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Zeb's not permanently human, he was just using the disguise generator for this story. Much easier to read books and show his partner's parents around if he's got opposable thumbs. :P

Normally I tend to go for shorter quotes, but this particular fic had massive chunks of badness all smashed together and breaking them up line by line would have felt too MST-y for me, so I left them large for this one in particular.

Thanks for the review. :)

Well, it has two canons I recognise, a team I'm at least vaguely familiar with, and is only ('only') 14 pages... I guess that means I should read it. ;)

The opening scene is really cute. I clearly have something of a soft spot for domestic scenes (says the person who has written multiple stories about his retired agents and their kids...), and this works really well. (Though... I guess Zeb is... human now? I've clearly missed a lot. You have a thing for literally transforming your characters, don't you?)

... oh my gods, Artemis, Zeus, what. <<< The fact that this comes across so clearly shows that you've selected your quotes well. It also doesn't come across as overly-quoted, which is always a good thing.

For the mission itself, I'd say it felt about the right length - you hit the high points (well, low points), and didn't overcharge (the art of presenting a charge list that people won't just skip over is a tricky one to learn). I'd personally make my badfic quotes shorter than yours are, but I think that's in the range of style and preference; it doesn't feel like you're MSTing, is the main thing.

So yeah: good stuff. :)

hS

Ha, Sergio's timeline manipulations are hilarious. ^^ And Corolla's are nice and sneaky.

I like the mismatched furniture. I also like the fact that the girls still don't care about Sergio's past (in a good way): it's clear he wants to be all angsty about it, but Corolla in particular is having none of that.

In fact, in general it's great to have Corolla in the field at last. She's great. ^^ The whole snowmobile scene was brilliant, and her interactions later in the chapter are building nicely both the stories of the overall quest, and of Sergio's personal arc.

Favourite line: “I’m still going to do my best. I’m not accepting a Bad End for you two, I’m aiming for the Perfect Golden Ending!” Corolla is a dedicated shipper. ^_^

... I will probably talk less about Corolla from here on out. Maybe. _{No promises.}

hS

But then I realized it wouldn't be even remotely SFW.

Multiversal empires never work out well.

By which I mean... aaawwww. ;;

Wobbles does many a Good, for EVERYONE! The Notary very much included.

One day in the happy world of Headquarters, something very peculiar happened. Wobbles The Clown was missing! All the boys and girls and nonbinary life forms were very confused, because Wobbles made sure to tell all her friends if she was going away, and Wobbles was friends with everyone.

Everyone in the Nursery decided to go and look for Wobbles, because she might have gotten lost or fallen down a plothole, and that could be dangerous - or worse, boring. So off they went on an Adventure.

They looked in the Floating Hyacinth's office, but Wobbles wasn't there.

They looked in Wobbles The Clown's RC, but Wobbles wasn't there either.

They weren't allowed to look in Rudi's, but a friendly Security Dandelion did instead, and it said Wobbles wasn't there either.

They looked in the A/V Division offices, but the grown-ups there were not very friendly and screamed and threw things and one did a wee in his trousers, and worst of all Wobbles still wasn't there!

Where, oh where could Wobbles be?

---

"I... I really appreciate you doing this for me." The Notary looked immaculate, and it was only when you got close by that you could see the age and tiredness in her eyes.

"Ah-buh-buh-buh-buh! I'm doing this with you. The hard work is all on you." Wobbles would normally have offered a hug, but the way the Notary was trembling meant she stayed a pace or two away.

"I know, I know. I'm just..." The Notary sighed, quiet and old as an empty church. "Thank you."

Wobbles smiled and said nothing.

The door in front of them eventually opened, and a much shorter woman greeted the two and welcomed them into her office. In a few moments, it clicked shut, revealing a sign that said Nurse Jennifer Robinson, FicPsych.

The old Time Lord sat, and spoke, and when the tears and shaking and pain dragged themselves to the surface, Wobbles was there.

Right where she needed to be.

Because I think I've seen their agents around. You can tell if someone's a Draconian agent because they tend to go cross-eyed a lot. I think they're plotting to invade... something. Or maybe they're just planning on filming incredibly strange adult entertainment? Wait, no, that's something else...

Get out of my teeth.

THE PPC IS A FRONT FOR THE DARCONIANS! I'VE SEEN THEIR PLAN, THEY WANT TO RUN MISSIONS FOR LONG ENOUGH THAT AGENTS JUST ACCEPT IT WHEN THEY DECLARE ALL FANFICTION TO BE A THREAT! THEN THEY'LL ANNEX OTHER CANONS AS "PROTECTION" AGAINST IT! THEY'RE BUILDING A MULTIVERSAL EMPIRE!

Fantastic. That's what I'm going for! Well, among other things, but this is very much going for an emotional response.

They've found him! No one's in such good shape, apparently, but...he's alive! And in safe hands!

Now we just need to get in to see him, and find out what even happened to begin with...

~Z

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.