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A Massive Multiplayer Crossover by Nimbus Llewelyn that started on the What If? that The Mighty Thor had been incarnated as James Potter, as a first run on that humility thing. Oh, and after he died, he went mad with grief and Odin had to wipe his memories. Then those memories were restored by Loki in Harry Potter's third year at Hogwarts.

The result is a world of strange hijinks, constant snarking, lots of badassery, evil plots, lots of characters, creepy super zombies lead by an even creepier necromancer, and Loki's incredible coffee making skills. The sequel piles on more weirdness. While the premise of Harry turning out to be the son of a Norse god and being given sudden superpowers is a typical Marty Stu setup, the story avoids becoming Wish-Fulfillment by exploring the issues it causes both for him and the wider world. The story also has a lot of Worldbuilding on a large scale.

The author has alternately stated that the entire series is mapped out beforehand, or that he changes his mind at the last minute. He cites as inspiration Smallville and X-Men: Evolution, which similarly start with a youth discovering their powers and the issues that comes with them, and The Last Son series and SmallvilleX: Evolution. He's also friends with the authors of The Magic of Torchwood and De-Aged, crediting the former as a key beta/source of advice and the latter as an invaluable source of scientific expertise.

In short: A patchwork Mega Crossover that is both Denser and Wackier and Darker and Edgier than the original material.

Has five instalments so far:

  • Book 1: Child of the Storm, which starts it all with Harry discovering his heritage and, essentially, trying very hard not to die as a lot of people try just as hard to kill him, while discovering new powers and making new friends, all while HYDRA ascend, the Darkhold whispers and everyone dances on the puppet strings of the Sorcerer Supreme... It is Complete, and can also be found on AO3.
  • Book 1.5: Chaos Reigns, is a side story set just prior to chapters 59 and 60, alternately from the POV of Harry Dresden and Wanda Maximoff, as they handle an incursion by the demonic N'Garai. It is Complete, and can also be found on AO3.
  • Book 2: Ghosts of the Past, follows on from the Final Battle of Child of the Storm with Harry starting to assert himself as a Power in his own right, but one still vulnerable thanks to his nature as a Glass Cannon and his inexperience, and dealing with the reverberations of the events of the previous book. Meanwhile, a number of separate villains are all, for one reason or another, out to either control him or to destroy him. It is Complete. The first (Prelude), second (Forever Red) and third (Recovery) arcs can also be found on AO3 note 
  • Book 2.5: Unfinished Business, is a side story in the vein of Chaos Reigns, similarly set with a Switching P.O.V. (this time, initially Carol and Peter's), around chapter 62-65 of Ghosts, when on a school trip to New Orleans, some very particular ghosts come back to haunt them... It is Complete.
  • Book 3: The Phoenix and the Serpent follows straight on from Ghosts (it was originally the second half of that book), and leads into the second half of Harry's 4th year, as everything gathers pace towards a cataclysmic finale, to teach Harry one final lesson. Everything has its time. And everything ends. It is Ongoing.
  • Book 3.5: COS: Short Stories and Other Whims is a series of interquels, one-shots, snapshots, and snippets, including prompt responses and things that don't fit in the main story. It's set from Ghosts onwards. It is ongoing.

Has also gained a certain amount of recognition beyond this page and recommendations on this site:

  • An incomplete reading, the first several chapters of which can be found here.
  • It is also being translated into Russian.
  • It also has a Discord - per Word of God, it's relatively easy to find because he uses the same penname everywhere.


Child of the Storm contains examples of the following tropes:

Ghosts of the Past contains examples of the following tropes (Spoilers for Child of the Storm):

The Phoenix and the Serpent contains examples of the following tropes (Spoilers for Child of the Storm and Ghosts of the Past):

  • Always Chaotic Evil: Discussed and Subverted with the Changing People a.k.a. the Deviants. When it comes up, one of the Eternals, Gilgamesh, says that even though he almost exclusively faces the violent and, indeed, evil ones, he doesn't think that all of them are like that. As he explains, he thinks it has more to do with the fact that they're constantly mutating, which can kill them, alter their brain-chemistry, render them infertile, or transform them into an animalistic monstrosity without warning. As a result, they're desperate to a) breed fast and relatively young before it becomes impossible, b) are terrified of any conceivable threat, no matter how minor, and respond viciously because any losses are one less potential person capable of passing on their genes. It's also implied that they're jealous of ordinary humans, who're stable and, if they get powers, they only mutate once or twice.
  • Angrish: Harry spends a considerable chunk of chapter 13 inciting Anakin into this both for his own amusement and to make him question what is going on.
  • Arc Villain: Following Yonder Star: The Grandmaster, Mad God and Dimension Lord of Sakaar, who drags in beings from across time and space ( and across the multiverse, when he can) to torment and feed upon for his amusement.
  • Asshole Victim: Lobo, a bully, jerk, and casual murderer who enjoys the fact that no one can really stand up to him and kills more or less for fun and in the case of Miek just to make a point... gets put in his place and humiliated with varying degrees of brutality by both Sunniva and Harry. The latter actually decapitates him - not that it'll do anything permanent - and hurls him into orbit. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
  • Badass Family: The House of Frey/Royal House of Asgard continues to produce badasses, with of course Harry; Sunniva, who has been a Phoenix host for decades without losing control, something practically unprecedented, and capable of curbstomping eldritch horrors while bantering with her distant nephew/walking him through using his powers on a grander scale; and Buri, God of Time, who's neatly been hiding under everyone's noses as Julie Maupin's a.k.a. the Lady Knight's barman/chauffeur and Time Cop partner, and it takes some time for either Harry or Sunniva to twig to what exactly he is - though they figure it out, and Harry even figures out who he is. As it turned out, he managed to prevent Malekith from entirely rewriting Asgard's history with the Reality Stone and survived a spirited attempt at murder by his son.
  • Batman Gambit: Midnight's involvement in Following Yonder Star is all about playing the Grandmaster and Harry against each other in just the right way to scour Sakaar, so that his master can step in to take over the dimensional space afterwards.
  • Beware the Nice Ones: Harry's pretty nice again - a few months being cut loose and training with Shou-Lao to deal with his emotions ensured he Took a Level in Kindness - and has largely shaken off his former shadows. However, he is still capable of being every bit as terrifying as he was before, when given sufficient incentive, and it's all the more disturbing for the sudden contrast.
  • Beware the Silly Ones: From the perspective of Sunniva, and the tribe Harry spent some time with, exchanging hunting skills and labour for a bit more education in survival skills (not that he really needs them - it's implied that he just wanted to some company), Harry is mostly an enthusiastic dork who happens to be a very capable hunter and have some odd powers, and frequently gets tripped up by his inexperience in comical fashion. Then a rival tribe summoned a demon bear. The bear was swiftly destroyed, the guilty parties in the other tribe slowly whittled away entirely unseen, with their fate being pointedly unknown, while the rest were banished with a warning to make something of their second chance - for they would not get another.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: Played for horror with the Grandmaster, who looks and superficially acts more or less human, but is actually an Eldritch Abomination in a human-suit with the associated difference in outlook and interests. While there's overlap, that just makes it worse.
  • Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting: It's revealed that the House of Frey's Generational Trauma, which Harry initially calls Buri on, is actually because of Bor being warped by Malekith and embracing the personality change. It's made clear that Odin has tried to do this, but thanks to his own issues and therefore met with limited success, with Thor arguably being the clearest success (and possibly because he takes after his mother).
  • Casual Danger Dialogue:
    • Harry and Sunniva maintain this habit, though a fair amount of it is Harry complaining - and lampshading how his usual Flirting Under Fire isn't an option because Carol isn't around and he can't snark at his enemies because they're eldritch horrors that won't appreciate his remarks. Sunniva, for her part, is teaching class while fighting Annihilus.
    • Harry resurrects this habit, in the style and physical form of Obi-Wan Kenobi, against Lobo. Given that he's a Master Actor and knows the role pretty damned well thanks to Carol "force-feeding" him the films, it's both uncanny and hilarious. It gets even funnier when he's first fighting, then working with, Anakin Skywalker of all people, who finds the imitation creepily true to life.
  • The Chanteuse: Julie Maupin's current role at her club on Sakaar, which acts as a mask for her 'true' role as a Knowledge Broker. What she's actually up to is considerably more nebulous and much more complicated.
  • Chekhov's Gun: Harry discovers in passing that with the Phoenix, he can shapeshift on a fundamental level, and is initially just a little curious about it. Fast-forward to chapter 11, and he's using it to hold the Grandmaster's attention by flawlessly disguising himself as a new competitor in the Contest of Champions - Obi-Wan Kenobi. And yes, everyone thinks he's gone mad.
  • Composite Character:
    • The Grandmaster in this setting is a mixture of his MCU self, his comics self, the Red King in Planet Hulk, and most pertinently, an evolution of Annihilus.
    • 'Julie' is this as a result of having been many people over her very long life, among them Julie d'Aubigny, Phryne Fisher, Spitfire I, and above all, the Lady Knight.
  • Cooldown Hug: In a further demonstration of Harry's proclivity to extend care and sympathy to people in bad situations, reaching goodness they never knew they had/outright denied, in chapter 13, while in the guise of Obi-Wan Kenobi, he delivers one of these to an immediately post-Mustafar Anakin Skywalker - or rather, the soul of Anakin Skywalker spliced onto Johnny Storm by the Grandmaster because his mutable light-form made it possible and the Grandmaster wanted to re-enact the Battle of the Heroes. The person in question is not immediately receptive, being enraged, terrified, confused, and Drunk on the Dark Side. Harry, however, has a very tight grip. The Grandmaster is not happy.
  • Cool Old Guy:
    • Shou-Lao is an Elder Wyrm over a million years old, is so large and so ridiculously powerful that he makes 'Dave' look like an oversized earthworm, and spends much of his time in human form as the strict but fair ruler of the occasionally extradimensional city of K'un L'un, protecting its people and teaching them how to protect themselves. He also has a very dry wit, a remarkable degree of occasionally exasperated patience, and a personality summed up by Word of God as a "benevolent Count Dooku."
    • Adam Brashear is a brilliant scientist who's physically about fifty and mentally about eighty years older than that, and despite having spent those eighty years in a fundamentally horrific Eldritch Location he's not just refused to give up his idealism and hopes for liberty, but he happily gets into animated discussions about the science of magic.
  • The Corrupter: Malekith with the Reality Stone was this for all of Asgard, attempting to rewrite it in his warped perception of what Asgardians were/had to be to fit his narrative - hairy barbarians, thieves, with no higher mentality than Rape, Pillage, and Burn. While this was mitigated by the Stone's instability and Buri and Strange working upstream and downstream in time, Asgard was still set back by hundreds of millennia into a cultural hole that Odin's still trying to haul them out of (we get hints of what it used to be like from Sunniva and Buri). Furthermore, Bor was the conduit and took the brunt of it, turning from a decent guy with a berserker streak into The Brute and a Nominal Hero at best, one who revelled in his transformation.
  • Cosmic Entity:
    • The Phoenix, natch. Also one of Her aspects, Galactus.
    • Also, the Grandmaster, a literal miniature universe incarnate - and not a nice one.
  • Dark and Troubled Past:
    • Harry's is touched on a few times, with more than one person (particularly Sunniva) being utterly appalled by the scale of his traumas, and it's shown that while he's done a great deal of healing, some things are still a bit raw.
    • Julie and Buri. Both are time-travellers and implicitly agents of Doctor Strange. One is compassionate and loving and has spent much of her life being constantly yanked through time without warning and away from the people she was with, dedicating her life to protecting the time stream so as to protect them from being erased - something that is implied to have happened, repeatedly, and she's the only one who remembers them. The other is the former King of Asgard, The Good King by any metric, and a good father, too. Then Malekith came along, used the Aether to corrupt his son and by proxy all of Asgard's history which Buri only barely managed to mitigate, which still set his people back hundreds of thousands of years, and Bor got the worst of it, turning into something of a monster. Worse still, he tried to kill Buri when the latter tried to help him.
  • Day in the Limelight: The Following Yonder Star arc serves as this for Sunniva, with most of the first five chapters being from her point of view as she tracks Harry (who she has not yet met) through the distant past.
  • Decomposite Character: Odin again—in Dresden Files canon, he was also the original Beowulf, a status delegated to his oldest illegitimate child, Vidar (who has about 2000 years on Thor and Loki). Here, that original bearer of that title was the Eternal Gilgamesh (though Word of God is that more than one person has held that name).
  • Determinator: One needs to be this to spark up a Green Lantern Ring. To spark it up when it should by all logic have no power, in another reality, then keep a jury-rigged gauntlet of five rings running on a battery that's the equivalent of embers for the best part of fifteen years? You need to be someone like Hal Jordan, which gains Harry's immediate and absolute respect.
  • Dragon with an Agenda: The newly arrived 'Midnight', who's a) dressed up as Darth Revan to match Harry's disguise and the presence of Anakin-spliced-onto-Johnny, revealing worrying foreknowledge and a warped sense of humour, b) capable of manipulating the Grandmaster into putting them into the ring next, c) capable of shocking Julie out of her controlled amusement and bringing out her first serious worry. Whoever they are, they are absolutely not working for the Grandmaster, no matter what he might think.
  • Dwindling Party: When the tribe that Harry was hosting was attacked by a demonic bear summoned by another tribe, looking to take their territory, this was inflicted upon them with all those he deemed guilty being slowly and methodically picked off by something they could not see, even in broad daylight. A reminder, early on, that while Harry has mellowed out, this only goes so far.
  • Eaten Alive: Going by the mention of screams, this is implied to have been the fate of Dax-Ur when the Grandmaster, in a moment of spectacularly bad taste, stripped him of his powers, and put him in a labyrinth with a super-sized lab mouse. Ben Grimm recalls being expected to find it funny by the Grandmaster... and the screams.
  • Eldritch Location: Sakaar qualifies as this, being a mish-mash pocket reality made of a mixture of reality and the Outside which has somehow not exploded, and ruled by a mad god. It both bends and outright defies logic and the laws of physics, with vari-coloured skies, countless differing layers of the world, stars on sticks that splinter into drifting comets, Dyson Spheres, Ringworlds, connections between worlds, with countless planets and civilisations literally fused together... and it's all the size of a dwarf galaxy. Oh, and even more than brushing it with cosmic senses makes Harry throw up. Anakin isn't too happy about it, either. And it turns out that the whole place is an extension of the Grandmaster, with everyone trapped there slowly being drained of their life force to feed him.
  • Fading Away: As part of Harry's Obi-Wan Moment, though more in the style of MCU Odin's. It's temporary, and partially a fakeout - though he really did get gutted by Midnight.
  • Fed to the Beast: The fate of Dax-Ur, a Kryptonian scientist who ended up in the arena on Sakaar, befriended Ben Grimm, then had his powers stripped by blue kryptonite and was trapped in a labyrinth with a super-sized lab mouse by the Grandmaster as his warped idea of a joke - which everyone else was expected to find funny.
  • Fiery Stoic: The ideal state of a Phoenix host, and what Harry has been drifting towards for a long time, solidified by first Shou-Lao's training, then Sunniva's. He hurriedly passes on this rough lesson to Anakin Skywalker.
  • Fusion Dance: Forced by the Grandmaster on Johnny Storm with his mutable light-form, and the soul of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader fresh from burning on Mustafar. Neither of the participants is at all happy about it once they twig to what's happened, while Harry is driven to the edge of a berserk rage.
  • Generational Trauma: The House of Odin's is discussed by a somewhat narked Harry with Buri. The source of it (or at least, the circumstances) is somewhat unexpected and rightly on the nightmare fuel page. Bor Used to Be a Sweet Kid, but took the brunt of Malekith's Reality Stone fuelled corruption of Asgard, and decided he liked it.
  • Good Is Not Soft:
    • Shou-Lao is the stern but fair protector and lord of K'un L'un, who trains his people to protect themselves in the Way of the Iron Fist - those protectors being led by the Iron Fist, who's significantly further empowered if they pass an Unwinnable Training Simulation by learning the appropriate lesson. If they don't, he can kill them and implicitly, has.
    • Phoenix hosts are this as a simple result of being cosmic trauma surgeons - they save what they can, but destroy what they must. Sunniva is willing to destroy all of Sakaar to protect the main reality, though she is profoundly embittered by the prospect and thinks of it as a Mercy Kill compared to what the Grandmaster is slowly doing to people (and she's hinted to be right), though she'll very gladly Take a Third Option.
    • Harry might have regained a lot of his prior niceness, to the point where his darker side is pretty much invisible to extremely experienced cop Hal Jordan, and avoids killing wherever possible, even delivering a Cooldown Hug to Anakin Skywalker/a newly minted Darth Vader, that doesn't mean it isn't there, when he decides to show it - and when he does, it's as scary as ever.
  • The Good King: Buri was this, as a Benevolent Mage Ruler, and despite Harry's not unjustified suspicions, a good dad too. Unfortunately, thanks to factors outside his control that he did his best to mitigate, his legacy was profoundly screwed up.
  • Good Parents:
    • Sue and Reed are this within their inevitable limitations of existing in the nightmarish Eldritch Location that is Sakaar, and while keeping the fact that they had a child secret. Despite everything against them, their son is an improbably well-adjusted and good-natured child.
    • As it turns out, Buri was one of these, despite Harry's entirely justified scepticism and bone to pick over a matter of Generational Trauma. Unfortunately, factors outside his control warped his son's personality in ways he couldn't heal (mostly because he didn't want to be healed).
  • Greater-Scope Villain: Midnight's currently unidentified master, who sends him in to manipulate events on Sakaar to his advantage.
  • Heal the Cutie: Several months of Walking the Earth in the distant past with no pressures other than very literal self-care, plus some extensive training and emotional purging with Shou-Lao, are noted to have worked wonders, with Harry being much lighter and easier than he was before.
  • I Have Many Names: Harry gets a few more this book: Listens-And-Asks-Endless-Questions, Starlight-In-His-Eyes, the Wanderer/Wander (which he finds quite funny for reasons no one else understands), Lord Earendil (this one he finds particularly amusing), and a modernised variant of the latter by his distant Aunt, Sunniva — Prince Aurvandil.
  • Instant Expert:
    • As Sunniva explains, a limited degree of this is part of the standard Phoenix package, which basically runs off the instincts of self-preservation and threat elimination. The next steps have to be more or less figured out by yourself.
    • Harry, to a degree - and being a Phoenix makes it substantially easier. As shown in Ghosts he can telepathically copy skills to a certain degree of competence with frightening speed (though learning how to use them properly is another matter). This gets expanded, as it turns out it's less just absorbing technique, but how it actually feels to use the skill - anything intuitive, he can pick up terrifyingly quickly. As a result, he picks up the ability to shift between physical and spiritual relatively easily when Sunniva flat out states he should not have been able to so soon, and according to Julie/the Lady Knight if he applied the same technique more broadly with Sif and Fandral, he'd be a Master Swordsman by human standards by 17 and by Asgardian ones by 30, rather than their estimates of early 20s and 100 respectively.
  • The Juggernaut:
    • Shou-Lao, who effortlessly shrugs off more or less everything Harry throws at him in their final testing duel and is barely even wounded, with Harry frankly admitting that unless he went Phoenix or really tried to kill him, there's absolutely no way he could win.
    • Lobo is both this and a Lightning Bruiser with a stupidly powerful Healing Factor, to the point where despite the fact that he's going bareknuckle with someone (Harry) armed with a Phoenix-imbued sabre that's currently functioning as a lightsabre capable of lopping off limbs, who's repeatedly going for a Groin Attack, he just keeps going, to the point where their fight is characterised as "unstoppable force versus immovable object." It takes Ben Grimm's sucker-punch to give Harry the necessary opening to end it.
  • Master Actor: Harry, again, who demonstrates it by flawlessly impersonating Obi-Wan Kenobi. Though it has to be said, the Voluntary Shapeshifting helps.
  • Master Swordsman:
    • Julie Maupin a.k.a. the Lady Knight leaves Harry in jaw-dropped awe. Given who she really is and who she's taught, this isn't remotely surprising.
    • The Scarab also qualifies, as while Julie blatantly outclasses it, Harry realises very abruptly that it blatantly outclasses him.
    • Julie, for her part, has Harry pegged as one of these in the making and spends the drive to the Future Foundation "teaching class". She later discusses this in more detail, noting the physical and mental attributes that make him this, and adds that he's "at least as talented as Arthur [Pendragon]. And Arthur was brilliant." From the greatest swordswoman of all time, that's one hell of an accolade.
  • The Mentor: Harry collects three in Following Yonder Star in Shou-Lao, Sunniva, and Julie Maupin/ the Lady Knight. Shou-Lao teaches him control and judgement, Sunniva teaches him Phoenix lessons on a cosmic scale, and Julie takes it upon herself to give him a few quick lessons in swordsmanship.
  • Mythology Gag: Harry, channelling the power of a cosmic entity, encourages a world to "Look to the skies... and let hope burn bright." Saint Walker would approve.
  • Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom: The Forest People have names like these, though they don't mind diminutives, such as Dresden's friend, 'Strength Of A River In His Shoulders', being quite comfortable going by either 'River Shoulders' or just 'River'. Likewise, the Forest Person that Sunniva meets in the distant past, 'Patience Of The Hills In His Heart', is quite comfortable as 'Patience'. They call her, 'Fire Of The Stars In Her Heart', and Harry initially gets nicknamed 'Listens And Asks Endless Questions', before being dubbed 'Starlight In His Eyes'.
  • Nice Guy:
    • Harry has evolved back into this thanks to having learned how to process his emotions and traumas, being instinctively kind to everyone he meets, charming, and friendly, and considerably more merciful than most would expect him to be. Sure, the old ruthlessness and fury is still there, but it's so well concealed that you'd never know it was present until he briefly shows it - and it's entirely under his control. He even delivers a Cooldown Hug to Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader, fresh from burning on Mustafar, whose soul was Fusion Danced with Johnny Storm, despite knowing exactly what he has done - something that would once have elicited just righteous wrath.
    • Sunniva is a Socially Awkward Hero to say the least, being uncomfortable with people as a whole, and not used to interacting with them much beyond what is needed to solve the problem. She's also a little bit of a Noble Bigot towards humans at first (and to be fair, these are literal cavemen deep in the Stone Age - even modern humans look down on them), but she is polite and respectful and sees protecting them as a duty that must be adhered to. And she rapidly readjusts her attitudes when she realises how wrong she was. More to the point, while she's still stilted around most people, she's kind in an awkward sort of way, and very supportive to/protective of Harry, her distant nephew, whose every achievement she celebrates as she mentors him and who she gives a You Are Better Than You Think You Are speech as he wrestles with the guilt of slaughtering the Red Army.
    • The Future Foundation is composed of these, with Sue being the Nice Girl she was when we last saw her despite a decade and a half on Sakaar with her little brother as the Grandmaster's Court Jester, and immediately inclined to be concerned for Harry (and justifiably disturbed by all he's been through in the - for him - technical year and literal two years since she last saw him). She's also an excellent mother, by all indications, despite perhaps the most challenging environment in the multiverse.
    • Adam Brashear is The Face of the Future Foundation, having been on Sakaar for the equivalent of eighty years and never given up hope, having first devoted himself to mitigating its effects, then to trying to free everyone else. Despite all he's endured, including the Grandmaster perverting his technology, he remains hopeful and friendly, happily engaging in a technical discussion of magic with a slightly out of his depth Harry.
    • Julie is a fundamentally kind and compassionate woman who, as the Lady Knight, has spent millennia loving and losing people thanks to the cruelties of time and the enemies she fights in Doctor Strange's time war, with a number explicitly being people that only she remembers after they were erased from history. She has every reason to be deeply embittered, yet she's still fun-loving, determined to do good, and kind to all she meets.
  • Not So Stoic:
    • While Harry has, thanks to learning from Shou-Lao, more or less completed his transformation into a Fiery Stoic and is generally good at handling his emotions, there are still moments. For instance, the capacity for nightmare inspiring softly spoken rage is very well hidden, but not gone, as is revealed when he promises that if the Grandmaster's treatment of Johnny Storm involves a particular kind of enslavement, he'll "make an Elder God scream." In some ways it's even more disturbing because that side of him is now so well hidden that even experienced cop Hal Jordan doesn't spot it until Harry chooses to show it.
    • Sunniva is very professional, quite serious, and not good with people on the whole. When she can be persuaded to loosen up and open up, however, she's just as willing to laugh at her distant nephew's shenanigans and pratfalls as anyone else, and she's bubbling with delight when he finally figures out the lesson she's trying to teach him against the Annihilation Wave.
  • Obi-Wan Moment: Harry has one in chapter 14, but it's decidedly impermanent - just as planned.
  • Oddly Common Rarity: Sunniva isn't entirely surprised by encountering another Phoenix host - the fact he's around the Nine Realms and everything else about him is what raises questions. As she explains to a very surprised Harry, she's met other Phoenixes before, because the Phoenix is Life and like Death, Life is happening everywhere and the universe is a big place. As a result, even if only an infinitesimal fraction of Life requires the intervention of a Phoenix host, there can be several - in the case of during their conversation, there are another three. As she also explains, Phoenix work can be very brief.
  • Old Cop, Young Cop:
    • Sunniva and Harry play with this, given the nature of the Phoenix as an enforcer of the laws of nature, with her relative stoicism, professionalism, and deep technical experience combined with his heart-on-sleeve emotions and creative approach.
    • Hal and Harry briefly enjoy this dynamic on Sakaar, with Hal being a Determined Defeatist worn down by a decade and a half of relative time on Sakaar but damned if he'll give in to despair, and Harry blithely (and rightly) certain that this is all a problem that can be solved, with work.
  • Patricide: Previously attempted by Bor against Buri, as previously speculated, after Malekith corrupted him. The father in question still has the scar.
  • Power Copying: As Harry notes, he's a good mimic, which is how (as a Phoenix) he picks up shifting from physical to spirit and back. Both Shou-Lao and Sunniva are appalled and impressed, with the latter flatly informing him that knack for mimicry or not, he should not have been able to do that. As he explains, it mostly works because he telepathically links with them, getting a feel of the feelings, impressions, instincts, and intuitions.
  • Psychic Powers:
    • All the usual suspects, naturally, plus Sunniva. It's a Phoenix thing.
    • During Following Yonder Star, Sunniva encounters a nascent Hive Mind formed from a tribe of low level psychics. When it detects the absolute leviathan in its midst, it's described as fluffing itself up like a kitten, and Sunniva has to try very hard not to coo at how adorable it is.
    • The Grandmaster is explicitly not a psychic, but what he does is arguably psionics approached from a typically warped perspective.
    • Anakin Skywalker, naturally, by means of cosmic powers - the Force.
  • Psychic Strangle: When coldly angry and impersonating Obi-Wan Kenobi - It Makes Sense in Context, Harry pulls this on Lobo, lifting him off the ground. Since Lobo is Lobo, this mostly just annoys him and deprives him of his ability to use his Super-Strength, buying time for Harry to 'explain' why his cover is cutting loose.
  • Rasputinian Death: As Harry complains, it is incredibly hard to make the Grandmaster stay dead. It eventually takes one of his bodies being atomised by a Mortis-mode Anakin Skywalker, the Phoenix fire of a Hive Mind billions strong (power on a scale normally capable of blowing up multiple universes) exploding in his face and scouring Sakaar, a Phoenix fire trap inside his next would-be host, Sunniva yanking him out, and finally feeding him to Galactus.
  • Reality Warper:
    • Phoenix hosts as standard, something displayed to full effect in Following Yonder Star, with Harry being encouraged to get creative.
    • Annihilus and his forces, in a much more horrific way do this by merely existing.
    • The Grandmaster, as all of Sakaar is an extension of him including, to a very large extent, the people in it. Hal states that he could wipe out billions and entire civilizations with a mere tantrum.
  • Refuge in Audacity: Harry's big plan to distract the Grandmaster while his allies enact a mass escape from Sakaar? Enter the Contest of Champions while disguised as Obi-Wan Kenobi. The entire rationale is that while it's utterly ridiculous, it's ridiculous enough that the Grandmaster, who's fascinated by narrative, should play along. It's noted by an amused Hal Jordan, once he finally stops laughing long enough to breathe, that they'll likely get sued if anyone ever finds out about this.
  • Second-Person Narration: When the story shifts to Anakin Skywalker's perspective, it shifts into this in the style of Matthew Stover's novelisation, Revenge of the Sith, because they were picked out more or less right when their story in that book finished.
  • Secret Identity: Julie Maupin has many, all concealing the fact that she's really the Lady Knight. Complicating this further is that that's just her main Red Baron - no one actually seems to know her 'real' name.
  • Shapeshifter Swan Song: The Grandmaster goes through two of these, thanks to his thoroughly Rasputinian Death.
  • Space Is Noisy: If you're a Phoenix host like Harry or Sunniva, it is. This is Lampshaded on the grounds that when you're a Phoenix, a) you're operating on very different senses, b) you can do more or less what you like.
  • Stealth Expert: One of the narratives that Sunniva encounters of what her many times removed nephew has been getting up to reveals that Harry is one of these, and capable of putting it to horrifying use - unsurprising from the former Red Son.
  • Stealth Pun: Bor was transformed by Malekith into someone obnoxious, cruel, rude, and nasty—in other words, a boor.
  • Story Arc: Following Yonder Star: A (relatively) young Sunniva tracks down Harry in the distant past, meeting him in K'un L'un after he's spent several months decompressing, exploring, and learning from Shou-Lao, before teaching him what it means to be a Phoenix as they jointly confront the Annihilation Wave and go to Sakaar, partway into the Negative Zone, to find the Silver Surfer. Everything, inevitably, spirals out of control from there.
  • Student–Master Team: Sunniva and Harry are a textbook example, as she teaches him about mastering the Phoenix and the cosmic big picture, and he - directly and indirectly - ends up teaching her about taking a more grounded perspective and actually mixing with the people they're protecting.
  • Super-Sargasso Sea: As in the MCU, Sakaar is this, all the more so for being a very strange Eldritch Location outside reality, with things and people (and bits of time) that fall through cracks in reality ending up there. Half of it is the Landfill Beyond the Stars, to Harry's profound disgruntlement when he lands in a rubbish tip, and the other half looks nice in an eldritch sort of way. Emphasis on the 'looks'.
  • Time Skip: A more complicated variant in that the story picks up 6 months after Ghosts ended. However, that time only passed for Harry in the past, as he's set to return to the present before anyone really notices. Per Word of God, he's entirely aware of that, otherwise he'd be considerably more than just a little homesick from time to time and Strange would have burnt a major bridge.
  • Took a Level in Badass:
    • Hal Jordan was last mentioned at the end of Child of the Storm as an Ace Pilot with a mischievous sense of humour. He finally reappears on Sakaar as a grizzled veteran space cop armed with a Green Lantern gauntlet powered by sheer stubbornness, unafraid to face down a Scarab Warrior and someone else with power that's off the charts, who's just effortlessly curbstomped some of Sakaar's biggest and baddest, and tell them to knock it off or answer to him. When his batteries are fully charged for the first time by Harry, he demonstrates just why the original Green Lantern had such a rep on Earth.
    • The Fantastic Four all reappear for the first time since the finale of Child of the Storm and have both their powers and a decade and a half of experience in using them and in dealing with distinctly arcane super-science.
  • Took a Level in Kindness: Harry had been defrosting over the course of Ghosts, but when he turns up again here, he is notably much nicer than he was prior to his Walking the Earth.
  • Tranquil Fury: Shou-Lao makes a distinction between Harry dealing with his anger by turning it cold and actually controlling his anger. The degree of emotional control is shown later on when Harry as Obi-Wan goes toe to toe with Lobo, who has profoundly pissed him off by killing Miek just to make a point - the rage is most definitely there, but he is using it as fuel and not letting it control him.
  • Unexpected Character: The involvement of Anakin bloody Skywalker was a surprise, to say the least, and an intentional one - mostly due to being the Grandmaster's whim.
  • Unwinnable Training Simulation: The Last Test of the Iron Fist is one of these, because no one, not even Harry, is going to overpower Shou-Lao in a straight fight. The entire point is that it's not just about strength, skill, or willpower, but also judgement. People who don't get that fail, and sometimes even end up dying.
  • Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Bor, of all people, with a few berserker tendencies at worst. Unfortunately, he took the brunt of Malekith playing The Corrupter to Asgardian history to turn them all into barbarians, ended up Drunk on the Dark Side, and decided he liked it.
  • Voluntary Shapeshifting:
    • A comparatively minor degree of it allows Julie to change her appearance whenever she likes to pass unnoticed, though Harry implies she could be much more comprehensive if she ever felt like it.
    • In Shou-Lao's case, it's anything but minor, when he goes from a dragon the size of a mountain range to a large man and back in the blink of an eye.
    • Harry, meanwhile, discovers that this is an artefact of Phoenix powers more or less by accident. He later uses this to flawless impersonate Obi-Wan Kenobi.
    • The Grandmaster can also shapeshift. It's best not to speculate on the details.
  • Walking the Earth: What Harry's doing at the start, Strange having dropped him through a time portal set to approximately 40,000 years BP. After landing on a Scottish glacier, he rambles south and eastwards, with a very curious Sunniva following some weeks behind him. While he has no clear destination, people he encounters indicate that he's being pulled eastwards. He eventually winds up in K'un Lun.

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