Dumbledore isn’t in the mirror. Harry and Voldemort are. The trap triggered, stuck them in a time-dilated mirror plane. Which is, of course, the only reasonable way to deal with an immortal serial killer. This even counts as fulfilling the darn prophecy, doesn’t it? Definitely if Dumbledore can extract Harry, because that way naught but a remnant will exist in the same world, and yes, it does count as Harry defeating him. He talked him into stepping into that trap, after all. Bravo.
Izeinwinter
Karma: 1,207
Lets see: Data and implications, assuming Quirrelmort is keeping up his habit of only rarely telling direct lies: Dark and sacrificial magic tends to kill you in the end, and neither the original Voldemort, nor Quirrelmort had a fix for this. The horcrux spell forks your identity, imperfectly, and also carries wholly unacceptable costs to anyone moral. So, you know, nothing voldy cares about.
Theory: Facing his own inevitable demise from accumulated sacrifice damage, Voldy attempted to fix the flaws in the horcrux process—First he attempted to bypass the loss of knowledge by targeting a strong wizard as the possession target—heck, that might have been part of the point of the campaign of terror—to draw out wizards with real power from obscurity. And so he ended up fighting both sides of that war, because he took Monroe’s body while still remaining Voldemort full time. The personality divergence from imprinting himself on a mind that strong, however, was more than Voldemort considered acceptable, and thus he targeted Harry. At a guess, he worked out how to remove the carrier object from the spell so that the death of Harry’s mother would copy him directly into the mind of baby Harry—who being a baby, would have very little in the way of a personality. The change to the rite also involved torching his then-current body. Heck, maybe all he did was use himself as the horcrux- but this was acceptable, because it was falling apart from sacrifice damage anyway. All of which worked fine, except babies forget just about everything that happens before the fifth year of life so the immaculate transfer of Voldemort’s entire mind got wiped by infant amnesia.
Lets see: Stone theories: “True power isn’t what people say it is”. Gold is not wealth—that is a wizard and goblin misconception, and youth isn’t a mystical quality, it is a body functioning correctly.
I am sticking with my theory that the alchemist stone is simply the second level version of the Reparo spell. The one that works on people. - It grants great wealth because it works on everything, which turns second hand and broken magical items, art, ect, into a trivial source of income, and it makes you immortal because age is just damage. Heck, it will likely raise the dead as long as their remains are still recognizably “a broken person”.
Consider that Harry is not the only player on the board:
McGonagall is being pushed towards taking action to fix this. Very, very hard. I do not just mean the defense professor. I mean the entire situation is leaning on her to go beyond the usual.
Snape: Been a loose cannon for a while now, and might decide to do something about this.
The Defense Professor. Probably set the hit in motion, but might be looking for the “undo! UnDo!” button due to the fallout.
Dumbledore: .. nah, actually do not think he is going to exert himself over this.
So, at present, there is a non-zero probability that Harry is carrying around McGonagalls living brain transfigured into a diamond because she swapped herself for Hermione, then Snape swapped the oxygenating potion for the draught of living death, and Harry decided to arrest decay with the tools at his disposal.
Mad cackle
Wait. I missed one. And Hermione and/or McGonagall got her soul anchored to the whooping willow courtesy of a timetraveling defense professor. (all the horcrux proposals ignore the fact that neither Harry nor Hermione would use that technique, nor do they know it. But Quirell does. And would. )
That Voldemort is her father, and her muggle background a lie. “Secretly a pureblood” really is a very credible explanation if you actually believe in blood purism.
He’s standing in a indestructible oracle. That he knows how to use, and Tom doesn’t. That is the most awesomely rigged battleground possible.
Re: The words on the mirror. In-universe, “CEV” is likely a translation from the atlanean—any reader will get a mirrored phrase which is the closest mapping to what it does which exists in their language or something like it.
General Theorem: This series of chapters ought to be named “Tom Riddle and the Illusion of VIctory”.
Voldemort has a nigh-absolute escape hatch. He can escape nearly any defeat, any trap, simply by dying. Possibly it’s even worse than that, and he can abandon bodies at will.
He also has a strong tendency to discount the intelligence of anyone who is not him.
The order of the pheonix was operating under the theory that he was a body-jumper from the word go.
The traps laid, the strategems in place are predicated on the central principle of allowing Voldemort to continue to think he is winning until it is much to late, and his defeat has become truely inescapable.
And I am pretty sure he’s walked into several of these snares already—In cronological order: Things that were likely traps not yet triggered. The DADA job. The corridor—in particular, standing around in Snape’s chamber for a full hour. The trip through the mirror, donning the cloak. Picking up the stone. Heck, Hermione’s corpse. (Harry should not have succeeded in sneaking that past Dumbles. So maybe he did not?) I’m probably missing several...
The dust speck “dillema”—like a lot of the other exercises that get the mathematically wrong answer from most people is triggering a very valuable heuristic. - The “you are trying to con me into doing evil, so fuck off” Heuristic.
Consider the problem as you would of it was a problem you were presented with in real life.The negative utility of the “Torture” choice is nigh-100% certain. It is in your physical presence, you can verify it, and “one person gets tortured” is the kind of event that happens in real life with depressing frequency. The “Billions of people get exposed to very minor annoyance” choice? How is that causal chain supposed to work, anyway? So that choice gets assigned a very high probability of being a lie.
And it is the kind of lie people encounter very frequently. False hypotheticals in which large numbers of people suffer if you do not take a certain action are a common lever for cons. From a certain perspective, this is what religion is—Attempts to hack people’s utility functions by inserting so absurdly large numbers into the equations so that if you assign any probability at all to them being true they become dominant.
So claims that look like this class of attack routinely get assigned a probability of zero unless they have very strong evidence backing them up because that is the only way to defend against this kind of mental malware.
I just had quite a dismal thought. Harry is in disbelief the entire wizarding world is not pursuing the stone as priority one, which is a reasonable enough reaction.. Except.. How many wizards actually manage to die in their beds? Given the stated lifespan, and the cultural tendency to marry young, families ought to have a lot of generations alive at the same time.. but the older generations are thin on the ground. Harry was not raised by his grandparents! none of whom ought to have passed away from natural causes. Those elders we hear about are in the main fairly high up on the “competency/scary/power” scales. The logical implication being that wizards are not overly concerned about old age, because very few of them ever die from it. Something else—A dark lord, screwing up a spell, the magical wildlife, a succession dispute.. will get you first.. This logic could well deter a lot of people from attempting alchemy ; Succeeding in making a stone without being as good a survivor as Flamel carries a significant risk of dying now to violence instead of in 90 years to natural causes.
Of course, this also means that Flamel might not be very unique at all. If the stone is widely regarded as a nuisance magnet, successful crafters may be keeping a low profile.
Good lord, Harrys parents are very good at this parenting gig.
The combo of the intellectual and the emotional appeal, in particular is a thing of beauty.
Let us see; Quite a few options were taken off the table in this chapter in particular because noone was missing, which rules out all the “substitute someone else” gambits people kept suggesting in a really impressive display of etics fail.
So Hermione got up and left. Or her body was absconded with. Correction: if she got up under her own power, she was most likely still absconded with, as otherwise she would have let people know she was mobile. I mean, even if she wanted to keep the world thinking she was dead to avoid further attempts on her life, she would want to tell Harry.
Possibilities;
Quirrell hid the body. On the grounds that Harry would find it difficult to do anything stupid without a body to do anything stupid to.
Snape. Yes, I am still on about the oxygenating potion. Exotica in bottles is what he does, and heck, he even uses “put a stopper in death” as an example of what a master potioner can do. In which case, he is keeping her incommunicado to avoid whoever is responsible finishing the job with fiendfire.
Harry: Stasised the body, and hid it to avoid burial, autopsy, ect.
Most of the plans to use time turning to fix this are massively overly complicated, by the way. Best bet is to swap the oxygenating potion for something which will make her death less permanent.
Which Harry can find or have made in < 6 hours.
Options: 1: Elixir of life. The stone is at hand, Snape is at hand. It is possible that shout is what taking it looks like. 2: Undeath. The potter verse does have vampires, and they are integrated in magical society at least to the extent that seeing one in a bad neighborhood is not grounds for an auror raid. Werewolf infection might also do it. 3: Draught of living death?
Harry is missing a point, tough. Flamel is 600 years old, and started out powerful. Presumably, “trying to blackmail / kidnap Flamel” has been the endpoint of the careers of enough dark lords that they do not attempt this anymore.
,,, Wait. alchemical diagrams need to be drawn “to the fineness of a child’s hair”? … … Eh,, I think it entirely possible that Flamel is the only wizard to ever manage to make a stone because he is the only wizard to ever try it while young enough to use his own hair. In which case, Hermione is going to show up with a working stone shortly.
There are even clearer examples of gender bias on the unconscious level. The fact that women are hired at equal rates as men by orchestras if, and only if, the audition is behind a curtain and everyone enters barefoot so the hiring committee cant tell gender by footstep sounds is the most damning I can think of right now. Because that is a straight up test of competence at the only skill relevant for the job, and applicant genitalia still sway supposed experts unless extreme measures are taken to blind them to that factor. Basically, at this point there is such a huge pile of evidence that human beings are just completely incompetent at screening out utterly irrelevant factors that I would judge it sensible hiring policy in any field to have the job interview behind a curtain and a vocoder.
… Fuck it, I’m using that in a story. It fits right into a certain culture I’m building. ;)
Fostering her out would be insurance against defeat. Placing her with pure-blood allies would not suffice for that eventuality, as such allies would most likely be going down with the ship too. Placing her with muggles takes her out of the war entirely, and the trace means she gets back into the wizarding world 11 years later no matter what happens..
Uhm. This is spookily compatible with Canon. For a girl with supposedly loving parents, she spends an inordinate number of holidays at hogwarts and the burrow. Worse, we never actually meet said parents at all in canon. We are told. By Hermione, that they get shipped to Australia with a case of amnesia. And I mean, “my parents are dentists” is exactly the kind of lie a clever 11 year old orphan might tell people to get them to iose all interest in further enquiries. So, basically, her family could oh-so-easily be entirely fiction in-universe.
She is a born shapeshifter. Of the line of Black. Moody offered to oversee that internship to learn who she was, because it would be fracking stupid not to. Finding out that Tonks is astonishingly decent people must have been the best news Moody got in decades.
Couple of options:
1: They do. Once a decade or so, someone succeeds and promptly takes full advantage of the fact that nobody is going to connect the youth of 16 they now have the look of with the magus of 160 they were, assume a new identity and keep their gob shut. For maximal hilarity, this could explain the rumor about double witches—there is no such thing, but youthful witches and wizards with absurd powerlevels? Real, if rare.
2: The rite does not work well, or at all, for the old. Several options:
2a: The muggle mythos about the stone is not entirely off base. The creation of the stone requires a level or type of virtue exceedingly rare in people who have survived 150 +years in the wizarding culture.
2b: “Alchemy” is wizarding euphemism for “Tantric Magic”, which is why all the books are restricted and while the spirit may be willing… >,) This also explains why Flamel only shares the stone with his wife—You can only help people you sleep with. This, of course, also rather nixes any of our heroes doing it anytime the next 5 years or so.
2c: For reasons similar to potions, the rite just does nothing for a caster over the age of 15.
3: Merlins interdict is screwing with the recipe- anyone wishing to make a stone has to do the research from scratch, and without an extant community of alchemical researchers, that is a project beyond the capability of any intellect ever born. - Flamels success happened in a context that no longer exists.
BTW, not related to the plot much at all, but I think I get the point of the dungeonrun first year students can beat.
The mirror is set to show students their CEV, which Harry dismissed as “Themselves in some very desirable situation”. Is dismissed the right word? Eh, anyway, I don’t think the people Harry talked to quite managed to convey the magnitude of it to him.
Slytherin’s core insight, the thing his house if founded on, is that people become who they are supposed to be by pursuing their ambitions, or at least that is the opinion of Quirrel the teacher-persona. I don’t actually care if he truly believes that, because it just strikes me as an important truth.
The mirror tailors good and sound ambitions for people. Or at least it does for any student which has a CEV which could conceivably be achieved via their own efforts. And they are, after all, witches and wizards.
Putting it behind an obstacle course makes people value and pay attention to what it gives them. It is a really impressive piece of pedagoguery.
So basically, the entire thing isn’t about Voldemort at all. It’s about teaching. Wonder how much of slytherin house did this run? Because it obviously is the house that would benefit the most from it.
Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods. So if you want to come up with gold by the tonne, you need to either actually engage muggles in trade (eewww) or go hunting for treasure with no (living) owners.
More amusingly: I am not at all sure competent wizards have much need to care about coin at all. Lucius is a political creature, so he needs ways to bribe idiots, but a wizard that keeps their newt skills up to scratch is pretty much carrying around a cornucopia machine in their pocket. Sure, you could spend a bunch of effort and rob a bank, then use that gold to have a house built.. Or, you know, save yourself the hassle and raise a cute little tower from the bones of the earth/bend space and live like a king in a post office box.. ect.
...Thinking..
No. Persuasive theory, but it has flaws in it—specifically, the Troll was too successful at neutralizing Grangers defenses to have been a misfired plot. Arranging for her to be wandering the halls alone? Sure. Sabotaging her broom? sure. Invisibility cloak not doing what it was supposed to? Well, I can see that. Telling the troll to eat her feet first so that the emergency portkey does not work?
That absolutely requires lethal intent. The rest of it all fits, but having Granger get ported out of harms way if Harry flies into a wall while en-route or something does not even require D to put a backup plan in place, it merely requires him to not neutralize a precaution already in place.
The anti-troll weapon.. Well, if the troll got stolen from the philosopher stone defenses…
however, that does not mean D was not hat and cloak. Because, as Harry so ably demonstrated, breaking someone out of askaban is not difficult. Sending Granger there would not require D to intend to leave her there, even if he was expecting the wizengamot to enact a lesser sanction.
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 have a theory about that.
What is the number one piece of advice we give people about relationships? The one rule which is regarded as the key to success and happiness in romance?
Its honest communication.
Salazar’s decendants can have a perfect, magically enforced, version of that. And all they have to do is marry their cousin. The family wasn’t obsessed with blood purity at all, it is simply that after growing up in a household where harmony was routinely established via this glorious gift of Salazar, the very idea of intimacy with anyone that this could not be shared with was usually repugnant.
That’s why Quirrel calls it a curse. It lead the entire clan down a path of inbreeding! Unintentional consequences are unintentional.