Categories > Books > Harry Potter > Let's Try That Again, Shall We?
Prologue, Part 3
3 reviewsStill setting up the premise. This will be the last we hear about Trelawney for a good long while.
5Original
The Harry Potter universe is the creation of J.K. Rowling. This is fanfiction. The standard disclaimers apply.
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Chapter 3: Prologue, Part 3
(A Plan, Sort Of)
Sunday, November 19, 1989.
Acamar Dunlin was in his workshop at home when Sybill arrived through the floo in the living room. "I'm in here!" he called.
"What are you doing with all this?" she said, peering through her oversize glasses at his current project. The workshop had a large table in the middle of it, on which was placed a thick glass dome about four feet in diameter, resting on a granite base. Within that were two smaller domes, each on their own base, and each containing a small glass vial and half of a lizard suspended, nearly motionless, in a small hole. Further examination revealed that it was probably two halves of the same lizard.
"A lizard?"
"Oh yes, a sand lizard. I caught it out on the heath myself, with one of those loopy thingies and a bag."
"But what are you doing with it?"
"Ah! I think it's quite clever, although of course I'm biased. The two ends of that hole there are chronologically desynchonized. Looking from left to right, you are seeing a fraction of a second into the past, and from right to left, the same distance into the future. The lizard is there because it's a living thing with at least a rudimentary consciousness. The universe doesn't like that, you see, taking a conscious thing and putting it in two different times at once. So it struggles to compensate by, more or less literally, pulling time off of the lizard, which then gets deposited on it in the form of dust. This is what you find in a time turner, although they normally produce it differently.
The little vials have a simple, low-power dust gathering charm like you might use on a feather duster—they just suck loose bits of things into themselves. Of course you get more microscopic bits of lizard dandruff than time dust, but I can sort that out later."
"Is that bad for the lizard? I can see it blinking, so I can tell it's alive, I think," she said, looking closer.
"Oh no—I mean, it probably doesn't like it very much, but after letting it thrash around at first I decided it was safer in a body-bind. I let it out each night and put it back in that tank over there." He gestured to the counter on the far wall, where a small glass box held some plants, two small bowls, a flat stone, and a heat lamp. "The glass domes are charmed to open up when you need them to."
"But why is it all under glass?"
"Well, the small ones are containing the spells that create the time differential. And the big one is just there in case everything blows up."
"Oh." She paused, contemplating this. "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why all of this? Isn't time dangerous to meddle with?" She looked worried.
"Well, of course it is, if you screw up. But this is only a tiny time differential, and the only reason it produces so much dust is that I stuck the lizard in there, instead of the crystal rods the Ministry uses."
"Uncle Acamar, you're not trying to make a time turner, are you?"
"Oh, heavens no, those things are made with way more precision than I'm capable of here. You need just the right amount of dust, and the charm that responds to the turning has to be just so, or else you have people getting hurt or going insane. And besides, I have enough dust for dozens of them by now." He walked over to a metal case on the counter, opening it to show a dozen stoppered vials resting in fitted velvet indentations. He lifted that up to show that the box was bigger on the inside, and had multiple trays of vials down in it.
"Dozens of . . . time turners?"
"Oh yes, assuming I could also purify the dust from the lizard bits down to Ministry standards. Hm. Not that there actually is a Ministry standard for lizard bits per million in time turner dust—I suppose if you asked them they would say 'none! there should be no lizard bits whatsoever!'" He paused, grinning. "Oh, come on, Sybill! You're supposed to ask 'but what are you planning on doing with all that time dust, Uncle Acamar?'"
"Er, what are you planning on doing with all that time dust, Uncle Acamar?"
"Why, trying to prevent your nightmares from coming true, of course!"
Sybill settled back into her familiar deer-in-headlights look. Acamar held his grin steady for a moment longer than he had to, then felt guilty about it.
"Okay, maybe that was overly dramatic. But I do have a plan for all this dust. Like I said, with a time-turner, you care about precision down to approximately the minute, or maybe even second, I don't know. You are also trying to keep things in a single, stable timeline so that time, or the universe, doesn't rebel and stop you. So you are trying to get a human being and everything they are carrying safely back to a very specific time and place. Clear enough so far?"
Sybill nodded.
"But what if you don't care about any of those things? What can you do then? As it turns out, you can do quite a lot, especially if you exploit time's own resistance to paradox, instead of trying to avoid running afoul of it."
"You would deliberately create a paradox?"
"No—I'd do what I did with the lizard. If you want time to do a certain thing for you, you can coax it into going along with it by creating a situation where a paradox would happen if it weren't for time's ability to prevent it. You have to know enough about how paradox gets avoided in order to know how to trigger the behavior you want, of course. But it's a relatively straightforward principle—you can see it operating right here in front of you."
"Oh. Do you actually think it needs the big dome? How dangerous is this?"
"Well, that's hard to know. The dome is there more to avoid risks. I'm a librarian, not an auror, you know."
"I don't think you ever answered what you're going to do with all the dust."
"Right! So easy to get sidetracked." He opened a cabinet and pulled out a lumpy cloth sack. "We are going to use these!" he explained, reaching in and coming back holding a golden snitch. He let go of it in mid-air, where it spread its wings and hovered. "You know, these were by far the most expensive part of this whole undertaking. Fifteen galleons apiece, and this model is basically a children's toy, for practice—no sense memory or any of that fancy stuff."
"You know I can help with the cost, if you need it. But, what are they for?"
"Oh, don't worry about the cost," he protested, waving dismissively. "An old man needs something to spend his money on."
"You're only 51."
"Hah. Anyway, I got the snitches because I wanted something that as many wizards as possible would naturally want to grab. It's a wonder no one ever put a portkey on one to use it as a trap before. Hm. Of course, maybe that worked all too well, and we never heard." He looked briefly concerned, then brightened.
"In any case, we want it to be a very good trap. The idea, you see, is to do what I'm doing to this lizard, except on a much more, um—epic, I think—scale. Take two of these," he said, with a snitch in each hand, "and put a sort of gate between them, although not quite as literally as you see here. Get one on either end, chronologically speaking, of our subject, so that from the perspective of the universe they are in two times at once—in a sort of superposition, you could say. Done right, time should respond to this indignity by moving the consciousness of their future self into the body of their past self, or at least merging the two! That's the plan, at any rate.
The snitches will have to have some sophisticated charms on them in order to pick good subjects independently, of course, since we can't go to the future ourselves to pick them, and your dreams aren't that detailed. I'm still working on that. I suppose out of fairness the charms will have to make sure the people really want to come, since we're going to destroy their timeline."
"Destroy?"
"Oh yes, that's the whole point, isn't it? And it's also why we don't have to be so precise—just moving a consciousness, we only care about precision down to a few years, and the future we're trying to change is so far away that we can blow it to smithereens, metaphorically speaking of course, without a risk of paradox. And we'll use a gigantic quantity of time dust in a one-time event that consumes it.
I think I've figured out how to link up all the snitches so that it all happens simultaneously from our perspective, too—the future snitches have to all grab people from the timeline of your nightmares, even if they don't open all at once here on the end proximate to us. I think I can do that."
Sybill's eyes widened. "You want to do this multiple times?"
"Well, the dust is easy enough to make, and we need to make sure it works. You know, leave ourselves room for error. Once someone comes back we can't force them to do anything in particular. Making sure the past and future snitches agree on the same subject is tricky; I haven't worked that out yet. Don't want to pair minds and bodies willy-nilly."
"You think something could go wrong, and pull a mind back into someone else's body? You can't let that happen! That's a terrible thing to do to someone, Uncle Acamar."
Acamar put on his best confident smile. "Well, I'm sure I'll find a way of preventing that."
"Are you sure this will work? And no one has ever tried this before? Why not?"
"Pretty sure, not to my knowledge, and I'll answer the third when the British Wizarding Library explains why it arranges things so that no one ever comes to see the reference librarian!" He said this with the barest hint of bitterness, but overall looked quite triumphant. "Um, that's your real answer, I think: Because no one ever asks the reference librarian."
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Chapter 3: Prologue, Part 3
(A Plan, Sort Of)
Sunday, November 19, 1989.
Acamar Dunlin was in his workshop at home when Sybill arrived through the floo in the living room. "I'm in here!" he called.
"What are you doing with all this?" she said, peering through her oversize glasses at his current project. The workshop had a large table in the middle of it, on which was placed a thick glass dome about four feet in diameter, resting on a granite base. Within that were two smaller domes, each on their own base, and each containing a small glass vial and half of a lizard suspended, nearly motionless, in a small hole. Further examination revealed that it was probably two halves of the same lizard.
"A lizard?"
"Oh yes, a sand lizard. I caught it out on the heath myself, with one of those loopy thingies and a bag."
"But what are you doing with it?"
"Ah! I think it's quite clever, although of course I'm biased. The two ends of that hole there are chronologically desynchonized. Looking from left to right, you are seeing a fraction of a second into the past, and from right to left, the same distance into the future. The lizard is there because it's a living thing with at least a rudimentary consciousness. The universe doesn't like that, you see, taking a conscious thing and putting it in two different times at once. So it struggles to compensate by, more or less literally, pulling time off of the lizard, which then gets deposited on it in the form of dust. This is what you find in a time turner, although they normally produce it differently.
The little vials have a simple, low-power dust gathering charm like you might use on a feather duster—they just suck loose bits of things into themselves. Of course you get more microscopic bits of lizard dandruff than time dust, but I can sort that out later."
"Is that bad for the lizard? I can see it blinking, so I can tell it's alive, I think," she said, looking closer.
"Oh no—I mean, it probably doesn't like it very much, but after letting it thrash around at first I decided it was safer in a body-bind. I let it out each night and put it back in that tank over there." He gestured to the counter on the far wall, where a small glass box held some plants, two small bowls, a flat stone, and a heat lamp. "The glass domes are charmed to open up when you need them to."
"But why is it all under glass?"
"Well, the small ones are containing the spells that create the time differential. And the big one is just there in case everything blows up."
"Oh." She paused, contemplating this. "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why all of this? Isn't time dangerous to meddle with?" She looked worried.
"Well, of course it is, if you screw up. But this is only a tiny time differential, and the only reason it produces so much dust is that I stuck the lizard in there, instead of the crystal rods the Ministry uses."
"Uncle Acamar, you're not trying to make a time turner, are you?"
"Oh, heavens no, those things are made with way more precision than I'm capable of here. You need just the right amount of dust, and the charm that responds to the turning has to be just so, or else you have people getting hurt or going insane. And besides, I have enough dust for dozens of them by now." He walked over to a metal case on the counter, opening it to show a dozen stoppered vials resting in fitted velvet indentations. He lifted that up to show that the box was bigger on the inside, and had multiple trays of vials down in it.
"Dozens of . . . time turners?"
"Oh yes, assuming I could also purify the dust from the lizard bits down to Ministry standards. Hm. Not that there actually is a Ministry standard for lizard bits per million in time turner dust—I suppose if you asked them they would say 'none! there should be no lizard bits whatsoever!'" He paused, grinning. "Oh, come on, Sybill! You're supposed to ask 'but what are you planning on doing with all that time dust, Uncle Acamar?'"
"Er, what are you planning on doing with all that time dust, Uncle Acamar?"
"Why, trying to prevent your nightmares from coming true, of course!"
Sybill settled back into her familiar deer-in-headlights look. Acamar held his grin steady for a moment longer than he had to, then felt guilty about it.
"Okay, maybe that was overly dramatic. But I do have a plan for all this dust. Like I said, with a time-turner, you care about precision down to approximately the minute, or maybe even second, I don't know. You are also trying to keep things in a single, stable timeline so that time, or the universe, doesn't rebel and stop you. So you are trying to get a human being and everything they are carrying safely back to a very specific time and place. Clear enough so far?"
Sybill nodded.
"But what if you don't care about any of those things? What can you do then? As it turns out, you can do quite a lot, especially if you exploit time's own resistance to paradox, instead of trying to avoid running afoul of it."
"You would deliberately create a paradox?"
"No—I'd do what I did with the lizard. If you want time to do a certain thing for you, you can coax it into going along with it by creating a situation where a paradox would happen if it weren't for time's ability to prevent it. You have to know enough about how paradox gets avoided in order to know how to trigger the behavior you want, of course. But it's a relatively straightforward principle—you can see it operating right here in front of you."
"Oh. Do you actually think it needs the big dome? How dangerous is this?"
"Well, that's hard to know. The dome is there more to avoid risks. I'm a librarian, not an auror, you know."
"I don't think you ever answered what you're going to do with all the dust."
"Right! So easy to get sidetracked." He opened a cabinet and pulled out a lumpy cloth sack. "We are going to use these!" he explained, reaching in and coming back holding a golden snitch. He let go of it in mid-air, where it spread its wings and hovered. "You know, these were by far the most expensive part of this whole undertaking. Fifteen galleons apiece, and this model is basically a children's toy, for practice—no sense memory or any of that fancy stuff."
"You know I can help with the cost, if you need it. But, what are they for?"
"Oh, don't worry about the cost," he protested, waving dismissively. "An old man needs something to spend his money on."
"You're only 51."
"Hah. Anyway, I got the snitches because I wanted something that as many wizards as possible would naturally want to grab. It's a wonder no one ever put a portkey on one to use it as a trap before. Hm. Of course, maybe that worked all too well, and we never heard." He looked briefly concerned, then brightened.
"In any case, we want it to be a very good trap. The idea, you see, is to do what I'm doing to this lizard, except on a much more, um—epic, I think—scale. Take two of these," he said, with a snitch in each hand, "and put a sort of gate between them, although not quite as literally as you see here. Get one on either end, chronologically speaking, of our subject, so that from the perspective of the universe they are in two times at once—in a sort of superposition, you could say. Done right, time should respond to this indignity by moving the consciousness of their future self into the body of their past self, or at least merging the two! That's the plan, at any rate.
The snitches will have to have some sophisticated charms on them in order to pick good subjects independently, of course, since we can't go to the future ourselves to pick them, and your dreams aren't that detailed. I'm still working on that. I suppose out of fairness the charms will have to make sure the people really want to come, since we're going to destroy their timeline."
"Destroy?"
"Oh yes, that's the whole point, isn't it? And it's also why we don't have to be so precise—just moving a consciousness, we only care about precision down to a few years, and the future we're trying to change is so far away that we can blow it to smithereens, metaphorically speaking of course, without a risk of paradox. And we'll use a gigantic quantity of time dust in a one-time event that consumes it.
I think I've figured out how to link up all the snitches so that it all happens simultaneously from our perspective, too—the future snitches have to all grab people from the timeline of your nightmares, even if they don't open all at once here on the end proximate to us. I think I can do that."
Sybill's eyes widened. "You want to do this multiple times?"
"Well, the dust is easy enough to make, and we need to make sure it works. You know, leave ourselves room for error. Once someone comes back we can't force them to do anything in particular. Making sure the past and future snitches agree on the same subject is tricky; I haven't worked that out yet. Don't want to pair minds and bodies willy-nilly."
"You think something could go wrong, and pull a mind back into someone else's body? You can't let that happen! That's a terrible thing to do to someone, Uncle Acamar."
Acamar put on his best confident smile. "Well, I'm sure I'll find a way of preventing that."
"Are you sure this will work? And no one has ever tried this before? Why not?"
"Pretty sure, not to my knowledge, and I'll answer the third when the British Wizarding Library explains why it arranges things so that no one ever comes to see the reference librarian!" He said this with the barest hint of bitterness, but overall looked quite triumphant. "Um, that's your real answer, I think: Because no one ever asks the reference librarian."
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