What it reminds me the most of is Harry's discussion with Hermione about the need for heroic responsibility - about always shouldering the responsibility for any final outcome of events, instead of thinking that your job is done when you, say, go to Professor McGonagall and tell her to do something about it.
My guess(though I wouldn't assign a very high probability to this) is that it will be uttered by Harry while he's away from anyone he considers to be sane or responsible(like, say, Quirrell) and he fails to prevent something tragic from happening. A more specific hypothesis: Quirrell's identity is revealed by him doing something unspeakably evil and Harry blames himself for not piercing the disguise earlier.
Deleted. I just noticed that a similar example has been posted.
I'm curious now...
We know that Obliviation doesn't erase everything - it erases memories but not every effect of the experience it erases. We've even seen it in story - Rianne Felthorne felt sad when looking at her "found" ruby. McGonnagall also hypothesized that Harry might have been abused(or otherwise experienced something awful) and then Obliviated.
Either way, I'm curious how this effect would interact with something like this.
If Harry told you the secret of the True Patronus(and you weren't the sort of person who could kill Dementors with that knowledge) and you Obliviated yourself, would that be enough to restore the capacity to use an animal Patronus?
True, using copies to achieve that kind of power doesn't seem to make much sense - the law even says that you can get as much... let's call it "work" out of the ingredient as was "invested". It's true that there isn't much of an investment of resources in copies.
So, forget the copies, let's use the originals.
For example, could you take Einstein's original notes/notebooks(copying them beforehand, of course, so that you don't lose information), liquefy them into a Scientific Breakthrough Potion and use that Potion to quickly figure another brilliant breakthrough? That's the kind of thing I'm wondering about.
If this were the case, could Hermione sacrifice the paper marked 42 for a Potion of Humanism?
Or if Harry wrote down his thesis on Partial Transfiguration, Hermione could make a potion from that (without reading it), and write down whatever discovery she made under the influence of the Breaking the Laws of Magic Potion, which Harry could then use to make a potion...
Ch 78 You know, of all the things in the chapter, the law of Potion-Making seems the most important, by far - if I understand it correctly, it has staggering implications.
It's clear that you can extract more than purely physical processes from ingredients - since we have potions that bestow even entirely abstract concepts like luck(and canon!Snape claimed to be capable of brewing fame and glory, I'm unsure if MoR!Snape claimed the same).
So, could you, say, take a CD with some software on it and use it as a Potions ingredient in order to extract the mental ...
This thread is a little silly, even by local standards. First of all, the fact that a potion can be no stronger than its ingredients doesn't imply that a potion will always be as strong as its ingredients -- there are probably all kinds of other restrictions on what can be effectively brewed. By way of analogy, most Volvo engines don't run at Carnot efficiencies and most split pea soups don't run at more than 0.01 efficiency.
Second, all of the canon/fanon magical ingredients are non-copiable...a feather or a squished animal is not like a CD or a video game...
Another thought: write down a description of a complex magical principle that you understand, but that the interdict of merlin would prevent someone else who was reading it from understanding. Use the parchment you wrote on as an ingredient in a potion to make a potion with the mental work needed to discover/comprehend that principle.
Poof, Interdict of Merlin loses its teeth entirely. :)
Another thought that occurred to me: Felix Felicis. No wonder it's hard to brew. Only way you could brew it is if you literally got lucky in the process of brewing it, by c...
You can make copies of books and of software CDs very cheaply. Given a law of conservation, it can't be the case that destroying (sacrificing) a cheap copy would gain you powerful results, or else you could generate infinite resources very quickly (and wizards would realize this).
Maybe destroying the last extant copy of a software would achieve the effect. One wonders what great magic was fueled by the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
Might explain all those Nazi book-burnings. Grindelwald's human allies weren't just providing human sacrifices.
My intuition, my sense of fairness, says that you can't get back the work required to create information without sacrificing an appreciable fraction of the number of extant copies of that information.
I would guess that Magic and the Mind Projection Fallacy are sittin' in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
So I don't know how much use it'd be for anyone else.
Well, maybe you're doing a sort of inverse of generalizing from one example in that you assume that your process wouldn't be of use to anyone else, when in fact, it might be useful? :-)
Your Seven Shiny Stories are also very specific examples that theoretically apply to that one person only but can serve to highlight more general principles.
Going for the meta article with "this is how you find those techniques" with an example added of "this is how I found this" might be the best though, similarly to how the Sequence/Seven Shiny Stories work now.
I don't think I've ever seen a fanfic that updated with this kind of regularity or speed.
Incidentally, Alicorn, I think that might be an interesting thing to add to your Luminosity sequence. Maybe make Seven Shiny Stories into Eight Shiny Stories(or add something like Ureshiku Naritai) and elaborate - based on your own example - how do you force yourself to write more, how you caught that without a schedule/that sensation of "somebody would notice" you don't update regularly and so on. I think it might serve as an interesting example of dealing with akrasia, just like Ureshiku Naritai serves as an interesting example of dealing with depression.
That's an interesting possibility.
Though, I think there's an easier approach.
In the case of passwords or PIN numbers or whatever, she could probably look into the future and see the password used by an authorized user of whatever-it-is-that-she's-trying-to-break(eventually, someone's going to use it).
This is vastly less universal(she can't solve problems unless someone already knows the answer), but far easier. She could, for example, try to see who's going to use the ATM next, overlook the PIN and then decide to steal that person's wallet.
On the other han...
Though, didn't Addy say that Elspeth still thinks of her power as touch-based even after she is capable of range?
Maybe she needs to think of her power as ranged on a more instinctual, subconscious level before she begins broadcasting her dreams as she sleeps.
Why?
Maybe she's just exhausted and that's how it manifests itself?
Assuming that the answer is the same as in Twilight Canon, here's why this works(if you have not read the books and do not want to spoil yourself, do not decipher, obviously):
Va Gjvyvtug Pnaba, Ryfcrgu(be engure, Erarfzrr be jungrire gur cbxrzba vf pnyyrq) cbffrff na 'vairefr' cbjre gb ure cneragf. Vr. juvyr Rqjneq pna ernq zvaqf, fur pna fraq gubhtugf. Naq juvyr Oryyn vf fuvryqrq, fur pna crargengr fuvryqf.
Were I involved in the decision-making, and assuming the Dementors are not just indestructible but also unimprisonable, unteleportable-to-the-surface-of-Jupiter, and so forth
They seem to be un-imprisonable, as far as I see. They can drain magic and decay matter. So that covers.... everything. Eventually, they'd get out of any ward or prison you'd devise for them.
Remember that Harry's hypothesis of Dementors having no structure but what the wizards involved think of them is untested at best. So they might take revenge if they were suddenly faced with wiz...
Chapter 62.
Well, that was interesting.
I'm wondering whether the general opinion of Harry as dark is going to change as a result of a freaking phoenix following him around.
Incidentally, I've honestly got mixed feelings about this issue. Dumbledore is completely correct in his "it's not that simple" sentiment but Dementors are evil.
I'm actually wondering whether Wizards in general agree with Azkaban torture or if they just feel that Dementors have to be dealt with somehow. Since everyone 'knows' they're invulnerable, they decided to deal with them...
It's monstrous, yes, but does anyone here honestly have a better solution, if you accept the premise that Dementors are indestructible?
Were I involved in the decision-making, and assuming the Dementors are not just indestructible but also unimprisonable, unteleportable-to-the-surface-of-Jupiter, and so forth, I'd like to think I would present the following argument: "Right now, we can't defeat the Dementors, so we do best to negotiate some kind of agreement with them. We ought to continue researching a way to defeat them, and implement it when we f...
Well, with the story over, I've just got to say - I'm massively impressed.
It actually encouraged me to read your sequence(far more than MoR) simply because of how insanely productive you were. Eliezer has an exceptional update schedule, but you're like a machine. Post-singularity.
What surprised me the most was, perhaps, that the story forced me to take sparkly vampires seriously. Previously, I had an instinctive /facepalm reaction to them, whereas now I've got to admit, that a more skilled writer than Meyer can certainly make it work.
All in all, there's only two things left to say: Thumbs Up and I Need My Luminosity Fix Plx!!!111oneoenoe
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.
I certainly wasn't expecting that. Still, I'd like to congratulate you on actually going through with it, most people wouldn't have the guts to do something this big.
Anyway, is my interpretation - that Luminosity!Bella's shield also has some sort of an enhanced-immortality power - correct? If so, that would be an interesting turn of events.
Well then, I'd be happy to correct you.
It's fairly common writing advice that you should do your best not to use any other verb than 'said' to carry on a conversation.
To put it simply, most people simply ignore the repetitive nature of 'he said', 'she said'. Therefore, conversation flows fairly smoothly and naturally. Constantly injecting synonyms for 'he said', 'she said' is a sign of a new writer.
Naturally this doesn't mean "never ever use anything else besides 'said' to mark the dialogue". However, the alternatives should be used only in plac...
Re: Flamel and his open-secret-recipe for the Philosopher's Stone.
Here's a quote from chapter 61:
And yet, the recipe is openly available for everyone to see. If anyone could reproduce the stone from the recipe, it would be the very intelligent, rational(and very interested in immortality) Voldemort.
So, how do we reconcile these two facts?
One option is, of course, the published, known recipe is a fake. The stone is real but Flame... (read more)
Or making the stone has some mental prerequisite, like casting Avada Kedavra or the True Patronus. One, in this case, which Voldemort cannot meet.
I just took this at face value, that no one alive but Flamel is powerful enough to make the Philosopher's Stone.
This could be because the magic is going away, so no wizard of any generation much later than Flamel's can possibly make the Philosopher's Stone.
I like the Interdict of Merlin theory too, though.
Why would we doubt it? It's a fact that high level spells cannot be passed down in writing. Surely many wizards tried to, if only to discover which spells are "high level". Presumably there's a sharp distinction between spells that can be written down and those that cannot. If wizards occasionally invented new ways to write down spe... (read more)