Strange Attractors

Chapter 41 - Aftermath

Author's Note:

I find it interesting that no one commented on Tom's rather skewed sense of humour.

Remember the "politics" and "political manoeuvres" tags that I gave this story? We're going to see the scale of the game Tom is playing here.

'-

About Hermione not using Homenum Revelio
(Skip if you're not that curious about the technical details):

This is a convenient spell to use if you're being chased by people or were chasing a group of people and you just lost track of them as they entered a new area. If you have experience in chasing groups so far as to not hold back from entering their territory, you also get used to being put on the back foot as you do that, as they have every advantage of not only knowing the grounds better than you, they can also prepare the terrain to benefit them and disadvantage you.

In these kinds of situations, there would be several efforts to spoof the spell already in place. At the top of my head kidnapping dozens of muggles, knocking them out cold, tying them up, and then scatter them all around your base could distract it. And that's just the low tech/low magic approach. Whatever number of people or directions they're from that the spell informs the caster is going to be useless due to the high amount of noise. This is the main weakness of the spell; it's not actually a friend-or-foe identifier.

If the wizards and witches can come up with an anti-apparition ward that can be deployed pretty quickly in the field, there's no doubt that it wouldn't take much effort to develop an anti-revealing ward that effectively functions as an enforced fog of war.

With these in mind, it's not surprising that Hermione's reflex in facing an entrenched attacker is to not use the spell and just move on to assuming there are people in the room and find ways to flush them out or clear those rooms for her team (as noted, usually it's the outright tanks like Harry who cleared them*).

*Harry still has the occasional nightmare of the time he accidentally sent a fire spell to a muggle used as a live shield by a wizard who popped up from behind a couch.

Of course one can argue that there are still good odds of the spell working, since the possible hostiles are using muggle weapons instead of wand. I'd like to point out that we can take the time to think and come up with several alternatives at once since we're playing armchair analysts after the fact, but in an emergency and under pressure, it's really trained behaviour and drills that come to the fore, and Hermione's skills and habits that she retains are still very effective.

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Hermione finds Andrew Abbott. In which there is not much rest to be had as the prefects began a meeting. Lunch break. Hogwarts once more. Tom's request. The Society's meeting.