School years in the land of headcanon
Previously Played Information
previous game: hogwartsknights
length of time there: August 2004 - Feburary 2005 (game died when the next book came out)
important development and/or events in your previous game:
Retcon only. These ideas were developed before all the books, therefore details, were out; but I believe are still compatible. The big ones:
- early life (disagrees more with the HPwiki than interfering with the books)
- slight reinterpretation, purely out of twisted interest, of the Marauders Era.
Callum, Johnny and Pomma were 14, 11 and 8 when they were stalked in the woods behind their house by a wild animal (nudge). Pomma was found next morning in shock up a tree, Callum had a broken leg from running, and Johnny was wandering in a daze with a bite wound on his arm. All three seemed to recover, until the following month when Johnny went missing again. His father went out to look for him. Phineas survived the event itself; his death some years later may or may not have been related.
After a brief period-which he’d only ever mention as "my parents tried everything to cure me"-Johnny ran away. Luckily, Phineas had already contacted Albus Dumbledore, who had Johnny found and brought to Hogwarts. Dumbledore offered to make him a ward of the school dedicated to becoming a full and productive member of the wizarding community, in exchange for never again contacting his family or returning to his old life, where he would be a danger to everyone and have no better prospects than institutionalization. The boy accepted. Dumbledore renamed him Remus Lupin.
(The change may or may not have been intended to be permanent, but it turned out to be. Lupin held to the agreement never to see his family, except sometime between graduating Hogwarts and becoming DADA professor, he saw Pomma exactly once. Being traumatically widowed twice can do bad things: Sue locked firmly into psychoreligious [as distinct from cool, reasonable religious] mode. By the time Pomma received her Hogwarts letter, she’d been hating and suppressing her wizarding abilities for so long, she tore it up herself. No others came. When they met as adults, bro & sis had switched worlds-‘Jonathan’ to ‘Remus’ vs. ‘Melpomene’ to ‘Ellie’-missing each other entirely. They never met again.)
For the first months, Remus spoke to nobody. He attended class silently, did nothing but study, and wore hand-me-downs collected by McGonagall. The closest he got to socializing was when he started sharing a table at the library with another gangly, pale, nerdy-looking big-nosed bookworm, Severus Snape. Had either of them been even slightly chatty, they might have become friends.
Enter the trickster gods. Great-looking, talented, athletic, A-students without ever seeming to study, and totally blasé about all of it, James Potter and Sirius Black were so powerful in the school, from first year on, they could scorn or adopt whomever they damn well pleased. They liked having poor desperate-to-please Peter Pettigrew around as a kind of audience. For some unearthly reason (like The Controller-Curiosity of Sirius, piqued by his assumption that Remus was a fellow domestic abuse refugee) they took a sudden interest. Snape was shunted back into the shadows before he could emerge, and Lupin was forced back into the sunlight. Thus, they simultaneously saved Lupin’s life and doomed it.
The main facts of their ensuing years are well known. Two points of clarification remain private:
1) Dynamics within the group weren’t entirely... wholesome. James had an uncontrollable temper (though loving Lily would improve him immeasurably). Sirius tried so hard not to be like his family that when angry he became exactly like them. Lupin’s DADA studies began by covering up for and cleaning up after both of them. Peter showed every sign of weak-willed instability all along, which James and Sirius played with and preyed on. The unrealized kinship of Lupin with Snape also continued: he was also completely besotted with Lily Evans. While Snape’s love further isolated him, Lupin did what he always does, and did his best to support James and Lily's relationship.
2) The Animagus Scheme. If Lupin can be so egocentrically guilt-ridden (can he!) as to let himself believe this, it may have defined more than he remainder of his schooling.
Lupin never intended for the others to know of his situation, and in turn didn't know of their animagus studies. By full force of their ingenuity and Sirius’s overpowering will, all three kept it a secret from him for over two years. (Later fuel for the "who’s the spy?" First War game.)
The plan was devised and driven by Sirius-with possible, unbeknownst to S., facilitation by Dumbledore. It had been just a little too easy for Sirius to break into Big D.’s office and steal Lupin’s file that night, when he finally couldn’t stand not knowing where Remus really vanished to each month. [Chronic illness my big liony-and-not-at-all-snakelike foot. ‘Cause snakes don’t have feet. Suck it, Lestrudel.] Sirius never believed for an instant that Remus was visiting his sick mother. Too familiar with family estrangement for that.
The big reveal was planned as soon as James, Sirius, and Peter (as it proved, in that order) could reliably transform under pressure. They were, of course, almost fatally overconfident. Only Sirius, if even, had any real idea of what they would be facing when they followed Remus to the Shack and surprised him right before moonrise. In what ensued, Peter was rendered catatonic, definitely unable to transform. Padfoot and Prongs spent the night fighting off Moony, to keep him from killing Peter. That was the night Remus got the three scars across his face-from Sirius.
Next morning, all but Peter were bleeding. Sirius, and eventually James, helped carry Remus back to Hogwarts. In a perfect unwitting Callum impression, Peter wouldn’t look at him the whole way. Remus quickly broke out of the infirmary and locked himself in his room, trying his magic in earnest for the first time against Sirius and James to keep them out. That might have been the end of them, if Lily hadn’t broken through his defenses by showing up, and went in after him. ("…there for me at a time…")
The situation of course mended and evolved into the strongest relationships (with Sirius and James) and happiest years of Lupin’s life. Still, things were never the same with him and Peter, formerly the clearest equals in the group. Like Lupin’s siblings, Peter never quite got that it hadn’t been Remus trying to kill him. The sense of betrayal may have had some part in paving the way for the real treachery later. (No more, of course, than Sirius and James had paved their own way with Peter, and probably events unfolded as they would have regardless. Still, Lupin always wondered-once he knew the truth of that day-if anything might have changed without that last loss of trust.)
Why will this Lupin fit into scorched? At times on HK, all this got a bit too playercestastic. Here's the chance for Lupin to finally move on a bit from all this baggage and focus on an entirely new world and set of people.
...So why bring it here at all? :D Pretty much to post it all up front and move forward.