Hidden Tales From The Chamber of Secrets - 94 - Failsafe
by Polydicta
The Marauders guarded their secrets most jealously. In fact, the security charms on the map were far more powerful than any of the four ever realised.
Disclaimer:
All fiction is derivative and fan fiction doubly so. I make no claim to own any part of any of the following, all I have done is an attempt to put together the elements in a novel fashion, using words and ideas like Lego ™ bricks.
There is no money involved – all I do is to share what I do for my own amusement.
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Hidden Tales From The Chamber of Secrets - 94 - Failsafe
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Professor Dumbledore,
I was most disappointed when I was informed by Mad-Eye that you have had to confiscate the Marauders' Map from Harry, but having heard the reasoning behind this course of action I must admit that this is a fair decision, especially in light of the events of the last school year.
I understand that the safety of the school as a whole is of the utmost importance. It is unfortunate that Harry does not see it this way, but I am sure that he will come around in time.
To activate the map, simply touch the tip of your wand to it and speak the password, which is 'I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.' To deactivate it, touch it with your wand again and say 'Mischief managed.' The map will show you the locations of everyone within the castle.
Yours,
SB
Dumbledore gloated. He had stolen the map from Harry while the boy was incapacitated after being cursed by the Weasley boy, on Dumbledore's orders. Albus had craved this piece of charmwork for his own, and for The Greater Good, he had taken it. The letter to Black was, of course, a pack of lies - for The Greater Good, of course.
The Headmaster knew that the map was a true masterpiece of charms and rune work, but he had no idea how intimately the map was tied into the Hogwarts wards. All he knew was that it interrogated the wards to find where everybody was in the castle or on the grounds and who they were.
What Albus The Manipulator didn't know was how the boys had tied the map into the wards at all.
"Prongs, Wormtail has found an access to one of the satellite wardstones."
"That's great, Pads, but what good ...?"
Moony interrupted. "We can tie the map into the wards this way, cut down on a lot of exploration and charm work."
What the boys hadn't realised was that they had managed to tie the map into the the defensive wards control node, which had been 'lost' since before Albus Dumbledore became the headmaster.
Albus took out his the Elder Wand and touched it to the tatty parchment. At that moment, Fawkes woke up, squawked, flew up to the sorting hat and flamed out.
"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good," the headmaster intoned, pushing a little magic into the map.
This started a chain of events unforseen by four fifth-year students twenty years past.
The magical sample was shunted to the wardstone, and the magical signature analysed. That caused the ward stone to start communicating with the map, uploading the map data. The wardstone automagically fed the signature to the intent and defensive wards, which sniffed out the users' intentions.
The intent wards determined that the headmaster was activating the wards maliciously for the purpose of harming one or more students. The creators of the map had never done that, it was always about fun and/or payback, so they never knew what might happen next.
Since there was malicous intent, the castle scanned the wards' activator, assessing the level of malice. Mere rightious anger, a desire for vengeance or justice would never trigger anything further other than to shut down the map. The desire to do premeditated harm, however, did.
A new set of functions were uploaded to the map. A message in Anglo Saxon was displayed on the parchment, though Albus, who couldn't read Anglo Saxon, ignored the message and waited for the map to finish activating. Not receiving a proper response from an authorised person, the wards promptly went to a war footing within the chamber containing the unauthorised user.
Albus Dumbledore's mind was analysed and fried slowly over the next three minutes before he was forcibly apparated to a holding cell deep within the mountain behind the castle. There was no other way in or out without the use of a token that had been lost in the 12th century.
A part of the library wards were activated, and an inventory of items in the headmaster's study was taken. Items belonging to other than the school were marked for return by the school's house elves, everything else in the headmaster's chambers was returned to its proper place, including nearly four hundred books lost from the library.
The first anyone knew of these events was when the wards settled on Minerva McGonagall.
The second thing anyone knew was when the wards followed the chain of intent back to the person who had incapacitated a student. Severus Snape was also mentally analysed and shipped off to share Albus' prison.
The ward-written autobiographies of Dumbledore and Snape appeared in the library at around the same time that a strange house elf popped in and collected the map, Dumbledore's stolen pensieve, the Potter Grimoires, the headmaster's wand and a few other items for return to The Great Harry Potter Sir.
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Nobody really questioned where Dumbledore and Snape were, but it was widely reckoned that they were definitely up to no good at all.
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