In the previous thread there was some discussion on Ch 76′s obliviation powered dictionary attack on Hermione. Most of that discussion seems to have assumed that what we saw between Hat And Cloak (HAC) and Hermione was simple to understand and relatively unskilllful… with Hermione’s “tootsie pop” response being inane and HAC’s probing appearing ham-handedly ignorant.
My impression was that we didn’t see the first or second cycle of relatively normal behavior for either character, but more like the 7th cycle (12 minutes per cycle for 90 minutes?), where HAC was doing something radically different each time to probe Hermione’s knowledge, feelings, etc in different ways, probably using legilimency. She was exhausted, like someone “in the box” with the police, except more stressful due to not even knowing she’s in the box. And the questions don’t have to be subtle, they just have to make her think of useful things while her eyes are visible. I don’t think she was the ultimate target either, but rather she is the closest non-occlumens to Harry other than possibly Draco, so mind raping her to learn about Harry is “safer” even if it demonstrates horrifying levels of evilness… which raises issues about how to hide that it happened from Albus and Minerva.
I’m curious what other people’s takes on the situation are. Specifically, what cycle do you think we saw out of how many total? Also, what are the odds that Hermione will be dead or missing in the next substantive chapter?
I would guess that Hat-and-Cloak probably wasn’t using leglimency, or it wouldn’t have needed Hermione to say that she found the mysterious getup suspicious.
I’m not sure how it worked in canon (and would expect semi-random behavior given Rowling’s tendency to fudge world building details that a more mechanistic thinker might nail down) but in MoR it appears that legilimency allows the reader to perceive the “conscious surface thoughts” of the readee, plus the feeling of active reading (used by an occlumens to race ahead and put fake conscious surface thoughts in the way), plus the traces of past reading.
When Albus read Harry early in the story to look for traces he asked Harry what Harry had recently eaten so as to prevent himself from reading anything private in Harry’s mind. If words can be used to redirect attention to banal issues so that it is impossible for even Albus to see more deeply, it stands to reason (to me anyway) that visibility is relatively shallow and that words could also be used to redirect attention towards the sensitive issues. So, HAC using legilimency probably couldn’t get a verbal reason for lack of trust without a probe to raise “trust of HAC” in Hermione’s mind, but once raised he would have been able to tell if she lied or detect any reasons that jumped into her mind that she didn’t say out loud for strategic reasons… and not much more.
I could be wrong. “Word of god” might contradict me. But assuming I’m not, then my working model of the fic includes that HAC now knows, for example, that Harry has a deathly hallow (because Hermione would probably have consciously surfaced the most dramatic evidence that Harry totally trusts her when HAC asked about that stuff and that’s pretty dramatic evidence). Given how many readers didn’t even get that cycles of oblivation were being used on her I’d guess that something too optimized (to the point of silence) would be even less intelligible in text.
I guess a totally “optimized” oblivation/legilimency cycle could probably do a full loop within like 8 seconds and would just involve a “don’t think of a polar bear” shout, reading everything brought up by that, then obliviate and repeat. We didn’t see that happen at all. Either we didn’t see it because it was impossible, or Eliezer didn’t think of it, or Eliezer didn’t think HAC would think of it, or it would have been too squicky and thereby violated the artistic permissions of the audience.
My bet is that this kind of manipulation would be impossible based on the in-story mechanics of legilimency and related spells… that the pragmatics of the process require a measure of indirection even with naive victims so that their eyes can’t be closed, and their thoughts have time to percolate, and things only mentally accessible from within a specific conversational context can occur to them to be read, and so on.
Even assuming those are the limits of leglimency, I think that “this guy seems really suspicious” would be pretty near the surface of Hermione’s thoughts without any additional prompting.
the occlumency trainer harry hires is able to read deeply within harry’s mind without a lot of trouble. I think thoughts are probably easier or harder to read based on how surface they are. Dumbledore made them think of something else so he wouldn’t accidentally read anything private because of how EASY it is to read surface memories, not because thinking of something else prevents being read entirely.
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.
If I remember right, a moderately big deal is made of wandless magic in the last couple books of the canon. I don’t think it’s come up in MoR yet, but it seems simpler to suppose that Dumbledore and canon!Voldemort are performing a wandless version of Snape’s Legilimency than to assume a more fundamental difference between the types.
It could just be a power difference. If wandless magic came with no penalties attached, you’d have to be mad to continue to use wands if you can manage wandless magic like Dumbledore can. It strictly dominates wands—you can’t be disarmed nearly as easily. (And when we see wizarding children ‘naturally’ use wandless magic, isn’t it weaker than what they can manage with wands?)
A big enough difference of degree can look like a difference of kind.
Two things, one: being more difficult to disarm isn’t really as much of an advantage as it might seem. Remember, we have some idea of how magical combat works in MoR, and it seems to revolve around layers of active and passive defenses—during Bahry One-Hand, veteran Auror, v. Polyjuiced!Quirrel, the description went
According to the Defense Professor, the essential art of dueling consisted of trying to put up defenses that would block whatever someone was likely to throw at you, while trying in turn to attack in ways that were likely to go past their current set of defenses. And by far the easiest way to win any sort of real fight—Professor Quirrell had said this over and over—was to shoot the enemy before they raised a shield in the first place, either from behind or from close enough range that they couldn’t dodge or counter in time.
If telekinesis-type spells (Accio, Expelliarmus, Wingardium Leviosa) are relatively easy to shield against, fights would tend to end by incapacitation rather than disarming whether you had a wand or not.
And two: interestingly, ‘accidental magic’ (used by wizarding children before they get their wands, generally in times of high emotion) is actually somewhat more impressive than what just-got-their-wands first years can do. Example: before he went to Hogwarts, canon!Harry once managed to get from standing on the ground to standing on the roof of his school without quite being aware of how he did it—the text seems to imply some kind of teleportation / Apparation, but it could have been self-levitation—either way, much more impressive than anything he could do for a while afterwards.
And two: interestingly, ‘accidental magic’ (used by wizarding children before they get their wands, generally in times of high emotion) is actually somewhat more impressive than what just-got-their-wands first years can do.
So? This is like someone saying, after scraping a violin for a few minutes, ‘pfft, I can whistle more musically than this darn thing’. It’s a tool, and like all tools, takes time to master, but when it does, you’re much better than without the tool. (Think about how long it takes to learn a computer, and what one can do with it.)
Chapter 24: Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis: Act 2
…
The line of reasoning continued: Atlantis had been an isolated civilization that had somehow brought into being the Source of Magic, and told it to serve only people with the Atlantean genetic marker, the blood of Atlantis.
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.
Under that hypothesis, accidental magic by wizarding children — otherwise without appreciable magic power, could be a Source of Magic initiated emergency “Help” spell.
I’ve been thinking about magical training that doesn’t look like conventional schooling, and training accidental magic would be an interesting place to start. Would it be like learning jazz? Improv? A soft martial art?
interestingly, ‘accidental magic’ is actually somewhat more impressive than what just-got-their-wands first years can do.
Harry (in cannon) performs accidental magic during times of high emotion and when he’s not able to cast spells (ie, before he has his wand or summer vacations). This is also true with Ariana Dumbledore, Snape, and Neville in each other occurrence of accidental magic in the series. In HP:MoR, wizards use the mana/muscle system for magic. It seems likely that magic can ‘build up’ if unused and release in an explosive (sometimes literally) fashion in the form of accidental magic. Furthermore, since nobody seems to intentionally use it, it must have a drawback; extreme draining of magic disproportionate to the effects seems like a logical effect.
Interestingly, both Tom Riddle and Lily Evans were able to consciously control ‘accidental’ magic as children. They both ended up the greatest spellcasters of their year. This would further reinforce the hypothesis that it extremely drains your ‘magic’ muscle, given that working out one’s magic has been established to make one a stronger spellcaster.
Furthermore, since nobody seems to intentionally use it, it must have a drawback; extreme draining of magic disproportionate to the effects seems like a logical effect.
Lack of control seems like the biggest issue. ‘Oops, I nearly killed someone’ (Ariana), ‘Oops, I didn’t mean to make that glass disappear’ (Harry), etc.
Rather than two forms of legilimency, I thought it was a matter of the caster’s facility with the spell.
In other words, it was my understanding that amateur Legilimens had to use their wand and the incantation in addition to eye contact, and with practice they could do away with the wand and word. That branch of magic is easily made wandless, perhaps.
That bit was textually sparse but my reading there was that in the fourth lesson where he pulled many secrets he was reading Harry’s memories of having been read over a longer period and it raising issues and them talking out an acceptable resolution so that the teacher would keep teaching. Presumably Harry could bring the whole conceptual network up “above his surface” right off the bat just to get it out of the way on purpose, which seems to be implied by this line:
...you saw that we already had a long discussion about whether you were willing to teach me Occlumency, and in the end you decided to do it, so can we just get this over with?
When Albus read Harry early in the story to look for traces he asked Harry what Harry had recently eaten so as to prevent himself from reading anything private in Harry’s mind. If words can be used to redirect attention to banal issues so that it is impossible for even Albus to see more deeply
I didn’t interpret it that way. Rather, I interpreted it that Dumbledore didn’t want to incidentally get data about any other thoughts, he just wanted to look for signs of prior tampering. In that limited context, he didn’t want Harry to think about anything that wasn’t Dumbledore’s business. A skilled legilimens if they are trying might be able to still get more out of that situation.
But Quirrell was also there, and presumptively allied with Lucius and against Albus.
“If you don’t tell him,” Professor Quirrell said then, “I will, even if you fire me for it.”
If Albus read Harry in front of Quirrell without doing something to prevent invasive reading being possible in principle then it would have given Quirrell much more ammunition to use in a complicated way. They actually did quibble over the matter, and the fact of the quibble (rather than a bigger deal) directly implies that both Quirrell and Albus had precise models of what was possible with legilimency under those conditions, and knew each knew, and knew what could be safely done and safely accused, and didn’t bother to argue about bigger issues, where they mutually understood, and understood that each understood, and understood that Harry could verify, that the distraction had been sufficient to make it impossible for Albus to have engaged in profound impropriety.
the fact of the quibble (rather than a bigger deal) directly implies that both Quirrell and Albus had precise models of what was possible with legilimency under those conditions, and knew each knew, and knew what could be safely done and safely accused, and didn’t bother to argue about bigger issues, where they mutually understood, and understood that each understood, and understood that Harry could verify, that the distraction had been sufficient to make it impossible for Albus to have engaged in profound impropriety.
Or that Quirrell had a precise enough model of Dumbledore that he knew he could only hurt his standing with Harry by accusing Dumbledore of things that Harry could easily learn were out of character enough to be improbable.
If he starts accusing Dumbledore of things he doesn’t himself believe that Dumbledore would do, he could end up being discredited and then looking paranoid rather than wise and experienced.
Dumbledore’s remark that “That was all I looked for” doesn’t sound like something he would say if, while reading Harry, he couldn’t have looked at anything else if he wanted.
I wonder whether the Tootsie Pop reference was a Leaning on the Fourth Wall hint to the readers or if we’re meant to take that as Hermione subconsciously remembering what was going on? (“One hundred and eighty-seven. I tried it once.” is kind of chilling, in that context.)
Or it could’ve been just a meaningless flippant remark, that too.
And 12 minutes per cycle? For the script given in the chapter, I’d peg it at more like 2 to 4.
Edit: Actually, I just though of a way to get an upper bound—the amount of adrenaline the human body can produce in 2-4 minutes is probably pretty sharply limited, right? Mr H&C presumably had to startle Hermione at the end of every cycle, so the physiological reaction would match up to the initial surprise and smooth over any discrepancies. I find it hard to imagine that “a rush of shock and fear hit her like a Stunning Hex over her whole body” more than five or so times without just leaving her burned out completely. (Not that she didn’t seem pretty burned out by the end.)
And she can’t be dead. For she is the bearer of a most marvelous destiny-
Actually I looked up in Wikipedia how many licks it takes to get the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop, and picked a number that seemed commensurate with the human-licker experiments.
The Chilling Implications you point out (how many licks does it take to get to the center of Hermione?) were totally lost on my consciousness until now. I wonder if that subconscious imagery had anything to do with why my brain produced that response from Hermione?
I find it hard to imagine that “a rush of shock and fear hit her like a Stunning Hex over her whole body” more than five or so times without just leaving her burned out completely.
I think you’re misreading the situation. From Hermoine’s point of view, it seems like she’s suddenly getting flooded with adrenaline. The truth is that she’s had the same level of adrenaline in her body and is just being made aware of it. It’s similar to how walking four miles then getting obliviated an hour back would feel like you’ve just gotten teleported and been hit with a jelly legs jinx.
The exact phrasing at the end of the cycle that happened onscreen was:
[...] the black mist evaporated away, no longer obscuring; she saw the face beneath, and recognition sent a jolt of terrified adrenaline bursting through her -
- she felt a momentary sense of disorientation -
- and then a rush of shock and fear hit her like a Stunning Hex over her whole body, she found that without any thought or any conscious decision her wand had leaped into her hand [...]
My interpretation, and maybe I am reading too much into it, is that it was necessary to give her a shock right before the Obliviation, because otherwise the physiological experience would be going from ‘walking calmly down the hallway’ to ‘walking tiredly down the hallway,’ which wouldn’t jive with convincing herself she just reacted very quickly (her wand leaped into her hand).
Also, why else would you reveal your true face to someone just before you Obliviate them and show them a different, equally false appearance? Eliciting the reaction seems to be the obvious motive, and helps get around a weakness of Obliviation—that it only affects the neurological, not the rest of the body (hence Harry’s signaling method of biting his lip).
I assumed that revealing your true face to the person would not ever be remember, so it wouldn’t matter what you did. There’s no reason to bother going into another room or even turning around (and risking them trying to run/hex you) to swap faces if you’re just going to obliviate them anyways. It’s just a result of being weary with the whole process.
These are only dry runs at cracking her password. You practice a dozen times until you succeed, obliviate her and let her settle down, obliviate her so she doesn’t remember the settling down time, then do the successful attempt. The “most glorious destiny” attempt won’t be what she remembers, but rather a seamless polished version after Mr HAC has confirmed it will work.
The final, final version will have her never even suspecting anything suspicious or having discontinuities like spinning around and wands leaping to her hands. Heck, it need not even occur at the same time, but rather a day later so she doesn’t get suspicious of lost time. Or at least, that’s what I would in the same position.
“I’ve been sent to help you, so please don’t be afraid. I am your servant in all things; for you, my Lady, are the last magical descendant of Merlin-”
“That’s ridiculous.”
(fleeting disorientation)
“For you, my Lady, are the last magical descendant of Ravenclaw-”
“I don’t believe you.”
(fleeting disorientation)
“For you, my Lady, are the bearer of a most marvelous destiny-”
Edit: (Personally, I prefer ”—she felt a momentary sense of disorientation - ”; it seems a little more subtle, but I guess that’s not the effect he’s going for.)
It is more subtle and I do prefer it. The problem is that a substantial fraction of reviewers are still saying they’ve got no idea what’s happening during the ellipses, and I care about that.
Your version is a little too unsubtle, but the fact that people were buying the “last descendant of Merlin thing” had me wondering what it would’ve taken to actually trigger their skepticism.
“For you, my Lady, are the last descendant of Cthulhu—”
“For you alone must stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness—”
No, I get why you changed it, and I certainly wasn’t offering that as any kind of serious suggestion, but… well, maybe it’s elitist of me, but frankly I don’t understand what benefit there is to catering to the lowest common denominator of ffnet readers. I mean, the lowest common denominator of ffnet readers is pretty low. (Boy-Who-Lived Gets Draco Malfoy Pregnant! sorry i suk at sumries lol, dont liek dont read)
On another note:
“For you, my Princess, are of the blood of the dragons—”
I agree. It was so obvious to me that Hermione was being Obliviated that when I read the instruction at the start of the next chapter I went back to see what I could be missing. It didn’t occur to me that peope might not be getting it. And that was when it had ellipses.
I’m one of the people who was confused by the Merlin thing and said as such in my review that I wasn’t sure if it was lying or not. In that version, the Obliviation was a lot less obvious. My initial reading was that the entity in question was trying to appear (probably untruthfully) to have been testing Hermione previously and was now ready to reveal itself in its true, nice form. It even occurred to me that it might even have been its actual form with it finally happy that it could appear as a nice being rather than as some terrible mystery. I was in particular thinking of the part in the Chronicles of Prydain where the companions are shocked to find out that the nasty looking hags true form might actually be beautiful young women. In that text they call it out explicitly.
Still, the switch to the repeated … made it really clear what was going on in a really blunt, squicktastic fashion. I have to agree with pedanterrific that you may want to be careful not to play to the lowest common denominator of ff.
“For you alone must stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness—”
I would really like if it included this. If you did go with pedanterrific’s suggestion this might also help reduce the squicktastic aspect of the repeated memory erasure. Actually, the juxtaposition might make it more squick; I’m not sure.
In the previous thread there was some discussion on Ch 76′s obliviation powered dictionary attack on Hermione. Most of that discussion seems to have assumed that what we saw between Hat And Cloak (HAC) and Hermione was simple to understand and relatively unskilllful… with Hermione’s “tootsie pop” response being inane and HAC’s probing appearing ham-handedly ignorant.
My impression was that we didn’t see the first or second cycle of relatively normal behavior for either character, but more like the 7th cycle (12 minutes per cycle for 90 minutes?), where HAC was doing something radically different each time to probe Hermione’s knowledge, feelings, etc in different ways, probably using legilimency. She was exhausted, like someone “in the box” with the police, except more stressful due to not even knowing she’s in the box. And the questions don’t have to be subtle, they just have to make her think of useful things while her eyes are visible. I don’t think she was the ultimate target either, but rather she is the closest non-occlumens to Harry other than possibly Draco, so mind raping her to learn about Harry is “safer” even if it demonstrates horrifying levels of evilness… which raises issues about how to hide that it happened from Albus and Minerva.
I’m curious what other people’s takes on the situation are. Specifically, what cycle do you think we saw out of how many total? Also, what are the odds that Hermione will be dead or missing in the next substantive chapter?
I would guess that Hat-and-Cloak probably wasn’t using leglimency, or it wouldn’t have needed Hermione to say that she found the mysterious getup suspicious.
I’m not sure how it worked in canon (and would expect semi-random behavior given Rowling’s tendency to fudge world building details that a more mechanistic thinker might nail down) but in MoR it appears that legilimency allows the reader to perceive the “conscious surface thoughts” of the readee, plus the feeling of active reading (used by an occlumens to race ahead and put fake conscious surface thoughts in the way), plus the traces of past reading.
When Albus read Harry early in the story to look for traces he asked Harry what Harry had recently eaten so as to prevent himself from reading anything private in Harry’s mind. If words can be used to redirect attention to banal issues so that it is impossible for even Albus to see more deeply, it stands to reason (to me anyway) that visibility is relatively shallow and that words could also be used to redirect attention towards the sensitive issues. So, HAC using legilimency probably couldn’t get a verbal reason for lack of trust without a probe to raise “trust of HAC” in Hermione’s mind, but once raised he would have been able to tell if she lied or detect any reasons that jumped into her mind that she didn’t say out loud for strategic reasons… and not much more.
I could be wrong. “Word of god” might contradict me. But assuming I’m not, then my working model of the fic includes that HAC now knows, for example, that Harry has a deathly hallow (because Hermione would probably have consciously surfaced the most dramatic evidence that Harry totally trusts her when HAC asked about that stuff and that’s pretty dramatic evidence). Given how many readers didn’t even get that cycles of oblivation were being used on her I’d guess that something too optimized (to the point of silence) would be even less intelligible in text.
I guess a totally “optimized” oblivation/legilimency cycle could probably do a full loop within like 8 seconds and would just involve a “don’t think of a polar bear” shout, reading everything brought up by that, then obliviate and repeat. We didn’t see that happen at all. Either we didn’t see it because it was impossible, or Eliezer didn’t think of it, or Eliezer didn’t think HAC would think of it, or it would have been too squicky and thereby violated the artistic permissions of the audience.
My bet is that this kind of manipulation would be impossible based on the in-story mechanics of legilimency and related spells… that the pragmatics of the process require a measure of indirection even with naive victims so that their eyes can’t be closed, and their thoughts have time to percolate, and things only mentally accessible from within a specific conversational context can occur to them to be read, and so on.
Even assuming those are the limits of leglimency, I think that “this guy seems really suspicious” would be pretty near the surface of Hermione’s thoughts without any additional prompting.
the occlumency trainer harry hires is able to read deeply within harry’s mind without a lot of trouble. I think thoughts are probably easier or harder to read based on how surface they are. Dumbledore made them think of something else so he wouldn’t accidentally read anything private because of how EASY it is to read surface memories, not because thinking of something else prevents being read entirely.
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?
If I remember right, a moderately big deal is made of wandless magic in the last couple books of the canon. I don’t think it’s come up in MoR yet, but it seems simpler to suppose that Dumbledore and canon!Voldemort are performing a wandless version of Snape’s Legilimency than to assume a more fundamental difference between the types.
It could just be a power difference. If wandless magic came with no penalties attached, you’d have to be mad to continue to use wands if you can manage wandless magic like Dumbledore can. It strictly dominates wands—you can’t be disarmed nearly as easily. (And when we see wizarding children ‘naturally’ use wandless magic, isn’t it weaker than what they can manage with wands?)
A big enough difference of degree can look like a difference of kind.
Except when you’re fighting trolls and need a Nasal Magic Delivery Device.
Or when you don’t know any spells but your opponent has perfectly good eye sockets. (Or when your wand is made of elder.)
Two things, one: being more difficult to disarm isn’t really as much of an advantage as it might seem. Remember, we have some idea of how magical combat works in MoR, and it seems to revolve around layers of active and passive defenses—during Bahry One-Hand, veteran Auror, v. Polyjuiced!Quirrel, the description went
If telekinesis-type spells (Accio, Expelliarmus, Wingardium Leviosa) are relatively easy to shield against, fights would tend to end by incapacitation rather than disarming whether you had a wand or not.
And two: interestingly, ‘accidental magic’ (used by wizarding children before they get their wands, generally in times of high emotion) is actually somewhat more impressive than what just-got-their-wands first years can do. Example: before he went to Hogwarts, canon!Harry once managed to get from standing on the ground to standing on the roof of his school without quite being aware of how he did it—the text seems to imply some kind of teleportation / Apparation, but it could have been self-levitation—either way, much more impressive than anything he could do for a while afterwards.
So? This is like someone saying, after scraping a violin for a few minutes, ‘pfft, I can whistle more musically than this darn thing’. It’s a tool, and like all tools, takes time to master, but when it does, you’re much better than without the tool. (Think about how long it takes to learn a computer, and what one can do with it.)
Chapter 24: Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis: Act 2 … The line of reasoning continued: Atlantis had been an isolated civilization that had somehow brought into being the Source of Magic, and told it to serve only people with the Atlantean genetic marker, the blood of Atlantis.
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.
Under that hypothesis, accidental magic by wizarding children — otherwise without appreciable magic power, could be a Source of Magic initiated emergency “Help” spell.
I’ve been thinking about magical training that doesn’t look like conventional schooling, and training accidental magic would be an interesting place to start. Would it be like learning jazz? Improv? A soft martial art?
Harry (in cannon) performs accidental magic during times of high emotion and when he’s not able to cast spells (ie, before he has his wand or summer vacations). This is also true with Ariana Dumbledore, Snape, and Neville in each other occurrence of accidental magic in the series. In HP:MoR, wizards use the mana/muscle system for magic. It seems likely that magic can ‘build up’ if unused and release in an explosive (sometimes literally) fashion in the form of accidental magic. Furthermore, since nobody seems to intentionally use it, it must have a drawback; extreme draining of magic disproportionate to the effects seems like a logical effect.
Interestingly, both Tom Riddle and Lily Evans were able to consciously control ‘accidental’ magic as children. They both ended up the greatest spellcasters of their year. This would further reinforce the hypothesis that it extremely drains your ‘magic’ muscle, given that working out one’s magic has been established to make one a stronger spellcaster.
Lack of control seems like the biggest issue. ‘Oops, I nearly killed someone’ (Ariana), ‘Oops, I didn’t mean to make that glass disappear’ (Harry), etc.
Rather than two forms of legilimency, I thought it was a matter of the caster’s facility with the spell.
In other words, it was my understanding that amateur Legilimens had to use their wand and the incantation in addition to eye contact, and with practice they could do away with the wand and word. That branch of magic is easily made wandless, perhaps.
That bit was textually sparse but my reading there was that in the fourth lesson where he pulled many secrets he was reading Harry’s memories of having been read over a longer period and it raising issues and them talking out an acceptable resolution so that the teacher would keep teaching. Presumably Harry could bring the whole conceptual network up “above his surface” right off the bat just to get it out of the way on purpose, which seems to be implied by this line:
I didn’t interpret it that way. Rather, I interpreted it that Dumbledore didn’t want to incidentally get data about any other thoughts, he just wanted to look for signs of prior tampering. In that limited context, he didn’t want Harry to think about anything that wasn’t Dumbledore’s business. A skilled legilimens if they are trying might be able to still get more out of that situation.
But Quirrell was also there, and presumptively allied with Lucius and against Albus.
If Albus read Harry in front of Quirrell without doing something to prevent invasive reading being possible in principle then it would have given Quirrell much more ammunition to use in a complicated way. They actually did quibble over the matter, and the fact of the quibble (rather than a bigger deal) directly implies that both Quirrell and Albus had precise models of what was possible with legilimency under those conditions, and knew each knew, and knew what could be safely done and safely accused, and didn’t bother to argue about bigger issues, where they mutually understood, and understood that each understood, and understood that Harry could verify, that the distraction had been sufficient to make it impossible for Albus to have engaged in profound impropriety.
Or that Quirrell had a precise enough model of Dumbledore that he knew he could only hurt his standing with Harry by accusing Dumbledore of things that Harry could easily learn were out of character enough to be improbable.
If he starts accusing Dumbledore of things he doesn’t himself believe that Dumbledore would do, he could end up being discredited and then looking paranoid rather than wise and experienced.
Dumbledore’s remark that “That was all I looked for” doesn’t sound like something he would say if, while reading Harry, he couldn’t have looked at anything else if he wanted.
I wonder whether the Tootsie Pop reference was a Leaning on the Fourth Wall hint to the readers or if we’re meant to take that as Hermione subconsciously remembering what was going on? (“One hundred and eighty-seven. I tried it once.” is kind of chilling, in that context.)
Or it could’ve been just a meaningless flippant remark, that too.
And 12 minutes per cycle? For the script given in the chapter, I’d peg it at more like 2 to 4.
Edit: Actually, I just though of a way to get an upper bound—the amount of adrenaline the human body can produce in 2-4 minutes is probably pretty sharply limited, right? Mr H&C presumably had to startle Hermione at the end of every cycle, so the physiological reaction would match up to the initial surprise and smooth over any discrepancies. I find it hard to imagine that “a rush of shock and fear hit her like a Stunning Hex over her whole body” more than five or so times without just leaving her burned out completely. (Not that she didn’t seem pretty burned out by the end.)
And she can’t be dead. For she is the bearer of a most marvelous destiny-
Actually I looked up in Wikipedia how many licks it takes to get the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop, and picked a number that seemed commensurate with the human-licker experiments.
The Chilling Implications you point out (how many licks does it take to get to the center of Hermione?) were totally lost on my consciousness until now. I wonder if that subconscious imagery had anything to do with why my brain produced that response from Hermione?
But still, probably not 187.
I’m sure there are other authors on fanfiction.net who could answer this for us.
It’s 34. The rule there is that the answer is always 34.
“187” is a slang term for murder, which comes from the California penal code. Is this a coincidence?
I think you’re misreading the situation. From Hermoine’s point of view, it seems like she’s suddenly getting flooded with adrenaline. The truth is that she’s had the same level of adrenaline in her body and is just being made aware of it. It’s similar to how walking four miles then getting obliviated an hour back would feel like you’ve just gotten teleported and been hit with a jelly legs jinx.
The exact phrasing at the end of the cycle that happened onscreen was:
My interpretation, and maybe I am reading too much into it, is that it was necessary to give her a shock right before the Obliviation, because otherwise the physiological experience would be going from ‘walking calmly down the hallway’ to ‘walking tiredly down the hallway,’ which wouldn’t jive with convincing herself she just reacted very quickly (her wand leaped into her hand).
Also, why else would you reveal your true face to someone just before you Obliviate them and show them a different, equally false appearance? Eliciting the reaction seems to be the obvious motive, and helps get around a weakness of Obliviation—that it only affects the neurological, not the rest of the body (hence Harry’s signaling method of biting his lip).
I assumed that revealing your true face to the person would not ever be remember, so it wouldn’t matter what you did. There’s no reason to bother going into another room or even turning around (and risking them trying to run/hex you) to swap faces if you’re just going to obliviate them anyways. It’s just a result of being weary with the whole process.
These are only dry runs at cracking her password. You practice a dozen times until you succeed, obliviate her and let her settle down, obliviate her so she doesn’t remember the settling down time, then do the successful attempt. The “most glorious destiny” attempt won’t be what she remembers, but rather a seamless polished version after Mr HAC has confirmed it will work.
The final, final version will have her never even suspecting anything suspicious or having discontinuities like spinning around and wands leaping to her hands. Heck, it need not even occur at the same time, but rather a day later so she doesn’t get suspicious of lost time. Or at least, that’s what I would in the same position.
Missed opportunity:
Edit: (Personally, I prefer ”—she felt a momentary sense of disorientation - ”; it seems a little more subtle, but I guess that’s not the effect he’s going for.)
It is more subtle and I do prefer it. The problem is that a substantial fraction of reviewers are still saying they’ve got no idea what’s happening during the ellipses, and I care about that.
Your version is a little too unsubtle, but the fact that people were buying the “last descendant of Merlin thing” had me wondering what it would’ve taken to actually trigger their skepticism.
“For you, my Lady, are the last descendant of Cthulhu—”
“For you alone must stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness—”
“Only you can prevent forest fires—”
No, I get why you changed it, and I certainly wasn’t offering that as any kind of serious suggestion, but… well, maybe it’s elitist of me, but frankly I don’t understand what benefit there is to catering to the lowest common denominator of ffnet readers. I mean, the lowest common denominator of ffnet readers is pretty low. (Boy-Who-Lived Gets Draco Malfoy Pregnant! sorry i suk at sumries lol, dont liek dont read)
On another note:
“For you, my Princess, are of the blood of the dragons—”
“You have the ability to overcome great fear—”
“By your powers combined, I am—”
“Yer a wizard, Hermione—”
Raising the sanity waterline and all that.
I agree. It was so obvious to me that Hermione was being Obliviated that when I read the instruction at the start of the next chapter I went back to see what I could be missing. It didn’t occur to me that peope might not be getting it. And that was when it had ellipses.
I’m one of the people who was confused by the Merlin thing and said as such in my review that I wasn’t sure if it was lying or not. In that version, the Obliviation was a lot less obvious. My initial reading was that the entity in question was trying to appear (probably untruthfully) to have been testing Hermione previously and was now ready to reveal itself in its true, nice form. It even occurred to me that it might even have been its actual form with it finally happy that it could appear as a nice being rather than as some terrible mystery. I was in particular thinking of the part in the Chronicles of Prydain where the companions are shocked to find out that the nasty looking hags true form might actually be beautiful young women. In that text they call it out explicitly.
Still, the switch to the repeated … made it really clear what was going on in a really blunt, squicktastic fashion. I have to agree with pedanterrific that you may want to be careful not to play to the lowest common denominator of ff.
I would really like if it included this. If you did go with pedanterrific’s suggestion this might also help reduce the squicktastic aspect of the repeated memory erasure. Actually, the juxtaposition might make it more squick; I’m not sure.
(In hindsight, Giles felt it was a little embarrassing, how obvious the solution was.
After all, what teenage girl doesn’t want to feel special?)
Euurghh the more I think about this the worse it gets
Sure Thing.
Oh! Ives! I love Ives. I spent a whole winter reading him once. I was so excited after ten pages that I went out and bought everything else he wrote.
(Bell rings.)
“You win” seems appropriate.
I think so. Eliezer needs to revise his chapter again.
I thought the Tootsie Pop bit was just a reference to this.
Yeah, I discovered that when researching HPMOR.
I’d describe the “tootsie pop” response as contemptuous rather than inane.