The protagonists of the story were eating breakfast in the Great Hall, seated at the Gryffindor table. Seriously, where else would they sit? No one cared about the other three houses anyway.
Anyway (hmm… that word just ended and started two adjacent sentences), there were a bunch of students who happened to be friends. No one really knew why they had a certain liking for each other “ could they have been childhood friends, or have met on the Hogwarts express, or perhaps formed some bond in the aftermath of a daring rescue of one of their number from the jaws of a killer iguana?
Who knew? Hell, even the author didn’t! The fact was, they were friends, and it really wasn’t important to the story why or how that came to be. There just had to be some convenient reason as to why the group of students would consistently sit at the same place and have conversations in order to advance the plot of the story, so friends they were.
And that group of friends was of completely indeterminate size and composition. No student or teacher at Hogwarts knew exactly how many there were (some characters disappeared and some were newly introduced from time to time) or if they were boys, girls, or a mix.
But not wanting to be overtly sexist, the author sensibly decided to make the group of friends an interesting mix of magical boys and girls, a group of perhaps eight or something like that. There was a stereotypical smart student, a stupid one, a sarcastic one, a couple infatuated with each other, and some other characters designed to make the group as thoroughly average as possible.
To avoid further dithering about that great Gryffindor groupie group that had no guinea pigs (the author was bored, so he decided to liven up the diction with a stupid bit of alliteration), they ate a hearty breakfast that consisted of food “ namely the edible type.
Without introducing any of their names yet, they finished eating with their miniature pitchforks (as in forks) and scimitars (as in guitar picks) and headed to their first class of the day: Defence Against the Dark Arts. And so they waltzed down the corridors and rushed up the stairs to the classroom that was located somewhere in the castle.
They entered the room and were joined by a group of Hufflepuff students. The teacher was seated behind the desk and stood up once everyone had taken their seats.
“Now, erm…” the teacher muttered to the students, “what year are you in?”
The group of Gryffindor friends and their Hufflepuff companions looked at each other, perplexed. They shrugged their shoulders, but one of the girls in the group of friends raised her hand.
“Yes?” said the teacher.
“Well, we’re not sure,” she informed the teacher delicately. “The author hasn’t specified what year we are in. I guess we’re just… students.”
The teacher had a flummoxed expression, but then asked, “And your name is?”
She hesitated for a moment before answering. That was a very awkward question, needless to say…
“I don’t know, professor. My name won’t be revealed until the next chapter.”
With the answer to the first question taken into consideration, the teacher seemed to expect an answer like that and looked slightly less confused. “Very well,” the teacher (still of unknown age, sex, and appearance) said, “five points for Gryffindor, er… whoever you are. Do you mind if I call you ‘Girl A,’ just so that the readers know I’m referring to you instead of some other girls?”
The other girls scowled since they were only ‘other girls,’ but Girl A beamed. “Thank you, Professor!” she exclaimed.
The teacher person-Homo sapiens sapiens-thing then proceeded straight to the lesson. To avoid setting the story during any of the actual Harry Potter books, the professor was (naturally) an original character, also in an effort to avoid the whole in-character thing that was such a pain in the arse.
“And now, we will learn how to defend ourselves against various Dark Fruit and Vegetables,” the teacher announced the class.
“Why was that capitalised?” Girl A whispered to one of her male friends, who simply shrugged. One of the Gryffindor friends was a bit more perceptive than the others and muttered, “Wait… this sounds oddly familiar.”
He didn’t have much time to contemplate the Monty Python reference. The students were assembled in a line facing the teacher, who went through each student in turn, having them practise against some Dark Grapes (now strangely italicised…). The Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors both went through the rounds, casting spells at the teacher armed with the deadly weapon, but luckily no one was hurt or killed during the course of the lesson.
However, that was very boring. The author thought it was very dull having nothing terribly exciting (as in violent!) happen at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, so he decided that a nice dose of chaos would liven things up. His fingers typed away on that QWERTY keyboard of his, and“
BAM! BOOM! BABOON!
“WHAT THE FRIG?” one of the Hufflepuff boys yelled in alarm, restraining himself to prevent increasing the rating of the story.
The wall of the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom directly behind the teacher had explosively exploded in an explosive explosion of exploding explosiveness. When the rubble and bits of stone and cloud of dust cleared, a man in swooshy black robes, holding a long wooden staff, and wearing ram’s horns on his head emerged.
“Oh my Godric!” screamed Girl A, since religious oaths didn’t seem to exist in the wizarding world, and a substitute was needed. “It’s him!”
“Who?” the stupid member of the group of Gryffindor friends asked in confusion.
She answered, “It’s“”
“TIM THE ENCHANTER!” Tim the Enchanter roared in an incredibly obnoxious and thoroughly unconvincing Scottish accent. The author (for it was he) was bored, typing this story late at night, so he decided to make a stupid cameo appearance in the little creation he created.
“But we’re not a ‘little creation!’” fumed Girl A, somehow able to read the preceding paragraph (her character was already starting to become something of a Hermione Granger figure, oddly enough). “We’re real people in a real story you created! We are… er…”
Her voice trailed off. How could she support her argument if she didn’t even know her own name or what she even looked like? Tim the Enchanter noticed, and laughed maniacally and Scottishly, if that was even a word. If not, the author made it up.
“Prepare to meet ABSURDITY, my little friends!” Tim shouted to his terrified, captive literary creations. “Your doom approaches with nasty hot flickery orange things!”
He twirled the long wooden staff in his hands and pointed it at the classroom door to the corridor. There was a jet of napalm and the door was coated in flames, trapping the students inside the classroom.
“Now… YOU!” Tim the Enchanter ordered to a random student, “Come here!”
Meekly the student complied, his eyes darting nervously from the author’s face to the tip of the staff aimed at his chest.
“Let’s have some fun, aye?” the author said menacingly to the group of students, but especially to the one he had singled out. “You have two choices. Death… or HAGGIS!”
Tim the Enchanter laughed evilly again, pointing dramatically to an enormous pot of haggis that wasn’t there earlier, and which must have been edited into the story right about… now. The doomed student’s sole purpose in the story was to simply die in some gruesome manner, just to highlight how deadly serious the situation was. And he did.
He foolishly chose to eat the haggis, and then expired in an incredibly horrific but very imaginative way. Apparently, it was ‘death and haggis.’ After all the penguins had melted away, the Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs and their teacher were positively cowering in fear, huddled in a corner and looking at the mad author with absolute terror in their eyes.
“HA HA HA!” Tim laughed unnecessarily as he fired a stream of haggis from his staff into the mass of students. The vile (absolutely, positively delicious) Scottish food cascaded into desks and people, ricocheting off surfaces and splattering the walls with the ingredients that were best not mentioned.
Just when the group of Gryffindor friends thought they were all going to meet their end, they heard the author shout (the fake Scottish accent mysteriously disappearing), “Bloody hell! Is that the time?”
Without another word, Tim the Enchanter vanished from the horrendous fanfiction he had written and proceeded to do better things.
It was night and freakin’ cold outside. The group of Gryffindor friends were assembled mutinously in their common room. They had survived a harrowing ordeal in Defence Against the Dark Arts, and considered themselves incredibly lucky to be alive at the moment.
But they weren’t just relieved, thus the inclusion of the word ‘mutinously’ in the previous paragraph’s first sentence. They were angry, livid, furious, incensed, riled, infuriated, irate, mad, fuming, and any number of other adjectives used to describe anger with great redundancy.
One of the nameless boys in the groups (he was the character that exhibited the leadership qualities) said to his fellows, “Our author is a hyperactive psychopath! Doesn’t he have anything better to do than torture the characters he made in this story? We have to put an end to this, and I say we must act now! It’s time we put our lives in our own hands for once!”
His impassioned call for resistance was answered with jubilant but hushed agreement.
“That’s right!” contributed one of the girls. “We have absolutely no character development! None at all! We have a RIGHT to know what we look like and what our names are!”
“Yeah! Hear hear!”
The Leader Boy then addressed his friends, his co-conspirators, “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go!” He was the impulsive kind of person.
But Girl A had something to argue about. “No, we shouldn’t,” she told them in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.
Her group of friends looked at her like she had gone totally bonkeroonie. “Are you mental?” they asked her angrily, and perhaps feeling a bit betrayed. “Do you like having Tim make stupid things happen to us and our school whenever he gets bored?”
Girl A was as cool as a cold cucumber that had been left in the freezer, then warmed up for a bit in toaster oven, and then put back in the freezer again, not that that simile made any sense at all. She simply replied, “I do want to rise against our author, but I think we shouldn’t do so right now“”
“But he’s asleep right now! We have an opportunity!” interrupted the Leader Boy.
“Yes, I know,” she continued impatiently. “However, I say we just wait until the next chapter. First of all, it’ll make a better story if we alternate our little bit of subterfuge with Tim’s insanity “ creates a better flow and makes the sequence of chapters more organised, you see. Secondly, but more importantly, none of us know any of our names yet. If we wait until the next chapter, our names will be introduced, and then we’ll be stronger because our characters are more in-depth.”
The Gryffindor friends all looked at Girl A, with identical expressions of confusion and understanding, which was totally contradictory and thus impossible. To rewrite that sentence, they all just looked at Girl A.
“I guess you have a point there,” one of the other friends (male, female, hermaphrodite, squirrel?) admitted. “Okay. We’ll suffer through one more day, but the revolution starts tomorrow night!”
Assorted cheering.
The Leader Boy asked, “So, all in favour?”
Everyone raised their hands and smiled triumphantly. So it was agreed. The uprising against the author, Tim the Enchanter, would begin in the next chapter.
“Now, we just need to come up with a name for ourselves…” Leader Boy stated, trailing off at the end of that sentence of dialogue, just like the first chapter of this story…