The next morning, the assorted group of Gryffindor friends were once again at the Gryffindor table, eating their breakfast.
Actually, they were trying to eat their porridge or toast or whatever they were eating, but they all found themselves unable to concentrate on food. Instead, they all nervously looked around them, at the other students and professors in the Great Hall, as if expecting something unexpected to come barging into the story’s plot with a severe lack of grace.
Leader Boy checked the watch that he didn’t know he had until the beginning of this chapter. He looked at the dozen little hands and planets spinning around and frowned, as if the unfathomable time piece told him something unpleasant.
“Anyone know their names yet?” he asked anxiously to his friends assembled at their section of the table.
He was answered by a quiet chorus of “No’s.”
“We're supposed to get our names in this chapter!” he fumed. “We should have attacked last night when we had the chance!”
Ever the voice of reason, Girl A interrupted the mutinous mutterings and explained, “Tim the Enchanter is probably doing other things at the moment and isn’t at his computer right now. We’ll just have to wait for him to start writing this chapter.”
With increasing anxiety and impatience, they did. Without having eaten much, the friends left the Great Hall and went to their classes.
And nothing happened. No explosions, penguins, haggis, and “ unfortunately “ no names either. The students found themselves so unable to pay attention that several points were taken from their house.
“Can’t you pay attention?” one of the professors had shouted. “You’re acting as if you’re expecting some crazed Scotsman with a flamethrower to come crashing in any second!”
Oddly, nothing out of the ordinary happened all day. Things were so normal that the Gryffindor friends found the experience quite eerie, albeit something they’d like to see happen a lot more often.
“What’s taking him so long?” one of the Gryffindor boys asked with agitation during supper, tapping his fingers on the long oak table. “I am becoming noticeably impatient!”
The author hadn’t intervened in the story in any way, though that makes one wonder how all of this text came to be. Anyway, one of the girls at the table replied, “Well, I kind of like this. Nothing stupid has happened today at all “ it’s something I can get used to.”
However, the nameless girl was rebuked by her peers, one of whom said, “So, you’re dropping out of our revolution then, is that what you’re telling us? You like having no name?”
“What? I didn’t mean that at all! What made you think of that?” the girl who set this conversation in motion answered defensively.
The other girl’s face turned red with some sort of bottled frustration, and then she exploded, blurting out, “IT’S THE TENSION! I CAN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE! AAAAAHHHHHH!”
And with that, she jumped from her seat and ran out of the Great Hall screaming her head off. The Gyffindor friends and everyone else at Hogwarts stared at that sudden spectacle, and they couldn’t have heard an atomic nuclei of argon drop (since it was a gas), that’s how quiet it was.
Once the shock had worn off, Wat Tyler turned to his remaining friends and announced, “That… was weird. Looks like the author’s returned“”
“Wait!” said Meagan suddenly, to be answered by a “What?” from Wat.
“Your name is Wat Tyler!” she revealed excitedly, noticing his suddenly introduced name barely two sentences ago.
He didn’t understand what she was on about. “Of course it is, Meagan,” he said, as if it was as obvious as a solitary giraffe in a colony of lunatics. “I know what my name“”
Wat stopped suddenly, and it dawned on him. “What kind of name is Wat?” he asked the ceiling with intermingled relief and exasperation.
Before any of his friends, Meagan, or the ceiling could answer, everyone at the tables was distracted by a jetpack-wearing Galápagos giant tortoise that zoomed down the length of the Great Hall, did some acrobatic loops and twists in midair, and departed out the doors with a shower of colourful sparks and smoke.
“Yep. Tim’s back.” Wat observed. “Let’s get the hell out of here before something absurd happens!”
The group of Gryffindor friends (two of their number named Wat Tyler and Meagan) decided that was best and hastened the termination of their evening sustenance consumption. They ran up and down corridors and climbed stairs until they reached the Gryffindor common room. As they closed the portrait door, the echoing booms of explosions and harpsichords could be heard.
“Whew! Glad we got out of there in time!” Wat declared to his friends, once they had seated themselves at the cluster of squishy chairs and sofas about the fireplace. Meagan, Chris, Zigmond, Alice, Harriet, and John nodded and muttered various words of agreement.
“Hey!” shouted Alice excitedly, “We all have names now!”
“Wow… John,” said John experimentally, testing the sound of that boring monosyllabic name. Nobody talked to each other for a few moments, as they were savouring the experience of having something to call themselves.
Finally, Chris broke the silence, suddenly annoyed. “How come all of our names are boring, except Zigmond’s? Can’t I have something better than ‘Chris’?”
That was a very good question. Meagan answered, “I guess the author doesn’t have much of an imagination when it comes to naming people, plus he can’t seem to come up with last names. Also, ‘Zigmond’ sounds too interesting “ it must be an inside joke or something.”
They nodded thoughtfully, wondering what it could possibly be. Harriet turned to Meagan and asked, “Who are you?”
“What do you mean? I’m Meagan.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” she said. “What I mean is, who are you? What role do you play in this story?”
Meagan thought for a moment and quickly scanned the previous chapter and the beginning of this one before answering, “I suppose I’m ‘Girl A,’ introduced in Chapter I: HAGGIS ATTACK! as the smart girl who is used to explain certain plot points.”
The group of Gryffindor friends then tried to figure out what role each of them will play later on in the story. Amongst the boys, there was a heated argument over which one of them was Leader Boy.
“I called it first!” shouted Chris.
“But I have a better name than you!” retorted Zigmond.
“I’m smarter!” argued John.
“HEY!” yelled Wat Tyler in a loud, authoritative, carrying voice. “Just shut up for a second! I’m the Leader Boy, because…
A.) I have both a first and last name.
B.) I was the first character to have his name introduced.
C.) I’ve had more lines of dialogue than any of you three, and…
D.) Notice how I was just described as having a ‘loud, authoritative, carrying voice’?”
The other three Y-chromosome bearers of the group couldn’t argue with that, so they just moved on to something different.
“So, which of us is the stupid one, then?” Zigmond asked Chris and John.
“Oh, that’s easy,” said John quickly. “It’s Chris, obviously.”
“WHAT? No! You’re stupid! It’s you, you bastard!” Chris snapped back.
But John defeated him by pointing out, “HA! You’re resorting to the Ad hominem logical fallacy! You’ve just proved that you are the stupid character, because you’ve turned to personal attacks rather than trying to defend yourself with a reasoned argument, SO THERE!”
Chris turned red, though he only really understood half of what John had said. In one last, desperate act to clear his character’s name, he pointed his finger dramatically at one of the girls and cried, “But it’s not me! It’s Harriet, you see? She hasn’t said a single word in this chapter so far!”
Harriet fumed “ her eyes were livid with (metaphorical) flames. “OH REALLY? Who’s the one who said, I quote, ‘who are you? What role do you play in this story?’ Who’s the one who started this conversation on our character roles in the first place, HUH?”
Chris looked awfully stupid after that. He sensibly (albeit angrily) conceded defeat. “I’m not that stupid,” he muttered under his breath.
That only left the “couple infatuated with each other,” (Chapter One, fifth paragraph) but no one in the group had any idea as to who should play those parts.
“Not me,” explained John. “I’m the heartless, sarcastic character in this story “ no room for compassion.”
Zigmond shrugged his shoulders. Somewhat apathetically, he announced, “I’ll do it. Why not?”
The female volunteer was Alice, who said to Zigmond, “So… I guess I’m your girlfriend, then?”
“Sure,” answered Zigmond in a noncommittal tone. “Why do I like you again…?”
The only person in the group of Gryffindor friends that was left without any character type was Harriet. “And what am I? What role do I play?”
Meagan referred back to what little of the story had been written so far, and replied, “Well, there’s no role for you yet. I guess you’re just an extra character until Tim the Enchanter thinks of something to do with you.”
That was not what Harriet wanted to hear. She wasn’t in the best of moods for the rest of the chapter.
“Hey! There should be eight of us!” Wat said to his friends. “There was that girl who was part of our group, practically one thousand words ago! What happened to her?”
“I don’t know. She must have been a disposable character.”
“Who said that? If the author is too lazy to say who says what, please identify yourselves, said Wat.”
“It was me, said Meagan,” said Meagan.
With everyone in the group sorted out (Harriet being the notable exception), the only thing left to be done before the beginning of the revolution was to name themselves. It needed to be catchy, inspiring, and revealing of their intentions.
“How about the Down With Tim the Psychotic Author Association?” suggested Zigmond. “We can call it DWiTPAA for short.”
“Or how about the Association for a Better Story, or ABS?” contributed Harriet, desperate to make her character serve some useful function, even if it was simply ‘idea supplier.’
And so they argued for the next several minutes, but it was John rather than Meagan who came up with the solution. “How about The Absurd Fanfic Revolution?” he said.
“AFR? That’s a horrible acronym!” stated Chris, even though he didn’t know what an acronym was “ he then looked up straight to the ceiling and shouted, “HEY! I know what an acronym is, Tim!”
But the author didn’t care, and he resolved to make Chris stupider in every successive chapter.
When John was asked by the others why he had picked the name he did, he explained, “Well, it’s perfectly simple. It’s the title of this story, so I thought it would just make sense if we named our group after it.”
Or was the story named after the group? THAT was an interesting question…
Anyway, it was decided - The Absurd Fanfic Revolution it was. All they had to do was wait for Tim the Enchanter to fall asleep, and then they would strike!
A few uneventful hours passed by before their planned midnight assault on the author. During that time, the AFR amused themselves by contemplating how their characters would develop after Tim had folded to their demands.
“I want to be tall and blonde,” Alice sighed. “…with nice blue eyes like the sea. I hope the author makes me nice, funny, and… caring,” she finished, after thinking thoughtfully for a bit. What a drip.
“Hell, I don’t want Tim to create my character,” John stated to anyone who’d listen. “I’d much rather form my personality on my own, thanks.”
So they talked, until Wat Tyler checked his watch and announced, “It’s time. The revolution officially starts right about… now!”
The student rebels cheered and unsheathed their wands dramatically, ready to do battle. They were not going to back down, not at all, not until Tim the Enchanter made them proper characters and left them in peace like they deserved!
“Now what?” asked Chris.
Meagan tut-tutted impatiently and walked into the middle of the deserted common room. With a broad, slashing movement of her wand, she shouted, “Computoris Portus Openus!”
Suddenly, there was a bright spinning light thing that endangered our intrepid heroes with the possibility of giving them seizures.
“What are you waiting for? Come on, chums!” Wat exclaimed as he threw himself into the brilliant portal. The rest all followed his lead and jumped through, and the glowing light disappeared.
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
Seven bodies fell out from nowhere and crashed into the very solid ground. Amazingly, no one suffered even a scratch, so they all just stood up and stumbled blindly in the dark, because it happened to be dark.
“Why is it so dark?” Chris inquired.
“That’s because it’s night time, you stupid idiot!” John’s voice answered.
“Either that, or Tim’s computer has the screen saver on,” suggested Meagan. “Lumos.”
From her wand light, the Gryffindor student rebel friend group discovered that they were standing on one of several large white rectangles arranged in a column, situated in the middle of a vast, endless grey plain.
The others also lit their wands, but that only revealed more bleak, flat, boring landscape, whose only interesting feature was the large white rectangles the main characters were standing on.
“Where are we?” asked Harriet.
Meagan aimed her wand at the ground and noticed that she was standing on some words written in black. She moved her feet so she could read what it said:
Meagan aimed her wand at the ground and noticed that she was standing on some words written in black. She moved her feet so she could read what it said:
“This is it! We’re in Tim’s word processor! This is the file for this story!”
“Bloody hell!” yelled Zigmond, also transfixed by the floor. “The page is writing itself! Look!”
Everyone did and were amazed to see this exact, very sentence forming into being right in front of their eyes! IT WAS WEIRD!
“This is just, too weird,” Alice admitted with redundancy in relation to the previous paragraph. Her eyes determinately avoided gazing at the ground, where her very words and actions were appearing in black letters, Times New Roman font size twelve, with justified margins.
“Okay, I have a plan, everyone,” said Wat, motioning for his friends to gather around him. “Let’s split up into groups of two and ransack all of his documents. Meanwhile, one team will stay here and rewrite this story. Agreed?”
Everyone nodded, but there was a problem since there were seven people who had to split into groups of two. Wat solved that little dilemma by simply agreeing to join one of the groups to even things out.
Meagan, Harriet, and Wat formed one group, the apathetic couple Zigmond and Alice formed another, and John and Chris (they both swore loudly, not at all thrilled with their pairing) were left together in the last group.
And so the three groups went their separate ways: Wat’s group stayed to edit this current story while the other two teams departed to do whatever they pleased to Tim the Enchanter’s other files. They conjured some brooms out of thin air and soared up to the monstrous horizontal blue bar suspended in midair that was emblazoned with the words, The Absurd Fanfic Revolution.doc “ Microsoft Word, shining in the reflected wand light.
John pushed the File button below the story’s title, and another menu appeared. Alice dipped her conjured broom down slightly and reached for the button that said Open. A window appeared with a huge list of files, and after some farewells, the two groups dived in and disappeared.