Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 112

Is it just me, or is Voldemort also using Hermione as a test subject for things he'd like to do to himself but never tried before? (In other words, he learned his lesson after Harry told him he should have tested Horcrux 2.0 on someone else first.)

I think it's quite poetic that Hermione is going to be made into a book.

Some discussion has popped up on /r/hpmor about the an apparent decline in the quality of HPMoR's recent chapters. Now, I personally don't think there's been any drop in terms of quality, but the commenters there make some compelling arguments. In particular, I feel that /u/alexanderwales articulates those arguments nicely:

I am hesitant to make any remarks prior to the story being completed, as I'm fairly confident that there are things which will only make sense after the fact. And I'm also hesitant to make remarks in a public forum that I know the author reads. But to put on my writing hat anyway ...

In terms of prose and mechanics, I think the chapters have been great. In terms of characterization, I think that Eliezer's Dumbledore has always been a little bit shaky, though almost always when he's being serious or emotional - this is in contrast to the aloof and enigmatic Dumbledore, which reads wonderfully. In chapter 110, he's mean, and gives weak arguments in favor of his side of things, and then he dies. Perhaps that's EY's conception of the character, but it's not mine. Harry and Quirrell are written the same as ever, and I had no problem there (save for the two times Quirrell leans so heavily on the fourth wall that it seems like it's about to break).

And then we get to plot, and that's where I start having some real problems. I wish that we'd gotten to see the Mirror of Erised prior to the chapter where it became really important. I wish we'd been introduced to the spell that Dumbledore uses prior to the chapter where he kills himself with it. There are a number of things that happen first and are explained after the fact, or that are explained only moments before they've happened. (And unfortunately, in a serial you can't go back and change these things if you realize that you needed to foreshadow them a few chapters back.) So yes, I agree that there are some issues with how information is given out to the audience. Most of it must be transparency illusion, which can be difficult for an author to deal with - it's clear in your mind what's happening, but when you put it to the page you don't realize that you're not describing it in such a way that the reader will get that too.

I do somewhat wonder whether this is the result of the author reading/writing these chapters all at once, which I would think would enhance the transparency illusion. I think we'd probably have had fewer problems with these chapters if they'd been released all at once.

Any thoughts on this?

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...

Harry gives some of his life (what does this even mean? Vitalism?) and magic to resurrect Hermione. Suppose he's given x% of his magic. Does this mean that Hermione has x% of Harry's magic, now and forever? For that matter, are the sums of their lifespans equal to Harry's previous natural lifespan? Or does it work like a spark, a small amount allowing Hermione to bootstrap back to full health?

If the second option is right, then patronus 2.0 + philosophers stone allows almost self-replicating wizards and witches. The only bottleneck is the stone takes "minutes" to work which still seems to imply that you could easily produce hundreds of wizard clones per day, against a wizard population of about 15000 in muggle Britain. Clone someone powerful, and world domination should be easy.

Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line...

(black robes, falling)

...blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word.

Prediction: This is the scene where that happes, and the "fraction of a line" is partial transfiguration used as a cutting weapon.

They have the instructions

Thiss iss ritual for ressurrecting her, if it musst be done again. Insstructionss are honesst, no trapss.

They have the flesh of his servant, who will willingly give

And Hermione, without waiting for any further instructions, said, the words spilling out of her in a rush, "I swear service to the House of Potter....

She has the means to find his foe, and forcibly take its blood

> I figured out why we couldn't cast the Patronus Charm, Hermione, it doesn't have anything to do with us not being happy enough. But I can't tell you. I couldn't even tell the Headmaster. It needs to be even more secret than partial Transfiguration, for now, anyway. But if you ever need to fight Dementors, the secret is written here, cryptically, so that if someone doesn't know it's about Dementors and the Patronus Charm, they won't know what it means...

And Harry also knew that it was Thestral blood which painted the symbol of the Deathly Hallows on the inside of the Cloak, binding into the Cloak that portion of Death's power, enabling the Cloak to confront the Dementors on their own level and block them. It had felt like guessing, and yet a certain guess, the knowledge coming to him in the instant of solving the riddle.

With the bones of an ancestor (Potter, Slytherin heir, or Peverell), unknowingly bequeathed, they will have the final ingredient.

Prediction: Harry will die, and Hermione will resurrect him

(previous discussion)

Ch. 108

"What did you do with Bellatrix once she was out?"

"Ssent her to a peaceful place to recover sstrength," Professor Quirrell said. A cold smile. "I had a use remaining for her, or rather a certain portion of her, and on my future plans I shall not answer questions."

Ch. 112

For a second Harry's mind couldn't process what he was seeing, and then he saw that Voldemort was holding a human arm, severed near the shoulder; it seemed too thin, that arm.

The Dark Lord pressed his wand to the flesh above the severed arm's elbow, and the fingers twitched, twitched like they were alive; by dim moonlight Harry saw a darker mark appear on that flesh, just above the elbow.

Is everyone else making this interpretation?

Thirty-seven death eaters now all have their wands pointed at Harry. Why aren't some of them pointed at other death eaters, to ensure loyalty, and some looking around, to maintain situational awareness? At this point, it seems more likely for a disloyal Death Eater to cause trouble, than for Harry to do it.

Voldemort is lying in parseltongue. He's not going to kill Harry because he can't. He can't because the curse or unbreakable vow he took to not harm himself didn't have release conditions. There was no purpose in putting them in. You don't set up "I can't kill myself unless I try to kill myself", because the 2nd part is useless if the first part works.

"But you tried to end my true life jusst then, sstupid child. Now cursse iss lifted, and I may kill you any time I wissh."

You sir, are a lying liar who lies in parseltongue. Or Harry would be dead right now. Indeed, he would have been dead long ago.

Voldemort is not allowed to kill a version of himself, period. This is how he intended to get around the prisoner's dilemma with his eternal chess buddy. There were to be no clever "Baba Yaga draws Perverelle's blood" outs that would allow someone to murder the foresworn, you were just. not. allowed. Ever. This is the lesson Tom Riddle drew from the story of Baba Yaga; don't leave that loophole. This is what he did with the Goblet of Fire, perhaps?

We would play the game against each other forever, keeping our lives interesting amid a world of fools. I knew a dramatist would predict that the two of us would end by destroying each other; but I pondered long upon it, and decided that both of us would simply decline to play out the drama. That was my decision and I was confident that it would remain so; both Tom Riddles, I thought, would be too intelligent to truly go down that road.

Voldemort would defect in a heartbeat, and he knows it. He has precluded this possiblity, precluded it so strongly that killing Harry or even willing him killed is either impossible to him or would mean his own death.

Note the instructions he gave to his Death Eaters are non-lethal, and varied, and multiplied by dozens of them. He is taking extraordinary non-lethal precautions. He is taking extraordinary measures to resurrect Hermione to prevent a living Harry from destroying the stars. Voldemort is doing this because he wants desperately to not die, and the more obvious option of just killing the idiot-child of foretold destruction is not available to him.

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.

Why is Voldemort not getting rid of Harry in some more final way?

Even if he's worried killing Harry will rebound against him because of the prophecy somehow, he can, I don't know, freeze Harry? Stick Harry in the mirror using whatever happened to Dumbledore? Destroy Harry's brain and memories and leave him an idiot? Shoot Harry into space?

Why is "resurrect Harry's best friend to give him good counsel" a winning move here?

Silly idea:

What Voldemort likes most of all is killing idiots.
The Death Eaters are, in general, idiots.
Pretty soon, there are going to be a whole bunch of dead Death Eaters lying in a semicircle around Harry. ;)

Two factors keep revolving in my head.

1) Riddle1/Quirrellmort/BadVoldemort is basically the only "existential risk activist" in the story at this point. Handling the big risks responsibly so that his immortal self would have a world worth living in forever was apparently his deep motivation for taking over Magical Britain in the first place, and then it turned out to be easier than expected. Eliezer probably doesn't agree with Riddle1's tactics or other values, but it seems like this aspect of him has to come out well by the end of the story for it to do the moral and educational work that Eliezer probably intends.

2) Riddle1 probably thinks that the prophecy makes Riddle2/Harry/GoodVoldemort into the number one existential risk to try to mitigate, and he is probably wrong about this because Riddle1 doesn't know much about science or science fiction, which are my leading candidates for "the power he knows not".

HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD.

The stars aren't sacred. They are fuel and construction material. Tearing them apart (under controlled conditions) and using them for productive purposes is totally part of how the future will go if humans make it off of this planet and start acting like a proper post-scarcity civilization from science fiction.

Presumably "he who tears the stars" is Riddle2/Harry/GoodVoldemort, but whoever does it presumably has a reason.

Many chapters ago my leading theory was that Hermione was close to information theoretically dead (brain ischemia being a significant problem within relatively short time periods and her body had hours before Harry got to it), and her body could be brought back animated by a plausible reconstruction of her mind built from external third party evidence sources... but this could produce a sad simulacrum or a high quality person depending on details.

Hermione not having woken up yet leaves the "sad simulacrum" option in play still :-/

Under this model, Harry could have had a long term plan to do the reconstruction very well, by using star sized computers that use every atom on the earth as part of the evidence base. There are lots of other reasons for doing something along these lines, like all the other minds that it might be possible to reconstruct and re-instantiate by the same method, which would flow with the anti-deathist themes.

I'm not strongly committed to this precise theory, because magic appears to make conservation of energy violations possible, and might allow effectively infinite computations to occur without using the stars to power them.

But still there are magical conservation laws it appears, as with "Dark" sacrifice costs and potion making. Given that Harry might be able to partially transfigure spacetime itself via an insight based on Julian Barbour's "timeless physics", it seems like he might be in a position to sacrifice and manipulate all kinds of things in clever ways and thereby not have to literally use hydrogen for fuel like a savage muggle... but it might still end up doing something to the stars?

One latent possibility that occurred to me is that Riddle2/Harry/GoodVoldemort might end up being "killed" and have the horcrux system work a bit weird and so that Harry ends up on the voyager probe... which he might have more luck controlling than Voldemort did during his first period stuck there. I think Harry might end up dead dead if he was discorporated, because he was created by Horcrux V1.0, and the Horcrux V2.0 network might only save Riddle1 rather than just saving any and all Riddle copies... but it seems like there is play in what might happen based on the evidence we've seen?

If Harry ends up on the Voyager probe, it puts him quite a bit closer to "the stars". It gives him time to think and "spaceship priming" might suggest an incredible array of options... Like transfiguring non-critical pieces of the probe into anti-matter or nukes, and using them to power exotic spaceship drives.

This particular scenario seems low probability (because Harry needs his wand to do transfigurations still and probably won't have that on the probe) but it shows how Harry already has crazily powerful science oriented options if he aims at short term profit taking instead of playing along with his student role and trying to level up in all the areas of magic that powerful wizards are expected to work on through years of school in order to become well rounded.

Of course, there's the 37 dark wizards aiming wands at Harry at the cliffhanger ending. I'm not sure how that will work out, but probably Riddle1 has some plans :-)

Crazy thought: Merlin lives backwards, Dumbledore has the Line of Merlin Unbroken, Dumbledore has a weird way of being able to make the future happen for the wrong reasons, Dumbledore just vanished into a place beyond time. Which makes me think Dumbledore might be Merlin's origin.

Voldemort orders Harry to keep his wand lowered. Why not to drop it?

Is there a reason Voldemort wants a priori incantatem?

Here's a possibility. Harry is currently in a pretty bad position, perhaps the worst part of which is that anything he can think of, Quirrelmort can think of. He needs an advantage Quirrelmort won't expect. Meanwhile, a fairly intelligent, highly motivated and nearly impossible to kill young woman, who Quirrel thinks of as totally safe and harmless, is right over there. I'm not ready to predict that Hermione will at some point wake up and do something really useful, but it would be really cool if she did.

I don't think Hermione is actually asleep anymore. I was expecting her to wake up right away when resurrected, and that didn't happen. Then the death eaters started appearing with loud pops loud enough to count distinctly, and that didn't seem to wake her. And since she's fully repaired there's no need to sleep to recover.

Chapter 73

Hermione felt the jolt of Innervation bringing her awake, and out of some intuitive strategism she didn't roll to her feet right away; it had been a completely hopeless battle and she didn't know what she could do but some instinct told her that leaping to her feet wasn't it.

Chapter 30

"Let me guess," Harry said, the sickness already churning in his stomach. He really hated losing. "It was a very easy battle, right? They dropped like flies?" "Yes," Draco said. "We got them all on the first shot -"

People here should be aware of fresh Word of God. Apparently we're NOT in the Mirror.

"The steel ring upon his left pinky finger was yanked off hard enough to scrape skin, taking the Transfigured jewel with it."

I guess we'll see whether Dumbledore knew what he was talking about when he told Harry to carry his father's rock.

The fact that so much of Harry's beliefs and actions are based on the assumption that speaking in parseltongue ensures that the truth is being spoken bothers me.

Harry believes this because

1. Quirrel told him.
2. He is seemingly unable to lie to Quirrel when speaking in parseltongue.

The first point is obviously something to be extremely skeptical of and, while the second appears to be strong evidence, it very strongly reminds me of

"I want to give you a drop of Veritaserum," Draco said. "Just one drop, so you can't lie, but not enough to make you answer anything..."

Of course Harry thinks he can beat Veritaserum due to his Occlumency training but this has never been put to the test and, even if it is the case, it has been established that there are things in the magical world that can be used to unilaterally manipulate a person's ability to lie.

It's a quite strange move to leave Harry standing at the end with his wand in his hand. I think that means Harry is still in a position to do transfiguration which is wordless.

Can someone with a horcrux network and the ability to create new bodies create new horcruxes without killing pre-existing people?

... So. That was a thing.

Let's see here. My current best guess for Voldy's extremely redundant anti-apocalypse plan looks something like this:

1) Kill Harry Potter. 2) Thoroughly kill Harry Potter with thirty-odd Death Eaters. 3) Have Harry Potter kill himself 4) Convince Harry Potter that if all else fails and he somehow manages to, I don't know, stab himself in the Resurrection Stone and set off a chain reaction that throws his other 108 Horcruxes into the Sun, he'll kill himself anyway 5) If he doesn't kill himself, ensure that Hermione Granger is around to keep him sane.

I think that since this story is Harry Potter and the Methods of rationality, its going to be Harry who saves the day. But if this wasn't a story...

Harry is in a totally impossible position (baring some experimental transfiguration). The best hope lies with McGonagall. She's been seen going off scrip before and if she realises the magnitude of the threat Volde now poses (perhaps Harry could impress this upon her, and point out that Volde has recently resolved to stop wasting time and just take over the world) she might realise that the only way left to stop Volde is to go totally off-script, and seek help from the Muggles.

While a gun can't hurt a shielded wizard, the shielding only has so much strength. Bring in the Muggle army with overwhelming numbers, heavy weapons, helicopter gunships and so forth. Wizards have access to apperation, dissilusionment etc which might still allow them to win against a pure muggle army, but a combine force of Muggles and Wizards would also have access to anti-apperation jinxes and so forth.

Admittedly, this ends centuries of secrecy. Therefore, the second option she has is to go to the Wizard UN or whatever their equivalent is, and explain that without reinforcements she will be forced to go to the Muggles for help.

Why is Harry still conscious? It makes no sense that LV would not get someone to stun him until he needs him again.

I was thinking that Harry should have asked who killed Narcissa Malfoy. Though in fairness, I don't have a good way for him to tell Lucius that V did it.

So, the next chapter.

1. Voldemort has some continued use for Harry. It could be personal (chess?), political (Light Lord?), magical (not sure?), theatrical (and now, my minions, I destroy the Boy Who Lived!), or some combination thereof.
2. For many of those uses, it makes sense to tell the Death Eaters to not harm Harry, while also demonstrating his dominance over Harry, since the Death Eaters run on dominance.
3. Harry has been repeatedly shown that Voldemort is better than he is at this game, and he won't have a chance for decades, and that his meddling routinely makes things worse (both Voldemort's plan around Hermione and Dumbledore's plan around Voldemort were ruined by his meddling). He could go quietly, or he could continue trying to win. As a piece of literature, I think I expect Harry to try to win; even when he can't come up with good plans / his mind refuses to think of things, he still goes with things that are mistakes rather than do nothing. As a piece of pedagogy, I'm not sure which to expect: persistence is a virtue, but so is not being a damn fool about it.

Harry continued pointing his wand downward, insofar as he had been told that, if he tried to raise it, he would die. He remained silent, insofar as he had been told that if he tried to speak, he would die.

This seems an incorrect usage of "insofar as", since it means "to the extent that", not "because" or "since". Native speakers, what do you think?

I get the feeling that splitting it up like that was intended to be a test of if we could figure out the flaw in Harry's plan quickly, much like Harry himself needing (and failing) to figure it out fast.

Still no direct answer for whether or not we are in a Mirror!Verse. Confirmation that Voldemort is acting to prevent Harry from destroying the universe--But I find myself still confused as to what he wants to do with Harry that is more important than killing him immediately to protect the universe. I would think that possibility negates any benefit of keeping Harry around.

In useless trivia: the Death Eaters got those masks and cloaks on in a hurry. It suggests that the outfits are some sort of spell that can be quickly applied, if seconds after being summoned the Death Eaters can arrive in full regalia.

The Dark Lord pressed his wand to the flesh above the severed arm's elbow, and the fingers twitched, twitched like they were alive; by dim moonlight Harry saw a darker mark appear on that flesh, just above the elbow.

Seconds later the first hooded figure appeared inside the graveyard with the popping sound of an Apparition. A moment after that came another pop, and then another.

The hooded figures wore silver skull masks, and moonlight fled from the robes beneath them.

Well, that's unfortunate. At least there won't be an update for a few days; maybe I can actually finish my thesis now in peace.

And since todays temp work was impressively mindless, I got rather a lot of thinking done.

Fair warning, this may well just be heading right into epileptic trees turf.

Dumbledore just cast himself from time in order to fulfill the prophecy about Harry Potter.

That line about how Harry will have to find some other dark lord to vanquish? It was not about the far future at all, it was about the next four minutes.

Let me explain: As long as the prophecy is in play, only Harry can defeat the dark lord. And that is not going to work against Voldemort. An 11 year old, no matter how resourceful and clever is just not going to come out on top of that fight. But just as the prophecy could have been about Neville as well as Harry, there is also more than one dark lord it could be about. The story pointed this out earlier.

So the prophecy is no longer in effect. Voldemort can be defeated by anyone with the firepower and a counter for the horcruxes.

And Dumbledore, the order of the pheonix, and everyone else he could bring in on it have crowdsourced a smackdown, which is about to land.

Most of this smackdown is in the form of longterm plots that are about to bear fruit.

From the top: Dumbledore knew who Quirrel and Harry were, from day one. Each and every single piece of information given to Harry was relayed in the expectation that Voldemort would hear it.

Dumble, Flamel, et all made a fake true cloak of invisibility. The point of this being to provide misinformation about what the mark of the deadly hallows looks like. I don't know what the "stone of resurrection" actually is, but I think Voldy will not like what it does, not one tiny bit. At a guess, it is for mapping out the magical "net" and find the darn things?

The people who just apparated in: Not death eaters. They're masked and cloaked minions. That's such a cliche it's actually painful to contemplate.

Voldemorts use of the stone to raise the dead is not the first time it has been used to do that. The rite he intended to use is not original to him, it is an old piece of lore, and it is an old piece of lore Flamel told the order of the phoenix about. This means "Flamel" has been able to raise anyone who still had foes and servants living and known graves of ancestors.

So it isn't new. Not widely used, but not new. Note that this isn't a good rite for defeating death in general, simply because most people dont have the first two at all. But it is a very effective way to ditch an identity for any of her collaborators who are in it for the long haul. Which means a lot of very powerful, supposedly deceased wizards and witches owe her. And he just tried to have her killed. (May even have succeeded. If so, she's probably already back up and wanting her stone back before anything expires.)

That is what the hour's delay in Snapes room was about - it was to take all the deatheaters into custody, and gather people up for a seriously onesided bout. The reason this ends in "liters of blood" is that the plan is to drain Voldemort dry so that they can raise as many of his victims as possible.

Oh, and Dumbledore didn't have unique access to divination, beyond a season pass to the hall of prophecies. That would make the plot unsolvable, because we can't reason a-causally.

Could Hermoine's crux hold the key to defeating Voldemort? If it was touched to his host body, could she take him on spirit to spirit?

Are there any good guesses out there of what the apocalyptic-seeming prophecies about Harry might mean? The one about tearing apart the stars could be a reference to star-lifting. Could the "end of the world" prophecy just mean that Harry would change the world or something?

From the top of the chapter 1 page:

This is not a strict single-point-of-departure fic - there exists a primary point of departure, at some point in the past, but also other alterations. The best term I've heard for this fic is "parallel universe".

We'd previously assumed that the primary point of departure was when Lily Evans/Potter used magic to help make her sister Petunia attractive enough to get the attention of Michael Verres, who raised HJPEV in a much better environment and gave him a much better education than canon!HP, which caused HJPEV's increased intelligence. This was even reinforced by Petunia's comment that "...Lily would tell me no, and make up the most ridiculous excuses, like the world would end if she were nice to her sister, or a centaur told her not to..."

However, it now seems that the reason for Harry's increased intelligence was that he had parts of Voldemort's mind implanted into his own when he was one year-old, presumably years after Lily helped Petunia. While HJPEV's intelligence isn't the only thing in the story, without that link I don't see how Lily's actions were the primary factor in determining HJPEV's potentially apocalyptic course of life.

Thoughts?

A possible Voldemort failure mode: due to them both being Tom Riddle, Voldemort's Horcrux network might accept Harry upon his death and somehow hurt Voldemort (leaving Harry able to coordinate others through Resurrection Stone). Killing Harry is either the next step of Voldemort's plan, or a possible move on Harry's part. Killing Harry seems prudent, alluded to in Ch. 108 and throughout in Harry's internal monologue:

"So use an axe, it's hard to get a prophecy-fulfilling spell backfire out of an axe," Harry said and then shut up.

"I decided the safest path was to try to fulfill the prophecy on my own terms," Professor Quirrell said. "Needless to say, the next time I hear a prophecy I do not like, I will tear it apart at every possible point of intervention, rather than trying to play along."

This time, the potential problem is not the spells used in the killing (where an axe would be a workaround), but the consequences of death governed by Horcrux 2.0. Problems with Voldemort's Horcrux due to some sort of interference (feint with Hermine) and also Voldemort's limited understanding due to insufficient testing were foreshadowed. A more careful plan might be to recreate the whole setup on disposable victims, together with infant copies that are grown up, and check how Horcrux 2.0 responds to the death of a copy who doesn't have a Horcrux of their own; and how it responds to a copy creating a Horcrux 2.0 of their own etc., while keeping Harry sedated somewhere in a way that wouldn't register as death.

Graveyard: check.

Voldemort resurrected: check.

Death Eaters: check.

Now I’m looking forward to an HPMoR-style Priori-Incantatem-scene …

Adding to my previous prediction comment:

Predictions:

The Transfiguration shaping exercise Harry was doing at the Quidditch match (Chapter 104) will become plot-relevant. 75%

Conditional on Harry "tear[ing] apart the very stars in heaven", him doing so will be a good thing rather than the disaster Voldemort thinks it will be. 80%

Speculations:

Lucius is in a tight spot here. He pledged the House of Malfoy against Hermione’s killer... who turns out to be Voldemort, who has now summoned him and is giving him orders. Perhaps Lucius will help Harry out? Especially since all the Death Eaters have been instructed to watch and point their wands at Harry, not each other, distracting them from any attacks coming from other Death Eaters. Costs of (assuming) unity?

Harry could use the shaping exercise + partial Transfiguration to his advantage. Even if he still can’t Transfigure air, he could Transfigure a thin line through his own body to the ground and into a small cross-section of the Death Eaters’ brains. (Having to go through his own body is why this wasn’t viable before.) All he would have to do is make that Transfigured section acid or some other convenient instakill (or insta-incapacitate if he prefers and can figure one out), use the shaping to get it in the Death Eaters’ brains first, and then stop before finishing the Transfiguration. If he can cast on Voldemort, then that’s even better because he can use the same trick on Voldemort simultaneously.

Presumably Voldemort took the Transfigured rock from Harry by only acting on the ring and using those forces to take the jewel along. That jewel may now be a 'ticking' bomb in two senses: 1) the Transfiguration will eventually wear off if not sustained or made permanent and 2) Voldemort touching the jewel directly would mean coming in contact with Harry’s magic.

When Harry uses the True Patronus to resurrect Hermione, he expends a small portion of his life and magic. Yet there is no indication that Hermione is limited to that small portion; she seems just as alive and magical as other first-year Hogwarts students. If that’s true, that implies that the True Patronus provides a positive-sum resurrection method (summing over the total pools of wizarding life and magic). IIRC all the other resurrection / immortality methods are zero-sum at best.

How long does that "spell of repose" Voldemort cast on Hermione (Chapter 111) last? If it’s worn off by now, I’d expect the gunshots and Death Eaters arriving to wake her, although she might be faking sleep (as she did in some of the army battles). It would be very nice for her to wake up soon.

Observations:

I notice that Chapter 112 has lots of moonlight and black robes, which suggests that the snippet at the start of Chapter 1 is coming up.

I notice I am confused about the heavily "storybook" nature of the last few chapters. Is Bahl’s Stupefaction (or similar) in play?

So, how is Voldemort going to try to avert the prophecy with the help of the Death Eaters?

WHY hasn't Voldemort ordered his followers to take Harry's wand? That is incompetence.

Warning for minor grossness: Harry can Transfigure bits of his body hair/skin into things, without appearing to move his wand. I don't currently see any particular use for this, but I wanted to mention it just in case.

At least one of the following is very likely to be true:

• the story will end with Voldemort winning

• Dumbledore isn't really trapped

• Voldemort will be trapped in time or in an inescapable magical container. He has far too many horcruxes around to have the same fate as in the original canon.

There are a few suspicious things with the ending of this chapter. Harry is, at the time being, completely defeated. Why are dozens of Death Eaters required to keep their wands on him? Voldemort could easily take his wand away and maybe even restrain him if needed. This precaution seems as if Voldemort was panicking.

Can somebody make a poll with two options: I have pitied Quirrell and I haven't pitied Quirrell? The dead one, y'know.

I'm sorry to say, but the last few chapters of HPMOR have been "wobbly" in exactly the same way as the last chapters of Ra. Oh we're saved, oh no we're doomed again, etc.

Chekov's wand discussion: we have been repeatedly told about Dumbledore's "long dark wand" (Ch. 56,57,77,81,94,110), a "wand of dread power" (Ch. 77), which we know from Canon is the "terrible device" Grindelwald possessed (Ch. 77).

In Azkaban (Ch. 57), Dumbledore confirms this:

"Nonsense, my dear," the old wizard said cheerfully as he strode off yet again, waving as though in admonition his fifteen-inch wand of unidentifiable dark-grey wood, "I'm invincible."

Query: A key point in canon is the mastery of this wand. In this universe, Voldemort!Riddle has defeated Dumbledore before the latter threw the wand away. Does that make him the master of the wand?

Re: Chapter 112

Blasted cliffhangers... :(

So, like, is Snape in that crowd of Death Eaters, or what?

I think that one of Harry's biggest mistakes in the whole scenario was not bargaining harder with Voldemort before they entered the corridor. It was clear that he had some leverage over Voldemort there, Voldemort needed him for some unknown reason. He should have been less fearful for his own life (since Voldemort apparently needs him), and tried to barter for limits upon Voldemort's future reign of terror should he succeed. For example, if he agreed to help, Voldemort would need to promise in parseltongue not to Kill, Torture, or Imperius (or have minions do it for him), more than X people per year. (Limiting to X instead of 0 might be enough to get Voldemort to go along with the plan, and Harry might be able to morally justify his assistance given that he would be saving hundreds of students lives that Voldemort was holding hostage, so the net result might be less lives lost).

He could have sold this to Voldemort as the only way that his moral compass would allow him to assist him: by making the scenario into a trolley problem, where Harry helping Voldemort was the option that cost less lives.

YESS! Voldemort is as intelligent as QQ always was! The true Dark Lord returns!