Which chapter had Dumbledore threatening Lucius again?
4.7.2
The Confederate mentioned an Aurora being tasked to survey the area.
There is only one aircraft bearing that designation, and ITTL, it's a mostly conspiracy theorized black project hypersonic American spycraft.
Guess it's not so much conspiracy here.
Wrong Aurora. It's a
Lockheed CP-140 Aurora out of
CFB Comox. Technically, it's an anti-submarine/marine recon craft, but it's the fastest plane on the Comox roster (at least as far as I could tell from my minimal research), so I figured it'd be the one sent to get eyes on something like what just happened at the Seven Sisters.
(Ninja-ed by
JoelStew, well spotted.)
As for the location discussion, the turn-off in the first scene is here (
Price Creek Crossing), the village is in a high valley at the head of Price Creek on the east side of the Seven Sisters Provincial Park and Protected Area (
Village) while the lake in question is here (
Stone ring). Everything with the stone ring is going on about 450 miles north-northwest of Vancouver, firmly within Canada.
One quick question, does Harlequin still think Harry is one of the older Dragons that just happened to wake up early?
He most assuredly does. I mean, after meeting him in person, Harlequin knows Harry isn't a particularly old dragon as dragons go --- Harry is still small enough to make it obvious he's a juvenile or at the most very young adult --- but a timeline where Harry hatched some time in the middle of the last millennium of the fourth age and managed to screw up his hibernation cycle is a good guess.
What
actually happened is just so ludicrous that Harlequin would never suspect it.
And once again we discover that the overpriced Winnebago is less well enchanted than the Knight bus or even Mr Weasley's car (which are able to snake their way through congested traffic without stopping and scare away obstacle without fearing collision - while the RV took 10 hours+ painstakingly navigating a dry river-bed/road !
Finally, Snape and co. must have been really rattled to not even think about firing a quick 'Reparo' to fix the damage to the Winnebago at the end there.
I have found that unfortunately the author has a tendency to forgo the usage of Magic by his characters especially when they should be using it as a matter of course due to their upbringing (for example: junior analyst Evans should have immediately used a 'Revelio' when he found his papers disturbed -DMLE training + Hogwarts education- even if it wouldn't have helped much since a bug would have been easily dismissed). I think the problem might come from OP trying to reduce too much of the perceived power of the HP universe to fit better into Shadowrun's lore without taking into account that perhaps Wizards learned to 'do slightly more with less' (ex:
Metagaming by Noodlehammer has the premise that HP's Earth had less magic which made it possible for better control and the development of greater research in spells and magical laws).
First off, it was 10
miles, not 10 hours. They covered that distance in a few hours, driving about the last third of it in the dark through unfamiliar terrain.
Second, that was a creek running through densely forested,
very rough terrain, especially once you get off floor of the Skeena valley proper. It's a far cry from a flat, dry riverbed.
Third, if I even decide to
keep the Knight Bus in its canon incarnation in this setting, it and its enchantments would be operating in an area where apparation/portkeys are routinely used, and thus where their principles of operation are open for exploitation by said enchantments. I would imagine those would be useful for ghosting around and through things at absurdly high speed, assuming you could afford to power them for routine travel (which is explicitly an issue in my handling of this setting). Under the Interdiction however, the use of such methods ends with the user being cleaned up with a mop.
Also, you say the Winnebago is overpriced, but who is to say how expensive a hypothetical Knight Bus equivalent would be? I'd imagine if Snape had priced a Knight Bus kitted out as a motorhome, he'd not have found it any cheaper than his Winnebago. Neither buses nor motorhomes are exactly cheap, at least not purchased new.
Fourth, aside from one time which explicitly required
a supreme plot device the elder wand to work at all, has anything enchanted/heavily magical
ever been repaired with a mending charm in HP canon? I mean, if that was an option, why did Harry need a replacement for his Nimbus after it was smashed? For that matter, why are the school brooms so old and tattered if they could be maintained with simple repair charms?
And fifth, the revelio... eh, that's a fair cop. Though I know I've tossed file folders onto a table before and had them fall open in odd ways, and I doubt I'd have thought anything much of it in Clyde's situation. I could have him try it and fail to find anything because Skeeter already left, but I don't know that it's worth a revision.
As for the setting in general and how it fits into Shadowrun, I've gone through that before in a number of posts. Essentially, wizarding magic is a highly refined casting system which allows routine, simple casting of what would be hopelessly complicated magic under the Shadowrun system through the use of a supremely engineered piece of magitech known as a wand (roughly on the order of a modern microprocessor in terms of complexity) and very complicated spell creation processes. I also made it so magic generally takes real, significant effort of an order with the magic's effects (unlike canon HP) and so magic that alters the character of spacetime has some additional restrictions (requires a caster with a soul and does not like being moved). Those changes were made so that economic plotlines made sense (as in, so that it was reasonable for a magical economy to exist at all).