November Small Story Poll Winner (Patreon)

HEY folks! It is time to end the small story poll, and this time it’s only two days after the poll closed. Hah!  It would have been yesterday, but I was having issues with AO3.

The rest ofATP53 is finished and has been sent off to morde24 for editing before reposting it here. It is not the chapter I thought, and the vast majority of the chapter still deals with characters other than Harry and his ladies, but they will start taking the limelight back in the next chapter. That, and outlining all the chapters for this month (17,000 words in new outlines alone, woo) have kept me really busy. Regardless, RL will die off for the next week, so I think I can get the winner of this poll done in a week.

And now, on to declaring that winner. The results of this poll were:

In third place, Horse for the Force with 1681 votes, only 47 of which came from fanfic. Here I think we are seeing the Ranma effect folks, as people have commented Ranma fics don’t always get the swing votes LOL.

On the other hand, without the carry over effect, it would have been in second place. As it was the carried over votes from last month (1/2 the total) of 1,265 and 89 votes from fanfic makes Magic of the Force comes in …. SECOND. Second with 2,638.

The winner, by a ridiculously small margin, is Fate Touched in Middle Earth with a total of 2,663, a 100 of which came from fanfic.

Wow… that was monstrously close. I can only assume this is a sign of how hungry people are for good Tolkien content LOL.

And now for something strange and unusual… Novus, this is for you.

“What are you doing woman, heal me alreaGGHHKK!!”

“Foolish male!” Growling, Viconia pulled the now rapidly bleeding out paladin towards her, pulling out the barbed arrow without even bothering to warn the man, her other hand already glowing with healing magic. “Oh yes, all that disdain for me, all that hatred for Drow-kind. And yet, when you need healing, who do you call upon? The ‘vile drow Witch.’ Hypocrisy, thy name is Paladin. I hope you keep this in mind going forward, Harry. It is still not too late for you.”

“Far be it for me to interrupt you when you’re ranting, at {},” Harry barked back, his shield shivering under the strike of several arrows, as he held it in front of himself and Dynaheir. Meanwhile, Dynaheir launched spells towards the entrance to the mine, killing one of the men there with a fusillade of Magic Missile. “But if you could get him back on his feet, we need to be retreating I think.

“Retreat, never, not when we have the light of day so close!” Shouted Branwen, dashing forward, her shield held in front of her. As it was a medium shield, the shield was able to protect her upper body. Her lower body was a different story. Two arrows found their mark on her shield, and another one in her thigh. Yet despite the strike, Branwen barely slowed. “Feel the fury of Tempus!”

She closed with two of the archers, smacking one into the wall with a shoulder charge, pinning him there with her shield as her mace hand came around, the head of the base crashing into the side of the other archer. But the rest retreated back out of the tunnel, and she was quickly forced back or be turned into a pincussion.

“Harry, I doubt that one of your perspicacity needs to be told this, but we are somewhat surrounded at the present moment,” Edwin began from behind before being cut off by an arrow to the chest. It wasn’t a normal arrow either, but an Acid Arrow, much like the ones which had announced this ambush. It burned through his Protection from Normal Weapons, and into his robes, though their defensive magics kept it from burning through too badly. “CURSE it, you useless simians could at least perform better as meat shields than this!”

“Jaheira is down! Khalid shouted for once almost sounding normal without his stutter, although it made an appearance the next second. “W, w, we need t, t, to retreat, b, b, back into the m, m, mines. Better part o, o, of valor and all t, t, that, Branwen.”

The ambush had caught them almost as they exited the mine, the latest dungeon they had cleared on their quest to discover who had been behind the attempt to incite war between Baldur’s Gate and Amn. Even Harry’s gamer skill hadn’t given a warning, which meant that all of these people had come from outside the dungeon area and had waited for them. The group behind them had included a wizard, several archers and two swordsmen all of whom must have drunk an invisibility potion before getting into position.

Now the wizard was dead along with one of the archers from that area, and Khalid was currently fueling it out with the two enemy swordsmen. Meanwhile a furious Minsc charged back along their route to close with those archers, who had hit Dynaheir with two arrows similar to the one that had just cut off Edwin’s words. The wizard had also targeted her with a silence spell.

But ahead of the group was the real fight, at least fourteen men, bandits, mercenaries, and orcs. And the group was nearly out of spells, out of potions, their armor battered, exhaustion setting in, and while he and Imoen were still in one piece, their health was near to the bottom of the yellow. Damn it! They either had to break back into the tunnel, which would mean they would be trapped inside, or break out past the stronger force waiting for them outside. It was only because of Viconia, Branwen and Jaheira’s last healing spells that any of them had survived the first arrow folly.

“Harry, that’s special ability you chose from your leadership skills when we slew the dungeon boss? Summon Honor Guard? I think it’s time for you to use it!” Imoen shouted, pulling a regular arrow from her shoulder, grimacing as she tried to staunch the flow of blood, having little effect.

“We don’t even know what it does! Edwin and Darcy might’ve convinced me to grab it, but what if it doesn’t help us as much as it would if I kept it in reserve

“In the name of Shar and her hatred for the spider bitch, will you stop stammering, useless male!?” Viconia shouted, having just taken an arrow to her side. Her armor had turned it, but it had interrupted her concentration. “If we cannot…”

“The last of the bastards back here are down, his but kicked by the mighty Minsc!”

Hearing that from his largest companion, Harry nodded, glancing at his HUD for a moment, examining the map. “Okay, Viconia, pull back to Jaheira, get her on her feet again. Leave {}, if we live through this we can pick up his body and revive him when we get to town. There is a side passage, a small guard post to the left, We’ll hold up there. Edwin, give us some space. Branwen, get back here or be left behind!”

With the somewhat recovered Edwin’s fireball giving them some distance, and the group behind them having been killed off, Harry hoped the assholes blocking their escape would come in to finish them off.

For a moment, this seemed to fail, as Arrows continued to fly all around him and Khalid as they stood rearguard as the others retreated to the small side room. But when the two of them reached it, Harry heard a loud shout of, “After them!”

As the enemy closed, Harry breathed a sigh of relief, ducking back behind the open door, while the others moved deeper into the room, upturning a table or taking position behind boxes, waiting to fire on anyone who entered if he and Khalid had to pull back. As they did, Harry waited, hidden behind the door, relying on his map, watching the red dots closing until they were almost on him. Then he shouted, “Honor Guard!” activating the technique as he would Cleave or one of his other abilities.

For a moment there was silence then the popping of displaced air, as four beings appeared around Harry. Harry first started to smile, then gaped, staring as behind him the rest of his party also looked on in group stupefaction.  For whatever Harry had been expecting, what he got wasn’t it.

Every side of him, or house elves riding large badgers appeared. And by large, Harry meant that their flanks almost came up to his thighs, they were by far the largest variety of badger Harry had ever encountered or even dreamed of. The fact that they were fully armored in plate mail and even had little helmets was also extremely strange. The house elves were not nearly as amazingly armored. They had frying pans, of all things and little tinpot helmets along with what looked like various types of brigandine armor and their various equipment actually didn’t look as good as the ones on the badgers.

Later, Minsc commented on this point at length, wondering about getting some of that armor for Boo. The others just wondered about the strangeness of it all.

The house elves looked around them for a moment, while the bandits, mercenaries, and their leader, a giant ork or troll named Tazok paused in their rush towards the beleaguered defenders. Spotting them, the elves all glared around at at the attackers, and as one shouted, “You will not harm Master Harry Potter Sir!”

Frying pans rose, directing their magic, and a unseen wave of magical force buffeted the attackers, hurling them into one another and away down the corridor.

The strange unison of the house else continued, shouted out “Atack Orlando!” The group formed into the strangest cavalry line ever seen and charged forwards, the badgers, snarling somewhat terrifying warcries.

Behind them, Harry’s party stared, slowly moving out of the room in order to watch the action. Harry turned to them, gesturing wordlessly in the direction of the screams and shouts, and now that he was listening, a few pleas for mercy. “That, that, that is most decidedly not what I thought it would be like.

“Nor I. Instead of ghostly soldiers perhaps facsimiles of soldiers we have met in our travels, instead we get little strange magic fellows riding badgers to war.  How utterly bizarre,” Edwin murmured, stroking his beard, his eyes calculating as he stared Harry. “Harry Potter, was it, instead of just Harry of Candlekeep? Why do I think there are many, many thinks about this moment that we should question?”

A very long explanation later, Jaheira began to tick points on her fingers, her eyebrow twitching, her foot gently tapping on the ground, causing her husband to shy away from her looking quite terrified, like someone looking at an avalanche coming towards them. While all around them, their attackers had been dealt with in extremely humiliating, if final, manners. “So let me get this straight. You and Imoen’s souls, minds, personalities, however you call it, are from another world. These house elf creatures come from there, were they serve as servants? And you arrived here through one of them helping you muck about with magic you did not understand?”

“And you have no idea why your skill selected them rather than more normal, prosaic aide. Though I will say that they were most effective,” Dynaheir murmured.

“Yep, that’s about the size of it,” Harry answered, gulping a bit at the look Jaheira was giving him.

“That’s about the size of it,” Jaheira repeated, her eyebrow twitching still more. Then she shook her head visibly reining in her temper. “I don’t know whether to be greatly annoyed that you kept this secret, or impressed were able to and that you knew none of us would believe it even with your Blood Mage abilities. Regardless, we will be talking more about all of this later. At the present,  I refuse to deal with this, as tired as I am.”

“How long will these creatures remain?” Viconia asked, having latched onto something entirely different than the others.

“Er…” Harry looked between the four house elves and their mounts than at his display, which showed a small timer. “It… it says another forty minutes.”

“Then I think we have more important things about the how these beasts arrived here,” Viconia demanded imperiously.

Moments later she and the other women were bathing in a area of the tunnel entrance carved out to look like a bath sunk into the floor. They all wore towels conjured by Harry as the house elves cleaned their hair, while nearby, the men ate some of the food the other two house elves were preparing for them. “Ah… that’s much better.”

“You, you honestly don’t care about where these creatures came from, or how Harry’s ability somehow pulled them to here?” Jaheira mumbled, trying to build up her annoyance at the sheer absurdity of what was going on.

“No. I just know I think I could get used to having those little creatures at our beck and call once a day. Couldn’t you?”

To that none of the girls had any reply, until the house elves disappeared, the technique ending, but leaving a much happier party behind them.