It was a dark and stormy night, sheets of rain hammering down upon a sea of faces. Blissfully unaware of his surroundings, a young man leaned, cool as a cucumber, against narrow doorway, pondering why the worst cliché in the fan-fiction had been unceremoniously dumped upon him.

Behind him, a heated debate took place. In the midst of the argument stood a man bearing a face that only a mother could love: the man was bald as a baby, narrow as a bean pole. In short, the Dark Lord was ugly as sin.

After a short while, a general consensus was reached, helped along by Voldemort’s pig-headedness. “You see,” he began, “It goes without saying that innocent bystanders are not to be tolerated. For the few amongst us who cannot go with the flow,” The Death Eaters attempted to mask their laughter at the horrid figure of speech with coughs that resembled that of a terminal illness, “We must agree to disagree.”

As one, the knot of wizards moved toward the young man. Fate, however, was not on the Death Eaters’ side that night. It just so happened that a spark from one unsuspecting Death Eater came in contact with a cliché. Now, as everyone knows, clichés are highly flammable objects, frequently marked with warning labels when available for purchase in convenience stores. A colossal explosion echoed throughout the street, distracting the Death Eaters from the lack of clichés in this paragraph.

Not only did the explosion spare this fan-fiction’s author, it provided ample opportunity for the young man to let a squeal of surprise and scurry off down the street. “Blast!” Voldemort shouted, not, of course, referring to the blast of explosive cliché, but to the fact that his victim had escaped. “He’s gone! Gone like the Looney Tunes! Gone like the Beatles!”
“Like who?” came the inquiring voice of Draco Malfoy. The generation gap stretched wider. Voldemort shook his head in dismay. The author rifled frantically through her book of clichés.

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Under the same sky, the young man spoken of in previous paragraphs broke his stride before a crumbling, old building. Just in the nick of time, he thought, for there was more than met the eye about this particular residence. It was a blessing in disguise, though in a more literal sense than the maker of the cliché had aimed for. The home was a diamond in the rough, a pearl before swine, and an excellent waste of perfectly good figures of speech.

The man turned the doorknob and entered, only to be met by a surging mass of people, all of whom called his name.
“Oh, Harry we were worried sick about you!” came one such voice.
“Scared to death, mate!”
“Thought your days were numbered!”
“Though you’d bought the farm!”
“Kicked the bucket!”
“Checked out!”
“Were pushing up daisies!”
“Thrown a sidewalk pizza!” This remark was greeted by a number of glares, due to the fact that its speaker clearly had a patchy knowledge of clichés.

“At any rate, Harry,” came the growling voice of Alastor Moody, “We must know what happened.”
“Death Eaters,” Harry replied, grimly. “Armed to the teeth with clichés, as far as I can tell.” A shiver ran though the group, followed by a panicked babble of voices. As they died away, a man stepped forward emanating a calm aura.
“We cannot permit ourselves to panic.” Remus Lupin stated. “What we must do is pursue this group of Death Eaters. I understand that a fight may break out, but we must act as though we are not concerned. After all, we are the Order of the Phoenix! We’re stronger than a small band of Voldemort’s followers, are we not?”

Far from inspiring his fellow members of the Order, he found himself staring into the murderous stares of Order. “Five sentences,” Harry hissed after a long pause, “And not a cliché to be found. How do you live with yourself, Remus? Couldn’t you have said something like ‘Stick together’?”
The Order began to contribute:
“Nothing to fear but fear itself!”
“United we stand!”
“I believe in us!”
“We fight for our people!” Until an extensive list was constructed, quotes growing steadily more morbid.
Ignoring the man’s protests, Harry exclaimed, “Take him away.”

Two figures dressed up in Easter Bunny suits appeared over Harry’s shoulder. After the disappearance of the Dementors, the Ministry of Magic had hired these deadly, though slightly less intimidating, versions of the old prison guards. Seizing Remus roughly by the shoulder, they then proceeded to drag him off into the sunset.

After his screams where out of earshot, a mass exodus (a cliché that the author could never make head nor foot of) began to file out of the room. “The ball is in our court, now.” Harry informed the Order, triumphantly.

Slowly but surely, a dramatic soundtrack began to play. Voldemort and the Death Eaters (conveniently located just outside the door) strode over to meet them. Both sides assumed dramatic poses. The author became so excited with the prospect of a climatic moment that she temporarily neglected her clichés.

Both sides fought valiantly (the author was back on task) but it was inevitable that the Harry and the Dark Lord would be forced to fight one another. The soundtrack grew louder (the composer of the piece shook his fist at the conductor of the orchestra) as the pair faced off; both raised their wands.

At the same time, the somewhat disheveled author exhausted the last of her cliché supply. Looking over the story proudly -overlooking, of course, the lack of an ending- she slapped a title on it, submitted it, and went to bed.