Petunia Evans, Tomb Raider
by Starfox5 (who is also the author of Harry Potter and the Lady Thief, Divided and Entwined and The Dark Lord Never Died) is a Harry Potter Fanfic in which Petunia Evans decides to become an archeologist and later aid Gringotts curse-breakers in raiding tombs while also raising her troublemaking nephew.
The fic is fairly short and fast-paced, one 7000-word chapter per year of the original novels.
Can also be found on Spacebattles here.
A sequel entitled Harry Potter and the Secret of Atlantis has been uploaded.
Unmarked spoilers below.
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This Work Has Examples Of The Following Tropes:
Petunia Evans, Tomb Raider
- Adaptational Attractiveness: Petunia was described as thin and horse-faced in canon, but is much more toned and attractive in this timeline due to her more active lifestyle. Just take a look.
- Adaptational Badass: Squibs, who here are able to perceive magic and are unaffected by muggle-repelling charms.
- Petunia, due to being a Composite Character with Lara Croft. Her Establishing Character Moment? Blowing up a Sand Drake with an RPG.
- Fleur Delacour can transform into a monstrous veela form, which allows her to fly and throw fireballs.
- Nymphadora Tonks is said to be able to take the form of any person and maintain it as long as necessary.
- Adaptational Heroism: Petunia who, while still retaining a nasty streak and a chip on her shoulder about magic, is a loving Parental Substitute for Harry.
- Gilderoy Lockhart at least knows more than a single spell and a somewhat capable fighter against the basilisk. He did steal credit for Petunia's work once and did cheat on her, but didn't Obliviate her. It is never mentioned if he Obliviated other people.
- Adaptational Sexuality: Luna and Ginny are gay (or at least bisexual) in this universe and they eventually end up as a couple.
- Alternate Universe Fic: In an Author's note, the author says the fic is set in one with a lot of changes:
- Squibs have somewhat higher magic ability than muggles; they are more magic-resistant, for one. Petunia is a squib, not a muggle.
- There was no hatred between Petunia and Lily, but the author mentioned that their relationship would be strained if Lily had survived purely due to her having magic.
- Petunia didn't marry Vernon, but instead went to boarding school and studied archaeology. She was eventually hired by Gringotts as a tomb raider who could both think outside the magic box and be immune to muggle-repelling charms.
- She was also a lover of a fellow Gringotts employee Gilderoy Lockhart. Until he cheated on her with a veela. And then published a fictionalized account of their work taking all the credit for himself and portraying Petunia as his plucky squib sidekick.
- Petunia and Harry became close friends with the Weasleys and Lovegoods long before Harry received a Hogwarts invitation, due to Petunia and Bill working together on multiple occasions.
- Insane Walburga Black filled Grimmauld Place with traps and monsters. Sirius had to hire Bill and Petunia to clear them out (and also so that Sirius had an excuse to get close to Harry and Petunia).
- Voldemort hid his Horcruxes in different places. All of Dumbledore's hypotheses proved wrong.
- Also, Voldemort liked Egypt, following the Tomb Raider theme.
- Voldemort hid Room of Requirement and filled it with hexes, traps and monsters. It was going to hold one of Horcruxes.
- Voldemort allows two other Horcruxes to come to life as younger versions of him, which contradicts his character as established in the books and as Dumbledore remembers him.
- Due to knowing Harry from early childhood Ginny does not suffer from her canon shyness in the early years around the boy who lived. There is also no sign of her having any attraction to him at all and instead she and Luna hook up around the fifth year (invoking Incompatible Orientation).
- Having discovered a passion for Tomb Raiding and adventure in general very early on, Ron is a lot more confident than his canon self and seems to have no fears of being overshadowed by his bigger brothers.
- Adventurer Archaeologist: Petunia. Harry, Ron and Hermione eventually follow in her footsteps after graduating.
- BFG: Petunia bought an RPG to use against a Sand Drake and later uses it at every opportunity. Gringotts even managed to get her a carry permit for this weapon.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Sandwalkers — dog-sized man-eating beetles of Sahara.
- Bigger on the Inside:
- Trapdoors opening into Extension Charms. Allow placing a trap on any floor or wall. Petunia had dealt with quite a few.
- Sirius's new car has several rooms inside.
- Blood Magic: A forbidden branch of Black Magic. Being a squib, Petunia's blood is magical enough to power a pre-made pattern capable of holding Voldemort for several hours.
- Cool Car: Beyond his Ford Anglia, Arthur Weasley also enchants a Range Rover to be an invisible Flying Car that's water and sound proof and Bigger on the Inside which he gifts to Petunia and Sirius. Later they add a machine gun too.
- Composite Character: Petunia is given some qualities of Lara Croft.
- Condescending Compassion: From Petunia's view, the Weasleys' pro-muggle views are this. She's rather insecure, expecting similar attitude from every mage that treats her well (which are few). Those fears diminish as mages start showing more respect after her fight with the basilisk.
- Crack Ship: Ginny and Luna. Bill can't say if his sister is serious or just screwing up with him. Largely averted later on as by the time of the Epilogue they are still together and adventuring as Wizarding naturalists. There are also some very heavy hints they are attracted to each other scattered throughout the earlier chapters.
- Crossover: Between Harry Potter and Tomb Raider
- Decomposite Character: Lara Croft. Her badassery and penchant for guns goes to Petunia while her aristocratic background goes to O.C. Stand-in Lena Kraft.
- Death by Adaptation:
- Several Death Eaters were killed during the Quidditch World Cup, including Lucius Malfoy. Possibly because Petunia and Sirius were there.
- On the other side, several Order members died trying to ambush Voldemort. This includes Kingsley Shacklebolt, who becomes the Minister of Magic in the original novels.
- Defictionalization: In-universe. Everybody thought Carpet Crocodiles were made up by Quibbler until Petunia and Bill killed one in Blacks' house. It may have been a spell created by Walburga Black to imitate the monster from Quibbler article. Nobody knows.
- Durable Deathtrap: Used commonly, but they are created by magical means.
- Evil Is Petty: Sirius's great-great-uncle once bought all the owls in Diagon Alley because a school rival said he was planning to buy one. He also tried to teach the owls to carry cursed letters to his enemies and it took five years for the owl population to recover from that.
- Gilligan Cut: Fairly dramatic for such a humorous story. Petunia discusses how wizards turned her house into a trap for enemies that may enter it searching for Harry. She expresses hope that maybe they'd just ignore it. Because she doesn't want to lose the home where she and then Harry grew up, even if that kills a few more Death Eaters. In the next paragraph she's standing by the ashes of her house. A wizard burned it without entering.
- Grave Robbing: Gringotts' Curse-Breakers, though they prefer to be called tomb raiders.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Petunia still carries a chip on her shoulder about magic and wizarding society, as they represent something to Harry that she could never give him, especially when the magical and vastly richer Sirius shows up. She slowly develops past this as the story progresses, and even gets together with Sirius.
- Happily Adopted: Harry by Petunia.
- I Am What I Am: After spending her story coming to terms with her being more than a squib, understanding that she isn't any less of a person or a parent to Harry, hooking up with Sirius and helping to destroy Voldemort for good, this is the lesson Petunia learns, encapsulated in the last lines of the story.She wasn’t just a squib. She was a woman. An archaeologist. A tomb raider. Holder of an Order of Merlin, First Class. An aunt. A wife. Some called her a hero. Some still called her an abomination - behind her back. None of them was correct.
She was Petunia Evans. Nothing less. - Internal Retcon: When The Masquerade was implemented, all historical records pointing towards magic were concealed as well, something that Petunia - as an archaeologist- finds personally insulting.
- Kill It with Fire: Petunia destroys an undead mummy with a molotov cocktail. Later she blinds the basilisk with phosphorus grenades.
- Lower-Deck Episode: The whole fic is this as it focuses on Petunia and she mainly interacts with adults: Bill, Dumbledore, Remus, Sirius.
- Lighter and Softer: Very much so.
- Voldemort and the Death Eaters never take over the Ministry, saving the lives of countless muggleborns.
- The number of casualities amongst the heroes are bordering zero, a notable Death by Adaptation being Kingsley.
- Magitek: Mentioned in passing. Petunia advises Arthur Weasley about Muggle devices when he enchants them or creates magic equivalents. Later he enchants Claymore mines and bouncing mines.
- Malevolent Architecture/Everything Trying to Kill You: Ancient Egyptian tombs of priests and wizards. Also Grimmauld Place, thanks to the late Mrs Black.
- The Matchmaker:
- Molly Weasley is trying to do this for her son Bill and Petunia. Petunia is not interested, especially as Bill is eleven years younger than her.
- Later Harry tries to matchmake her with Sirius. Petunia sees that as Sirius's ploy to visit Harry more often. She promises to stop objecting to his visits and gifts, but Sirius proposes to her anyway.
- Motive Misidentification: During Harry's fourth year, Petunia snaps at Sirius's advances towards her, thinking he was just trying to seduce her to be a bigger part of Harry's life, instead of thinking he actually is attracted to her, a squib. She apologizes for her outburst later.
- Muggle Born of Mages: One of the reasons Petunia declines advances of wizards — she doesn't want her children to depend on the father too much. Sirius insists mage-squib pairs usually produce mages.
- Muggles Do It Better: Not entirely, but Petunia's skills with muggle weaponry make her an asset to Gringotts' Curse-Breakers, and many an enemy wizard has fallen to her bullets and bombs. That said, she employs Bill's magic to replenish ammo, and uses potions and magic grenades.
- Mummy: Petunia and Bill have to torch an undead one during one of their expeditions.
- No-Sell: Squibs are unaffected by muggle-repelling charms.
- Our Dragons Are Different: Beyond the canon species, there's also Sand Drakes which were used to protect Egyptian tombs.
- Ragnarok Proof: Stone blocks that hold anti-intrusion charms are magically protected from eroding. This makes them stand out.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: All Blacks shared this attitude, fueled with inexplicable Arbitrarily Large Bank Account. Sirius uses it for good, casually solving every problem money can solve. And causing some angst for Petunia.
- Shout-Out: To the The Mummy (1999), when Petunia and Bill meet the undead mummy of a nameless necromancer.
- Also the canon books, as Hermione once took Harry to the London reptile house where he released a cobra constrictor that he planned to take with him to Brazil.
- Spared by the Adaptation: Most protagonists and a few less pleasant characters.
- Gilderoy Lockhart wasn't Obliviated and is still at large.
- Ginny Weasley wasn't involved with the cursed diary. Instead it was a background Slytherin. He lived.
- Sirius Black got a fair retrial during year 3 and didn't have to hide.
- It is speculated that after Quirrelmort spent a year teaching Defence Against Dark Arts Voldemort's curse got lifted. At least, Remus Lupin had no problems teaching several years straight.
- Cedric Diggory lived. He did not participate in the tournament (Harry was the only one) and Voldemort was resurrected in Egypt rather than Britain.
- Barty Crouch Jr. was still at large and nobody knew that he escaped by the end of year 4.
- Year 5 ended with Sirius Black still alive. There was no ambush in Department of Mysteries.
- Dumbledore lived. With Lucius Malfoy dead, Draco stopped participating in Death Eater activities. There was no attack on Hogwarts in year 6. And it were professional curse-breakers that went after Horcruxes.
- Hedwig and Moody lived. Every attempt to ambush Harry was an Order's clever trap, and usually Order suffered no losses.
- One of Weasley twins was severely injured when Death Eaters attacked The Burrow, but ultimately both survived. The attack also revealed Snape as Dumbledore's agent and he had to flee. He had no chance to duel Voldemort.
- The Elder wand is never mentioned. As far as everybody knows, Voldemort never tried to obtain it and Gellert Grindelwald is likely to have been spared.
- There was no Battle for Hogwarts and no piles of bodies.
- On the other hand, Peter Pettigrew went to prison after Black's retrial. See also Death by Adaptation above.
- Squee: Hermione's reaction when she meets Dr. Petunia Evans, a famous archeologist in the muggle world, for the first time.
- Underestimating Badassery: Voldemort thinks that a blood ritual to trap him won't work with the blood of a squib like Petunia. He is quickly proven wrong.
- Unperson: The Ancient Egyptians loved to do this to wizards who dabbled in Black Magic or to increase the legitimacy of a new Pharaoh.
Harry Potter and the Secret of Atlantis
- 0% Approval Rating: The Magical Ottoman Empire is despised in Russia, Southern Europe and the Balkans due to Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil which is sustained by kidnapping young foreign witches. Wizards and witches from these regions are very supportive of the Power Trio setting the Sultan's palace on fire.
- Absolute Xenophobe: Australia's Aboriginal wizards, and the Amazon native wizards. The latter turns out to be inaccurate, only because other wizards are Innocently Insensitive and unknowingly violate one of the tribe's taboos.
- Adaptational Badass: Gilderoy Lockhart is shown to be more explicitly competent here, being able to fight against multiple enemies and never being The Load.
- Addictive Magic: Subverted with The Dark Arts. They are not addictive but it's a not a magical compulsion- dark spells are simply easier to cast than regular spells and thus a Dark Arts practioneer can feel handicapped when refusing to use them in battle.
- Adventurer Archaeologist: Harry, Ron and Hermione, which results in them being outraged at proposal like destroying walls and Ron points out that pieces of ceramics (worthless to the wizarding world) reveal details about Atlantean civilization and ancient cultures.
- Atlantis: After graduating and becoming accredited Curse-Breakers, Harry, Hermione and Ron go investigate what they believed is a ruined Atlantean outpost in the Amazon Forest. In the sequel the Power Trio, with the aid of a Jungle Princess, travel the world in search of it.
- Awful Truth: As Power Trio slowly gathers information on Atlantis they come to realize that the Atlanteans are Precursors who created all the magical cretures through Blood Magic and Human Sacrifice. This is Played for Drama as Ari and Fleur don't like the implications of that, though Ari comes to accept it.
- Blood Knight: Ari, Ron's girlfriend. Her answer to people betraying the group is to simply kill them.
- Blood Magic: The Atlanteans used this kind of magic extensively to create nearly all the magical creatures that populate the Potterverse.
- The Charmer: Ron, bordering on The Casanova though he's still a Nice Guy. By the time of the Trio's adult Curse-Breaking adventures, he has had many girlfriends before Ari.
- Chased by Angry Natives: While searching for Atlantis in the Amazon Forest, the Power Trio find themselves under the attack from a tribe of over a hundred wizards and witches.
- Deal with the Devil: Hermione makes a Deal- with capital d- with a Jinn princess, Tahira.
- Doorstopper: The sequel, Secret of Atlantis as it now exceeds novel length and is as long as Goblet of Fire and Deathly Hallows.
- Dressed to Plunder: Wizards and witches in the Caribbean, due that magical pirates thrived with the implementation of The Masquerade due the collapse of wizarding colonialism in the New World.
- Evil Colonialist: The reason why Amazonian wizards are so hostile to foreigners is because of the many attempts to conquer the Amazon forest trying to find Atlantis.
- Generation Xerox: Harry decides to go into Curse-breaking.
- Hidden Atlantean Village: Harry and his friends find a long abandoned Atlantean village hidden inside a magically created cave inside a cave, which seem to be a failed Atlantean experiment at agriculture, in Jamaica.
- Hoist by His Own Petard:
- The implementation of The Masquerade ended Wizarding colonialism, as the newly created magical countries no longer had the resources of muggles, and thus incapable of maintaing control over the New World colonies.
- Atlantis was ended by a large scale magical sacrifice intended to protect it. It had already worked once, and the sacrifice that ended Atlantis was devised because the effects of the first were expiring, but with the second they were arrogant enough to sacrifice enslaved Muggles rather than volunteers from their own people, and the victims took control of the spell and wiped Atlantis out.
- I'm Dying, Please Take My MacGuffin: Al-jinn, an elder of a jinn clan, gives a magical Atlantean rod to Harry after he's struck with a Cutting Curse by mercenaries. It was a Secret Test of Character.
- MacGuffin: Atlantean artifacts, as they're the key to finding the lost continent.
- Particularly an enchanted skull which has Sealed Evil in a Can (for a given definition of evil anyway). The ghost, Ophas, proves instrumental in allowing the Power Trio to find Atlantis' location.
- Magic Wand: A great focus is given to the fact that wands were a Story-Breaker Power which resulted wizards to develop a jump in power level, as they now could cast dozens of spells at a time, instead of doing a lengthy, complex ritual.
- The Masquerade: The fic focuses on the impact of this trope in the New World, especially regarding Evil Colonialist tendencies of European wizards.
- Nubile Savage: Ari, an indigenous witch from the Amazon Forest, who is also a werejaguar and Ron's very Blood Knight girlfriend.
- O.C. Stand-in: Lena Kraft, a rival of Petunia, returns to play a more pivotal role both by creating problems for the Power Trio and also for the climax conflict in Atlantis.
- Our Monsters Are Different: The Author loves to spice up the already crowded Potterverse.
- Our Genies Are Different: They're called Jinn, have the power of Playing with Fire, Flight and immortality. They don't have Make a Wish powers but accept Deals.
- Our Liches Are Different: Horcruxes have their origins in Egyptian magic and a nameless necromancer was buried alive until Petunia and Bill found him and set him on fire. And of course, Voldemort also counts.
- Our Mermaids Are Different: Beyond the Selkies of the Hogwarts' Black Lake, there's also the standard beautiful mermaids of the Caribbean.
- Precursors: The Altanteans, which most evidence points as being the creators of most magical creatures in the Potterverse. They were magically advanced for their time, using magic for Mundane Utility while also at the same time lacking a Magic Wand which speed up the spellcasting process.
- The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: Magical Jamaica rebelled against Magical Britain in 1752 while the latter was dealing with a goblin rebellion. The British Ministry attempted to retake the island and would only give up in 1827 when it acknowledged the island's independence.
- Spared by the Adaptation: The number of casualities in 9/11 are far lower due to the anti-muggle spells on the top floors of the Twin Towers held by wizarding companies. The people in the airplanes still die, though.
- Story-Breaker Power: Magic Wands turn out to be this. Wandless magic is simply Awesome, but Impractical as, for instance, a wizard with a wand can create a full staircase with a single spell while wandless wizards have to cast multiple spells to create the staircase piece by piece. Plus wand-based magic has faster spellcasting time and more firepower.
- Smug Super: The Atlanteans were this, as they implemented a Super Breeding Program to allow the Mage Species to outnumber the muggles but this backfired as they could not believe that a muggle's soul was equal to a wizard's soul. Thus when sacrifing hundred of muggles, the muggles took over the spell and destroyed Atlantis.
