All of Phigment's Comments + Replies

That he is Tom Riddle.

A whole lifetime's worth of stuff, which is repressed and forgotten by Tom Riddle Jr.

0skeptical_lurker
I guess this is plausible.

Or he and Bella are kicking back on a beach in the Caribbean, drinking alcohol from coconuts and murdering anyone who plays loud music nearby or fails to clean up after their dogs.

Rematch in twenty years.

Phigment190

Yeah, this is one of those solutions that, had I been writing, I would have ruled as not actually workable. Takes too long, Voldemort or a Death Eater sees the threads and breaks them on general principles, nanotubes don't actually have enough tensile strength to reasonably slice up everybody at once consistently, and so forth. I pretty much filed any tactical violence plan under "not practical".

Still, not my story. It's not out of keeping with the rest of the stuff in HPMOR.

High odds that Voldemort escaped. He's been extraordinarily hammy th... (read more)

8Transfuturist
The volume of the transfiguration makes it negligibly quick; nanotubes have the highest tensile strength of any material and they were not lone tubes, but braided; I'm fairly sure spotting a braided nanowire in the dark is nearly impossible; and the tension transfiguration is what made the slicing consistent. How exactly is it not practical?
3DanielLC
That's why you have multiple tactical violence plans running at the same time. Mine had neurotoxin and jets of fluorine. Also, Harry could transfigure a flashbang if he gets noticed, and he reinforces his body with carbon nanotubes for in case he gets shot.
2Subbak
We know for a fact that the Hogwarts wards do not raise an alarm when they should, because they did not detect Draco being under a Blood-Cooling Charm. And we also know that Voldie had a better idea regarding those wards (whether he actually had said wards in place around Draco is debatable, but still, he had the idea). So I think it's extremely probable that the wards he has to detect his own death are more efficient than the Hogwarts wards, and he's currently riding Bella's body and kicking himself for once more not having just used Avada Kedavra.

I don't recall invisible shields, but it's certainly plausible.

We've also seen him just flatly stop curse bolts in midair and then flick them away, without apparent shielding or obvious effort. He's got defense options like Smaug has gold coins.

If killing him was easy, someone would have done it before. Even though he had horcruxes, it's telling that he never actually had to respawn from one until he tried juggling dynamite and blew his own self up.

4Astazha
From Ch. 74. It's not clear to me whether the shield was invisible until struck or if he put it up very quickly and silently. This.

Wise sort of went on vacation when Harry elected to oppose the invincible dark lord instead of volunteering to be his most favored flunky.

Voldemort is capable of making stupid mistakes; he admitted that with his whole discussion of being trapped for years without a body. But he doesn't make stupid mistakes very frequently. So, if you believe he's making a stupid mistake, you should try to take advantage, because you may not see another one.

4Ander
Yes, that makes sense. It seems Harry shouldve been much less confident that Voldemort was making a mistake, but he was very rushed.

Harry has literally been watching the current body Voldemort is inhabiting for the entire time that body has existed. He has seen every spell cast while Voldemort has been using it.

Either Voldemort has not raised shields (which he typically did not do as Quirrell) or he's capable of casting shielding spells which Harry cannot detect either the casting or ongoing effects of even in the midst of extended close observation. And if it's the latter, we're back to "in order to have a shot at beating someone, you have to assume he's theoretically beatable ... (read more)

0Astazha
Shields are useless against Harry's magic because of the resonance. The earthbending trick was nice, though.
0skeptical_lurker
I seem to remember that in Azkaban his shields were invisible.
Phigment150

Attempting to shoot Voldemort was still the correct action for Harry to take, given his constraints.

Any opportunity to defeat Voldemort at this stage is going to be sudden and short-duration. If you pass up a potential victory shot because it's possibly some sort of misdirection, you'll likely pass up every potential shot at victory you might encounter.

7westward
Harry had a better choice: "Shoot the hostage" Either fatally or a good wounding in the leg. Harry'd already committed that his life was a worthy sacrifice to foil V's plans. Clearly V. felt Harry should be alive for some reason. Ergo, Harry's death would have hurt his plans. Stopped entirely? Maybe, maybe not. A leg wound, preventing him from walking, requiring his own wand to heal or some machinations on V's part to find some non-magical interaction way to heal/move Harry would have also done nicely.
2ChristianKl
Not necessarily. Voldemort did say that he reanimated Hermione for Harry. Simply going along with the plan might be the best option. That would also mean to ask Voldemort about keeping Harry alive. Harry problem is that he can't lose and settle for something less than total victory.
0skeptical_lurker
Even if Volde really was hamming it up that badly as to shout that he was mortal again, he would presumably have shields up which would stop bullets.
Ander110

I think that attempting to shoot him there wasnt giving an intelligent enemy very much credit. It would only work if the stupid mistakes that Voldemort was making were real, and not a ruse. Given that Harry possibly has only one chance (because Voldemort promised in parseltongue not to try to harm Harry unless he tried to harm him first), taking the first opportunity that presents itself, which might be a trick to get Voldemort out of that promise, is probably unwise.

Depends on the poison.

If it's something that prevents the poisoned person from noticing he has been poisoned, sure. Doesn't matter if you could fix the problem, if your brain has been prevented from realizing there IS a problem.

Alternately, if the "poison" is some sort of deleterious transfiguration effect upon the subject, which the stone will immediately make permanent, it would be hilarious. Snape, at least, thinks this way. Remember his attempt spike Voldemort's resurrection components with LSD?

You're right, I would expect the troll and unicorn merges to have caused interaction. Hmm.

Seems, then, like the resonance is more a complication of doing unusual things with the horcrux ritual than a matter of Voldemort's magic affecting Harry, per se.

This is a completely excellent suggestion.

Dumbledore, knowing that Harry was an expected pawn in Voldemort's plans, just booby-traps all the personal possessions that Voldemort would logically want to deprive Harry of, like the cloak, his wand, his pouch, his time-turner, Hermione's corpse...

In the same vein, booby-trap the Philosopher's stone. Coat it in a fine layer of contact poison, so that anyone who managed to retrieve it from the mirror and handled it with bare skin would get whammied. Then, if you actually win, wear gloves.

0Alsadius
Is poison really a good attack against someone who holds the Philosopher's Stone?

My thought was that his personalized horcrux spell tied whoever it was used upon to the horcrux network he built.

Therefore, by using it on Hermione, instead of having two parallel horcrux immortals, Hermione's mind was connected to his network, and he was disconnected.

This was not something he had ever examined in detail, because it never occurred to him to spread his horcrux method around before.

Harry cast a spell on Hermione just minutes prior.

A spell imbuing her with his magic and life force, which would never return to him.

I imagine that's what cause the resonance reaction.

2Vaniver
I think Voldemort thought of that:
0b_sen
True, but then Voldemort performed magical rituals on Hermione. I imagine that ritual magic would also count as magic interacting, although it's possible that it doesn't. It's also possible that the Patronus is somehow protective from whatever Dark magic Voldemort just attempted (and needed to kill Quirrell for). Good point, in any case.

I think it's very easy and potentially problematic to focus on too-narrow a category for your specialties.

To flagrantly steal an example from SlateStarCodex, examine basketball players. Professional basketball players tend to be tall. Several standard deviations taller than the general population. There is a definite, verifiable link between increased height and increased basketball success.

However, the most successful pro basketball players are not necessarily the tallest. Michael Jordan was not the tallest player in his environment, but was absolutel... (read more)

Phigment100

It's odd in the sense that he hasn't been especially prominent in the story so far. All the others were involved in the bullying storyline, or are Draco.

Therefore, by the principle of conservation of nonsense, Theodore Nott must actually be polyjuiced Dumbledore.

Phigment150

On the contrary.

Voldemort can only be defeated by The Power He Knows: Nott!

Notice that Theodore Nott is right outside. He was (oddly) traveling with the Meddling Kids Squad.

2Velorien
Very good. However, there's nothing odd about his presence with the other children. He's a Slytherin who's been portrayed sympathetically ever since his induction into the Chaos Legion, so it's very plausible that he's a member of the Silvery Slytherins and thus someone Draco would turn to for help in an emergency.