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aladner comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 10 - Less Wrong
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On the topic of potion invention, what ever happened to the cloak from the dementor Harry killed? Based on the rules of potions given so far, that could probably make a nice Potion of the True Patronus™.
Or a potion of instant death if it instead stored the decay effect from the dementor.
That's so easy to do you don't even need magic.
I'd imagine that would be determined by the other ingredients and stirring patterns. It could also be used to make someone invisible to dementors, immune to the effects of dementors, temporarily unkillable, give off their own dementor-like aura, or just look like a dementor. Depending on what the other rules are, that cloak could be very valuable.
Testing which potion we got by such and such stirring pattern would be fun.
You give it to your hero and he is instantly dead. Or you give it to some criminal sentenced to death/Azkaban and he becomes unkillable for a month, or invisible to Dementors :)
Or you give it to rat and nothing happens - you try to kill the rat and he's killed - maybe that was potion that makes you invisible to dementors?
That sounds a lot like modern drug testing, actually...
I think you would need a remnant of the destroyed dementor itself, not just a cloak a dementor happened to be wearing when you killed it, and I don't think dementors leave anything behind when you kill them.
Either Dumbledore or Quirrel took it, or it's long since locked away in the Department of Mysteries.
But yeah, as JoshuaZ points out, just as easily could be a Potion-of-Death. (Or heck, "potion-of-anthropomorphic-personification")
I guess Harry's got another reason to destroy more dementors. Also, I suspect the cloaks will have more than one use. Dragons blood apparently has twelve uses, after all.
Um. It's not like Dementors come with cloaks, you know. If cloaks-that-have-been-worn-by-Dementors were really valuable potions ingredients, there's lots of easier ways to get them than by destroying Dementors. The Aurors manage to get the things to put them on in the first place, after all.
Dementors are implied to cause their cloaks to rapidly deteriorate, so they probably don't last long. Maybe "living" dementors accept new cloaks, but don't let the people take the ones they're wearing any more than you'd let a stranger make off with your shirt.
Yes, but the magic that was used to acquire that particular cloak was capable of blinding/destroying dementors, so it should be possible to get that magic back out using the newly revealed rule of potions.
I'm not so sure obtaining an object is the same as creating it. Using Accio on a potion-ingredient will not allow you to make a summoning Potion.
It's already established that obtaining a crushed ingredient will let you access the strength involved in crushing it. So obtaining an ingredient that had to be taken by invoking extreme powerful magic might let you access that...