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But yes, something's very much gone wrong nearby

I, uh, double-checked.

Also, there is such thing as a fortepiano.

--Ls

Edit: Oop, I meant vice versa. facepalm

--Ls

Oh dear, I’m falling behind! Sorry, it was an unusually busy week and weekend last week, and I haven’t had much free time until Thursday morning this week.

So, we have our first Ron-narrated chapter! And the Weasley family dynamics aren’t quite so funny or positive when they’re not presented through canon!Harry’s envious orphan eyes. It feels weird to hear that Molly and Arthur are “having too many arguments,” but I guess it was easier for the canon Weasleys to just always be poor than the Avalon versions to have wealth stripped from them. Speaking of which, what did the Ministry visitor mean when he said, “the house will not allow the Weasley wardstone to move”? Were they straight-up trying to force the Burrow to move so the Ministry could seize the ancestral land? That feels so beyond the pale as a way of paying back debt . . . Throughout this whole chapter, especially the “Then” sections, I kept waffling back forth on being frustrated with Ron for being a spoiled brat, and sympathizing with his feelings. I get how he can feel like nothing is really his, that he’s only ever the recipient of hand-me-downs. But at the same time, his parents can’t just make money from nothing, the Burrow has what it has, and Ron isn’t the only one in the family who needs things. It was also interesting seeing Percy being sincerely supportive towards Ron, even though it was couched in gross terms of becoming superior to their own family. But he really did seem to want Ron to get to bring a pet for company, and to keep Ron safe at Hogwarts, so it’s still a rather sweet moment. (It’s also wild to see how things line up in just the right way. If Percy hadn’t shown Ron this moment of kindness, Pettigrew may not have been captured when he was, and could have remained free to reveal himself and strike at Lily when the chance presented itself. And if Ron had gotten his own wand like he wanted, Lockhart’s attack in year two would have been successful, and Ron and Harry would be the ones in the Janus Thickey Ward now!) I also like the detail that the Weasleys have grown to be natural Occlumencers, just by virtue of needing the mental privacy (poor Ginny!). It makes for a nice turnaround from canon, where Occlumency is so rare, and only associated with extremely powerful mages. Ron should make a much better teacher for Harry than Snape/Prince!

Interesting. The flashback in the previous chapter showed Prince and Lily as students, with Price pointing out that actual snake venom can’t envenomate through ingestion, only within the bloodstream. But Lily in the present is rescued through Runespoor antivenom, even though she ate the poison. This tells me that either A: this was all planned in advance, and Prince essentially gave Heiress Avery a useless poison, which Lily faked symptoms for to cover Prince’s betrayal, with Love carrying antivenom on hand to provide an explanation for the “recovery,” or B: I’m supremely overthinking this, and Prince’s poison is just so chemically similar to actual Runespoor venom that the antivenom had enough effect to keep Lily alive until better medical response became available. The first option may be debunked by Harry’s Bond nightmare, but Lily may have faked that too, to provide better cover for the ruse, especially after Sirius told her that Harry had found out about the plan? Incidentally, I had never really looked up Runespoors themselves before I read this chapter. It seems Mrs. Rowling wrote them as having three heads with different personalities (planning, imagining and criticism), which some folks interpret as a metaphor for creative writing. Some Runespoors bite off the “inner critic” head in frustration if they get tired of hearing it complain. Interesting that Mrs. Rowling would have this mental concept of violently cutting off all manner of listening to criticism, isn’t it?

Ew, no, Lockhart, I didn’t need to see him again! Having his personal memories wiped is no excuse for him to be hitting on underage witches! But also, wow, am I deeply terrified of these dreams he’s having! Is that “dark-haired witch” Bellatrix? What use could she possibly have for a mind-wiped Half-Blood? You’re scaring me, Lily, I am scared!

Are you telling me that my boy Neville is mad at Harry for hugging Qiu when she is sad? That is the thing you do with sad people, Neville, you hug them! I dislike the feeling of physical contact, and even I understand this! I was just hugging a crying coworker last week! But because Wizarding society is SO MESSED UP, my good man Neville Longbottom is here tearing into Harry for providing emotional comfort, like a normal human being should in that situation. Somebody had to hug her, her gutter trash “best” friend Marietta clearly isn’t going to do it, but no, don’t hug the crying girl, Harry, you might accidentally marry her because magic!

Okay, Narcissa Malfoy was the last character I expected to witness, not only attending a family board game night, but crushing said board game night? Like, I didn’t even picture her participating, and here she comes just like, demolishing everyone? And “Father said that Mother’s tactics weren’t suitable for polite company” is a sentence that contains a shocking amount of threatening energy, considering it’s referring to chess! It’s a shame the Purebloods don’t interact with Muggle culture, because I bet Narcissa would be a sight to see playing Cluedo . . . I love Arthur and Lucius just being openly hostile against each other in front of everyone, culminating in the two of them degenerating into Three Stooges physics by the end. I thought I was getting the general idea of your rules for Pendragon castle (basically a geography game tracking through a mental map of the UK?), but then you started throwing in the Monty Python and the Holy Grail locations and broke my brain. Purebloods like the Malfoys would never stoop to watching Muggle film, so this isn’t a case of the Wizarding World accepting the Monty Python film as canon to Arthurian legend, already a weird enough sentence to type. But no, what you’re actually implying is that at least one of the Pythons is a wizard and snuck actual magical locations into the movie. Why are you doing this to me, Lily? I have to think about this all day now, Lily! I don’t really play chess, but that match at the end of the chapter was pretty intense! I love how you wrote that Lucius was on the verge of backing Ron into the final plays of the game, but then had all the teasing about Draco’s future got under Lucius’s skin and made him start playing overly defensively, giving up victory for the sake of protecting a piece other than his king. I know your ending note said there’s some foreshadowing about the final two years hidden in the chess moves, but I don’t think I’m smart enough to work any of that out. I am, however, smart enough to see a metaphor for how the canon version of Narcissa cost Voldemort his victory by prioritizing her son’s safety, which is pretty keen!

“She eats Gurydroots; she’ll eat pickles, too.”
“Gurdyroots”

. . . said Malfoy, his eyes already glittering in the way it did when he . . .
The way they did

New word: pianoforte, though that’s just extra letters for “piano!”

—doctorlit somehow had it in his head that Regulus was older than Sirius until this chapter; he isn’t sure how he got that impression

I see the coffee is still... do we call it glitching if it's just an unanticipated but logical result of one's actions?

hS

The dig!

The doug!

The deg!

The dgo!

The doggy!

The woofer!

The borker!

The heckin' snooter!

Chapter: Pagecount / Wordcount

Prologue: 21 / 4781

Ch. 1: 19 / 3222

Ch. 2: 11 / 2038

Ch. 3: 10 / 1591

Ch. 4: 11 / 1908

Ch. 5: 11 / 1794

Ch. 6: 13 / 2115

Ch. 7: 12 / 1864

Ch. 8: 12 / 2021

Ch. 9: 12 / 1716

Ch. 10: 10 / 1622

Ch. 11: 17 / 2812

Ch. 12: 11 / 1754

Ch. 13: 7 / 1077

Ch. 14: 8 / 1304

Ch. 15: 27 / 4358

Ch. 16: 4 / 703

Ch. 17: 18 / 2670

Ch. 18: 8 / 1300

Ch. 19: 19 / 3389

Epilogue: 10 / 892

All told: 271 pages, and 44,931 words! Now, the pagecount is a bit misleading since the pages are formatted a little bit differently than most books are. The text is bigger, and the paragraph breaks are as well. You can get away with a lot more compression in a book. But that wordcount! 45,000. That's half a Discworld novel. That's 5.4% of Homestuck. That's a lot more than a little anxious boy like me ever could have expected. And a lot of these words are good! I think the ending's a little rushed, but I'll await final judgement on that.

Many, many thanks to everyone who's been reading so far. Your praise does not fall on deaf ears, and maybe one day I'll even be able to appreciate it.

It's over, it's over, I'm finally free! It's over, it's over, and a big fat tee-hee!

Warning for uhh... violence, and a little bit of skirting BL1? Naomi's not in a good place. Also BL9 and heavy heavy swearing.

Here's a link to the first part if you wanna read from the beginning. Same warnings apply, and a few new ones like BL2 mentions and some NSFW mentions and a near-encr because I thought through the implications of this fic wrt PPC worldbuilding... the whole thing's rated M, okay?! "Shpx" was the right word more than once, is what I'm saying.

First part

The Black-and-Silver Ball, and what happens after.

MAJOR warning for homophobia and biphobia: Harry gets outed by Ron to Gary and Rose, and Gary and Rose do not take it very well. This is the 1990s, and Section 28 is very much still in effect in Muggle Britain. Gary and Rose will hopefully come around on it by the end of the year, but yes, right now things are a bit strained.

Also, Harry has a mild panic attack on the roof during the ball, and there's a couple comments about him (BL1) flinging himself off it or out a window. It does not happen, of course, but the idea is still broached.

Having written a bunch of Post-Self stuff, including, most relevantly, "Coffee Leak", I ended up getting some art of Tomash, the perisystem technician dog (not the Boarder).

So,

(Art by Roxanna (has, at time of writing, some NSFW behind a click-to-view))

• Tomash

So those of you not on the discord so often might not know I make gacha life/club videos every so often, outside of my badfic games entries of course. I recently finished the latest episode of a series I've been working on very slowly for years, and you can watch it here.
You can find a playlist for all the videos in the series on my channel. This latest one, and some of the newer episodes have some songs I composed specifically for it! I will work out where best to post those songs separately eventually.

I’ve read many many PPC spin-offs and I can confirm that all types of humor have been used. It doesn’t have to be black humor, although that can be funny in the proper place. For instance, in The Dark Side, Neshomeh and Phobos used multiple different types of humor to make it a funny and engaging story. Also, not all spin-offs need angst. Some people choose to and others don’t; it seems to be a personal preference. Frankly, my stories are also fairly light hearted, mainly because I already have my dark and gritty books. It’s my little break. :)

You don't need to make your stories darker, in fact, I think lighter stories fit the setting better.

--Ls

I don't believe there is a "set" mood for the PPC, and I think it is brilliant all in itself because we have characters with all kinds of backstories, and fiction does have all kinds of balances between lighthearted and grimdark. So i believe you're golden in making a light-hearted one!

In fact, if there's something that is generally agreed upon here, is that the opposite - going too dark - is what doesn't really fit the PPC's scope. The TvTropes page is kind of an example of why: whoever originally created it years ago seems to have focused a lot on a couple spinoffs that were much darker (and violent) than the average, and I think I remember there was a bit of controversy where TvTropes staff saw following attempts at fixing that as maliciously trying to give a different image of the PPC (while they only had one facet of it talked about there.)

The TOS was mostly lighthearted, so I don't see a problem with you being lighthearted! Other people might write more cynical humour but you don't have to, seriously, especially if it's not something you want to write.

(ETA title isn't referencing any specific PPC mission. It's a parody of a meme :P)

As most of you know, I write the Four Demonly Kings and Fairy Godfathers spin-offs. I generally keep to the humor of the universe (and I love funny stories in general), but I feel that my stories seem too idealistic and light-hearted compared to other PPC stories, which generally emphasize black comedy and a sense of crushing despair underneath the wacky hijinks. I generally don't feel comfortable writing very dark or angsty stories, and I don't want to upset readers, but I'm afraid my writings might be diverging too far from precedent set by the community. What do you think about this?

Instead, by moving laterally to the Silver Isle, they forced Team Malfoy-Black to consider between the Dinsdale Objective and the Stinchcombe Countergambit, hence Lucius crossing over to the Blood Moors. But I understand the confusion--lateral moves against Everard's Defence are fairly nonstandard. But that's why Ron's the chessmaster in the family!

While Shiho and Naomi have been rescued, the threat of the Organization's submarine still looms over the Pacific Buoy. It is an all in for both sides, meaning that either the Skystreakers or the Organization will sink.

Though I feel I must point out that Hermione's third move means that a few moves later Draco would have been in spon two ways from the Lord Chislehurst Conjecture, and would have had to backflow via Pengellyn's Martyrdom to somewhere on an entirely different line, such as Avalon Grand Ballrooms or Basingstoke. Perhaps that's a house rule?

=]

It was somewhere in the comments on a post about Anarchy Chess rules.

I'm guessing you appreciate my insight into the true origins of Mornington Crescent as a bastardisation of the noble wizard pastime of Pendragon Castle, then ;)

...

Probably me, thinking about it, I've been a faithful listener since Humph was hosting. But still! =]

We're leaving Hogwarts and taking a little bit of a breather with Ron!

Ron Weasley meditates on possessions and friendships. The second Weasley-Malfoy Games Showdown is held.

Warning: Allusions to the deaths of family members. Also in the garden lunch scene, Mrs Weasley expresses concerns about Luna's puberty-blocking potion, which can be upsetting in the context of IRL discourse surrounding puberty blockers.

The first rule about Debate Club is that you do not talk about Debate Club!

Cormac's mum really is something. I was parodying a bit of the typical fanon Draco there, where he acts like a total arse because one of his parents is a total arse to him. The two of them are a bit like foils as a result. (And to be fair Umbridge isn't standing up for Scrimgeour and Tiberius McLaggen because she accepts their ~friendship~. She's doing it because they outrank her; it's the one sure way to make her treat you like a person.)

She can't actually ban Harry for life, but I'm sure she'll make a spirited effort. :P

Yeah, I was going for a bit of a subtler way for Qiu to not be coping that well under the surface and the result is her using Harry as an emotional replacement Cedric. There are differences here from the book: Qiu saw Cedric die; she heard before he died that he loved her. Cho, on the other hand, only knows that her boyfriend was killed and there's two competing reasons how that happened--a tragic accident, and murdered by a maniac Dark Lord whose return the Ministry thinks is fake news. So Qiu is more sure of everything that happened to Cedric; she's just having trouble with the lack of him in their Bond and the agony of losing him so soon, etc. And Harry trivialising her feelings in the books was a bit... I mean, I know why Harry would do it (PTSD. So much PTSD) but I feel like his callous lack of understanding her contributes to a lot of negative feelings towards Cho in fandom? And also it made Hermione a lot more emotionally in-tune with other girls than she was previously portrayed to be. That girl prides herself on not being like the other girls and I feel like her lecturing Harry on his own relationships in the 5th book turned into her being shipper on deck (to, like, a very intrusive degree) in a lot of Harry-ship fanfics? Anyway I digress. You're right--Marietta is more of a overbearing mother hen than a friend trying to comfort their friend who has just lost the love of their life. You'll see how that works out for them :P

You'll see what was really happening there with Sev and Lily and the poison... eventually!

Thanks for catching the capitalisation error!