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In which YOU are the Instrumentality, assisting a chosen wizard on their Ordeal (and, hopefully, beyond that...)

[Lemme know if anyone thinks this is a good idea, and I'll start it up.]

Also: ALL THE EMOTIONS.

At least they found Jacques...?

Bother that. Broke the HTML by accident :/ I must have forgotten to check it again after adding the notes at the end. Sorry!

~Z

It was Franklin who made the call.

"Ianto," he said when the younger wizard picked up. "Good. Faster than an owl, this."

"Sir?" Ianto had been preparing to leave, had just been going to get a last healing potion, but a call from this man...

"Jacques is in St. Mungo's," Franklin said.

Ianto sat on the sofa's arm with a thud. "He--"

"They don't know yet," Jacques' father said. Now Ianto understood the rough quality to his voice. He'd been thinking vaguely of phone quality before, wondering if cellphones could really be any better. "His--your--other friends, Jon, Rose--they're in with him."

Ianto dropped the phone. He sat frozen for a moment before he managed to get off the sofa and pick the receiver back up. "I--" His voice was barely audible.

"How soon can you get here?"

"Minutes," Ianto said blankly. "I was--going already. To check--" To check down at Jacques' favorite Muggle club. One last time, before he accepted that the week was up and he was going to chase his friends into Death Eater territory.

To accept that he was probably going to try to contact John Hart.

"Fourth floor," Franklin said. Ianto finally noticed how much thicker his accent was than normal: an old oddity, Scottish-tinged words to his wife and sons' French. Odder, really, was his surname, taken to match his wife's-- "Be careful on the way."

"Yes, sir."

Franklin hung up. It was a testament to the situation, probably, that he hadn't repeated his habitual insistence that Ianto could always use his given name now he was nearly five years out of school.

Ianto allowed himself half a minute to sit and feel his hands shaking. Then he got up, gathered his things and some of Jacques', and forced as much calm into his body as he could before he Apparated to the alley closest to St. Mungo's.

Try as he might, however, he could do nothing to calm his mind.



--
Yes, there will be more! But this seemed like a, ahem, fun place to cut it. I never get to do cliffhangers anymore.

Jack's father was also named Franklin; his mother's never named, though we see her briefly. In this AU, both of them are alive, and the mother is named Amélie. That he's Scottish is both to explain the name and in slight reference to Jack's actor, John Barrowman, actually being Scottish for all he uses the American accent in most of his performing roles. Jacques having developed a British accent while at Hogwarts is also partly in reference to Barrowman's American accent, though it was partly just a survival tactic.

Also, have some dates! This is set in late 1979 or early 1980, which means that the war is about two years away from ending. Jacques graduated in 1974, Ianto in 1975; around 1976 they ended up in the PPC, where they spent one to two years. This places them back in their version of the Potterverse around 1978 (or possibly late 1977).

~Z

Jacques had himself a nice bit of inter-House interaction, not only with Hart. Hart wasn't even the only Slytherin--there's Jon.

And, of course, Ianto's a Hufflepuff one year younger. That was an interesting build.

In short: I'm starting with the partially written scene. After that might be Rose visiting the PPC. After that, well, we'll see what happens!

~Z

It's sort of what happened to my own little ficlet, there - though it's a product of the process, and definitely far-removed from the timeline's starting point.

That sounds like the sort of inter-House interaction we need more of, tbh.

... Rose meeting the Sunflower Official. Can you imagine?

Glad you think so.

I just love that at the root of it all is Hart--John Hart. In Torchwood, he's Jack's Time Agent ex-partner; here, he's the Slytherin boy who took exception to Jacques probably as early as the train to Hogwarts, and kept up a banter-filled rivalry of the sort where they literally fought each other for all seven years, each fancied the other at some point, and had some weird kind of trust between them that most people weren't really aware of because it was mostly shown in moments hidden here and there.

And that's the guy who Ianto thinks passed the trait on to Jacques, who passed it on to his own friends in turn. Can't be the most pleasant feeling in the world, that.

And hurray, Rose feels like Rose! They're all meant to (feel like themselves, that is), in a way--the idea is really just 'okay, translate everyone into the Potterverse in the seventies.' So, you know, Gwen Cooper spent a whole lot of years trying (and failing) to rein in the Marauders, which is a bit of a callback both to her personality in general and to her time on the police force. On the show, she also has a boyfriend named Rhys. He doesn't know what Torchwood does--he thinks she works for special ops. Here, he's a Muggle; she meets him over the summer holidays in her last few years at Hogwarts, and falls for him. Things like that--believe me, I can go on, and on, and on...and that's how I got such a developed AU to begin with. I just kept on thinking of how to carry things over.

As to Rose in the PPC...well, I can't so much see her deciding to stay, but I can see her visiting. To the point where I now have in my head the first couple lines of a scene for it. So that might happen at some point.

In the meantime, as I mentioned above, expect a little sequel to the scene pretty soon. I had the first couple lines come into my head this morning, and ended up writing out two notebook pages' worth of it soon after. Now I just need to type it up and finish it...

~Z

This was intended to be pretty much all about emotional states, so this is a good comment to get :)

Sequel incoming, probably soonish. There's definitely more to be told here.

~Z

“Seems like it,” Lemon agreed, smiling at the scene.

Chelsea tapped the camera icon on her phone’s touch screen. She set the camera to point towards her. “Okay, here we go!” With one hand, she held the phone sideways and angled it to get the robots and herself in the picture. She held her free hand in a peace sign and smiled. She pressed the button and a camera snap sounded. She tapped the recent photo icon, making photo she took expanded on her screen, then showed the photo to the robots. “Whaddya think?”

I missed the part where she read the label. Before I noticed that, I'd thought the narration had her as actually confused about what the hair dye was.

Ce'rana doesn't get a lot of opportunities to mess with Alex, and she wants to make the most of this one. If that means pretending to be clueless for ten minutes, she can do that.

She always knew exactly what that was. She also knows that Alex is A Little Vain about his little streak of color. The obvious solution here is to tease him.

First off, thanks.
The tense changes were mainly to imply what time it was taking place in. The double line spacing between "No more.-" and "Or the bullet" was intentional, to separate it from the rest, and indicate a time shift. It shifts to the present tense, because it's when people are talking about it. Honestly, personal mistake not adding a second space between "get what he deserves" and "Another month".

Re, SPaG:

I used approached for that very reason. We, as the reader, are not supposed to know if the bullet, say, is touching him, or if it's inches away. As a writer, I wanted that uncertainty.

Stray hyphen was intended to give the section preceding it sort of a "reporty" feel. Not super duper official, but still some inkling of it.

The golems might have simply been silenced by burying them. It's hard to hear screeching under 50 ft of dirt. Or maybe they were deactivated by someone. Lost power. Or maybe the small hammers just didn't work. so they had to use bigger ones.

Thanks for the help with the rest of the SPaG; and because I forgot to mention it earlier, partial credit to John Milton (yes, that Milton) for inspiring this writing style.

I think I see what you're trying to do here, slowly building up the impression of the world (I guess?) that this guy is really gone while also leaving it eerily ambiguous. Even if he's dead, his legacy clearly lives on in some fashion. It's a cool idea.

I'm thrown off by the tense changes and inconsistent paragraphing, though. Are those things deliberate? If so, I can't work out the meaning to them. Are you trying to show a meta effect of Harrison's ability to mess with reality? I'm confused.

Also, some SPaG:

- "approached" is a very passive word for a speeding bullet and doesn't tell us how close it got.

- You want "farther" for physical distances; "further" is for everything else.

- Stray hyphen at the end of the fourth paragraph.

- "phenomena" is plural, so the phrase should be "phenomena are ... are not connected" or "phenomenon is ... is not connected".

- "amount" is for uncountable measures. Golems are countable, so you want "a small number" of them. And, where are they roaming? The house? The farmland? Somewhere else?

- Were the golems silenced by an outside force, as the current phrasing implies, or did they just run out of juice and fall silent on their own?

- It sounds a bit like it's the fire that was demolished and shipped, since that's the subject of the first clause of that sentence. It could benefit from rephrasing to put the house in that role.

I think that's everything I noticed. Again, cool idea, and I think it could be very effective with some tweaking.

~Neshomeh

At least plant sprouts are fairly manageable... *shudder*

The context was rather unclear but I’ll probably be using these characters for some more prompts.

Amelia doesn’t really have to start studying quite that early - Clara’s probably been hassling her for weeks!

I’m not quite sure what Amelia looks like, but I know Clara’s small with blonde hair and glasses.

They’re... well, schoolgirls, for lack of a better term. They’re studying magic and the exams are probably the equivalent of GSCEs.

Hope that makes it a bit clearer!

The shot was fired from behind. Point blank, from behind a cardboard box. In a flash of explosive light, the bullet left the chamber, piercing the cardboard, and approached Harrison's spine. In an instant, he vanished. The bullet might not have hit him, if it was any further away. But the bullet had vanished with him. The bullet hit, far away, in a dark safe room, somewhere miles away underground. Or maybe not. Harrison was gone, and so was the bullet.

It was written off as a failed mission. The target had gotten away.
Or maybe he wasn't lucky enough.

Two weeks pass. There were no more sightings of Harrison. No more tears in reality. No more extra hours of daylight, or unending night. No more. -


Or the bullet hadn't hit and he is merely biding his time. Maybe he is taking the chance to finally disappear. A fake death. A get out of jail free card.
A rare opportunity for a man like him. He should get what he deserves.

Another month passed.
He was only human, after all. Wasn't he? He seemed more machine than man. More animal than human. He was strong. Powerful. But a bullet can change all of that in an instant.
Harrison is presumed dead, succumbing to his injuries.

He was a force to be reckoned with. He defended many people. He helped many. But he harmed many, many more. He never showed his hand, and was trusted by nobody. He got what he deserved.

Harrison is dead. Whatever phenomena is occurring is not connected to him whatsoever. His house has fallen over a patch of farmland. Constant streams of ash pour out. A small amount of partially damaged golems currently roam, but will be contained and destroyed. Harrison is dead, and the dead have no hold over the living.

The golems began screeching at 9:04 pm, Tuesday evening. Simply bashing them with hammers wasn't enough. Attempts to move and contain them have failed. Harrison must have had batteries somewhere continuing their power. They will die soon enough.

After eight weeks, the golems have finally been silenced. Twenty ton deadweights; it was simpler to bury them than to move them. The house fire ceased, and was promptly demolished and shipped to a proper disposal site. An anticlimactic conclusion to the end of his tale.
And now, for some final words: Good riddance.

But the last sentence of that paragraph seems a bit disjointed. The word "estimation" carries a bit of a logistical connotation, and one would use it for things that has a quantity attached to it. What you used it for however is something that has no inherent amount; one can't have varying degrees of artisan, whereas one can have varying degrees of artistic ability. Perhaps a better word might be "impression" or "judgement" instead.

Re: Ave being tense. She's worried about Elanor's glitter levels. Some of the glitter in her system was passed on to her baby, but not enough to warrant a tracker. Still, she's a mom, and moms worry about their kids.

Sorry, Zeb becomes a permanent bachelor and Ave and Dee don't know what the hell is going on between them.

The beginning was very sweet and heartwarming. And Zeb teasing the Aviator was very fun.

This sue was pretty blatant, wasn't she? And man, that plants line. Spelling is important! (Although it's true planets probably would have been worse.)

Anyhow, very enjoyable. Read it on the train and laughed out loud.

Full context only really comes if you read what goes on in the Dreamwidth roleplay comm

Full context only really comes if you read what goes on in the Dreamwidth roleplay comm

Full context only really comes if you read what goes on in the Dreamwidth roleplay comm

My brain's not putting up any coherent thoughts on characterization, so I'll leave that to someone else who wants to review, but I think this was overall a well-written piece that did a good job of conveying people's emotional states (especially Ianto's urge to go out and do something and/or go on a roaring rampage of revenge).

- Tomash