LV & room of requirement

[Mike]

No: HPFGUIDX 187241

> Andrew wrote:
>
> <snip>     However, I was under the impression that
> Filch was actually a squib.  How come then that Filch was able to
> use this magical room?  It would seem that magic was needed to be
> able to enter the room, yet Filch appeared to have entered it many
> times to hide all the confiscated items.  Did he therefore have
> some magical abilities or did he perhaps have help to enter the
> room?

Mike:
Welcome to the posting ranks, Andrew! :)

My impression was that the RoR provided the magic. The Room itself was imbued with magic by the founders. It was the Room that read the minds of its potential users and figured out exactly what they needed. Heck, it even figured out that putting all kinds of books on DADA was what was needed to convince Hermione that this was the right and safe place to train.

As to Filch, yes he was a squib. But that meant he was born of magical parents and he therefore carried the "magical gene." He just wasn't able to access his magic for whatever reason. Nobody in the WW could figure out why they had squibs. The RoR would have read that in Filch, IMO. But more than that, the founders wouldn't have figured that anyone non-magical would be anywhere near the RoR. They wouldn't have put any restrictions on its use. And HRH, nor anyone else that I'm aware of, had to use magic to get into the room. In OotP, the three of them just walked past the room three times concentrating very hard on what they needed. Filch could just as easily have done that and the Room would have provided. 

Can't you just see Filch walking past it once thinking, "Where's my cleanser?", reversing his course thinking, "left it back around the corner". Getting around the corner, not finding it, then walking by a third time cursing his luck that he had to now descend 6 flights of those damn moving staircases to get back to his supplies room. Then, *surprise*, there's another storage closet up here on the 7th floor. BTW, does anyone else think that after you've accessed the RoR the first time with a request that you don't need to walk by it 3 times with the *same* request? I find it hard to picture an on the run Neville having to pause and walk by the RoR three times to get back into his sanctuary.

On Voldemort, I agree with Carol, his arrogance would lead him to believe that only he found the Room. If only because of the reason Steve mentioned, he was hiding a Horcrux. Who else would be making such a request of the RoR? He didn't count on the fact that the Room didn't care *what* he was hiding, only that he was hiding something.

And, I bet the reason Draco was using the same Room was simply because the Vanishing Cabinet had been moved to there. I don't know and we were never told how he found this out. Though I'm sure he was slick enough to weasel that information out of someone. Filch or a house elf that he summoned wouldn't hide that information from him. But he wouldn't want to move it from there for the same reason that he didn't want to take the other one out of B&Bs. Can you see him getting caught levitating that thing down a hallway and trying to explain his way out of that?

Mike, who likes getting out his Plot Hole Filler for these easy ones
;)