Helping Hands Chapter 17 (Patreon)

Chapter 17 of Helping Hands, in which Harry, Luna, and the others finally venture into the shadow-cursed lands, finding the resistance to Thorm in the process, and working out a plan to deal with their great foe and, hopefully, find something they can use to save the others from their tadpoles.

A/N: A fair few of you have, over the past few months, expressed that this story seems to have gotten too bogged down in this current world and I wanted to address that. When I first decided to add the multiversal stuff to Witchcraft and Devilry, there were a lot of women from different universes that I considered adding to it. I eventually cut almost all of them, realizing that the story would become a bloated, unwritable mess if I went that far, and so I conceived of Helping Hands as a way to get to all of them.

This was supposed to be a sort of anthology series, where Harry, Luna, and Ciri would go into a world, find an attractive woman, seduce her, bring shenanigans, and then leave, taking her back with them. My original idea when they went to Planetos was for them to save Daenerys and then immediately get out of there, leaving the world to rot. I had had this idea ever since I watched season 8 of Game of Thrones, which I hated with such a fiery passion that it was actually what got me back into writing fanfiction. As I was writing that part, though, I found myself wanting to have them do more in that world, and that turned what would have been a one or two chapter thing, into a multi-chapter arc.

This then, in turn, led to the current situation with Baldur's Gate. I'm still enjoying this story, because I love BG3 and having them enter into that quagmire and try to fix it has been fun. If you are enjoying it as well, I'm very happy about that, but I understand that a lot of you aren't, and in all honesty, with how the story has progressed, I think it would be silly to try to steer it back to what I originally envisioned for it, so I've made a decision.

I will be finishing this arc outright, and I will use it to wrap up Helping Hands, but that won't be end for this concept. I plan to essentially reboot the story when it's done, writing something new that is similar in concept yet not weighed down by everything that's happened, and that story will stick to my original vision for it. Women who would have suffered an unfortunate ending in their story (or otherwise just suffer a lot) will be saved, seduced, and whisked away to an island paradise to live in peace and bliss. I really like that idea and it's just such a fantastic vehicle for letting me explore characters that I would otherwise do nothing at all with, or just use in one-shots.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TrgGyY6Ct3eMNOy1CQbTjKOXpX8_yjXADcHk9KMCaes/edit?tab=t.0