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Cindy wrote:
Nah, I'm sticking with my prior view of why the Cup is round-trip. Crouch Jr. blew it. The Cup was always set to be a round-trip from the center of the maze. Otherwise, the winner would have to grab the Cup and battle his or her way past these life-threatening obstacles back to the entrance of the maze to claim the thousand galleons, which doesn't make sense.
But that would still make it only one-way, surely?
The Cup is already in the center of the maze. It was, I agree, probably originally set to carry the first person who touched it out of the maze and back to the entrance, where they would then presumably be lauded as the winner of the Tournament and presented with their thousand galleons.
But that's still just a one-way ticket. It's not round-trip. It takes you from the center of the maze to its periphery -- and that's it.
So Crouch Jr. didn't just mess with the Portkey's original destination. He also, whether intentionally or not, changed it from a one-way Portkey, designed only to carry its user from the center of the maze to its periphery, to a duel-use Portkey, designed first to carry its user to the graveyard and then back to the periphery of the maze.
The question then becomes whether this was intentional, or a Great Big Fat Mistake on arrogant young Barty's part.
Cindy suggests the latter:
Crouch Jr., being talented but rather new to the art of programming Portkeys, didn't know about this round trip feature, or more likely, didn't care. 'Cause Crouch Jr. had every reason to think that the only thing that might be returning via the Cup was Harry's corpse.
So rather than substituting one destination for another, Crouch tampered with the Portkey by adding a new destination and ranking it higher in the "queue" than its original one, which he never bothered to delete and which was therefore still active, although relegated to a secondary function?
That works. It means that the first time that the Portkey is touched, it will follow its new orders ("take user to graveyard"), while the second time it is touched, it reverts to its original programming ("take user to periphery of maze.")
If that's the case, then I assume that had the Cup been touched a third time, it would have done nothing at all, as it would then have run through all of its "orders." After fulfilling its second (and original) function, it reverted to an inactive object, just like the old boot at the beginning of GoF did.
That's certainly a possibility, although I think that I still prefer the idea that the plan was originally to use the Portkey's secondary destination, either to descend on Hogwarts or simply to send Harry's corpse back as a nice little message for the wizarding world. The former is Bangier, to be sure, but I find the latter far more likely.
Even if we assume Stupid!Voldemort, rather than Pip's Scheming!Voldemort, I still don't think that he'd make such an amazingly disastrous error as to attempt a strike on the Triwizard audience when there is no way to Disapparate from Hogwarts grounds. Even Overconfident "Oops, I forgot!" Voldemort isn't quite so daft, I don't think, as to consider it a good idea to try pitting his thirty some-odd Death Eaters against the cream of the wizarding world, element of surprise or no element of surprise. It would make sense if they could appear, fire off a bunch of curses, and then Disapparate, but since they wouldn't be able to do that, I can't see it as a feasible plan.
Although you know, maybe Voldemort had just forgotten about that aspect of Hogwarts? Heaven knows that everybody else does. "You can't Disapparate from Hogwarts? Oops. I forgot!"
In which case Harry really saved some unfortunate Death Eater a whole lot of grief, didn't he? Because I'm sure that one of those guys would have been willing to point out to Voldemort the flaw in his cunning plan. I'm equally certain that whoever did so would have suffered for it. Evil Overlords just hate being told about flaws in their cunning plans.
—Elkins, who thinks that once somebody breaks that Memory Charm that Voldemort's got blocking all of his happy childhood memories of flowers and puppy dogs and all the maternal hugs and kisses from that nice Muggle lady at the orphanage, things are really going to change in the Potterverse.
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on June 26, 2002 6:05 PM
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