Abusing the Room of Requirement

[jwcpgh]

No: HPFGUIDX 76299

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "tesseract197" 
<tesseract197 at e...> wrote:
> Tess (me):
> What I find most interesting about the room is that Pansy was able 
> to enter it to get the D.A.'s membership list after the raid:
> <snip> 
> When she entered, after all of the D.A. members had gone, was it 
> still 'open' and set up for the meeting, with cushions on the 
floor, 
> etc.? I can't imagine that it would be, because we're told that it 
> can only be accessed by someone who desperately needs it for a 
> specific purpose, and often even people who've found it once can 
> never do so again (Ch. 18, pg. 386-87, U.S. edition). So I'm 
> doubtful that she ran into the exact room that the D.A. had been 
> practicing in, list and all.
> 
> Or did she simply walk in front of it three times and think, "I 
need 
> evidence that a secret meeting was being held here"? That's what 
the 
> second part of Umbridge's statement seems to imply, IMO. If that's 
> the case, then the room did indeed grant a wish for a material 
> object and produce something other than a location, and it 
> apparently doesn't care if what it produces will be used for an 
> immoral purpose.
> 
> Of course, there's always the possibility that walking in front of 
> the room and thinking, "I need this room to contain exactly what it 
> did twenty minutes ago" (or "the last time it was used" or "when 
> Potter was here" or whatever), will open a copy of a previous 
setup, 
> and therefore you could indeed enter (and take stuff out of) a 
> version of the room that had been set up by and for someone else's 
> needs. Aw, I never said it was a perfect theory.
> 
> Tess

Laura:

This all seems to be some pretty high-level thinking for Pansy.  
She's never given any indication of intelligence before.

How about this?  Do we know how the room is closed?  We know, for 
instance, that the Marauders' Map required a specific set of words to 
erase itself.  What if, in his haste to get everyone out that night, 
Harry neglected to close the room properly?  In that case, it still 
would have been open intact for whoever walked in.