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Everywhere that Tomash went, the Scouts were sure to go.

This included the the PPC's digital HQ.

It didn't take long for Tomash#Facilities to create a few Scouts. He'd been turning himself (more technically, some instances of himself) into a dog dog, as opposed to a dog-person, for some time now. It was fun, relaxing, a useful way to keep eyes on the System HQ without being too obtrusive, and, most importantly, fun.

So, dreams of dogs wandered the servers between the universes, looking for homes to watch over and settle down in. While cats are the masters of getting into places they had no business being, dogs aren't slouches in that department either.

Thus, there's a Scout on the Board. Yep, right here. On the Board. He dug right under the fourth wall.

It has a book floating next to it, and it's wagging its tail.

We're in a book! he says, using the sense-messaging he still has. Look, it's right here!

So, here's Scout. Its relatives, in some sense, have now shown up in Idumea, a book I have co-author credit on! Said book is a solid punch to the gut that explores the escape from the cycle of suffering in a digital world.

I'd recommend folks read the thing, and I hope you also enjoy the dogs.

doctorlit, last chapter: Was that a Maiden’s Kiss?
narrator: It was, in fact, a Maiden’s Kiss.

I see the pre-Bond from the Maiden’s Kiss is connecting Harry with Draco’s dreams, just like what happens with Lily sometimes. I admit, though, that when that first nightmare started, I thought it was Harry dreaming about the abusive conditions Merope had grown up in after “meeting” her in the Pensieve . . . So it was a little horrifying to realize that it was actually Draco remembering Cygnet Lodge! That’s a real prisony, torturey vibe they have going on there, to say nothing of the conversion therapy/troubled teen industry metaphor! Then again, we saw what the Carrows were like while they were in control of Hogwarts in canon, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that their alternate timeline selves are just as awful with authority over children. But man, making a ward that behaves like a boggart feels so far beyond the pale, even for this society! I guess they think a little PTSD is a reasonable price to pay for teaching the kids to “break down their resistance.” On a lighter note, I did enjoy the symbolism during the dream/memory of Pansy’s jump rope rhyme: Draco trips on the “H” for “Harry!”

I’m generally terrible at forming mental pictures of characters, but the second I read the green scarf in the Forbidden Forest, I immediately thought it belonged to Astoria. The end of the chapter seems to have proved me right, since it implies she saw Harry and Draco kissing that night! Astoria-stop-being-antagonistic-challenge, difficulty: impossible. And now Nott knows . . . And Nott was clearly heading for the Vanishing Cabinet, and is apparently in direct contact with Gaunt . . . He really is planning to sneak Knights of Camelot into Hogwarts to assassinate Dumbledore, isn’t he? There’s too much drama between Gaunt and the Malfoys in this timeline, so Gaunt selected a different Pureblood student for the task . . .

I know I’ve gone off on this before, but now that I’ve truly had a first-person account of how the Maiden’s Kiss affects people: this society all garbage! I hate that anyone goes through the Bonding process and thinks, “Yeah, I’m definitely going to apply that same potion to every one of my future infants so they can all experience the Objectively Worst Puberty, too! Glad I live in such an enlightened age.” Garbage. This practice should have died out after literally one generation. It’s mind control, and it’s nearly reducing Harry and Draco to animals. I hate it. Bless Lily and Jenni for their desperately necessary work!

Professor Liu: starts bringing up wife cauldrons
doctorlit: I don’t think this is some metaphor. It’s probably just telling the young men they need to help with house chores, and not leave all the domestic responsibilities to their future wives.
narrator: It was, in fact, some metaphor.

I’m glad to see Draco is being involved in the Pensieve lessons, and generally in the movement against Gaunt. He’s certainly had more time with the trio in this timeline, but he’s still felt distanced for a lot of the previous years; it’s high time the trio became a quartet for good, and Dumbledore recognizes it. For that matter, I like that Babbling’s research into Hogwarts’s history and the Tome’s archaeological veracity also seem to be leading her to a point of debunking some of Gaunt’s claims about the world. And perhaps the next session with Dumbledore will involve a first-hand account from Myrtle, rather than Pensieve memories? Dumbledore really seems to be weaving a lot of different threads together to deconstruct Gaunt’s fascism, and I love to see it!

Oh my, that Smart-Answer Quill is giving New Avalon an early taste of AI-generated essays! That’s very sad! I’m fond of the twins, but they need to let students learn how to construct sentences, dang . . .

Boy oh boy, this Pensieve memory is displaying a serious lack of reasoning skills, all around! First, Ogden and Radford listen to an account of what’s pretty clearly a dosing with love potion/Bond enhancer and they . . . just don’t notice? And then Cece and Dottie overhear two strangers in strange clothes talk about putting something in the lemonade, and then accept lemonade from those strangers like two minutes later? No wonder Merope got away with her plan, she was apparently the only intelligent person, wizard or Muggle, for miles and miles around!

New words you taught me:
Chivvy (I feel like this one has been in my vocabulary subconsciously, but I never really looked it up before now, and I don’t think I’ve ever used it myself!)
Craic

—doctorlit is impressed Dumbledore got the Acromantulas to sign anything at all, considering how spider feet are shaped . . .

Translates to "above all," and perhaps carries a connotation of excessive dogmatism.

~Neshomeh

You may notice that my missions so far have had no failures. This is because:

1. Adding failed missions would overly complicate the plot and compromise the tone for stories meant to be light-hearted. This is also why I don't intend to kill off (especially Hazama clan members; killing them would flat-out lead to plot holes) or irreversibly mentally break any of my agents either.
2. The main conflict is not agents vs. badfics. It's agents vs. each other and agents vs. their wacky life in the PPC. Those areas are where I put conflict and failures in.

Do note me if there's anything wrong with this set-up.

I think you made a typo in saying "the preference for romantic love uber alles", because I'm not sure what that means.

--Ls probably won't be using the concept of amatonormativity, unless as a trivia question

And, frankly, you don't need to shoehorn a relationship in just to have one.

--Ls, agreeing with Nesh and Lily

Female characters honestly get shafted in all sorts of ways, including very often being written solely as romantic lovers or love interests with nothing else going on in their lives. The world loses nothing by having more female characters fulfilled by friendships and activities, without needing to be/do anything else in order to be worthy.

And that goes for real women, too. {= )

~Neshomeh

And honestly older writers, too--we all have these moments of doubt regarding the reception of our work. But I can say for sure that writing for yourself and what you want to see will always make for better writing than writing for the opinions of other people.

Honestly, sometimes I doubt my own writing, which is why I regularly check in with the comm to make sure my writing doesn't violate the general spirit. Do stop me if I come off as repetitive or attention-seeking.

Characters develop relationships organically as you continue writing them into situations. I know I didn't start out intending to put my Agents together; they just kinda fell into it after a while. And amatonormativity--the preference for romantic love uber alles, and how everyone's expected to fall in romantic love and place romantic relationships above all others--is equally worth "protesting", especially in fanfiction spaces. ;)

especially in fanfic, so I impose this rule as a kind of protest.

And why only for female characters?

~Neshomeh

I impose a personal rule that any and every female character that I'm currently writing must, without exception, eventually have a permanent love interest. However, I'm very stuck on who should be coupled up with Helena, and I don't plan on creating an entirely new character as a love interest for her. Boarders who have read the Fairy Godfathers spin-off, who do you think has the most romantic chemistry with her?

Since everything is hard-coded into it, all you have to do is reverse-engineer the choices of background and character customization the author did. However, for comics in general I assume the "describe through narration" trick is the most suited, and to be fair since the Words would likely appear as a comic page we could also have PPC Agents being forced (for SEP field effectiveness or just "The Flowers will nag us if we don't") to constantly move out of frame to not affect the fancomic until the kill time comes, of course it being played for comedy.

Likewise, the Words for a fan animation or fan film would be the video feed - but it would likely be silent, forcing PPC Agents to track down the original video on their own devices and have to rewind and fast forward to take notes. Not good for their sanity, but good for our laughs.

Relatedly, I did the opposite once - I did a mission in comic form, though the fanfiction sporked was a regular text one. It was kind of a special for the 15th anniversary of me publishing stories online, as the mission is basically a remake of one I originally did in regular text format.

One example that comes to mind is Iximaz, who sporked a comic by showing panels where fic excerpts often went for an Avatar: the Last Airbender comic I don't remember the name of.

An alternative route, funnily enough, can be seen in my last mission finished a month back. There, I just described the panels in narration because while the Atla comic was digitally published and could provide high-quality screenshots, the comic I sporked was a terrible one I made when I was ten, drawn on a sheet of paper with art quality so awful that using Ix's method wasn't an option for me. I had to take a photo of the paper and it just didn't come out all that well.

I've never seen one done to a fanfilm, though it definitely sounds like something that could reasonably fall under the PPC style, considering its inspiration from Mystery Science Theater and its movie-sporking tendencies. I know something similar was discussed on the Board with the possibility of sporking a Gacha Life 'fic,' though nothing came out of it.

Hope this helps!

Have there been any instances of agents in the PPC taking on fan works that weren't written? For example, comics (i.e. It's (Not) Your Fault) or fan films (i.e. Spider-Man Lotus).

Nothing good is going to come of Draco grabbing a sample of Draught of Living Death, especially since he hasn’t been tasked with assassinating Dumbledore in this timeline.
Oho.

I just hope the Sectumsempra spell isn’t there in this timeline, or that Harry doesn’t run into it, or never gets put in a position to try it.
Ohoho.

I guess someone’s trying to sabotage Gryffindor this year? Or maybe specifically the Gryffindor Quidditch team?
Ohohoho.

I'm glad you liked the house-elf shenanigans :D And yes, Astoria is such a wet cat right now. Poor pathetic little meow meow with her ill-advised crush... It is like a plot from a badfic, isn't it?

You make a good point about Gaunt Snr. being so obsessed with reclaiming the manor like Sauron reclaiming the Ring! I'd argue he's a bit more Gollumy, but y'know.

Read on to see more maidenly shenanigans ;) (I laughed so hard at that joke tbh)

Harry and Draco deal with the consequences of their kiss in the Forbidden Forest.

MASSIVE BL10/11 warning for Harry's nightmares in this chapter, plus warnings for self-harm, blood, indoctrination, physical (and sexualised) assault, body-shaming and ableism, and allusions to date rape (what Merope did to Tom Riddle Snr) and child marriage. Please check the pre-chapter notes for more details!