The Tangled World!

Building from the Top Down

Harry ducked under Dudley's punch, then sidestepped as the boy fell over. Dodging was always the best way to deal with Dudley, as the boy lacked any sort of grace, and Harry's reflexes were pretty good. In fact, dodging Dudley's punches was probably why Harry was so good at blocking spellfire by levitating objects. In a way, that meant that Dudley was indirectly responsible for him surviving his encounter with Quirrell. That was a strange thought.

Still, Harry was only passively aware of this train of thought. Most of his focus was on "staying in the moment". Staying in the moment was hard when the moment was about dodging punches, but Harry thought he was doing pretty well.

What little remained of his attention was focused on feeling out the environment around him. He kept feeling until a slight ripple to his right caught his attention. Harry focused on this ripple and put every ounce of his willpower on pushing at it. He continued this for what felt like minutes before the memory faded from around him and he was face to face with the occlumency teacher.

"Your skills with the basics of Occlumency continue to be impressive." She said as Harry tried to regain his bearings. "That said, while your ability to detect intrusions is exemplary, you really should be able to push me out of your mind at this point."

Harry groaned a bit as he adjusted his position on the couch. He really was trying to push her out, but no matter what he did, he could never seem to manage it.

Harry watched as Sarah moved over to Tracey and performed the same task. A minute later, she stopped and pinched her brow.

"Miss Davis, I don't know exactly how you are doing it, but you cannot simply light your memories on fire to keep me from looking at them."

Tracey crossed her arms. "Well, it keeps you out, doesn't it?"

"Miss Davis." Sarah hissed at her. "I am trying to teach you an art. You cannot simply circumvent the proper method of learning."

"But that's so boring! I can just burn it all down and then think about something else and it keeps you from reading my mind regardless."

Sarah took several slow, deep breaths before moving on. Harry felt kind of bad for her, actually. Really, would it kill Tracey to do things normally once in a while?

Still, at least she was doing better than Hermione. Speaking of which...

Sarah sighed as she stopped reading Hermione's mind. "Miss Granger, surely you can detect something? Anything?"

Hermione squinched her eyes for a moment before shaking her head. "I don't know what I'm even looking for!" She exclaimed, frustration leaking into her tone.

Hermione had, though an unlikely feat of accidental magic, created an advanced occlumency construct known as a "Mindscape". Harry vaguely recalled that detail coming up in the first term, but didn't pay it much mind. After all, accidentally recreating advanced magic would surely be a good thing, right?

Well, it turned out that the truth was more complicated than that. Mindscapes had advantages that came with them, such as perfect recall, but they also had disadvantages that came along with them. Sarah stressed that the biggest problem with mindscapes was that they prevented any sort of "dynamic defences", which were apparently the basis of all forms of occlumency defences. Moreover, since mindscapes were inherently organised, that meant that anyone invading Hermione's mind could more easily pick out whatever information they were after.

So, Hermione was stuck. She couldn't learn the basics because she lacked the ability to "dynamically alter her conceptual space" — a term which Harry only vaguely understood — and thus she couldn't learn basic defences. And since she couldn't learn basic defences, she couldn't use them to learn the types of defences she needed to keep her more advanced mindscape safe.