... For some odd reason Batman just entered my head, and I have decided that if he were investigating this case, things would have gone very differently - and rightly so! (I'm not even going to try and dissect that train of though, no siree!)

It sort of pains me how bad that last section was -- it had the potential to go really well! As a sort of plotty, mid-book, villain confrontation that I normally see between Harry and Dumbledore in the more shitty Harmony/Independent!Harry fics "oh god don't get anyone else involved everyone might die", "I must have faith in my goddess because right is on my side!", type deal, but then I'd want Marx to show up later to prove that you can't shove everyone who might be helpful out, and normally Zoey's line to Neferet would get binned before the final edit; finagling with it to get it to sound right is too much effort in this scenario.

Of course, that would mean that we'd actually have a likeable protagonist, a plot that wasn't revealed in a rain of dead fish and a coherent book. Oops.