The Inquistor Carrow Chronicles is a Harry Potter and Warhammer 40,000 Crossover Fan Fiction series by littlewhitecat
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Where in canon Ron and the Weasley twins rescued Harry from the Dursleys at the beginning of his second year, in this series they were caught by Mrs. Weasley when they tried to sneak out. Desperate and dying, Harry Potter prayed to anything that might be listening for an escape from the Dursleys, and his magic answered...
Two months later, a discharge of magical energy deposits an eight-foot-tall unconscious giant at the edge of Hogwarts' Black Lake. This is Allesandor Darius Carrow, Inquisitor of His Most Holy Majesty's Ordo Malleus and brother of the Charnel Guard chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. Though Inquisitor Carrow used to be Harry James Potter, nearly three centuries of life in the most grimdark cosmology imaginable has transformed him utterly.
The first story is Inquisitor Carrow and the GodEmperorless Heathens, followed by Inquisitor Carrow and the Bureaucracy of Failure, Inquisitor Carrow and the Tournament of Tribulations and Inquisitor Carrow and the Vigilantes Vague. However, the author has commented how dissatisfied he was with the final draft of Vigilantes Vague and rewrote it as Inquisitor Carrow and the Phoenix Fiasco, while removing the older version. It's also been confirmed that the followup to Phoenix Fiasco will be the final part of the saga, plus a prequel set in the Imperium.
This Fan Fiction contains examples of:
- The Alcoholic: Following the revelation of how truly powerless he is, Fudge crawls into the bottle.
- All-Powerful Bystander: The God-Emperor of Mankind. In addition to vast physical strength and psychic power that makes Carrow look like a squib, he could halt all Carrow's schemes at any time, just by telling him to do so. However, he has sworn to himself not to interfere... for now, at any rate. He directly enters the frame in chapter 9 of "Tournament of Tribulations" to save Carrow's life after he gets skewered by a Daemon.
- Alone in a Crowd: As powerful as Carrow might be, physically and magically, he's desperately lonely without other Astartes. This is one of the main reasons the Emperor, who would know the feeling, agrees to start the program early.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:"Well of course we've got a problem," Snape snarled, "we've got a room full of human offal and no DADA teacher," he gesticulated wildly, "the perpetrator is probably loose in the school, and worst of all, I'm probably going to have to cover the bloody man's classes!"
- Beyond the Impossible: Carrow does something which is canonically impossible; when faced with one hundred dementors, he doesn't bother with any kind of Patronus to make them go away. He just wipes them all out with a single blast.
- Black Hole Sue: In-Universe and out, besides being insanely powerful by M2 standards (see Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond below), Carrow is also infectious. Virtually anyone who interacts with him for a prolonged period of time is gradually changed into someone suitable for M41. By the time of Phoenix Fiasco, someone at the R&D firm Carrow founded has mechadendrites installed and mentions the possibility of getting another arm implanted (even though she already has three), with no one finding this odd.
- Bling of War: Carrow insists on having as many weapons and vehicles around him as possible heavily gilded, to the exasperation of his publicists and engineers. When Faulks has to get his teeth fixed, Carrow has them replaced with scrollwork-laden gold prostheses, and the Aquila scientists beg the God-Emperor to please suggest a different color scheme other than black and gold for their Mars rocket.
- The City Narrows: Knockturn Alley, as per canon. Fudge goes there in an attempt to hire the disgraced Glossop son as either a thug or an assassin to deal with Faulks, and is warned in polite but very low and very firm tones not to return. His rattiest cloak is seen as gaudy and expensive there.
- Cool Plane: Big Bertha (AKA Hammer of Justice), built by Aquila Industries (the company Carrow created to introduce 41st millennium tech to present-day Earth). It's implied to be as close to a Thunderhawk as the engineers managed, and when Carrow gives her a test flight without authorization it amazes everyone by taking off vertically when everyone expected it to not fly at all (why the British authorities refused said authorization) before reaching the Mir Space Station, returning to Britain and outflying the fighter complement of a carrier.
- Crapsaccharine World: Wizarding Britain reaches such foul depths of heaping abuse, crime and misery upon muggleborns and even poor purebloods that even Rita Skeeter morphs into an Intrepid Reporter determined to expose and quash the rot stemming from a few rich pureblood families.
- Distant Reaction Shot: In the first chapter, a particle physics professor in Switzerland notices unusual data when Harry is sent nearly forty millennia into the future and Carrow is sent back the same distance to England. His thoughts on the matter are "Hmm, that was strange" the first time it happens and "Oh, back again" the second time.
- Draco in Leather Pants: Snape, In-Universe, much to his frustration. Snape's carefully cultivated aura of evilness just evaporates in the presence of Carrow's quintessential grimdarkness. Before he knows where he's at he's getting a Weasley sweater and Weasley hugs, and when he's brought up on the old Death Eater charges half of Gryffindor volunteers to testify on his behalf.
- Driven to Suicide: One of the twenty Space Marines created by the Emperor's reverse-engineering wasn't able to handle the extreme transformation the program forced upon him, and threw himself head first down a height of around thirty feet, cracking his skull.
- Dystopia Is Hard: The horrified Fudge learns all too late that people don't exactly dislike little things he now has to deal with in the Ministry, like not having to pay bribes when dropping their taxes, having some actual laboral security, and actually demanding competence in the workplace over blood relations.
- Early-Bird Cameo: The first chapter makes note of a particle physics professor who notices unusual data when Harry/Carrow are transported through time. He isn't referenced again for another six chapters, at which point it's revealed that he's the present-day version of the God-Emperor of Mankind.
- Emperor Scientist: The God-Emperor of Mankind. He isn't an emperor yet, but he works at CERN and is experimenting with artificial gravity.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Just after arriving back at the 20th century, Carrow's left at a loss as to how to communicate with the God-Emperor of Mankind. Hermione suggests to write him a letter, and Carrow realizes that he always treated his reports as personal missives to the Emperor, so writing another one shouldn't be any different.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep":
- The narration always refers to the God-Emperor of Mankind as "the God-Emperor of Mankind", or just "The God-Emperor". Prior to the reveal, however, he was "a professor of particle physics".
- Also, Dumbledore's letters to him address him as "Dear Mr. God-Emperor".
- Though he apparently goes by Jon Schmidt to his human colleagues.
- Evil Is Not a Toy: Voldemort, desperate, is forced to summon a Daemon against Carrow. It's mentioned that as powerful and nasty as Voldemort is, this is an unspeakably stupid act.
- Fan Convention: The Emperor mentions he likes going to these, having once cosplayed as He-Man and met Leonard Nimoy, who touched his prized mug.
- Fate Worse than Death: Fudge's current career. He's lost enormous amounts of power, reducing him to a puppet figure for Carrow, his main backers have been killed, his attempts to kill Faulks have met with miserable failure and given Carrow more ammo against the Ministry, and he's been shown that should he even think of pulling the same trick again, he'll be simply converted into an automated servitor under Carrow's command.
- The Fellowship Has Ended: After the death of its most senior member, the vampire coven working with Carrow is dissolved.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: Carrow is from the 41st millennium and used to its grim darkness. He's now in the 2nd millennium, a much different and nicer time whose chronicles have become fragmentary by the 41st Millennium, and dealing with the Wizarding World, that didn't leave "a sidenote of a sidenote" in history.
- Fluffy Tamer:
- Early in Heathens, Carrow is returning from a trip down Knockturn Alley when he gets jumped by a starving (and apparently mentally disabled) vampire. His thoughts can roughly be rendered as, "Awww, how cute. I think I'll keep her as a pet".
- In the early chapters of Bureaucracy, Carrow rescues a Siberian tiger cub from some cultists. He names her Artemis and also keeps her as a pet.
- Forced to Watch: After bankrolling a miserably failed attempt to attack Carrow's offices, Fudge is caught by Faulks, restrained, and made to see as Caspian Glossop is converted into an automated Servitor, and warned in no uncertain terms that the next time he tries something funny, that will be his fate.
- Friend in the Black Market: Snape keeps a small, very private business furnishing couples with illegal fertility and healing potions.
- Future Imperfect: While for the most part Carrow sticks to the ethics and values of M41's Imperium, he's very annoyed with the Mechanicus for ritualizing a lot of humanity's knowledge, which he realizes when he visits a normal school and sticks around to solve some math problems.
- Hellfire: Fiendfyre appears to be the closest analogue to Carrow's warp-fire in conventional wizardry.
- Humble Hero: In his own way, Carrow is this. When Ginny Weasley drops in exhaustion after being possessed by Voldemort's diary, Carrow immediately hands her to Snape, who books it to the infirmary while Carrow rips Voldemort apart. At the end, he gives all the credit for saving Ginny to Snape, saying that at best he only stuck around for cleanup.
- Giant Spider: In return for taking Carrow to Diagon Alley, Snape requests an acromantula delivered to his feet. Carrow follows Snape's instructions to the letter, bringing a live acromantula to breakfast at Hogwarts and killing it in front of Snape, who's delighted by it, unlike the students. Later Carrow brings an acromantula into the DADA classroom to train his students.
- Godzilla Threshold:
- Carrow's presence is what drove Voldemort to use the daemon-possessed collar.
- On a more humorous note, the Centaurs view contacting the God-Emperor to ask him to please tell Carrow to leave them alone as this.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Whispers of one begin circulating in Phoenix Fiasco - a strange cult leader who uses the alchemical symbol of Saturn as her emblem. Everyone who's heard or dealt with her is terrified, calling her a lunatic.
- Hidden Depths: Most people initially see Carrow as a dumb monster, possibly one with good intentions. Then they get caught by surprise by his intelligence, extreme cunning, and surprising talent as a painter and hyper-realistic sculptor.
- I'll Kill You!: An extremely rare use in which this trope is, entirely unironically, used to comfort someone. After Ginny Weasley is released from the diary's clutches, she despairs over the possibility of falling under the influence of something as horrible. Carrow gently reassures her he'll kill her himself if that happens ever again.
- Morton's Fork: A humorous variation. For his first communication with Carrow, the God-Emperor sends him a postcard of The Adoration of the Magi by Peter Paul Rubens. He explodes in fury after several minutes of flipping the card, unable to decide what to do with it between the sacred contents and the heretical image.
- Mundane Solution: After several attempts to banish Binns fail (including one that almost summons a daemon), Ron suggests that they just tell Binns that he's dead and it's time for him to move on. It works.
- Mundane Utility:
- After creating an enormous antigravity magnet, the God-Emperor uses it as a coaster when he's not working. And then when he uses a random pencil as a wand (under the logic that it has a graphite core coated in wood), he still uses it as a pencil that conveniently never needs sharpening.
- After receiving designs for miniature fusion reactors, some researchers at Aquila Industries use the first prototype on the coffee machine.
- Nepotism: Defied. Fudge's horrified when he hears the son of a pureblood Ministry worker was tossed out after trying to apply for a job without even the most basic of competence and making a scene. He immediately goes to the worker and promises him his son will get a job, only for the man to adamantly refuse, since said son has proved himself a failure in the wake of Carrow's reforms.
- No Name Given: The mysterious witch spreading dangerous magic rituals is left unnamed as Carrow captures her. The only important bit about her is that her main spellbook is a Chaos-tainted artifact.
- Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond:
- Inquisitor Carrow is barely special by 40k standards: he's a space marine serving as inquisitor attached to the Ordo Malleus, and the only really strange thing is that he also has an understanding of technology. For HP standards, he's practically invincible, and the only time he's actually in trouble is when he has to fight the Daemon possessing Voldemort without Powered Armor.
- Lampshaded when a couple missions bring him to Bosnia during the civil war: he defeats a World War II-vintage tank hand-to-hand while criticizing its thin armour and small main gun compared to the Imperial standard, has trouble recognizing a British FV432 deployed with the UN force as an armoured personnel carrier due the ridiculously weak armour and weapons compared to the Imperial Guard standard and what he used to ride in (and accidentally left a hand print in the armour), and believes the collateral damage of his escapades wouldn't be recognized as anything more than the result of the fighting between the local factions until he's explained otherwise.
- The technologies Carrow (and the Emperor) are building are either absolutely normal for the 41st millennium or crude copies thereof... And absolutely overpowered for modern standards. Even the friggin' lasgun.
- No-Sell: In Carrow's first year, Lucius Malfoy charges Snape with the job of poisoning Carrow. He starts with old favorites like belladonna and monkshood, to no effect. He progresses to using arsenic and cyanide, which only makes Carrow chuckle and chide him for lack of imagination. By this time, professionally furious, he goes on to "poison" him with more exotic toxins, culminating with Mordred's Breath, a venom so potent it basically melts the victim's muscles in mere seconds. When Carrow's response is to nurse a case of indigestion measuring around ten seconds, Snape, who's already very frustrated and unwilling to spend more money on useless poison, outright tells Malfoy that if he wants him to keep trying, he's welcome to pay for the powdered manticore claws.
- Off the Rails: In the timeline that produced Inquisitor Carrow, the Wizarding World died with none the wiser. In this one, the God-Emperor of Mankind has been made aware of its existence and the colossal amount of possibilities it offers him in countless areas of expertise. Carrow's Aquila Industries is busily bringing the technology of the 41st millennium to M2, while Voldemort's steady decay and the destruction of his entire network is both leaving him with very few and very dangerous cards to play, and freeing up space for other monsters in the dark to fill the niche. The Centaurs are particularly aghast at the early rise of the God-Emperor of Mankind.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Natasha can walk in daylight, and also appears to be mentally disabled. It's unclear whether these two traits are connected, but neither applies to her kin.
- Pass the Popcorn: When Carrow gets attacked by a tank in Yugoslavia, his Acolytes take bets on how long it will take him to disable the tank and kill everyone in it.
- Powered Armor: Carrow's Space Marine armor.
- The God-Emperor later made his own, though much less effective due to the lack of many technologies and materials.
- Really 700 Years Old: Dumbledore's attempts to get Carrow to reconnect to his life as Harry Potter constantly run into the problem that Carrow is about 297 years old, so his first year at Hogwarts ended centuries ago for him though it was only months ago for everyone else.
- Running Gag: A few:
- Neville randomly transforming in a grizzly;
- The rain of rubber ducks in Hogwarts.
- People being terrified by Carrow when they first meet him;
- People expecting Carrow to be a wimp and being even more terrified when they finally see him;
- People underestimating Carrow and his entourage's combat abilities.
- Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up: Caspian Glossop, for Faulks. He leads a group of Knockturn malcontents to attack Carrow's offices, intending to take out as much as they can, and if possible, kill Faulks. The attack is a sound failure and Faulks picks Glossop amid the wreckage to personally interrogate him.
- Sitcom Archnemesis: Widow Weber is the God-Emperor's annoying neighbor, who bangs on the ceiling whenever his experiments cause too much noise.
- Sole Survivor: Snape, of the Death Eaters.
- The Stool Pigeon: Snape, of the Whistleblower Wilson variety. Initially unaware of the depths of Augustus Crabbe's depravity, when Dumbledore confronts him, he immediately produces an extensive list of potions masters, suppliers and clients who might be involved in his horrifying actions.
- Strongly Worded Letter: The Centaurs, fed up with Carrow, send a message to the God-Emperor via Snape to convince the big idiot to leave them alone.
- Super-Soldier: Carrow is a Space Marine, it comes with the qualification. In The Phoenix Fiasco the God-Emperor reveals to Faulks he has started the Astartes Program early after reverse-engineering it from Carrow, with Cedric Diggory being among the first twenty to be changed. The last chapter of Phoenix Fiasco reveals he survived the program to completion.
- Tank Goodness:
- Aquila Industries is building one armed with a railgun and powered by a fusion reactor.
- Subverted by the T-54 Carrow faces in Bosnia: he defeats it in melee combat while comparing it unfavourably to what goes around in the 41st millennium. To be fair, even a modern MBT at a military expo (possibly an M1A1 Abrams, going by the description) fell short of the 41st millennium tanks...
- It's also worth noting that with a Power Sword and Space Marine Powered Armor, Carrow could probably defeat an 41st millenium tank in melee combat.
- Tome of Eldritch Lore: Carrow writes up one as a present for Hermione. He later finds a Chaos-tainted tome with the mysterious witch he'd been pursuing.
- Training from Hell: How Carrow teaches Defense Against the Dark Arts. He brings in an adolescent acromantula for each student to kill using a knife (not a wand) as a special treat to all of his classes, though he's kind enough to maim the giant spiders for the first years.
- Unwanted Gift Plot: Snape suffers from this. It began with the Acromantula he demanded from Carrow, who later on kept on gifting rare ingredients to Snape, never minding the danger or legality of these items.
- Villainous Fashion Sense: Carrow. He attends the opening of the Tri-Wizard Tournament dressed in black leather, gold braid, and a werewolf pelt, followed by a swarm of flying skulls. Karkaroff's reaction is "And people complained about the Dark Lord?!"
- One of Carrow's engineers is also fed up with his usual black and gold color scheme, to the point of asking the God-Emperor of Mankind to suggest a different one.
- War Is Glorious: Carrow's mentality in regards to weapons design; everything is designed to exalt war to the point his engineers have to tone his proposed presentations for arms fairs so they won't get kicked out for being so absurdly pro-war.
- Wide-Eyed Idealist: To Carrow's utter shock, The Emperor is this.
- The Worf Effect: There is a great scene near the end of Bureaucracy where Sirius Black warns Carrow that if he's not careful someone like Fenrir Grayback would come after him. A ferociously grinning Carrow prompts his secretary with Greyback's name, only for him to reply in a deadpan tone that Carrow had actually already killed Fenrir during a minor skirmish a few chapters back. Annoyed, Carrow mumbles how pathetic the werewolf was.
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Snape briefly chastises himself over not being of more use against Voldemort in God-Emperorless Heathens, but Carrow reassures him that the fact he stopped to pull Ginny Weasley out of the fight, allowing him to later determine she's free of taint and ensuring her survival, and still has enough fortitude to go on, puts him head and shoulders over many soldiers he's known.
