Harry managed to slip out of the common room and out into the hall where the goblet innocently sat.
It wasn't that he didn't trust Dumbledore... Okay, it was more that he fully believed Dumbledore's idea of security matched that of John Hammond. The similarities were uncanny.
He had the best of intentions, but when it came to follow through, generally he fell through.
Hence why Harry was calmly laying down in the room with the goblet in his Indominus Rex form. Thanks to the camouflage and the fact it was so dark, no one saw him.
A good thing too. He saw Moody walking right past the age line with a paper in his hand. Harry silently stood up, reached close to where the line was...and used his tail to knock Moody flat on his ass.
It all happened so fast that Moody couldn't get a stunner in. And thanks to the conk on the head, he would be dazed long enough to switch into his T-Rex form and sit on the idiot.
He almost felt sorry for the Ex-Auror when those cheesy potatoes kicked in. That had been one massive...and smelly...fart.
If the head injury didn't knock him out cold, the smell did.
Two hours later, and Harry almost jumped up when he felt movement under him roughly fifteen minutes after he sat on Moody.
It wasn't until one of the professors came in to investigate the door being open that they spotted Harry. Or more precisely, Godzilla.
"Potter! What is the meaning of this?!" demanded Snape irate. He loathed patrolling at night.
Harry said nothing, merely stood up and let Snape see the comatose form of Moody.
Only it wasn't Moody at all.
Where the ex-auror had been, there was an unknown male with a peg leg roughly where Moody had his, in Moody's clothing.
Snape, apparently recognized him.
"Potter, change back so we can talk properly. If he wakes or moves, stun him without hesitation," said Snape eerily calm.
Harry shifted back.
"Who is he? I caught him about to put a paper inside the goblet, so I knocked his leg out from under him with my tail."
"A dead man, much like Pettigrew was supposedly dead. And a former Death Eater, but one that went to Azkaban. Do you see a flask on him anywhere?"
Harry looked until he found something silvery on the man. He cautiously levitated it to Snape. One sniff was all he needed to confirm his suspicions.
"Polyjuice. Make sure he doesn't leave, even if you have to sit on him again. I'll need to inform Dumbledore about this."
"Why not have Susan send a letter to her aunt? I mean this sounds like something Madam Bones would be rather interested to hear, and he doesn't have a good track record with sharing information."
Snape blinked twice, before he nodded in agreement.
"Stay here."
An hour and two stunners later, and Amelia Bones came into the school. She was not pleased at being woken up so early.
"Barty Crouch Jr. How was he captured?"
"I knocked him out with my tail, then sat on him until someone came in here," supplied Harry helpfully. "Thankfully the age line didn't react since I wasn't trying to breach it."
"I'm not going to ask," said Madam Bones after thinking about it. "Why didn't you call Dumbledore?"
"For the same reason I went over the security measures with my muggle partner. He had all these brilliant ideas, but when it came to security his follow through had a bad habit of falling through. Besides that man has too many secrets," said Harry.
Amelia thought that one over before nodding. He did have a valid point.
"Besides, it was pretty easy keeping him down once the cheesy potatoes kicked in."
"...Cheesy potatoes?"
"I gave the house elves recipe books, and they've been having fun with trying new ones. This week it was cheesy potatoes as well as some of the new favorites. I daresay it didn't agree with Crouch though...the smell alone would have knocked him out a second time."
Despite the situation they were in, Madam Bones worked that one through before she let out a genuine laugh. She managed to hold in her snickering long enough to ask "Were you in human or animal form at the time?"
"I was sitting on Crouch with my arse close to his face. What do you think?" deadpanned Harry with a grin. Madam Bones laughed again.
It was when she was leading an unconscious Barty Crouch Jr. that Dumbledore finally showed up. And he was not particularly pleased she had come to Hogwarts. Even less so when he learned Snape had called her first rather than alert him to the issue.
And if that wasn't damning enough to the old wizard, the fact that Barty apparently had been attempting to put Harry's name into the goblet and force it to pick a fourth, only to be foiled by the boy himself upset him greatly.
Harry hid a frown.
'Come to think of it, Dumbledore wasn't exactly pleased to have Talon around to begin with. And the less said about the looks he shot me when he found out I tricked the teachers to the third floor first year, the better. It's almost like he wants me to have dangerous adventures,' thought Harry.
Looking back on it, there was always some sort of near-miss adventure averted because his attention was generally focused on his raptors rather than magic.
To be fair, Talon and Sickle did require a lot of care and attention, especially since they were adapted to live in a tropical climate and not a cold and humid one like Scotland. There was also something about some deficiency specifically engineered into the dinosaurs, but to date Harry never had that issue.
Either Wu hadn't put in the so-called contingency correctly, or the dinosaurs naturally adapted after they got old enough. They were, after all, born long before humans even existed so it was possible they had never needed whatever it was Wu withheld to begin with.
Science was a wonderful tool...but humanity's grasp on it was still in it's infancy. And just because they had managed to somehow resurrect dinosaurs did in no way mean that they understood everything about them.
Harry made sure to mention that to Grant in a letter, about how they still needed people to dig up the dinosaurs and figure out how they lived before human intervention if they wanted to have even a remote chance of understanding how they would react once they were brought back.
It certainly improved Grant's mood, hearing that from Harry. Apparently he was of the unpleasant opinion he might be out a job at the rate Hammond was going. He just needed a reminder.
"Wait, could you repeat that?" said Daphne incredulous.
After they spent so long conspiring for the big show, the group seemed to...meld...together easily. Once they got over the whole house rivalry thing.
"I said I sat on a Death Eater and then knocked him out with a fart. I think I might be lactose intolerant or something, because this has happened before..." said Harry.
"Not that. I mean the part about a Death Eater in Hogwarts," said Daphne, not even caring what he meant by 'lactose intolerant'. If she did, she'd ask Hermione.
"Oh. Well according to Madam Bones when she questioned him, he was supposed to put my name in the goblet under a fake school and force me to compete. But since I busted him before he could enter my name, it should mean I'm not going to be forced to enter. Also his dad is apparently going to be joining him because he helped break him out in the first place," said Harry.
"Who was he again?"
"The Crouch family. Father and son. And unluckily for him, he cast out his elf before this whole thing happened, so she can't exactly destroy evidence now. Considering what happened, I'm planning on having Dobby retrieve Crouch's elf and have her bond to my line. It should cheer her up at any rate."
Hermione growled, but kept her peace. She didn't like the whole system, viewing it as slavery, but after a nice, long talk with Flitwick she learned to keep her mouth shut about it.
The elves needed the bonding to survive properly, since there was apparently some form of magical degeneration in their cores that made them atrophy until they died otherwise. Harry said she was welcome to try and find a way to either reverse it, or avoid that issue before she attempted to free them.
At least it shut her up about the subject.
"Wait, Crouch as in Barty Crouch?!" said Blaise.
Harry nodded.
"His son was...is...a convicted Death Eater, and from what little Susan's aunt let slip, was party to something that happened to the Longbottoms."
Susan winced.
"I heard about that. A team of Death Eaters stormed the wards of the Longbottom hideaway and tortured Alice and Frank Longbottom until they lost their sanity. From what I heard it's why Neville lives with his grandmother."
"Just out of curiosity, are their minds completely gone or are they just catatonic?" asked Hermione.
"I have no idea. It's not something you ask," said Susan.
"No, I get what Hermione's asking. What sort of services could one get to repair or treat mental health issues among magicals?"
"It's not discussed, period," said Daphne flatly. "Either they do away with you or hide you from the public, since it's seen as having an unstable connection to magic."
Hermione, Harry and Colin all frowned.
"That doesn't sound right. I mean our uncle David is schizophrenic, but he takes his medication and goes to appointments regularly to live a normal life. Are you saying there's nothing like that in the magical world?" said Colin.
"What's schizophrenic?" asked Tracy.
"It's a mental disorder. There's medicine and treatment, and some people can more or less adjust to normal society," said Hermione.
"We don't have anything like that," said Tracy with absolute certainty.
"Well it's worth bringing up to Neville in any case. There's a chance their minds weren't lost at all, just put into a state of shock and they just need someone who knows what they're doing to break them out and tell them it's safe to come back. Or definitively tell the Longbottoms that they're just shells and that it's healthier to put them out of their misery," said Harry.
"You do that, I'll stay out of hexing range of Augusta Longbottom thank you," said Blaise flatly.
"Anyway as it turns out Mr. Crouch switched his wife for his son, and when she died no one bothered to check if it was really him. He had his son under Imperius all this time with only Winky to insure he stayed put. He even cursed an employee who found out and was threatening to blackmail him."
"Who?"
"A witch named Bertha Jorkins, I think," said Harry. "There's also the fact that an inspection of the trunks showed he was keeping Moody in one of his expanded ones with limited food and water. Just enough to keep him alive. They're reasonably certain they can bring him back to full health, but until then Madame Bones is sending another auror to teach us. That is, if Moody is still interested."
"Bet that did wonders for Dumbledore's reputation," said Daphne with a snort. There were answering snorts for the others.
"That brings another issue to mind. We all know the Malfoys haven't got any love for Dumbledore. But consider this...how many positions of authority does Dumbledore currently have?" said Harry. He looked at Hermione.
"Supreme Mugwump, the lead diplomat of the International Confederation of Wizards, and headmaster of Hogwarts," she replied immediately.
"Now what do each of those positions do," said Harry.
"Supreme Mugwump is basically like the head judge, in muggle terms," said Daphne.
"I think you mean Chief Magistrate, but they amount to the same thing," said Hermione.
"As head diplomat he is the leading voice in the ICW," said Blaise.
"And as headmaster he has a hand in the education of all new witches and wizards, and his accomplishments mean people listen to him outside of school," said Fred.
"Right, now I want to ask you this. Who else has the power as the head judge, effective diplomat, and lives in a castle that presides over others of varying nobility?" said Harry.
He had looked Dumbledore up, and when he added all those duties up in his head, he didn't like the picture he got. At all.
It took Hermione a few moments before she caught on.
"Oh my god..."
"What is it?" asked Dennis.
"A king. He's essentially set himself up as a king in all but name," she said in shock.
"He even lives in a castle with the best rooms and has a throne," added Harry. "What's more he essentially has a hand in almost every aspect of magical culture for Great Britain and the outlying countries, particularly Europe."
Blaise, Daphne and Tracy blinked, before they paled as well.
"That is rather horrifying."
"I'm not saying that Dumbledore is bad, but perhaps Lucius Malfoy was right in that we need to replace him. Besides, it can't be healthy acting as a de-facto king of an entire community."
Seeing the Slytherins nod in agreement, Harry had the feeling this particular revelation would hit the snakes pretty damn hard, especially when they point out WHY they came to that conclusion.