The Great Hall looked a little cleaner the morning after the Soviet assault the previous day. The bodies had been removed, the bloodstains washed away, and all the wooden and stone debris cleared up.
And as usual, the seven main protagonists of The Absurd Fanfic Revolution were seated at the Gryffindor table, drinking pumpkin juice and eating kippers for breakfast. Unlike before, they were in an unusually cheery mood “ they basked in their own cleverness for that humiliating blow against the author. Even the fear of retaliation had subsided somewhat.
“So, what’s Tim going to throw at us next?” Zigmond said through a mouthful of toast. “Nazis?”
“An army of psychotic gorillas?” suggested Chris.
“No no, I got it! Today we’ll be fighting an army of psychotic gorilla Nazis!” synthesised Alice. She extended her arm in a mock Hitler salute, thumped her chest with the other hand, and went, “Ooook! Oook! Oooga!”
They ignored the stares they were attracting with their impersonations of fascist primates “ the tension had all but disappeared, for they had a good (if rather stupid and somewhat tasteless) laugh together. Funnily enough, wizarding children were largely ignorant of past Muggle dictatorships, but that little fact was ignored in this story. So too was Muggle cinema.
“I mean, how can you take Tim the Enchanter seriously?” John explained. “Communists? Come on! Commies make horrible villains “ what you need are NAZIS! Look at the Indiana Jones franchise “ Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a horrible movie! Why? ‘Cause they had communists as the bad guys! Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade were good movies, because for villains they had friggin’ NAZIS!”
Once the seven friends had come to their senses, they adopted a little more serious tone and saw to the castle’s defences. “See anything yet?” Wat asked a nameless sentry posted on top of one of the walls. Every time he was answered with confirmation of no enemy activity whatsoever.
“It’s quiet…” Meagan observed dramatically. “Too quiet…”
“Hey Meagan!” an obnoxious voice suddenly shouted. She whipped around and discovered that it was Chris: “WAAHHHAAAGGGHHHH! Bloobllbooblublublbbboobblublubllbubolb!”
She and everyone else who happened to witness that sudden, deranged outburst stared at him. Their eyes were wide like this: O_O
“What was that?” Meagan inquired incredulously.
“I don’t know!” replied Chris energetically. “Gib gib beep nargah beep bbluubbaaarrrggghhh! Hee hee hee!”
And he ran off, flapping his arms like some big flapping thing, screaming completely nonsensical things and basically making everybody feel uneasy.
“By Merlin,” Meagan uttered in horror. “It has begun!”
“What?” prodded Wat Tyler, now genuinely distressed.
“THE ABSURDITY!”
Indeed it had. Muscle had failed during Tim’s first strike. This second blow was aimed at their minds…
“Hi, Jon!” somebody greeted John.
“It’s not ‘Jon.’ It has an ‘H’ in it.” he answered, highly annoyed.
“Hello there, Jhon,” another passing person said.
“How can you not spell my name right? It’s ‘J-O-H-N!’”
“Morning, Jonathan!”
“IT’S NOT ‘JONATHAN,’ EITHER!” John exploded. He didn’t bother taking his wand out and hexing the offender “ he simply tackled him and punched and kicked“
Wat and Meagan dived in to rescue the hapless wrong-name-caller person. Two pairs of hands grabbed John and pried him off, still yelling things like: “How-can-you-not-get-my-name-right-you-stupid-bastard?”
Chris was wreaking havoc, doing his best to drive everyone insane with a nonsensical chicken impression. When Meagan attempted to subdue him, he abruptly changed tactics and screamed, “TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS ELEPHANT!”
“No it’s not! It’s four!” corrected Meagan, also shouting because she hated stupidity and false information with a passion when she saw it.
“ELEPHANT!”
“NO! FOUR!”
Wat couldn’t help. When he tried dragging Meagan away from the crazy Chris, she shrugged him off (“Don’t touch me!” she screamed) and mired herself in the advanced-mathematical debate of death. “LOOK! I HAVE TWO FINGERS, AND I PUT UP TWO MORE FINGERS! WHAT DOES THAT MAKE?”
“AN ELEPHANT!” Chris bellowed.
Meanwhile, Zigmond was with his pseudo-girlfriend, Alice. Unexpectedly, he announced proudly in a loud, clear voice: “I have one testicle!”
“OH. Er… that’s nice,” Alice replied EXTREMELY awkwardly, unsure of what to say.
Zigmond nodded and smiled broadly… but then his face suddenly turned to stone. Mortified, he stammered, “Ig-ignore what I just said! It wasn’t me “ the author made me say that! IT’S NOT TRUE!”
Or was it?
“Excuse me for a moment…” he said as he ran off to one of the loos. Even though the bathroom door was closed shut, the scream of “NOOOOOOOO!” could be heard anywhere in the castle, even over the commotion of the atonal music that rattled the walls.
Alice was soon to have her own problems. Watching the chaos erupt around her, she anxiously ran her fingers through her hair… and discovered she didn’t have any!
Unsure of what problem to confront, Wat tried his luck in comforting the distraught and recently bald Alice. “Well, it’s not like you have any actual physical description or anything “ it’s all up to each reader’s and character’s imaginations. Just pretend that you still have hair“”
“BUT I DON’T!” she sobbed uncontrollably. “I’m now officially UGLY!”
Then“
“Kiss me now, Wat Tyler!” said an irresistible, attractive feminine voice, smoother than velvet.
Wat turned around and his eyes beheld the wondrous sight of a spectacularly beautiful young woman. Her hair was a perfect, pristine sheet of silvery-blonde, and her sapphire-blue eyes sparkled like rays of the suns off the shimmering sea. She had a small, dainty, and adorable little nose, and her smile could have melted even the coldest hearts of depleted uranium, isotope U-238.
Down from her face, she was wearing silk, designer Hogwarts robes in brilliant Gryffindor colours, which displayed the perfect curves of her waist, hips, and dual upper-torso mounted lumpy things magnificently. Wat was simply paralyzed by the sight of the perfect embodiment of all of his depraved adolescent fantasies that he never knew he had until they were mentioned right now in this sentence.
“Gugh… gghh…ghgh…” he gurgled absurdly before he managed to find his voice and asked, “Who are you?”
Instantly, rose-scented tears swelled from the lovely eyes of the Aphrodite standing in front of Wat, which incredulously made her more attractive. She sobbed, “Don’t you remember, Wat, my love? I’m the American exchange student from Salem Witches Institute “ Serenity Sapphire! Don’t you recall how you were the only one to comfort me when I arrived and was sorted into Gryffindor, against the wishes of my adoptive Death Eater parents, the same people who murdered my real mother and father?”
“Wait - WHAT?” Wat asked, for the ridiculousness of Serenity Sapphire’s statement had shaken him out of her beautiful aura magnet spell.
That only made her cry harder. Her heart broken, she wailed, “Angst angst! Don’t leave me, Wat! You’re the only one for me “ my shining star! Angst!”
“No! Get away from me!” Wat shouted, repulsed by Serenity Sapphire’s melodramatic gushiness. “I don’t even know you!”
After taking a parting, longing stare at her gorgeous face and other features located a little lower on her body, Wat turned away and went back to the pressing matter of ending the chaos erupting around him.
“YOU BASTARD!” John’s voice barked. “MY NAME IS ‘JOHN!’ NOT ‘JEAN,’ YOU DAMN FRANCOPHILE!”
Once again, he was back to pummelling another inoffensive student who got his name wrong. Wat distanced himself from the irrationally perfect American exchange student girl and tried to restrain his friend.
“Stop it, Johnny!” Wat urged.
“MY NAME’S NOT ‘JOHNNY,’ EITHER!”
And then the two of them got into a fight…
The students weren’t the only ones going mad or doing their best to kill each other. Professor McGonagall was beating up Professor Longbottom with the Sorting Ceremony stool while shouting, “Take that, you green, tree-hugging commie!” Also, the recently introduced OCs Sergeant Price and Reg Scott were engaged in a heated argument about broomsticks, even though the Muggle knew nothing about them.
“What are you talking about? The *Glisenti Falco 360* (sparkles!) is the best broom in the world, you moronic Muggle!” blurted the Auror. For proof, he consulted a magazine called ‘Stick It’ and pointed to the page featuring a scantily clad witch posing coyly with the said broomstick. The debate caught the attention of the other Aurors tasked to defend the school (and they weren’t doing a very good job), and soon they entered the fight.
“No, it’s the FIREBOLT!” one of the scarlet-clad figures declared as she delivered a haymaker to the traitor of Britain’s proud racing broom industry. The uppercut slammed into Reg’s jaw and knocked him off his feet and onto his back. A student took the opportunity to steal the magazine that had fallen out of the Auror’s hand.
More people started fighting over topics of no importance, like whether the moon really existed or not. An even greater number had simply devolved to lunacy “ some stripped naked and danced, and others tried to discover the fabled Five Hundred Uses of Socks. Then there were the people who were sane, per say, but couldn’t stand the sight of a story gone mad. They banged their heads against the walls, thinking that would help for some reason.
“LESBIAN VAMPIRE PORN!” Chris screamed at the top of his lungs as he ran through the Great Hall, waving the aforementioned magazine (‘Fanged Lezzie Lasses With Fine Tits and Arses!’) above his head. He was followed by an unruly mob of excited boys, and curiously enough, a few girls as well.
Back to Wat and John’s scuffle, Wat managed to knock his friend unconscious by hitting him on the head with a pineapple left over from breakfast. Looking around him, he was dismayed to see a scene that could only be described as pure, unadulterated pandemonium. He spied Meagan sitting on the floor with her knees up to her chin and a spaced-out expression on her face.
“Meagan! You have to help me sort out this“”
“Two plus two equals elephant,” she droned monotonously. “Two plus two equals elephant. Two plus two equals elephant. Two plus two“”
SLAP!
Wat didn’t know why he did it and was immediately horrified that he did. The flat of his hand struck her cheek, causing her to tip over and lie sprawled on the ground. “Ow! That hurt!” she moaned in pain.
His mind still panicking a bit, he seized her by the shoulders and yelled in her face, “Quick! What’s two plus two?”
“F-four?” she answered, and Wat Tyler sighed in relief. She blinked a few times and observed the chaos for herself in horror.
“Merlin’s pants! The whole of Hogwarts has gone mad!” she said, appalled.
Wat nodded vigorously. “Tell me about it! At least no one has committed suicide or anything“”
BANG!
A freshly-dead (and slightly decapitated) corpse with a Smith & Wesson 500 magnum revolver in its hand toppled from a banister and impaled itself on a gargoyle, which then broke off and landed on the floor, and then EXPLODED!
“GOOD GOD!” Wat and Meagan screamed simultaneously. That corpse wasn’t the only student that somehow acquired a ridiculous Muggle firearm. Another person with a captured Soviet RPG-7 was screaming, “There is no tomorrow! This chapter is the end!” and firing rockets at people.
BOOM! The rocket propelled grenade blasted a chunk out of the Slytherin table, spraying lethal wooden splinters into bystanders. “TAKE HIM OUT!” Wat shouted to the very few people who still had their senses about.
A volley of stunners rammed home, and the heavily armed student went down. “WE HAVE TO BRING EVERYONE TO ORDER, EVEN IF IT MEANS STUNNING EVERYONE IN THE CASTLE!” Wat commanded, and Meagan, Zigmond, and Bald Alice (tearfully) obeyed, wands drawn purposefully before them.
Harriet didn’t. She was sitting in a corner, looking morose. “Harriet, what’s wrong?” Wat asked her impatiently.
“I’ve been ignored for the whole chapter! I’m supposed to be part of The Absurd Fanfic Revolution, but I haven’t been mentioned until now! WHY DO I HAVE TO BE SUCH A USELESS CHARACTER?”
That was easy to fix. Wat just shouted at her and told her to help clean up the mess, and that would probably give her some extra sentences later. Reluctantly, she agreed and joined in the massive civil war that had erupted in the middle of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Wat found John and revived him (“Hey Wat “ that bloody hurt!”), and got him working too. That only left Chris…
“HA HA HA HA! I’M A PENGUIN!” Chris bellowed. Rightfully thinking that he couldn’t contribute anything useful, Wat stunned him.
Scattered here and there throughout the Great Hall were dead bodies “ mostly students, but there appeared to be an Auror or two in there as well. Whether they were killed in a fight or committed suicide was completely unknown and not all that important. They were just dead.
In one far corner of the huge room, there was a student dressed in all black and was giving a speech from behind a pulpit (that had mysteriously appeared out of nowhere) like some kind of disturbed vicar. The keyword there was ‘disturbed,’ because written on the wall behind him dripped the words Avada Kedavra, written in blood.
“…Worship SATAN, the true owner of your souls! The Angel of Blackness loves the Harry Potter books and because we appear in this fanfiction, your souls have been so corrupted that we sinners are totally beyond saving “ so let us embrace our evilness!” the demonic vicar preached. “KILL THE NONBELIEVERS!”
There was a furious three-way battle between the sane members and followers of The Absurd Fanfic Revolution, the Students of Darkness or whatever they were called, and those people who had just gone mad and attacked everyone in sight. Spells, chairs, goblets, bullets, and underpants (among other things) flew in all directions, striking down their luckless victims with cruel and oddly hilarious indifference.
“CYMRU AM BYTH!” a wild, red-haired girl proclaimed, spewing out buckets of phlegm just to pronounce that motto properly. In a terrifying sing-song voice, she urged, “Welsh witches and wizards of the world, UNITE! Down with the English!”
A kilted kiltie abruptly stopped playing his bagpipes and yelled at the Welsh students, “No, we’s gohnna bash the English, yeh wee gowksh! Prepare for shtabbing wiff me claidheamh mòr!”
The mad Scot whipped out a huge claymore and some haggis, and he and his fellow highlanders charged. With mysteriously procured national flags and ethnic garb, the Welsh and Scottish über-nationalists slaughtered each other for the right to march their tiny armies south on London.
What had been a three-way battle quickly became five. There were shouts of pain, clangs of weapons, and blasts of spells. Battle cries like “Be like Satan “ don’t wear underpants!” and “They may take our lives but they’ll never take our freedom! SCOTLAND “ THE BRAVE!” filled the Great Hall. In short, the inhabitants of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry were slaughtering each other without any interference from the author at all.
Well, not really. He made them go insane to begin with…
Suddenly, the Great Hall was filled with a brilliant light and the beautiful sound of an angelic chorus. Instantly, the absurd fighting came to a abrupt halt as all eyes centred on the gorgeous form of Serenity Sapphire, who called out in her silky, melodious voice, “Please, stop fighting! Why can’t we all like, just get along?”
Completely forgetting the battle, all the girls (except the newly uglyfied Alice) fawned over Serenity’s perfect hair and stunning looks, wishing that they could be half as lovely as she. The male combatants all turned into babbling idiots, and some shouted out, “MARRY ME, SEXY!”
But Serenity Sapphire shook her head, making her hair go swoosh!swoosh! perfectly like in those hair conditioner advertisements. With conviction, she said, “I’m sorry guys “ you’re all very nice, but my heart belongs to Wat Tyler. Wat! Hug my gorgeous body with your dazzling arms!”
“Help me!” Wat shouted to no avail as the Mary-Sue ran in his direction, with her hair billowing and her arms outstretched. She was closing in with the devastating inevitability of a runaway freight train.
“Impedimenta!” Wat yelled. The spell sort of worked “ Serenity Sapphire was stopped, but not as if she had run straight into a brick wall. Instead, her feet daintily carried her to a halt an uncomfortably close distance from him. Again, sweet perfume-scented tears flowed from her deep ocean-blue eyes.
“Why don’t you love me, Wat?” she wailed dejectedly. “Is it because I’m too perfect? Too beautiful? Angst angst!”
“NO! It’s because you’re ruining the story and you’re getting on my nerves! Why the hell did Tim write you into this chapter?”
“So I can tell you that I LOVE YOU!” Serenity Sapphire pronounced with heartfelt emotion. “I thought you LOVED me after I saved your life seven times earlier in the story “ and I’m pregnant with your baby!”
“WHAT?” Wat screamed in horror as Serenity charged again in a desperate attempt to embrace him and win his affection.
“EAT PINEAPPLE, TART!” John roared as he leapt in front of Wat, armed with a pineapple impaled on the end of a broken table leg, like some sort of firm and fruity mace. He delivered a furious, two-handed swing“
POW!
The Mary-Sue parried the pineapple weapon with the front of her gorgeous face, and she was smashed to the floor.
“Christ, she was annoying!” John declared as he threw the deadly pineapple bludgeoning stick to the ground.
“Yes, she was,” Jesus agreed, and everyone nodded.
After a pause, John turned to the leader of the revolution and wryly asked, “So Wat… what was it like?”
“What was what, like?” Wat queried, hoping John wouldn’t say what he thought he was going to say.
“Getting Miss Sapphire pregnant, obviously!” he prodded (literally, with his elbow), enjoying the sight of Wat’s face turning red. “You lucky, lucky thing!”
In exasperation, Wat explained to his idiot friend that he did no such thing, for he had only just met her earlier in this chapter. John’s sceptical laughter was not encouraging, and Wat had a feeling that neither his friend nor the author were going to let this matter go away.
To change the subject, Serenity Sapphire was still ridiculously beautiful, even in death “ her face was unmarked: no bruises, no blood. A small, lovely garden of flowers magically sprouted into bloom to mark the place on the floor where she fell.
“My, how unbelievably sappy,” Meagan observed distastefully. “Good thing she’s done with “ this chapter was going seriously off track!”
“Yeah!” a student wearing nothing but underpants said, shaken out of the dead Mary-Sue’s aura-spell. “What were we doing before she showed up? I can’t remember.”
“Washn’t there shome sort of battle or shomefink?” one of the kilted Scottish students supplied.
Seeing danger, Meagan hastily said, but a little too quickly, “No there wasn’t!”
“Ah… YES there was...” another student refuted. “Now I remember! DIE PERSON THING! FEEL THE WRATH OF SATAN’S UNDERPANTS!”
The boxer shorts went flying and smacked into a face. A volley of socks and spells fired back, and soon enough, the battle was once again in full swing.
More chaotic fighting…
After another seventy-two paragraphs of mindless combat, some sixty-one million more people were dead, and countless more were wounded. The Satan-worshippers all ended up committing mass ritual suicide with toenail clippers, and the Welsh and the Scots had slaughtered each other to the last girl and boy. The totally unhinged students also exacted a grim toll on themselves and everyone around them “ dead bodies, socks, and underpants were everywhere. The Absurd Fanfic Revolution eventually won the tangled, confused civil war in the Great Hall, but it was a Pyrrhic victory.
A second bloody step forward for our liberation, Wat mused unhappily at the sight of the countless dead that littered the castle. It was a complete waste “ they had all fought together, united as one against the Soviets, but in this chapter, they died at each other’s hands or even their own, all in a stupid fit of madness. The strike of the Mary-Sue had also threatened to destroy the story, almost warping it into tale of angst-filled romance.
How much more could the revolutionaries endure? Nobody knew, but there was only one thing that was clear “ Tim the Enchanter would have to suffer for this.
“Hey Wat “ what’s this I hear about you getting some girl pregnant?” asked Chris near the conclusion of this chapter.
Wat Tyler said nothing and merely fumed in private: Tim will definitely have to suffer for this.
BADLY.