Harry Potter: Don't touch

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***

Harry awoke as abruptly as he had fallen asleep. He was lying on the strange bed next to the podium.

- You're on in five minutes, get ready,' Lupin waited for Harry to get up from the bed and vaporised it with a spell.

- How are the contestants doing? Has anyone reached the final stage yet?

- Not yet. Professor Snape, patrolling the approaches to the final area, spotted George Weasley, Victor Cram and George Hypotenuse there, and informed the commentator. They're in the lead, Victor Kram seems to be just behind them. But you have every chance to catch up with them if you hurry, give up early. I'll be rooting for you.

- Thank you,' Harry thanked the professor sincerely. - Aren't you supposed to be patrolling the passages in the maze?

- I should, but I've got the final part of the labyrinth, and while there's no one there, I can stay here. Maybe I'll even see you in the maze if you release the red sparks.

- I see, once again, thank you so much! You've been a great help to me. I hope from the bottom of my heart that I can live up to Hogwarts' expectations and place high! - It wasn't quite true, Potter was thinking first of all about himself, secondly about Bagman and his hopes, and only thirdly about the honour of Hogwarts.

- We expect nothing less than victory from you. Hurry up, you're on in four minutes.

In Potter's hour and a half of sleep, not much had changed. The hundred spectators were still sitting in the bleachers. Dumbledore had returned to his judging seat and was chatting with Hagrid. The only champions on the pitch were Harry himself and Johan Lundren, whose start was five minutes after his.

- Well, Harry, are you ready to win? - Bagman personally came up to ask him how he was feeling.

- Ready! I know what's coming. I'll do my best.

- Well, you got something?

It was about the map. And Harry knew that very well. But how to answer was the big question. Play dumb, hoping that Bagman wouldn't be so blunt? Risky. Tell the truth that Dumbledore has the map? Or try lying in the hope that the Headmaster won't go public with the find?

- I have it. I left it in the drawing room, I don't know how the Maze will react to it. I've learnt it, it won't be a problem.

- Oh, good. Anyway, here's a quick update on the tournament. No changes. No one's getting any closer to the finals. No one made it past the second sphinx, though two of them tried. You've got a good chance. There's something else I can't talk about, but I can hint that caution is more important than speed. All right, then. Go to the side entrance, near which an auror in a white robe will be standing, and I will now announce your start.

Harry did so. He felt no excitement about the start of the final test. Potter was completely confident in himself and his abilities.

- Shall I go this way? - He asked the red and green haired young boy.

- Aha! Your start in forty seconds. Good luck, and I'm a fan, by the way! - the auror exclaimed excitedly. Too happy.

- Listen,' Harry switched to the first name. An unexpected hunch came into his head. - Are you Tonks by any chance? I mean, what if I were?

- Tonks? - He was genuinely surprised. - Oh, I see, I know her, she's Mad-Eye's apprentice, isn't she? And so are you, right? Isn't it true that Mad-Eye...

- Ladies and gentlemen,' Bagman's voice, amplified by Sonorus, was not as loud as when the start was first announced. - It was time for the youngest, but by no means the weakest, champion of the Tournament of the Three Wizards, Harry Potter!

The applause Harry received from the audience was less raucous than the applause that went to George, who was not him, but Fred. But still the audience expressed their approval in some way.

The whistle blew, and Harry, forgetting the young auror, raced into the maze.

* * *

Right. Left. Left again. There's a shortcut here if you cut through the gap.

- Nulus venificium agger! - Harry pointed his wand at the maze wall.

The hedge shook, began to fall, and for a couple of seconds there was a hole in the maze wall, which Potter entered through with a leap.

Once out of the wall, Potter immediately looked around, a fork appeared in front of him. One could go right or left. Which way now? In preparation for the third trial, Harry didn't think the spell would work. He had assumed that in a maze, the hedges would work as a dense wall and would be impossible to break through with an anti-vegetation spell. So the unexpected success took him by surprise. Harry stopped and began to construct a map of the maze in his head from memory. He went six times right, two times straight, eight times left, or was it nine? Or maybe ten? Right. He's lost. Bloody Dumbledore, taking the map away from him!

His intuition told him to go left, logic and memory told him right. Harry went right. He walked for about ten minutes, the passage going nowhere for a long time. Finally Potter came to another fork in the road. There were now six possibilities for the path. Potter remembered that there was only one fork on the map that had six paths, and this fork looked exactly like that. There were passageways leading to different sides of the world. North, west, east, northeast, and northwest, and one more passage went roughly where Potter should be coming from, which was towards the south.

- Point mi! - Harry exclaimed.

The wand pointed to the central, northern passageway. Yes, this was indeed the fork, so going to the right was the right thing to do. At the same fork it was necessary to turn south, but the other five options had challenges that Harry, thanks to Bagman's map, could avoid. Excellent!

It wasn't until an hour after the start that Harry encountered his first trouble. A white cloud floated slowly down the south path. Potter stepped further away and fired the first spell that appeared in his head at it:

- Incendio!

He had no idea what that white cloud was. Whether it was dangerous, whether it was safe, what its weaknesses were, whether it possessed a mind. This was the first time Harry had encountered such a phenomenon.

Either the white cloud was a common enemy that was killed by any spell, or Harry had just guessed at the spell that killed white clouds, or maybe there was no cloud at all, nobody cancelled illusions.

Either way, the fire spell hit vaporised the cloud. Harry walked on...

After half an hour, he finally reached a fork leading to two different trials. The northern one and the eastern one. One led to the boggart and sphinx, the other to the phoenixes and redcaps. Harry knew how to deal with the redcaps, they were not difficult opponents, but he hadn't thought of the best tactics for dealing with the phoenixes of the 'S' species, and there was almost no information about them at all. The other option was a little easier, Harry had been practising solving the puzzles generated by the Ravenclaw drawing room door for about three months now, and he had no problems with the boggarts, thanks to Professor Lupin. On the other hand, the Ravenclaw drawing room door was one thing, but the sphinx was quite another.

Harry had read Newt Salamander's huge book on the creatures. Even he hadn't quite worked out where they got their information from for the riddles. Salamander put forward a theory that all the riddles of this world are already genetically embedded in their heads, and they, even being in four walls all their lives, can give out a riddle about the sun. But this theory of Salamander was refuted by experiments.

For example, in the year one thousand nine hundred and eighty, a sphinx named Raos told scientists a riddle in which the answer was the word 'Computer', but Raos was born in the nineteenth century, and at the beginning of the twentieth century was captured and studied in captivity; there he received absolutely no information about the trends of the world and its inventions, he could not have known about the existence of the computer. Scientists who study sphinxes have put forward three hypotheses. The first one is that the sphinx receives information from other sphinxes about mysteries related to the outside world through invisible communication channels. Some Almahat even suggested that sphinxes have a division into sexes - male and female, where some sphinxes collect information about riddles, pass them to others through obscure communication channels, and those ask them to people.

But Almahat, by all accounts, was wrong. All the sphinxes caught by the wizards were not information gatherers, but asked riddles, which cast doubt on the existence of other sphinxes that make up these riddles.

The second hypothesis was almost the same, only the information about the riddles was supplied to the sphinxes not from other sphinxes, but by magic itself. But this hypothesis contradicted the main conclusion that scientists made about magic long ago - magic is unreasonable.

The third hypothesis spoke about incredible perception of the world of sphinxes, that they could move their souls in space at will for cognition of the world. They were simultaneously everywhere and everywhere, could analyse human speech and on its basis formulate questions to which these people could not so easily find an answer. But this hypothesis also sounded improbable, the soul cannot move by itself, there must be a material object that holds this soul within, a living being dies only when the body - that which contains the soul - ceases to function, that is, the soul of a living being is destroyed as it loses its connection with the material object. So if the sphinxes tried to move their souls, they would die. However, in defence of the third hypothesis was the theory of the Deathly Hallows, namely the resurrection stone that moved the soul from the afterlife to our world, which from the point of view of science - impossible.

What conclusion could be drawn from this story? Would Dumbledore be a pretty good sphinx? No, not that one. Predicting what kind of riddle the sphinx would ask is impossible. Which means that no matter how long Potter practices with the Ravenclaw door, the sphinx's riddle might not be answered. Also a problem would be the boggart that took on the appearance of Piers Polkiss at the sight of Potter, Harry knew how to deal with the boggart, but even the possibility of Piers appearing made him wildly afraid. His hands began to shake at the mere thought of his old acquaintance, and he wasn't sure that he would be able to keep his wits and clarity of thought when the boggart appeared. Thus, wherever Harry went, a difficult challenge awaited him. The choice of branch remained to be made. North or East. Potter has decided to make this most important choice as a man.....

- Dumbledore,' Harry pointed to the east passage.

- Ate, - to the north aisle.

- Tomato, - again to the east aisle.

- And the Dark Lord, - and so on.....

- He loves it.

- Comfort.

- That's why.

- He.

- Decided.

- To drink.

- Compote.

- I could.

- Yell loudly.

- Eat a fried pigeon.

- But no.

- I won't.

- Because I choose--

- You!

After much deliberation, careful analysis of his surroundings, his powers, Bagman's map, and all the impressive powers in this world, Harry made the decision to go to the northern passage...

Half an hour into the journey, and there before him lay a small lion with the head of a man. The sphinx with its body was blocking the only possible path that led to the second platform.

- Listen, can we make a deal with you? - Harry turned to the sphinx. - I've read about you, you like riddles, and I've solved so many in the last three months that I can tell you all of them. I can also teach you Aweik. I invented it myself, and no one knows it yet.

- We're negotiable, of course.

You have to think outside the box, and you have to know a lot.

If you don't want to be stuck here forever.

It's a riddle you'll be forced to solve.

Harry tried to conjure up a chair for himself, but his imagination failed him and he ended up with a large wooden one. Transfiguration was a lot worse for him than normal spells.

- Okay, that'll do. - Potter sat down on the wood. - Come on. I'm ready.

- Be warned, my dear friend.

Take your time, be a little slower.

If you give the wrong answer.

You'll see my bad character.

The Sphinx is silent.

- So, here's my riddle for you.

Imagine you have a small platform in front of you.

On it lie three chests.

The contents of which cannot be peeked at by stealth.

One of them contains only diamonds, shiny ones.

In the other, rubies, all real.

When you open the third chest, this is the picture:

Rubies, diamonds, half of both.

The fate of the intruder brought one.

He knew nothing about those chests.

So he opened the first chest he could find.

He began to fill his pockets with a certain kind of stones, like a chipmunk.

These stones happened to be rubies.

They won the man's heart.

Only half a soundouk could fit in his pockets.

For the intruder, the burden was too great.

After selling the jewellery, he went back.

The rest of the wealth was collected carefully.

Opening the same chest, he took the rest of the stones.

The question is, what were these stones?

You can't give an exact answer, you need probability.

Which stones did the intruder's greed take away this time?

- Hmmm... Well, if he liked rubies so much, then, probably, if he tried to open the same chest, there were rubies there too. Does that make sense? If he liked rubies, he wouldn't have picked diamonds.

- The rubies were randomly chosen by him.

Diamonds could just as easily have been picked up.

- So, so from a random chest, he took half of the rubies that were also randomly chosen, he sold them, then came back for the rest of the stones in the same chest, which may not be rubies, because we don't know which chest he opened, right? And the question is what kind of stones lie there, right?

- Exactly,' the sphinx decided to dispense with the rhyming answer this time.

- All right, then. Let's give it some thought.

Commentary on Chapter 81. The Labyrinth. Passages, forks and sphinxes.

Answers are accepted in the comments. The riddle is elementary, but fun.