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elharo comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94 - Less Wrong
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Comments (343)
I am predicting that Harry has Hermione's body, though I'm not yet sure where. The reason is that Harry, from whose POV we see Chapter 94, does not seem especially concerned or upset that someone has run off with Hermione's body. If someone else had taken it, and thus interfered with his plans, he would be. He'd be thinking hard about who has it, where they've put it, and how to get it back. He'd probably be yelling at the professors for being stupid and incompetent. Instead he barely reacts when the headmaster tells him "Hermione Granger's remains are now missing."
He has probably transfigured the corpse, since that explains all the emphasis on maintaining transfigurations of large objects like his father's rock earlier in the book.
You're right Harry's mood is some evidence for his having the body. And from his behavior I think it's clear where it is:
From this and putting the ring as far away as possible I'm pretty sure the body is the ring and the rock sits on it to fool the magic detector. Someone called it in the comments on last chapter, when I get a chance to check I'll edit their name in so they get the appropriate Bayes points.
Yes. Note this part:
He was putting the ring on, because he was afraid of wearing it while asleep, because the transfiguration might fail. Waking up with a dead girl is better than waking up without a finger and with a dead girl.
Why wouldn't he be using partial transfiguration here?
Transfigure only part of Hermione into a ring?
The brain, presumably.
That would be worse, as he would physically rend the brain when it popped into existence. He could have it somewhere else, though.
We don't know that the brain would be 'rended'. McGonagall is not torn in half as she transfigures into a cat, and we don't see a transfigured rock exploding into rock dust when it untransfigures. And even if they did, well, Harry could've transmuted the brain into diamond of the same volume or something.
Animagus is not FREE transfiguration. it is a million times safer, but also more limited.
Yes, but one could create a non-free transfiguration just for that (e.g., transform anything into ring such that the de-transfigured object is still viable). I’m not 100% sure but I think the main part of the process for inventing partial transfiguration took less than 6 hours, so another insight is plausible.
I mean, untransfiguring the brain while it overlaps with a solid object.
Transfigure Hermione into part of a ring, and a marshmallow into the rest of it. That might not even require partial transfiguration, if you make them fit together like puzzle pieces.
Ringmione seems to be the most popular hypothesis at the moment. It strikes me as extremely careless a plan for Harry to attempt; recall Quirrell's comments after the battle with the transfigured armor, and the first battle where passing out ended the transfiguration on the marshmallow he was practicing with.
However, I took "Harry's parents come to Hogwarts" as a completely insane move that Dumbledore/Macgonnagle would be highly unlikely to pull, and yet the elder wizards thought rather differently from me and did it anyway. I still think using the ring involves Harry assigning way too little cleverness to Dumbledore, but in light of the ordeal with his parents I'll give it a little more probability weight.
(Note also that Harry did something under the covers when Flitwick showed up.)
Hum, well, if you think like a general wanting to win a war, yes. If you think as a teacher preoccupied about a 11-yo boy's mental health after he literally saw his best friend bleeding to death in his arms, fetching the boy's parents feel like the thing to do. And my own mental model of McGonagall is more that of a teacher preoccupied with a child's mental well-being than of a general.
McGonagall is upgrading herself and questioning her previous stances, but still, she seems like the only one who actually cares for a Harry as a child in distress, nearly as much as she cares about the war.
Harry will already lose a finger if anyone finite's his ring. He practiced with the marshmallow because the rapid expansion of the rock would tear off his finger.
Ringmione isn't much more of a personal risk to him.
This is a world where there are potions that can regrow bones in a single night. I think it wouldn't matter that much to Harry if he did lose his finger.
Cannon!harry does NOT like skele grow. I don't expect Rational!Harry would like it any more, even if he wouldn't complain about it to anyone.
No, but Hermione's life is on the line - he'd bite off his own fingers to save her.
No, the rock might crush his finger, or cause other problems, but it would push his hand out of the way, while with a ring, the center would close.
ch 30
This implies to me that that his finger would've gotten wrecked if that was a rock. Remember, finite on the rock blew out both the front and back of the troll's head. It wasn't just expanding in a confined spot; it expanded fast enough to blow out both sides. Explosive de-transfiguration. Certainly enough to tear off a 10 year old's finger.
Remember that Harry only needed to keep Hermione in the ring until after his stuff was searched; it strikes me as improbable that Dumbledore will demand to search the gem again. (Of course, having Hermione's body magically appear would still be a bit awkward, but the losing-a-finger part was the only one which I would expect to truly scare Harry.)
I still don't think the ring theory is correct, though. Harry has no reason to bring Hermione's body with him to the meeting; at best, it is an unnecessary risk. There's a Time-Turner theory elsewhere in the thread that seems far more elegant to me.
If Dumbledore asks his Patronus to find Hermione, and it flies over to Harry's ring, that would be awkward. Hiding a body in Hogwarts doesn't strike me as particularly difficult, even without transfiguration. I don't see why he would have to keep it among his personal possessions.
I don't think Patronus works with dead bodies though. Whenever Harry casts it, it seems like "life force" or whatever is pretty important
What location is safe to leave the transfigured Hermione? Hogwarts is not a safe place.
Almost anywhere where someone won't be deliberately looking for a transfigured item or where they won't accidentally pick it up. You can't search the school in general for transfigured items, it would take too long. He could simply put transfigured corpsemione into any random book in the library or hand the item to someone to hold for him for a while or put her under someone's bed or anywhere as long as he can plausible retrieve her before his transfiguration wears off.
Of course, he will have problems once someone starts trailing him.
It is notoriously difficult to trail someone who is wearing the True Cloak of Invisibility, with added anti-detection charms because apparently the Deathly Hallow just wasn't enough.
I read that as being an excuse for the differences between Harry's Cloak and the one Neville's familiar with.
I did too at first, but when Harry reads the follow-up letter from his father we see that it turned out for the best.
And there's a clue that I should remember it when I twitch slightly. When Harry was worried about whether he'd wrecked his relationship with his parents, I wondered whether that actually made sense.
If Ringmione is true, then I would assign over 50% probability to Dumbledore having noticed it and not called out Harry on it, in the same way that Dumbledore appeared to have noticed Harry in Azkaban and chose to not reveal it. I suspect Dumbledore is still just fighting the War, and believes that Harry is the key to defeating Voldemort and/or actually is Voldemort, and so Dumbledore did not reveal Ringmione because he believes Harry is trying to do the right thing and revealing Ringmione would cause a disastrous confrontation.
Given that all of Dumbledore's subsequent actions, including some pretty drastic decisions, were made on the assumption that Voldemort had returned, based solely on the evidence of the Azkaban break-in, this seems unlikely.
He even told Bones that he had only given each cell a quick examination due to the sheer number he had to look through, which is an unnecessary detail in-universe, but out-of-universe explains to the reader how he could have overlooked Harry's concealment.
ETA (this does mean "edited to add", right?): If Dumbledore was already working on the assumption that Harry was involved in the breakout, he would not have been so surprised that retrieving him from Mary's Place early would cause a paradox.
I have had felt for a while now that Dumbledore knows a lot more than he says. I'd put at least 55% chance on him knowing Harry was involved. What I don't get is why he says nothing and goes along with it. Even for Harry freeing Bella is more than youthful high spirits.
What's the strong evidence you have that lets you put it at at least 55% in spite of seeing no reason for Dumbledore to say nothing and go along with it?
It's not completely any one thing, rather it’s a combination of many things
In Azkaban, Dumbledore walks through and checks every unit. Bella remarks afterward that it was Dumbledore doing the check. That means he was close enough for her to identify him. She was not in great shape at the time and had almost no magic left. He was the most powerful wizard in several centuries doing an active search. It seems very unlikely he didn't notice everyone in the room. So with no tricks or deductions, I think there’s a chance Dumbledore finds out right here, and we see some hints that he did.
Returning from his search Dumbledore remarks that a prisoner had the same magic as a first year. As a Hogwarts prof, he knows very well how much magic a first year has.
Returning from the search Dumbledore changes tune from "Bella must not leave alive" to "let us not be the first to use deadly curses". (Ostensibly because they didn't kill Barry)
But if Dumbledore didn’t find Harry with his search, there are still various clues out there. And Dumbledore is the most powerful wizard in the world, in a world where power comes from solving mysteries, remembering details, and piecing together clues.
He knows that the individual in question didn't kill Barry
Dumbledore checks and discovers that the intruder has a patronus that hides him from dementors in a way never before seen, a week after having watched Harry invent such a charm.
When the intruder dismisses the patronus, the intruder shows up to the dementors but Bella remains hidden. Hence there is a second way to hide. Dumbledore has given Harry the true cloak of invisibility.
The dementors later refuse to cooperate as if they have been threatened / commanded. Later in the story, Harry scares / commands a dementor in Dumbledore's presence.
The intruder leaves Azkaban on a rocket powered broom!!!!
The broom in question is nonstandard with two seats. Later in the story Harry asks that he and all his friends be given multi seat brooms.
It turns out the rocket was transfigured out of ice to protect people breathing the smoke. (Note we don't see Dumbledore get this detail on screen, but it’s fair to assume intelligence sharing given other scenes)
The breakout happened when Harry was out of Hogwarts.
Checking on Harry before the breakout would cause a paradox.
The night after the breakout, Harry has an emotional breakdown and flips out on Dumbledore over how terrible conditions are in Azkaban and how much of a jerk Dumbledore is for going there and doing nothing about it.
Dumbledore may act crazy, but he is not actually an idiot. From Quirrell “"Mr. Potter, one of the requisites for becoming a powerful wizard is an excellent memory. The key to a puzzle is often something you read twenty years ago in an old scroll, or a peculiar ring you saw on the finger of a man you met only once.” Again, Dumbledore is the most powerful wizard in the world; he doesn’t realistically fail to put the above together.
Its 55% and not higher because 1) I can’t see exactly why Dumbledore acts like he doesn’t know if he knows. 2) some odds that Dumbledore’s mind is clouded by the hand of god.
Dumbledore clearly suspects Harry might be behind Azkaban. In fact, he says as much. However he doesn't "know". He also suspects it might be Voldemort. (He probably hasn't considered the possibilities that it was Harry and Voldemort working together.)
Dumbledore certainly doesn't "say" that he knows. But as readers we are not shown his internal thoughts (in contrast to Harry, Hermione, Mcgonagall, and many others). Dumbledore's thoughts have been deliberately made opqaue to readers. So we can't definitively say that he knows or doesn't know something. We can only infer which is more likely given other known facts.
I will note on a meta level though, that one possible reason not to show a character's thoughts is that they are thinking and saying different things.
...
Huh.
This... changes things.
That... is interesting. Very interesting.
... possible motivations: long-distance time travel, wanting to remain not-an-enemy of Harry so he can still exercise some influence on him (note: right from the start, he's the one who got the original HE IS COMING prophecy, right when a hypercompetent and extremely unexpected Harry Potter has arrived), wanting to figure out Harry's motives first.
Really?
Maybe only part of the ring is Hermione?
How would that help if Dumbledore Finite the ring? The dispelling doesn't seem that specific.
It wouldn't - but it would reduce Harry's risk of losing a finger to a Finite Incantatem in combat. And Harry does take pains to physically separate the ring from the stone before Dumbledore inspects the stone:
Unless that's just an intended second red herring, to make Dumbledore feel even worse about mistrusting Harry a second time. But just like Harry, Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape err in completely distrusting the wards when they say the Defense Professor killed Hermione, we can't treat possibly falsified evidence as anti-evidence, this has to shift our belief at least a little bit toward the Ringmione hypothesis.
The ring is also a significantly less suspect place to hide Hermione than the stone, because transfiguring something into a ring that you wear goes directly contrary to McGonagall's safety advice. Partial transfiguration provides a way around the safety issue, and Dumbledore and McGonagall are unused to thinking about things that can be done with partial transfiguration, so the idea is less likely to occur to them.
I'm about 50% confident that Hermione is in the ring.
(By the way, the wards' identification of Hermione's killer as the Defense Professor is strong evidence for the theory that the Defense Professor was carrying some nasties standing in his pocket when Dumbledore drew a circle around Quirrel to mark the Defense Professor to Hogwarts's wards.)
Then the wards should be saying now that the Defense Professor is dead?
On a side note, the actual skill that HPMOR is teaching its readers seems to be not science but rather Talmudism, the skill of finding clever interpretations to some words written in a book. It would be cool to see a fanfic that tried to teach science by similar incentives.
This seems to be my impression as well, which is somewhat unfortunate. (This is one of the reasons I try to avoid speculation in my commentaries, though it makes its way in from time to time.)
I think this is the case because there's an author intending the story. The correct way to predict the story is to predict the human writing the story, which is not the correct way to predict the fabric of reality. The story is also (mostly) non-interactive. Identifying an experimental intervention which could have a high information impact, while the backbone of science, is inaccessible to readers. Instead, observational data must be interpreted, which makes it difficult to distinguish between interpretations that agree with the existing evidence but disagree on other features.
And so you could have a game that teaches science (in some ways, Nethack does this, and similar games are easy to imagine), but I don't think you can have a fanfic which does.
Maybe you could have an mspaintadventure that teaches science.
For some reason that reminded me of the beautiful MSPA wizardfic. Not that it's scientific or anything!
I hadn't thought of that. Some possible explanations:
1) Quirrel didn't actually use that trick.
2) The wards don't report the deaths of faculty, only students.
3) As long as any part of "Defense Professor" has is alive, the wards don't register its death.
4) The wards did register the Defense Professor's death, but either
4a) Dumbledore didn't notice the extra death report, since he was preoccupied with a student's death, and didn't look it up afterwards
Or
4b) Dumbledore knows about it, and (correctly) assumes that the same glitch that attributed the troll's actions to the Defense Professor attributed the troll's death to the Defense Professor.
This may not be entirely fair to the Talmud, which at least sometimes grounds out into "what rule for living should we deduce from the clues in the text?".
Losing a finger shouldn't happen. A human is a torus. Depending on which way he puts the ring on, he'd just wind up with his finger in her mouth, or otherwise.
So...you're saying that transfigurations have to be homeomorphisms? You couldn't transform the toroid Hermione into some sort of Klein Bottle, even if you really, really wanted to?
He's saying that there should be less danger of snapping stuff off due to sudden topological changes when there's holes going through both the source and target form (and damn, got there before me).
As for control, it seems to me like the orientation is even intuitively clear in this instance once you actually think about the topological similarities. What with mental images being rather important with magic, it's likely to be doable. (And for getting rid of the mental image later, there's Obliviate!)
Is there a reason to think people have control over what parts of the input to transfiguration become what parts of the output? Most people just think whole input object to whole output object. Harry has figured out how to take only a "partial object" as input, but choosing what parts end up where sounds much more complex.
A desk is not a torus.
But then what was he doing under the covers?
Misdirection?
Although that is evidence against Ringmione.
Misdirecting Flitwick by pretending that he's transfigured a whole ring instead of a partial one? But it would be much less suspicious just to get out of bed, given that what he'd want to hide would be that the ring was transfigured at all.
I was thinking, to leave a false clue that Hermione's body was hidden either in the bed or on his person.
Interesting point.
Of course, he could have removed the gem so that it wouldn't damage the ring when it was transfigured back, and put it on the other side of the desk so that when the rock "fell with a loud crack upon the Headmaster's desk" it wouldn't smash the ring.
But yours is still possible as well.
I'll save you the checking, it was me. Link.
The gem is red herring, the ring is Hermione.
This was my thought as well, but Harry would have had to be unreasonably sure that Dumbledore didn't have some kind of "de-Transfigure everything in sight" spell to use on him.
It's called Finite Incantatem.
Think about what would happen if Dumbledore (strong wizard, has all sorts of authority) cast Finite Incantatem on his desk, and the spell doesn’t include a “do what I mean, not what I say” security feature.
There must be thousands of spells in that general area. Even if for some reason the desk wouldn’t be disenchanted (which probably it wouldn’t, else casting Finite on someone holding a filled magic pouch or near a magic trunk would be very dangerous, and someone would have mentioned that in MoR), it still probably has dozens if not hundreds of other spells, and can thousands of magic items due to recursive space folding. Even if many of those are protected against Finite, they are so many in total that it’s very likely that a lot aren’t.
Now that I think about it, casting Finite on something you don’t know about sounds just as dangerous as casting a spell you don’t know what it does. (Basically, Finite means casting the reverse of a spell.) Very exploitable unless something automagically checks for corner cases.)
Nothing, I would think
Either he used a specific counter-free-transfiguration spell, in which case it wouldn't affect anything that was not free transfigured, or he uses Finite and only puts enough magic into it to overwhelm anything a first-year student could produce.
I suppose he could have put in just enough juice to counter one spell from a first-year but not enough to counter two, but that is relying on a second layer of Dumbledore error.
That's even assuming that Finite or Finite Incantatem can affect artifacts, which we don't know to be true. Have we seen any signs of such?
That wouldn’t be quite enough; Harry could have got someone else to help, though indeed it is unlikely.
You’re quite right about this. Presumably there’s some sort of “stabilizing” element for artifacts and spells that are meant to be (semi)permanent, precisely to avoid accidental Finite. (Not necessarily brute-force resistance spells, it could be just a safety thing to make sure you really want that cancelled.)
It's clear that in Potterverse, there are at least four inputs to a spell: wand, gesture, incantation, and state of mind of caster. Killing Curse and Patronus, for instance, are quite clearly dependent on state of mind. Transfiguration also depends on state of mind, and I don't recall any indication that there is any modification of the gesture or incantation depending on what transfiguration one intends to perform; that is determined entirely by intent. I think that it is reasonable to assume that, just as the Transfiguration spell is a "Do the transfiguration I'm thinking of" spell, the Finite Incantum spell is a "End the spell (or class of spells) I'm thinking of" spell.
This would make the most sense, of course. But remember that this thread started from the idea “what if Dumbledore mass-Finites”, i.e. without knowing what spell he was cancelling. This might work if Finite is smart enough to identify a class like “unknown spells that entered the room together with Harry in this general area”, but that’s stretching it a bit.
Also, though that wasn’t my original point, it still has the risk of very dangerous effects. E.g., if Harry had used a 1 ton stone instead of his father’s, for some reason. Or if someone else placed a dangerous transfigured item on Harry.
By the way, I just had an idea: the reason you shouldn’t transfigure living things is that they get sick and die after turning back (presumably due to DNA damage and protein denaturation, basically approximating radiation exposure). Trolls are dangerous because they self-transfigure into themselves. Now, imagine you’re a wizard strong enough to transfigure a troll, say into a gemstone on your ring. While transfigured the troll shouldn’t be able to fix itself (since it’s a stone). It might even pass most magic wards. But when you turn it back, the troll should repair itself almost instantly, showing no signs of transfiguration sickness.
Do we have an example of Finite being used to cancel anything other than transfigurations or first-year level spells (Somnium)?
Canon is rather inconsistent, as you’d expect. In MoR chapter 23 there’s this:
Stuff like locks would obviously be protected, but Harry’s thoughts (“some”) suggests that it’s more of an exception.
Not in sight, but Finite Incantatem does seem to be a (likely moderate and adjustable) area-affect spell based on it's spammability in combat and the ability to finite things that you don't know the exact position of.
A second, hidden copy of himself could possibly use the time turner as soon as it was announced the ring was to be transfigured, and make sure Hermione was not in the ring, but I think Harry has better uses than that for as much time turning as he can get.
I wondered about why he took out the gem and put it far away from the ring. But I'd be surprised if Harry were good enough at occlumency to fool Dumbledore. Wondering how he answered those questions.
His occlumency is not the issue. In MoR, as best as we can tell, there are perfect Occlumens, but not perfect legillimens.
it's the other little clues that get left around that may or may not give him away.
Or Harry transfigured Hermione's body into a rock and then the rock into a brown diamond. Unless the story explicitly disallows double transfigurations and I missed it.
I thought this, but the spell used to undo a transformation by Harry in 89 is 'Finite Incantatem' which sounds more like 'stop magic happening here' rather than 'undo a single transformation', especially considering its varied other uses. Assuming Dumbledore didn't make a basic error (he didn't) I feel as though my stone hypothesis from earlier has been falsified.
My problem with that is that the rock should then still be a 'transfigured object' for the purposes of the spells and detected when Dumbledore examines the untransfigured diamond.
I agree, and suspect a time turner is involved. Reasoning:
If I am reading this correctly, Harry asks about whether or not making Hermione an Infernius would allow her to keep her mind twice, once in Chapter 90, and once in chapter 94. In neither case does his reaction seem to phase the other person much, so it doesn't seem to be a social maneuver.
Harry also needs to urgently go to the bathroom in 94. So he doesn't seem likely to waste time asking questions that he already knows the answer to for no reason.
This strongly implies he has forgotten part of the events of chapter 90 at some point, or that he asked that question for some reason other than curiosity. Also, he has access to an unlocked time turner, and is going to have access to memory charms soon (the moment he gets to have a moment where he's not drowning in social contact and can actually go READ the book). He's also really, really, determined to do something to revive Hermione.
Harry could now suspect that he is GOING to take Hermione's body in the future. Then he can attempt to go back in time, and then steal the body, and then memory charm his past self so his past self didn't remember during the interrogation. It's chapter 13 all over again, except far more seriously this time.
This might explain his lack of surprise, and his vague mentions of probability. It could FEEL like he had been woken up in the middle of the night, stolen Hermione's body and handed it off to his time turned self, even though he can't actually remember his time turned self having told him to do that.
Also, it explains such remarks as:
Which in this case you could take as:
So forming an intention to do something really does mean to an extent it might already be happening.
I think Harry's second question about Infernius was rhetorical.
Harry is saying that he's mentally prepared to kill something that looks like and used to be Hermione.
I don't see the point in using it as an Inferius. Why would Dumbledore expect the Dark Lord to do that?
He would expect it because it's cruel. The Dark Lord seems to have optimized his (public) actions for sadistic pleasure more than effectiveness.
If Quirrellmort sees Harry as a genuine threat, though, he's probably holding the body hostage. He'll have placed it in stasis as best he can.
OK, although I also don;t think that any post-Azkaban Harry would be fazed by having to kill Zombie Hermione.
It's also possible that he wanted to confirm the validity of the information he got from Quirrell. If Quirrell and Dumbledore agree on something, it's probably true to the best anyone can tell, or at least that's probably how Harry sees it.
Also likely to hide the fact that he already had the answer to this question--it wouldn't do for people to start wondering what he and the Defense Professor were talking about...
Regarding Harry's lack of surprise, isn't it odd that he puts no effort into wearing the expression of someone who has no idea about Hermione's body being missing?
Remember that Harry had just been hastily awoken long before his accustomed time. It's not unreasonable for Harry to be behaving a little bit awkwardly, and it certainly isn't enough of a tell for Dumbledore to draw any conclusions.
What does seem to be a bit of a tell is his strange behavior around the ring; he seems to deliberately create tension before the ring is verified in order to, apparently, play for sympathy afterwards.
I suggest that Harry, upon finding himself being interrogated about Hermione's remains, resolves to time turn himself after the meeting back to before he was woken and replace the Hermione gem with the Father's Rock gem. Only after resolving on this course of action is Harry ready to submit the gem to Dumbledore for examination.
He can stow the Hermione gem anywhere non-obvious in the meantime and recover it later.
If that logic worked Hermione wouldn't have died in the first place.
Not necessarily. We don't know what causes ontological loops to form. Precommitting seems to be insufficient, but that doesn't mean that Harry can't get a loop when he needs it.
Except that Harry didn't have access to his time turner prior to witnessing Hermione's death. Once something has happened it cannot be re-written in the self consistent time travel of the HPMORverse.
Harry did ask Dumbledore about ways to create the illusion of death in order to get around this hurdle (essentially allowing the information to be the appearance of Hermione's death as opposed to her actual death), but the Headmaster said he had tried something like that with disastrous results previously.
I know of nothing in the known rules of time travel in HPMOR that wouldn't allow for Harry to plan to swap gems. In fact, he used basically this exact same trick for the Remembrall and Torture incidents.
I suspect a time turner is involved for different reasoning. Specifically, I suspect that Harry's wards allow time-turned copies of himself to do things while he is asleep (since future-him knows more). So, my guess is that Harry stole Hermoine's body last night, woke up to find it missing (hence, the fumbling under sheets), goes through the interrogation, goes back in time, and steals Hermoine's body from his sleeping past-self.
Nice.
Note that Harry has no legitimate way to know what an Inferius is.
Also, I highly doubt that Hermione is in the ring - it's just too awkward, it risks detection, if it gets detransfigured in a critical situation then suddenly he has to lug Hermione's body around while fighting off Voldemort or something.
It's far more likely to be an anonymous brick, marked with, oh, let's say a stylized helium atom, that he placed in plain sight somewhere. Shame he doesn't know about the Room of Requirement, or he could've used the Room of Lost Things...
Inferi appear to be common knowledge; they're cited in casual contexts in chapters 70 and 78, by Lavender Brown and the narrator respectively.
That said, the idea that Harry has Obliviated himself is interesting - there's been a timeskip and he's had access to his Time Turner, so he's had time to read his book, and he thinks about Memory Charms during the conversation, which is something of a dropped hint.
The transfiguration won't last forever if he leaves it on its own.
I'm not sure if this means that he actually has to have it on his person at all times, or if he just has to go near it every so often. Maybe he transfigured her into his blanket.
I would have guessed he'd have used the pouch, although Dumbledore can apparently search it without Harry's permission, so that's risky.
Eh, the theories about the ring is the body and the gem is the decoy seem crazily, unnecessarily risky. They rely on Dumbledore doing an insufficient search. It seems like a much more reliable strategy is that as soon as Dumbledore asked to check the ring, he precommitted to going back in time to swap the body-gem for the rock-gem. Then he goes to the bathroom, drops back an hour, transfigures the rock, swaps the gems on sleeping Harry, then goes back to the bathroom for the handoff.
That said, it's been stated that solids undergo internal changes over time, and so a living thing transfigured into a solid and back would die within hours. There's got to be another piece to the puzzle than just Harry transfigured the body. I considered the possibility that Harry transfigured it into something more stable than wizards are used to dealing with, like a single gold atom, but that presents it's own logistical challenges.
Isn't there a simpler (and nicer) solution than Hermione-corpse-transfigured-to-ring, or Hermione-corpse-transfigured-to-gem-then-swapped? Both of these seem unduly complicated and ghoulish.
The nicer solution is that whatever Harry was doing between Hermione's death and dinner-time, he has already succeeded. Harry has somehow set up a time marker by which his future self can travel back to restore Hermione to life (or pass himself some sort of message back telling him how to do it) and she is already resurrected and out of here.
Presumably the plan also involved him selectively obliviating himself, so that he would retain the motivation to work out how to do the impossible in the future, while being quite relaxed about little details like the missing body.
An interesting question is how did he get round the 6 hour limit? Are there any hints in the story so far on the solution? Some thoughts:
I don't see Hermione be revived any time soon, for both story reasons and because Harry is unlikely to unravel the secrets of soul magic in mere hours, even with a time loop at his disposal.
More likely, Harry has found a reliable way to suspend her, and that would be the "he has already succeeded" you speak of.
Is there any chance that Harry has figured out how to hack time turners?
I thought of a weird hack based on ambiguity about "information". Here's how it works:
In the present, you have a problem you need to solve but will only be able to solve a long time in the future.
Set up a random process to guess an answer and write it to a sheet of paper A.
Do something with the answer, then hide the paper somewhere safe where it won't be disturbed until you later solve the problem properly.
Memory charm yourself to forget what was written to A.
Much later, solve the problem properly. Also learn the Imperius curse, and then Imperius yourself to do the following protocol. Cast all sorts of other advanced protection spells to prevent anyone or anything else interrupting the protocol.
At time T, you expect to receive a sheet of paper B with a correct answer to the problem. You then look in the place where you hid paper A and see if the answers match. If they match, you write "Success" on a third sheet of paper C. If they don't match, you write "Fail" on paper C, add a completely different answer from either A or B to paper C, and put it in your pocket. If you don't receive a paper B at all, then write "Fail" on paper C, add a random answer, and put it in your pocket. Memory charm yourself to forget what was written on A and B, and what you wrote on C.
At time T+1 hour, you look in your pocket and do the following. If you find a paper C starting with "Fail" then copy the rest of its contents to a paper B, and send it back in time one hour to yourself. If you have a paper C starting with "Success" then write down the correct answer to the problem on a sheet of paper B and send it back in time one hour to yourself.
It seems like the only consistent loop is where the guessed answer written on paper A matches the correct answer later written on to paper B. But since it's "only a lucky guess", it's not strictly information about the future. Would that work?
This doesn't seem significantly different from the loop Harry already tried, that didn't work. Don't summon Azathoth.
Well it didn't work before because getting scared and writing "DON'T MESS WITH TIME" was also a stable loop. If you read the description carefully, Harry broke his own protocol.
This is why I suggested adding the Imperius, memory charms and other powerful protection spells to ensure the protocol is followed. If Azathoth appears in the middle of the protocol anyway then the protection spells weren't strong enough !
There's still the danger that the most likely stable loop is one where somebody breaks your protection spells. You need the probability of that to be much less than the probability of guessing the correct answer A.
I'm not sure what you're implying here. Is this just a general rule of thumb for rationalists?
Just a general rule of thumb. The time loop is a powerful optimization process with outcomes that are not intuitive to humans. It's analogous to invoking evolution. If 'the world is destroyed by an asteroid' is the only stable outcome, then it seems that's what you're going to get.
Hermione was dead when transfigured. Any revival has to already surmount post-mortem decay and the transfiguration damage might not be a significant additional cost.
That may be true, but it may not be, and in transfiguration, you may recall, you do not care to guess. Harry will take every possible avenue to reduce the amount of magical omnipotence he needs to revive Hermione, and he has utterly no clue how much damage will be done with a straight transfiguration, and he has nobody to ask. I don't believe for a minute that the best he came up with thinking about it for 5-6 hours was to simply transfigure her into a ring/rock.
Harry knows why solids undo internal changes, though - it's because they do. You sit a block of gold down for an hour and random heat vibrations are going to reorganize the atoms. Map that gold block back to a human, and now you have heart-atoms where lung-atoms should be. Wait too long and you'll get a ghoulish soup.
He can avoid this by using a very stable crystal, and keeping the crystal itself cool, but it's still probably a temporary solution.
Or transfiguring the body into something that doesn't change very much over time even if it is warm, such as an electron or a molecule of nitrogen and store that safely (what about a single carbon atom within a diamond? Should go about unchanged, and is easy to store).
Actually ,there's an even bigger problem. In order to maintain the transfiguration, you'd have to touch that carbon atom again.
What does it mean, on a molecular level, to "touch" things? It's just repulsion of electrons. So if Harry has learnt to do partial transfiguration by considering things to be just piles of atoms, he might also be able to get around that restraint.
Of course, you are still completely right that transfiguring stuff into very small particles is quite dangerous: What if the atom sublimates? What if somebody somehow takes it up so it becomes part of that person's body? How to find it in case it gets lost in the atmosphere, in the sea, or anywhere else? Etcetera. All sorts of fatal mistakes can be done, and Harry will not want to risk dying, or making Hermione's recovery impossible.
I'm not sure you can transfigure things into individual atoms, though. It's been implied that large scale changes are hard, and the scale change from body -> gem is, what, twenty orders of magnitude smaller than that from gem->atom?
Now, the real ideal would be some supercooled perfect crystal of nitrogen or something. But that has... obvious problems.
There's a yet-simpler possibility.
He's not stupid, he knew that he would be summoned when her body disappeared, so he slept with whatever her body is transfigured next to his skin so that it wouldn't reverse itself and then removed it in that first moment. No Time-Turner use required.
I notice that there are no instructions to check anywhere else--such as under the covers on his bed.
Agreed that it seems overly risky, but conservation of narrative detail says it's the ring regardless. And I can buy Harry going for a clever red herring ploy even so. (Also, coming out of his goodbyes, he presumably burned out most if not all of his time turner turns for the day, but I forget if he was about to get new ones in time to hack it if necessary.)
You'll have to explain why. It seems to me my theory fits the details just as well and isn't prone to catastrophic failure given a slightly more diligent DD. Even if it is the ring, he still precommits to going back in time to do the swap, just in case DD does turn out to be sufficiently diligent.
There's no way he burns all the time turner uses for the day at once unless there's no other possiblity. He learned in Azkaban that you always leave yourself wiggle room. And entirely aside from that, it's good for 6 uses per day. It's a new day.
This is where he's going to be using the time-turner to pick up Hermione's transfigured body before Flitwick arrives.
The reason this works this time, is that he has already precommitted to doing so when he spent all those hours thinking until dinner the day before. The ring is a red herring.
Wait, can you use a time-turner to go back, pick up something and return to the present? In that case you can keep something permanently hidden outside of time, except for a minute every 6 hours as you pick it up and drop it off.
I'm reasonably certain time turners can't jump you forwards in time. So far as I can tell everyone who's used a time turner has taken the 'long path' to catch back up with their most advanced present.
Harry can return to the present via the long route, if necessary. It doesn't appear that anyone bothered to check for extra Harries in the morning, so he wouldn't need to do anything more exotic than hide in the washroom before the previous Harry iteration got there in order to fool the Professors.
For indefinite qualities of "permanently"-- it sounds like it's got the same sort of vulnerability as those embezzling schemes that fall apart if the embezzler is sick for a while.
How do those work?
I ask only out of curiosity!
I don't have specifics, but it's something like the embezzler being in charge of the accounting. so that scheme holds up as long as no one else looks at the books. Sensible companies have enforced vacations for anyone who has that sort of responsibility.
My first thought was that she'd been transfigured into the pajamas, but I don't think that's likely. My theory is that when Harry slept in his bed it was the second time he'd been through that time period. The first time, he stayed invisible with transfigured Hermione in his possession, waited until woken-up Harry had finished being searched, gave her to woken-up Harry, then went back in time and went to bed.
That would require him to stay up all night, since he cannot know in advance the exact time Flitwick will arrive. It is much more likely that the Harry we saw was the first one, and that he's now going to go back in time to pick up the body.
I'd been wondering if Harry might have left Hermione's transfigured body with someone else. Probably not Neville or Quirrel, because the professors are already paying attention to them lately and Harry doesn't completely trust Quirrel's intentions. But he could safely leave it with Lesath, as long as no one saw Harry give Lesath the body and reclaim it later. Harry considers Lesath's loyalty a resource now, and no one else thinks Lesath is relevant. It's not typical of Harry to rely on others for help, though, so I'm not confident that he actually did this.
EDIT: It's the ring. Everybody beat me to it.
Didn't even think of the Harry not being upset thing. I assumed Harry has Hermione's body, because he has the obvious motive and he's clever enough to hide it where Dumbledore couldn't find it.
EDIT: Also not sure where. I'm a little unclear on what the inspection of the pouch involved. For example, if Harry transformed Hermione's body into a key and put it in the pouch, would there be any way for the professors to discover this, aside from guessing there was a key in the pouch and then examining said key?
It appears that transfigured items have a detectable magical signature indicating they are transfigured.
Made even more probable by McGonagall having told the class in her introduction on transfiguration that goblins have ways of finding out who transfigured a false coin.
I assumed that, but it's a little unclear how hard that is to do. Could they pick up the signature of a transfigured item in the pouch if they can't figure out how to get it out of the pouch? If the ring were a transfigured item, what are the odds the detection method would pick that up without a specific decision to scan the ring?
The more I think about it, the more it seems likely Hermione's body is in the pouch. The pouch has funny rules that Harry has investigated with unusual thoroughness, and he might be able to exploit that to create a situation where no one but him is likely to be able to figure out the right word to say to retrieve Hermione's body.
Dumbledore can simply reach into that pouch to grab what he needs.
Particularly since, given Harry's investigations into the pouch, "Hermione's body" or at the very least "Hermione's transfigured body" should fetch it for you no matter what you've hidden it as. The pouch isn't an extra way of hiding something, its a particularly handy way of finding hidden things.
Or rather, it would be foolish to presume he did not - Dumbledore is a seriously powerful wizard, after all.