest fortification on the entire planet and it would count as a major military strong point right up until the development of advanced gunpowder artillery roundabout the time of the enactment of the Statute of Secrecy; techniques for storming a fortress like Hogwarts would not be developed for two or three centuries after its construction, and the existence of magical teleportation makes it completely impossible to take by purely muggle siege. The building itself was a potent display of technological prowess at the end of the Viking Age. It would have been legendary worldwide, stories would most likely have been told of it as far afield as the eastern end of the Silk Road.

    Its existence may even have had a role in the unification of the Kingdom of Scotland - bear in mind that Hogwarts had stood on that spot for well over half a millennium when the Statute of Secrecy came to be; hell, if the 'a thousand years old' it's stated to be in the 1990s is anything like close to accurate it predates the Norman conquest of England by roughly a century, and was built at a time that Viking raids were still ongoing all over Britain. I could well imagine the existence of this seemingly impregnable, hilariously unassailable, not-at-all-friendly fortress helping to drive the small muggle kingdoms that existed in Scotland at the time of its construction to band together.
     
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