But unless you bought Draco Malfoy's latest theory that Professor Sprout had been assigning and grading less homework around the time of Hermione being framed for attempted murder, thereby proving that Professor Sprout had been spending her time setting it up, the truth remained unfound.
So Imperiused-Sprout is Hat and Cloak?
The obvious question is, why did Quirrell cause Harry to believe that Quirrell is Voldemort? As a background assumption, Quirrell plays the game one level higher than Harry. Quirrell is able to model people very accurately, and has recently been uncharacteristically sloppy. Quirrell is also obviously prepared for Harry to figure this out (gun, smile, etc.), and I would think it likely that he could craft a plan so that he would successfully avoid suspicion, so I'm expecting that Harry believing that Quirrell is Voldemort is part of the plan.
What's his game?
The only thing that comes to me instantly is that Harry is now more likely to just accept whatever Quirrell villainously monologues next as true. I'll note that people are already accepting this as some sort of confirmation that Harry is Tom Riddle. CONSTANT VIGILANCE, PEOPLE! All we have seen is Quirrell say "Hello, Tom Riddle," to Harry!
That, and title of this chapter is The Truth, Pt 1, Riddles and Answers. As in two Tom Riddles.
So ...
Harry and Quirrell are partial backups of Voldemort, written onto the respective brains of a young boy and an adult man.
For Quirrell, being the Dark Lord is a core part of his identity; he identifies with that part of himself and its goals, namely personal immortality, which he believes can only be achieved at the expense of others. He believes this for good reasons, namely the underlying magical laws that give rise to the rules for potions and rituals: something of equal value must be sacrificed to gain a desired end: light for light, life for life. Magic is, in the end, zero-sum. Quirrell believes the zero-sum nature of the universe is cold reality, and that anyone who denies it is lying or deluding themselves.
For Harry, being the Dark Lord is not a core part of his identity, but a peripheral part ("mysterious dark side"). Harry identifies not only as a child of the Enlightenment, but as someone who wants to use his powers to elevate all of humanity. Harry does not believe that the magical laws are the way the universe works; he expects human accomplishments can be positive-sum. He believes this for good reasons, namely the positive-sum accomplishments of Muggle s...
Hm.
So, as we approach the end of the fic, there's one question left that looks really hard.
Let's try to solve it!
...but in all seriousness: I expect Harry to solve Death before the end of the fic - it's too central to both Harry's current motive and thus the current plot arc, and Eliezer's motives in writing this fic, to avoid, even putting aside the conspicuous Peverell prophecy.
There is not enough time left for Harry to do this by learning some secret art or by putting his own spin on an existing spell. Therefore, this problem should be soluble with what Harry has on hand.
For now, I will treat Quirrelmort and Dumbledore (come on, you don't honestly think he's going to be absent for the big climactic duel of words and ideals, do you?) as resources - never mind how Harry convinces them for now.
You're missing sextillions of resources, although only a few hundred billion are in this galaxy and only one is near enough to use immediately without FTL.
The stunning aspect of "the secret to creating new potions" isn't just that you can expend energy accumulated in some magical ingredient, it's that sunlight counts as magical energy. Yottawatts of power plus the ability to transmute elements might be useful...
My suspicion is that Cedric is under a Deathly Hallow invisibility cloak, instructed to leave and send a Patronus to Dumbledore at the first sign of serious trouble, and furthermore Memory Charmed Harry to forget him so that no one could read Harry's mind and figure out that backup plan.
I also suspect that the next chapter will contain a long discussion between Harry and Quirrel before any serious action, but Quirrel might want to have that long discussion after they're in the final chamber, not before.
Is it just me, or did several extremely verbose paragraphs full of questionable reasoning essentially boil down to 'everyone came at the same time so they must have had the same cause'?
EDIT: I mean it's a valid point to make. But it somehow comes from a big complicated tree of wild guesses rather than that statement.
As someone pointed out on Reddit, it's pretty suspicious that Harry figured everything out almost immediately after Snape hit him with a "Dispel Confusion".
Snape's head snapped around, as Professor Sprout raised her wand, and the Potions Master managed to raise a wordless translucent ward between them. But the bolt that shot from Professor Sprout's wand was a dark brown that produced a surge of awful apprehension in Harry's mind; and the brown bolt made Severus's shield wink out before they touched, clipping the Potions Master's right arm even as he dodged. Professor Snape gave a muffled shriek and his hand spasmed, dropping his wand.
The next bolt that came from Sprout's wand was a bright red the color of a Stunning Hex, seeming to grow brighter and move faster even as it left her wand, accompanied by another surge of anxiety; and that blew the Potions Master into the door, dropping him motionless to the ground.
I interpret that as Legilimensed Sprout's magic is Voldemort's magic is Sense of Doom magic. But then how was the troll made immune to sunlight, when Harry touched the troll's skin directly?
Nope. Quirrell on the possibility of Lucius framing Hermione:
"From a dark alley the black-clad form of Malfoy steps forth - he would go in person, for this - and speaks to her a single word."
"Imperio."
"Legilimens, rather," said Professor Quirrell. "I do not know if the Hogwarts wards would trigger for a returning Professor under the Imperius Curse. And if I do not know, Malfoy probably does not know either. But Malfoy is a perfect Occlumens at least; he might be able to use Legilimency. And for the target...perhaps Aurora Sinistra; none would question the Astronomy Professor moving about at night."
"Or even more obviously, Professor Sprout," said Harry. "Since she's the last person anyone would suspect."
The Defense Professor hesitated minutely. "Perhaps."
An alternate interpretation is that Voldemort was strengthening a few of the spells that Sprout cast, as well as the spell that Tonks used to win the battle, and this use of his own magic was what caused Harry's doom-sense to tingle. If that's the case, then there would be none of his magic on the troll.
"Harry had refreshed the Transfigurations he was maintaining, both the tiny jewel in the ring on his hand and the other one."
Hermione, probably.
The play on words with the title of the chapter (Riddles and Answers) and the final reveal was neat. Harry might be a copy of Quirrell!mort who's had his memory erased (rememberall,) and good ol' Quirrell!mort needs Harry to get the stone because...?
I'm still really curious how the Deathly Hallows are going to tie into this.
Also, where the hell is Cedric Diggory? Will it be another situation like what happened with the troll? The spare gets killed, or Harry is the spare, and is found defective?
Who says he need Harry to get the Stone? For all we know, he wants Harry to look into the Mirror of Desire in the hope that this will explain what the %&* Harry wants.
Yes. But two minutes before that he was thinking of taking Cedric, and then we get a cut scene to him sneaking about in the hallway with Lesath. That implies that Cedric might still be in play, otherwise we probably would've gotten a short sentence or two on why he chose Lesath over Cedric.
Cedric, who may or may not have a time turner, could quite possibly show up.
He's the Super Hufflepuff! He's taking all the electives, which is physically impossible without a Time Turner! He was mentioned right before Harry started making thorough off-screen preparations, and then conspicuously forgotten for the rest of the chapter! Dramatic logic dictates that he's got to show up at some point, probably in some way that involves time travel.
... Unless the whole thing was a throwaway joke about how useless Cedric was in Goblet of Fire, in which case yeah, I guess it was pretty funny.
I have never been so strongly connected to or affected by a piece of fiction, and have been breathing heavily since reaching the last couple of lines. You devil, Yudkowsky.
Things I notice I'm confused by: If Quirrel needs Harry's help to get the stone, why didn't he just ask? (Edit: okay, he did ask. But why didn't just ask earlier? And why is he playing all these tricky games?) I mean, it already worked for freeing Bellatrix. If there's a disturbance which Dumbledore suspects is a distraction, why did he send only Snape, rather than several aurors/coming himself?
What could Quirrel need Harry for? In canon, Harry could get the stone because he wanted to find it, not to use it, or something like that? But this Harry definitely wants to use it.
If there's a disturbance which Dumbledore suspects is a distraction, why did he send only Snape, rather than several aurors/coming himself?
Hypothesis: the situation is a trap for Voldemort. The corridor itself is blatantly a trap - it's easy to enter, but we know from Fred and George that it's full of invisible wards. Voldemort wouldn't risk confronting Dumbledore, and an unguarded corridor would be too suspicious, but Snape is just right in terms of difficulty level (and also has the option of going "my lord, you have returned!", surviving an encounter which would be fatal for anyone else, and possibly sneaking off to call Dumbledore).
The flaw with this is that the trap is really obvious, and Voldemort's intelligence is known to be very high, so it's implausible that he would enter the corridor at all unless he was absolutely certain of being able to steal the Stone despite the wards, and before Dumbledore could return.
Now that the cat's out of the bag, I wonder whether Quirrell set up Hermione and the troll as an excuse to Fiendfyre his way through some of Hogwart's walls.
Any professor could begin docking an escalating number of points from both houses points for poor sportsmanship. Just because they get a lot of points doesn't mean their total has to end up large.
I thought that Quirrell would die and in this chapter we'd learn the lesson that stories don't always finish when you expect them to (and then Harry would go on a 16-chapter quest to figure out Quirrellmort) but it appears that Yudkowsky can teach us that fact of life without it actually happening in the story.
The outcome of the comedy of errors that we witnessed, was that Harry realised that Quirrell was Voldemort. If this was Quirrell's explicit intention, then that's strange because there are much more efficient ways for him to do this (there are also m...
The outcome of the comedy of errors that we witnessed, was that Harry realised that Quirrell was Voldemort. If this was Quirrell's explicit intention, then that's strange because there are much more efficient ways for him to do this
Maybe the point is for Harry to not go that extra step, and realize that Q wanted him to know at that point?
Though I think the simpler explanation is just that Q's plan failed, and now he is resorting to his backup plan. That Q is always N+1 to Harry's N strikes me as a false portrayal of human reasoning and knowledge.
Don't forget that Quirrell can sense Harry's emotions (cf. coming to a resolution, and the prophecy). Under the circumstances, he doesn't need mind-reading to realise that Harry's figured him out.
Missed on first reading:
Harry had refreshed the Transfigurations he was maintaining, both the tiny jewel in the ring on his hand and the other one
An aside, a while back Harry convinced himself that Voldemort couldn't be smart, because his attempt to take Magical Britain had failed in the face of the Order of the Phoenix, who he's convinced himself would be easily disposed of through cleverness.
I remember thinking that Harry was accepting Dumbledore's assessment of Voldemort's goal, that is, taking over Magical Britain. But I think Voldemort didn't want to be World Leader, he wanted to be Boogeyman. I think he had no intention of defeating the Order, and spent his time tormenting them.
Good point. As skeptical_lurker said:
The mirror shows what you want, so the idea is a "good" person like canon Harry would see themselves finding the stone (which allows them to actually find the stone), whereas a "bad" person would see themselves drinking elixir of youth or making gold. Harry would presumable see himself providing everyone with elixir of youth, which means that he would not see himself finding the stone, which means he could not find the stone.
In that case, we would assume that Bellatrix would see herself presenting the stone to Voldemort and pleasing him, which would allow her to find it. In fact, that's a reasonably satisfying answer to why he wanted her out of Azkaban. So why does he even need Harry?
Remember that no matter what happens, the Hufflepuff boy will still come to Harry at a bit after 11:04. This means either that Voldemort will survive this encounter and retain mobility in four hours, or that he set up this message in advance (or that Harry is wrong about the source of this message).
I understood it to be implied that the message was actually set in advance to mislead Harry into believing time travel was involved.
Also, the transfiguration Harry is doing is an obvious hint as to the antimatter weapon ending.
What are some sensible-sounding alternatives to eliminating the snitch entirely?
The best I can think of is have two snitches—red snitch, blue snitch. Whenever a seeker catches their snitch, the opposing team can't score any more; the game ends when the second snitch is caught.
Prediction:
Harry gets the Snitch eliminated from Quidditch. Not just in Hogwarts, but in the big leagues as well - they don't want a Germany vs. Austria on their hands.
All of the celebrity Quidditch players of the world - Victor Krum, Ludo Bagman, Finbar Quigley - are distraught by these sudden and drastic changes to a traditional game they've loved for many years. At the ceremony marking the changes, some of them tear up.
The Daily Prophet headline is "BOY WHO LIVED TEARS UP THE STARS"
Eliezer gives all of us a long lecture about how the prior for somebody making celebrities cry is so much higher than the prior for someone literally ripping the Sun apart that the latter hypothesis should never even have entered our consideration, regardless of how much more natural an interpretation of the prophecy it is.
HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD.
This prediction doesn't fit very well with the exact text of the prophecy: "apart", "in heaven", "end of the world".
Clever, but you have to balance it against the closely related fact that making celebrities cry is surely much less likely to be the subject of a prophecy than destroying stars.
With professional players, whose job it was to play Quidditch.
It won't survive children doing the same. More to the point, the snakes and ravens are deliberately and obviously exploiting the current rules, which will trigger all sorts of fair play instincts.
If the Philosopher's Stone can make transfigurations permanent, must we assume this is how Lily made Petunia permanently pretty? So Lily had access to it? So she had occasion to do some other stuff with it?
Adding to my previous prediction comment:
Predictions:
Harry can resist the Imperius (if it were to be cast on him). 90%
Quirrell enchanted Harry's pouch so that Quirrell can enter and leave on his own in his Animagus form, and there is no mention of those enchantments being removed after leaving Azkaban. This fact will become plot-relevant at some point in the final arc. 75%
Some magical effect was previously preventing / discouraging Harry from figuring out that Quirrell is Voldemort. 65%
Speculations:
The True Patronus appears to have more intelligence than P...
I'm looking forward to the next update. Earlier (as in, over a year ago), I was guessing that when this conversation came around, either Quirrelmort would have been partially won round towards the light side, or HP, would be coming towards the dark side, or both, and Quirrelmort would say something along the lines of "I'm sorry I killed your parents. I was trying to find a cure for death and Dumbledoor's faction tried to stop me, and I believe that the ends justified the means. Obviously it was nothing personal, and knowing you now if I could take it ...
I still consider it unlikely that Voldemort is keeping Harry alive just to get the Stone. But perhaps he thinks a more altruistic desire for the Stone will allow someone to find it when the Dark Lord could not? Would that suggest Tom Riddle was originally more altruistic?
There seems to be a contradiction between the end-of-chapter weapon choice and the low magnitude of the sense of doom.
To reply to Shminux, I imagine it's because the sense of doom is some magical warning of the repercussions of Harry and Voldemort's magic colliding, which probably is not being set off by the probability of Harry's life being ended by a high-velocity piece of metal fired from a completely non-magical weapon.
To Alsadius, I think the gun is more deadly to Harry than an Avada Kedavra because of Harry's previous resistance to the spell. Remember when Quirrell previously suggested that they stage a "return of Voldemort scenario" where the pretend-Voldemort shot another killing curse at Harry who would block it with his Patronus 2.0? Harry's reaction was something along the lines of, "Nobody would believe that Voldemort would be so stupid to try that again." Apparently, Harry's ability to block it (as demonstrated in Azkaban) and previous resistance (as demonstrated the night his parents died) made Voldemort think the same thing.
Could the thing in the mirror be the Resurrection Stone, instead of the Philosopher's one? Linking Hallows seems more likely to lead into the prophecies about Harry than simply retrieving Flamel's stone.
I think it's more likely that Quirrell has the Resurrection Stone. When Harry shows him the Deathly Hallows symbol, he cuts their meeting short and hurries off somewhere. In canon, the stone was set into the Gaunt family ring, which Quirrell would have seen and would know the location of (it is implied that HPMOR follows the canon relationship between Tom Riddle and his family: "I have long since resolved my parental issues to my own satisfaction", "my family are long since dead at the Dark Lord's hand", Snape and Moody meeting at Tom Riddle Senior's grave).
...Harry didn't quite know how to describe in words the sense of kinship he felt with Professor Quirrell, except to say that the Defense Professor was the only clear-thinking person Harry had met in the wizarding world. Sooner or later everyone else started playing Quidditch, or not putting protective shells on their time machines, or thinking that Death was their friend. It didn't matter how good their intentions were. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, they demonstrated that something deep inside their brain was confused. Everyone except Professor Quirre
Some questions I would have if I were Harry:
Why do you teach me? Why do you teach others valuable lessons in Battle Magic?
What really happened at that martial arts dojo? Did you have good reason for not losing? Is the story of Voldemort killing everyone and not learning anything wrong?
Why have you demonstrated kindness to me? Ex.
"Very well," Professor Quirrell said. "I grant you permission to offer me something I want." The gun gestured invitingly. "That is a rare privilege, child. Lord Voldemort does not usually negotiate for what he wants."
Dear, dear, did he really call Cedric a spare? That doesn't bode well.
1:00–1:20: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1VfpFM1Gr8&index=13&list=PLC76BE906C9D83A3A
At this point, I would like to say "I Knew It" on the endless Quidditch match, but I can't find where I described this exact solution to the Quirrell wishes. I mean, it's kind of an obvious thing to do...
Lesath Lestrange is under Harry's time-turned invisibility cloak, but Cedric Diggory could be under his non-time-turned cloak.
I found it unbelievable that Harry would have taken that absurd amount of time to decipher what "the constellation" meant. It was obvious even to me.
New chapter!
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 104.
There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: