Get Fuzzy comic & RAB

[pippin_999]

> Carolyn:
> I think this theory suffers from many of the original objections to 
> RAB being Regulus. 
> 
> - Even though a junior DE and brought up in a household obsessed
with 
> the Dark Arts, it stills seems unlikely that he would have acquired 
> enough of a thorough-going knowledge of hxs to understand what the 
> locket was. Even 16 year old Tom had to ask Sluggy about the
theory, 
> and he was deeply immersed in evil by that stage.
> 
> - Further, we know that Tom trusts no one. Would he really have
been 
> stupid enough to give Bella enough hints as to what she was holding 
> in her hands? We have been told he has never loved, so he can't
even 
> have been blinded by her rabid charms.
> 
> - And how could Regulus create a fake item that would fool Voldie? 
> This would take very advanced magic, surely?
> 
> - And why was Voldie hiding the locket in the lake this late in the 
> day (1980s)? As far as we can work out, he'd got hold of the
trinket 
> a year or so after leaving school. Why put it in the birdbath of
doom 
> some thirty-odd years later?
> 
> - Finally, surely the hxed locket would be alarmed in some way, and 
> efforts to destroy it would not only damage Regulus in the same way 
> that DD got his hand blasted, but would alert Voldie to the theft?

Pippin:
Information about horcruxes is banned at Hogwarts, therefore it 
exists elsewhere. Otherwise no ban is needed.

Where better to look than in the private library of
an old Dark Arts family, which both Regulus and Bella had access to?
Voldemort would know nothing of it...the Blacks Sr. weren't
DE's or they would have been killed when they turned against
Voldie.

As Hermione says, there's nothing like banning a topic to make sure
it will be researched and discussed. Why wouldn't Bella and Reggie
have discovered the same volume as teenagers, long before they
joined the Dark Lord, and shuddered appreciatively over the contents?

Tom is most likely more than immune to Bella's charms, but the
reverse is not true. He knows he needs to make Bella feel special
to keep her in his power, just the way he did with Ginny. He entrusts 
her with the locket,  tells her it's precious, a token of his esteem. 
Well, it's no secret that he's interested in immortality. 
AFAWK, aside from the Stone, there's no *other* way to live forever. 
Why *shouldn't* she have guessed what it was?

I'm sure she did.  That's why she knew he had to be alive!

But Regulus guessed what it was as well, and stole it from her.
The swapped locket didn't have to be good enough to fool
Voldemort, only Bella. And why shouldn't Reggie be uncommonly
good at transfiguration? His brother was. Grinding the emblem
off would do no harm to the horcrux, I suppose, and I suspect
Voldemort didn't really imagine that any wizard would dare
deface an emblem of the great Slytherin himself. 

Voldemort doesn't seem to have discovered the fate of the diary
until after the fiasco at the Ministry, so the same might be true of
the swapped horcrux. At that point, GP was protected by 
Secret Keeper, as LV well knows, and Kreacher was apparently
being held by Dumbledore.  

Voldemort, who knew that Dumbledore was keeping
an annoying close eye on him, used the fake locket to set
a trap. He didn't tell Bella that the horcrux she returned
to him was phony, but she did notice she's out of favor and
blamed it on her failure to seize the prophecy and the
Dark Lord's wrath at Lucius.

The cave setup was then either constructed quite recently, 
stocked with corpses from the graveyard, or perhaps there
was a real horcrux there once, which Voldemort removed
and took elsewhere. 

I take Dumbledore's statement that the protections 
around the horcrux weren't crude after all as his
ironic acknowledgement that he'd been had.

Pippin