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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 116
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 116.
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.)
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
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Comments (302)
Ch. 116:
Should be "Confederation".
Should be "blew".
Also:
Isn't the singular "Inferius"?
I think that might have been Harry making a mistake on purpose. At least that's how I interpreted it when I read it.
I'm sure there's some small simple potion that makes a whistling noise as its only effect...
It's a nice story. But it won't work.
Harry wants folks to think LV killed the death eaters and not him. But he has trained Draco too well. Given priors on someone defeating Voldemort you would assume it's Harry, DD, or QQ in that order. Draco knows Harry and QQ were up to something because he and several other kids bumped into them and had a scuffle at the third floor corridor. If that wasn't entirly obliviated away, Draco will figure out that Harry was involved.
For some reason I was thinking Harry was under his invisibility cloak until pretty much everyone involved in that charade was unconscious. Am I misremembering?
DumbleDore?
Yeah. I meant Albus Dumbledore. For some reason my brain saw DumbleDore and abbreviated that as DD. Probably symmetry with QQ.
I see lots of people doing that on /r/hpmor and I've never been confused by it, strangely enough. It's not just you. You probably absorbed it unconsciously.
Draco will probably figure something is strange, but he may not guess/learn that Harry killed his father. I think that's one of the main purpose of Harry in crafting a fake version of events.
Hello. My name is Draco Malfoy. You killed my father. Prepare to die!
Draco has been well trained enough (by his father and by General Chaos) to know that you don't say stuff to people you are murdering.
I was wondering if one of the things Harry would do with his extra hour was a Patronused message to Lucius to "Stay where you are, remain silent, do not respond to the Dark Mark, for one hour, if you want to live." Or even better, a message to Draco to send that message to Lucius, except Draco is probably still sleeping off Harry's stunner.
In any case, under the circumstances, Harry might be able to trade the whole sad story, including confirmation of Dumbledore's ordered killing of Narcissa (now that Dumbledore is gone) for Draco's forgiveness.
Warning Lucius would risk paradox, particularly since Mr. Counsel was probably Lucius.
Since time loops are stable, no reason not to try. Even if Mr. Counsel is Lucius, the most stable time loop is that Lucius doesn't believe the Patronus and gets killed anyway, and then Harry can at least truthfully tell Draco he tried.
A fair point (and upvoted), but since Harry will still have killed Lucius if he fails, it'd still be best to try to hide the whole thing from Draco. But yes, try (since he doesn't know for sure who Counsel is), and tell Draco that he tried if Draco figures it out, but don't tell him otherwise.
So, I don't know how these stable time loops are supposed to work. My working model is that they function by trial and error, that time iterates through a universe until it encounters paradox, at which point it returns to pre-paradox, inserts some change into the world through prophecy or whatever, and tries again. This continues until a stable timeline is found, with an unknown number of them being discarded/destroyed. It appears from within that things worked on the first pass, but they did not. Our viewpoint never follows into one of those dead ends, but they exist(ed).
If the world really works that way, Harry would be potentially throwing his victory away by forcing a paradox. Time would have to reset to before the paradox and insert a change into the world to ensure a different outcome. He may or not be victorious in that new timeline. Harry dying was already a high probability and it would certainly resolve things to Time's satisfaction. His best chance of securing his immediate past as part of the real and continuing world would be to make sure this timeline remains self-consistent.
(Plus, he's prophesied to destroy the stars and creating a time-paradox seems like a really obvious possible way to do that.)
The only other possibility I can think of for these apparently stable timelines is that the whole universe is pre-determined and no one has any free will at all. I read something from EY about universes with time travel and he seemed to be in support of this second possibility. Any other possibilities for how this would work?
I think that the trial and error model is implausible; in which "time" are these trials and iterations occurring? The global determination of the whole universe seems much simpler.
I don't think it necessarily conflicts with free will, when free will is understood in a compatibilist way (which is how EY and most LWers understand it). If we agree that one can have free will in a completely deterministic universe with ordinary past-to-future causal chains, then why can't one have it in a universe where some of the chains run future-to-past?
That's a good link, thanks. I'm warm to compatibilism. I think I've confused the conversation by using the wrong terms, though. Instead of pointing at a lack of free will I should have pointed at the complete lack of causality, which is more constraining. You can read EY on it here.
My interpretation of this would be that space-time would be a fixed object that exists in it's entirety. In the same sense that you could take a cross sectional scan of a sneaker and play it from rear to front, there would be a logical consistency to how the slides transformed as you progressed through the shoe, but it would not make any sense to say that one part caused another. In this analogy, 4-dimensional space-time is the shoe, and the cross section is 3-dimensional space. We play it from back to front, watching a movie of the universe, but the entire universe from beginning to end already existed; we're just looking at a slide of it at a time. Everything is consistent as the cross section passes through, but there's no causality in play, it's just an object being viewed in sequential slices. Much like EY's modified game of Life with time-travel.
This actually seems pretty unsatisfying because there is a strong impression that the world is being run mostly on causality in the normal direction, with reverse causality coming in occasionally. This seems to me to work better with the iterating model.
Regarding the time for trials and iterations, I would refer to simulation as an analogy. "World time" is happening in the simulation, and this is what the characters are aware of. From within the simulated world, how much "Meta time" has elapsed outside of the simulation (i.e. the time stream that the computer is in), or how many failed attempts have been dumped from RAM is not very relevant in the sense that these facts don't have any impact on "the world" (the simulated one) and are in fact probably unknowable to its inhabitants unless access to that meta-information has been somehow granted. To a denizen of the world, the fact that we switched from world version 721.213 to world version 779.344 last Tuesday at 9:41am is unknowable, the transition seamless, the lost attempts erased from world time even though they still occurred in meta time.
I'm not saying HPMOR is a simulated world. That's just a model I'm using to think about timelines being destroyed and recalculating.
The nature of causality is controversial, but in my opinion it should be understood as a feature of the second law of thermodynamics. That causes precede their effects is an empirical law, not a logical necessity. Time turners can violate this in certain ways, but they don't throw it out entirely.
As you look through the block universe, you can observe various features corresponding to causality: the increase in macroscopic entropy, the expansion of radiation, the human creatures inside that remember the past and plan for the future. The block universe model doesn't eliminate causality; it is a physical feature within that universe.
All that has to happen is that there is some entity that behaves and responds in the same way that Mr. Counsel does. While it might be likely that the Mr. Counsel character is Lucius, there is nothing in the laws of time that prevent the person under that hood from being someone else - particularly because Harry took care not to look closely at the remains of the decapitated death eaters.
Well, that's certainly one way to explain away all of the strange aspects. Establish them as fact, through the mysterious bond between LV and HP, and do so in front of a huge crowd so that the word can spread and mutate on its own. By the time anyone comes to investigate or question, they will already be influenced by the show or rumors they've heard, promoting that hypothesis to their attention rather than coming to it naturally.
It's pointing the police at Mortimer Snodgrass, from chapter 17, as it were.
It's actually the same tactic as the Weasley twins used to cover the "engaged to Ginever Weasley" story- plant so many make newspaper reports that everyone gets confused. And it kinda happens again after the Hermione/Draco incident. Guess Eliezer like the theme of people not being able to discern the truth from wild rumours if the truth's weird enough.
Oh, trust me, they can't discern the truth from wild rumors even if it's normal. (I am speaking of real life, here.)
To be fair, it's really hard to figure out WTF is going on when humans are involved. Their reasoning is the result of multiple motivations and a vast array of potential reasoning errors. If you don't believe me try the following board games with your friends: Avalon, Coup, Sheriff of Nottingham, Battlestar Galactica, or any that involve secrets and lying.
Didn't Harry JUST learn a lesson about not keeping secrets and assuming he's smarter than the rest of the world put together?
Well, he also learned a lesson about not keeping secrets, in the way he told to Voldemort about the Deathly Hallows.
I assumed he was just trying to keep it a secret from the masses. I don't know if he planned on telling the people who'd realize that what actually happens wouldn't be such a big spectacle, but I figured he at least accounted for the fact that they'd realize it.
I was thinking the same thing. If I were Harry I would call Moody and McGonagall to the headmistress' office and spill everything. As a side-note, I think Moody would rather appreciate Voldemort being taken down by stuporfy.
Problem is parts of his agenda (eg keeping Voldemort alive in transfigured form) don't line up with the likely agenda of the others.
Nah, with horcruxes around, that's by far the best solution.
I can see him believing that it would be very difficult to get them to agree regardless.
Though, given the Drought of Living Death...
Naw, they still wouldn't want to leave him in Harry's care. Plus, then they might get all of his magical secrets (including Harry's (soul/mind's) magical heritage, rather than leaving them for Harry to use. Or they might Obliviate everything, depending on whether their paranoia wins over their greed.
Yes, that's a more direct objection.
"Harry, let me verify that your Time-Turner hasn't been used," said Professor McGonagall.
"LOOK OVER THERE!" Harry screamed, already sprinting for the door.
I think there is a very good chance that McGonagall is worried enough about Hermione, about Dumbledore, ... and won't check Harry's Time-Turner. She's not much into multilevel plots, she's smart, but too honest to live in constant suspicion.
Like she didn't think much about the consequences at the "war level" when she offered the fealty oath to Hermione back then in the Wizengamot.
She sees Harry in pain and traumatized, and she sees the immediate chaos, it wouldn't be very "in character" for her to suddenly suspect Harry and probe him like that.
It could happen because she learned to not follow her "role" anymore, but it still doesn't seem the most likely thing for her to do.
Moody or some aurors on the other hand...
Re aurors: http://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/2xxybs/chapter_116/cp4g7ao?context=3
I think that McGonagall has learnt enough to be suspicious of Harry, but she's still more circumspect than to call him on it in front of the whole school. Maybe she'll check up a bit later, and maybe in private Harry will be happy to tell her the truth anyway, with appropriate precautions. On the other hand, if he's decided not to tell her, then he'll arrange not to be found until it's too late. (When is it too late to check if a time turner has been used?)
When does TT reset to unused? At midnight?
Unclear. Either midnight or as soon as last 24 hours contain less than 6 hours of looped time. I've been wondering this as well. I think I remember something being said like "No combination of time-turners could let you fit more than 30 hours into a day" but I don't know if that really helps...
Where is that written? I well remember that no chain of time turners can send information (at least information comprehensible by humans) back more than 6 hours, but that still allows one to add those 6 hours more than once a day, especially with multiple time turners.
Also, won't anyone go back with a time-turner to check Harry's version of events?
Also, won't Snape know?
I assume Harry will have to tell part, though maybe not all, of the truth to the remaining members of the Order of the Phoenix.
Would you risk going back to a live LV just to check it out? Take the risk that Harry didn't notice some annoying bystander get dispatched, or just didn't mention it? A lot of those revelations only came out when the subject came up, after all. Using a Pensieve would be much safer.
You assume Snape isn't one of the headless minions on the ground...
Snape isn't, because he can't apparate from Hogwarts. Amusingly, Snape may interpret his exclusion from the mass sacrifice as a deliberate "kindness" from the Dark Lord.
Just watch from a distance, using a telescope.
It seems that death eaters have "anti-time-looping wards" (chap 94), we don't know exactly how they work, nor if they were used in the graveyard, but it could very well be that no time-traveler can check the events that happened on the graveyard.
They were used. Voldemort mentions not completely trusting them.
Edit:
Quote from chapter 113:
A story for the masses is necessary and this doesn't appear to be a bad stab at one. Harry can always bring trusted others on board by telling them what actually happened. He might have actually done that already and this is their plan. How much time did Harry have to do stuff before needing to show up anyhow (40m? 50m?)? Also, Prof. McGonagall is terrible at faking anything so telling her the truth before this seems like a bad idea.
Harry can just claim to have already used it that day for an innocuous purpose, like studying or something. Sure, McGonagall could accuse him of stupidity because that leaves him unprepared for an emergency, but pleading guilty to stupidity is easy. (Well, easier, anyway.)
Shouldn't Harry have fallen to his knees twenty seconds earlier, if he originally heard/saw the explosion via Voldie-simulcast?
Now that may be just what Draco needs to realize that something's wrong with Harry's story. Maybe Harry didn't know the timing well enough to fall at the correct second and had to listen for the crack.
We do not know at what speed does information travel through the Riddle link.
Harry implicitly took it to be instantaneous when he mentioned the 20 second delay.
He was claiming to be dipping into Voldemort's working memory, not experiencing it directly - that's why he knew what happened to Dumbledore.
Anyway, that could plausibly provide a level of insulation.
I begin to wonder exactly how the story will be wrapped up. I had thought the source of magic would be unlocked or the Deathly Hallows riddle would be tied up. However, I wonder if there are enough chapters to do these things justice. I also wonder whether Eliezer will do anything like was done for Worm where the author invited suggestions for epilogs for specific characters.
There aren't enough chapters, and didn't Harry say that it might take decades of work? In rationalist fiction there's no reason for all plot threads to come together at once.
We've got four chapters. Maybe one chapter dealing with what happens when Hermione wakes up, one for Draco dealing with the death of his father, one for McGonnigal giving a speech as the new Headmistress, and one for Harry considering his plans for the future.
If they work out just like this, what prize should you win?
So I guess no effort is going to be made to rescue Lucius or Dumbledore directly.
Lucius is both dead and warm. I think he's dead dead unless Eliezer has someone like Harry does something in a very narrow time window. Dumbledore is a much easier problem to solve (story wise) and can be solved at the same time as the Atlantis story thread if that is what the author plans.
I doubt we can do justice to Atlantis in five chapters of plot; the last few chapters only resolved as much as they did because Eliezer fired almost all of the available Chekhov's guns. We might get some hints, a sketch of a solution, but we're not going to see it in detail.
All he really has to do is convince Lucius to be a rock for about five minutes while he would have been summoned. Heal anything with transfigurative healing + the Stone.
For Lucius, I guess it's too late.
For Dumbledore, there is no hurry, if he's frozen out of time, he can be rescued in a few days, weeks or even years, so definitely not the day to try to do it.
Well, Harry has the Stone now, so he could still try to repeat Hermione's resurrection process for Lucius and possibly other Death Eaters, though without all the rituals afterward.
I don't know how well that is going to work after the bodies beings warm for a while and with a fairly big boom.
I wonder if you can Obliviate physical decay and return the brain to the state that it was in immediately after (or better, before) death. It seems unlikely, but then so is thinking with the brain of a cat, so who knows? If Obliviate works by altering brain states, and Magic recognizes a dead brain (so long as not too far decayed) as still a brain with all of its prior states from when it was alive, then it just might work. Obliviate 2.0 if necessary.
Remembering isn't the same as decaying. Forgetting isn't the same as regenerating.
Certainly not, but they're both changes in the brain, and who knows how magic thinks of these things? Magic has very strange opinions about the nature of reality. It's definitely a long shot, but somebody should try it.
Why would Harry resurrect Death Eaters and not common people, who are dying in millions all over the world?
The point was that it's possible. Why might it actually occur? First, he might figure 'I did this, so I'm going to fix it'. Also, they are fairly powerful, comparatively speaking, to common people - he might have some plot to raise them and bind them to help him or put them in a position that he expects a net positive in his future effectiveness?
Why is he spending effort on saving Tom Riddle and not common people, who are dying in millions all over the world?
Remember that if Tom Riddle dies, a potentially vengeful demon with significant magical power is unleashed. Preventing that from happening is worth doing for the sake of those common people, regardless of its impact on Tom Riddle.
He is not saving Tom Riddle. He is saving millions by keeping Tom Riddle alive.
Interesting, I was expecting Harry to ascribe the destruction of the Death Eaters + Voldemort to Dumbledore.
I was expecting him to ascribe it to Quirrel.
Same here
There's nothing to be gained by doing it, and it messes up the timeline of the (fabricated) story.
Keep in mind that Harry probably has some hope of getting Dumbledore out of the mirror some day and explaining how Dumbledore got into the mirror after defeating Voldemort has some complications.
I'm not sure how Quirrell's last plot could still come to fruition. Slytherin have won the house cup and one of the professors awarding house points to Ravenclaw at this stage would feel like Quirrell's plotting had failed.
Unless they award the points in response to Voldy being killed by Hermione. Which means even in dying, Quirrel wins.
The annihilation of Quirrell!Mort (assuming that is what's happened) isn't something I can envisage as being part of Quirrell's plot. So, although the outcome Quirrell was aiming for coming to pass would make it look like he was successful in fact his plot failed and Harry's plot on his behalf succeeded.
It can be argued that Quirrell manipulation of Harry to ensure Quirrell was seen to win was a strand in Quirrell's plot. But, his fear of death / destruction of his horcrux was so profound my model of Quirrell wouldn't perceive himself to have won under these circumstances.
Hm, my take-away from the end of the chapter was a sad feeling that Quirrel simply failed at or lied about getting both houses to win.
Failed, I think. As of 104, it looked like his Christmas plots were all going to succeed - the Ravenclaws and Slytherins were in the process of tying for the Cup, and raising the popularity of Harry's anti-snitch proposal in doing so.
It is only the revelation that "Professor Quirrell had gone out to face the Dark Lord and died for it, You-Know-Who had returned and died again, Professor Quirrell was dead, he was dead", which Quirrell would not have planned around, that threw a spanner in the works by motivating the Slytherins to seek outright victory.
Quirrell was adverse to outright lies, so at this point I think he failed.
"For defeating the Dark Lord, we award Hermione...wait, what was the difference in score again?...four hundred and twenty points."
It's a fitting honour for the brave Professor Quirrell; no fair Slytherin would deny him this.
Especially since they'd still have the cup.
The Quidditch Cup, but not the House Cup.
Oh. I was expecting something like...
-
Chapter 116, alternative version
Harry spun his Time-Turner and returned six hours into the past. Then he took his broomstick and hurried towards Hogwarts.
This time he decided not to repeat his usual mistake. If Lord Voldemort could learn, so could Harry. He didn't have to solve all the problems of the world alone. And Professor Quirrell, his alter ego, was not the only available option.
He hesitated a bit before knocking on Headmaster Dumbledore's door. This is going to be so awkward, he thought. He tried to imagine what to say. Hello, Headmaster. Professor Quirrell is Lord Voldemort, and I have killed him in the future. By the way, it was me in Azkaban, sorry about it, I didn't know back then. Anyway, you are going to die in the mirror soon. To avoid a time paradox, could you just send a copy of yourself or something? Please hurry, we don't have time, you have to trust me! Ironically, that would sound really insane, but Harry now trusted Headmaster Dumbledore to be able to deal with the news. Dumbledore was willing to sacrifice his own life, if it meant destroying the Dark Lord, but Harry hoped there would be a way to avoid it. The timeline had to proceed as Harry had experienced it, but if it turned out that what Harry believed to be real people were instead merely convincing illusions, then no one had to die. Maybe he could also save Lucius Malfoy, or even all the Death Eaters.
Then Harry noticed the door was open. He slowly walked inside the dark and seemingly empty room. Maybe he should write a message and leave it on the desk...
The door suddenly shut. A person standing in the dark was pointing a magical wand at Harry.
"Drop your wand immediately. Then don't move. We have to talk."
Harry's brain was so shocked that only afterwards he realized his fingers have already obeyed the command automatically.
"Yes, Harry, always playing one level higher than you," Professor Quirrell said, smiling. "I see you have returned from the future, which obviously means that my plans didn't work as expected. That is an admirable achievement. Now you are going to explain me all that happened in future, in Parseltongue. And then I will see what I can change to preserve your experiences while giving myself a more favourable outcome."
-
This is the second part of your exam. You have 60 hours. Your solution must allow Lord Voldemort to survive the following six hours without creating a paradox in timeline, without losing his consciousness or magical abilities. Otherwise you will get a shorter "Voldemort was defeated and they all lived happily ever after" ending.
The following chapters 117, 118, 119, and 120 will contain the remaining four parts of the exam, where you will solve even more complicated problems from the viewpoint of Headmaster Dumbledore, Hermione, Severus Snape, and Minerva McGonagall. The last chapter 121 will contain a surprising revelation that all of them are actually horcruxes of Baba Yaga. Oops, sorry for spoilers.
Harry only has one hour left on his Time-Turner for the day; he used five hours to do everything he did with Voldemort after Voldemort sent him the forged note at the Quidditch game earlier.
Hardest part to fake is Harry's sense of doom/scar pain/resonance: there probably has to actually be a Riddle in the Voldemort-body as it gets stunned, obliviated and transfigured. Better make sure it's a Horcrux V1 copy. So bring a V1 Horcrux, use it to overwrite the Voldemort body you create with the Stone, then possess that body on top of the Riddle already in there, then abandon ship right before the stunning hex.
HPMoR!Harry would never ever do that.
So, the revival of Hermione would be explained by Voldemort trying to resurrect himself, making a mistake, and resurrecting Hermione with superpowers instead (or alongside) him, as a side-effect of his own resurrection process? (St. Mungo will surely detect at least some of the "upgrades" Hermione got)
By the way, I think Harry is likely to make those upgrades to himself, and maybe even use the idea of these upgrades to elevate some (or, as a long term goal, ALL) of mankind to posthuman level, using the Stone.
Elevating all of mankind to a posthuman level will be difficult. He'll have to use the Stone around twice per second.
Perhaps he could use some kind of portkey system, where portkeys are set to take people to the Stone and then immediately away, and you need to use transfiguration right before that.
Indeed, one of the stories at qntm features discovering something like the Fountain of Youth, and describes the organizational nightmare of letting a large enough proportion of mankind use it.
Harry Potter, however, if he makes himself immortal, will have a lot of time. Even if a lot of people die of old age or illness before he can reach them, he can still reach a lot of people given enough time. He would also need to figure out some efficient way of space travel and terraforming, otherwise he could cause overpopulation.
Also, Nicholas Flamel would like to have a word with Harry, as he (she?) kept the Stone for herself specifically to stop a cheap proliferation of its powers.
Nicholas Flamel is dead, at least according to Dumbledore. (Or tucked away for later secret extraction?)
Does Dumbledore know about Perenelle? Maybe I just don't remember.
Yhea, two problems with that: 1: I really don't put it past Dumbledore to just lie about everything to Voldemort, and 2:. Flamel had access to the stunt Voldemort pulled on Hermione for a minimum of 500 years, and potentially more like a thousand. I figure good odds killing Flamel just gets you a rebirth in fire phoenix-style and an annoyed arch-wizard.
Doesn't this also apply to Baba Yaga?
BABA YAGA FAKED HER DEATH AND POSSESSED PERENELLE, TRUE STORY
Sorry, I think I've read too much Reddit today.
Am I missing something? Why is Harry inventing this silly story?
I bet Hermione is just going to love being the center of all the attention and scrutiny this will bring on her.
She came back from the dead. Gonna be a lot of attention and scrutiny regardless.
It's a good question. As a perfect or near-perfect Occlumens, Harry could have come up with any story he wanted, if all he was trying to do was conceal certain facts (like partial transfiguration, what he really did to Voldemort, and the fact that he probably killed Lucius).
Why I think he's doing this :
so Draco doesn't know that Harry probably killed his father ; Harry values his friendship with Draco and doesn't want to lose it ;
so Harry doesn't have to tell everyone about his secrets (like partial transfiguration) ;
so they don't search for Harry for the transfigured Voldemort ;
so Harry doesn't have too many legal/political problems for actually killing dozens of people, including some very powerful ones ;
to give some credit and status to Hermione, which at this point Harry trusts more than himself to take the ethical decision (and not destroy the world) ;
to save the image of Quirrel, I think Harry still has emotional commitment to the character of Quirrel, even if it was just a mask, and doesn't want that image to be destroyed.
Preserving the image of Quirrell also helps in continuing to restore Slytherin, whereas outing him could damn the house to be forever ignoble or be removed completely
Howso? It is no revelation to anyone that Voldemort was a Slytherin.
Well, people are less likely to believe in an idea if an argument used in favor of it later turns out to be entirely false. For example, if I say "green jelly beans are slightly carcinogenic" and someone says "yes, also each one you eat has a 1/100 chance of killing you immediately", makes a lot of publicity about this, and months later it turns out that that statement was completely unfounded, then people will be less likely to believe me now. Even though they have very little new information compared to just me saying "green jelly beans are slightly carcinogenic".
So in this case we have people saying "Look, some Slytherins are good, see QQ!", and gaining some amount of support with that. QQ turning out to be Voldemort would not only defeat everything the argument did (which is not bad in and of itself, the argument was after all flawed), but also cause a backlash which would make Slytherin appear worse in comparison to before QQ was the Defense Professor.
Hm. While QQ was widely praised as being a great teacher, I don't think anyone missed the fact that he was radiating a constant aura of evil (before the fact that as the Defense Professor he was guaranteed to be evil by definition). I think his contribution to public perception would have been "some Slytherins are incredibly badass" rather than "some Slytherins are good".
I'm not sure if there was a general "antihero or villain?" buzz about QQ or if Harry was the only person who thought the former. Luckily, affirmatively making him a hero works either way.
Though, what was David Monroe's House?
One of this comment's third cousins says that Monroe was a Slytherin.
And Quirrel was Ravenclaw.
Not in HPMOR.
Chapter 16:
Yes in HPMOR
Chapter 79:
The disparity is one of the reasons that the Aurors are sure he's not actually Quirinus Quirrell.
But why is any of original!Quirrell's biographical information relevant to this discussion? Everyone who knew Quirrell the Defense Professor will remember him as a Slytherin.
Voldemort was in Slytherin and claimed to be Slytherin while impersonating QQ. The actual QQ was known to be Ravenclaw:
And Monroe was in Slytherin. That was a piece of intentionally leaked information so that the "smart" people could deduce that he was Monroe.
If Hermione manages to fall for Harry's story, then she's going to love it much much better than she ever would have loved the truth about her resurrection. It's worth it.
And thus, Eliezer's mild obsession with conspiracy-for-the-greater-good-in-fiction-and-science rears its head again...
I've been re-reading the fic, and the science conspiracy idea shows up early on.
Quirrel in chapter 20:
Harry gets on board with the idea in chapter 23:
In 23 I took it to mean he was using conspiracy-ish-ness to get Draco on board.
I don't see how this is a problem. Do you think it is a problem ? If so, then why specifically and do you have any ideas for a solution?
The actual order of the stories is probably better, but it would have been interesting to read 116 first and then find out what really happened.
I agree, but that would have precluded the potential sad ending after a failed Final Exam.
He could always have said, ‘Great, you passed! You'll find out how in a few days. In the meantime ….’.
But then there wouldn't be continued speculation that this is still the bad end.
Ah, is that what shminux meant!
On /r/HPMOR, some have been speculating that Dumbledore coated the Philosopher's Stone with Bahl's Stupefaction, which you might remember from chapter 63:
This would explain why Voldemort let Harry keep his wand after swearing the Unbreakable Vow, and now also might explain Harry's recent actions.
I'm a fan of this.
That's a literal Idiot Ball reference, not to mention canon. I don't think we'll see it.
But it's not an idiot ball if there's an actual legitimate reason for being stupid.
Like, in The Naked Time and The Naked Now, the initial infections were pure idiot ball.
The subsequent infections, and the crew doing spectacularly stupid and even suicidal things, were not.
I hope Eliezer pulls something like this to justify the Villain Ball.
I kind of wish Harry just figured out how to escape earlier. It would have been awesome for him to end the Unbreakable Vow by transfiguring the other wand into a flashbang.
Any volunteers to tell invincible resurrected Dark-Lord-slayer Hermione what grade she got in Defense Against the Dark Arts?
Well, she’ll get an Outstanding for “defeating the Dark Lord”. So that pretty much cancels her Fail grade, right?
Except there's no Defense Professor available to award her a new grade, and by the time a new one is recruited, it'll be next year and her achievements from the previous academic year will no longer be relevant.
Yup. The fact that she defeated the Dark Lord right after the Professor who flunked her failed to do so will only serve to underscore the injustice.
Headmistress McGonagall has good grounds to overrule this now.
She initially got a fail grade for dying, but then Professor Quirrell let her retake the test.
We know that many other Hogwarts students will invent and/or believe the weirdest theories. I’m definitely looking forward to the theories about why Hermione’s body was there for Voldemort’s rebirth, and about how she defeated him …
Any suggestions? (Aside from the obvious one: “Harry must have taught her some of his tricks!”)
Just wait for the next issue of the Quibbler.
The couple who lived.
The Boy Who Lived impregnates the Deathly Hallow Girl with Tom Riddle's child!
The Boy who Lived kills 30 high ranking witches and wizards, resurrects his first kiss, fakes the death of Voldemort and wears him as a ring!
I think it's pretty obvious.
Voldemort has always been attracted to power, and it's well known that Hermione is the most powerful witch of her generation.
He made several overtures to her, but was unable to turn her from her path, and so he killed her.
Upon her death he felt great remorse (such was his passion) and decided to bring her back from the dead (such was his power).
Dumbledore tried to stop him, and so was eliminated.
In fact, Voldemort was so enamored of Hermione, that after she was brought back, he use dark magics to give her even greater power.
Quirrell (who has been hiding his identity of David Monroe) was secretly on hand for the ceremony, but by the time he realized what was happening, it was too late to stop it.
Cutting charms were used on Voldemort's hands, and other terrible damage, but despite all this, Quirrell was defeated.
Ironically, having given her the power of friendship, it was the power of friendship which ultimately was his downfall.
"Well, obviously, if I'd been at the scene and defeated You-Know-Who and the Death Eaters and brought Hermione back from the dead by channelling General Chaos's unspeakable dark powers, I wouldn't just tell you that," Tracey Davis told the reporters.
Edit: "And that's Darke, with an e."
"What explosion? You mean you didn't realise that was Harry Potter snapping his fingers extra hard?"
"Of course she came back. Having two lives is why they call someone a double witch!"
"And then You-Know-Who cast the Killing Curse on her, but it rebounded because she was protected by the power of Harry Potter's love. Huh? Of course she's his true love. How else would he have been able to pull her out of the Mirror in the first place?"
"So Harry Potter spent all his Quirrell points to get Professor Quirrell to let Hermione take a make-up exam. And everyone knows those are meant to be harder than the original..."
I can't believe Hermione Granger has been framed for murder by Tom Riddle....again.
Would be amusing if Voldy has been playing as the Cthaeh for the last few chapters, in strategy if not in power.
A couple guesses about scenes that might be coming:
Harry has a (mostly) honest conversation with Moody about what happened to Voldemort, with an eye to adding more safeguards. They consult with the world's foremost expert on memory-charming powerful wizards into insignificance, Gilderoy Lockhart.
Hermione is determined to rescue Dumbledore from the Mirror, and a phoenix comes to her because of it.
I cannot for a second imagine Moody allowing Harry to hold on to Tom Riddle. There are too many ways in which keeping a superpowered, immortal amnesiac former villain on your person could go wrong. Harry must anticipate this, so can't consult Moody.
Perhaps. But Moody did defer to Dumbledore, keeping Moody totally in the dark doesn't seem like a plausible option, and Harry explained to McGonagall in chapter 14 that he had enough common sense to seek out the appropriate experts in situations like this (or discovering Salazar's Chamber).
I just noticed something:
Chapter 79:
Chapter 108:
It seems like Dumbledore knows quite a bit more than Voldemort thought. Did he know Q=V and HJPEV=TMR?
And finally, Chapter 110:
Always? That's an odd turn of phrase. Who was elsewhere?
At least of the latter, see the "I laughed and I laughed when I realized you [Voldemort] had made a Good Voldemort to oppose the Evil."
Of the former, yes, I think he knew. See his over the top protestations of how he was oh so ever so completely fooled by Quirrell, had absolutely no idea whatesoever that he was Voldemort, and felt like a fool and a moron for missing it.
Dumbledore's an over-the-top kind of guy. I got the impression that he was being genuine in his comments re: Quirrell; see for example his initial confusion when he sees him in the mirror.
On the other hand, I'm now pretty sure that he knew Harry was a Riddle instance, or at least something similar, all along.
I've been wondering about this for a while, but never had a chance to do the required detective work. Were Harry and the Defense Professor in the castle at the time? If so, when Dumbles said "Find Tom Riddle..." he most definitely learned that HP and QQ were both Tom Riddles.
So... were they in the castle at the time? Or was QQ at St. Mungo's or the DMLE?
At the time when Dumbledore uses the map, Harry is in Hogwarts, investigating, while QQ is at the DMLE, being investigated.
Thought so. Seems like a pretty close call to me. Thanks.
Although, really, it seems a bit contrived. If QQ was identified to the wards as the defense professor, wouldn't that be what the Hogwarts security system sees?
I'd read it as "Defense Professor" being a role with a package of permissions being assigned to a user. The map shows usernames, so to speak, not what roles or permissions they've been assigned in some other portion of the security system.
I don't think it goes : username (Tom Riddle) => permissions (Defense Professor) or Harry (recognized as Tom Riddle too) would have the Defense Professor permissions.
I mostly assumed that the map and the wards are two different systems, maybe not crafted by the same person (not the same founder if they were made by the 4 founders, or by different headmasters if they were added afterwards).
Yeah, I'm thinking separate systems but there's a lot we don't know about how this works and why the discrepancies are there.
Actually, we aren't sure that Harry doesn't have Defense Professor permissions, are we?
Indeed. I don't think Harry's ever tried to do something that only a professor can do, or that would have markedly different results if a professor tried to do it.
Edit: "markedly visible" was meant to be "markedly different". I need more sleep.
Like, say, brainwash or torture a student.
If Harry's right about the effect that transfiguring the stunned Voldemort will have, won't the wards identify "the Defense Professor" as still alive?
Interesting hypothesis... but if the wards didn't identify Harry as the "Defense Professor", and identified the troll as "Defense Professor". So I guess the wards identify the bodies more than the "spirit" inhabiting them, which means they won't recognize Voldemort now that he left Quirrel's body to his original snake-like body.
I guess the only other evidence we have is that the Map, using the wards, would (implicitly) alternate between showing him as QQ and TR depending on whether QQ was being actively possessed, but as far as we know reported relatively consistently on the presence of the Defense Professor, such that it was a surprise to Dumbledore that the wards reported him being the troll. We do know that the wards are able to remain aware of identity even through transfiguration, as shown with both the troll and the unicorn.
It seems like that's about as consistent with the hypothesis "the wards counted QQ's body, QQ's suppressed consciousness, TR's consciousness, and the troll as the Defense Professor" as it is with "the wards just counted QQ's body and the troll as the Defense Professor". It comes down to whether it's more likely that the wards use the simpler strategy of tracking bodies (as Velorien said) since there would be little reason to track spirits/consciousnesses, or that they target your magical "self" as well as the Map seems to do, possibly based on some fundamental aspect of magical self-ness.
Of course, all this is even assuming the wards track the deaths of professors. It seems like the sort of thing you'd want wards to do, but I can't think of anywhere that that's been confirmed. We do know that the wards didn't report that the Defense Professor died after the troll died, so if it does keep track of the deaths of professors, it doesn't count as death when some living portion of "the Defense Professor" is still alive.
Given that Voldemort is the first known wizard to successfully move between bodies, it's unlikely that the wards would have been calibrated to track that sort of thing.
Voldemort's greatest fear is death. Death's greatest fear is Harry Potter.
You know, we still don't know if Death thinks, and whether there are souls. You might be actually correct.
After rereading, I beleive that Mr White is Lucius Malfoy. Not only is the name an allusion to his hair, he is said to be less useful than he was in the past due to the fact that V will soon rule openly. In the past Lucius was V's puppet in the Wizengamot.
Mr Write then proceeds to sacrifice most of his magic to bind Harry Potter. I suppose with him dead, this doesn't matter.
This story will collapse after a very few prior incantums on Quirrelmort's wand by the investigators.
Yeah, and not just that. The magical equivalents to forensic science would have to be terrible indeed if this works, with a lot of fail from intelligent people like Bones, Moody, or for that matter Snape.
I'm kinda hoping that what we're actually heading for in the next chapters will be some kind of payoff to this:
PS. I wonder what an analytic charm cast on Harry's "bleeding" scar would show.
Yup. Part of my justifications to Harry setting the stage in 115 were (from right before this):
They will have to find the wand first:
QuirrelMort's wand is in Quirrel's hand.
Voldemorts wand is the one that Harry took.
Last spell cast with Quirrell's wand was the acid for the plant.
Was just about to ask where the switchover occurred.
There was an AK before then, as well as infuriating (?) fluffy.
That won't look good.
Prediction 1: Hermione will soon harrow Azkaban. Why wouldn't she? She's all but immortal, now.
Prediction 2: Time-travel and memory-charm shenanigans incoming. Evidence:
Harry weirdly ignored the missing recognition code on LV's forged message.
Cedric considered in Harry's plans, and his Time-Turner mentioned, then seemingly forgotten.
Death-Eaters all dead, but no faces observed.
Flamel asserted dead, but we didn't see it, and LV explicitly didn't kill him personally.
Dumbledore thinks in stories, yet we're supposed to believe he's surprised when the villain reveals he's captured the hero and his equipment (Harry and the Cloak), just like villains always catch heroes and take their stuff near the end (see: Frodo Baggins, Luke Skywalker).
Hermione has been asleep the whole time, neither giving nor receiving information.
Questions:
did Harry tell Cedric to do certain things before Harry left? Did Harry tell Cedric to Obliviate Harry afterward so Harry could play his part convincingly? What did Harry most likely tell Cedric to do?
who will do the Time-Turning, Hermione, Cedric, or Harry?
who will be saved? Obvious candidates include Flamel, Dumbledore, Lucius Malfoy, maybe all the anonymous Death-Eaters.
if you were Hermione and had a Time-Turner and the Stone and the Cloak and six hours to save everybody but Voldemort, Quirrell and Macnair, how would you do it? (Do you need the help of someone who can Obliviate well? Do you need partial Transfiguration?)
Prediction 1:
Huh? Hermione is a rule follower. She wouldn't destroy Azkaban if she had a button she could press that would do so. Also she can't kill even one Dementor, or even cast a patronus to prevent one from killing her.
Prediction 2:
Don't think so, remaining story too short for such shenanigans.
She also knows exactly what it's like to be an innocent sentenced to Azkaban for a crime they didn't commit, and how easy it is for such a thing to happen. You can't go through an experience like that without re-evaluating some things about how you see the world.
The point of the above post, I believe, is that there is nothing stopping her from learning to cast Patronus 2.0, at which point it's plausible that the infinite unicorn blood would replenish her life-force so killing Dementors wouldn't end up draining it all.
It's not entirely clear how Hermione's troll/unicorn stuff interacts with the depletion of life-force necessary to fuel the Patronus. That said, she has a Horcrux, so at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. And if Harry can eventually destroy Azkaban, Hermione certainly can.
I'm skeptical. If dementors really do destroy your soul then having a horcrux may not be helpful against them. I'm a fan of taking V's wand down to the pit, in fact.
The Cedric situation hints strongly at information control, maybe to deal with the six-hour limit on Time-Turners.
Being Hermione makes this harder. There's a way to do it: find a morgue, transfigure the bodies into simulacra of the Death Eaters, give permanency with the Stone, raise them as Inferi, then use Horcrux 1.0 castings with a respawning Hermione as fuel to copy the original Death Eaters' mind-states. But Hermione doesn't have the power, doesn't know that kind of Dark magic, and has way too many ethical scruples; and we don't know the Horcrux enchantment in enough detail to know that it's exploitable in that way. (You don't need the Horcruces to fool physical examination, but I assume Voldemort has some way of sensing people's minds or magic.)
It also might not account for everything it needs to, given that Harry feels what I assume to be their deaths on-page. That could be the Horcrux enchantment dissipating, though.
Or, a simpler solution: travel back six hours, Obliviate Voldemort while he's on the toilet (he could probably resist Imperius at full power), Imperius him to do everything Harry remembers that involves personal agency except summon his mooks, then false-memory-charm Harry into thinking thirty-six Death Eaters were present when they weren't. Take office as Hogwarts' first Professor of Retconjuration.
Okay, Harry is really overdoing it here. It would have been much safer to pretend utter ignorance of everything, or at least to limit his reaction to falling over. The scene as set will cause sufficient theorizing without trying to force a particular narrative.
On a meta level: Getting this scene from a bystander means they are not in the mirror. So that's that.
I.. also just realized that "Flamel" can't possibly be dead. The rite Voldemort used on Hermione was not one of his own devising, but a piece of lore well known enough to have a usual result. "Flamel" had the stone of permanency for either 600 years, or much longer than that. And has more lore than Voldemort.
The best creature to assume the essence of from a defensive standpoint isn't a troll or a unicorn. Tough, heck, if there is no downside to just stacking things, maybe she did. The creature in the potterverse with the most absolute defense is the phoenix. Fiendfire? Firetravel away. AK? Respawn and laugh. So Dumbledore may have seen Flamel die, but that means absolutely nothing.
.. depending how the sacrifice works, this might not even hurt the phoenix you are using! Well, permanently anyway.
That would require getting a hold of and killing a Phoenix, which would be difficult even for Quirrel.
Had more lore than Voldemort. Legilimency is fun.
The obvious plan is to steal Flamel's lore and then induce Flamel to commit suicide. Legilimency serves for both purposes. This may be blocked by Occlumency or Dumbledore's intervention, but using a controlled minion to simply kill Flamel seems to go against point 1.
So what mechanism do you suggest Voldemort used, in light of the above quote?
I read "another" as someone besides Quirrell. I don't see how that disagrees with, say, V reading Flamel's mind and then Bellatrix AKing F, or V reading F's mind and then commanding F to kill themself, or so on.
The most obvious interpretation is that V just sent B to kill F, or Owled F a hand grenade, or so on. But I don't see why V would prefer that option, especially given that even in the world where V has F's lore, V would want Dumbledore (at least) to believe that F's lore is gone.
Shorter point: Your argument supposes that Harry - at age 11 - has mental defenses better than Flamel at age >600. Seriously, no. Yes, the resonance, but if Legitimancy was that powerful, he would just have someone else dig through Harry's skull.
It's almost as if Harry is a mental clone of the most powerful Legilimens in recorded history.
ಠ_ಠ
Yhea, that's not a workable approach. Seriously, Flamel is centuries old and has had the key to eternal life for all of that. and the largest hoard of lore on the planet for most of it. Trying to legilimency that mind has the most likely result of you becoming a drooling vegetable. Certainly, its not going to actually work. If it did, it would be point 1 on every single aspiring dark lords to-do list. That's actually my main reason for thinking "Not dead". A lot. Really, just a an absurd number, of people must have already tried this. It doesn't even matter what "It" is. Someone tried that one already. And failed. If Voldemort had attempted it in person? Maaaaybee. A hired hit? Nope.
The relevant section (Ch 108):
Perenelle's safety relied on the Stone's uniqueness and hiddenness, which is no longer a factor as far as Quirrell is concerned.
I agree with your assessment of how powerful Perenelle/Flamel (side note: need a good portmanteau a la Quirrellmort) should be, having been able to outwit Baba Yaga in her sixth year and then having six hundred years of excellent leverage to accumulate lore and also maybe play with what the stone can do.
That objection notwithstanding, the most plausible non-Voldemort killer would be Bellatrix, using her superpower of very strict obedience to orders like "Just use AK and do not hesitate for any reason".
I read this as metaphorical, with Harry the Slytherin-just-kidding-Ravenclaw going Slytherin, but I don't see exactly how that fits.
The interpretation where the Slytherins are playing to honor their fallen professor is much more straightforward.
Come to think of it, what Harry said was mostly true. It's just that he omitted the part that the Tom Riddle who killed Death Eaters was known to magical world as Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, that Hermione followed him by means of being attached to his toe and that only the weapon which "destroyed" LV was first transfigured by Hermione.
I'm curious a bit about how he achieved the trick with the scar. Was it just by prodding? By taking/applying anticoagulant? DId he ask Moody to help him with it (apart from other things to cover the real story)?
I thought it was bleeding because of the magical resonance that was actually happening at that time when other Harry hit LV with the stuporfy.
My first thought was about the centuries-old theatre trick: Harry hides a few drops of red paint in one hand, presses that hand on his forehead because “the scar hurts” … and voila, a bleeding scar.
Your thought seems simpler, though, as well as plausible:
(chapter 114; although I’m not quite sure whether that really refers to blood from his scar, or just garbled sensory input caused by the resonance)
I assumed with a blade, his fingernails, or minor magic... Everyone's eyes were on the game.