Summary:
A repackaging and archive of a quest I'm running on Questionable Questing.
Si with Harry Potter magic
Chapter 1: Yer a Wizard, QQ
Chapter Text
AN: This is version 2 of a repackaging of a quest currently running on Questionable Questing.Winning vote information and some few author's notes from the live quest will be kept in the text; Q&A posts, the character sheet, and other informative posts may or may not be posted as a separate documents at a later date.
Where voted-upon items have been edited into a previous post/chapter to maintain the flow, a small marker (typically '-=-=-' at the beginning and end) will be added to denote this. This is not done in all cases—sometimes it would cause posts to balloon to twice the previous size or look odd, this is considered on a case-by-case basis.
-=-=-=-
You jolt into full wakefulness and stare at an overcast sky framed by leafless trees.
You blink a few times and wait for your brain to prod you into doing something. School, work, a dentist appointment-
Nothing.
You try and figure out why you're apparently outside, since there's no roof and you can faintly hear traffic in the distance.
Still nothing.
You feel a bit of worry creep in as you start trying to make sense of things.
Where am I? No idea.
How'd I get here? No clue.
What's my name? Snoop Doggy Daaaaaawwwwg. Thanks brain.
The unhelpful 90's rap lyrics aside, you have no idea what the hell is going on. Have you lost your memory? You're pretty sure this isn't how amnesia works in real life, this is feeling like some laser-guided amnesia TVTropes bullshit. No hangover- maybe this is some kind of lucid dream? You don't think you've had one of those. Maybe, instead, it's the most boring ayahuasca-fueled spirit quest ever. What kind of bland white-bread asshole has a spirit quest where you can hear traffic? Where are the glowing talking animals?
You're delaying. You don't want to know what's going on because you have a bad feeling and a head full of static slowly resolving itself into a heaping helping of trouble. The phrases 'We apologize for your unscheduled death', 'alternate soul accommodation' , and 'celestial bureaucratic ass-covering' float through your forebrain. A bone-deep surety that this isn't your world and you've probably been tampered with as well settles in. You clamp down on the reflexive desire to check yourself over- you're sprawled on your back in the middle of who-knows-where, you can freak out once you've found shelter and some privacy.
Levering yourself up, you discover you're on something hard and barely wider than you are- you roll off to the side and stare at what you're sure is a sacrificial alta- nope, that's a enormous steamer trunk. With seven locks on it. You pat yourself down hoping that this means what you think it does, and patting your sleeves rewards you with a wand in a holster. You ignore the snide comment of wand holsters aren't canon in your head and pull it out. It's- plain. Really plain. It's almost a drumstick with a textured handle. What a bloody letdown.
Nevertheless, half-remembered knowledge floats through your head and prompts you to tap the first lock. The trunk pops open and shows you absolute chaos. Honestly, it looks like a tornado blew through Diagon Alley and then shat in the trunk. A quick look shows you something like a dozen scarves or trimmed robes in the four Hogwarts color schemes, and plenty of crazy ones- there's at least two that involve neon colors, and one with throbbing paisley, and that's just the layer you can see. You close the trunk and try the second space and find a similar mess of books. Multiple copies of various Standard Books of Spells and copies of Hogwarts: a History lie jumbled together with seemingly every other book you'd need in Hogwarts. You revise your idea—it was a magical tornado, it hit Flourish and Blotts and shat in this compartment; the previous one was where it ransacked Madam Malkins. The next few compartments follow the same kind of idea- it looks like potions ingredients and cauldrons in one and wizarding miscellanea- a broom or two, what looks like a foe glass, most of a chess set in the next. Locks five and six open to blank space, each the size of a decent room but completely bare of anything. The seventh compartment looks like that magical tornado did the same with the Room of Requirement. You'll need an empty warehouse and possibly the jaws of life to get all of that crap out.
Giving up on taking any kind of inventory, you close the lid and tap the blank nameplate to shrink the thing into a much more manageable matchbox. Stashing it in one of the interior pockets of your coat, you find that there was something already in that pocket.
A hotel keycard.
For Hampton Inn Brockton Bay, room 394.
Oh. Oh.
That was not a name you expected. This is gonna suck hard.
Mechanically, you return the keycard to your pocket and look around. You're in a copse of trees, probably in a park of some kind. There's hints of a trail that you can see through some scraggly bushes. Walking in that direction does indeed reveal a paved path, and the sound of cars is louder. In something of a daze you arrive at the park entrance and see- amazingly enough- a Hampton Inn right across the street. There are also a number of billboards, most of which either reference Brockton Bay as part of a company name (Brockton Bay Bank- 3B4U!), or reference something else from the Wormverse- the Medhall building is prominent in the skyline, and signs reference both the Palanquin and Fugly Bob's. You spend a bit just looking around, soaking in the run-down sights and considering casting fiendfyre and letting everything burn.
You don't remember making your way inside, but you shortly find yourself opening the door to what is supposedly your hotel room. A few steps inside and your attention snaps to the bed where two packets and one letter are laying, the latter glowing faintly. Skimming the letter quickly gives a little context to some of the information floating through your head. It's a shitty half-ROBing- you died when you weren't supposed to and your mere existence in the midst of the celestial bureaucracy baffled the semi-divine filing clerks and office workers. You've effectively been shoved into something like a test server to kick around for a while so you're not underfoot to make anyone look bad in front of their divine middle manager. So, as one does, you've been hidden someone no one would care about, a shard of the Wormverse. And instead of superpowers via parasite, you were given Potterverse magic. But as the letter tells you, it's a bucketful of 'the breadth and depth of all of the Harry Potter world and associated stories.'
... you've been given fanfic magic. Maybe you can be a multi-animagus or cast with two wands simultaneously. Your zoofull of patroni will shine gold as you erect wards using runes carved wandlessly while doing ritual magic. Hell yeah! It all sounds great as long as it doesn't come with mpreg, soulbonds, secret creature heritage, Snape being your father, Draco Malfoy in leather pants, or any of that bullshit.
Putting the letter down, you decide to take a break and get some water before tackling anything in the packets. In the bathroom your attention is immediately grabbed by the face in the mirror. It's largely your face, but not totally. You've got a five o'clock shadow going on and honestly look a little haggard. Maybe dying and being reincarnated was stressful, who knew? Looking closely at your new face, though, there are definitely elements that are different, kinda…
[X][Looks] Potteresque.
Wild, dark hair and almond-shaped intensely green eyes.
-Adds [Potteresque] trait(s).
While you're contemplating the weird face in the mirror you meet your own eyes for a moment too long and are swept up in a storm of backstory-worthy memories. You see yourself going through the stations of Potter canon, then the crazy-ass stations of Potter fanon- being raised by goblins, the Malfoys, Tonks, Bones- pretty much everyone that was ever namedropped in the series. Mixed in with this is all of the learning that actually occurs in Hogwarts, both normal, like the OWLs and NEWTs, and the exotic, like the animagus transformation, and completely made up crap like 'battle magic' or 'ritual magic'. You try to corral some of that learning to try and fill in the basics. Yes, people remember the 'it's levi-oh-sa instead of levi-oh-sah' quote, but really there was a lot of little details that went along with all of that. You manage to make sense of a bit of it before you give yourself a raging headache. It's just a start, but you'll need to know something to defend yourself with.