Ringmione seems to be the most popular hypothesis at the moment. It strikes me as extremely careless a plan for Harry to attempt; recall Quirrell’s comments after the battle with the transfigured armor, and the first battle where passing out ended the transfiguration on the marshmallow he was practicing with.
However, I took “Harry’s parents come to Hogwarts” as a completely insane move that Dumbledore/Macgonnagle would be highly unlikely to pull, and yet the elder wizards thought rather differently from me and did it anyway. I still think using the ring involves Harry assigning way too little cleverness to Dumbledore, but in light of the ordeal with his parents I’ll give it a little more probability weight.
(Note also that Harry did something under the covers when Flitwick showed up.)
I took “Harry’s parents come to Hogwarts” as a completely insane move
Hum, well, if you think like a general wanting to win a war, yes. If you think as a teacher preoccupied about a 11-yo boy’s mental health after he literally saw his best friend bleeding to death in his arms, fetching the boy’s parents feel like the thing to do. And my own mental model of McGonagall is more that of a teacher preoccupied with a child’s mental well-being than of a general.
McGonagall is upgrading herself and questioning her previous stances, but still, she seems like the only one who actually cares for a Harry as a child in distress, nearly as much as she cares about the war.
Harry will already lose a finger if anyone finite’s his ring. He practiced with the marshmallow because the rapid expansion of the rock would tear off his finger.
Ringmione isn’t much more of a personal risk to him.
This is a world where there are potions that can regrow bones in a single night. I think it wouldn’t matter that much to Harry if he did lose his finger.
He’d sustained that Transfiguration for seventeen days, and would now need to start over.
Could’ve been worse. He could’ve done this fourteen days later, after Professor McGonagall had approved him to Transfigure his father’s rock. That was one very good lesson to learn the easy way.
Note to self: Always remove ring from finger before completely exhausting magic.
This implies to me that that his finger would’ve gotten wrecked if that was a rock. Remember, finite on the rock blew out both the front and back of the troll’s head. It wasn’t just expanding in a confined spot; it expanded fast enough to blow out both sides. Explosive de-transfiguration. Certainly enough to tear off a 10 year old’s finger.
If Ringmione is true, then I would assign over 50% probability to Dumbledore having noticed it and not called out Harry on it, in the same way that Dumbledore appeared to have noticed Harry in Azkaban and chose to not reveal it. I suspect Dumbledore is still just fighting the War, and believes that Harry is the key to defeating Voldemort and/or actually is Voldemort, and so Dumbledore did not reveal Ringmione because he believes Harry is trying to do the right thing and revealing Ringmione would cause a disastrous confrontation.
Given that all of Dumbledore’s subsequent actions, including some pretty drastic decisions, were made on the assumption that Voldemort had returned, based solely on the evidence of the Azkaban break-in, this seems unlikely.
He even told Bones that he had only given each cell a quick examination due to the sheer number he had to look through, which is an unnecessary detail in-universe, but out-of-universe explains to the reader how he could have overlooked Harry’s concealment.
ETA (this does mean “edited to add”, right?): If Dumbledore was already working on the assumption that Harry was involved in the breakout, he would not have been so surprised that retrieving him from Mary’s Place early would cause a paradox.
I have had felt for a while now that Dumbledore knows a lot more than he says. I’d put at least 55% chance on him knowing Harry was involved. What I don’t get is why he says nothing and goes along with it. Even for Harry freeing Bella is more than youthful high spirits.
What’s the strong evidence you have that lets you put it at at least 55% in spite of seeing no reason for Dumbledore to say nothing and go along with it?
It’s not completely any one thing, rather it’s a combination of many things
In Azkaban, Dumbledore walks through and checks every unit. Bella remarks afterward that it was Dumbledore doing the check. That means he was close enough for her to identify him. She was not in great shape at the time and had almost no magic left. He was the most powerful wizard in several centuries doing an active search. It seems very unlikely he didn’t notice everyone in the room. So with no tricks or deductions, I think there’s a chance Dumbledore finds out right here, and we see some hints that he did.
Returning from his search Dumbledore remarks that a prisoner had the same magic as a first year. As a Hogwarts prof, he knows very well how much magic a first year has.
Returning from the search Dumbledore changes tune from “Bella must not leave alive” to “let us not be the first to use deadly curses”. (Ostensibly because they didn’t kill Barry)
But if Dumbledore didn’t find Harry with his search, there are still various clues out there. And Dumbledore is the most powerful wizard in the world, in a world where power comes from solving mysteries, remembering details, and piecing together clues.
He knows that the individual in question didn’t kill Barry
Dumbledore checks and discovers that the intruder has a patronus that hides him from dementors in a way never before seen, a week after having watched Harry invent such a charm.
When the intruder dismisses the patronus, the intruder shows up to the dementors but Bella remains hidden. Hence there is a second way to hide. Dumbledore has given Harry the true cloak of invisibility.
The dementors later refuse to cooperate as if they have been threatened / commanded. Later in the story, Harry scares / commands a dementor in Dumbledore’s presence.
The intruder leaves Azkaban on a rocket powered broom!!!!
The broom in question is nonstandard with two seats. Later in the story Harry asks that he and all his friends be given multi seat brooms.
It turns out the rocket was transfigured out of ice to protect people breathing the smoke. (Note we don’t see Dumbledore get this detail on screen, but it’s fair to assume intelligence sharing given other scenes)
The breakout happened when Harry was out of Hogwarts.
Checking on Harry before the breakout would cause a paradox.
The night after the breakout, Harry has an emotional breakdown and flips out on Dumbledore over how terrible conditions are in Azkaban and how much of a jerk Dumbledore is for going there and doing nothing about it.
Dumbledore may act crazy, but he is not actually an idiot. From Quirrell “”Mr. Potter, one of the requisites for becoming a powerful wizard is an excellent memory. The key to a puzzle is often something you read twenty years ago in an old scroll, or a peculiar ring you saw on the finger of a man you met only once.” Again, Dumbledore is the most powerful wizard in the world; he doesn’t realistically fail to put the above together.
Its 55% and not higher because 1) I can’t see exactly why Dumbledore acts like he doesn’t know if he knows. 2) some odds that Dumbledore’s mind is clouded by the hand of god.
Dumbledore clearly suspects Harry might be behind Azkaban. In fact, he says as much. However he doesn’t “know”. He also suspects it might be Voldemort. (He probably hasn’t considered the possibilities that it was Harry and Voldemort working together.)
Dumbledore clearly suspects Harry might be behind Azkaban. In fact, he says as much. However he doesn’t “know”.
Dumbledore certainly doesn’t “say” that he knows. But as readers we are not shown his internal thoughts (in contrast to Harry, Hermione, Mcgonagall, and many others). Dumbledore’s thoughts have been deliberately made opqaue to readers. So we can’t definitively say that he knows or doesn’t know something. We can only infer which is more likely given other known facts.
I will note on a meta level though, that one possible reason not to show a character’s thoughts is that they are thinking and saying different things.
… possible motivations: long-distance time travel, wanting to remain not-an-enemy of Harry so he can still exercise some influence on him (note: right from the start, he’s the one who got the original HE IS COMING prophecy, right when a hypercompetent and extremely unexpected Harry Potter has arrived), wanting to figure out Harry’s motives first.
And there’s a clue that I should remember it when I twitch slightly. When Harry was worried about whether he’d wrecked his relationship with his parents, I wondered whether that actually made sense.
Remember that Harry only needed to keep Hermione in the ring until after his stuff was searched; it strikes me as improbable that Dumbledore will demand to search the gem again. (Of course, having Hermione’s body magically appear would still be a bit awkward, but the losing-a-finger part was the only one which I would expect to truly scare Harry.)
I still don’t think the ring theory is correct, though. Harry has no reason to bring Hermione’s body with him to the meeting; at best, it is an unnecessary risk. There’s a Time-Turner theory elsewhere in the thread that seems far more elegant to me.
If Dumbledore asks his Patronus to find Hermione, and it flies over to Harry’s ring, that would be awkward. Hiding a body in Hogwarts doesn’t strike me as particularly difficult, even without transfiguration. I don’t see why he would have to keep it among his personal possessions.
Almost anywhere where someone won’t be deliberately looking for a transfigured item or where they won’t accidentally pick it up. You can’t search the school in general for transfigured items, it would take too long. He could simply put transfigured corpsemione into any random book in the library or hand the item to someone to hold for him for a while or put her under someone’s bed or anywhere as long as he can plausible retrieve her before his transfiguration wears off.
It is notoriously difficult to trail someone who is wearing the True Cloak of Invisibility, with added anti-detection charms because apparently the Deathly Hallow just wasn’t enough.
It wouldn’t—but it would reduce Harry’s risk of losing a finger to a Finite Incantatem in combat. And Harry does take pains to physically separate the ring from the stone before Dumbledore inspects the stone:
Slowly, Harry did so, removing the gem and setting the ring off to the other side of the desk.
Unless that’s just an intended second red herring, to make Dumbledore feel even worse about mistrusting Harry a second time. But just like Harry, Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape err in completely distrusting the wards when they say the Defense Professor killed Hermione, we can’t treat possibly falsified evidence as anti-evidence, this has to shift our belief at least a little bit toward the Ringmione hypothesis.
The ring is also a significantly less suspect place to hide Hermione than the stone, because transfiguring something into a ring that you wear goes directly contrary to McGonagall’s safety advice. Partial transfiguration provides a way around the safety issue, and Dumbledore and McGonagall are unused to thinking about things that can be done with partial transfiguration, so the idea is less likely to occur to them.
I’m about 50% confident that Hermione is in the ring.
(By the way, the wards’ identification of Hermione’s killer as the Defense Professor is strong evidence for the theory that the Defense Professor was carrying some nasties standing in his pocket when Dumbledore drew a circle around Quirrel to mark the Defense Professor to Hogwarts’s wards.)
Then the wards should be saying now that the Defense Professor is dead?
On a side note, the actual skill that HPMOR is teaching its readers seems to be not science but rather Talmudism, the skill of finding clever interpretations to some words written in a book. It would be cool to see a fanfic that tried to teach science by similar incentives.
On a side note, the actual skill that HPMOR is teaching its readers seems to be not science but rather Talmudism, the skill of finding clever interpretations to some words written in a book. It would be cool to see a fanfic that tried to teach science by similar incentives.
This seems to be my impression as well, which is somewhat unfortunate. (This is one of the reasons I try to avoid speculation in my commentaries, though it makes its way in from time to time.)
I think this is the case because there’s an author intending the story. The correct way to predict the story is to predict the human writing the story, which is not the correct way to predict the fabric of reality. The story is also (mostly) non-interactive. Identifying an experimental intervention which could have a high information impact, while the backbone of science, is inaccessible to readers. Instead, observational data must be interpreted, which makes it difficult to distinguish between interpretations that agree with the existing evidence but disagree on other features.
And so you could have a game that teaches science (in some ways, Nethack does this, and similar games are easy to imagine), but I don’t think you can have a fanfic which does.
Then the wards should be saying now that the Defense Professor is dead?
I hadn’t thought of that. Some possible explanations:
1) Quirrel didn’t actually use that trick.
2) The wards don’t report the deaths of faculty, only students.
3) As long as any part of “Defense Professor” has is alive, the wards don’t register its death.
4) The wards did register the Defense Professor’s death, but either
4a) Dumbledore didn’t notice the extra death report, since he was preoccupied with a student’s death, and didn’t look it up afterwards
Or
4b) Dumbledore knows about it, and (correctly) assumes that the same glitch that attributed the troll’s actions to the Defense Professor attributed the troll’s death to the Defense Professor.
This may not be entirely fair to the Talmud, which at least sometimes grounds out into “what rule for living should we deduce from the clues in the text?”.
Losing a finger shouldn’t happen. A human is a torus. Depending on which way he puts the ring on, he’d just wind up with his finger in her mouth, or otherwise.
So...you’re saying that transfigurations have to be homeomorphisms? You couldn’t transform the toroid Hermione into some sort of Klein Bottle, even if you really, really wanted to?
He’s saying that there should be less danger of snapping stuff off due to sudden topological changes when there’s holes going through both the source and target form (and damn, got there before me).
As for control, it seems to me like the orientation is even intuitively clear in this instance once you actually think about the topological similarities. What with mental images being rather important with magic, it’s likely to be doable. (And for getting rid of the mental image later, there’s Obliviate!)
Is there a reason to think people have control over what parts of the input to transfiguration become what parts of the output? Most people just think whole input object to whole output object. Harry has figured out how to take only a “partial object” as input, but choosing what parts end up where sounds much more complex.
Misdirecting Flitwick by pretending that he’s transfigured a whole ring instead of a partial one? But it would be much less suspicious just to get out of bed, given that what he’d want to hide would be that the ring was transfigured at all.
The more leads Dumbledore pursues that turn out to be false, the less likely it will seem that any future lead is true.
Kind of like how “Santa Clause” told Harry that Dumbledore would take away his cloak, so that when Dumbledore didn’t, Harry trusted him more than before the suspicion.
Of course, he could have removed the gem so that it wouldn’t damage the ring when it was transfigured back, and put it on the other side of the desk so that when the rock “fell with a loud crack upon the Headmaster’s desk” it wouldn’t smash the ring.
Ringmione seems to be the most popular hypothesis at the moment. It strikes me as extremely careless a plan for Harry to attempt; recall Quirrell’s comments after the battle with the transfigured armor, and the first battle where passing out ended the transfiguration on the marshmallow he was practicing with.
However, I took “Harry’s parents come to Hogwarts” as a completely insane move that Dumbledore/Macgonnagle would be highly unlikely to pull, and yet the elder wizards thought rather differently from me and did it anyway. I still think using the ring involves Harry assigning way too little cleverness to Dumbledore, but in light of the ordeal with his parents I’ll give it a little more probability weight.
(Note also that Harry did something under the covers when Flitwick showed up.)
Hum, well, if you think like a general wanting to win a war, yes. If you think as a teacher preoccupied about a 11-yo boy’s mental health after he literally saw his best friend bleeding to death in his arms, fetching the boy’s parents feel like the thing to do. And my own mental model of McGonagall is more that of a teacher preoccupied with a child’s mental well-being than of a general.
McGonagall is upgrading herself and questioning her previous stances, but still, she seems like the only one who actually cares for a Harry as a child in distress, nearly as much as she cares about the war.
Harry will already lose a finger if anyone finite’s his ring. He practiced with the marshmallow because the rapid expansion of the rock would tear off his finger.
Ringmione isn’t much more of a personal risk to him.
This is a world where there are potions that can regrow bones in a single night. I think it wouldn’t matter that much to Harry if he did lose his finger.
Cannon!harry does NOT like skele grow. I don’t expect Rational!Harry would like it any more, even if he wouldn’t complain about it to anyone.
No, but Hermione’s life is on the line—he’d bite off his own fingers to save her.
No, the rock might crush his finger, or cause other problems, but it would push his hand out of the way, while with a ring, the center would close.
ch 30
This implies to me that that his finger would’ve gotten wrecked if that was a rock. Remember, finite on the rock blew out both the front and back of the troll’s head. It wasn’t just expanding in a confined spot; it expanded fast enough to blow out both sides. Explosive de-transfiguration. Certainly enough to tear off a 10 year old’s finger.
If Ringmione is true, then I would assign over 50% probability to Dumbledore having noticed it and not called out Harry on it, in the same way that Dumbledore appeared to have noticed Harry in Azkaban and chose to not reveal it. I suspect Dumbledore is still just fighting the War, and believes that Harry is the key to defeating Voldemort and/or actually is Voldemort, and so Dumbledore did not reveal Ringmione because he believes Harry is trying to do the right thing and revealing Ringmione would cause a disastrous confrontation.
Given that all of Dumbledore’s subsequent actions, including some pretty drastic decisions, were made on the assumption that Voldemort had returned, based solely on the evidence of the Azkaban break-in, this seems unlikely.
He even told Bones that he had only given each cell a quick examination due to the sheer number he had to look through, which is an unnecessary detail in-universe, but out-of-universe explains to the reader how he could have overlooked Harry’s concealment.
ETA (this does mean “edited to add”, right?): If Dumbledore was already working on the assumption that Harry was involved in the breakout, he would not have been so surprised that retrieving him from Mary’s Place early would cause a paradox.
I have had felt for a while now that Dumbledore knows a lot more than he says. I’d put at least 55% chance on him knowing Harry was involved. What I don’t get is why he says nothing and goes along with it. Even for Harry freeing Bella is more than youthful high spirits.
What’s the strong evidence you have that lets you put it at at least 55% in spite of seeing no reason for Dumbledore to say nothing and go along with it?
It’s not completely any one thing, rather it’s a combination of many things
In Azkaban, Dumbledore walks through and checks every unit. Bella remarks afterward that it was Dumbledore doing the check. That means he was close enough for her to identify him. She was not in great shape at the time and had almost no magic left. He was the most powerful wizard in several centuries doing an active search. It seems very unlikely he didn’t notice everyone in the room. So with no tricks or deductions, I think there’s a chance Dumbledore finds out right here, and we see some hints that he did.
Returning from his search Dumbledore remarks that a prisoner had the same magic as a first year. As a Hogwarts prof, he knows very well how much magic a first year has.
Returning from the search Dumbledore changes tune from “Bella must not leave alive” to “let us not be the first to use deadly curses”. (Ostensibly because they didn’t kill Barry)
But if Dumbledore didn’t find Harry with his search, there are still various clues out there. And Dumbledore is the most powerful wizard in the world, in a world where power comes from solving mysteries, remembering details, and piecing together clues.
He knows that the individual in question didn’t kill Barry
Dumbledore checks and discovers that the intruder has a patronus that hides him from dementors in a way never before seen, a week after having watched Harry invent such a charm.
When the intruder dismisses the patronus, the intruder shows up to the dementors but Bella remains hidden. Hence there is a second way to hide. Dumbledore has given Harry the true cloak of invisibility.
The dementors later refuse to cooperate as if they have been threatened / commanded. Later in the story, Harry scares / commands a dementor in Dumbledore’s presence.
The intruder leaves Azkaban on a rocket powered broom!!!!
The broom in question is nonstandard with two seats. Later in the story Harry asks that he and all his friends be given multi seat brooms.
It turns out the rocket was transfigured out of ice to protect people breathing the smoke. (Note we don’t see Dumbledore get this detail on screen, but it’s fair to assume intelligence sharing given other scenes)
The breakout happened when Harry was out of Hogwarts.
Checking on Harry before the breakout would cause a paradox.
The night after the breakout, Harry has an emotional breakdown and flips out on Dumbledore over how terrible conditions are in Azkaban and how much of a jerk Dumbledore is for going there and doing nothing about it.
Dumbledore may act crazy, but he is not actually an idiot. From Quirrell “”Mr. Potter, one of the requisites for becoming a powerful wizard is an excellent memory. The key to a puzzle is often something you read twenty years ago in an old scroll, or a peculiar ring you saw on the finger of a man you met only once.” Again, Dumbledore is the most powerful wizard in the world; he doesn’t realistically fail to put the above together.
Its 55% and not higher because 1) I can’t see exactly why Dumbledore acts like he doesn’t know if he knows. 2) some odds that Dumbledore’s mind is clouded by the hand of god.
Dumbledore clearly suspects Harry might be behind Azkaban. In fact, he says as much. However he doesn’t “know”. He also suspects it might be Voldemort. (He probably hasn’t considered the possibilities that it was Harry and Voldemort working together.)
Dumbledore certainly doesn’t “say” that he knows. But as readers we are not shown his internal thoughts (in contrast to Harry, Hermione, Mcgonagall, and many others). Dumbledore’s thoughts have been deliberately made opqaue to readers. So we can’t definitively say that he knows or doesn’t know something. We can only infer which is more likely given other known facts.
I will note on a meta level though, that one possible reason not to show a character’s thoughts is that they are thinking and saying different things.
...
Huh.
This… changes things.
That… is interesting. Very interesting.
… possible motivations: long-distance time travel, wanting to remain not-an-enemy of Harry so he can still exercise some influence on him (note: right from the start, he’s the one who got the original HE IS COMING prophecy, right when a hypercompetent and extremely unexpected Harry Potter has arrived), wanting to figure out Harry’s motives first.
Really?
I did too at first, but when Harry reads the follow-up letter from his father we see that it turned out for the best.
And there’s a clue that I should remember it when I twitch slightly. When Harry was worried about whether he’d wrecked his relationship with his parents, I wondered whether that actually made sense.
Remember that Harry only needed to keep Hermione in the ring until after his stuff was searched; it strikes me as improbable that Dumbledore will demand to search the gem again. (Of course, having Hermione’s body magically appear would still be a bit awkward, but the losing-a-finger part was the only one which I would expect to truly scare Harry.)
I still don’t think the ring theory is correct, though. Harry has no reason to bring Hermione’s body with him to the meeting; at best, it is an unnecessary risk. There’s a Time-Turner theory elsewhere in the thread that seems far more elegant to me.
If Dumbledore asks his Patronus to find Hermione, and it flies over to Harry’s ring, that would be awkward. Hiding a body in Hogwarts doesn’t strike me as particularly difficult, even without transfiguration. I don’t see why he would have to keep it among his personal possessions.
I don’t think Patronus works with dead bodies though. Whenever Harry casts it, it seems like “life force” or whatever is pretty important
What location is safe to leave the transfigured Hermione? Hogwarts is not a safe place.
Almost anywhere where someone won’t be deliberately looking for a transfigured item or where they won’t accidentally pick it up. You can’t search the school in general for transfigured items, it would take too long. He could simply put transfigured corpsemione into any random book in the library or hand the item to someone to hold for him for a while or put her under someone’s bed or anywhere as long as he can plausible retrieve her before his transfiguration wears off.
Of course, he will have problems once someone starts trailing him.
It is notoriously difficult to trail someone who is wearing the True Cloak of Invisibility, with added anti-detection charms because apparently the Deathly Hallow just wasn’t enough.
I read that as being an excuse for the differences between Harry’s Cloak and the one Neville’s familiar with.
Maybe only part of the ring is Hermione?
How would that help if Dumbledore Finite the ring? The dispelling doesn’t seem that specific.
It wouldn’t—but it would reduce Harry’s risk of losing a finger to a Finite Incantatem in combat. And Harry does take pains to physically separate the ring from the stone before Dumbledore inspects the stone:
Unless that’s just an intended second red herring, to make Dumbledore feel even worse about mistrusting Harry a second time. But just like Harry, Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape err in completely distrusting the wards when they say the Defense Professor killed Hermione, we can’t treat possibly falsified evidence as anti-evidence, this has to shift our belief at least a little bit toward the Ringmione hypothesis.
The ring is also a significantly less suspect place to hide Hermione than the stone, because transfiguring something into a ring that you wear goes directly contrary to McGonagall’s safety advice. Partial transfiguration provides a way around the safety issue, and Dumbledore and McGonagall are unused to thinking about things that can be done with partial transfiguration, so the idea is less likely to occur to them.
I’m about 50% confident that Hermione is in the ring.
(By the way, the wards’ identification of Hermione’s killer as the Defense Professor is strong evidence for the theory that the Defense Professor was carrying some nasties standing in his pocket when Dumbledore drew a circle around Quirrel to mark the Defense Professor to Hogwarts’s wards.)
Then the wards should be saying now that the Defense Professor is dead?
On a side note, the actual skill that HPMOR is teaching its readers seems to be not science but rather Talmudism, the skill of finding clever interpretations to some words written in a book. It would be cool to see a fanfic that tried to teach science by similar incentives.
This seems to be my impression as well, which is somewhat unfortunate. (This is one of the reasons I try to avoid speculation in my commentaries, though it makes its way in from time to time.)
I think this is the case because there’s an author intending the story. The correct way to predict the story is to predict the human writing the story, which is not the correct way to predict the fabric of reality. The story is also (mostly) non-interactive. Identifying an experimental intervention which could have a high information impact, while the backbone of science, is inaccessible to readers. Instead, observational data must be interpreted, which makes it difficult to distinguish between interpretations that agree with the existing evidence but disagree on other features.
And so you could have a game that teaches science (in some ways, Nethack does this, and similar games are easy to imagine), but I don’t think you can have a fanfic which does.
Maybe you could have an mspaintadventure that teaches science.
For some reason that reminded me of the beautiful MSPA wizardfic. Not that it’s scientific or anything!
I hadn’t thought of that. Some possible explanations:
1) Quirrel didn’t actually use that trick.
2) The wards don’t report the deaths of faculty, only students.
3) As long as any part of “Defense Professor” has is alive, the wards don’t register its death.
4) The wards did register the Defense Professor’s death, but either
4a) Dumbledore didn’t notice the extra death report, since he was preoccupied with a student’s death, and didn’t look it up afterwards
Or
4b) Dumbledore knows about it, and (correctly) assumes that the same glitch that attributed the troll’s actions to the Defense Professor attributed the troll’s death to the Defense Professor.
This may not be entirely fair to the Talmud, which at least sometimes grounds out into “what rule for living should we deduce from the clues in the text?”.
Losing a finger shouldn’t happen. A human is a torus. Depending on which way he puts the ring on, he’d just wind up with his finger in her mouth, or otherwise.
So...you’re saying that transfigurations have to be homeomorphisms? You couldn’t transform the toroid Hermione into some sort of Klein Bottle, even if you really, really wanted to?
He’s saying that there should be less danger of snapping stuff off due to sudden topological changes when there’s holes going through both the source and target form (and damn, got there before me).
As for control, it seems to me like the orientation is even intuitively clear in this instance once you actually think about the topological similarities. What with mental images being rather important with magic, it’s likely to be doable. (And for getting rid of the mental image later, there’s Obliviate!)
Is there a reason to think people have control over what parts of the input to transfiguration become what parts of the output? Most people just think whole input object to whole output object. Harry has figured out how to take only a “partial object” as input, but choosing what parts end up where sounds much more complex.
A desk is not a torus.
But then what was he doing under the covers?
Misdirection?
Although that is evidence against Ringmione.
Misdirecting Flitwick by pretending that he’s transfigured a whole ring instead of a partial one? But it would be much less suspicious just to get out of bed, given that what he’d want to hide would be that the ring was transfigured at all.
I was thinking, to leave a false clue that Hermione’s body was hidden either in the bed or on his person.
Except he wants to give the impression that he doesn’t know anything about the body’s disappearance and it’s entirely someone else’s work.
The more leads Dumbledore pursues that turn out to be false, the less likely it will seem that any future lead is true.
Kind of like how “Santa Clause” told Harry that Dumbledore would take away his cloak, so that when Dumbledore didn’t, Harry trusted him more than before the suspicion.
Interesting point.
Of course, he could have removed the gem so that it wouldn’t damage the ring when it was transfigured back, and put it on the other side of the desk so that when the rock “fell with a loud crack upon the Headmaster’s desk” it wouldn’t smash the ring.
But yours is still possible as well.