Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort evaded the Mirror, and is watching every trick Harry's coming up with to use against his reflection.
Semi-pessimistic assumption: Harry is in the Mirror, which has staged this conflict (perhaps on favorable terms) because it's stuck on the problem of figuring out what Tom Riddle's ideal world is.
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort can reliably give orders to Death Eaters within line-of-sight, and Death Eaters can cast several important spells, without any visible sign or sound.
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort has reasonable cause to be confident that his Horcrux network will not be affected by Harry's death.
A necessary condition for a third ending might involve a solution that purposefully violates the criteria in some respect.
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort wants Harry to reveal important information as a side effect of using his wand. To get the best ending, Harry must identify what information this would be, and prevent Voldemort from acquiring this information.
Pessimistic assumption: Voldemort wants Harry to defeat him on this occasion. To get the best ending, Harry must defeat Voldemort, and then, before leaving the graveyard, identify a benefit that Voldemort gains by losing and deny him that benefit.
Pessimistic assumption: Free Transfiguration doesn't work like a superpower from Worm: it does not grant sensory feedback about the object being Transfigured, even if it does interpret the caster's idea of the target.
Pessimistic assumption: At least in the limit of unusually thin and long objects, Transfiguration time actually scales as the product of the shortest local dimension with the square of the longest local dimension of the target, rather than the volume. Harry has not detected this because he was always Transfiguring volumes or areas, and McGonagall was mistaken.
Related to: Use the Native Architecture
When cholera moves through countries with poor drinking water sanitation, it apparently becomes more virulent. When it moves through countries that have clean drinking water (more exactly, countries that reliably keep fecal matter out of the drinking water), it becomes less virulent. The theory is that cholera faces a tradeoff between rapidly copying within its human host (so that it has more copies to spread) and keeping its host well enough to wander around infecting others. If person-to-person transmission is cholera’s only means of spreading, it will evolve to keep its host well enough to spread it. If it can instead spread through the drinking water (and... (read 887 more words →)
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