Phucking Phantastic

Dan and Phil x Harry Potter x Life is Strange Crossover

A Concept: You play as Daniel Howell, a young half-blood wizard who mysteriously receives time-rewinding powers at the beginning of his first year at Hogwarts. He realizes his powers do not adhere to the same spatiotemporal constraints as time turners: they do not obey the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle, and can only rewind up to five minutes at a time.  Unbeknownst to Dan, his powers are finite - the rate of depletion is available only to you, the player, in a meter on the right of the screen. For the first half of his time at Hogwarts, you use Dan’s powers to remake decisions to make life easier for him and his Muggleborn best friend Phil. Then, in his fourth year, Harry Freakin’ Potter returns from the maze with a dead body and life for Dan gets really dark really quickly. You realize too late you should probably have conserved your powers for the war.

Let me tell you what I know about this after living here for nearly thirty years.

This is a modern European country, the home of hot net startups, of Internet giants and (in some places, some very few places) the fastest broadband on Earth. People here live in this century, HARD.

Yet they get nervous about walking up that one hill close to their home after dark, because, you know… stuff happens there.

I know this because Peter and I live next to One Of Those Hills. There are people in our locality who wouldn’t go up our tiny country road on a dark night for love or money. What they make of us being so close to it for so long without harm coming to us, I have no idea. For all I know, it’s ascribed to us being writers (i.e. sort of bards) or mad folk (also in some kind of positive relationship with the Dangerous Side: don’t forget that the root word of “silly”, which used to be English for “crazy”, is the Old English _saelig_, “holy”…) or otherwise somehow weirdly exempt.

And you know what? I’m never going to ask. Because one does not discuss such things. Lest people from outside get the wrong idea about us, about normal modern Irish people living in normal modern Ireland.

You hear about this in whispers, though, in the pub, late at night, when all the tourists have gone to bed or gone away and no one but the locals are around. That hill. That curve in the road. That cold feeling you get in that one place. There is a deep understanding that there is something here older than us, that doesn’t care about us particularly, that (when we obtrude on it) is as willing to kick us in the slats as to let us pass by unmolested.

So you greet the magpies, singly or otherwise. You let stones in the middle of fields be. You apologize to the hawthorn bush when you’re pruning it. If you see something peculiar that cannot be otherwise explained, you are polite to it and pass onward about your business without further comment. And you don’t go on about it afterwards. Because it’s… unwise. Not that you personally know any examples of people who’ve screwed it up, of course. But you don’t meddle, and you learn when to look the other way, not to see, not to hear. Some things have just been here (for various values of “here” and various values of “been”) a lot longer than you have, and will be here still after you’re gone. That’s the way of it. When you hear the story about the idiots who for a prank chainsawed the centuries-old fairy tree a couple of counties over, you say – if asked by a neighbor – exactly what they’re probably thinking: “Poor fuckers. They’re doomed.” And if asked by anybody else you shake your head and say something anodyne about Kids These Days. (While thinking DOOMED all over again, because there are some particularly self-destructive ways to increase entropy.)

Meanwhile, in Iceland: the county council that carelessly knocked a known elf rock off a hillside when repairing a road has had to go dig the rock up from where it got buried during construction, because that road has had the most impossible damn stuff happen to it since that you ever heard of. Doubtless some nice person (maybe they’ll send out for the Priest of Thor or some such) will come along and do a little propitiatory sacrifice of some kind to the alfar, belatedly begging their pardon for the inconvenience.

They’re building the alfar a new temple, too.

Don’t go near big trees in the night

If you live on a farm, don’t look outside the windows at night

I have broken all these rules.

I’ve seen some shit.

If it sounds like your mom, but you didn’t realize your mom is home…. it’s not your mom. Promise.

One walked onto the porch once. Wasn’t fun. But they’re not super keen on guns. Typically bolt when they see one.

You think it’s the neighbor kids.

It’s not the neighbor kids.

Might sound like coyotes but you never really /see/ the coyotes but then wow that one cow was reaaaaaally fucked up this morning. The next night when you hear another one screaming you just turn the tv up a little more. Maybe fire a gun in the air but you don’t go after it. If it is coyotes then it’s probably a pack and you seriously don’t want to fuck with that and if it’s the other thing you seriously REALLY don’t want to fuck with that.

So in the south, especially near the mountains, you just go straight from your car to inside your house, draw your curtains and watch tv.

If you see lights in the fields just fucking leave it alone.

Eyes forward. Don’t be fucking stupid. Mind your own business. Call your neighbors and tell them to bring the cats in. There’s coyotes out. Some of them know. Most of them don’t.

Other than that everything’s a ghost and they died in the civil war. Literally all of everything else is just the civil war. We used to smell old perfume and pipe tobacco in the weeks leading up to the battle anniversaries.

Trust me. It’s a thing every Filipino can do.

We don’t point because it is impolite. It’s a holdover from the provinces. You don’t point because Somebody Unseen will take offense.

When you walk in the fields, you always say “Tabi tabi po” (Pardon me, excuse me, just passing through) as a sign of respect. Especially if you need to answer nature’s call and there’s no bathroom to go to.

You never knock over little mounds because the Old Nuno lives there.

You turn your clothes inside out if you get lost walking in the woods or in the Mountains, because you know They are playing tricks on you.

You never mess with an old balete tree. It is Their home.

When we hear weird noises and see shit at night, our first instinct is “Wanna see it?”

We will brazenly walk into the woods, high on weed and drunk out of our minds, jsut cus “Walking in the pitch black is fun”

I feel like there’s a lot of infographics out there about STI prevention, but not enough about what happens if you already have one.  (The answer is not “you give up because your life is over.”)  So here, have some education!

- Dean Winchester

civil war where everything is the same except team cap/team iron man are rivaling baseball teams!!! this was so fun to make like you guys don’t even KNOW, this was shamelessly inspired by sports animes