Comment author: alephphi 10 March 2015 10:28:36PM 19 points [-]

Minerva's hand passed over one of those objects, the one with golden wibblers, her eyes closing briefly.

Heh. From Chapter 17:

Oh, the little fiddly things?" said Dumbledore. "They came with the Headmaster's office and I have absolutely no idea what most of them do. Although this dial with the eight hands counts the number of, let's call them sneezes, by left-handed witches within the borders of France, you would not believe how much work it took to nail that down. And this one with the golden wibblers is my own invention and Minerva is never, ever going to figure out what it's doing."

Comment author: Astazha 19 February 2015 07:27:46PM 10 points [-]

The Defense Professor sent Harry the forged message after 11:04pm, but early enough that Harry was able to arrive at 6:49 with 1 hour left on his time turner. The time-turner has been confiscated, but this is still a big security hole.

Example possibility: Harry and Quirrel arrive at the mirror, and time-turned Harry is already there with Dumbledore, Moody, Madam Bones and a dementor, which had not been detected by present Harry because patronus 2.0 is out and shielding everyone from it. Quirrel can't apparate away in Hogwarts, patronus 2.0 stops any AK, and Dumbledore & friends can hold Voldemort off long enough for the dementor to start sucking face with Voldemort, who is particularly vulnerable. Harry retrieves his time-turner and goes back an hour to message Dumbledore via patronus and set this ambush up. Asking Harry to state whether he has betrayed him is of limited use here, since the betrayal can happen in the future but impact the present.

Why has The Defense Professor deliberately preserved an hour on Harry's time-turner? It must be significant to his plan.

Comment author: alephphi 19 February 2015 11:00:34PM *  6 points [-]

That's been bothering me ever since chapter 104 came out. It doesn't seem likely that Quirrel would have just missed that, so I see a couple possibilities:

1) Part of Quirrel's plan somehow requires Harry to use the time turner once, so by having Harry go back five hours he limits Harry's use of it as much as possible.

2) It's a trap. Leaving via time turner is an excellent escape mechanism, and Quirrel knows that Harry has a tendency to overuse it for that purpose. So if Harry does manage to do something unexpected, Quirrel's hoping he'll go for the time turner--only to find that it doesn't work.

Why doesn't it work? Because Quirrel wrote the note at 12:04, went back via his own time turner, and handed the note to the anonymous Hufflepuff*. Thus, if Harry were to activate his time turner for the sixth time at 7:00, it would fail in some fashion ("for you couldn't send information further back in time than six hours, not through any chain of Time-Turners" -- chapter 61).

This is a pretty narrow window, though. Quirrel would have to anticipate that Harry might immediately go back from 11:04 to 6:04 once he got the message, so Quirrel wouldn't have written the note any later than 12:04 (if he wrote it at 12:20, for example, and Harry tried to go back to 6:04, it would fail and he'd know something was up.)

Which means that the forbidden period can't end any later than 6:04, and the absolute earliest Harry would want to use the sixth turn would be 6:49 when the whole thing started. So there's a 15 minute period from 6:49 to 7:04 where Harry thinks he can use the time turner but can't. This would be fine if the whole process were to finish in 15 minutes, but that seems unlikely, especially with Quirrel dawdling in chapter 107.

*It's amusing to think that Quirrel went back to 11:04 to hand the note to the Hufflepuff, whose quote "I know you said not to talk to you, but -" would have, if he had not been interrupted by Harry, ended something like "but I don't see why you gave me a note to just hand back to you ten seconds later. Hey--the version of you that handed me the note is still right there under the bleachers, waving at me and smirking." But really, there's no reason Quirrel would have taken that risk when he could have just gone back further and handed the note to the Hufflepuff "earlier".

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