Fans of Alternity

Is there supposed to have been another Grim Truth post from Sirius? (Arthur tells him he saw his "entry last night.") If so I didn't and can't now see it. I did catch the exchange on Harry's journal where Sirius and Lucius exchanged barbs. Is that all that's meant when Arthur and Bellatrix say that Sirius provoked the attack Lucius led on the Cherwell camp?

Interesting bits and bobs in McGonagall's post tonight, too. (About the book's forgery; mention of Flitwick -- deceased, apparently -- from Molly; about the castle's protections; McG's note that Lucius is not a Legilimens and her clear anxiety about facing someone who IS one.)

ETA. Lucius talks about the provocation as though it was just Sirius' intrusion into Harry's comments thread.

More interestingly, Lucius links the disturbance in the camp with the "robbery" at Gringotts:

After the blackguard (no pun intended) retreated from the journal where he made a nuisance of himself, he apparently decided to incite an attempted break-out at Cheswell. It's all in the papers. He must have accomplices in this country, whom he induced through some method (doubtless an illicit and indecent form of magic) to disrupt the camps. Bella believes, as do I, that these culprits are the same miscreants who corrupted the Goblins enough to gain access to Gringotts and rob the bank last month. It makes sense: Their modus operandi seems to lie more in encouraging - possibly forcing - members of these inferior castes to rise up in revolt, creating chaos and bother for the rest of us.

I take Arthur's account as a truer representation of what happened at Cherwell (Lucius calls it Cheswell), which is to say that Lucius, Bellatrix and others went to the camp and took out their frustration with Sirius on the helpless captives (no uprising, no escape, no initiative on the Muggles's part, just a bit of Death Eater Muggle-baiting like we see canonically at the World Cup match).

I wonder if Lucius' linkage of the Cherwell and Gringotts incidents is more than just a matter of PR spin: perhaps the Gringotts episode was equally a matter of Lucius, Bellatrix, et. al. having done something extra-legal. Perhaps they went to Gringotts with a plan to empty a vault of something of value (the Philosopher's Stone, presumably) only to find that the vault in question (one they did not have legal power to access -- so what would their way around the Goblins have been? maybe I'm wrong) had already been emptied, though they thought that impossible, its rightful owner having been thought to be out of the country. In other words, I'm proposing that the substantial link between the camp riot and the Gringotts "robbery" might be that Lucius and cronies are the active agents in each case and that in each case they've concocted a story of insurgent lawlessness to cover their own dodgy dealing.

Also. It's not lost on me that Lucius hints that Sirius and his insurgent blackguards (a great pun) make use of Imperius to control Muggles.

Hey, folks:

I just received a reply from alt_player (in this case, the player who plays Sirius), who wants us to know that Sirius really *did* Order Lock his birthday greeting to Hermione (though there was a player-slip in this case). I was afraid the rest of you might miss this important bit of official correction because I may be the only one who will have gotten email notice of the comment.

The discussion in question is here.