Ah well push the date back then. He dies July 1st. Point being I don’t think McGonagall would hide the stone in the school. I actually had a scene in my head of her getting a floo call from Flamel asking for the Gringotts key Dumbledore kept in his office so he could go get his stone.

 

Why wouldn't she? She doesen't want Voldemort to return either, at Hogwarts is clearly the safest place to put it, as just has been shown that the next best place isn't good enough.

 

Hogwarts is only the safest place because that's where Dumbledore is.

 

Quirrel could barely get past the protection Hagrid put in place, and the mirror of erised would still be at Hogwarts, so Dumbledores presence wouldn't make much difference to the safety of the stone.

 

Wasn't the Mirror Dumbledore's protection? That likely means he either thought of it, or enchanted it, or (probably) both. It seems unlikely that it would happen otherwise - if Flamel would house it there at all.

 

Rowling revealed that Dumbledore found it at Hogwarts, in the Room of Requirement, I'd assume it was already found at this point.

 

I didn't say he created it. I said he thought of it - as a means of protecting the stone, and enchanted it to do so.

 

Plot bunny: On the eve of her death Merope Gaunt encounters a mysterious stranger


Merope clutched her son to her chest. She was weak and had lost a lot of blood.

Wool’s Orphanage read the sign up ahead.

She was beginning to feel light-headed. Only meters left, and her son, her precious Tom could survive.

There was a loud crack, and an aristocratic man with bright green eyes, messy black hair and a lightning bolt scar on his forehead stood in her path. He was pointing a wand at her son.

Merope froze. “Please”, she begged the man, “not Tom, not Tom”

“Stand aside you foolish girl”, said the man in a cold voice.

Merope began to sob, there was nothing she could do, he was clearly a wizard and she was little more than a Squib. She clutched Tom to her chest, tears streaking down her face.

“AVADA KEDAVRA”, the man yelled and she knew no more.

Harry walked towards the infant, a cruel smirk on his face. “So Voldemort”, Harry spat, “your reign of terror is over before it even began”.

“AVADA KEDAVRA” Harry yelled. Against all odds, the bolt was deflected. An explosion tore through Harry and painted the front of Wool’s Orphanage in a splatter of gore.

Tom Riddle began to wail in the arms of his dead mother.

 

I was discussing this with @Steelbadger yesterday.

About 50 years after the battle of Hogwarts, the school is closed down.

It started with a few small incidents, people going missing, strange accidents and the like. Eventually it gets so bad that they have no option other than closure.

Between the Horcruxes and the Hallows, Hogwarts developed a curse, something black and unnatural.

A team of cursebreakers have to interview Harry Potter and see if he can shed some light.

 

"Strange deaths and people going missing? Hasn't Hogwarts always been like that? Sounds like the students just need to up their game and slay a basilisk or something."

 

The idea is that it eventually reaches CoS levels and passes it, forcing the closure.

But yeah, kids these days.

 

Ron at age seventy: "What a bunch of whiny little wankers! Back in my day, Dumbledore just gave us the twinkly-eye and shooed us out of his office to fight death eaters, or drive off dementors or some shite. Have any of you lot even seen a werewolf up close? Thought not. It's a travesty! You little snowflakes wouldn't have lasted thirty seconds under Dumbledore! Great man, Dumbledore, good times..."

A crossover bunny:

Some wackadoo necromancer (possibly Voldemort), trying to improve the formula for creating inferi, accidentally (or on purpose) curses the muggle world so that all new muggle corpses rise as a sort of lesser inferius. The curse is also transmissible by bite.

A couple months later, somewhere in Georgia, a man named Rick Grimes wakes up in an abandoned hospital...

 

The transference via could be linked back to either vampirism or lycanthrope in his research, like he tried to combine elements from other dark curses to improve the inferi process.

 

Not sure if this is the right thread, because it's less a plot bunny and more a mechanics based bunny. A small part of a potential story, not the start to a full one.

Anyway, I was trying to find tricks to make spellcasting swifter, and thought of a few ways. By that, I mean wanded spellcasting, with incantations (even if silent ones). I also decided not to do anything with wand movements or the purely mental parts of casting, as those are kind of a given and overused (though not necessarily a cliche). So, the incantation.

1. Change incantations into other, shorter ones, possibly by changing languages. Say, 'Muffliato' into 'Muffle'.

2. Again, this is about making the incantation shorter, but in a different way: skipping the middle part. 'Protego Diabolica' to 'Proteica' and 'Wingardium Leviosa' becoming 'Winosa' or something like that.

If put into a story, it could be Grindelwald who most used the latter method. (Note: I didn't much like the first Fantastic Beasts film/movie, didn't even make it to the end, so I only have cursory knowledge of what Grindelwald is like in those films). As for the first one, note that I used it with a custom and recently invented spell, not an official one, because the latter have likely been modified and refined for simpler and better use in the course of decades/centuries.

Has anyone else thought of this, and how bad or good do you guys think it is as an idea?

 

Silent casting seems to take care of long incantations in a much cleaner way that smashing together the words does.

 

True, but one still needs to think of the words, and some spells do not lend themselves well to silent casting. Edit: I've always hated long incantations, so 'Wingardium Leviosa' jumps at me. Even being cast at the speed of thought doesn't fully negate the disadvantage of 7+ syllable spells.

 

This seems like some stupid spacebattles shit.

What is the plot to the story you're writing? Voldemort vs Dumbledore in the Ministry during OOTP was great because of the buildup and narrative leading up to it, not because of the way they said their spells.

 

I write this story for one of the DLP writing comps years ago. Not the best execution and only time I wrote a short story.

 

I don't really see the point in this. If you're writing it into a fic, you're going to have spend some space explaining it and thats just not going to be particularly interesting. Not even going into whether you could actually make the logic of it make any sort of sense.

My perspective of silent casting is that it'll be almost instantaneous. You might be thinking the words, but you're thinking at the speed of thought. You think the concept of the words rather than saying the words silently to yourself.

 

Okay, point taken. I'll think of something else to show Grindelwald's mastery of magic.

Give me a bit of time; I'm writing a snippet for it.