I did, in fact, read your wonderful story from start to finish in one go. It was very amusing, though at some times I wondered if some amusing bit I was reading was relevant to the plot. That's fine with me if it was not, but I get the feeling that seemingly irrelevant things turn out to be relevant later on in part 2. Your Defense professor was really interesting and good. I find myself wondering if he was someone who "caught a snitch" seeing as someone would undoubtedly mention him in the years after and his poster did not exist in cannon. His reactions seem a bit too genuine for him to have known much about UK Wizards from personal experience. Maybe he caught it on his first trip to the UK or something...
I like that you "normalize" everyone. Slytherins are real kids, not a nest of evil snakes and mini death nibblers. You illustrate how many people cultivate their public image. It's nice to see the side of Snape that we don't see in cannon. In cannon we see a horrible vindictive jerk who realistically would have too many enemies to keep his job. Honestly if I could place myself in the Hogwarts Universe, I would tip of Skeeter to sit in one one of his classes so she could get too much shit in the fan for Dumbledore to clean up.
I think Tonks would have had a bit more emotional upheaval from the "loss" of her son from the original time line, but I suppose it is hard to predict how someone would really deal with a situation like this.
I'm not sure why Remus is reacting the way he is. He seemed eager to make up with Sirius in Cannon, but did have a bit of a "running away" and "avoidance" problem. It's hard to really get a handle on cannon Remus in regards to his motives and how he would react. In some ways it seems as though he may have also caught a snitch, but it also seems like he may not have.
Maybe I just did read it carefully enough, but distribution of the snitches sees vague. Did people have to catch one twice, once in the future and once to where they were sent, to be sent back? I understand that part of it was to use a paradox to accomplish the goal, but I'm not sure how. I'm also curious how that time dust got under the bed and there seemed to be no snitch catching involved in the future, but he was still holding one when he got to the past. I don't see too much evidence of other time travelers. I thought of the possibility of some time travelers showing up to realize that things had already changed from what they remembered ( like Amelia Bones coming back to a point after she had participated in the Sirius Black trial), but I'm not sure that would be possible.
I very much look forward to part 2. maybe I can get some more ideas on who caught a snitch. I think that trunk maker might have, but it's also just as likely he didn't. I also think Harry could have, but I don't think you will write that. We shall see! :D
Author's response
Thank you so much for both reading and reviewing! I really, really appreciate it.
A couple explanations: I hate to discourage wild speculation, but the snitches are not supposed to be a mystery to the reader in any way, other than who it will be when the time comes. Right now only Tonks and Oren are time travelers, I only plan to have two more, their character studies are already mostly written (one of the was in fact the first thing I wrote for this story ever, and it will probably end up as chapter 60 or something). I will probably space them out much like I did Tonks and Oren -- in the summer, at least a month apart. One of those will be a canon character, one will not. Feel free to speculate about who it will be in the meantime. :)
Also, yes, this was planned as a multi-year work. I just didn't expect year 1 to be so involved!
The snitches work by having one on each end of the transfer of consciousness. Canon-timeline characters get one, and their post-snitch-creation, now AU younger selves catch another. The consciousness of the first displaces that of the second, so they don't remember their younger selves catching the snitch. For Tonks that was the only thing that had changed, so it wasn't a big deal, but later arrivals will have greater and greater divergences. Anything beyond what I explained in chapter 3 should probably be written off as "this is a MacGuffin" and not overthought, at least up until the next snitch scene.
The snitch under the bed in Oren's chapter had simply anticipated where he would be and flown in an open window. It had many years in which to do this.
As to Tonks, I figure she _did_ have that emotional upheaval, and I just haven't written about it. Not strategically, though -- there are an infinite number of things unwritten. :)
With Remus, a lot of the problem is simply that canon Remus is light on details, and a lot of gap filling has to happen. I am also not being super-paranoid about details that can only be gotten by multiple close re-reading the books. But yeah, Remus is a very difficult character.
I really appreciate the compliments about Eeles. I will be sad to see him go at the end of the year, and will probably contrive to at least make him plot-relevant for longer (I already have some plans).
Thanks for saying I normalize everyone -- I try really hard at that. Characters might be deluded or insane, or might not share the values of other characters, but I hate writing someone whose head I can't get into at all.
As to things that don't seem relevant yet, sometimes it's just that I'm not beating the reader over the head with something. For example, one of the things I think the Weasley twins are "about" in both canon and my story is beating swords into plowshares and vice versa, and the ethical implications of that for those who try to "help" them. That is supposed to be a long, slow, morally grey aspect of the storyline.
Another reason is that I try to make a lot of things be like Kettleburn's squirrel -- seemingly reasonable, ordinary steps, that only seem questionable in hindsight once someone is actually groping Professor McGonagall.
Some things are done purely for characterization, so that I don't have to do that later when I need the character to be able to do things without my having to write all sorts of extraneous stuff.
And a few things are me writing a check to myself concerning what readers will tolerate later in the story. E.g. chapter 2 is there to make it easier for me to write explicit things later. Those _will_ happen -- I have already written some.
I have in fact written about 42k words of Part II already, and about 5k of what I guess will be Part III (those aren't typos -- that's nearly half again what is already posted). Some of it is, I think, really good (and really strange), but I'm not satisfied enough with my editing to post any of it yet.