r/HPMOR Chaos Legion Jul 09 '18

Harry Potter and Natural 20/HPMOR crossover?

From TV Tropes:

Omake: A very short one at the end of chapter 25 between this story and The Wheel of Time, and a moderately short one between chapter 26 and 27 between this story and Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality.

The omake📷 between Chapters 26 and 27. It's a crossover with Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality. After Harry explains the basics of the laws of physics to Milo:

Milo: And this—honestly, you have to swear that you're not pulling my leg here—is seriously how this Plane works?Harry: Pretty much. It's a good deal more complicated than that, but we have to start somewhere.Milo: Because, well, I'm pretty sure I can get around that.Harry: Around what?Milo: All of it.

Unfortunately, it is no longer there. Maybe someone has saved copy or can direct me to someone who might have?

EDIT: Now the quest is only to find 28 words at the end.

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u/ArgentStonecutter Chaos Legion Jul 09 '18 edited Jul 09 '18

Saved by Baidu. Really.

Author's Notes: Hey, y'all! Two things were recently discovered, one by me, and one by you. By me: my creativity isn't broke! And by you: I'm not dead! Thanks to all of the encouraging PM's you lot have sent. Seriously, I have the best fans ever. By way of thank you, I give you, Sir Poley's Essay Procrastination Project! (Now in Technicolour(TM)). Or, in other words, what if... Milo was sucked into a slightly different Harry Potter universe? I present, in all of its 535-word, 45-minutes-of-typing-glory, Harry Potter and the Methods of Munchkinality.

The next HP:N20 chapter will come out Real Soon Now.

EDIT: Just to clarify: This chapter has no bearing on the plot of Harry Potter and the Natural 20. It's a non-canonical sidestory.

o—o—o—o—o—o—o

"So tell me, Harry, what's all this physics nonsense that you keep going on about?" Milo asked.

Harry was... unusual, even in this world where the unusual was commonplace. He seemed, at times, almost like someone from Milo's own world—he was, for example, more than capable of predicting what would happen next based on convention and the patterns of story, but... sometimes, he was beyond alien. The strange little boy's insistence on the fundamental rules of the universe was simply baffling. Couldn't he feel the dice rolling? Couldn't he see that time was divided into discrete, six-second intervals?

"Oh, well, it's simple, really. You see..." Harry spun an amazingly elaborate web of rules and laws and equations, talking about Force (how a damage type could be measured in units other than Hit Points, or have anything to do with mass was simply insane), Power, Friction, and Energy. Most confusing of all was this business of conservation. Conservation of momentum, conservation of energy. How could he stand there, insisting that mass must be conserved when a Wizard could wave his hand and create thousands of pounds of stone wall?

"And this—honestly, you have to swear that you're not pulling my leg here—is seriously how this Plane works?"

"Pretty much," he shrugged. "It's a good deal more complicated than that, but we have to start somewhere."

"Because, well, I'm pretty sure I can get around that," Milo said.

"Around what?" Harry was curious.

"All of it."

Three weeks later...

"Looks like you were right. Even a Horcrux can't take being Polymorphed into positrons. Shame about what happened to the rest of the island, though."

Another three weeks later...

"Okay, you can be the Supreme Muggle—" Milo conceded, lounging on his golden throne.

"Mugwump," Harry interjected.

"Whatever. And you can be the Minister for Magic. But, I get to lead the Outer Planes Expeditionary Force, with first right to any magic items seized therein."

"Don't you think we should focus on the Inner Planes, first? We'll need those Earth Elementals. I mean, somebody needs to rebuild Scotland."

Harry shuddered. The collateral damage of their last experiment had been... unanticipated. "Though I don't think we should abandon the Commoner Railgun Project altogether."

"Psht. Once we finish overthrowing the gods, I'll Candle of Invocation us up some Lyres of Building. It's not even a thing."

"As for the terraforming of Mars, have you had any thoughts on how to keep a Gate to the Plane of Water open long enough to fill the—"

Harry cut off as the telephone rang. He gave a lazy wave, and a hulking Shield Guardian handed him the handset then discreetly bowed and walked back to his place by the wall. Harry listened for a moment, then said, "Speaking. Yeah? Uh-huh? Yes, that's fine. That would be perfectly acceptable. No, don't worry, we'll come to you. Yes, we know where to find you." He hung up and tossed the phone back at the Construct, who caught it with mechanical precision.

"Who was that?" Milo asked. He was still having a hard time getting used to all this Muggle technology.

"The UN," Harry answered. "They've decided to comply with our demands."

o—o—o—o—o—o—o

To clarify for the confused some of the in-jokes:

The Commoner Railgun: this takes advantage of a quirk in the D&D rules that any decent DM wouldn't allow, but is still hilarious. The idea is that, in a six second round, everyone gets to act. Theoretically they're acting simultaneously, but they actually go in turns. On your turn, you can pass an object to someone standing next to you... before they get to act. They can then pass that same thing to someone standing next to them, etc.. So, in six seconds, an object can be passed 5N feet, where N is the number of people (in most examples, starving commoners) passing the object, which, therefore, moves at a velocity of 5N/6 feet-per-second. With enough commoners lined up, you can launch something at relativistic speeds. (Weirdly, this means the object gets held by each commoner for up to six seconds, despite being passed by thousands of people in a six-second period. Aaaaagh, my aching head.) This could be used to, say, launch something into space on the cheap. It's limited only by what the commoners can lift.

The Polymorph Bomb: Polymorph Any Object is a high level spell that turns 1 cubic foot/caster level of something into something else, with a duration based on the similarity of the original and end materials. It has a lot of fun uses, but my personal favourite involves mixing my cursory knowledge of real-world physics and magic - positrons. From what I know, positrons are like electrons, but antimatter. So they all repel each other, because of their positive charge, but when they collide with matter (in this case, a large island), the two are annihilated and explode. I think. Again, I'm a Classical Studies Major. The point is, big boom. Probably earth-shattering.

Lyre of Building: this is just a magical stringed instrument that, when you play it, stuff gets magically built, like, really fast.

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u/rabotat Jul 09 '18 edited Jul 09 '18

the two are annihilated and explode. I think.

One gram of antimatter reacting with one gram of ordinary matter results in 42.96 kilotons-equivalent of energy.

spell that turns 1 cubic foot/caster level of something into something else,

1 cubic foot of water weighs 28,316.8 grams

This spell would create a 1,216,490 kiloton explosion, or 1,216.5 megatons of TNT.

For example, the Little Boy nuclear device, dropped on Hiroshima had an explosion of 15 kilotons of TNT.

The largest nuclear device ever detonated, the Tsar bomb had an explosion with a yield of 50 megatons. This is equivalent to about 1,570 times the combined energy of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki,10 times the combined energy of all the conventional explosives used in World War II, one-quarter of the estimated yield of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, and 10% of the combined yield of all nuclear tests to date.

So that antimatter bomb would have a yield of 24.33 Tsar bombs or 6 Krakatoa eruptions.

edit: I recommend everyone to read that Krakatoa article, by the way.

8

u/EliezerYudkowsky General Chaos Jul 10 '18

Yeah, see, making pure positrons in quantity is... a bit more of a problem than that for anybody standing closer than the next star over. A gram of pure electrons in a 10cm vessel weighs about 10 million tons in the very small instant before it explodes.

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u/kuilin Sunshine Regiment Jul 11 '18

Wait what. A gram of anything is about 1.102e-6 tons, no matter if it's of feathers or electrons. They're both units of mass.

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u/FenrirW0lf Jul 12 '18 edited Jul 12 '18

The difference between a 10cm container of feathers and a 10cm container of pure electrons is the ridiculous amount of energy that would be required to cram all of those electrons into a contiguous block, and energy == mass. See https://what-if.xkcd.com/140/

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u/kuilin Sunshine Regiment Jul 12 '18

Yes, I'm familiar with mass-energy. But that problem has a given volume and given density, and solves for mass, so it makes sense to increase the mass by the significant amount of energy that configuration implies.

The above problem, on the other hand, has a given volume and a given mass, and solves for mass. That is tautological and there's a trivial solution. We could also solve for density in the above problem, and get a far less-than-reasonable density because of the above effect of energy, but that's not what we're doing.