Avada Kedavra and ways to kill wizards

[cindysphynx]

No: HPFGUIDX 31342

Marian wrote:

> 
> I was looking through the archives and also at the Lexicon (which I 
> fear is impeding my ability to do work on my thesis!) and I was 
curious 
> about the distributional qualities of spells. Is it necessary to do 
one 
> Avada Kedavra (or Crucio, or whatnot) per person? Or can you hit a 
> couple of people sitting next to each other if you have really good 
> aim? In GoF, there's a description of curses ricocheting off 
Riddle's 
> father's gravestone, which leads me to believe that as long as a 
curse 
> happens to touch more than one person, maybe you can kill both of 
them. 

I think this is a pretty interesting idea.  It kind of reminds me of 
the way the old Star Trek gang used to set their phasers for a wide 
field instead of a narrow beam.  (They did do this, right?).  Anyway, 
I would think an auror like Moody would especially need to be able to 
pick off more than one DE at a time.  

Back to the question, though:  maybe if you hit more than one person 
with Avada Kedavra, you'll just injure one or both of them.  Kind of 
like what happens if you shoot a gun and hit two people.  This makes 
some sense, based on Moody's statement that the whole class could AK 
him, and he would only get a nosebleed.  So maybe AK requires 
powerful magic behind it, and spreading it out over several potential 
victims would undermine its fatal power.

Maria again:

> 
> I was just reading the new, revised 
> lexicon page about the timeline of James and Lily's death, and I 
was 
> wondering if the "missing" spell - the one that rebounded onto 
> Voldemort - might just simply be the one that hit Lily. 

This is really interesting.  So if I understand it right, Voldemort 
kills James.  Then he shoot at Lily and Harry, hitting them both with 
his AK curse.  The part that hits Lily kills her, but the part that 
hits Harry rebounds onto Voldemort.  The fact that it is only a 
partial AK that rebounds would be why it doesn't kill Voldemort 
outright.  The reason Harry's AK rebounds instead of killing him like 
it killed Lily is that he has her protection through her love, blah, 
blah, blah.  It has lots of potential, I think.

Cindy (who is convinced Marian should write her thesis on her new, 
whiz-bang distributional qualities of spells theory)