Harry can go months without using his dark side. Quirrel on the other hand goes into zombie mode every day. Perhaps zombie mode is what’s left of the original Quirrel.
avichapman
Karma: 266
Are Cognitive Load and Willpower drawn from the same pool?
Your idea caused me to connect two dots. Perenelle and Alissa Cornfoot. They are both students who are attracted to badass professors. On one level, the example Miss Cornfoot provides plausability for Prenelle’s interest. On a more conspiracy-theory-y level, Perenelle is still hanging around near the stone?
I just had another thought in relation to Harry’s second transfigured object. I had thought as Quirrel did that Harry’s second transfigured object was Hermione’s body. (Though Harry successfullly fooled Quirrel into thinking the second object was the steel ring. It wan’t, but we know he has something because of the mention of ‘the other one’ in Chapter 104.)
But just after Hermione’s body dissappeared, they throroughly searched Harry’s person and stuff for transfigured objects and finite incantatem-ed the lot. Perhaps Harry’s second transfigured object is not Hermione, but something aquired more recently? I’m thinking of Cedric. Can a living body be transformed into something solid like a rock without deleterious effects?
Good idea. Not enough time.
I just made a mental connection—probably a stupid one. The pouch’s capacity was recently expanded and Cedric has yet to make an appearence...
I noticed that too. It’s often a sign of obliviation. My secondary hypothesis is that it was a mistake and will be corrected in a later update.
We do know that devil’s snare will play a part.
“It’s not as if he wants to keep the students out, oh no, they need to go in and get stuck in my Devil’s Snare!”
The only answer that doesn’t feel like a stretch is that the O is a reward for the phenominal progress made during the year.
Quirrel had a very low opinion of science and didn’t seem to appreciate the power it confers until the most recent chapter—which doesn’t gel well with what we know of Harry. Of course, future-harry could be lying about that when interacting with his past self, but that would require a complexity penalty against the hypothesis.
I don’t think that would bother me. If the resulting person has all of my memories and personality and everything else that I consider important about myself and the original copy was destroyed painlessly it would make no difference.
But then again, I’m a programmer. I copy data structures and destroy the originals all the time and yet treat them as one and the same.
An increase in the sense of doom? What if Quirrel can possess many bodies at once. He created Voldi to have a villain to fight back in the olden days and then retired Voldi when he got sick of it. He periodically takes over other people’s bodies for his own ends, sometimes even when he’s not in his ‘zombie mode’. Perhaps the variability in the sense of doom is correlated with his extra-body activities. When he takes over the body of a dead centaur, you get an increase in the sense of doom. The fact that he’s not in ‘zombie mode’ at the same time as possessing the centaur might makes things even worse.
This would mean of course that Voldimort isn’t Quirrel—Quirrel is Voldimort. Quirrel isn’t out and out evil the way Voldi is. He simply invented a larger than life character so that he can play the good guy. Being possessed of normal human emotions, his fondness for Harry could be real.
Good point about the light hours thing. It sort of kills the hypothesis.
I agree with drethelin that the 6 hour mark doesn’t have to correspond with Quirrel’s last day of school. However, in the last story arc, Quirrel talks like his time limit is only a short time away, perhaps only a month. Of course, he could be talking about his inevitable firing from the defense professor position.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that Quirrel went away to the plaque when he was in zombie mode, nor to suggest that it had become a Horcrux. Instead, what I am suggesting is that Quirrel is always in the plaque and is operating his body by remote control. If it takes some effort to do so, he might let the body go slack when he doesn’t need to be doing anything.
As for the horcrux, this could always be a different, but perhaps related, spell.
I was re-listening to the podcast of Chapter 20 (Bayes’s Theorem) when I was struck by an idea. It builds on another idea I heard in this same forum. The original idea was that Quirrel had Horcruxed the Pioneer plaque and that, due to the nature of magic, his Horcrux passing beyond a distance of 6 light hours would lead to his death due to a limitation on magic’s ability to affect things more than 6 hours into the past—which would be needed for faster than light communications.
Having now re-listened to that chapter, I’ve picked up some new clues. Harry had made the suggestion that it might be possible to add an entire human mind’s worth of information to the Pioneer plaque by creating a portrait or arranging for a terminally ill person’s ghost to be attached to it before launch. Quirrel of course denied that he had done anything like that through a bit of misdirection. This leads many to speculate that he had Horcruxed the probe, downloading a copy of himself into it for posterity.
I had the idea that perhaps he downloaded himself into the probe and then started to operate his body by remote control. When his body goes limp, it’s because he’s not at the ‘controls’ at that moment. Once the probe passes beyond 6 light hours, it will become impossible for him to continue to tele-operate his body any longer and he will be trapped on the probe for the rest of its flight time. I believe he is revealing an important clue in the following paragraph:
“Sometimes,” Professor Quirrell said in a voice so quiet it almost wasn’t there, “when this flawed world seems unusually hateful, I wonder whether there might be some other place, far away, where I should have been. I cannot seem to imagine what that place might be, and if I can’t even imagine it then how can I believe it exists? And yet the universe is so very, very wide, and perhaps it might exist anyway? But the stars are so very, very far away. It would take a long, long time to get there, even if I knew the way. And I wonder what I would dream about, if I slept for a long, long time...”
Is he contemplating the eons that await him while the probe moves on to ‘some other place’? Does he plan to put his mind on hold, to sleep, for most of that flight time?
Here’s my first attempt. It was meant to be about confirmation bias. On rereading it, it seems more like it’s about finding the positives in bleak situations. I guess that’s important, too.
Nothing much happened this week, you tell your mum at week’s end. Because ‘nothing’ never gets mentioned, when talking to your friend.
Because inside all that nothing, there are things both here and there. If a room is mostly empty, You’ll find a table or a chair.
On Monday you did nothing, except you stubbed your toe.
On Tuesday you did nothing, but it begain to snow.
On Wednesday you did nothing, except you found that money.
On Thursday you did nothing, except you spilled that hunny.
On Friday you did nothing, except you cleaned that fluff.
But now remembering your empty week, do you think of all that stuff?
So telling your friend about that room, Or your mum about your week. Now that room is full of stuff. Your week is not so bleak.
If it’s true that intelligence correlates with height, I wonder if it is because childhood nutrition affects height? Perhaps childhood nutrition also affects brain development. Interesting.
Could this constraint apply in other ways? Suppose magic is the result of something that responds to the wishes of witches, as suggested at one point. If that something is Earth-based, perhaps a wizard on an outbound spacecraft would stop being able to do magic when he reaches 6 light-hours out. An interesting experiment.
Harry might be able to realistically do an experiment similar to this as a first year if there is a magic spell that lets you communicate with an object. He could use a spell to accelerate that object to a very high speed and then check in on it as it approaches the 6 light-hour point.
I hadn’t realised I could. I’ve just done so. I didn’t write any kind of note to that effect. Is one needed for a spelling edit?
And the clock is ticking. If Dumbledoor is aware of the plot to kill hundreds of students, the folks inside the box have some leverage.