Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 114 + chapter 115

This is bloody brilliant foreshadowing!

Also don't forget trapping himself in the mirror rather than Harry.

I dunno, it seems like you could say Dumbledore's Father and Mother defeated Voldemort, they had a child who was intelligent enough to do those things you said.

More seriously, it was a causal chain. Pretty much everyone involved was crucial.

If I had to give credit to one party in particular it would be the entity or entities which hands out prophecies (I suspect this is Future!Hermione, but we'll see). Voldemort's first defeat was caused by his attempts to fulfill the first in his own way. His second was caused by his attempt to comprehensively thwart the second.

I mostly agree with the first part, and it's an important reason for which I didn't like the "final exam" concept, there is just too much we don't really know about how HPMOR world works. It's fine from a pure story-telling point of view, because we can assume Harry knows more about it than we do (he's living in it after all, he did read many books about magic, do many experiments, attend to lessons, ...) but it's not fair to ask us to outguess such things.

For the second part, I don't really agree. Think about the emotional state of Harry. He got through a very very stressy times, and despite all odds, he won. I must be feeling some euphoria for that. And at the same time, he killed dozens fo people. In self-defense, sure. But he, the anti-deathist just killed dozens of people. In such a situation, the mixing of euphoria of winning against all odds and the horror of having just killed, wondering what the future ethical transhuman civilization would do and think about all that feels totally appropriate to me. It's exactly what I would expect of Harry, the one who (re-)invented True Patronus.

Anyone who gives a speech in a school talking about how drugs are fun is a good person to emulate, IMO.

Alternatively, "What would Neji do?"

You're within the range of my Transfiguration! Eight Trigrams, Thirty-Six Tentacles!

A: Taylor would violate her mentor's mind and then make him look like a hero.

Answer A: Carbon nanotube spiders. Ouch.

Answer B: I think all of them were in range. Admin powers time?

Snake detecting spells: Canon!Harry sucked at Occlumency.

• The villain allows the hero to win
• The villain is weaker than the hero
• Deus ex machina
• The hero doesn't win

Take at least one.

there are a dozen simpler and/or more effective countermeasures he could have taken

While I wouldn't go quite that far, I do agree with you on one thing: leaving Harry his wand was really stupid. Why did he let Harry keep his wand?

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 this whole time, and he called all the Death Eaters together, killed or crippled a few, and then explained his evil scheme to the hero before giving him a countdown to his inevitable death, while leaving him armed. It seems very plausible that Tom Riddle was tired of Lord Voldemort, and decided to retire him via dramatic massacre. Why make his new body a snaky freak-show, after all?

On the pedantic nitpicker trivia side of things, you don't have a tank of "oxyacetelene". An oxy-acetylene rig uses a tank of oxygen, and a tank of acetylene. But Harry is probably not a welder, and neither are the Weasely twins, so nobody involved was equipped to notice the problem.

Me too. I didn't say this a couple of days ago, owing to a lack of confidence that I now see to have been misguided; but while the nanowire PT solution is reasonable and effective and exactly the sort of thing that a sci-fi fan who fancies themselves clever would come up with, it's narratively shallow. And I can't see messily killing thirty-six people as in character for Harry at this moment, however much noise has been made about killing intent. Coming up with creative ways to kill people is one thing; actually going through with it in anger, or even thinking of it when faced with real hostility, is quite another.

(I'm also not totally sure it would work, but that depends on messy materials-science math that I can't be bothered with right now.)

Lest I be accused of being overly negative, though, the Obliviation bit does have a certain elegant symmetry to it.

Same here.

On the other hand, the description in chapter 114 read a lot nicer than all the suggestions that I read in the discussion thread on chapter 113. I guess there’s a difference between the bare-bones suggestion (which is clever, but unsatisfying) and the fully fleshed out story (which I found satisfying enough) and I did not think of this in my earlier comments. My apologies to everyone who got a doubtful response from me!

I'm so disappointed that the Partial Transfiguration faction turned out to be correct.

Thank Merlin they didn't listen to us and continued submitting PT solutions. :)

Yeah. I really hoped Eliezer would go for a pure verbal solution. Something like what I proposed, but smarter.

As opposed to? (I wasn't keeping close track of the theories as we went forward).

I suppose she's the courageous hero.

Good points here.

About the Time Turner, I thought there were wards against it. The stunning hex was a bet, but jumping on the Time Turner could have gone even wronger.

Dumbledore appeared much more wielding the "idiot ball" than Voldemort in this final arc.

Voldemort initially needed Harry to have his wand for the Unbreakable Vow. Yes, it was a mistake to not remove the wand from him afterward.

He couldn't imagine Harry would be a threat with a wand without being allowed to speak or move it, partial transfiguration of carbon nanotubes or antimatter from the wand itself just was unimaginable to him, so it's an understandable mistake, but it does strike as odd when compared to all the precaution he's taking in "paranoia mode".

The trope that describes a character (villain or otherwise) suddenly going stupid and careless is Holding the Idiot Ball. Which EY promised that nobody would ever do.

Even if this was the good ending I want to see the bad ending.

Hm. Was hoping for a talking solution, expecting a combination of Transfiguration and science to feel gimmicky.

But hey, I'm getting ahead of myself, not even 100% sure this is going to be a good end.

^ Funnily enough, I was posting that when I saw your post.

I would add a reason for Harry to have the wand.

Like, instead of, "You will not raise your wand", "You will only raise your wand when and how I permit it. Do not demonstrate a spell unless ordered."

That would imply that Voldemort was open to the possibility that Harry might demonstrate something, which would require arming him.

The big problem is that he left Harry his wand. If he uses more precautions against Harry, but still keeps leaving Harry his wand, then that makes the fact that he left Harry his wand less realistic, not more. So I actually think that you should go the other way with it - have him be less paranoid about Harry. Because otherwise you're making the inconsistency even worse. He's being cautious and paranoid enough to strip Harry's clothes from him, but leaves the wand in Harry's hand for one moment longer than he has to? It makes more sense if he has the Death Eaters throw a bunch of Finites at him to check for residual traps left by Dumbledore, and for that to be where he sees most of the threat coming from.

Having the Death Eaters look around makes sense, but the paralysis seems contrived to me. It's a very specific level of intelligence between what he have now and just having Mr. Grim cast Expelliarmus. I think it is more realistic for Voldemort to have dismissed the threat than for him to have considered it and decided that paralyzing Harry was the best solution.

Don't be too hasty, whatever you end up deciding! It's only been a day. A lot of people put a lot of thought into solving this problem, and it makes sense that their attitudes about whether the problem was too easy, or too hard, or whether they solved guessed the author's solution, or whether it's unrealistic, would be emotionally enhanced by the effort they spent.

Take a week, take a month, talk to people you trust.

As AlexanderWales says, the biggest flaw is the wand. If you add a line about harry being left holding his wand so that Voldemort can impose further unbreakable vows if he sees fit, or he has it left in case he needs to demonstrate any secret knowledge (along the lines of Patronus 2.0), Voldemort goes from holding the Idiot Ball to just making a mistake. He's trading off Harry possibly doing something impossible with his wand vs a far likelier benefit.

Long time lurker, signing up just to be able to vote for the harder version. Turns out I start out with 0 karma and am not allowed to vote. Oh well.

The biggest problem for me is that when I imagine myself reading these events and Voldemort going, "A nice try but I can sense whatever transfiguration trick it is that you're using. Thank you, that will take me some time to perfect in my eternity," I don't feel surprised.

Throwing additional stipulations and conditions into the situation doesn't change the fact that the way in which Voldemort loses is not convincing.

It doesn't feel like Harry earned the win because I can just as easily imagine Voldemort laughing at Harry's childish tricks and killing him. For the finale to truly be satisfying, there has to be a specific, pre-established reason why Voldemort was unable to defend against Harry's tactics and, at least in my mind, this was not the case.

Simply being unaware of partial transfiguration doesn't cut it. This is a person who casts nearly thirty charms to discuss sensitive information in Mary's room and recognizes the value of ambush and surprise attacks. Yet in his final moment of securing his eternity is unable to sense transfigured material winding its way around himself and his followers. Material transfigured by person he has a known magical resonance with.

It simply does not feel reasonable for Voldemort to lose like this, no matter how many addendums are added to justify his behavior in these final chapters.

I think the only thing that would satisfy me is a legitimate excuse for Voldemort to leave Harry armed. Anything short of that, you may as well leave it as-is for historical reasons.

I'm going to repost something I wrote in another bit of the discussion:

if people reason about V as an optimization process rather than a character, they will never be satisfied by V losing a duel because V is defined by his duel-winning property. So the only winning move is not to play, but there are satisfying ways for that to happen.

V has established that he is willing to try to intervene at every possible point when it comes to breaking the prophecy. So he would paralyze Harry, and take Harry's wand from him, and destroy Harry's wand. Especially in the context of V asking Harry to share secrets V doesn't have.

It seems to me the simplest place to intervene is the characterization of V. Have Harry, during one of his bleak "how the heck am I going to defeat V" moments (or possibly at the start of 114), remember what gattsuru talks about here. V is sharp but limited; Harry can use those limits against him. Then Harry surprising V makes more sense, and every idea Harry uses could explicitly be linked to one of V's weaknesses. (For example, Stuporfy works because V disdains dueling.)

Even then, I do not think it will work fully, and some readers will only be satisfied by a 'mutual victory' ending. I have in mind an ending that would work for that that I'll write up when I have time for fiction (tonight?), but it requires more changes earlier and may not match at all your goals for the fic.

(Incidentally, if I were in V's position and knew about Time-Turners, those could be used to add a further layer of security. I would precommit to Time-Turning back an hour and asking Harry to reveal his secrets in the presence of my original version iff Harry in fact revealed his secrets to the future copy of me that appeared and then died quietly; otherwise I would kill him immediately. This might violate the "use Time-Turners for arbitrary computation" rule, but I don't think so; it seems closer to asking Flitwick to rescue past-you, or the original Time-Turner prank, or a minor modification of it could move it into that class.)

What I'm uncertain about is what was going through Voldemort's mind at the time. I have no idea what he was thinking when he let Harry keep his wand, and so for me, that part kind of fell flat, especially when it turned out there was no explanation other than, "He was overconfident"... which sounds like an explanation, but isn't one, not really. It's just like saying "magic" or "phlogiston". How does the mokeskin pouch work? "Magic!" What causes fire? "Phlogiston!" Why did Voldemort let Harry keep his wand? "Overconfidence!" For me, that just isn't specific enough of an explanation to actually allow me to make predictions. My model of Voldemort can't receive "overconfidence" as an argument and spit out the action "let Harry keep his wand"; the argument isn't well-specified enough. How was he overconfident? What was his exact train of thought? As Harry put it in 108:

"It was, but..." Harry said. "Um. The laws governing what constitutes a good explanation don't talk about plausible excuses you hear afterward. They talk about the probabilities we assign in advance. That's why science makes people do advance predictions, instead of trusting explanations people come up with afterward. And I wouldn't have predicted in advance for you to follow Snape and show up like that. Even if I'd known in advance that you could put a trace on Snape's wand, I wouldn't have expected you to do it and follow him just then. Since your explanation didn't make me feel like I would have predicted the outcome in advance, it remained an improbability. I started to wonder if Sprout's mastermind might have arranged for you to show up, too. And then I realised the note to myself hadn't really come from future-me, and that gave it away completely."

Since the explanation "overconfidence" didn't make me feel like I would have predicted Voldemort's actions in advance, it remained an improbability.

I'm not suggesting for you to add a scene from Voldemort's point of view into Chapter 113 or something--that would be a jarring shift in perspective, IMO. (Although it would be nice if you could somehow give a hint at Voldemort's motives--I particularly liked Luke_A_Somers' suggestion.) That being said, I am curious: what was your model of Voldemort thinking when you had him let Harry keep his wand? If not too inconvenient, could you elaborate on what you were modeling Voldemort's thoughts as?

If you want to make the scenario more realistic then put more time pressure on Voldemort or put him under more cognitive stress some other way. The hardest part for Voldemort is solving this problem in a short time span and NOT coming up with a solution that foils Harry. The reason experienced soldiers/gamers with little to no intelligence still win against highly intelligent combatants with no experience is that TIME matters when you're limited to a single human's processing power. In virtually every combat situation one is forced to make decisions faster than one can search the solution space. Only experience compensates for this deficit to any measurable degree. In this situation there are several aspects that Voldemort does not have experience with. If he must spends his cognitive resources considering these aspects and cannot draw from experience it makes mistakes much more likely.

I'd like that slightly more, but such minor changes barely address the issue. Also, I am already suspecting that the way in which Harry will unparalyze himself after his improbable PT rampage is just going to involve some other unlikely feet.

I voted for the change, but I don't feel these are crucial changes... I think a clearer problem is that it is not obvious, until Harry actually does it, that he could cast Transfiguration on his own wand. Or cast spells on his wand in general, it's a bit like a gun shooting at itself.

I say more on this and propose an easy solution here. Chances are you've seen it and didn't agree, but saying just in case.

Please don't change it. It's more than awesome enough as it is. Even if I did expect partial transfiguration to have some role, using the wand itself as raw material was tremendously surprising. For many people it will look too easy, but only with the benefit of hindsight.

Edited to add: some previous chapter should be modified to establish that transfiguration is indeed wordless.

Edited to add: I'm stupid. Chapter 15 says it is.

For what it's worth, I felt that Taylor's survival was much more believable than Harry's. Maybe that's because I knew in advance that Taylor's problems would not stop with defeating Coil? :-)

The climax and the reader reaction to it have been slightly better than I was expecting. I would certainly not complain about improvements, but there are probably better marginal returns elsewhere.

Instead of "having a Death Eater paralyze Harry", I suggest that Voldemort paralyzes Harry himself before the Death Eaters arrive by throwing a trapped Knut at him with Petrificus Totalis set on it to trigger or something.

Then Voldemort, just before the Vow, asks one of the Death Eaters to partially remove the paralysis just from Harry's head.

This looks all the way simpler. A paralysis is good from Voldemort's perspective, but if it is good to have it would be good to have from the start -- so as to be in better control of the situation rather than depend solely on the abilities of the Death Eaters -- and don't tell me that Voldemort couldn't have found indirect ways to inflict a variety of magical effect on Harry the moment he realized his magic couldn't touch him directly.

EDIT TO ADD: Ugh, no, that solution I just suggested (trapped Knut with paralysis spell) has the problem of leaving Harry paralyzed afterwards, while the paralysis spell would be dissolved at the Death Eater's death...

Just checking, does the last option mean that the text shouldn't be updated by reddit suggestions? That's what I meant when I clicked it. The two should've been created separately.

My main problem with this whole thing is that LV doesn't get the death eaters to cast shields, most notably shields against material objects, which we know are a thing from the mirror saga. Obviously the resonance is a concern, hence the death eaters cast the shields, but there is no way that LV doesn't think that Harry is going to try something, he takes practically no precautions at all.

The most important thing is not to disturb the literary correspondence between the Collective Intelligence's historical effort and the text.

Meaning?

Harry can control the order of a transfiguration process, as seen in ch.104. Those are not threads floating freely in the air, they're part of a specific wire shape in the process of being transfigured. We also know that you can transfigure against tension.

A wizard did it.

*ducks all the rotten tomatoes*

Thank you! That was exactly the thing that I couldn't put my finger on, still bothering me after I articulated my other worries.

Considering the only DE to raise shields also tried to kill LV and attempted to enlist the rest of them to join him...

The persona of LV might well have considered it a betrayal, to have their shields up around their lord. For why would you need them, if you were not plotting treachery?

Why raise shields, when they are instructed to hex Harry as soon as he raises his wand?

Wordless, quasi-invisible partial transfiguration is a power they know not, so they did not prepare for it.

Agreed. This result wasn't my first guess about the nature of it. I'd assumed that it probably affected V most strongly regardless.

He will return to the game, find it still in progress, and say something about people being incredibly... stubborn about winning, because looking onto his watch honestly, this should have ended an hour ago. THEN McGonagall will ask him if he would please snap his fingers.

I don't know if he has the emotional maturity to resist that opportunity.

And Harry exceeded my fears! Good for him.

We had a hint:

"And then," spat Harry, the fury coming fully into his voice, the cold rage at the universe for being like that and at himself for being so stupid, "I asked Hermione and she said that they were just afterimages, burned into the stone of the castle by the death of a wizard, like the silhouettes left on the walls of Hiroshima. And I should have known! I should have known without even having to ask! I shouldn't have believed it even for all of thirty seconds! Because if people had souls there wouldn't be any such thing as brain damage, if your soul could go on speaking after your whole brain was gone, how could damage to the left cerebral hemisphere take away your ability to talk?"

I feel stupid for rejecting transfiguring Voldemort because it didn't occur to me not to use the Stone.

If she does, she'll have to do it with only one arm.

I believe the resonance from transfiguration is shown to be very minor, for whatever reason.

When Harry has to transfigure Voldemort himself, not just contact him with transfigured material, it is only mildly uncomfortable.

It is not incomprehensible that a much, much lesser contact could escape any notice at all until at very close range.

The resonance appears much stronger when he Obliviates the Dark Lord Tom than later during the Transfiguration. Of course the former could just be stronger magic, but I assumed the alteration to V had reduced it (and thus he couldn't have started with the Transfiguration in the hope of getting a more experience entity to do the mind-alteration later). This would support the theory that V updated his old Horcruxes somehow, or just didn't connect them to the network. (There could still be variant Tom Riddles coming some years later!)

We don’t know enough details about how the Horcrux Network and the Special Connection between V and H work, but …

"OBLIVIATE!"

And it all poured out of Harry into the spell.

Harry fell over on his side, dropping his wand, gritted screams coming from his throat, his hands going helplessly to his scar, even as the sudden blast of pain in his head began to fade. Only dimly did his eyes see that the air was filled with glowing snowflakes, drifting motes of silver light like tiny specks of Patronus Charm.

… this is highly unusual for an obliviation, so I think it is very likely that V has not left his body.

Something that could indicate trying to dodge, or consciousness leaving the body. It's not unreasonable for Voldie to think "I've lost here, no matter what I do this body will be unusable in the near future, in case he has a plan to incapacitate me without triggering my Horcrux wards I'd better go someplace else".

It is implied that while Voldemort can stop possessing a victim at will, he cannot stop inhabiting his own body at will.

[EDIT]Though Harry internally states the opposite:

He cannot be imprisoned, for he can abandon his body at any time.

This is the part I was thinking of:

The soul he'd created for himself had to be anchored in this brain, it mustn't be allowed to float free.

consciousness leaving the body

Let's suppose for a moment that Voldemort realises in time that he's about to be got rid of in some way he'd not predicted and loses his body before Stuporfy hits him.

Are there still any justifiable ways for Harry to win [i.e. incapacitate V at least as much as in 115 by all justifiable means]? He would probably have to get back in time as fast as he can, before he witnesses death and/or torture of his parents/friends (which V is going to start), so he can create a time loop where they are safe. But what to do next? Harry has an hour to protect a lot of people he cares about from a bodyless spirit. It won't do to gather them all in a safe place only to have V enter one of them and kill the others. It's going to be harder to devise a plausible mistake for V because now some of the plot devices planned from the beginning won't help us.

ETA: I mean, Harry only needs to hit Voldemort with a spell strong enough to knock V out, but light enough not to knock Harry out and not to exhaust him. And V now knows that and may escape the body even if he can't evade the bolt. Unless there are extra-fast sniper magic wands, there needs to be a trick.

As stated in 108, V is now free to select whom to possess from a lot of weak/willing people. I wonder if Hermione can be possessed at this point: is she sufficiently weak? (no idea) does possession mean harm? (probably yes, because the body of Quirrell aged too fast) does V's promise not to hurt Hermione still stand? (maybe yes, but if not, V now has a very young and durable body to live in)

This would to some extent letting Harry keep his wand- he wants to have some fun after all, and Harry should be given a very limited chance to win. Not much, maybe strip him naked, surround him by armed killers and point a gun at his head, whilst giving him only a minute to think. But leave him his wand, and do give him the full 60 seconds, don't just kill him if he looks like he's stalling.

He could have just Obliviated himself if that's all he wanted.

And now we really know why Harry had to carry around his father's rock. For practice

I thought that we knew that like 30 chapters ago?

He's out of mana. Also, staying at the scene would be an enormous risk. Also, being death eaters, they would on average kill more than one person each.

Why doesn't Harry resurrect the people he just killed, or at least freeze them? They don't have to die.

Well, as a point of practicality, he's used up all his magic for at least the next hour and only has so many items in his first-aid kit.

They don't have to die.

He would need to wipe their memories first, one would assume; right now, the only witnesses to the scene remember nothing, and Harry (as an Occlumens) can pretend to not have knowledge of it.

The way he set it up gives Hermione the same credit for defeating Voldemort that Harry got when he was a baby.

Passed in the first 30 seconds and then spent 60 hours worried that it can't be that easy.

It'd be a clever tell if Eliezer wanted us to conclude they're still in the Mirror, but I don't think its absence is strong evidence of the opposite. The Mirror might not work that way, and Eliezer might simply have forgotten if it did.

(I would say it'd be clever if anyone walking into their dream-world died soon after of amino-acid chirality issues, but similar things have been done so many times that it's not very creative. Plus it clashes with the theme.)

I've seen it suggested that V can leave a possessed body (becoming a disembodied spirit) but not his own. I don't recall seeing anything (either in canon or in HPMOR) that confirms or refutes that.

I share your concerns about #2, although generally "once you have physical access to the hardware, it's over" -- if you can catch Voldemort or Dumbledore or whoever asleep, you can smash their head with a big rock or something.

Can't perfect Occlumens protect themselves from mind-altering spells even when unconscious ?

I don't think we've seen any evidence of that in the story.

If you can just Obliviate even the most powerful Occlumens so easily, why didn't either Voldemort or the Order (Moody or Dumbledore) think about it and use that trick massively ?

For what purpose? If you've got your enemy at your mercy with their shields down, you either kill them, or you do something more useful with them (e.g. Imperius). I don't see what you'd get out of Obliviating them instead of either of those options.

Voldemort still killed David Monroe, he just did it earlier than everyone thought he did. Chapter 108:

I had long ago taken my vengeance on David Monroe - he was an annoyance from my year in Slytherin - so I bethought to also steal his identity, and wipe out his family to make myself heir of his House.

Your other questions remain, though. Harry no longer killed Voldemort for good, and Hermione (apparently) has. This should be interesting. I predict this becomes an issue, confidence 70%; and, conditional on that, that Draco sides with Hermione again at a crucial moment, confidence 85%.

Where was it stated that the Potter family's noble status is a result of baby-Harry killing Voldemort?

Hypothesis: this has already happened. Voldemort has an implanted memory of exactly how he failed to kill baby Harry.

I know, right!?

I feel this is a glorious moment. Reductionism, consistency, causation. These are hallmarks of rationality and of the Methods thereof.

Anybody with sufficient understanding of the situation should be able to deduce the outcome, because it is dependably going to be whatever the rational answer is! Decision Theory allows us to identify the best course for a certain set of values and goals, and the rational answer will be the same for everyone.

That this actually worked is a sign of the very tight internal consistency of the story. That this would almost never work in any other story is a powerful indicator of the opposite.

I'm sure he realizes it, but Harry literally obliviated everything in his memory, which would presumably include knowledge of any anti-obliviation counter measures (like the signals that were mentioned early on).

Unless there's some spell or artifact we haven't heard of before now that blocks/reverses Obliviation, I am going with it worked. And from a meta perspective, we know the story is winding down, so Voldie coming back with his full memory and then having another showdown with a different solution seems highly unlikely.

If I understand him correctly, H intends to keep V transformed until H is powerful enough to transform V’s body back to a healthy state (and make that permanent with the Stone).

Imprisonment is a possibility after that, but depending on your views on the relation between identity and memories, this might not be appropriate after the obliviation.

The shelf containing the Time-Turners gets bumped, and they all fall off, turning them- causing them to go back in time and fall again; I thought I remembered someone getting trapped in it. Perhaps that was an embellishment in the movie?

It was in the book, as I recall, but it didn't really make sense; Eliezer would never allow it.

In addition to being unsolvable from the perspective of the audience -- we don't know anything about magic!

Um, what do you mean by "unsolvable"? I would assume you mean "no one thought of it or suggested it," but in fact many, if not most, of the suggestions involved using magic in basically the way Harry did.

Eliezer may in fact be thinking of this as an AI box situation, and trying to point out that giving the AI any extra capabilities in the external world whatsoever me be a horrible mistake.

That said, I agree with you.

That assumes a great deal of control over the design of the network. We don't know what steps Voldemort followed to design the Horcrux 2.0 ritual, but I don't think it implausible that the final result was the best he could do with the knowledge available, rather than the best an intelligent programmer could do with full control over the system's hardware and code.

I don't think wizards can detect magic that easily. Patronus is definitely easy to detect, it radiates both in visible light and in... emotional waves, whatever that is ;)

But think about how it's hard to detect someone who is polyjuiced, or someone who is imperiused. Or how Dumbledore had to cast spells to detect what transfigured objects did Harry has on him when he looked for Hermione body.

It seems perfectly plausible that wizards can't detect (without actively casting some detection spells) a transfiguration that happens on the microscopic scale and can't see.

From chapter 94 :

Slowly the boy sat up in bed, his hands momentarily fiddling beneath the covers.

I assume that he swapped the Hermione-toering with the portkey-toering at this point, leaving the Hermione-toering beneath the covers, or making it drop into the moleskin pouch, or something like that.

Mr. Counsel is probably Lucius Malfoy, too. I imagine Draco's not going to be too happy about that.

Wasn’t that resolved in chapter 79?

Pack of cards?

I suspect he's gone. Remember when Dumbledore told Harry about phoenixes? Those who get a chance, get one chance. From then on it's their own phoenix and it can never be given to someone else. Mybe he died, maybe he left for wherever phoenixes come from.

The reason you didn't see the Philosopher's Stone in your first read is that it wasn't there. Eliezer accidentally dropped it in one of his edits, and put it back in after Reddit was all "Where's the Stone?!"

The strange smells are described as “coppery smells”, which probably refers to all the blood.

(Of course, the hemoglobin in blood contains iron, rather than copper, but “irony smells” would not be a great choice of words, I suppose …)

(Edit: Reread, and noticed it says "Harry donned his robes, and placed the Stone of Permanency in an ordinary pocket, he wasn't sure what the Stone might do to his pouch." Retract previous sentence.)

That was edited in later, you were right the first time.

Now I want to see the bad ending, so that mentally I can make it the official one.

Heh. That's what I do with _Three Worlds Collide_.

Actually, that's not really true. I count the official ending as the true ending; it's more like humans to behave thus. I just count the other ending as the good ending.

I'm so cross with Voldemort! How could he have possibly left Harry with the wand? How could he? It's the exact sort of mistake he obviously wouldn't make, especially since he already demanded Harry's wand several times already. How could he have left Harry with an hour on the time-turner? The game was going to last all night, it would have been so easy just to use up all the hours. Why did he wait for last words? See points 14 and 16 on the supervillain list: NO last requests, NO last words. It's all so weird and uncharacteristically unlike him!

Well, seeing as he was almost prophesied to fail, it was sensible to make sure Harry would have someone to stop him in the future. And as it turns out, this was a very good idea.

By the way, why did Voldemort make a description of Hermione resurrection ritual and put it in a pouch if he planed to kill Harry anyway?

He was planning for the possibility of failure. If he failed to kill Harry, he wanted Harry to always have Hermione to consult.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15VARTF8-ZhcuyCfct0o3RZQ7tcPmXLd0YvtIC1v-db0/edit#gid=0

Hmm, if it was known that Dumbledore had died and that Quirrell had been Voldemort all year, bad things could happen to Hogwarts. This route makes it most like that it will be McGonagall as headmistress.

Because it's hard to be seen as on the light side when you decapitate 38 adult wizards in an instant? Fame is harmful, not helpful, to Harry's goals. Better to make it look like Voldemort managed to cause a magical backfire that killed all his minions in a failed ritual involving Hermione. To go back to the Azkaban chapters, the perfect crime is the one that is declared a tragic accident and closed.

Other than modesty, letting Hermione take credit is a very elegant solution to a slew of problems: he can say that House Potter owes her no enmity after her defeating of their common foe, and this gets rid of any lingering doubts about her attacking Malfoy (probably...).

I'm pretty sure the original answer always had the partial transfiguration / nanotubes / garotte element. Consider the bit at the very start of chapter 1 (fraction of a line, robes falling, blood); the fact that in H&H's transfiguration experiments they use nanowires, verify that they're very strong, and verify that their length can be changed by transfiguration; arguably the bit in chapter 7 where Harry thinks what a good idea it would be just to decapitate all the Death Eaters; Dumbledore's insistence that partial transfiguration, being a power the Dark Lord knows not, may be vital to his victory.

While I am inclined to agree with the general spirit of your comment, I think you're being a little harsh. This is still miles more believable than much of Rowling's work. For one thing, recall that her Voldemort achieved the same terrifying results during the Wizarding War while being an idiot all the time.

Chapter 90:

even a simple Obliviation will stretch the edge of your current stamina. It is a dangerous art, illegal to use without Ministry authorization, and I would caution you not to use it under circumstances where it would be inconvenient to accidentally erase ten years of someone's life. I wish I could promise you that I would obtain one of those highly guarded tomes from the Department of Mysteries, and pass it to you beneath a disguised cover. But what I must actually tell you is that you will find the standard introductory text in the north-northwest stacks of the main Hogwarts library, filed under M.

So there is no defense against Obliviation that Voldemort could have prepared for himself?

I confess I expected paranoid-Moody thinking from Harry, not Far-mode Good thinking. The stakes are so high that anything other than ruthless pragmatism feels insane to me.

About ten chapters ago.

Resonance. He doesn't dare involve himself with Harry's magic in any way.

He'd just been attacked by a magical source that disarmed his weapons at the wrists, was cast wordlessly and without wand motions, and did not leave an obvious bolt to block. This is probably a bad time to show off.

At a deeper level, Voldemort (and Mad-Eye Moody) favor a combat philosophy of dodging, under the quite reasonable realization that there are a large number of spells that can overwhelm shields or are unblockable.

From 113:

This is the order in which the next acts shall be done. First Harry Potter shall be stunned, then his limbs severed and the wounds cauterized. Mr. Friendly and Mr. Honor will examine him for any trace of unusual magics. One of you shall shoot the boy many times with my Muggle weapon, and then as many of you as can shall strike him with the Killing Curse. Only then will Mr. Grim crush his skull and brains with the mundane substance of a tombstone.

So it was planned, but never executed. All other references to the gun have it in Voldemort's hand.

Unfortunately Harry hasn't learned the Cruciatus Curse.

This sounds less safe because you'd need to wake him up to torture him into insanity. If you wanted the multiple layers you could torture the obliviated version into insanity, but I think I prefer the transfiguration. I'd even consider making it permanent with the Stone of Transfiguration, but this would result in a lot of lost knowledge and it's also possible that the horcrux network would consider it a death.

ETA: I rather liked the wand-in-a-dementor-pit idea.

Safest option would have been the dementor's kiss. Or, if the kiss isn't a thing in MoRverse, tossing his wand to them as Harry had mused.

If I understand correctly, you only suffer from transfiguring yourself or parts of yourself after returning to your original form, after the transfiguration stops being sustained and wears off.

And if you Transfigure yourself into an adult bodily form, then, when the Transfiguration wears off, you will die.

Bolding mine.

The Stone solves that. Assuming Harry grabbed it, which seems like a no brainer but I don't think was ever explicitely mentioned that he did. EDIT: Aha, it was edited in just now.

It's the same as with Hermione's body and the unicorns. They are stones as long as they are Transfigured. When Transfiguration stops, they will soon suffer. That's why Harry kept Hermione's body and now thinks about sustaining the Transfiguration of Voldemort all the time - he wants them to stay Transfigured until their state can be helped. He's kind of frozen now.

No, this is Flitwick's personal dueling version of Stupefy, which is hard to dodge. Chapter 86.

Different spell. http://hpmor.com/chapter/86

This is Mad-Eye Moody's homing version of the spell, which has a different incantation, as used in Ch 86.

It's only fair. We've spent the last few days brainstorming ways to save Harry, and our work has paid off after a fashion. Now we have the leisure to reflect on the situation from a different angle.