So Harry gets his wand back, gets his pouch back, Voldemort resurrects Hermione with superpowers, then Voldemort becomes super-weak, his horcruxes mysteriously stop working, and he mentions this is happening loudly enough for Harry to hear and kill him?
Either this is still all in the mirror, or Harry needs to buy lottery tickets right away.
Or this is a big setup by Voldemort. Saying "I must make a Horcrux" out loud is the giveaway; I doubt even Harry's fantasy of a beatable Voldemort would be that stupid.
My guess (conditioned on this not being the mirror) is that Voldemort gave Harry his pouch and wand and then faked weakness to trick Harry into attacking him so that he could kill Harry without violating his prior promise. He resurrected a nearly-immortal Hermione to dissuade Harry from ripping the stars apart in case killing him failed, as part of his defense-in-depth strategy against the prophecy. Since he could have tricked Harry by much simpler means if that were the only goal, he can say in Parseltongue that restoring her counsel is the greater part of his motivation.
Suggestion: the entire plot with super-Hermione is Voldemort's practise at being nice. But he's not being nice to Hermione, he's being nice to Harry. He reasoned that this is a better way of stopping Harry destroying the stars than simply killing him (this way carries a slight risk but stops him having to kill his friend). He simply didn't see it because is was a 'nice' method.
This would explain the extravagance of the immortality mechanisms he's giving Hermione.
Not quite an either/or--perhaps he's also testing the immortality mechanisms he will use on himself. It hadn't occurred to me, but he may not be as confident as he pretends to be about how the Stone and the troll/unicorn/Horcrux spells will interact. And it closely parallels his previous failure to test his Horcrux system.
Then Harry took off his left shoe, and his left sock, and took off the toe-ring that was Hermione Granger, the Transfigured shape identical to the toe-ring that had been given Harry as an emergency portkey.
(Chapter 111)
"Dumbledore resumed his examination. Harry had to remove his left shoe, and take off the toe-ring that was his emergency portkey if someone kidnapped him and took him outside the wards of Hogwarts (and didn't put up anti-Apparition, anti-portkey, anti-phoenix, and anti-time-looping wards, which Severus had warned Harry that any inner-circle Death Eater would certainly do). It was verified that the magic radiating from the toe-ring was indeed the magic of a portkey, and not the magic of a Transfiguration. The rest of Harry was deemed clear."
(Chapter 94)
The pain in Harry's scar flared as the naked girl's body lifted into the air, then flared again as dead leaves danced around her and she was clothed in the seeming of a Hogwarts uniform, though the trim was red instead of blue.
(...)
The girl in the white shift was surrounded by a blazing aura of silver fire, as the Patronus was born inside her.
Continuity error?
So we have the Alicorn princess resurrection and the power he knows not being Friendship, seeing as he could've discovered the flaw in his Horcrux 2.0 system only fitting one person by sharing it before...
Hermoine is now partly an unicorn, which is the first step towards becoming an alicorn at the end of the story. She's also constantly self-transforming due to the troll power.
The basics for her going FOOM are set.
In case you are unaware, hyakuju montauk is a reference to this horrifying SCP. Hyakuju is Japanese for 110.
Blood Fort is probably Blood Fort Andromeda, the Nobel Phantasm of Rider in fate stay/night, where it was also used to threaten a school full of students.
Apokatastethi is apparently a biblical Greek hapax legomenon that means resurrection, as in the resurrection that is promised by Christianity during the end times. I think the phrase means, "restore, restore, restore the body for me" but my biblical Greek is even worse than my biblical Hebrew, and both are decades old.
While I'm not at all sure this is all real (we did end the last chapter with Harry staring into the Mirror, after all), Quirrell's continued NOPE-ing over Trelawney's star prophecy remains utterly hilarious.
It's like he thinks that his own life depends on Hermione Granger being alive, somehow.
For I would never want you to be deprived of Hermione Granger's counsel and restraint, not ever while the stars yet live.
snickers
hypothesis: Voldemort is pretending to lose.
Everything he said and did about Hermione is true - he wants Harry to have restrains and a sidekick (and a true friend, but his is an emotion he knows not). He knows that Harry has the best chance to defeat death, and so the best course of action is to move to the background to live a safe, boring life, now with his horcrux network, new body with who-knows-what capabilities, Harry being one of the very few things in the world that can hurt/kill him. So if Harry will think Voldemort is finally dead...
Against this...
I think I have a better interpretation of this line than I did before:
"My great creation -" gasped Voldemort. His voice was high, sounding panicked. "Two different spirits cannot exist in the same world - it is gone, it is severed!
The "great creation" is a 'pocket world' where a spirit resides, and can possess anyone who touches a portal to it, and can perceive the world around the portals, and so on. As another feature of not testing the Horcrux system, Voldemort is unaware that it's limited to one inhabitant--and so when he introduces Hermione, he evicts himself. This is a terrible shock, and gives Harry the drop on him.
Harry saw it the instant the Confundus wore off, and the man's expression changed, becoming again the face of Professor Quirrell.
Did it really wear off completely? Voldemort's behavior from this moment forward seems... confunded.
Some obvious theorycrafting: (presuming, based on Hermione's resurrection, that Voldemort's plan is for Harry to rule the world): (note: Quirrel did mention once before in Parseltongue: plan iss for you to rule country, obvioussly.)
Harry kept wand and bag. Obviously planned. Especially with words suspiciously similar to prophecy.
Why the 'true form' with the weird appearance? Unless perhaps that form came about via sacrificial rituals and thus must contain evidence of such sacrifices to retain power.
What kind of sacrificial advantage do you get by destroying your nose forever?
"Power of unicorn'ss blood to presserve life makess excellent combination with troll'ss healing. Only Fiendfyre and Killing Cursse sshall girl-child fear, from thiss day."
What, not basilisk venom? In canon, that was also a way to destroy a horcrux.
I am also updating towards the theory that what we are seeing in this chapter and the last is some sort of illusion; either the mirror or hpmor!legilimency. The biggest piece of evidence against it is Eliezer's assurances that the story will not lie to us because he wants the plot to be solvable; he was very careful to point out that Draco's false memory was, in fact, false.
How is Voldemort resurrecting Hermione?
With his own resurrection, he's transfiguring stuff into his body, using the Stone to make the transfiguration permanent, then having his spirit repossess the body.
With Hermione, the body was never the problem. Where's he getting the spirit? How does the Stone help?
So, now Hermione is by far the most immortal person in the universe. She has troll's and unicorn's powers and Voldemort's Horcrux 3.0 network. (Although she doesn't have physical possession of the Resurrection Stone, at least not yet. I wonder if she will be able to sense all of Voldemort's horcruxes right away when she wakes up, or if she would need to know some extra spells for that.)
A troll heals by continuously transforming into its form. Does this mean Hermione will never age, because she will always transform into a 12-year-old body? On the plus side...
Okay, either we are still running sims in the mirror, or Dumbledore hexed the ever loving fuck out of that cloak. Voldemort is acting like he just took an enormous dose of Bhal's.
Or.. he can't kill Harry, and knows it? It's plausible, as about a million people have suggested it that killing Harry would send him into Voldemort's horcruxen, which might be bad.. but no, there are lots of not-fatal at all ways of putting a stop to that prophecy...
So, random possible goals... make invincible, intelligent horcrux. Provoke Harry to attempted murder.
I am somewhat suspicious of announcing one's own vulnerability as opposed to just killing her in the half-second it takes for AK.
I wonder: if phoenixes originally came from within the mirror, does that mean they can travel freely back and forth? If so, it may be possible that Fawkes can get Dumbledore out.
Anyone else thinking that Dumbledore's divination power comes from a reflective "what if?" machine?
I wonder if that was all acting. If it wasn't, then Hermione may now be very hard to kill indeed.
This can only be a good thing.
Taking a short break from trying to figure out just what is going on...how do y'all think Hermione would feel if, assuming no levels of deception, she woke up to this scene?
Some quick predictions before the next chapter, adding to my previous prediction comment:
Conditional on the Mirror being involved in a test meant to distinguish some subset of rationalists (not necessarily a proper subset) from other people, Harry will pass its test by the end of the story. 95% (See my previous prediction comment for why I think this is a sufficiently plausible hypothesis to condition on.)
Conditional on the Mirror being involved in a test meant to distinguish Light Rationalists from other people, Voldemort will not pass its test without s...
I don't expect the gun to work; it seems to me that if Voldemort had a ritual to give people properties of magical creatures, he would have given them to himself, and firing a gun at a troll three times would not be terribly effective. But would his body recreated from his blood through this ritual have those features? Uncertain. But shooting a troll three times would still give you enough time to close the distance, or cast a spell on him before he could fly away, or so on.
[edit] As people pointed out below, I forgot about the temporary nature of the spell without the stone.
It is also interesting that the horcrux spell can be cast for others (or is he doing other mind magic at the same time?).
Voldemort would not have given the properties to his body before now, because he had not had the Stone, and without its permanence effect, after a few hours the transferred properties would wear off.
He was overconfident in giving them to Hermione now, instead of to himself.
Either Voldemort has something up his sleeve or canon-Harry's power to summon a deus ex machina are finally starting manifest.
EDIT: Seems to be the former.
More than any chapter so far, this one makes me worry that the story will not have a happy ending.
On a side note - Blood Fort sacrifice, hm? *amused*
"Fal-Tor-Pan" similarly, though I had to Google that one.
I'm curious where Harry got the gun. Unless it's some kind of railgun, the bullets can't be safely transfigured. Perhaps he asked one of the professors to get it for him. While given guns to children is normally incredibly dangerous, it's par for the course in Hogwarts.
Suggestion: fewer threads, more chapters per thread. Chapters aren't separated by weeks like we're used to.
Harry pulled the trigger. Bang or click?
What happens if you AK someone keyed to the horcrux 2.0 network?
Prediction: If Hermione is AK'd, her soul will be shunted to the network. There will be no death burst and Voldemort's horcruxing attempt fails. Then things get interesting.
Prediction: Voldemort ends up in Hermione's super-immortal body and claims it doesn't break his promise because Harry was the one who triggered it. This scenario is the only explanation I can think of for why Voldemort is prioritizing Hermione's body over his own, giving Harry all his options back, advertising his moment of weakness, and generally behaving like a second-rate Hollywood villain. Confidence: 25%.
So it looks like some of Harry's magic is on the diary for whatever reason, because Voldemort casting a spell on the diary sets off the resonance hard. Did Harry cast a spell on it earlier?
Voldemort isn't that good a coder - It's a continually updating system, that loads his present mindstate onto the entire system.. And he just rekeyed it to Hermione. All backups and lore: Gone.
Dumbledore loaded the cloak with Bhals stupefication, didn't he? Some delivery mechanism that only tiggered when worn by an adult. Hence the mad cackling and very poor plan for stopping Harry from breaking the universe <,<
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 111.
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.)
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: