Enter the Dragon (Harry Potter/Shadowrun)

[hyperspacewizard]

Another great chapter its always a treat when this updates. The great spirit being only 12 line was pretty funny. Im going to theorize that Harry and the gang are going to come across some Aztecs trying to mess with the node and get into a fight but thats me just guessing.



Also

They may be referring to the events in earthdawn instead of the landbridge which would mean they have an oral history thats super super super old.

 

[Something]

I really hope Bones is doing her full-scale lightning raid against everyone linked to the auction house, because otherwise Dumbles is going to have to commit and take the full punishment for killing a shitton of people. Her deadline is about two days before an incredibly pissed off chessmaster war mage or an incredibly pissed off metallic dragon with complete magical resistance or quite possibly both hit wizarding Europe in full force.

 

[Kitty S. Lillian]

Lovely and amusing and deep worldbuilding you have here.
Typo:

Unphased by the confrontational tone,

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Unfazed

 

[Littlenous]

On the other hand, I think the Confederation dodged a bullet there with how much of a failure the WoD turned out. They might be better off working on some kind of pathogen that kills the coca plant.

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Won't work in the long run
I... kind of "overheard" that Russia tried this in Afghanistan. Then world's newspapers published news about suffering of "poor afghanian farmers", and some specialists came over to deal with that thing
"Drugs as part of world politics"
At worst, cultists can spin that as "Help! That pathogen mutated and now spreads to wheat!!!", and gain support from "concerned citizens".

 

[The Unicorn]

Dunkelzahn Very nice chapter, I really like the way you describe the confederacy and both the representative going looking for Harry and the scene with Snape were very nice, however I have a nit-pick about the expanded storage area you had Snape fill with steel for Harry.
A volume the same size as Winabego's interior full of scrap steel would be well over 200 metric tons. While that could be a resonable amount of material for them to carry for Harry to eat, if a couple of wizards can move that amount a couple of km, even if it exhausts them, then moving a dozen tons should not be at all difficult, which doesn't fit with how magical transport was treated in this story so far.

i'm not convinced that Harry will be very impressed with the "bureaucratic delay". Not when it comes to the health and well being of one of his damnsels...

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The point was that it didn't actually affect her health, all it does is affect Harry's ability to make a fool of himself.
More importantly, it was designed to ensure that Harry won't suspect anything, while I'm sure Snape will, I'm not sure he'd say anything, especially as he'd probably be able to figure the reasons for it.

On the other hand, I think the Confederation dodged a bullet there with how much of a failure the WoD turned out.

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The WoD is a failure because while you can stop one source of the drugs, the addicts just get their fix somewhere else. Since the confederacy doesn't actually care about the addicts, and in fact would be overjoyed if they got their fix from somewhere else and so weren't providing the Azteks with magical energy, they'd consider that a victory.

Then world's newspapers published news about suffering of "poor afghanian farmers", and some specialists came over to deal with that thing

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Not quite. The sequence of events was:
1)Evil communist demons invaded Afghanistan.
2)The US went to help fight the communist deamons.
3)Due to 2 the newspapers got interested in what was going on there, and the CIA was happy to provide some unbiased and honest reports.

Without the cold war events would be very different even without Wizards to rework the evidence.

 

[Littlenous]

Not quite. The sequence of events was:
1)Evil communist demons invaded Afghanistan.
2)The US went to help fight the communist deamons.
3)Due to 2 the newspapers got interested in what was going on there, and the CIA was happy to provide some unbiased and honest reports.

Without the cold war events would be very different even without Wizards to rework the evidence.

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This happened AFTER communists left Afghanistan. And, I think, after USSR was disbanded too. The point is, that "some" peoples in "big politic" WISH for Afghanistan to be the drug-making country, and REFUSE to have it other-way

 

[The Unicorn]

This happened AFTER communists left Afghanistan. And, I think, after USSR was disbanded too.

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That seems unlikely. If you find any cites or remember some more details about this story I'd like to read about it.

 

[Kooler]

This was great I had a blast reading it.

 

[Spartan3909]

Lovely and amusing and deep worldbuilding you have here.
Typo:
Unfazed

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It's spelt correctly for anyone not using American-English.

 

[Littlenous]

That seems unlikely. If you find any cites or remember some more details about this story I'd like to read about it.

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Googled some right now, 2009 looks suspicious to me: It got into news on russian
https://russian.eurasianet.org/node/57411 Other years about opium...
And here is wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan In March 2010, NATO rejected Russian proposals for Afghan poppy spraying, citing concerns over income of Afghan people

 

[Voxdeo]

I really like this story. The way you build out the world is very interesting. However, I'm not very knowledgable of Shadowrun law, but in the real world the Aztecs are only 700 years old. Little tough to be fighting them for over 2000 years. Is this a change in the Shadowrun verse or is Aztec used as a catch all for mesoamerican civilizations?

 

[Hunting time]

Dunkelzahn Very nice chapter, I really like the way you describe the confederacy and both the representative going looking for Harry and the scene with Snape were very nice, however I have a nit-pick about the expanded storage area you had Snape fill with steel for Harry.
A volume the same size as Winabego's interior full of scrap steel would be well over 200 metric tons. While that could be a resonable amount of material for them to carry for Harry to eat, if a couple of wizards can move that amount a couple of km, even if it exhausts them, then moving a dozen tons should not be at all difficult, which doesn't fit with how magical transport was treated in this story so far.

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Dunkelzahn
I'm going to have to second this
i made it a point a time ago about expanded spaces and you made it very clear they weren't being moved because it exhausted wizards over very short distances. I'm fairly sure we even talked about the Trunk from Fantastic Beast and Where to Find them and the Tents from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire/Deathly Hallows which was said that they can't be moved.
You gave the Train company as another reason.
So is this changing then?

 

[Littlenous]

So is this changing then?

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They got strong wizards on board+living dragon

 

[The Unicorn]

Googled some right now, 2009 looks suspicious to me: It got into news on russian
https://russian.eurasianet.org/node/57411 Other years about opium...
And here is wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan In March 2010, NATO rejected Russian proposals for Afghan poppy spraying, citing concerns over income of Afghan people

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The first link does not appear to support the claims, granted machine translated so I could be wrong or missed a specific line that supports the argument but it seems to be all about the poverty in Afganistan (partly due to drought) and how little of the international aid actually goes to help Afganistan agriculture.
For the second, that's not a cite. It references https://www.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE62N56U20100324 which is a cite, but again doesn't support the claim that

Russia tried this in Afghanistan. Then world's newspapers published news about suffering of "poor afghanian farmers", and some specialists came over to deal with that thing

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It's a proposal, that wasn't carried out, and the newspapers reported the fact that it was rejected. The Newspapers weren't the cause, and there was certainly no one going to Afganistan to help the drug dealers in response to the reports.
I can think of several good reasons to reject the Russian proposal, starting with the fact that Russia did not have troops in Afganistan, but NATO did (meaning that any screw ups either real or imagined would result in dead NATO soldiers, but wouldn't bother Russia),and a bunch more bad ones (such as relationships between Russia and NATO) none of which have anything to do with the poor suffering drug dealers, and none of which would apply if the country proposing the idea would also be the one performing it, with no one else capable of objecting in the target zone. Which would be the case if the US decided to do something about Drugs in Central/South America, this was even more true in the 1990s.

in the real world the Aztecs are only 700 years old.

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That's in a world where their magic didn't actually work. In one where they had actual death magic they could rise to power a couple millenia earlier.

is Aztec used as a catch all for mesoamerican civilizations?

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Aztec in Shadowrun are even worse than in RL, as hard as that is to accomplish, they are very much not generic anything, not even generic evil.

They got strong wizards on board+living dragon

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Nope. They have only two wizards on board and they're hauling around more than 200 metric tons.

Dunkelzahn A few possible fixes for the issue that occur to me:
1) Instead of an expanded area, use the same sort of magic used in the brick fuel, with magical reinforcement to have the super dense "steel" cubes stay in storage instead falling through the floor.
2)Have Harry along for the ride to pick up the steel.
3)Have the expanded storage be empty and still have Snape completely exhausted by hauling around that large an expanded volume.

 

[Voxdeo]

That's in a world where their magic didn't actually work. In one where they had actual death magic they could rise to power a couple millenia earlier.

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But the Aztec people weren't a thing before the 1300's. They grew out of other tribes and civilisations. They grew up on top of the ruins of older civilisations that shaped their very identity. They weren't just hanging around in the wings for 1700 years waiting for the other people to die off so that they could have their turn.

 

[Kitty S. Lillian]

It's spelt correctly for anyone not using American-English.

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You have a source for that?

 

[TheBeardedOne]

Dunkelzahn I'm fairly sure we even talked about the Trunk from Fantastic Beast and Where to Find them and the Tents from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire/Deathly Hallows which was said that they can't be moved.

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I assumed that the Trunk was merely a portal to a pocket dimension rather than an actual Expanded Space. My personal headcanon is that it would be far harder to set up, but retains the ability to move so long as there is only a single Portal since a second one would be "locked" into a fixed realworld distance relative to the first (which would be why Newt used a single-Portal only version. A second Portal would have had him limited to lugging his Trunk around in a sphere while a third would limit him to a planar circle. Four or more would be solidly locked).
The pocket dimension would explain Macusa in the film, though. Rather than go through all that effort to expand the tinly places between wall layers and risk catastrophic compression if a powerful enough Finite hit, they fixed a Pocket Dimension in place with shielded doors in strategic points, giving them huge amounts of space to work with and ways to exit if one Portal got blocked.

 

[Skjadir]

But the Aztec people weren't a thing before the 1300's. They grew out of other tribes and civilisations. They grew up on top of the ruins of older civilisations that shaped their very identity. They weren't just hanging around in the wings for 1700 years waiting for the other people to die off so that they could have their turn.

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The Aztecs in Shadowrun can be said to run back much further than rl (up to the last age which I think is ~5000 years).

They are also terrible news in Shadowrun (just as here) and own the megacorp (Aztech) that is pretty big when it comes to magic (and also food/other consumer goods).

Aztec in Shadowrun are even worse than in RL, as hard as that is to accomplish, they are very much not generic anything, not even generic evil.

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To make a point the canon Shadowrun Aztec megacorp can rather clearly be point out as the worst megacorp in terms of doing bad things (and that is saying something considering just what shit the other megacorps get up to at times).

The awful things we have seen in the story when we take looks at the darker side of things is pretty normal in Shadowrun and kind of in the open, the stuff Aztecs gets up to is worse (kind of hinted at here with the blood magic).

 

[Dunkelzahn]

nice chapter thx for writing it
nice idea to messing up plans of shadowrun aztecs interesting that they have lore so old that they recall the land bridge perhaps they also recall the location once there ?

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They may be referring to the events in earthdawn instead of the landbridge which would mean they have an oral history thats super super super old.

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Oral traditions can last a surprisingly long time among real human societies, with some examples going back many thousands of years with very little variation. I suspect a society whose members routinely live twice as long, and in very rare cases can get up into the half-millennium sort of range can stretch that number a lot longer.

The idea I had for this was that these are some of their oldest legends --- the land bridge that brought them across to the New World, and the Sundering (i.e. the end of the Fourth World and the disappearance of the spirits) --- that they've told as a unit for so long that they stitched the two into a single narrative and lost track of the time between them. They were both a long time ago, with the bridge disappearing about 8000 years ago and the end of the Fourth Age a bit over 2000 years later.

I originally had Toh Yah telling Harry the story in their scene, but I cut it out about two-thirds of the way through when it got way too big and too off-topic. The story as I had blocked it out:

1. The Great Bridge
   1. The original people, two brothers, started out over in Asia
   2. They were threatened by unspecified but terrible invaders
   3. They sought the spirits' counsel on what to do
   4. The spirits sent them out into the Wastes (ice age tundra) where the invaders would fear to follow with a promise that they would teach them how to survive there
   5. The brothers spent a long time there, surviving with the spirits' instruction but never truly prospering
   6. One day they found the Bridge, it was farther north and therefore even more forbidding than the rest of the Wastes, but it could be a path to something better
   7. The brothers asked the spirits' counsel again, they spoke of a land of plenty on the other side of the Bridge, and promised to guide them as they had before
   8. The elder brother, bitter from his time in the Wastes, refused. He accused the spirits of deliberately leading them all into suffering for their own amusement and declared that it would have been preferable to have been killed quickly by the invaders rather than suffering interminably under the spirits' 'guidance'. He repudiated the spirits and decided that it was better to stay where he was rather than follow them into further foolishness and make things worse.
   9. The younger brother chose to trust the spirits that saved them before, and he followed across the bridge.
   10. When the younger brother arrived in the new land after a long and difficult journey, he found it as promised, lush with fruit and fat with game. Huge animals that could feed entire tribes on one kill roamed the land in massive numbers, and they were the only people to be found.
   11. The younger brother prospered, fathering many children and passing on the wisdom of the spirits.
2. The Sundering
   1. One day, the younger brother was teaching his children and told the story of the Great Bridge
   2. His foolish youngest son was moved by compassion for the older brother, saying that they had plenty and he was family.
   3. The son proposed that they go and tell the older brother of their success to assuage his doubts so that he might come and share in their bounty
   4. His father denied the request, saying that his elder brother had made his choice and repudiated the spirits. Bringing such an ungrateful person into their camp could only invite trouble.
   5. The foolish son didn't like the command and though he knew better, so he left in the night to go himself.
   6. The son used the skills his father had taught him to disobey his command and cross the Bridge, eventually he finding the elder brother's camp. There he introduced himself and told of the bounty to be found on the other side of the Bridge
   7. The elder brother welcomed him with open arms and agreed to his proposal, packing up the camp and setting out with the foolish son as his guide. However, the elder brother was playing his nephew false, planning to use the foolish son as a hostage to demand the greater part of his brother's bounty. Having repudiated the wisdom of the spirits that had guided him, he had soon found the Wastes to be untenable and had only grown more bitter and resentful.
   8. Arriving in the new lands and seeing the bounty his brother had enjoyed, the elder brother was enraged and resolved to destroy everything his brother held dear in revenge for the wrong done to him.
   9. When they came within sight of the smoke from the younger brother's camp, the elder brother called a halt, proposing that they make camp so that they might be well rested for the reunion in the morning. The foolish son agreed and went to sleep. Then the elder brother fell upon his sleeping nephew in a rage and murder him and led his people in a night assault on his brother's camp.
   10. The younger brother, wise and attentive to the spirits' guidance, had set guards on the camp and was forewarned. He met his elder brother's force in battle. Many were killed on both sides until eventually the younger brother's forces, strong from the years of prosperity, were victorious.
   11. In the end, the younger brother stood over his elder victorious and demanded to know why he had done this evil thing.
   12. The elder brother declared that it was vengeance for the wrongs done to him. What had his brother done to deserve such good fortune? He had been filled with rage at the unfairness, and his course had been set.
   13. The younger brother demanded to know what has become of his youngest son. The elder brother boasted of murdering his nephew, and in a fit of rage, the younger brother killed him. Then he broke down and wept.
   14. Brother had killed brother, angering the spirits. They came and demanded to know why he had done this evil thing. The younger brother told his tale of woe and rage. He admitted his fault, and promised to take his elder brother's sons in as his own by way of atonement.
   15. The spirits' anger thus became tempered with pity. They would not destroy the younger brother for his crime of passion, yet a punishment would still be doled out.
   16. The spirits caused the great herds to disappear, forcing the people to struggle, roaming far and wide to feed themselves. They had become too numerous for the lesser game, and they were forced to send out many hunting bands, each led by one of the sons, by blood or adoption. While the bands were away, trickster spirits went among them, sowing confusion that they might not understand each other when they returned. Finally, a spirit of the water flooded the Great Bridge, forever removing the path for more evil to make its way across.
   17. When his sons returned, the younger brother found that although he could understand them, they could not understand each other due to the actions of the trickster spirits, and there was much confusion.
   18. The younger brother sought the spirits to ask their counsel once more, asking why his sons could no longer understand each other. They explained that this was part of his punishment for slaying his brother in anger. His sons would no longer speak the same language, and they would thus go their separate ways. The younger brother's legacy would survive, but it would fracture. His descendants would war upon one another, just as he and his brother had done. When the spirits had finished speaking, they left and did not return no matter how they were sought. The younger brother wept bitterly.
   19. When the younger brother eventually died, there was nothing to hold his sons together, and they went their separate ways spreading out over the diminished lands, thus arose the Nations.

I was trying to pull together aspects of a number of different stories --- Cain and Abel, Abraham, and Genesis among them --- as well as natural historical events like the human migration into the New World, the loss of the North American megafauna, and the flooding of the Bering land bridge as the ice age ended.

Alas, it was too much to keep in the story proper.

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I really hope Bones is doing her full-scale lightning raid against everyone linked to the auction house, because otherwise Dumbles is going to have to commit and take the full punishment for killing a shitton of people. Her deadline is about two days before an incredibly pissed off chessmaster war mage or an incredibly pissed off metallic dragon with complete magical resistance or quite possibly both hit wizarding Europe in full force.

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She's got a bit more time than two days. Harry and company still have their week-long road trip and then hunting for the stone circle to deal with before they come home. Call it the better part of a month.

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Dunkelzahn Very nice chapter, I really like the way you describe the confederacy and both the representative going looking for Harry and the scene with Snape were very nice, however I have a nit-pick about the expanded storage area you had Snape fill with steel for Harry.
A volume the same size as Winabego's interior full of scrap steel would be well over 200 metric tons. While that could be a resonable amount of material for them to carry for Harry to eat, if a couple of wizards can move that amount a couple of km, even if it exhausts them, then moving a dozen tons should not be at all difficult, which doesn't fit with how magical transport was treated in this story so far.

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Dunkelzahn
I'm going to have to second this
i made it a point a time ago about expanded spaces and you made it very clear they weren't being moved because it exhausted wizards over very short distances. I'm fairly sure we even talked about the Trunk from Fantastic Beast and Where to Find them and the Tents from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire/Deathly Hallows which was said that they can't be moved.
You gave the Train company as another reason.
So is this changing then?

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I had intended for that to come across as the maximum size to which it could be expanded, it can be (and is at present) a lot smaller. Right now it is just big enough to hold about six or seven stripped down and crushed cars' worth of scrap metal packed quite closely, call it about a 2X-3X volumetric expansion on what began as a sizeable underfloor compartment that ran perhaps half the length of the vehicle. I may need to clarify that, it seems that I lost some detail during editing (that scene changed a great deal during development).

The mechanics on the expanded space thing are essentially:

• Moving an expanded space takes the intervention of a living magic user (specifically, a sapient one, that is one with a soul) for the entire time it is moving
• Moving an expanded space is functionally a lot like dragging a parachute through a viscous fluid
  • The bigger the expansion coefficient (how much the space is stretched, rather than absolute size) the bigger the parachute, thus the more it resists movement
  • The faster it moves, the more it resists movement
  • Note that the limiting factor on the magical effort needed is the space itself, not what's in it. The contents are a problem for the physical moving of the thing, hence why they needed to double up on the tires.
  • There are also some interesting influences on the subject which are dependent on local spacetime curvature, but those wont become story-relevant for a long time
• The mechanism for that resistance is essentially that you are dynamically stretching spacetime as the thing moves through it to maintain the expansion. Think of it like that rubber sheet model that is so common in explanations of general relativity, only you've added in a sort of ring clamp around a local distortion (that is, you've made a little bag or pocket in the sheet and clamped the neck down with magic). Leaving it sitting in place is relatively easy, but trying to slide the clamp along the sheet is hard.

Spoiler: Rationale for needing the living magic user to move expanded spaces

So the idea behind this is the following:

• In order to mess with spacetime you need to be able to get a hold on it
  • Without magic, this means tremendous amounts of mass-energy and thus gravity. Gravity is very weak, but it is the only nonmagical force which can get purchase of spacetime.
  • Magic provides a means for interacting with space much more strongly, but it needs to be in the right place and the right orientation in order to do so.
  • Away from a soul, magic is as much part of the physical world as anything else, and it can no more find purchase on spacetime than any other flavor of mass-energy can. That is, you can't you can't grab hold of spacetime with something lying entirely within spacetime.
• Souls are transcendent, projecting influence into the physical realm from something beyond
  • Magic (in this setting) is the mediating force between the soul and the physical world. It is the means by which the soul, the seat of agency and will, communicates that agency with the physical structures, body and mind, that enact that will in reality.
  • Because the soul is beyond spacetime, yet it interacts with things within spacetime, the connection between the soul and the physical must penetrate spacetime somewhere along the way
  • That point of penetration is by definition a point of interaction
  • Thus magic apart from a soul and magic interacting with a soul are two qualitatively different things
• Thus when a soul is present, magic can find purchase on spacetime in order to actively do things
  • expanding/contracting space
  • grabbing onto spacetime and pushing/pulling to make a reactionless drive
  • etc.
• Active spatio-temporal magics are thus only possible because of the geometry of the soul. Without the soul, none of it works.
  • Note: That is not to say that an existing expansion or other construction will collapse without people, you can bend the spacetime and create the "clamp", as it were, but any changes (relocation, maintenance, resizing, etc.) need further intervention

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I really like this story. The way you build out the world is very interesting. However, I'm not very knowledgable of Shadowrun law, but in the real world the Aztecs are only 700 years old. Little tough to be fighting them for over 2000 years. Is this a change in the Shadowrun verse or is Aztec used as a catch all for mesoamerican civilizations?

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It's a change in this setting specifically.

The design philosophy I'm operating under in this regard is that the magical and nonmagical sides of the cultures used to be united until the magical sides unilaterally started splitting away and hiding. This was not necessarily a simple and peaceful process, and sometimes heralded a lot of disruption and change. The magical 'Aztecs' are the direct continuation of the older culture, while the nonmagical Aztecs were effectively involuntarily exiled from their parent society about a thousand years ago. The civilization Cortez encountered was what those exiles had managed to rebuild in the intervening time. This was the usual model for civilizations in the Americas in this setting.

 

[Diver]

So what you're saying is the spirits were judgmental superdicks and the world is better off with them dead/sleeping... sounds about right.

 

[GhostHaxStomp]

The younger brother's legacy would survive, but it would fracture. His descendants would war upon one another, just as he and his brother had done.

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"How dare you kill your kin that is evil and disgraceful."

"Yeah I did a bad, I'm very sorry and I will live the rest of my life with this shame."

"Nah, we curse your bloodline and the land so that all of your descendants will fight and murder each other forever. There will be no true peace and also they dont understand each other."

"Bro wtf"

 

[Voxdeo]

The Aztecs in Shadowrun can be said to run back much further than rl (up to the last age which I think is ~5000 years).

They are also terrible news in Shadowrun (just as here) and own the megacorp (Aztech) that is pretty big when it comes to magic (and also food/other consumer goods).

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It's a change in this setting specifically.

The design philosophy I'm operating under in this regard is that the magical and nonmagical sides of the cultures used to be united until the magical sides unilaterally started splitting away and hiding. This was not necessarily a simple and peaceful process, and sometimes heralded a lot of disruption and change. The magical 'Aztecs' are the direct continuation of the older culture, while the nonmagical Aztecs were effectively involuntarily exiled from their parent society about a thousand years ago. The civilization Cortez encountered was what those exiles had managed to rebuild in the intervening time. This was the usual model for civilizations in the Americas in this setting.

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ok, thank you. I'm perfectly happy with that; I just wanted to have the picture clear.

 

[Littlenous]

The first link does not appear to support the claims, granted machine translated so I could be wrong or missed a specific line that supports the argument but it seems to be all about the poverty in Afganistan (partly due to drought) and how little of the international aid actually goes to help Afganistan agriculture.

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The point is, when i began to google, i found THAT article at 2009, but then the others on the search were about opium. 2013 was about set record of it's production.

The Newspapers weren't the cause, and there was certainly no one going to Afganistan to help the drug dealers in response to the reports.

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Of course newspaper weren't the cause! They were EXCUSE for "the right people" to COME THERE!
If you haven't noticed:
In July 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, collaborating with the UN to eradicate heroin production in Afghanistan, declared that growing poppies was un-Islamic, resulting in one of the world's most successful anti-drug campaigns. The Taliban enforced a ban on poppy farming via threats, forced eradication, and public punishment of transgressors. The result was a 99% reduction in the area of opium poppy farming in Taliban-controlled areas, roughly three quarters of the world's supply of heroin at the time.[18]​ The ban was effective only briefly due to the deposition of the Taliban in 2002.
Which means (in my opinion), that almost right AFTER Taliban began to fight the drugs, they were "deposed" with the support of US, UN and NATO troops, and drug dealing began anew. And NOBODY of the said forces actually cared about drugs, cause they were made by "useful people".

There were plenty of similar examples over the world: Did you knew that Duche Mussoliny (Ruler of Italy during WW2) dealt with all the mobsters? But, later on, when US government found out that liberated Italy is "too red" for their tastes, they helped to revive those mafia, in order to "recolor" the nation!

 

[Spartan3909]

You have a source for that?

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Nope, because I'm wrong. Carry on, nothing to see here...

 

[Erik Phantom]

God I love this story.

Such detailed worldbuilding and characters. Even the train stuff, which I personally could not care less about, is interesting nonetheless just due to the effects it has on and details it reveals about the world and characters.

 

[The Unicorn]

But the Aztec people weren't a thing before the 1300's.

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The name might have changed several times over the centuries, the point is you have a setting where blood sacrifice magic actually works so a society that encourages it will grow a lot faster than it did in RL.

I was trying to pull together aspects of a number of different stories

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None of which actually fit with Amerindian cultures or creation myths.

Right now it is just big enough to hold about six or seven stripped down and crushed cars' worth of scrap metal packed quite closely,

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That would not require any sort of space expansion. Assuming the storage space is only 2ft. high, 15ft long (half the vehicle length and 5 wide (the vehicle would be ~7ft wide) that'd enough for more than 30 metric tons of steel.

Moving an expanded space takes the intervention of a living magic user (specifically, a sapient one, that is one with a soul) for the entire time it is moving

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This is fine, the problem is if they're carrying enough steel to make an expanded volume needed, you really need to make it clear why the earlier transports couldn't use it.

The faster it moves, the more it resists movement

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This is something that really needs to be clarified. If this was an issue then Snape would have driven back very slowly to make it easier on himself, because if it was possible for him to drive at highway speeds, we're back to the problems with horse drawn wagons (which are much slower and thus easier to expand) becoming so much more efficient that steam trains make no sense. If Snape had to crawl along at under 20kph (~15mph) to be able to haul the ~100tons of steel he was carrying, then things fit a lot better.

Which means (in my opinion), that almost right AFTER Taliban began to fight the drugs, they were "deposed" with the support of US, UN and NATO troops, and drug dealing began anew.

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If you don't get the many things that are wrong with this statement there's no point in continuing the discussion.

 

[Littlenous]

If you don't get the many things that are wrong with this statement there's no point in continuing the discussion.

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Sorry about late replying, I can't exactly "text" at work... Were you hinting about "Black September" and following hunt after Al-Quaeda+Usama Bin Laden?
Because if you are, then I must admit that I'm on the side of "conspiracy theory" about them: That Twins fell for the same reason as USS Maine (1898) and RMS Lusitania (1915), to become an EXCUSE to participate in "little victorious war" (WW1 wasn't "little" but at the point of US involvement it was surely "Victorious"). And buildings collapsed NOT because planes crashed into them.

Political history is really dirty business That's why i stopped reading news at some point, too stressful. Especially, when you meet someone who was labeled as "Bad guy" few months/years ago, as "one of ours" now...

Erm... just to be sure, i deducted about "Black September" and what followed. Were there something else i missed?

 

[Barbaric_Bob]

I'm of two minds of this story
It's great, its elaborate world building is done well, and the explanations of the hows of magic are comprehensive and it has dragons, they make any story statistically 245% better.
on the other hand
ho-ly-shit this potter world is DARK, rampant slavery, mind-bending people into labor-slaves or worse
got a problem? sure fella we can solve that by VIOLATING YOU ON A FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL!
*shudders*

Once Harry gets back and learns of what happened to Hermione I don't think Brittain will have many slave houses left standing and a dragon powered foot to the testicles is the least of Malfoy Sr.'s worries if he ever sniffs out that little connection

 

[Aaron Fox]

Sorry about late replying, I can't exactly "text" at work... Were you hinting about "Black September" and following hunt after Al-Quaeda+Usama Bin Laden?
Because if you are, then I must admit that I'm on the side of "conspiracy theory" about them: That Twins fell for the same reason as USS Maine (1898) and RMS Lusitania (1915), to become an EXCUSE to participate in "little victorious war" (WW1 wasn't "little" but at the point of US involvement it was surely "Victorious"). And buildings collapsed NOT because planes crashed into them.

Political history is really dirty business That's why i stopped reading news at some point, too stressful. Especially, when you meet someone who was labeled as "Bad guy" few months/years ago, as "one of ours" now...

Erm... just to be sure, i deducted about "Black September" and what followed. Were there something else i missed?

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Black September is the event in Jordan where Palestinians living there attempted to pull a coup against Jordan just so they can have another go against Israel. Almost ignited a civil war in Jordan because of it.

 

[The Unicorn]

Erm... just to be sure, i deducted about "Black September" and what followed. Were there something else i missed?

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Yes, you missed the history of the last 100+ years. I must say for all the problems with our world I much prefer living in it, than whatever alternate universe you live in.