This is something I wrote years ago before book 5 came out, and before I'd actually read the books. No one had heard of Horacrux, and I assumed book 7 would reprise Harry's use of the sword of Gryffindor. I wrote this based off of what I'd learned from fanfics, because it was an annoying plot bunny.
I never posted it before because I didn't write HP fics, since I hadn't read the source material.
The phrase "Dueling Snitch" should obviously be changed, I knew it when I wrote it. I just put it in intending to replace it when I thought of something better. I never did. Any suggestions?
The Power He Knows Not Of, Quidditch.
It was very straightforward. You remember in my second year when I was hit by a bludger enchanted by Dobby to go after me to the exclusion of everyone else?
Well, when we got to the point in the DA where we were working on blocking one curse by firing another, I contacted a quidditch supply company about buying a few hundred bludgers to use as moving targets.
Being such an unusual customer, no one had ever ordered hundreds of bludgers without buying a quaffle or snitch before, they wrote back and we entered into a correspondence.
At first, I refused to reveal my use of the items, both because I felt it best to maintain as much secrecy as possible, and because I felt they might be offended over their destruction. But eventually they agreed to keep secret whatever I was using them for, for several years, and I revealed their use as a teaching aid as a moving target.
They'd never considered the possibility before. Instead of being offended, they were intrigued, and considered the possibility of expanding their market once our period of secrecy was at an end. The DA became a combination focus group and research department for the testing, suitability, and design of bludger targets. We passed recommendations and reviews back, and they sent us prototypes.
One of their prototypes was an unsuccessful bludger that was designed to stay from five to twenty feet of the target, always moving, and try to hide behind the target. Apparently programming bludgers to fly around a target is harder than having them fly at someone. But it got me to thinking of the way Dobby modified that bludger in my second year.
The big problem when dueling with spells is that the spells are relatively slow. If I point my wand at someone and shout the command, I have no guarantee that the target will be hit. But if I could point my wand, and tell a bludger to hit that person, the target can't just duck. The bludger would try again. The target would have to destroy the bludger, or continually dodge, and the targeting is effectively instantaneous.
So I went to Dobby with a bludger, and asked him what he could make it do. We settled on two commands: target and return, and Dobby designed a prototype.
It turns out that house elf magic and wizardry magic can both be put on the same item without interfering at all with each other.
Meanwhile, we were experimenting with the companyÆs newest invisible ink bludger. These were much softer than the standard, but had three major differences. They would deactivate for thirty seconds when hit by a variety of simple charms, like a tickle hex, or leg locking charm so the student didn't have to blow them up. When they hit, they left an ink mark that lasted half an hour before fading. And they were invisible.
These proved a royal pain to fight if you didn't have a way to see invisible objects. Casting area effect charms, seeing their movement through smoke and fog, and hearing the sound as they sped through the air were the only way to take them down.
I put in an order for a couple hundred of hard, invisible bludgers. And asked Dobby how long it would take to enchant them. We added a mass-targeting command so I could sweep my wand and target a group, and we added a charm making specially marked people protected.
We decided it was unfair to make Dobby work on an assembly line, so he gathered up a score of other house elves, and they worked together on them during the slack parts of the day.
While I kept a bag of thirty of them, which I could use to test, I had the elves put the rest in a trunk designed to automatically expand inside to hold whatever was needed. When they ran out of supplies, I told Dobby to order more of them in my name, not realizing how many he was turning out.
It seems the elves enjoyed doing something useful during the wee hours of the morning when they had to normally remain unobtrusive; and being able to sit in a circle and talk while they worked on something important was a thrill. The number of elves crept up without my knowing, and with Dobby ordering supplies, and infinite storage for the result, I had no idea how many we were making.
So it was a surprise to me, when I learned that when I opened that chest I released around fifty thousand invisible stone bludgers with the new self repairing and invulnerability charms on them. It might have been a mistake to wait until Voldemort appeared before using them, but I wanted to make sure we got him by surprise.
While he might have been difficult to kill after all of his magical rituals, the bludgers turning his bones to powder ended his ability to do anything useful, and when I redirected them to handle the death eaters, trolls, and giants, they did very well.
Quite a few bludgers were apparently destroyed, but most death eaters were unprepared for a hundred invisible self-targeting rocks coming at each of them from all sides, and after the first twenty impacts, usually found it difficult to continue after something broke. Two or three were able to port key out, but Voldemort couldn't move at all, and Lucius Malfoy's wand was shattered in a lucky blow, and he needed to use it to activate his recall.
You were right that it needed Godric Gryffindor's sword to finish him off, but he couldn't manage wandless or accidental magic after all of that physical blunt damage. He was in too much pain, and with too few working parts.
Since then IÆve had my bludgers locked up in my vault, and made the supply company destroy all records of the production of the deadly bludgers in exchange for allowing them to release their three lines of pedagogical bludgers, which they're calling student, master, and auror level pedagogical bludgers. They're working on a snappy replacement for the name pedagogical bludgers, but the best we've gotten so far is Luna's "dueling snitch"
Dobby and I are working on an improved model which we didn't have time to implement before the battle which should make me the best protected wizard in England. It has two new modes, one for blocking and predetonating spells like Avada Kedavra and one for stripping the flesh off of targets.
The company is now looking into a set of fifty soft bludgers glowing red and gold. The slower red ones try to hit the gold ones, while the gold ones try to circle the red ones. They make good lighting, and can be made to stay near the ceiling, but for some reason they tend to gather in clumps. The research people are looking into making them somehow avoid areas with too great a density, but they're nowhere near ready for market.
Author's notes:
His new model is based on one millimeter metal octohedronal bludgers. A cloud of sharp invisible randomly flying sand.
The clumping of the lighting bludgers is an inevitable consequence of the simple commands to fly based on the location of the other bludgers. You can model it yourself on a computer and see. It's either an example of the difficulty of local rules providing a global solution, or an example of order arising out of what looks like a mess, depending if the side effect is one you wanted or not. It's tangentially related to the way clouds of birds fly in flocks without a leader*.
* IÆm referring to the way hordes** of pigeons, for example, fly; and not migratory ducks.
** Pigeons are satanic creations and therefore live in hordes, instead of flocks as real birds do.
I never posted it before because I didn't write HP fics, since I hadn't read the source material.
The phrase "Dueling Snitch" should obviously be changed, I knew it when I wrote it. I just put it in intending to replace it when I thought of something better. I never did. Any suggestions?
The Power He Knows Not Of, Quidditch.
It was very straightforward. You remember in my second year when I was hit by a bludger enchanted by Dobby to go after me to the exclusion of everyone else?
Well, when we got to the point in the DA where we were working on blocking one curse by firing another, I contacted a quidditch supply company about buying a few hundred bludgers to use as moving targets.
Being such an unusual customer, no one had ever ordered hundreds of bludgers without buying a quaffle or snitch before, they wrote back and we entered into a correspondence.
At first, I refused to reveal my use of the items, both because I felt it best to maintain as much secrecy as possible, and because I felt they might be offended over their destruction. But eventually they agreed to keep secret whatever I was using them for, for several years, and I revealed their use as a teaching aid as a moving target.
They'd never considered the possibility before. Instead of being offended, they were intrigued, and considered the possibility of expanding their market once our period of secrecy was at an end. The DA became a combination focus group and research department for the testing, suitability, and design of bludger targets. We passed recommendations and reviews back, and they sent us prototypes.
One of their prototypes was an unsuccessful bludger that was designed to stay from five to twenty feet of the target, always moving, and try to hide behind the target. Apparently programming bludgers to fly around a target is harder than having them fly at someone. But it got me to thinking of the way Dobby modified that bludger in my second year.
The big problem when dueling with spells is that the spells are relatively slow. If I point my wand at someone and shout the command, I have no guarantee that the target will be hit. But if I could point my wand, and tell a bludger to hit that person, the target can't just duck. The bludger would try again. The target would have to destroy the bludger, or continually dodge, and the targeting is effectively instantaneous.
So I went to Dobby with a bludger, and asked him what he could make it do. We settled on two commands: target and return, and Dobby designed a prototype.
It turns out that house elf magic and wizardry magic can both be put on the same item without interfering at all with each other.
Meanwhile, we were experimenting with the companyÆs newest invisible ink bludger. These were much softer than the standard, but had three major differences. They would deactivate for thirty seconds when hit by a variety of simple charms, like a tickle hex, or leg locking charm so the student didn't have to blow them up. When they hit, they left an ink mark that lasted half an hour before fading. And they were invisible.
These proved a royal pain to fight if you didn't have a way to see invisible objects. Casting area effect charms, seeing their movement through smoke and fog, and hearing the sound as they sped through the air were the only way to take them down.
I put in an order for a couple hundred of hard, invisible bludgers. And asked Dobby how long it would take to enchant them. We added a mass-targeting command so I could sweep my wand and target a group, and we added a charm making specially marked people protected.
We decided it was unfair to make Dobby work on an assembly line, so he gathered up a score of other house elves, and they worked together on them during the slack parts of the day.
While I kept a bag of thirty of them, which I could use to test, I had the elves put the rest in a trunk designed to automatically expand inside to hold whatever was needed. When they ran out of supplies, I told Dobby to order more of them in my name, not realizing how many he was turning out.
It seems the elves enjoyed doing something useful during the wee hours of the morning when they had to normally remain unobtrusive; and being able to sit in a circle and talk while they worked on something important was a thrill. The number of elves crept up without my knowing, and with Dobby ordering supplies, and infinite storage for the result, I had no idea how many we were making.
So it was a surprise to me, when I learned that when I opened that chest I released around fifty thousand invisible stone bludgers with the new self repairing and invulnerability charms on them. It might have been a mistake to wait until Voldemort appeared before using them, but I wanted to make sure we got him by surprise.
While he might have been difficult to kill after all of his magical rituals, the bludgers turning his bones to powder ended his ability to do anything useful, and when I redirected them to handle the death eaters, trolls, and giants, they did very well.
Quite a few bludgers were apparently destroyed, but most death eaters were unprepared for a hundred invisible self-targeting rocks coming at each of them from all sides, and after the first twenty impacts, usually found it difficult to continue after something broke. Two or three were able to port key out, but Voldemort couldn't move at all, and Lucius Malfoy's wand was shattered in a lucky blow, and he needed to use it to activate his recall.
You were right that it needed Godric Gryffindor's sword to finish him off, but he couldn't manage wandless or accidental magic after all of that physical blunt damage. He was in too much pain, and with too few working parts.
Since then IÆve had my bludgers locked up in my vault, and made the supply company destroy all records of the production of the deadly bludgers in exchange for allowing them to release their three lines of pedagogical bludgers, which they're calling student, master, and auror level pedagogical bludgers. They're working on a snappy replacement for the name pedagogical bludgers, but the best we've gotten so far is Luna's "dueling snitch"
Dobby and I are working on an improved model which we didn't have time to implement before the battle which should make me the best protected wizard in England. It has two new modes, one for blocking and predetonating spells like Avada Kedavra and one for stripping the flesh off of targets.
The company is now looking into a set of fifty soft bludgers glowing red and gold. The slower red ones try to hit the gold ones, while the gold ones try to circle the red ones. They make good lighting, and can be made to stay near the ceiling, but for some reason they tend to gather in clumps. The research people are looking into making them somehow avoid areas with too great a density, but they're nowhere near ready for market.
Author's notes:
His new model is based on one millimeter metal octohedronal bludgers. A cloud of sharp invisible randomly flying sand.
The clumping of the lighting bludgers is an inevitable consequence of the simple commands to fly based on the location of the other bludgers. You can model it yourself on a computer and see. It's either an example of the difficulty of local rules providing a global solution, or an example of order arising out of what looks like a mess, depending if the side effect is one you wanted or not. It's tangentially related to the way clouds of birds fly in flocks without a leader*.
* IÆm referring to the way hordes** of pigeons, for example, fly; and not migratory ducks.
** Pigeons are satanic creations and therefore live in hordes, instead of flocks as real birds do.
