“Avada Kedavra!”
“Expecto Patro—”
Something hit Kaethryn before she could finish the incantation. For a moment her brain attributed the horrible jolt through her body to the impact of the Killing Curse itself. Then her brain noticed that it was still noticing things, and also that Harry had tackled her. The green bolt of energy flew past and through the wall, where it would keep going forever until it hit something with a soul. Kaethryn felt a pang of concern for any Muggles flying in planes, and any aliens out there in the universe, though she knew that was irrational. It was more likely that the spell would never come close to hitting anyone.
She hit the ground with Harry on top of her. His weight was on her for just a fraction of a second before he grabbed her hand and pulled her up and running.
“I told you not to try to block the Killing Curse with the Patronus 2.0!” he shouted as they sprinted down the narrow hall. His wand was in his other hand, and he pointed it at the door. “Reducto!” The spell blasted the door apart, and they raced through the cloud of dust and splinters a moment later. “It’s too slow!”
“I panicked!” Kaethryn gasped, wishing she was in better shape. “My brain stopped at the first solution that came to mind, which was also the most high-status and impressive solution, not the most practical—”
“We can go over your thought processes later!” roared Harry.
“Avada Kedavra!” shouted the Hooded Man, who had come to the end of the hall. Harry yanked her down, and Kaethryn stumbled and fell, the bolt of green light flashing over her head.
“Come on!” Harry urged. Gripping her tightly by her sweat-covered hand, they raced toward the stake that marked the edge of the Anti-Apparition Field.
The Hooded Man appeared past the broken door. “Avada Keda—”
Harry pulled her body past the marker, spun on one foot, and with a crack, they vanished.
And appeared a moment later in Kaethryn’s bedroom. He released her hand, and they both sagged to the floor, panting hard. Kaethryn winced and touched a hand to the stitch in her side, really wishing she had been better at sports.
“That was my fault,” Harry said between deep breaths. “I thought the message from McGonagall’s mirror-self was trustworthy. Now we know he’s working for the Order.”
Kaethryn winced at the realization. Minervo had seemed so kind and gentle. Knowing he had been working the whole time for a group of sadistic killers hurt worse than being bitten by a hippogriff had.
“I’m sorry too,” said Kaethryn weakly. “I made so many mistakes. It’s my fault the Hooded Man found us.”
Harry shook his head. “You’re still in training. I shouldn’t have even brought you along. Ever since being forced to go through a third Phoenix Rebirth, I feel like I’ve been a little slower, a little weaker.”
Kaethryn looked at him with concern. “Do you think it’s because of the Order?”
Harry hesitated. “I think it’s…Voldemort.”
“But he’s in the Mirror right now!” Kaethryn gasped.
“Not that Voldemort. The Voldemort who’s in the future.”
“I thought Ron and your dad were—”
“He must have outsmarted them, even with Merlin’s daemon giving them advice. Damn it!” Harry swore. “I never should have let anyone else face him. It’s my destiny.”
Kaethryn never knew what to say when Harry started talking about destiny. He was so concerned with righting the wrongs that Time-Reversed Harry had inflicted on the world that sometimes he went into his own shell, and she didn’t know how to bring him out.
She got to her feet and noticed for the first time that they were in her bedroom. Harry had been in such a rush that he would have Apparated to the first place on his mind. Did that mean that her bedroom was the place on the top of his mind? He had only seen it once, briefly, when he had come to take her to Pigfarts, the school for heroines on Mars. What did it mean that six months later, it was the place his mind immediately went to?
She raised her hands to her cheeks to block the sight of the pink flush on her cheeks, but when she looked at him, he was staring at the floor, mumbling about asking Luna whether Timeline 4 would remain stable if he recoded some of the prophecies. Kaethryn wanted to help, but she didn’t know how. Instead, her eyes caught the sight of herself in the full-length mirror. Immediately she felt self-conscious. She wasn’t exactly beautiful. Her heterochromatic eyes, one blue and one green, peered at her from the mirror. And her half-elf ear-tips showed through her wavy blonde hair, with a single fiery curl of red hair running down her shoulder marking her mixed lineage. Her mouth was a little too big, and the delicate pattern of freckles was asymmetric across her soft facial features.
As for her body, things weren’t much better. She had somehow been cursed with a stick-thin body yet extremely noticeable breasts. It was hard to imagine that Harry had been thinking of her bedroom for any reason other than because the Order would never be looking for the home of an Initiate Heroine who was supposed to be in a Martian classroom right now.
She turned around at a noise Harry made. He got up quickly and grasped her shoulders, his eyes, bright green with just a fleck of phoenix flame at the center, shining excitedly.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Remember Nega Ollivander? I think it’s time I cashed in that favor he owes me.”
x25Hermionicorn says Awesome chapter!!
fireofphoenices says First!
profesorquirrelkowsky says wow, much rational. so bayes.
nevilles_underpants says I’m so confused. Isn’t Nega Ollivander fused with the Stone? How is Harry going to talk to him?
Umbragex99 says he’s fused with the resurection stone, so he can still be talked to with ghost simplex.
Umbragex99 says soul* simplex
always_pings_wildbow says but the last time they went into the soul simplex harry fucking died! And Hermione made an enemy of the soul queen when she rescued him, so this plan is fucking stupid. Nega Ollivander fusing with ressurrection stone was a fucking cop out anyway. Celestia just couldnt think of any way for Kaethryn to defeat him after she made him overpowerd.
glitterkitten says For the last time, Nega Ollivander wasn’t overpowered, and him fusing with the Resurrection Stone wasn’t a cop-out. First of all, it was made clear that Nega Ollivander had weaknesses when Mad-Eye Moody mentioned “a Russian warlock who tried something similar” (Book 2, Chapter 34). That was clearly meant to be a reference to Rasputin since the leader of the Japanese delegation to the Space Games talked about Rasputin in a way that nearly exactly matched the description of Nega Ollivander in the first paragraph of Book 2, Chapter 63. Also, when we had the reveal about Apparition 2.0, a bunch of people pointed out in the comments, including me, how that could be used to defeat Nega Ollivander. I think it’s pretty clear that Cels wrote the climax of Book 2 the way that she did because she wanted to make it clear that although Kaethryn could have defeated him with rationality, she didn’t. Harry recognized her potential, but also that she has a lot of learning to do.
Second, can we talk about how stupid it is to accuse Celestia of a cop-out? She’s a great writer. We wouldn’t be reading and commenting obsessively on the seventy-ninth chapter in the third book minutes after it came out otherwise. I hate how fickle fan communities can be. At least entertain the possibility that you’re having a bad experience because you’re bad at experiences.
celestia_lovebad says A glitterkitten comment already!
glitterkitten says <3 I just want to find out what happens next so bad. :3
celestia_lovebad says Sometimes it feels like 90% of my motivation for writing is to find out what your next comment is going to be. :3
slatestarskitter says Watching two hi-status members of my community interact makes my status gland go doki doki.
molestwrong says all hail glitterkitten Also, isn’t it weird how Harry said “Remember Nega Ollivander?” Like…how could Kaethryn forget? He kind of wand-raped her for most of a year.
glitterkitten says I think that line is supposed to indicate that, although Nega Ollivander is obviously a huge deal to Kaethryn, he’s just another bad guy to Harry. Remember, this fic is jumping off from the FAIl continuity, where Harry wasn’t able to Petrify Merlin’s shade with the basilisk in time. So this is a Harry who’s faced Quirrell, Moon!Grindelwald, and the Skeptics from Timeline 2. Nega Ollivander was just another Tuesday for Harry.
molestwrong says reiterate glitterkitten sentiment
mathpet says I wish glitterkitten would write a fic. I’d favorite it so damn fast.
celestia_badlove says Me too!
glitterkitten says I write worse than I dance.
elimazer_rackhamsky says Two left hands?
glitterkitten says More like no hands. And dialogue that sounds like it was written by someone with pretty much exactly the amount of daily human interaction that I typically have.
mathpet says Now I want to read a glitterkitten fic even more.
glitterkitten says No.
A knock shook the door. Hazel quickly clicked over to a browser that didn’t have over fifty different HPMOR fanfics open. “Coming!” she called, and hurried to the door, pulling a sweater on over her t-shirt, which had an image of snapping fingers.
Two burly men in suits were at the door. They looked like secret agents or something—dark glasses, earpieces, the works.
“Can we come in?” said the one on the left. His hair was dark and cropped.
“Do—do you have a warrant?” Hazel stammered. She felt like an idiot—isn’t that what a criminal would say? She wasn’t a criminal, but why were two FBI or CIA or whatever guys here? You were supposed to make them leave unless they had a warrant. They would try to pressure you. Or was that cops? What was the difference? Hazel felt the swirling sickness in her stomach that happened every time she had to interact with people. The fact that these people were dangerous made it a hundred times worse.
“Why, did you commit a crime?” said the other man. His hair was dark and cropped too.
“No!”
“Answering our questions constitutes consent to be interrogated,” said the first agent. “You better let us in.” He leaned forward and pulled down his shades so she could see his eyes. “Glitterkitten.”
Her heart beat so fast in her chest that she thought she was going to faint. “I—I don’t—what are you even—”
“Ma’am, these sunglasses have a chip that’s reading your heart rate right now. Stop trying to hide things.”
“Are you aware that reading fanfiction constitutes a Class E felony under current IP law?” said the other.
Hazel’s throat constricted. Everyone knew that no one actually got charged for reading fanfiction. It was like jaywalking or using a prostitution app: technically illegal, but not really.
“We’d like to talk to you inside your apartment,” said the first man.
“N-no!”
“Ma’am, your Internet connection is provided by Disney-Comcast. That’s the internet this neighborhood is zoned for, meaning that your actions implicate the property owners. We don’t need your permission to enter. We already have theirs.”
Hazel felt like the world was breaking apart. In the same confused haze that she had experienced walking back to the car after being rejected by her first crush, where all the shapes and colors blurred into blotchy nonsense, she stepped back into her apartment, the agents following her inside. Somehow, she found the back of a chair with her hands and pulled herself into it, shaking so hard that the one leg that didn’t fit right against the floor rattled every time it knocked against the tile. One of the agents was pacing around her living room. The other placed a small device with a blinking red dot on the table.
“It’s better if you cooperate,” the agent said.
“Please don’t arrest me,” Hazel whimpered in a voice that might have shuddered or broke or not even escaped her lips at all; her jaw felt stuck and her tongue dry as sandpaper. Like many lovers of fiction, she had often imagined herself in the kinds of scenarios the heroes and heroines of her favorite stories found themselves in. Rationally, she had understood that she was more likely to fall apart and panic than bravely confront the danger. But the ego at the core of her soul had quietly insisted that she would be brave, when it was really time to be brave, and this insistence had been so constant and so certain that it hadn’t even been a voice, but more like the background noise of the wind on a windy day. And now, with the leg of the chair rapping against the floor loud enough to wake the dead, her fingers curling her hands into fists against her will, and the dry feeling of her face with all the blood draining from it, she realized that even her rational self had totally underestimated just how badly she would break down. Had she enough friends to be a part of any conspiracy, she would have sold them out within seconds and been grateful for the opportunity.
“Done,” said the agent pacing around her house.
The other agent touched something on the blinking device. “This is Agent White. Agent Grim has activated the localized EMP. Speaking on short wave now.”
Agent Grim came to the table and pulled a chair out. They both sat down.
“Hazel,” said Agent White. “You can speak freely. Sorry about frightening you like that. We have to play our parts as long as others are listening.”
“Y-you’re not here to arrest me?”
“Not even if their were corpses piled on top of your coffee table.”
“We would make a note of it though,” said Agent Grim.
“Quietly adjust missing persons records,” said Agent White.
Some of the noise from Hazel’s field of vision faded, and shapes and colors came into focus. She saw that Agent Grim was smiling, and Agent White looked a little apologetic. They both had their sunglasses off, and their eyes were charming.
“Thank god,” squeaked Hazel. This could be a trick to get you to talk, scolded part of her, but the rest of herself was quickly coming to accept that Hazel was never going to be any kind of hero.
“Let me tell you a little bit about the world,” said Agent White.
Hazel knew most of the story. Over the past thirty years, global warming had gotten so bad that most of Europe was under water. Efforts to evacuate the population offworld to Muskland had been bogged down in legal battles and tweets. In America, Eric Trump’s third term as President had led to skyrocketing unemployment, with Even More Modern Monetary Theory, or EMMMT, proving to be even less effective than its predecessor. Tweetcrime was out of control, and the mega-mergers like Disney-Comcast, McDonalds-British Petroleum, and Google-Sinopec had turned out pretty much how everyone expected them to. To escape reality, more and more people turned to virtual reality, which had turned into modern form of feudalism, with people slavishly working to mine virtual currencies to afford the micropayments necessary to live. April of 2019 had been when things really took a turn—a supervolcano explosion and the outbreak of the Facebook Wars.
But she hadn’t known that Australia had descended into civil war between people and the genetically enhanced spiders, which had seemed like such a great idea—all that spider silk. Apparently Google-Sinopec was blocking web access to information about the series of nuclear accidents in the Middle East. And there were plans in the works to make even more Star Wars movies.
“We hoped people would get smarter as the things they voted for had ever-worse effects,” said Agent White, while Hazel fought the urge to curl into a ball and cry. “But public opinion is worsening in every way. There are even people calling to recriminalize marijuana because it turns people psychotic.”
“No, that’s social media!” Hazel cried out in frustration.
“We know,” said Agent White. “I’m explaining the situation. We live in a world desperately in need of smart ideas. But the academics have given up. Physicists don’t see the point in developing new theories if the technologies are snatched up by corporations and the intellectual ideas sealed behind patent law.”
“The Elsevier-WIPO merger,” Hazel muttered.
“Ever since Alexandra Elbakyan was publicly executed, no one has tried to challenge it,” Agent White said. “Economists have given up on trying to correct public opinion. Philosophers have embraced every position by every major political party. Poetry is somehow even worse than it was in the 2010s, and no literature has a chance of selling any copies if the characters don’t name-drop Amazon at least once a chapter.”
“At least music is pretty good,” said Agent Grim. “I saw the Beatles holographic tour last month.”
“Then it’s hopeless,” said Hazel in a small voice.
“No,” said Agent White. “That’s where you come in.”
“Me?” Hazel said. “I’m just a…a—”
“An expert on the fanfiction of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” said Agent White. He was grinning.
So was Mr. Grim.
Hazel was strongly reminded of that one scene in Evangelion where all the NERV people were being really smug.
“Hey–Grim and White!” Hazel exclaimed. “Those are the Death Eater names of Lucius and Sirius!”
“Unless you go by the Shadows of Entropy canon, in which case Voldemort deliberately used misleading names,” said Mr. Grim.
“Oh, wow, a Shadows of Entropy fan!” Hazel gushed excitedly. “I loved the ending—I still can’t get over how Neville solved the riddle set by Maxwell’s Demon.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Mr. Grim with an embarrassed smile. “I only played through the first bit of the visual novel.”
“Oh…yeah,” Hazel mumbled. This is why she didn’t talk to people. What she wanted to talk about so rarely matched up with what they wanted to listen to.
“Although HPMOR has humble beginnings, today it has thousands of catalogued fanfictions, many of which have their own extended fanfanfictions, and so on,” said Mr. White.
“Not to mention the yottabytes of HPMOR porn floating around out there,” smirked Mr. Grim. Hazel willed herself not to blush. She had consumed far more of that than she wanted to admit. Just yesterday’s nighttime activity had involved fanart of James Potter from the NeuRal NetWork continuity in a compromising position with the male DeepMind avatar that they used for the AlphaGo versus Leela matches.
“Mr. Grim and I belong to a task force assigned to do one thing: find a solution for humanity,” said Mr. White. “In our research, we noticed that the one remaining healthy, thriving community with a scientifically minded and positive, forward-thinking attitude toward civilization and the world is the members of the extended HPMOR fanfiction community.”
“So we developed a plan,” said Mr. Grim. “A plan so crazy that we initially treated it as a joke. But the more we thought about it, the more it made sense. Now it’s the only plan that doesn’t seem crazy.”
“That plan is—”
“An HPMOR fanfiction,” Hazel interrupted excitedly. “A fanfiction so big and incredible, so brilliant and inspiring, that it singlehandedly solves humanity’s problems.”
“Exactly,” said Mr. White, smiling.
“You see why we thought it was crazy,” said Mr. Grim.
“But what does that have to do with me?” Hazel asked. “I’m not a writer.”
“Your Glitterskitter Reads Fanfiction page gets over two million visits a day,” said Mr. White.
“I mean, I just update more regularly than the other….”
“You’re the number one upvoted commenter on ratfic.net.”
“That’s because….”
“We’re not asking you to write if you don’t want to,” said Mr. Grim. “But we do want you to meet the writers we do have.”
“Ohhh noooo,” said Hazel. “No, I don’t want to actually meet any—”
The space station was called Atlantis. Mr. White and Mr. Grim hadn’t accompanied her to space. Instead, they had arranged the trip, and now she was being shown around by a woman named Claire who introduced herself as “part of the administrative staff for Hopemor.”
That’s what they were calling it. Hopemor.
“And that’s the theater for viewing media from Earth,” said Claire. “Any questions?”
Hazel shook her head. The long tour had exhausted her, not to mention the challenge of keeping up in the exchange of pleasantries. Claire was one of those people who made social interactions effortless. It gave Hazel a headache.
“Go get some food,” Claire said with a sympathetic expression. “You remember where the cafeteria is?”
“Yeah,” Hazel said.
“You can do anything you want while you’re on Atlantis,” Claire added. “But we are having an orientation meeting at 15:00 in the community room. I did let a few writers know that Glitterkitten is on the station. I bet they’ll want to meet you.”
“I really wish I had picked a name that isn’t Glitterkitten.”
“I like it!”
“I was literally twelve and trying to be cute. But then my read-through of HPMOR got popular, and I was stuck with the name.”
“You don’t have to go by your online handle,” Claire assured her. “Though I think you might be surprised by how much weight the name ‘glitterkitten’ carries in the HPMOR fanfic community.”
At 15:00 exactly, Hazel opened the door to the community room. She was surprised by how many people were there. Instead of the half-dozen or so she had been imagining, there were at least two hundred people in the room.
Are they all HPMOR fanfiction writers?
Claire was there, along with a number of other people in uniforms. In her mind, Hazel was already separating the uniformed people from the casually dressed as administrators and writers, respectively.
Hazel found an empty seat while even more people trickled in. About five minutes later, it wasn’t Claire who spoke, but a uniformed man with shoulder-length blond hair.
“Hi, everyone, hi,” he said in a voice aimed over the noise of the general chatter. “Could I get everyone’s attention? Thanks.” His posture was relaxed, and he leaned his hips against the edge of a table. Throughout her short time on Atlantis, the staff and administration had deliberately maintained a very casual atmosphere. Clearly, the goal was to make the creative writers comfortable, like the Silicon Valley work environments of yore, before all the sexual harassment lawsuits and international data legislation wiped out all but the biggest tech groups, which started acting much more corporate afterward.
Not all of the chatter died down right away, and the man spoke a couple more times before people quieted down.
“Thank you for coming here,” he said. “My name is Daniel, or Dan. Dan the man is fine. I mean, if you call me that I’ll resent you, but I won’t show it.”
There were a few chuckles. Hazel felt her stomach knotting. There were too many people in one room, and no glowing shield of her computer screen to guard her from them.
“So I have about two hundred of the best and most easily contacted HPMOR fanfiction writers in the room with me today,” said Dan. “And I’m very excited about that. Most of you should have gotten the briefing, but just to make sure we’re all on the same page, this is about saving the world.”
There was more laughter. Dan chuckled too. “I know, it sounds like something out of a fanfiction. But it’s true. You all are the best and brightest, and we need you guys, girls, and others to bail us out.”
A guy in the audience raised a hand. “Are we all supposed to write one collaborative fanfic?”
“That’s—” Dan started.
“Because you guys probably aren’t writers, so you might think it’s easier to write with collaborators,” said the guy. “It’s actually harder.”
“Thanks for pointing that out,” Dan said, completely unflustered. “Actually, it’s all totally up to you guys. There’s almost no requirements—we think we’re going to see what kinds of groups emerge and have monthly meetings with those groups just to see what we can do on our end to help, but even that is up in the air. This is all about creating the ultimate creative environment for you writers to work your magic.”
“Okay, because I saw all these people in here and was like, okay, if they’re all writers too then this is pretty idiotic.”
“Yeah, we’re definitely letting the writers be in charge of the writing,” Dan said. “Whether that’s one two-hundred-person story or two hundred individual ones, it’s all up to you.” Dan addressed the rest of the attendees. “Basically the only point of this meeting is just to establish that the creative part of project Hopemor has officially begun. We also wanted you all to know how many other writers are here, and to start meeting and talking, if you want to. Obviously you don’t have to.”
“So there are no parameters on what we have to produce?” a woman with curly brown hair and plump cheeks asked.
“Harry Potter, rationality, and optimism are about the only three requirements, and even those are contingent,” said Dan, smiling.
“I’m probably going to keep working on my current story,” said an Indian guy with torn jeans. “I just don’t think I can concentrate on anything else.”
“Whatever works for you,” said Dan.
A blue-haired woman with black-painted nails spoke up. “Am I the only smut writer here?”
“Probably not,” said a voice, but no one volunteered themselves.
“What kind of smut do you write?” a guy asked curiously.
“My handle is cockfuckster96 on fuckingrational.com,” she said. “I write cockfucking stories.”
“What’s cockfucking?” he asked.
“Cocks in other cocks.”
The guy seemed to regret involving himself in the conversation. “Like…?”
“Like Harry fucking Neville’s cock. Quirrell fucking Snape’s cock. Quirrell, Harry, and Snape all fucking Neville’s cock.” She sat back, one arm around the back of her chair, wearing a smug expression.
“Oh shit, I read your stuff,” said a guy with a slight Ukranian accent. “I can’t believe how many scientific concepts you’re able to explain with cockfucking analogies.”
“We reached out to cockfuckster96, or Tabitha, as her mother calls her, because her stories reach a wide audience and have reportedly led a number of people to study rationality,” said Dan.
“But why cockfucking?” the first guy asked.
“I like guys who fuck guys’ cocks,” said Tabitha.
“You know guys don’t do that, right?”
“You don’t know the right guys.”
“We can move on,” said Dan, still wearing that easy smile.
“Is it just writers here?” asked a girl sitting up front with a bright white blouse. “Shouldn’t we have psychologists, marketers, media experts, that kind of thing?”
“The original writer of HPMOR didn’t,” said Dan. “But there are other types of artists here.”
“I’m a fan artist,” volunteered someone. A few other people revealed they drew art as well. There was a composer, and when she revealed she was behind the piece “Hermione’s Last Death,” a number of people burst into applause. There were also a few game designers, not just for visual novels, and even a guy who made animated films.
“You know who they should have gotten though?” said someone. “Glitterkitten.”
“Oh my Bayes,” said another. “Can you imagine her comments on the final project? If we have one, I mean.”
“I need her to explain my characters to me,” said one of the older women in the crowd. “I was depending on her explanations of all the character arcs by the end of First Derivative.”
A guy with a lot of tattoos spoke up. “Yeah, I mean, I feel like I just write things, and then in the comments she explains all the themes and stuff, and I’m like ohhh, that’s what I’m doing.”
“We definitely thought about inviting glitterkitten here,” said Dan, grinning. “Would she like to say hi?”
“Wait, glitterkitten is here?” the guy said, and then shut up. The mood in the room had changed.
There was silence, and Hazel realized to her horror that Dan was expecting her to fill it.
“Um,” she said, and then about four hundred eyes were on her. “H…hi….”
“Why don’t you ever comment on my cockfucking stories?” demanded Tabitha.
Hazel had never expected to answer that question. “If you link them to me I’d be happy to take a look.”
“Can you explain to me what you said about how Ginny’s arc in Mathemagic is a reverse mirror of the villain’s?” said a guy with a long beard and lots of rings in it. “I’m the author, but I mean….”
“Um, sure, later,” said Hazel, quite wishing to open an airlock take a few deep breaths of space.
“Why don’t we break up into smaller groups?” said Dan. “From now on, Project Hopemor has begun. Talk to each other—or don’t—and make something amazing, please. The Earth is counting on you.”
There were tables with food and things to drink. Hazel grabbed a bagel with some spread and a small paper cup of soda. Gingerly, she nibbled on her food while trying not to drop anything, trip, or be looked at or spoken to.
She had been expecting to be rushed by people interested in her after the way her reveal had gone, but apparently there were enough other interesting people to talk. By sheer drift, she found herself sucked into a group of six other people, talking about the original HPMOR.
“We should take the best practices from the original creator,” said Mohammed, who did Bayesian vignettes. “No fanfic has been so influential since Paradise Lost.”
“You mean Eliezer Yudkowsky,” said a girl who Hazel thought was named Imka, but she had said it kind of fast and Hazel was afraid to ask for clarification. “Aka Lesswrong.”
“Aka wertifloke,” said Chandler, who said he mostly wrote fics based off other fanfics.
“That’s never been confirmed or denied,” said maybe-Imka.
Hazel tried her best to contribute to the conversation. “I heard he was almost done with the epilogue before he lost his life in the San Fransisco Housing Revolt.”
“It sucks we never got to see it,” said Rushi. She had a pierced nose with a stud, and Hazel was trying not to stare. “I miss his pseudonymous shitposting.”
“Turns out he controlled the Twitter accounts for Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Kendall Kardashian,” nodded Mohammed.
“His plan to achieve world peace with a combination of inflammatory political rhetoric and shady health and beauty products was truly visionary,” said Gael, who had a t-shirt showing fingers snapping and had retold HPMOR as an epic poem.
“It’s just a shame we never found out if there’s a chapter nine-and-three-quarters,” joked Hazel.
“What?” said Imka.
“Oh, sorry, just a dumb joke,” said Hazel, instantly regretting opening her mouth to do anything but eat and breath air. “Like, what if there was a secret chapter nine-and-three-quarters this whole time that you could only enter if you were accepted to go to a special rationality school? It’s just silly anyway. I was kidding.”
“How would he have even done that?”
Hazel shrugged and shook her head mutely.
“Anyway, we’re doing this without him, so it’s moot,” said Gael.
“But his will lives on.”
A slight woman with braided dark hair holding a mug with both hands stepped into their circle.
“What do you make?” asked Mohammed. It had quickly become the standard introductory question.
“I wrote Rebuild of HPMOR,” she answered.
“Fuck my mother and my father too,” said Imka. “You’re Gloec?”
“Mm-hm,” she answered. “But it’s pronounced glowsh. And you can just call me Ethan.”
Hazel was too stunned to be shy. “Rebuild is the number one upvoted fanfic on fuckdisneycomcast.cri. It’s the number one upvoted story period on ReadIt, and you can only read it there by going through like seven layers of security.”
“It’s the only fanfic to have contributed original and significant theorems to theoretical physics,” said Mohammed. “We can’t cite you because of IP laws, but we all know where the primary zero-mass theorem comes from.”
“Alexandra Elbakyan’s last ReadIt comment was on your story,” said Rushi. “Before they shot her full of bullets, cut off her head, crushed her body under a steam roller, threw it all into an incinerator, and blasted the ashes into space.”
“I loved your story,” Hazel gushed. “I reread it almost as much as I reread HPMOR.”
“I loved your comments,” Ethan answered. “Especially the one on chapter 34 about Harry’s dream.”
Hazel shook her head so violently that bits of bagel were sent flying. “Oh, I’m nothing, I’m not smart like you, you do real science, I can’t actually help.”
Ethan took a sip of her mug with both hands and smiled slightly. “Truth has a way of revealing itself,” she said.
Hazel slumped on her bed in the room Claire had showed her to. She felt completely drained after hours of talking about fanfiction and being pressed by authors for questions about their own work. Now she just wanted to eat the slice of cake she had taken from the cafeteria and veg out to some serious fanfiction.
There was a mirror that she saw her face in on her way to the desk with the terminal. Hazel stopped and looked at herself. She wasn’t exactly beautiful. Her hair was in some ways distinct from an average over the hair of all the models whose faces had appeared on fashion magazines, and her mouth was a little too big. As for her body—
Hazel slapped clapped her hands hard across her face. She was acting like a girl in a bad earthfic, stopping at the mirror to review her looks. The next cliche would be for a man to—
The door, which Hazel had forgotten to lock, pushed open. A male face poked in, followed shortly by a male body, and Hazel’s eyes got rather busy trying to take it all in. There was a lot of man there. A lot of gorgeous, hunky, male dude supporting a pair of deep blue eyes and a mouth that transformed into a sheepish smile.
“Sorry!” he said, glancing at the number on the door. “Wrong room—I think I’m—yeah, next door.”
Hazel swallowed some of the drool in her mouth.
“Real sorry,” he said again. “My name’s—hey, are you glitterkitten? Wow—well, anyway—”
He’s so fucking hot.
Oh my implausible god he’s so hot. Look at his chest, oh mmm yes look at his arms at his eyes oh god you’re staring look away, look away NO NOT AT HIS CROTCH YOU FOOL
“Anyway, I’ll be just down the hall, so…sorry!”
The door closed. Hazel groaned and covered her eyes. She had actually stood there gawking like an idiot without saying a single word. He probably thought she was the weirdest pervert on the planet—er, space station—and that included people who literally wrote stories about cocks going inside other cocks.
Hazel grabbed the slice of cake with her bare hand and slammed her butt down in the chair in front of the desk. She needed to reboot hard, and that meant HPMOR.
A minute later, she was reading through the opening chapters, smiling at Harry’s earnestness and McGonagall’s exasperation. She grinned in anticipation as she neared the end of chapter 9, remembering how much she enjoyed the conversation between Harry and the Sorting Hat. For her, that was when HPMOR really took off.
She clicked “next” at the bottom of the screen. The familiar line of text rolled across the screen.
Oh dear. This has never happened before…
Hazel blinked. That wasn’t right. She looked at the top of the page.
It didn’t say chapter 10.
More text was rolling across the screen. Hazel automatically started reading while her hands clenched and unclenched themselves.
Oh dear. This has never happened before…
She was in between chapter nine and chapter ten.
And what she read next made her mouth fall open.
Submitted March 30, 2019 at 08:29PM by timecubefanfiction https://ift.tt/2CL9DNs
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