Crossover Omake: A Very Strange Thanksgiving, Part 2

A Very Strange Thanksgiving, Part 2

Violet Potter

“You know, somehow, I don’t think American Thanksgiving dinners are anything like this,” I said dryly.

Not that I was complaining. I was currently on my second beef rib, smoked to perfection and sliding off the bone. It was salty, peppery, and rich, and went phenomenally well with this hot sauce the owner called the Tohsaka Special. 

Blaise laughed at the name for some reason. Apparently, Tohsaka was a real person who had a grudge against some priest? I had no idea what that had to do with food. All I knew was that it was spicy, tangy, faintly sweet, and made my mouth go numb in a way that enhanced the beefy flavor. If this was what Chinese food was like, I’d been missing out.

I’d followed Blaise because I was promised tasty food I’d never tried before. As always, he delivered. He’d taken me on a few foodie adventures over the past three years, especially over the summers. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to follow a Slytherin through a door that most definitely hadn’t been there before, but this was Blaise. I could trust him.

Besides, if he really wanted to screw with me, he’d probably find a way. It was better that I just let him do whatever he wanted than spend the next month looking over my shoulder.

That was my story and I was sticking with it.

“Definitely not,” Blasie agreed. He took us to seats next to an impossibly attractive Asian woman. Cho Chang, the Ravenclaw seeker a year above us, was hot, but her? Luo Hao made me feel inadequate without even doing anything. “Usually, American Thanksgiving includes a whole-roast turkey, ham, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and at least three kinds of casseroles and pies. Oh, and the family drama. You can’t forget the family drama.”

“He’s right,” the equally handsome rabbit-man said, nodding sagely. I wasn’t actually sure if he was a man at first. He looked like he could be my age, or maybe even a “she.” He swore he was centuries old though, and pinched my cheeks like only a grandpa could. “Family drama is a mandatory part of Thanksgiving dinners. At least one relative must be gay, racist, or about to get divorced.”

“Right? Bonus points if you also have a grandpa who’s about to croak and leave behind a big inheritance or a cousin who got an abortion. They add a little something-something to a Thanksgiving dinner. I swear, the spite makes the turkey taste better.”

“That’s because the tension helps you to forget how dry turkey meat can be when roasted whole. There are ways to keep the breast moist of course, but they take a lot of preparation that most home cooks just can’t do.”

“Well, my idea of Thanksgiving is a metric truckload of barbeque,” our host said. After setting the table, he and his wife, an impossibly gorgeous fox-lady, sat down with us. “My family had those soap opera dinners back in Texas. Let’s just say Brockton Bay wasn’t so bad in comparison.”

“That’s gotta be a lie,” one of the brunettes said. They were both named Amy. They looked identical at first glance, but one was a bit more athletic. Apparently, they were alternate universe versions of each other, not twin sisters. “Your family can’t have been that bad. No one sane comes to Brockton unless they have literally zero options.”

“Heh, maybe not quite that bad. I started the Holy Grill because owning a smokehouse was my dream. Brockton Bay just happened to have the cheapest land. When gramps died and I got my share of the inheritance from selling the ranch, that little plot of land was what I could afford.

“Makes sense that the city with a literal gang of Nazis is the cheapest option.” She went for a sausage, the last on their side of the table, but her doppelganger’s fork found it at the same time. “Oi, that’s mine!”

The other Amy, smirked. “Nah, smoked chicken and apple sausage is my favorite.”

“Screw you, we have the same palate!”

“Exactly, so you know I’m not giving it to you.”

We watched as the two bickered and played tug-of-war with the sausage link. Then, the athletic version glowed blue and twisted her hand just so, yanking the last sausage from her opposite. “Hah, aura!”

“What the–Since when can I do that?”

“You can’t. I can,” she crowed. Then, with a superior grin, she slowly bit down on her spoil of war. “Blake gave me aura.”

“Not likely. Humans can’t awaken each other’s aura,” Aaron said from the far end of the table. He’d claimed one section to himself and his pokemon. “I mean, it’s possible in theory, but it’s mostly done in bloodlines. Someone who didn’t have the talent for it can’t just be given it.”

“Hey, how do you know I have no talent for it?”

He held up his hand and a shimmering blue light covered it. “I don’t, but I’m something of an aura master myself. External manifestation of aura like what you just did takes decades of training for most people. Either you’re a once in a generation miracle-child, or you had help. At a guess, legendary help.”

“Exactly right,” the guy named Blake said. He was a red-armored man who could turn into those pokemon Aaron had. “I can turn into more than raikou. Victini is the one who gave her aura.”

“Ah, now that, that makes more sense.”

“Wait, if Blake can turn into Victini, isn’t it the same thing?” Riley asked. She was the adopted younger sister of an Asian man dressed in a white overcoat but had chosen to sit with Aaron and his pokemon.

Only one hand was… a hand. The other had split into some kind of Terminator-esque cyborg thing that spewed out a fleet of drones. Each drone was shaped like a ladybug, almost disarmingly cute, no pun intended.

Blaise assured me that she was no threat. Or rather, that other guests were so much scarier that she wasn’t even an afterthought. Given all the horrific shit he’d been painting in school, I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

The “adaptive sensory and diagnostics module,” whatever the fuck that was, was currently examining Aaron’s five pokemon. He had a sixth but the last one was on a training trip with his mother. Whatever, so long as she kept her definitely-not-mechadendrites away from me, we wouldn’t have any problems.

“Not quite,” Blake, the red-armored man who could turn into pokemon, said. “Some pokemon, especially the more powerful Legends, are not just templates. They are the Legends in question, so I guess it's a form of possession, not just transformation.”

Amy, Bryce’s Amy, nudged her boyfriend(?). “Oi, how come I don’t get crazy powerups?”

Bryce rolled his eyes and mixed a bit of hot sauce and pulled pork into a bowl of macaroni and cheese. I needed to try that; that looked tasty. “You could have. I don’t know how good your clone is with aura, but you could have eaten a zoan at any time. Aura without Aaron’s absurd level of mastery isn’t that big of a physical powerup. You’d definitely be stronger than she is as a zoan.”

The two descended into quiet bickering amongst themselves. They insisted they weren’t dating, but I couldn’t tell. They definitely had better chemistry than my aunt and uncle. For that matter, Blake and aura-Amy, too. They were “fake-dating,” or maybe “fake, fake-dating?” I wasn’t sure. I’d known them for an hour and I was already invested in their maybe-nonexistent love lives.

I gasped in mute horror; I was starting to turn into Parvati. I couldn’t let that stand so I promptly drowned my woes in Bryce’s hot sauce, pulled pork, & mac combo idea. It really was delicious, but a bit of pickled onions took it to the next level.

Blaise called it a multiversal constant: Amy Dallon was a creature who was doomed to have a weird love life. Given his complicated relationship with Fate, I was inclined to believe him. Besides, he was one to talk, stuck in a love… I wasn’t even sure what polygon it was anymore…

Whatever the case, the two Amys got along like a house on fire. They bickered like sisters while discussing what I could only assume were  crimes against nature and god. Blaise also said that they didn’t like each other because their respective relationships made them question their own life choices or something.

“So, kid,” the bunny called from Luo Hao’s other side. “You’re Harry without a dick, right?”

I almost choked on a chicken wing. “W-What?”

“She is,” Blaise answered for me. “But how do you know Harry Potter? I thought you weren’t a reincarnated soul, Lord Tianyu.”

That was another thing. Blaise was beyond respectful towards the bunny and the gorgeous Chinese woman. Not just the polite formality he used whenever he talked to lords of the Wizengamot, but truly reverent. He’d almost bowed before he was stopped.

It was bizarre. Blaise was the single most sarcastic, shit-stirring person I knew. He was the all-knowing seer, the self-described troll. He wasn’t supposed to show genuine respect for someone he’d only just met.

“Just Tianyu, kid. We’re all friends here. And I’m not. I was comparing notes with John earlier and I believe my world is something of an amalgam. You see, the school called Hogwarts exists in my world. Your ‘Magical Britain’ is a very small slice of a very big world.”

“Wait, what about Voldemort?” I asked. “He’s the greatest dark lord to ever live!”

“Hahahaha, Voldemort? Voldemort? The greatest anything?” he cackled. He laughed so hard that he almost fell off his chair. “Oh, you sweet, summer child.”

“He is! If you’re underestimating him, your world is in a lot of danger!”

I felt Blaise pull me into a one-armed hug. “He’s not, Vi. Let me guess, Voldemort’s already been killed off?”

“Yes. I believe Alice told Alec that Voldemort was looking for the holy grail. He wasn’t, of course, Helga’s fancy cup is hardly a divine treasure, but it was enough to arrange a meeting.”

“Ooh… You’re talking about Black Prince Alec, right?”

“NNaturally. You can say a lot of things about my kleptomanic brother, most of them both true and unflattering, but he’s still a Campione.”

“Then I can guess the rest. You know he has seven horcruxes, right?”

“Those cute, little soul anchors? Alice told me about them. Unlike us Campione, he’s not immune to divination on the White Princess’ level. It took her agents a week, and that’s without our intervention.”

“W-What about the prophecy?” I asked, feeling a little numb. Blaise told me the full thing only recently and it’d been weighing on me ever since. “I’m the only one who can kill Voldemort. Or, whoever my counterpart is in your world.”

“Campione are fate-breakers,” Blaise explained, as if that was supposed to mean something to me. At my confusion, he sighed. “Look, prophecies are absolute, but only until you meet a Campione. Those guys don’t play by anyone’s rules but their own, not even Fate’s. If Voldemort met Black Prince Alec, then his only options were to kneel and apologize for whatever slight he caused, or die.”

“Oh… And our world doesn’t have any of those?”

“We don’t. Trust me, if there were Campione in our world, we’d know. Virtually none of my long-term predictions would have been accurate. Like, did you know? I can’t even see four seconds in the future right now no matter how hard I try.”

“Wait, what? But your visions are perfect.”

“Again, Campione. You don’t have the context to understand how big a deal they are. For that matter, how big a deal most people at this table are. You keep saying I’m overpowered, but between a True Magician, an unrestrained Tamamo no Mae, the keeper of a World Rune, two Campione, a Tinker of Fiction, a Ben 10 ripoff with legendary pokemon, two Panaceas, Riley, and who I’m like ninety-nine percent sure is a Champion-class pokemon trainer? I’m just about the least overpowered person here.”

“That… That’s hard to imagine.”

“Let me put it this way: I’m quite sure that everyone here can storm Hogwarts and conquer it by themselves if they really wanted to. Except maybe Riley and the two Amys, but they’re scary for completely different reasons.”

“Speaking of, love,” Tianyu said. He took a piece of brisket and a corn tortilla and made a taco before feeding his wife. “You’ve been thinking about a sightseeing trip, no? How do you feel about their world?”

“Hoh? And what is there to see in their world?” Luo Hao asked inquisitively. She ate like a black hole, yet with impeccable manners. There wasn’t even a droplet of sauce splattered on her robes even though she’d eaten at least eight plates more than me.

“An entire magical society that refuses to move past the steam engine. You keep saying the industrial revolution was the start of the decline of civilization.”

“Interesting… But don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing, husband,” she said, giving him a gimlet eye.

The bunny smiled like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “Hmm? I figured you wouldn’t mind a magical world that’s still trying to figure out how electricity works.”

“You want me to take care of this ‘Voldemort’ character.”

“Why not? What is a prophecy before the Ruler of the Martial Realm?”

“N-Now, hold on,” Blaise said, eyes wide with panic. “We don’t need your help! I mean, Voldemort’s basically handled, I promise. You don’t need to waste your precious time to come over, your eminence!”

I looked at him like he was crazy. Someone else would break the prophecy for me? That sounded fantastic! “What are you talking about? Please come, Luo Hao. I never asked for this to begin with. I promise I’ll give you the grand tour.”

“Hmm… Perhaps… Mount Lu has been rather dull lately. I shall consider your offer, child,” she said with an elegant nod.

Blaise collapsed into his seat, sinking down until his head was barely above the table. “You’ve doomed us all, you ignorant bitch…”

“Oh, relax,” Tianyu chirped happily. “She isn’t the sort to kill off Voldemort. After all, he is little Violet’s ‘heavenly tribulation.’ It wouldn’t do to take that opportunity from her.”

“I don’t mind,” I said hastily. “Feel free. I don’t need whatever a ‘heavenly tribulation’ is.”

“She’ll probably insist on becoming a professor at Hogwarts. Trust me, you’ll learn so much from her. By the time she’s done with you, you’ll wonder why you ever worried about a gnat like Voldemort.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but that sounded nice. Blaise respected them immensely. If Luo Hao could teach me to deal with Voldemort, then that’d make my life so much easier.

Besides, it sounded like they were immune from the prophecy nonsense. If that was true, Voldemort probably wouldn’t attack Hogwarts while they were there. The thought of a year without any chaotic mishaps sounded too good to resist.

“I look forward to your instruction, professor,” I said respectfully.

X

Blake Isley

After dinner, we all separated again into various groups. Our host and the magic bunny were having a nice chat over a few glasses of bourbon. Between them was a pile of wood, made of what appeared to be every species under the sun. They were very passionate about smoking meats.

Their wives were with them, though they seemed only tangentially interested in the conversation. Instead, they were having a lovely chat, Luo Hao with a porcelain cup of baiju and Tamamo with a saucer of sake. Last I checked, they were discussing the merits of origami as the foundational art form for the creation of talismans and familiars.

The rest of my new friends gathered around Bryce and I as we got ready to spar. We agreed to go all-out. Though Bryce claimed that he’d only barely cheesed a win against the endbringers, he was confident in his ability to hold his own against me. And, thanks to a bit of spatial finangling on the part of our host, he’d be allowed to summon whatever he wanted from his lab.

The barriers were set and we’d been assured that no collateral damage would occur. Tamamo even made viewing screens for the guests with lesser senses. I would normally have been doubtful of such claims, but more than one person here had the presence of a Legend. Even Victini, ever so chatty, had felt a tad intimidated by some of our new friends.

“Are you ready?” Andy asked us. He, being the Yveltal-equivalent of his world, had nothing to fear from us and had agreed to be our referee.

“Shift, garrchomp,” I muttered. The change was immediate. I became a landshark, the most feared predator of Sinnoh. Towering over my opponent, I nodded.

Bryce wasn’t intimidated. He put on his helmet and dismissed his tombstone-like construct. Instead, he adjusted his gloves and took a basic but well-practiced combat stance. “Yeah, I’m good. Let’s do this.”

Andy brought his scissor-blades down. “Then begin!”

The earth ruptured as I willed it to, blowing shrapnel and dirt towards him in a textbook Bulldoze. It was meant to unbalance him, buying me the half-second needed to close the gap. Really, who wore roller blades to a fight?

Well, except Korina, but I was convinced that she only did it to annoy her grandfather. 

He wasn’t there. Roads of condensed water vapor formed beneath his feet as he skated into the sky. A pseudo-flying type, then. That was fine; garchomp were perfectly good aerial combatants as well.

He pulled out a pair of ornate pistols with a practiced flourish. One was a classic, six-shot revolver while its sibling had glowing tubes instead of the revolver chamber and a slightly longer barrel. I dashed into the dust cloud I’d created, but his aim did not falter. No doubt, it was the work of SAINT, his porygon-2.

Then, the revolvers fired and I swiftly dodged out of the way. A garchomp’s cruising speed was well above the speed of sound, more than enough to outpace two handguns.

And I was glad I did. The explosion would have turned most into a fine mist, but that was manageable. The Ice Beam-lookalike? That made me uncomfortable on an instinctual level. As a fully evolved dragon, I could withstand the cold to a degree, but that didn’t mean that shit didn’t hurt. Bryce definitely knew how to deal with a pokemon.

With a roar that would have cleared the sky of birds for miles, I shot into the sky. Draconic fire coated my body and the very air began to shimmer from the rapid spike in temperature. It would blunt any of his freeze ray shenanigans.

We played a game of cat and mouse. Just when I thought my teeth would close on his leg, he shimmered out of existence, leaving behind a puff of mist.

The real him faded back into the visible spectrum just four feet above me. He flipped in the air and brought his heel down in a vicious hammerblow. “Crush Claw!”

I responded in kind. A scything blade of pure draconic fire met the descending foot.

To my surprise, my Dragon Claw didn’t immediately break his fancy skates. Instead, it felt as if I was slashing at a tyranitar’s hide, some kind of near-invincible stone that defied all logic.

The world, or at least our sparring area, shook as the shockwave from our clash hit the barriers. It didn’t hurt either of us, but it pushed us back to neutral.

“Huh… I thought we’d need Amy to regrow your leg after that,” I said idly.

“Nah, you can stop thinking of me like I’m a normal human,” Bryce replied. He put away the conventional revolver, leaving the laser version in his offhand. “I’m going to start pulling out the interesting stuff if you don’t mind.”

“Interesting stuff, huh? What does a tinker with all the specializations define as ‘interesting?’”

“Well, it’s bound to be a blast,” he shouted. He snapped his right hand. For a brief moment, I saw a single spark flicker between his thumb and middle finger. Then, the sky exploded.

I felt the shockwave more than the heat. The explosion didn’t come from him. It was everywhere, as if the sky around me had suddenly been laced with grenades, all primed to detonate at the same time.

And from a blast that would have leveled a large building, I got… a headache. Garchomp were bullshit-sturdy like that. They were Sinnoh’s own all-terrain, heavy assault juggernauts.

I let out a deafening roar. The air rippled with my power and the smoke cleared, presenting my unblemished scales.

“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking with me,” Bryce, the cheap bastard, whined. He shot away, releasing a plume of fog that obscured my senses.

I took that as my cue to hold back a bit less. It’d been almost a year since I got my power, plenty of time to regain my mastery of aura. I could happily say that the templates I drew from improved as well, to the point that I could use most of the moves in a pokemon’s arsenal, even those that typically needed external tutors.

A massive Sandstorm answered my call, a whirlwind of dirt and dust that could scrape a cow down to its skeleton in seconds. I felt the earth resonate with me as I “swam” in this vertical column. From this position, myriad gems formed around my person, shooting out like lasers towards the shadows in the fog.

Like this, the battle reached an uneasy stalemate. We hid in our respective weather effects while taking potshots at each other. Bryce had called his porygon-2 out to play and the little guy fired an annoyingly accurate salvo of Ice Beams that chilled my wings.

I got a few hits in as well, mostly by following the trajectory of the beams. Unfortunately, Power Gem wasn’t nearly as effective against them as Ice Beam was against me.

That was fine. He thought he had me cornered, but I used this chance to prepare a truly massive Draco Meteor. It built up inside of me, making me feel a bit like a shaken coke bottle. When I was ready, I distended my jaws with two, muted clicks and a hyper-condensed orb of blue fire rocketed into the air. 

From the outside, it was all but undetectable, masked in my sand tornado. They sure as shit felt it when it exploded, though. My cover was blown apart from within, sending sand raining down like hail. Dozens of meteors rained down, each with enough draconic aura to level a building.

Most people claimed that Draco Meteor was an indiscriminate attack, that its widespread destruction was uncontrollable. Some dragon trainers specifically considered it a good thing. An attack that was unpredictable was harder to avoid, after all.

They were wrong. It absolutely could be controlled. Regis could do it, and so could every Champion-class dragon I’d ever known, from Lance’s dragonite to Cynthia’s garchomp. It was, according to Lance, the true proof of mastery as a dragon type specialist. Fire? Rage? Destruction? These things came easily to dragons.. Discipline and discretion were much harder.

The sand dispersed, revealing my glorious visage to all. A corona of blue flames cloaked me, an armor of impossibly hot flames more effective than any castle’s walls. The meteors began to fall around us but I wasn’t done. Fins stretched wide, I seized hold of them all and brought them towards the cloud of fog Bryce had been hiding in.

“Draco Meteor: Convergence!” I shouted, with not a little vindictive glee.

“Oh, you son of a bi–” He didn’t get to finish before the first meteor exploded, blowing apart his fog cover. Then the second hit. Then the third. A shimmer of green surrounded Bryce, as well as some kind of golden, honeycomb structure.

He had layered force fields, probably the porygon-2’s Protect and something he’d tinkered up. Seriously impressive, more control than pretty much any other trainer I’d ever met.

That was good. I didn’t feel nearly as bad about this. A dozen more meteors crashed into him. To their credit, Bryce and his partner pokemon lasted through eight before the last four collided with his suit directly.

The impacts spiked them into the earth like a volleyball. A column of dust rose into the air, obscuring my opponent from view.

I thought it was over. Surely, this was as far as a tinker got, right? He did say he’d beaten the Simurgh and Leviathan, but neither of us had gone all-out. Maybe he had a few tricks he’d tailor-made for an endbringer-class opponent, but that didn’t mean they were easy to deploy.

Then, I felt it. The smoke cleared and Bryce stood tall, helmet cracked and cape in tatters, but definitely not out of the fight. He held something in his hand, a golden egg-shaped totem of some sort.

It was angular, as if cut from a crystal to display rigid faces and clean edges. On top was a crest, a stylized “M” with four, triangular arrows. It looked like a gaudy bauble that Dean’s dad might have as a paperweight.

Except, it radiated power like only a Legend’s relic could. Maybe it wasn’t aura in the way I knew it, but there was something awe-inspiring about it, a majesty that went beyond the gilded surface. There was no doubt in my mind that it was no less a relic than the Red or Blue Orbs.

“Say, Blake,” Bryce called, grinning through his half-shattered helmet. “Do you believe in miracles?”

Author’s Note

Lol, wouldn’t it be funny if Luo Hao became a Hogwarts professor? It’d be a one-shot, mostly of Violet learning to appreciate a seer’s warning for what it is. A seer is like a prairie dog. If it suddenly goes to ground, maybe you should too.

I actually considered adding more of my characters. Charlie Foxtrot would get into a fight with Tamamo over how many tails is the “proper” number for optimal floofing. Atreus would learn baking tips from Tianyu. Lumine would greet every one of them like old friends because she’s the Traveler and this shit isn’t her first rodeo.

Yes, Bryce went for the nuclear option. After all, there are no other opportunities for him to cut loose like this. Bryce’s most powerful specialization was not Harry Potter, One Piece, or even Type Moon. It was Digimon.

Animal Fact: Cows have best friends. They can actually get stressed and potentially even violent when separated from them for too long.

Also, dairy cows are generally pretty docile. Seedstock/Breeder bulls are not, something about all that testosterone and zero cows. They’re assholes and will fuck you up for zero reason at all.