Redcsp: Thread (and Year) 2 (2024)

A 1958 Cadillac Series 86 hearse is not in any way shape or form a subtle motor vehicle even if it has not been repainted (or rather magically recoloured) everywhere that is not glittering chrome or glass into a high gloss approximation of British temperate pattern 'disruptive pattern material' camouflage clothing, been fitted with an obnoxiously loud bassy car stereo, had its interior lined with red velvet, had the bier area in the back occupied by a scruffy mattress, sleeping bags, and scattered articles of clothing, or contain clear signs that two deliberately trashy and provocative lunatic 'goths' have spent the last two weeks living in it by for example the dashboard being a melee of casette tapes or two extremely strange teenage girls currently being in the process of snogging in the front seats, one of them with her feet (in the metalhead equivalent of gogo boots) sticking out of a rolled down window while the speakers kick out something definitely not silent about enjoying the silence, with a third and fourth teenage weirdo lounging against its chrome-plated front, one of them smoking an incredibly smelly cigarette.

It is on the other hand and especially given the above deliberately, preposterously, obvious and incredibly obnoxious and that, Dan Granger supposed as he (currently clad in civvies) found this object parked in the drop-off zone outside Gatwick airport at which he had just seen his wife on her way to effectively drop off the face of the earth, was probably the entire point.

(He didn't actually know what make year or model the car was, only that it was an old American barge, most definitely a hearse, contained more chrome than he'd seen in one place in quite some time, and something about the paint being shiny made him want to get an eye twitch.)

The Morticia Addams Impersonator leaning on the front saw him - or rather his niece, currently dressed in her Victorian doll princess of Hell getup with the effect completed via the impressive set of pigtails she'd spent nearly two hours of that morning creating, and the set of ant goggles shoved up on her forehead; 'Morticia' elbowed the teenage boy beside her (who looked like he wanted to be a vampire, or possibly Riffraff, when he grew up) causing his nose to emerge from the book he'd been reading; he glanced up, did a double take, nodded, said something, and resumed reading as Hermione left go of her uncle's hand and sauntered over to the car.

"Nice boots, squirt," 'Morticia said, clearly quite amused.

"Mm, very goth," the vampire impersonator muttered.

Hermione ignored them in favour up walking straight up to the feet sticking out the window, and poke the inside of a shin through fishnets with explosive results: squealing, legs flailing, a certain pink-haired maniac popping upright, and the owner of the leg also popping up with her hair in a mess and her eyes very wide.

"What the f*ck! Hermione! That feels like someone shoved a fistfull of ice cubes up my- stop it!" Esme complained and two heads leaning against the front of the obnoxious barge-car started rotating.

"Thought you two needed to cool it a bit," Hermione cheerfully told her, tapping an ankle again.

"Dialed-up cooling charms up the inside of a leg are -not funny-!" Esme declared. "My twat felt like I'd been shagged by an iceberg!"

"Kinky," the vampire impersonator remarked, pocketing his book.

"What the f*ck Dora, I thought you said -baby- goth, not the goth Victorian doll from Hell," Morticia complained, stomping round with her hands on her hips, closely followed by a vampire Impersonator.

"Not my fault she's naturally talented, Jezebel - you," and she pointed at Dan, "Need a lift anywhere? I've got this thing's wards sorted so we're basically driving straight to and parking in the most obnoxious possible position smack dab next to St James's Market and 'councidentally' not getting ticketed or towed."

"That sounds handy," Dan admitted, frowning, "The meter maid repellent that is, my sane and boring parents motor is over there,"

"By which he means a Land-Rover with a garden gate on the front, because squaddie," Hermione snorted. "Hopefully it's not going to be so long before I can do this again, Uncle Dan," and she latched on for a hug, which he returned.

"I'll speak to you when I can," he told her, watched her pile into an incredibly obnoxious American barge car, which proceeded to bellow into life and prove something just as obnoxious had been done to its exhausts, and he turned and started walking back to his Landy with utterly no idea when or even if he would actually see any member of his family again.

f*cking Balkans.

f*cking NATO.

f*cking Middle East.

... f*cking Wizarding World.

-/-/-

"So does he know you're staying with us bad influences for a week and getting a lift up to Jockland with Dora?" Was the first thing asked in the car as it hurtled out of Gatwick, asked by the girl in long slinky black dress and spiky collar whom Tonks had called 'Jezebel'.

"No, I don't think he'd have okayed that, he thinks I'm getting on a train to Edinburgh tomorrow, I'm pretty sure he'd have got a bit excited if I'd admitted what's going on," Hermione admitted.

"Thought he looked like a complete normal," the as yet unidentified bloke said. "By the way, I'm J.D, stands for Just Dave, the one actually leasing the flat Jez and my boyfriend Kenny have spent the last three years crashing in,and if I suddenly go to sleep it's because I'm coming down off thirty hours on speed getting the flat looking like it hasn't had any explosions in it recently while Jez was still out of it from getting roofied again and Kenny was getting in the way of Dora unf*cking the wards he'd f*cked -again-.So what was that about ice dild*ing Esme?"

"I meant to give her a very cold leg," Hermione admitted. "I maaay still be having some control problems, thought I'd got that sussed."

"Should've guessed you're a witchygoth," Jezebel said, nodding. "I take it Dora met you at voodoo school then?"

"Yeah, remember my shortarsed friend Harry, the kid who basically I work for now? She's a prominent member of his escorting pack of scary little girls."

"Enough of the scary little girls stuff or I'm firing an overpowered cooling charm down your trousers."

"It's an appropriate description, I've never been scared of a munchkin before. Sorry, the speed just wore off, going to sleep now," J.D said, and started snoring.

-/-/-

One week, at least three illegally confoundused bouncers, nightclub visits, confoundused bar staff, loud music, shopping for assorted accessories and general clobber, discovering if you were to ask most of the people selling such in the St James's Market the question 'do you take brass' the answer was almost inevitably yes followed by a hurried exchange of Wizarding coinage and the same question in certain nightclubs would make questions about ages go away,and living in the spare bedroom of three very strange (even by her standards) young adults later, sitting in a currently hot pink hearse (a rotary dial on the dash set the bodywork colour) on the way north up the M1, Hermione asked a question that had come up.

"Which demesene is St James's in? I can't remember seeing it on a map of Wizarding London."

"That's because it's not," Esme, who was lounging in the bier, said. "It's not a big deal, most of the people you paid in brass the last week are probably muggles, technically, but it's not a big deal since the Statute just flat out hasn't applied to goths in London since 1986."

"What."

"It's partly my fault, I'm one of -at least- 78 magic students who got home with no recollection of magic -at all- after someone set off a mass Obliviate in the St James's Market the summer after my first year in first year at Hogwarts, my dad's an arsehole and a skinflint but he was very put out and got Dora's 'aunt' Lily, the one we're dropping you off at the demesene of, to say some very particular things, and that's why there hasn't been any goths Obliviated in London since 1986."

"Basically the Statute got completely shut down for the goths of London because about one in six of us are 'witchygoths' with a 'poky stick of doom' used to work 'brain powers' we mostly learn at 'voodoo school'," Tonks said. "Didn't you notice J.D and Jezebel don't have wands? Kenny's the only resident of Wizarding Britain in that flat, has been since about when J.D leased it. Nah, they're as muggly as muggle can be, so's our friend Freddy who f*cked off to Brum for work."

"... how come my uncle and aunt couldn't get my communication mirror to work?" Hermione, who had J.D and Jezebel in her list of mirror runephrases, asked.

"Because it hasn't had its input runes unf*cked to work with a pencil poking it by Yours Truly," Tonks told him. "The actual functional structure stamped into the nickel baseplate is a piece of -work-, it's going to be a headf*ck to decipher it, but the input runes on the foil surface of the actual mirror are straight off the Hogwarts futhark and putting another layer in - basically just a thin insert the size of a Sickle - so any touch, including things like tapping it with a pencil or a muggle's finger - is a piece of piss."

"I hadn't had a look at the guts of one of these things."

"Worth doing, it's just... yeah. Pads is a goddamn genius and a lunatic, and calls everything on the baseplate a trade secret. Including how these actually transmit light and sound - at the moment best guess is they're pretty much scrying mirrors bypassing any anti-scry wards via the whole law of contagion thing. Any rate yeah, they're easy enough to unf*ck to put extra functionality in, it's the entire connection and transmission end that's what happens when a mad genius runescribe invents a custom futhark to do one job and designed to be ridiculously difficult to understand. We're - as in your owner's new 'steal improve compete' enchantment bootlegging piracy brigade are - most of the way to figuring out get these things to play back the pensieve-style light and sound recordings we've already figured out how to get them to store in basically a tiny flat pensieve tucked in between the glass and baseplate alongside the front end rune slate adding functionality like the connection not forming until you've seen who's on the other end and approved it, and we're pretty sure we can get them to transmit the memories instead of a live image. Don't tell Pads, his expression when we release them for sale is going to be hilarious and we're making it as annoying to actually figure out how to copy as possible."

"So basically Master's still pissed off with his mum and Padfoot, good to know."

-/-/-

The Orcadian helicopter carrier Mjolnir, second built of her class and launched too late to take part in what was going down in history as the Mediterranean War, was a very very long way from home indeed as she, and her escorts - a squadron of Mimir-class fast scout corvettes and one of their in a technical sense ancestors in the form of a Second World War vintage American-built PT boat owned by a man named Onimusa Akira and/or Akira Yoshisson, pulled into PT-256 's home port, which most of the latter's crew hadn't seen since they'd loaded their boat aboard a Black and Black freighter on their way to show the whole world that that yes, Oni they may be, but yes, the hidden samurai of Hokkaido were in fact Orcadian; did in fact remember their ancient fealty to the Crown of the North; they were sworn to his service, until death; they were in fact every bit as loyal to their liege from a distant and ever so slightly foreign land as any other Jarldom in the Orcadian Empire and not a second Gotland.

And not only was he bringing home three new friends and a whacking great pile of loot (including the grinning, sufficiently maniacal to run with a heavy mob of Oni, young woman from Algiers who was shortly going to marry Akira's son Tetsuo andwas currently lounging up for'ards with most of the rest of his warriors who had accompanied him, or joined him in, the now completed duty) and a good few wild stories, he had three wickedly fast new Mimir-class boats to join in the current long-ongoing quiet conflict over the future of magic in Japan including none less than the third-launched, second-comissioned, and by now very much storied Hermione.

His great-great-grandfather hsd been very much on point: loyalty to the king from the old country turned out to be a damn good idea for quite a few more reasons than their honour demanding it.

In a few days the Mjolnir and most of her flotilla would continue on east towards the Aleutans and the precariously on the edge of Soviet Alaska Jarldom of Unalaska, to show the colours and give a sabre a bit of a meaningful rattle, but Force Hokkaido would not be going with them.

There was work to be done at home...

"So you're finally back in one piece then Akira Yoshisson! Managed not to get yourself blown to pieces or sunk then, now -there's- a -major- surprise. -Idiot-."

... and a dearly beloved Nihonjin pureblood wife from an allied clan from Tokyo who had been -quite cross- at the decision to go without her,to be repeatedly hit by then bribed.

"Gods," and he remembered exactly he'd fallen in love with the tiny ball of slightly boyish ferocity who'd just jumped down from the pier, blocked the attempt to clock him in the head with a shinai, pinned her in a very unconventional hold most other people would regard as an enormous Oni-sized bearhug, kissed her, and continued, "It's good to be home, stop grinning at a man greeting his wife and make this tub fast you louts."

"Idiot! You had me bloody worried!"

-/-/-

"Oh good, you're here, I like the new stud and or skipe infested leather things that nose ring is intriguing -hang on, fraid the Pottery's still a building site and it's going to be a building site for pretty much the entire summer except basically two days before and the day after the weddingbut I've got something in my room to bring the last of the just been stabbedness down on the new holes in your ears and your nose too - anyway welcome home Hermione, we were just going to go and shotgun scrap building stuff that'll sink at Chucklef*ck again and there's a shotgun you can join in with if you like. I take it Dora basically booted you out the car and went north?"

"Yes Master, she's probably already warpspeeding through muggle Linlithgow on the way to Perth, what's this about reverse engineering- oh wow, I see what you mean building site."

"Aye, it's basically finishage uppage at this point for this part but there's a whole new wing going up starting the day after the wedding - we're getting proper rooms through there, I've not actually drawn up actual plans for your room beyond it's got an extension sort of bit taking up the free space left over from putting the apparently ideal habitat of Carrows in that can probably be either a walk in wardrobe or I sketched up lining it with bookshelves and putting this really cool old actual lectern we've got in the attic - here we go,"

"OW! Master, what the -f*ck-, don't just shove your fingers up my nostrils like that, also this stuff -stinks- when it's right up your nose!"

"Hmm? Huh, yeah, it does smell a bit weird really close up, well you're the one who decided to get a nose ring like I sculpted into our centaur golems and I can tell you got that and your ear piercings done by muggles since they're still swollen up a bit - I don't like their idea of hygiene, those can get infected too easily, if you want any more holes put in you I'm doing them and healing up around the stuff through them, and I'm going to be a bit angry if you don't. Right, come on, the gun room isn't getting rebuilt so let's grab shotguns and annoy a kelpie."

-/-/-

"Blarg blarg blarg bloody Potters blaaaaarg!"

-/-AN-/-

And with Year 1 now downloaded to my laptop, lett the mayhem resume.

For some reason the Oni of Hokkaido have decided they're all named after characters from Akira mostly with the family name of 'Onimusa', and I have just been informed that the 'allied clan' has the family name of Tendo and that Akira's wife is in fact Akane - I've just learned that Ranma 1/2 took place in Wizarding Tokyo during the late 1970s (which is not going to become a fanfic, very little seperating it from canon beyond the cast mostly not being anything like so stupid) and that there is, in fact, another allied clan named Saotome (the Mot-grade adult son of which is still being run ragged by a still very fighty harem casually managed by his first wife Kasumi and her prominent interest in being on both ends of shibari; in BDSM terms she's a switch and has carefully trained Ranma to be a good dom to the two people she successfully convinced to be their subs)meaning that Jusenkyo does, in fact, exist somewhere in the Bayanakalas though Harry et al are never going anywhere near them.

I don't -think- the former Nerima Wrecking Crew are going to play a prominent role, at least not any time soon, they'll be written in such a way as to make sense without already knowing their source material if and when they actually get page space, they are not scheduled to become any sort of spinoff fic, just self-explaining repeating cameos in this one, and these two families are courtesy of Ranma's chronic hero syndrome and chaos magnet status and being allied by marriage to the Oni prominent players in the rising Black and Black backed largely muggleborn alliance who are going to quietly win the long low-key ongoing civil war for Japan's magical future in the background over the next few years of fic.

Oh, and I've just learned how exactly they joined the civil war on the muggleborn side, having been one moderately powerful ssmurai clan and one formerly very powerful samurai clan fallen on hard times: Genma Saotome was fatally injured in the early 1980s due to using himself as a meat shield while getting Kasumi, then pregnant with his first grandchild, out of the line of fire of one of the civil war's more violent flareups, about which Ranma, Soun, and Onimusa Akira are -f*cking livid-: the old part-time panda was a gobsh*te and a crook and a lazy sh*t but he was -family-, y'know?

Happosai is dead, to the intense relief of everyone involved. It's why the Tendos, Saotomes, Joketsuzoku, several others, are allied to the Oni and it's why Akane is married to the Jarl of Hokkaido, towards the end of the resolution of the fiancee mess - short version Ranma is married to Xian Pu (who is now a fulltime catgirl as while actually lifting Jusekyo curses still hasn't been figured out jamming one partway has) Ukyo, and the one person capable of keeping those two in order EG Kasumi who he'd become close to while drifting apart from Akane in the aftermath of Jusendo mostly due to Akane finally admitting that she was not ever going to be able to get over Ranma's curse times Kasumi finally admitting to finding Ranma enormously attractive in both forms - Happy took off with the latest potential Jusekyo cure (a bust, though it -did- successfully jam Shampoo's transformation juuuuust short of being catlike enough to freak Ranma out) got run down on Hokkaido, and during the resulting mess Akane met and fell in love with a certain Oni and Happosai got his head flattened with a whacking great war clubmidway through dying of a massive heart attack, leading to Soun immediately approving of the match and along with Genma finally letting up on wanting Ranma to marry Akane and not the least fighty (and most powerful) Tendo sister.

Ranma's realised - not in these exact terms as they haven't been invented in time -he/she is in fact genderfluid though only sexually interested in women, identifies as whichever form he/she is currently in, and has since his/her father's untimely death and the family sword becoming his/hers sat his/her mother down and patiently laid it out in black and white that she can shove that hokey seppeku contract or -leave-, which along with A, three wives B, grandbabies and C, this coversation resulting from being found dominatrixing all three of aforesaid wives successfully got the stupid contract quietly put on the fire and forgotten about. He/she has moved from looking for a curse cure to looking for how to control the transformation as it -still- goes off at the most ridiculously awkward moments, and suddenly becoming him while wearing her dominatrix outfit that time a hot water pipe decided to randomly blow out made for one -bitch- of a wedgie in the process of bursting tight leather underwear.

(Guess why the new one also changes shape.)

Nabiki Tendo is unmarried and in charge of the combined family's muggle business concerns AKA their pet Yakuza gang - illegal casinos, loansharking, protectioneering, prostitution, information brokering, gun-running, p*rnography, and drugs. It's her dream job, now if only she could get through to Kasumi that she's asexual, arromantic, terrifies her underlings, and the chastity belt required to be worn whenever associating with muggle gangsters is completely extraneous. Oh well, no big, she's the one with the only keys to the stupid thing (very unlike Kasumi and the keys to hers) and it's not like it's uncomfortable or even gets in the way or has a twat plug like the one Kasumi enthusiastically insists on being locked into by Ranma whenever she's not currently tied up, about which eww, hmm, p*rn inspiration, and thank any and every deity who might be listening for effective privacy wards.

Tatewaki Kuno got his skull caved in with an Oni tetsubo for attempting to repeat his performance from the wedding disaster when Akane married Akira,a few months after Kodachi successfully pushed Ranma hard enough (via attempting to poison Kasumi) that she (Ranma) very seriously beat the sh*t out of and very nearly killed her (Kodachi); she did some very major soulsearching and checked herself into a psychiatric hospital, where she is very, very gradually finding her way to reality; it's slow going but there's a hopeful prognosis. Sasuke (not that one, pintized not-highly-visible ninja from Ranma 1/2, no redeye syndrome) has semi-retired and is focused on bringing the grandkids up to snuff for whenever the last scion of the House of Kuno gets out the loony bin and finds some nice ronin or another to rebuild her samurai clan with, any good samurai clan needs a loyal ninja clan to pick up behind them and anyway teaching kids to ninj is relaxing.

Ryoga and Mu Tsi are still on the go - the former got accidentally married to an Amazon after blundering into Joketsuzo and got his directionlessness curse lifted and is currently still there enjoying not being lost and raising a brood of preposterously strong Amazons, the latter spent two years locked in duck form by Shampoo and has since f*cked off to North America without sharing that he's figured out how Joketsuzo curses work - basically an animagus transformation with a curse trigger - has locked the trigger down turning it into a fully functional animagus transformation, and is currently running a Chinese restaurant (which strictly DOES NOT serve duck) in the muggle part of the Spanish colony of San Francisco - he's got out the habit of forgetting his spectacles, and has settled down with a local muggle girl. Their first kid just recently had her first accidental magic.

Pantyhose Taro, now going by the name of 'Bob Handsome', wandered around being depressed for a while over not officially getting his name changed before Happy carked it then went 'f*ck it' and conquered a bandit kingdom somewhere in the American midwest under an assumed name where he's known as 'King Bob the Liberator' and is locally quite popular with a steadily changing cast of multiple girlfriends / part or full time 'royal consorts' who don't give him even nearly half the sh*t Femboy's smaller and far inferior harem get up to, though he's getting a bit worried about the English lich journalist who just conquered the bandit kingdom next door and the escalating 'gang war' between the Salish and Communist Portland two bandit kingdoms further over, not sure if worth it. He's still an asshole, but is now an oversexed asshole with responsibilities he has to deal with responsibly in order to continue being oversexed.

Konatsu is married to a fellow shinobi from Kyoto - last survivor of a clan otherwise out along with their samurai clan during one of the civil war's nastier turns - and they are focused on growing a loyal ninja clan liable to screw with people's perspective of gender for the samurai clan his liege lady married into as neither the Saotomes nor the Tendos had one before, which is just wrong, any good samurai clan needs a loyal ninja clan to pick up behind them, everyone knows that. He still hasn't worked out how the hell people keep mistaking him and his wife for lesbians and their son for a little girl,and has shrugged it off as people who aren't ninjas being weird and a bit thick and most men being ridiculously ugly. Currently their primary ninja duties involve childcare whenever certain parents are 'playing'.

The local Japanese and more broadly southeast Asian schools of magic appear to be impossible martial arts focused (with a heavily Shinto derived version of runecraft involved and specific to Japanese origin families) and relatively little and quite modern usage of wands and other such Euro/Roman derived magic techniques. Also I think the Joketsuzoku et al may be heavily involved in why there are three Wizarding Chinas; they were probably heavily involved in the establishment of the central of the three, the Republic of China, and are a fairly typical (albeit matriarchal) central Chinese demesene equivalent.

Incidentally, Konatsu and Sasuke just explained that there's a strong resemblance between Wizarding ninjas and a sort of halfway house between an Orc and a house-elf; they're a set of three subspecies of magical humans each with a strong symbiotic relationship between them and whichever normal human (magical or otherwise) they've sworn themselves to, mostly expressing as loosely Orc-like physical adept enchantments geared for quick, quiet, high stealth, servant/spy/assassin as opposed to Orc style raw brute force with all the subtlety of a very big hammer, coupled to a mindset closely resembling a house-elf.

I am also informed that due to the civil war they are endangered species with only around a couple of hundred individuals left of each strain of magical ninja as of the early 1990s - Konatsu is from the now slightly most populous (and originally rarest) strain (as is his wife) all of whom look very much female to normal human eyes and continue looking like pretty teenage girls until shortly before dying of old age typically around 200 years old, while Sasuke is from the second most common strain (currently and formerly) of which at three feet tall he is considered quite a big bloke and at 186 years of age he's getting on a bit. The third, formerly by far most common and now somewhat rarest, strain appear visually indistinguishable from average Japanese muggles, albeit also with a life expectancy of around 200. All three are able to produce viable offspring with normal humans, with an easily 95% probability of any such child being a ninja of the same strain as their ninja parent, and other magical subspecies of human (with relations between two different strains of ninja always producing children of the mother's strain) but typically much like dwarfs or goblins find anyone outside their own specific subspecies of ninja physically offputting and frankly a bit mental. All three strains were created as three individuals at the direct orders of none other than Oda Nobunaga in the last few years of the Sengoku era, and reached maximum populations of around 3-6 thousand individuals of each strain roundabout the moment that Fat Man initiated over Nagasaki, wiped out most of Japan's ruling magical elite, and started the half century long hidden civil war of which your average Japanese magical, ninjas included, is by now -utterly sick-.

Cheers,
Cal.

What's the Orcadian for "pimp my ride"?

On Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 09:53 AM, Sandy River DL wrote:

Okay, this universe just keeps getting more and more Crazy Awesome.

It needs it, honestly.

What the fic centres on is this entire incredibly diverse world we live in packed with enormous amounts of 3+thousand year history, only with every tribe, clan, city state, kingdom, way of life, whatever in it as of the late 17th century having a diverged hidden magical offshoot that are going through simultaneous industrial, globalisation, and social, revolutions as the fic happens, with people trying to kickstart an information revolution too - with the epicenter of all three smack dab on the British Isles - while being smacked together with the constant escalating influx of new magicals flooding in due to the RL 20th century global population boom times a standard life expectancy 2-3 times 'normal' human and a typical reproductive lifespan of around 120 years.It is NOT and has never been the global monoculture Rowling wrote, it just flat out can't be, it doesn't make sense - so I decided to use canon as the seed value for the traditional upper class 'gentry' of English and Lowland Scots magicals.

The at-any-moment pandemonium in Lily Potter's kitchen/dining room is a microcosm of the world it is in, in a big way. The whole setting is, has to be, crawling with different strains of the same pandemonium because this is a world - as diverse and just plain huge as the real world in a way I don't think JKR ever even thought of - in the middle of an -enormous-, alters absolutely everything and cannot be reliably predicted and never mind controlled, irrevocable unstoppable sea change.

Tonks and her Londonian goth mates are basically just a few years ahead of the game. I don't know if they're the first people living in the postStatute world and I don't know how long they're going to be running a double masquerade hoodwinking 'normals' on both sides of the fence, but they're definitely basically living in early 2000s postStatute London already.

... I have a feeling something very similar is going on with cosplayers in Tokyo, may have kicked off about a decade earlier, and with Californian anarchist punks kicking off right around 1990. Probably a few others worldwide.

Cheers,
Cal.

On Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 02:57 PM, <calum.doghead@...> wrote:

... I have a feeling something very similar is going on with cosplayers in Tokyo, may have kicked off about a decade earlier, and with Californian anarchist punks kicking off right around 1990. Probably a few others worldwide.

It's entirely plausible that SCAdians, RenFaire types, and sci-fi fans (groups which overlap to varying but great degrees) have been living in a post-Statute world since the 60s.

They've been playing "Don't freak the mundanes" for DECADES. ;)

--

...Did Snape get reincarnated as a Kelpie?

later

Alex

The week, running up to the wedding was, unsurprisingly, steadily escalating bedlam with Narcissa Black and Lily Potter steadily looking more and more harried as they ran around herding an increasingly widespread army of metaphorical cats, from the platoon of dwarfen builers putting the finishing touches to renovations of the downstairs of the Pottery to the small army of professional caterers up from London through arranging the town of rented enchanted tents (the interior of each of which resembled a high-end hotel room, provided by the same business as the catering and the portable reception hall) through a frantic scramble at the Linlithgow Tableware Company to get the presentation cases in which each guest would be given the top-flight table setting identifying them and the occasion by name, and so on, and so forth, and like her owner and the rest of her friends Hermione Granger spent it basically just staying out of the way.

(Or rather she did after the one time she'd even vaguely got in the way had resulted in her being grabbed held down, her corset savagely tightened all the way to the tightest it could go, her waist chain adjusted to fit, the key confiscated, and a blunt threat if she was a nuisance again before Lily was back from her honeymoon she'd find herself in one as small around as Astoria's with it fully fastened - she quickly found out that the same had happened to both Daphne and Tracy earlier in the month, and that the twins no longer had the keys to theirs.)

Then two days before the actual event, post a frantic mad last minute dash to get the weather working squared away to ensure that the whole event would take place in perfect warmth and sunlight, suddenly the dwarfen builders squared their construction equipment away in a temporary shed hidden under a tastefully appointed tent and transformed into dwarfen wedding guests (and were joined by a good mob of their rellies) just in time for the first few guests, coming from furthest, in the form of a certain actual Maori chief from Aeotoaroa, to arrive having 'flown muggle' like a lot of those coming over the final 48 hours of Sirius Black being a bachelor, and Hermione started realising what a very big do this was: it wasn't just a rich people wedding with vestiges of high class party, it was doubling as a grand diplomatic meeting between the many, -many- trading partners and factions being backed up by and just -friends of- the ultimate directors of a politically active global megacorporation.

A point wonderfully underscored by the invite list ranging from a delegation from the Salish Federation to two mad teenage goth girls in a currently neon green hearse. From the Valar of Skye, Mairi Duncansdottir, in bird sh*t streaked Volkswagen crewcab with a family of crows, to the leadership of what she gathered was an actual legit samurai clan. Or two cojoined by marriage, something like that,they spoke oddly accented and phrased Norn but basically no recognisable English. Accompanied by five very pretty girls ranging in age from about five to a pair of lovey-dovey teenagers, the eldest three of whom spoke English flawlessly and claimed to be 'kunoichi' ninjas - the third to eldest girl, who was probably about ten, claimed to be a boy and that the teenagers were 'his' parents, which Hermione basically completely disregarded.

Orcs were not thin on the ground and were, of course, clad in their best outlaw biker gear for the entire proceedings, as were a variety of Wizarding British high society typer (including Professor Dumbledore) Hermione found out later included the handful of Wizengamot members Lily Potter actually both liked and trusted, one man and two women all Orc-looking and clad in Viking-looking expensive clothes she later found out were the 'Free Jarls of Gotland' so some sort of offshoot of Orcadia that somehow wasn't part of Orcadia any more, and several reperesentatives from Wizarding Sweden clad in blue-and-yellow very expensive robes.

There was the best part of a thousand guests in all, and Lily Potter and Sirius Black took the time to great every single one in person, by name, over a two day period of people arriving.

The whole time there were villeins (currently looking very like villains) out in force on patrol backed up by nearly a hundred exceptionally qualified Orcs and multiple combat-veteran ifriit and djiin with express orders to keep all but the approved two journalists and any other 'uninvited guests' out.

The actual ceremony was a very understated affair in the village sacred grove (with space temporarily warped to produce a semicircular auditorium sort of affair) where some priest type said various things that went in one of Hermione's ears and out the other, and Lily and Sirius took it in turns to replace the other's ring or necklace (delete as appropriate) and right after that and some singing in Anglo-Saxon Harry Potter obviously decided things had been going off too floawlessly because he suddenly legged it ahead of the formal procession, at the head of which directly behind bride and groom Luna had very urgently placed herself causing Hermione to join her, and they found a Harry standing right smack dab in the centre of the reception hall tent doors with a deadly serious expression and what looked like a wooden hatbox in his hands.

"Sorry Dad," He informed Sirius. "Mum said I couldn't do this either until she'd remarried or until we were both of marriagable age so basically first available opportunity," and he marched straight past his mother and freshly minted stepfather, stopped foursquare in front of Luna, snapped to a very military attention, dropped to one knee right in front of the entire assemblage of around a thousand guests, stopping the procession dead in its tracks, and said, "I know it's basically a formality at this point but: Luna Dolphin Lovegood, will you marry me?"

Luna immediately unfastened her knobbly dog collar (didn't she normally have a padlock on the buckle?) pocketed it, pulled out a ring box, and said, "Of course I will Master, now my neck feels all sort of bare, put it on me then."

The object she was wearing round her neck two minutes later when she sat down at the table the other side of Harry from Hermionewas incredibly bulky, three inches wide by about half an inch thick, straight at the top and following the line of her collarbone at the bottom, made from solid silver, had knobbly bits with small spikes and a ring dangling prominently at the front with a chain lead clipped to the ring, the other end of which she'd shoved into Harry's hand while she was putting a silver ring with engravings matching the texture of the collar on his finger, and was fastened at the back with pop rivets, and it made Hermione Granger -insanely- envious.

Even after Harry unclipped and pocketed the (guess what, spiky chain) lead as soon as they sat down, spectacle completed, and not just because it made it -blatantly obvious- that the shortish blonde wearing it wasn't just going to be the queen of Orcs, she had been for years, either.

And directly after thst she found out that Lily (now Lily Ann Black-Potter) and Sirius were going to spend basically the entire rest of the summer honeymooning at Ardgowan Castle with a brief break for Harry's birthday, and that Eddie Campbell was going to be in charge of the house until they got back on the last day of August, and she resigned herself to a rest of the summer in a state of complete and utter bedlam.

She was not disappointed.

-/-/-

Ginny Weasley was worried, frustrated, and pissed off: the day had -finally- arrived.

She was going to see Master again! Here parents couldn't stick-in-the-mud her any more! HA HA EAT IT YAH BOO SUCKS!

Unfortunately he had not been any sign of anyone - tallish, green eyes, black hair, very little remaining sign of his scar, giant stompy boots, Crown of the North, Slytherin uniform -fitting his description as acquired by threatening Ron with her homemade spear (which her dad had then confiscated) anywhere on the Express, she'd -quadruple- checked every last compartment and even waited for a chance to check each and every toilet while methodically working from one end of the train to the other, twice.

More concerningly, there hadn't been any sign of her friend Luna, at all, either, and none of the various other girls who were obviously going to be Master's other sex pets (which made sense that'd obviously be a thing) her brothers had mentioned hanging with Master (who like her parents they constantly called 'that Potter boy') and by the time she found herself getting off the train she was getting bloody worried.

Until, that is, when worriedly following Rubeus Hagrid (who she vaguely knew as his cousins were one of the handful of remaining Weasley villein families) a very big very shiny black and chrome car from the very red interior of which loud music with a huge beat and mournful singing was booming pulled up blocking the north end of Station Road having come down Castlehill Road, and Luna got out wearing a Hogwarts uniform with her waist -tiny- with very impressive boots and a really nice belt pouch and a really impressive murdering knife and what -absolutely had to be- a betrothal necklace -absolutely positively- given to her by Master, it was -the perfect- collar for Master's actually responsible wife.

"Luna!" She fair old screamed, pegging itcover as the car proceeded west, "Gods I've missed you, I couldn't find you anywhere on the Express and I couldn't find anyone who could even -maybe- be Master and I can't remember what Master's actually actual name is and-"

"Ginny," Luna said, "Breathe. We flew in on one of Master's Orcs helicopters - it's a big flying machine with whirly bits on - we got here about an hour ago, Master's in the Great Hall with the others waiting for us, we just need to tell a stroppy old hat to put us in Slytherin and we're going to be back with him, come on, there's boats to Hogwarts down the stairs here cause apparently we have to go on them to get sorted, Iunno, grownups being grownups again, and I've got proper concubine shoes and a corset that does up properly and my old collar and my old lead in my trunk for you."

"Oh, good," Ginny said, following her best friend and Master's future wife who had to put up with being responsible down the steps, near sagging with relief. "I heard all sorts of bits and pieces of stuff about last year but Mum and Dad cancelled their subscription to the Prophet after that thing with Black and Black buying it out and my brothers are full of sh*t so I don't know what to believe, what's been happening?"

"Awesome stuff's been happening, so for example do you remember Dora, who used to keep an eye on us sometimes when we were all living in Ottery St Catchpole? Her girlfriend Esme has another year at Hogwarts but they're both already working for Master doing research stuff, that was Dora dropped me off on her way back to Thurso, she's completely mental and awesome. And up course there's this," and she touched the huge lump of silver wrapped round her neck, which Ginny was just -itching- to draw, "Master's mum married Padfoot in July and Master barged in and gave me this in front of the entire formal procession to the reception dinner, it was brilliant and had Cissy -completely squinting-."

The boat started moving. Ginny ignored it, along with the two completely disinteresting random kids who'd got in ot with them and were now gawping at Luna.

"Oh and more importantly it was mostly Master's Orcs and allies but basically Master won his first war in March, it's why there just flat out isn't an Ottoman Empire any more and it's why Master now has an actual pretty serious navy and enough money Orcadia's actually seriously starting to industrislise - we're starting Orcadia's first actual artificial leyline nexus up at Thurso next weekend, wanna come watch?"

"... My parents will -definitely- be able to get all stupid about that," Ginny said.

"Come off it Ginny, we're not gonna bother asking Southron groan ups if you can come, tell you what, I'll kidnap you along on the trip - we're flying to Inverness, shopping and sorting some secret stuff out,then taking the evening train to Thurso, staying the night in Kirkwall, starting the nexus Sunday morning, having lunch in Thurso and actually seeing Dora's new lab, and flying back to Hogwarts in time for Sunday dinner."

Ginny ignored the other kids wowing at the boring old castle, instead dubiously asking, "Are we talking fake kidnapped or proper kidnapped, it's way too long since I've been tied up."

"Well I was thinking fake kidnapped but if you want I can proper kidnapped you?" Ginny asked. A boat that wasn't carrying unsorted firsties - a motor launch with cabin and several rough-looking armed men, matching Prcy's description of the Hogsmeade demesene militia, hove to and waited for them to pass.

The random other kids had resumed staring. Ginny, annoyed, stared back, finding a boy who looked vaguely like a blonde chimp with ears even more sticky-out than Ron's and an even more 'durr?' expression than Ron's, and a dark-haired girl with an upturned nose that looked very much in need of a punch to turn it the rest of the way up.

"Keep looking at me in that tone of voice and I'll use you for bait to find out if there's any of those mutant duck monsters Ron was on about still around," she warned.

"What," the girl with an upturned nose asked, in a grockley accent, "Are you two on about?"

"Oh, I'm Kuna, I'm the swrf fisncee of the King of Orcs and basically where he keeps his common sense, I'm also his court sane person. And this is my best friend Ginny who's going to be one of Master's concubines when we're old enough," Luna offhandedly told her. Hagrid yelled something extraneous about minding heads - if you weren't Hagrid size you'd have to have really tried even if as tall as Ginny's dad to manage to bang your head on the castle water gate.

"Actually I've sorta changed the exact details a bit, I want to be Master's pet sex slave and shieldmaiden preferably with a -proper gnarly- spear and a proper chain lead," Ginny admitted. "At least as long as that doesn't involve being responsible for anything that doesn't involve being tied up and used or murderizing something because responsibility -isn't- a me thing."

"Okay, sure, why a spear?" Luna asked as the boats came alongside the dock in the bowels of the castle.

"Because I like the idea of a spear good for fending stuff off with the pointy bit and proper clocking stuff one since the difference between a spear and a quarterstaff is a pointy stabbing bit," Ginny explained, scrambling out then helping Luna follow. "I made a sort of homemade spear out of an old broomhandle and my penknife to see if it felt right and it mostly didn't due to being a crap spear."

"We'll figure something out, I knew it was worth bringing a spare bayonet for you," Luna said.

That was about when they got hushed up for the emergence of her parents friend Minerva, and several annoying minutes, Luna going and sitting down at the Slytherin table beside the boy Ginny knew at first glance was Master, and several very pointed threats directed to a knackered old hat later, Ginny became the first Weasley sorted anywhere that wasn't Gryffindor since one of her father's direct line ancestors had married a girl who happened to be the last scion of the Gryffindor family.

-/-/-

"Hello Ginny," Harry said. "Er, there's a bench?"

"Nah," said the pretty ten-months-younger redhead who had just sat down on the floor between his leg and Luna's leg. "This is -my- seat and anyone else who wants it can sod off, and anyone who isn't Master or someone Master owns who kicks me is getting knifed."

Harry considered this statement, then said, "You're not allowed to knife anyone who works for me either."

"Yes Master, so anyone who works for you is allowed to kick me too,"

"This is Hermione, she's mine. The person directly opposite her and the person the other side of her are the Carrow twins, they work for me, they're my Hermione-minders and they really don't like being told apart. Opposite me is Daphne, she's mine, and opposite Luna is Tracy, who's also mine."

"Okay Master," Ginny said. "So basically they're allowed to do anything to me as far as I'm concerned."

There was a pause, then Tracy experimentally kicked her.

"Just one thing, Tracy?" Luna said. "Ginny won't -care if you leave bruises, or even bleeding, but -I will-. She is my -best friend-."

"As will I," Harry said, deliberately resting a hand on Ginny's head, "-Do not- go overboard, understand? If I have to heal anything you've done to each other, I will be -angry-. Clear?"

Seven quietly obedient voices, two Carrows and Ginny included, chorused, "Yes Master."

"Hestia dear, we really must stop reflexively doing that," Hestia said.

-/-/-

"Oh bloody hell," Ron said as his little sister emerged from beneath the Slytherin table long enough to acquire a plate and some food before vanishing back down there. "Mum's going to go spare."

The blonde Slytherin kicked Ginny again; both creepy twins hands shot out, rattling spoons off knuckles, and two voices sharply chorused, "No causing messy eating."

-/-/-

Luna pulled the twins aside on the way back to the Slytherin dorms while Ginny was functionally unaware of the existence of anything not named Harry Potter, and asked a simple question:

"You know that book I saw that made me think you'd eventually have a good use for something?"

Both went bright pink and Flora (Luna was ignoring how easily she could tell which was which because Harry said so) said a quiet and very defensive, "What about it?"

"Do you have it with you?"

"No, we don't, Hestia and I have it fully memorised," Hestia said.

"Bugger, um, I need you to teach me the basics because the only part I can remember is the bit about how dangerous bad knot placement is and I urgently need to learn to tie girls up properly."

The twins shared glances, and Flora dubiously said, "We're willing to teach you under two possible circ*mstances. You shan't be allowed to learn on either of us as it incolves us not being identical when there's someone's -eyeballs- in the room," and she said 'eyeballs' in a very ew-look-what-the-cat-brought-in way.

"You're going to need to find someone to practice on, and it's either going to be Hermione or it's going to be someone who's willing to be placed under temporary blindness and deafness hexes from before we join you until after we leave." Hestia said.

"And you're going to have to find somewhere -private- Neither I nor Hestia like -anyone- knowing we have these skills, they are -intensely- personal," Flora said.

"Hermione is an exception as Flora and I realised last Yule that she's our daughter despite being older than us and fortunately unrelated to us."

"Also," Flora said, "We trust her to not blab on us."

Luna nodded, frowned, and said, "Actually I've got a counterproposal..."

-/-/-

"Hermione, I need you to learn something," Luna announced, sticking her head in between Hermione's bedcurtains. "So you're getting private after dinner lessons starting tomorrow."

Hermione fininshed pulling her uncle's old Royal Marines T-shirt on and said, "Okay, sure, what lessons?"

"Tying people up properly lessons of course."

Hermione considered this, said, "I'm not even going to ask," and pulled her covers over her head.

Cheers,
Cal.

On Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 01:45 PM, AlyssonR wrote:

Better still, many have been playing mindf*ck the straights/mundanes

for those same decades ... or more.

This was why goths sloped into that position: one of the Rules of Goth as described by a friend (a perkygoth where I'm one of those generic metalheads who like goth music, in my case particularly cybergoth, enough to attend gigs and the likes aka a Notagoth) was/is 'do at least one thing every day that scares normal people'.

Cheers,
Cal.

On Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 02:27 PM, Alex McGregor wrote:

Did Snape get reincarnated as a Kelpie?

This kelpie has a good reason for it: he's 'Chucklef*ck', the one that got fed a chicken containing a grapnel strung to the back of a heavy all-terrain wrecker and dragged round a village, and has since had a great many obnoxious things beginning with a hand grenade chucked in the loch right in front of his lair.

He'd have f*cked off to a different stretch of loch long since if the boulders below the pottery didn't form just the -perfect- underwater cave, by a wide margin the most comfortable lair in the loch, now if only he didn't have noisy neighbours...

Cheers,
Cal.

On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 01:03 AM, AlyssonR wrote:

Noisy neighbours .... you mean the sort who put multiple kilowatt

scale submarine audio transducers in the water just to get the right

amount of throbbing audio from the loch surface??

Let's just say there's a reason the saltwater kelpie population within about 30 miles of Faslane is zero, and they stay the hell away from the torpedo range on the Minch - being hit by a sub's sonar going active at a range below a mile is about as fun as being in a concrete basem*nt when a flashbang goes off.

Cheers,
Cal.

It's almost certainly not canon, but I've decided that the very first Redcap was nicknamed "the Dragon Spooker".
--

On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 12:37 PM, Jeff Marcum wrote:

The only reason the NWC never goes to Orcadia is that the IWC and everyone with a speck of brains is terrified at the thought of the potential chaos caused by any and all of them meeting the Redcap's family.

That (disorderly) horse just -thoroughly- bolted: guess who the samurai clan leadership at a certain wedding in the summer of 1992 were. Blame Kasumi, she took one look at the invitation and decreed it would be improper not to attend.

It's also not the first time Lily and Ranma have actually met: that was due to the time Ranma took the kid gloves all the way off on a pair of Death Eater fugitives (actually Flora and Hestia's parents) who had abandoned their two-year-old daughters, had been hiding out in Shinjuku for about two years and continuing their serial killing, and Ranma after several months of increasingly urgent hunting caught them literally redhanded and put a stop to it quickly, efficiently, and as cleanly as cracking out the Yamasenken and ripping someone's heart out ever gets.

(Actually Angry Ranma is DANGEROUS k?)

They were his/her second and third kills. There hasn't been a fourth despite the fact that the only regret he/she has about the whole affair is not having killed them at least twenty-eight human sacrifices earlier, them two -needed killing-.

Lily visited Tokyo about a year after Akane married Akira (a year and a half after Ranma put Amycus and Alecto down) due to having caught wind of the two fugitives with a distinctive M.O having surfaced there. She spoke extensively to Ranma in Norn (in the Hokkaido dialect of which he/she was by then at a fairly reasonable if rough conversational level ala Xian Pu's Japanese the second time she arrived in Tokyo) took a statement, saw to it that the DMLE and Demesene of Hogsmeade alive-or-dead bounties went to the right person, and had an extensive discussion about the technical differences, details, and pros and cons of their -radically- different styles of combat magic: Ranma -thoroughly- enjoyed this part of the conversation.

(It's widely believed in Hogsmeade - including by the twins - that the Redcap killed the elder Carrows earlier and used it to funnel money to a Japanese ally. Flora considers this the only good thing apart from producing Hestia that her parents ever achieved and vice versa.)

They parted with high opinions of each other, enough so the Saotome-Tendo clan may have received wedding invitations even if they had not later become Black and Black military allies.

Lily considers Ranma a very blunt and lowbrow and plain-spoken, reminiscent in a good way of a certain brutally honest motor mechanic,expert on southeast Asian combat magic and a genuinely decent sort, while Ranma considers Lily a kinda savage but honourable (albeit extremely foriegn) warrior with a very, -very- deep understanding of the manipulation and nature of ki (as elemental magic is known in much of southeast Asia) along with the fact he/she is predisposed to have a good opinion of people who don't treat him/her like a dipsh*t or a freak just cause he/she never had much time for all them high-falutin' manners and varies in gender depending on temperature and humidity.

Cheers,
Cal.

On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 01:34 PM, DigiCom wrote:

It's almost certainly not canon, but I've decided that the very first Redcap was nicknamed "the Dragon Spooker".

OK.

So, the name comes from a specific type of Sidhe - Irish 'Fair Folk' - known for wearing a woolen cap kept dyed red with fresh, human, blood.

It's straight out of RL Irish folklore.

Cheers,
Cal.

I'm aware. But when I think "dangerously magical redheads", said sorceress is the first that comes to mind. :D

(And given that she's from a different dimension, it's entirely plausible that the Sidhe took their moniker from HER.)