Subject: Equipment idea
Author:
Posted on: 2014-02-03 20:02:00 UTC
I thought up a new type of PPC equipment. It's a Canon Round. They have sections of canon inscribed on them and the canon burns them to death. Please, tell me what you think. :-)
I seem to be doing this a lot lately.
Having read this and been thinking about one of the missions I've got lined up, would it be possible for in the Harry Potter continua to charge Mary Sues by Howler, allowing Agents to be at a safe distance to then take out said Sues from range, potentially even using the Howler as a distraction (this is of course assuming the Sue hasn't already 'found' a way of getting rid of Howlers)
Storme Hawk
there may be some logistical problems to be considered.
As far as I remember, the canon sources don’t give us a "How to create a Howler" instruction, and I doubt that Harry would know how to do it. Hermione might know, though.
The information may be found in the library, but at least one of your agents may need to be a witch or wizard native to the Potterverse to be able to understand the instructions and perform the task.
How is it done?
Do they need a magic quill and/or magic parchment? Where do they get it?
Do they write using the tip of their wand instead of a quill? I’m sure this cannot be done with a Muggle-use wand from HFA. PPC wands can perform more spells, but I don’t like the idea of DoSAT just building wands for all occasions. Again, you may need a native witch or wizard wielding a canonical wand.
Do they write an ordinary letter and then enchant it (resp. the Charge List) to make it a Howler? I’m not a friend of made up spells, but perhaps the readers don’t need to see how it is performed.
Do they need an owl, or may a Howler be delivered by other means?
I’m looking forward to see your solutions.
HG
There seems to me to be two methods that one create a Howler. Due to the fact that all Howler's (in the books at least) are red envelopes or letters, whilst normal letters and such are made of white parchment, it seems logical to assume that the a Howler is made from a special type of paper that's been enchanted to convey the senders message as loudly as possible, I'm going to call this Howler Paper from now on.
The first way I thought of was that the Howler paper is written on, just like a normal letter, and then after a spell of some kind, it is 'activated' and then quickly attached to an owl who flies it to it's recipient. One of the main problems I see with this way is that the Howler Paper wouldn't really know what to sound like, the only time that a voice could actually be focused on it is when the activation spell is said, and then would it even be able to hear it at that point?
This bought me on to my second idea and the one I think more likely. The Howler Paper is less of a letter in the way we think of them and more of a middle-man between the sender and the recipient. Instead of writing the message the sender would cast an activation spell of some sort and then say the message to the Howler Paper, perhaps there also being spells of some sort that make it understand what tone the sender wants bits to be in, before casting another spell that let's the Howler Paper know the message is done before then, once again attaching it to an owl who goes to find the recipient. Although the requirement of two spells does make this method a bit more complicated.
Of course if neither of these ways are correct, it could just be a spell that transforms a normal letter into a Howler, but once again how does it know what to sound like?
Assuming there is such a thing as Howler Paper in the Harry Potter continua then I would guess that that would be the sole thing specifically needed to make a Howler, especially if the second method is true. Where one would get it? I would assume shops like Scribbulus Writing Implements in Diagon Alley, or Scrivenshaft's Quill Shop in Hogsmeade. For Agents, I assume the Room of Requirement would be able to provide it.
Whether or not the Agents know how to do it or not could prove funny as they try a load of different ways throughout the fic. I think that in the end it may not necessarily matter if we know how they ended up doing it, seeing as the end result is known to be canonical so long as it seems that what they did would seem to be canon and would work with what resources canon gives us.
I hope this makes sense, sorry for any and all grammatical mistakes I've made along the way
Storme Hawk
Well as a Harry Potter fan,I love the idea! Good one!
I actually thought that the idea of agents copying sections of canon on to pieces of paper and wrapping them around a bullet was a good bonding experience for the characters. I also think that the same could apply to arrowheads, knives,what have you.
If you wrap a piece of paper around a bullet, it's going to get shredded by the feeding mechanism or as the bullet goes through the barrel, and the remains burned by the hot gases that do the "propel the bullet out of the gun" part.
Then, those remains can clog the gun and make it jam.
A better idea would be to write the snippets of canon on very thin strips and put them into the tip of hollow point bullets (using wax or glue or something along the lines of those to close the hole)... but sicne the "hole" on hollow points tend to still be quite small I don't know how well it would work.
It seems to remind me of the rounds used by Space Marines against Daemons.
I actually thought that the idea of agents copying sections of canon on to pieces of paper and wrapping them around a bullet was a good bonding experience for the characters. I also think that the same could apply to arrowheads, kniv
I don't know if everybody knows of them, but they were very popular with Laburnum and Foxglove and their friends Stormsong and Skyfire, especially for dealing with author-wraiths.
Essentially, they got a plaster cast of Brian Jacques' signature, and Makes-Things then moulded it onto slingshot pellets for them - for a quick burst of canon. Just launch the signature-infused pellets at your target, and wham! All the power of a book/DVD/etc, no need to get close enough to risk possession!
And one other Agent - Fritz Sorgebrunnen - took the signature idea to slight extremes and got his aluminium baseball bat covered in the signatures of a dozen or so authors/show creators/what have you.
I'm sure you could modify the idea to be used with bullets. Just one thing - I wouldn't suggest the canon "burning" them to death, because if the bullet's embedded in them that could be a slow and agonising way to go, and the PPC doesn't condone torturing.
I'd somehow forgotten about Fritz and his bat though! I miss Joe's spinoff.
They're called bullets. Besides, there's a slew of fandoms for which they would be useless since guns are not a thing in them.
However, the idea is not entirely without merit; I can see an agent of Japanese origin (or Japanophilic bent) having a strip of canonical script for use as ofuda. These are the strips of paper with writing on them used all the damn time in Japanese exorcisms; you inscribe the canon words on some paper (wood, cloth and metal are also apparently acceptable), recite nine words, and throw it at the possession victim while bellowing "akuryō taisan", which I believe is Japanese for "evil spirit begone" or some such thing. In circumstances where time is of the essence, such a thing would definitely be quicker and safer than trying to hit an angry wraith-powered canon with a copy of The Hobbit or whatever.
Unless you're suggesting that they'd have to be the entire series, which we know not to be the case because nobody carries around the entire boxed set/full book series of Harry Potter. Is there some sort of critical mass of canon or something? If so, how do comic books work?
Besides, I quite like the image of a brace of agents sat in a ring of candles diligently copying out key quotes from their canon of choice onto thin strips of paper. It could be a really good way to show character development without any dialogue, a major moment of bonding between the two agents conducted in respectful, meditative silence... yeah, that'd be cool.
It's almost a shame I can't write it with Wobbles and the Notary. =]
Apologies for that, I'm basically out on my feet. I'm pretty sure it has to be like a book or a movie or something as opposed to say, a strip of paper with a quote written on it. That sounds like a really cool take on it though!
(BTW, the wiki page for one of your agents raised as many questions for me as it answered. May I e-mail you?)
I haven't seen anything to directly contradict it and I've been going through the wiki for a while now. It's too cool an image for me to pass up. Besides, all that "the power of Insert Name Here compels you" stuff gets a little old. I'll have to dig out my copy of Mauss's A General History Of Magic for some interesting African rites and see how they can be applied (since, in the words of Umberto Eco, "magic is just the other person's religion").
((Of course. It's harry heath ninety-nine at that email service Hotmail has. [=))
Seriously though, sounds good. And I'll send that e-mail soon.