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Did you notice that from Quirrel's perspective, that's exactly what he has done to/with Harry? Killing Hermione had the effect of hardening Harry's resolve, and removing some of his scrupels. For Quirrel that's "stronger".
Have her make a horcrux by killing another human? it's pretty clear both canon and MoR that killing somebody is necessary to make a horcrux.
I don't think that's compatible with moral of any of the people that want Hermione to live.
It's quite clear that whoever introduced the troll to Hogwarts wanted Hermione killed, otherwise her broomstick wouldn't have been tampered with.
I think you're reading too much into small details.
It could very well be that McGonagall doesn't like phoenix travel, or (more likely) that Dumbledore focused on bringing Harry and Hermione into the safety of Hogwarts as quickly as possible, while McGonagall has lower risk and is also able to defend herself.
Fawkes can only transport three people at a time
Somehow that also seems unlikely to me. Phoenixes are displayed as very powerful, both in MoR and canon. Their actions are more limited by their narrow goals and maybe limits of their intelligence than by limits of their magic.
I dimly recall that in canon, Squibs are actually the children of two wizards. That contradicts Harry's finding directly.
But then Rowling probably didn't have any rules in mind about how magic inherits, so it might be impossible to come up with a good theory that explains everything we know from canon.
One thing I'm missing from this whole horcrux discussion is: What happens if you die of age, and have a horcrux?
People just seem to assume that once you have a horcrux, you won't wither and die.
But we have no indication to believe this is what actually happens. canon!Voldemort catches a rebounding killing curse, and the horcrux doesn't make him live on in perfect health. Instead he is very close to death, has no body, and needs to possess animals or other humans to extort some influence.
So what happens if you have a horcrux, and come close to dying from old age? It seems to me that your body would die, and you'd need some avenue to live again, and that is not a nice prospect at all. If you have access to a philospher's stone you wouldn't have such a problem, but then you wouldn't need a horcrux in the first place. What else can you do? Possess another human, who suffers greatly from it. Or the ritual that requires a servant of yours to sacrifice a limb; oh, and there's only a limited supplies of bones from your father, so you can't repeat it indefinitely.
In summary, it seems that a single death doesn't give you 100k+ years of live without additional major costs.
but the Hogwarts map couldn't find him when asked to find Tom Riddle, his true name.
Note that Quirrel was at the Ministry for Magic for interrogation while Dumbledore used the map to search for Riddle.
Yes. That and the fact the book is resistent to rough handling. Though of course if I were a magical archaeologist, I'd also find some spell that makes those valuable artefacts as indestructible as possible.
You mean, like, the book he gave Harry?
In canon it's definitively done.
But how?
I'm pretty sure that both canon and MoR are silent on how it's done, which is a real pity.
In canon there is a scene where Voldemort breaks into Nurmengard to ask Grindelwald where the Wand is, and then kills him. In a non-magical world I'd say that the fact that somebody can break in means that somebody can break out too, with help from the outside. Even if that's not the case in a magical world, it means that his followers could continue to communicate with him. Not good.
On the other hand there seems to be magic in canon that cannot be broken or circumvented, except for a very specific trigger. Think of the Fidelius charm, which hides a building from everybody, except those that the secret keeper has told the location. Or the potion in the cave that must be drunk, and cannot be vanished, transigured or otherwise "magiced". Maybe a similar kind of "absolute" magic exists that can be used to imprison people reliably. So reliably that no Auror need to stand guard, and are tortured with humming.
Or maybe they simply wanted a child? That can happen at that age, even if it's not all that common in our societies.
There are only thirty hours in a day and every child means greater demands on your time.
Which is much less of an issue if your own parents and grandparents (and maybe even another generation) are around to dote on your children.
Maybe using magic doesn't strengthens your magic the way that physical exercise strengthens your muscles, but rather similar to a river carving its way through the landscape -- the more water flows, the deeper the river bed becomes.
Such a mechanism wouldn't require any more genetic information, because it's not a property of the individual magic user.
It's chickens all the way down, isn't it?
There could be multiple factors that govern the strength of wizardry. For example the base could be a trained component like muscle strength, but the total observable strength also depends on your ability to control it. If you have very fine control over the magic (ie very precise wand movements, nearly perfect self control for spells that require it), you can make your magic flow much more efficiently. A bit like pulling a lever into the exactly correct direction, or a bit in the wrong direction -- it'll still work, but requires more strength.
A good question.
Maybe "magic" is what gives you a free will, ie the explanation of how a will can exist with a certain measure of independence from the neurons. So all consciousness requires a small amount of magic, and only wizards and magical creatures have the ability to further manipulate that mysterious magic.
And if a wizard exhausts his magic, he becomes unconsciousness until his magic recovers, because the mind can't work without the basic .
If magic is a prerequisite for conciousness, it would also explain the correlation between intelligence and strong wizardry.
Ok, this is quite old stuff, and maybe it has been discussed already, but I couldn't find it,. Chapter 25:
And by similar logic: The words a wizard spoke, the wand movements, those weren't complicated enough of themselves to build up the spell effects from scratch - not the way that the three billion base pairs of human DNA actually were complicated enough to build a human body from scratch, not the way that computer programs took up thousands of bytes of data.
So the words and wand movements were just triggers, levers pulled on some hidden and more complex machine. Buttons, not blueprints.
And just like a computer program wouldn't compile if you made a single spelling error, the Source of Magic wouldn't respond to you unless you cast your spells in exactly the right way.
The chain of logic was inexorable.
And it led inevitably toward a single final conclusion.
The ancient forebears of the wizards, thousands of years earlier, had told the Source of Magic to only levitate things if you said...
'Wingardium Leviosa.'
No, not the ancient forebears. There are spells that sound "a lot older than Latin", and (at least in canon) there's a spell with incantation "point me" (Goblet of Fire, iirc).
So it looks like the spells haven't all been created at ancient times, but rather some spells have been created later. That is supported by McGonagall in Ch. 16, "people invent new Charms and Potions every year."
So, it seems there is some rather complicated way to invoke magic, and Charms present a shortcut that original discoverer of a spell has installed.
Why did it take more effort to cast the Alohomora spell, if it was just like pressing a button?
Probably because the spell only channels your magic, and there's a magical barrier that the locking spell has left, and that has to be overcome with magical strength. Or maybe it's more like pulling a lever than pressing a button. It's still efficient, but you still need some magical strength to perform the action.
Who'd been silly enough to build in a spell for Avada Kedavra that could only be cast using hatred?
As a safety mechanism. It prevents you from fooling around with the spell and killing somebody if you haven't actually meant it.
Why did wordless Transfiguration require you to make a complete mental separation between the concept of form and concept of material?
Since wordless Transfiguration doesn't have a word as a trigger, there needs to be a different mechanism for preventing accidental Transfigurationt. Going to some extra length mentally might be that safety mechanism
Thanks for writing that, I enjoyed it.
There's a tiny problem with it: Patronuses speak with the voice of the one who cast them, and the members of the Wizengamot have already heard Harry talking, so they'd notice there's something wrong with the Merlin connection.
Maybe this is the wrong place to ask, but are there any other cool pieces of "edufiction" like HPMoR? I mean fiction where you can learn about science, economics or other topics just by reading the story, and thinking along with it.
There is lots of historic fiction material, so I'd like to exclude that genre from my question.
Quirrel doesn't have his wand, in Chapter 79 it says "despite the fact that Mr. Quirrell had politely surrendered his wand upon being detained for interrogation,"
Update: oops, accidentally replied to the wrong comment. Never mind.
For purely selfish reasons I hope it's in the "first 80% done, second 80% being worked on" sense.
Maybe one of the charms protects against time-traveling in and out of the room?
I have a theory. In canon, the fact that Harry's mother died for him produced some kind of magical protection. Harry had to live with his relatives during the summer to keep that protection alive.
Maybe in HPMoR, Dumbledore speculates that Harry can keep that protection in place by carrying a part of Harry's old home (the rock) with him.
I thought his response to blackmail of his allies was to burn Narcissa Malfoy (or at least have everybody thinking that he burned her alive).
Potions is not the only thing that's neglected in canon; Transfiguration is also "just" taught but never used (except by the teachers). I love it that Harry!MoR puts Transfiguration to good use; after all it seems to be the most general magic manipulation.
It feels a bit as if canon and MoR aren't the same fiction subgenre. Canon is about a boy growing up, about action and an isolated society that still parallels the muggle society in many ways. MoR is more about discovering the magical world and about complicated plotting.
Right. And Lucius calls Snape his "valuable ally", so it's likely that Snape has done the dirty work for Lucius inside Hogwarts.
If I understood correctly, Harry didn't invent a new potion, he found it one of the books that Flitwick recommended. And if you assume that Draco still has Snape's support, it won't be easy for Harry to find more powerful potions than Draco.
It also seems clear that the teachers involved think that inventing new potions is far too dangerous with Harry's current level of experience (which is basically none). That's why I don't think that more potions will be the way to Chaos' success. At least not the critical factor.
So, what kind of "miracle" will Harry produce for the next battle (assuming for a moment that Hermione is going to be released, and there will be a next battle)?
I thought that maybe he finds a way to learn wordless magic, thus having a huge advantage since the others don't know what spells will be coming. But then I realized that it's not even necessary -- in the heat of the battle it's enough not to shout the incantation, whispering it will mean that the opponent can't hear it.
It's a simple enough thing that I wonder why none of Harry, Hermione, and Draco seem to consider it.
At least I haven't found any indication that shouting the words of a spell make it more powerful.
There are certainly some analytical charms that give you some sort of idea how magical objects work. For example where Harry offers Dumbledore and Quirrel some Comed Tea, they both analyze it before drinking.
The complexity of such analytics probably scales withe complexity of the magical object that is being analyzed, so finding out about the dial was probably immensely difficult, but not by collecting and correlating data, but by inspecting the device rather closely.
In my understanding, the wards serve mostly two purposes: prevent harm from the outside (by mostly isolating Hogwarts magically from the outside), and analytical wards that inform the school authorities if something really bad happens.
So if you want to murder someone inside of Hogwards, you face the problem that the murder is immediately detected, and then you're sealed off from the outside -- the chances of escaping aren't very high.
You are right that the wards don't seem to prevent any accidents, but it seems that most "school magic" doesn't go horribly wrong without prior warnings. For example in potions, people seem to know which potions are dangerous, and those are only done under supervision.
Blocking the Unblockable Curse.
This is mostly related to canon, but also a bit to HPMoR.
I've always wondered why the killing curse counts as "unblockable". In "Order of the Phoenix", Dumbledore blocks it by moving a statue in its path. Seems to work nicely. There is other evidence that solids stop the killing curse -- if it went through it, you could accidentally kill somebody behind a wall when missing your target. Prof. Moody would surely have mentioned that danger when talking about the killing curse, if that was the case. So you could carry around a steel plate strong enough to block the curse, and quickly move it into its path. Not easy, but possible.
There are also several instances where simple spells conjure animals (I remember bats and small birds). I wonder if you could simply conjure an animal into the way of the killing curse. It might need to have a minimal size to work, but a powerful wizards should be able to do that.
I also wonder if there are ways to combine charms: one detection charm that triggers another one. For example one that detects killing curses, and enables apparation or a portkey.
So, one proven way to block a killing curse, one conjectural, and another conjectural way to escape it. I can't believe the wizards still call it "unblockable" :-)
I guess that too frequent obliviation damages or wears out the mind, and iirc there are several hints that it can be quite cathastrophic if an obliviation goes wrong.
So there probably wouln't be large scale psychologic experiments based on obliviation.
There seems to be a slight contradiction.
On the one hand, Harry and Hermione find out that one needs to know what a spell does in order to cast ist successfully (Ch 22, "If you didn’t tell her at all what the spell was supposed to do, it would stop working.").
And then in 26, about the 6th years Griffindor (canon!Harry) who hexes canon!Draco: "He is in his sixth year at Hogwarts and he cast a high-level Dark curse without knowing what it did.”
Shouln't that be impossible? Or if the knowledge from Harry and Hermione's experiment wasn't very general, Harry should have noted at least. (Though honestly I didn't notice during my first read, being amused about the reference to canon).
There seem to be two forms of leglimency, one that requires an explicit spell and a wand, and can be performed by most wizards. That's what Mr. Best in MoR uses, and what canon!Snape uses while trying to each Harry Occlumency. The victim knows what's going on, but usually can't do anything against it.
The second one is the form that Dumbledore (and canon!Voldemort), which just requires looking into the eyes of the victim, and lots of training. This is the "stealth mode", and most victims don't notice the intrusion at all.
It was always my intuitive understanding that the first form allows you to dig deep into one's memory, wheres the second form only shows you what the victim is thinking right now.
Does that make any sense?