"You." Professor Quirrell spun, and she found herself gazing directly into eyes of icy blue.
... (a few paragraphs, whose action gives no great reason to think that eye contact was broken) ...
A wordless image crossed her mind of a patch of glass on a steel ball.
Uh-oh.
Well. Quirrell has already covered for Harry's penetration of the Azkaban wall. He wasn't explicitly informed about how it was originally done but he's somewhat good at filling in the gaps. (Obviously there's room for more confirmatory evidence though, so not a complete lack of uh-oh either.)
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.
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.)
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!)
What with the timey-wimey shenanigans in the writing and her brain not having spent too much time "dead" yet, I'm suspecting Hermione will yet live.
What with the show and Dumbledore's diagnosis, I'm suspecting Magic will continue to think her dead and thus her career as a witch being over (pending Harry hacking the Source of Magic).
Plus repercussions of the "Do not mess with time" kind.
Okay, time to amuse ourselves while waiting for the next chapter.
When last we saw Hermione Granger, she was considering mass producing immortality to clear Harry's debts. I say we should see if we can think of things she could do to make money that are even more disruptive of the status quo than that.
1: "Hi Harry! I created a workaround for Merlins interdict! How much do you think I should charge for teaching someone Al-Azhims Greater Gate"?
2: "I found Rowena's Library Annex. Also, Rowena. anno 987 english: Incomprehensible. But her latin is excellent, so I think we are good to go."
3: "I used a wit-sharpening potion to devise a better wit-sharpening potion... "
4: "The good news is, I now have 27 metric tonnes of gold on hand. The bad news is, about that international wizarding secrecy decree..."
"I've had limited success in permanent transfiguration; no forms but I can power some nuclear reactions with my magic, the effects being ... as lasting as one might expect of the end product. Where would one sell weapons-grade plutonium in quantity?"
The bits with surveillance, manipulation and deceit were somewhat spooky, and I suppose someone might find them scary in the arsenal of a superintelligence. Not me, though, in this instance - the setting and the knowledge/presumption that the original Optimalverse is as bad as it gets counter the potential for scariness.
The uploading back-and-forth gets a little boring for an old timer as well. But worth a read anyway.
I think EY phrased it as "more narrowly-focused artifacts can defeat other artifacts in the area of their specialty", or something like that (does anyone have the reference?).
Of course, that still seems odd, because the Cloak's specialty is "being invisible" and the Eye's is "seeing in every direction at once, seeing through solid objects, and seeing magic including hiding or invisibility spells". I must be missing something. Maybe the Cloak's specialty actually has to do with Death, and the mundane invisibility is a side effect?
All of those Eye functions can be summed up as "seeing bloody everything" (presumably within some range of the user), which at least seems more narrowly focused than your description, so perhaps its creator thought so too, which seems to count for something here, what with the broom physics and all.
That's a plausible thought on the Cloak, though.
Yeah, one's floating in magma- and none of the others are in places they would be exposed to a direct nuclear blast in the event of nuclear holocaust, either.
And even if they were... the reason the fang and sword (and Fiendfyre) worked is because the criterion for destroying a Horcrux is "damaged beyond magical repair". Basilisk venom and cursed fire both have a distinctly magical quality of "no takebacks". Who knows of being reduced to constituent atoms by mundane means counts? (Probably it does, but it isn't certain.)
But I assume it bothers him because if he wanted humanity eradicated, he could have accomplished it by now. And he didn't seem to take any pleasure in his belief that
"Those fool Muggles will kill us all someday!" Professor Quirrell's voice had grown louder. "They will end it! End all of it!"
[...]
"Yes, nuclear weapons!" Professor Quirrell was almost shouting now. "Even He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named never used those, perhaps because he didn't want to rule over a heap of ash! They never should have been made! And it will only get worse with time! [...] The eager little fools who discovered the secret of nuclear weapons didn't keep it to themselves, they told their fool politicians and now we must live under the constant threat of annihilation!"
Who knows of being reduced to constituent atoms by mundane means counts? (Probably it does, but it isn't certain.)
It still doesn't make it certain to work for such a case in particular, but Snape's "From the rumors I have heard, Headmaster, Muggle weapons are only slightly worse than the more... recondite aspects of wizardry" seems to be evidence towards counting.
Hypothesis: Once upon a time, the wizarding world had no popular sport of its own, and Quidditch was more akin to aerial dueling, a one-on-one contest of skill. Then, someone realised all the various benefits/opportunities offered by popular sports (perhaps by watching the Muggle world), and added extra rules and a team element to give the crowds something to watch while the Seekers continued their long periods of boredom interspersed with sharp bursts of activity.
Quidditch today generates a massive market in terms of matches, merchandise, contracts, celebrity culture etc. - a market that benefits the economy as a whole and certain key segments of it especially. It also serves various other purposes common to team sports, such as channeling the volatile energy of young people, and creating a harmless outlet for tension between countries (harmless in theory, anyway - we don't have riot statistics for the wizarding workl).
Whoever shaped Quidditch into its modern form didn't need a balanced game - they just needed something to fill the sport-shaped gap in wizard society. Such a hypothesis would explain why Quidditch is so poor in game design terms - unbalanced scoring, disproportionately high risk of injury and matches of unpredictable length don't matter quite so much if your goal is to pander to the audience rather than make a fair test of the competitors' skills.
Canonically the situation was quite reversed, the Snitch (or rather it's predecessor, the Snidget) having been introduced to the already existing Quidditch game by a noble's quirk. I doubt this is different for MoR.
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What was the reason Lucius Malfoy thought of?
I'm only coming up with Hermione having perhaps been replaced by a certain escapee.