It was a bit gloomy in the lake.

Harry had sort of been expecting that – a series of books he'd read back at primary school had included an underwater adventure or two, where it had been sometimes funny and sometimes important that being underwater changed how colours looked. It wasn't as bad as the book had said, though, or at least it didn't seem like it, though that could just be Harry's dragon eyes again.

There were all sorts of big underwater plants near the shore – Harry vaguely recognized them from Herbology or Potions, because the ones that weren't actively magical did at least qualify as potions ingredients so they showed up in One Thousand Magical Herbs And Fungi – and Tiobald looked back as they reached them, making sure Harry and James were keeping up.

"I'd say what there was to watch out for, but it might tell the contestants," he said, his voice perfectly understandable underwater. "Just follow me."

Harry did have to admit that that was a good point.

They kept going, angling down with all three of them swimming fast – Harry did occasionally have to slow down to make sure he was steering in the right direction, but he didn't have trouble catching up again – and the amount of light gradually reduced until they were right in the deepest part of the lake. There was an expanse of black mud, which had no sign of any directions that Harry could discern, but Tiobald seemed to know where he was going.

Naturally, that was when they started to hear a kind of ethereal song.

"The Task's started," Tiobald informed them, glancing back, then turned left and led them towards the source of the song.

It was only a couple more minutes before Harry and the others reached the selkie village – or the village of Clan MacUalraig, or whatever it was they actually called it. Harry was slightly ashamed to realize he'd never bothered to ask.

Still, it was a fascinating sight. All the buildings were made of stone, and patterned with algae, but some of the bigger ones didn't have a roof – Harry supposed that you didn't really need one underwater, it wasn't like it was going to rain – and what at first looked like staining with algae, though looking more closely Harry saw that there was a kind of elaborate art to it. It looked a lot like Greek or Roman mosaics, only made with algae instead of bits of coloured stone, and most of what was on the buildings seemed to be abstract art with patterns like waves and trees and seaweed.

There were selkies, as well, which was sort of what you had to expect in a selkie village. They looked more like Tiobald than anyone else Harry had seen, but he could see the differences in their faces and he had the feeling that he'd be able to tell them apart once he was introduced – though he did think it might be a little more different if the necklaces of pebbles they wore were interchangeable, because some of the patterns were really distinctive and it'd be hard to ignore them.

Harry's friend led them along one of the weaving streets of the settlement, passing by various selkies. Some of them waved – probably mostly to Tiobald – while others called out hellos, and one at least stared at Harry in surprise.

"That's Harry, Moibeal," Tiobald said, flipping around to fold his arms at her. "I've told you and told you about my friends on the surface."

"It's mighty strange to see someone with wings, is all," Moibeal replied, looking away.

Harry sort of wondered what the audience on the surface was thinking of this.

"The statue's just over there," Tiobald added. "Follow me a bit further, then find somewhere good to watch?"

That sounded like a good idea to Harry.

He wasn't sure at first what the statue was, but they passed the final set of buildings and reached what was probably the underwater equivalent of a village square – which had a giant statue in the middle, plus perhaps a dozen guards armed with spears and tridents around the edge.

In the open space were more than a dozen merfolk singing in chorus, going on about how the champions had to come to see their home or they'd have to go back alone, and behind them was a giant stone statue.

After looking at it for a few seconds, Harry decided that if he lived in a village with a statue that big he'd probably just call it the statue. It would save time because it'd usually be the one he was thinking of.

Tied by seaweed ropes to the tail of the statue were three people, all apparently asleep. Cho Chang – the Ravenclaw Seeker – was one of them, while the second was Anne Smith (or Anna Smith depending on how she was spelling it today), and Harry didn't recognize the third except that she looked a lot like Fleur Delacoeur.

"They must be the hostages," he said, and James tried to say something in reply but all that came out was a big bubble of air.

Tiobald made a sign language gesture with his right hand, holding it for James to see. "That means okay," he explained, then showed 'no' as well.

Deciding that he already knew enough sign language that he couldn't really learn anything new from Tiobald – or probably, anyway – Harry swam away a bit, looking for somewhere good to serve as a vantage point.

Remembering his mirror camera, he made sure to get a good long look at the hostages, then at the choir as they sang (this time about how 'fifteen minutes are gone by now, you'll have to find us here somehow'), then decided he'd probably be best able to help by swimming in circles and looking for a Champion coming out of the gloom.

Or the giant squid, but hopefully the giant squid wouldn't turn up today. It would be quite inconvenient.

After about a quarter of an hour (probably), Harry realized that he didn't actually have any way to tell what time it was.

He hadn't brought his watch along, for the very good reason (he thought) that it wasn't one of the ones that said 'water resist 300 metres' you could get in some shops – so if he had brought it along it probably would have broken anyway – but that did mean he was more or less down to guessing what time it might be.

It was far too deep into the Black Lake to see where the sun was, so the way they usually did it in books wasn't really an option, which meant it was a bit of a puzzle.

After thinking about it for a bit, swimming in circles as he did with half his attention on looking out for incoming Champions, Harry remembered that there'd been that one time that Fred or George had cast a spell that told him the time. It had been near the end of Fourth Year, he thought, which must mean that it was a charm Harry was going to be learning in the next few months.

Knowing that didn't help him much now, though, because he was fairly sure he'd know what time it was in a few months. But it had been something to do with time, and Harry shrugged his wings before deciding to give it a go.

"Tempus," he said, pointing his wand up a little bit, and some numbers appeared in mid-air.

Harry was quite pleased with himself for that, until he actually looked at the numbers. He wasn't sure what they were, but they certainly weren't normal Arabic numerals or Roman ones, and for all he could tell the spell was informing him earnestly that the current time on the moon was thrilve hundred and neeb.

Giving it up as a bad attempt, Harry decided it wasn't that important and returned to his patrol.

Only a minute or so later, though, there was a sudden white flash, and a spectral version of Fawkes appeared over where James was. Harry swam closer, accelerating, and though he missed the first bit he could hear the rest.

"...afraid that you must come up early," Dumbledore's voice was saying. "Miss Delacour got into some trouble and so she has had to return to the lake shore."

"I'll go and tell Dad," Tiobald offered, swimming rapidly over to one of the selkie guards.

"Please bring Miss Delacour's hostage up," Dumbledore's patronus concluded. "Thank you."

With that, the odd sight of a glowing white phoenix deep in a lake vanished, and James began to swim over towards the statue as well.

'Your time's half gone, so don't delay,' the choir sang, 'Or you'll have lost your points today...'

That made Harry curious, so he swam over to one of the nearby merpeople. This one was one of the guards, with a stone-tipped spear, and looked over as Harry approached.

"Excuse me?" he asked. "How do you tell the time? I'm curious."

"Same way you do," the selkie replied.

"Really?" Harry said, glancing down at his wrist. "You don't have a watch."

"What's a watch?" the selkie said.

Over by the statue, the girl who looked a lot like Fleur had been freed from the green ropes binding her to the statue, and James began to swim up towards the surface with her. A couple of the guards went with him, and Harry watched them rise.

"What is a watch?" the selkie asked again, sounding both slightly annoyed and a bit curious.

"It's how I'd tell the time, if it worked underwater," Harry tried to explain. "It's got a crystal in it that shakes back and forth very fast, because of electricity, and then hands on it show me what time it is."

"No, we don't have that kind of magic," the selkie told him. "But time's easy. It's just obvious how long it's been."

Harry thought about that answer, remembering to treat it like he was reading a book where he'd just met a new character, then realized that it probably just meant that – unlike humans and dragons – selkies just knew what time it was.

That would be really useful in, say, an exam.

Surprisingly, being involved with the Task like this was almost boring.

Harry tried to listen to the sounds making their way through the water, seeing if he could hear the sound of someone swimming, but the Selkie choir was loud enough that Harry didn't think he'd be able to actually hear past it until someone was quite close. That was a bit of a pity, but Harry also had to admit that he was really impressed with them – they'd been singing at this point for (apparently) forty-five minutes, since they'd just sang that 'But fifteen minutes now remain, and you've no chance to try again', and Harry hadn't yet spotted where they'd either repeated themselves or had to stop for a bit.

Some of the rhymes hadn't been very good, but then again it was in another language. It was enough of an achievement that they'd all rhymed at all.

Harry swam a bit further out, to where the singing was quieter, and tried to listen again. It didn't really help, but a few minutes later he heard a faint rumbling from the mirror – like distant shouting and cheering.

Looking around, it took a moment, but Harry spotted two shapes swimming towards the village. One of them was Cedric, with a Bubble-Head Charm around his own head a lot like Harry's, and the other was Ken Towler with all the amphibian features that Gillyweed gave.

"Finally!" Cedric said, his voice a bit faint because of the water. "It's bloody hard to find anything down here!"

He kicked his feet like he was doing the crawl and pulled with his hands like he was doing the breast-stroke, Ken behind him and holding his mirror out, and Harry swam up a bit so he could get a good view of both of them from overhead.

The buzzing from the mirror was getting less faint, so everyone on the surface was probably getting quite excited.

Cedric swam straight over to the statue, and the guards parted to let him through. He rummaged in the pocket of his swimming trunks to get a knife, cut through the ropes holding Cho after a bit of work, then swam back up towards the surface of the water with Ken following him and Cho in tow.

After almost an hour underwater – and at least half an hour waiting around the selkie village – Harry had to admit that it seemed almost anticlimactic, but then again he wasn't really the target audience here because he was one of the cameradragons.

(Or the only cameradragon, but there were other camerapeople in the water.)

Maybe it would have been a bit more exciting if he'd been trying to stop the champions getting at the hostages. That felt a bit more dragon-y than filming, but then again not only had the First Task been sort of the same as that – in terms of getting past a dragon – but on top of that it was usually princesses which dragons tried to stop people getting to.

As he was mulling about how quickly Cedric's rescue attempt had gone and how it related to princess rescue attempts, though, the selkie choir announced that time was up. They stopped singing, paused for a few seconds to confer, then started a kind of repetitive chant in multi-part harmony that was just the words 'extra time' over and over again.

Krum was still nowhere to be seen, and when there was a sudden loud burst of cheering through the mirror he was carrying Harry realized that that must mean that none of the Champions had successfully retrieved their hostage inside an hour.

Maybe it was just the difficulty of navigating underwater?

Harry thought about that for a bit, decided that he'd have tried a Summoning Charm to see if it would help tug him in the right direction, then saw a distant and predatory shape moving through the lake water.

There was a little flicker of silvery light off in that direction, another one of Dumbledore's Patronuses, and another shape swam to the side a bit. Harry looked closer, all four paws gently pushing against the water so he could manoeuvre, then realized what he was seeing looked an awful lot like a person with a shark for a head.

And Cormac, as well. Which meant the person with a shark for a head was probably Krum.

As Shark-Krum swam closer, and Harry got a closer look, he realized that either Krum was really good at Transfiguration or Krum thought he was really good at Transfiguration and had just got lucky. From Transfiguration classes Harry remembered that if you Transfigured a person into a dog they'd end up only being able to think about as much as a dog (which was why the Animagus transformation was so important, as it ignored that sort of thing) but Krum had transfigured his head into a shark head, and that meant he'd had to transfigure enough of his head for gills but miss enough that he could still think properly.

Kicking hard, Krum swam over to the statue, then started trying to bite Anna free. It didn't look very safe, and after the second attempt (which Harry was mirror-filming from one side) one of the selkie guards bopped him sharply on the nose and shook his head.

Harry had to say, he was impressed by Krum's reply. It didn't involve any words, but he'd never imagined a shark could either pout or roll its eyes.

Krum then swam over to another one of the guards, gently took hold of her spear a bit below the tip, and tugged gently.

"Should I let him have it?" the guard asked, looking over to the selkie with the most ornate necklace (who Harry guessed was the leader), and the leader visibly thought about it for a bit before finally nodding.

Now armed with a spear, Krum used it to cut away at the ropes holding Anna to the statue. It still took a while, and at some point Cormac vanished up towards the surface so his Gillyweed didn't wear out (which still left Harry and Tiobald to do the filming), but eventually Krum managed to get the spear blade in enough of the right places and free the enchanted kitsune.

He turned to face towards the surface, ready to swim up, and Harry was about to follow suit when he spotted something large looming overhead.

"Squid!" the selkie leader called, as – true to his word – the Giant Squid approached ominously. "Ready!"

All at once, the choristers and everyone else who'd been watching vanished into their houses. The selkie guards all swam together into a formation, while Krum decided it would be best not to swim right into the arms and arms and arms of a giant squid and hung back a bit.

Getting his wand out and ready, Harry followed the selkies. "Can I help?" he called.

"If you can scare it off, aye," the selkie replied.

Harry thought about what he could do, then pointed his wand. "Petrificus Totalus!"

Sadly, the spell didn't quite work fully – probably because the Giant Squid was just too big. It did however suddenly stick its tentacles together in pairs, pause, then start awkwardly swimming away.

"...that'll do nicely," the selkie leader told him, sounding impressed.

"I'd better go and take the spell off again," Harry said, remembering that you had to cast a counter spell to the Body Bind, and started swimming as fast as he could after the Giant Squid. "I'll just be a minute."

When Harry got back to the Selkie village after dealing with the Giant Squid, he found that (perhaps as he should have expected) Krum had gone up to the surface as soon as the Squid situation was under control. Tiobald had followed him, filming all the way, and Harry just shrugged before saying thank-you and swimming up as fast as possible.

At first it was hard to tell how quickly he was moving, once he'd gone high enough that he wasn't seeing the lake bed, but then it started to get lighter.

It still seemed like a long way to go, then a bit less, then all of a sudden he was right at the surface of the water and broke through fast enough to rise four or five feet into the air. Sweeping his wings up he hammered down once, then twice, and managed to settle into a glide just above the surface of the lake.

The colours seemed very odd after so long underwater. There were also a lot of people making a lot of noise in the stands, but that was for Cedric and Krum so Harry didn't really dwell on it much.

Flaring his wings and alighting over by the tent, Harry saw just about everyone else who'd gone down into the water. Most of his fellow camerapeople were actually still in the water, equipped with gills and with Professor Sprout crouched next to them, and Tiobald was just getting himself seated in his wheelchair again with Luna's help.

"Excellent work with that charm, Harry!" Professor Flitwick said. "Can I just take that mirror from you?"

Harry duly took it off and gave it to him, then backed off a bit so nobody was nearby and shook himself out vigorously to shed as much of the water as possible. That still left him a bit damp, and he accepted a towel from Madam Pomfrey before looking around.

Cedric was wrapped in a towel as well, as were both Anne Smith and Cho Chang, and Krum had apparently managed to either successfully untransfigure himself non-verbally or had someone else do it because he was back to looking normal instead of like a shark.

"Thank you," the Durmstrang student said, looking up at Harry. "I did not expect the squid."

"Nobody expects the squid," Fred said, appearing as if from nowhere.

"We didn't expect the squid," George agreed, appearing as if from next to his twin (because he did).

"Speaking of which," Fred added, "We have named the squid."

"You did what?" Cedric asked. "...actually that sounds entirely like you two."

"We've decided he's now called Mongo," George explained. "You know, broadly nice, but so strong it can break stuff by mistake."

Harry didn't really understand what they were getting at, and said so.

"We'll have to pester Sirius to show you that video, then," Fred decided. "It's hilarious."

"I didn't really get the bit with the dancers near the end," George supplied.

"Your attention, please?" Dumbledore requested, his voice magically amplified so everyone could hear it. "Thanks to the fine efforts of the students who donated their time to give us all those fine views of the Challenge as it went on, I would like to announce that we have determined the points scores for each Champion."

Harry looked over, interested to see if they'd draw lines in the sky again – a spell he sort of wanted to learn – but instead Dumbledore just kept going. "Cedric Diggory performed a fine Bubble-Head Charm and a Warming Charm, and contended successfully with the grindylows and other perils to be found in the Lake. He returned with his hostage one minute outside the time limit of one hour, and as such has been awarded a total of forty-five points."

"Fair enough," Cedric admitted, as the Hogwarts crowd cheered lustily for him. "Should have been just a bit quicker with that Warming Charm..."

"It took us long enough to get there with someone leading the way," Harry volunteered.

"You know what I'd have done?" Fred asked. "Ferret submarine."

"But you're not a ferret," Harry said.

"I'm not a submarine either, but you didn't complain about that one," Fred retorted.

"Fleur Delacour unfortunately ran into trouble with a large number of grindylows, and had to return to the surface early after being helped by Miss Crofts. Her spellwork however was excellent, and we have awarded her twenty-three points."

Harry looked around to see where Fleur was, and after a bit of searching spotted her with her hostage over by the stands. She was talking to the girl Harry assumed was probably her sister, and didn't seem too upset by the result.

"Hm." Krum said, just as Harry found Fleur.

"Come on," Anne invited from where she was sitting, snickering a bit. "Tell us how you really feel."

"I will not know until I know my score," Krum pointed out, but almost as soon as he'd finished talking Dumbledore was speaking again.

"Viktor Krum's display of Self-Transfiguration was inspired, but he returned several minutes later than Mr. Diggory and last of all three Champions. We have decided to award him forty points."

"I'm okay with that," Cedric said, after a few seconds of internal calculation. "I think that means there's, what, two points in it going into the final Task?"

Krum nodded.

"And, finally," Dumbledore added, "I would like to extend my thanks – and five surprise house points – to all of our non-Champions who helped to make this a fine Task for everyone."

"I wonder if you can call that Gryffindor bias?" Anne asked, still sounding deeply amused. "Or is it just that most of the people willing to jump in a freezing lake are Gryffindor?"

"I don't think the lake's technically freezing," Harry pointed out. "It's at least a few degrees warmer than that."

"Hey, sis," Tyler called, running over to join them. "How was it at the bottom of the lake?"

"Ask someone who was awake," Anne told him.

Harry thought that was a good point, but what Tyler did next confused him. The Slytherin third-year looked at the ground near his sister, then at Krum, then at Anne.

"Is something wrong?" Anne asked, then squirmed as her brother fiddled with her hair. "Hey!"

"What do you care, you're going to need to wash it anyway," Tyler replied. "Maybe you could make a thing out of weaving stuff into it. Lakeweed is green, Slytherin colours are green-"

As the twins continued bickering, Fred and George exchanged a look.

"...I'm getting that feeling like I'm looking at us from the outside again," George mused.

"Aha!" Tyler announced. "There was a bug in your hair."

He headed off towards the now-emptying stands, and Anne shook her head with a grumble.

"Brothers."

She picked up her towel, scrubbed it over her hair, and when she was done it looked like she hadn't been in the lake at all.

"Did you just do that with magic?" Cho asked, enviously. "That's really useful. I bet everyone wants that power."

"I don't," Harry volunteered. "But only because I don't know what I'd do with it."

Cho admitted that that was a good point.

"It's a glamour," Anne supplied. "It just looks like this, it still feels bleh underneath though."

Then the Gillyweed finally began to wear off, and Cormac was the first to hurriedly splash out of the water and cast a Warming Charm on himself.

"It was kind of weird," Ron said, halfway back to the castle. "There was stuff going on on lots of mirrors at once, so you never knew which one you should be paying attention to."

"In Muggle sports and stuff, for a team game they usually use one or two cameras and have someone whose job is to pick which one's playing," Dean supplied. "For stuff like this I think they'd probably have turned it into a tape after it was over – so they could show from one view and then another, and skip all the swimming."

"Steady on, there'd be nothing left," Ron countered.

"Most of the swimming," Dean amended. "At least this way you didn't just end up staring at a lake for an hour, right?"

"They wouldn't do that, would they?" Hermione said.

"I was the one who pointed it out to Dumbledore," Dean confided. "At this point I think I'm becoming the Being Sensible Professor. Dumbledore already said he'd ask me about what they were going to do for the next Task. That's the last one, it's after the exams."

"The bit with the giant squid was kind of cool," Neville said. "When that happened there was loads of cheering."

"There was?" Harry asked, honestly a bit surprised. "I just cast one spell and it went away."

"I'm actually not sure if it was there to do anything dangerous at all," Hermione told them. "Sorry, Harry. It was looking big, though."

"There was a selkie painting which showed them chasing off the giant squid," Harry replied. "I'm not sure if you saw it? And… well, I was thinking about it, and a lot of them have spears. If they don't need to defend themselves against the giant squid, what else would they need them for?"

"At this point we might be overthinking things," Ron said. "Let's go have lunch."

"It's only about quarter past ten," Dean told him. "I don't think they've even got close to starting lunch yet."

Ron considered that.

"Then let's wait for lunch. And ask Harry questions about what it was like underwater that he doesn't have to answer."

He snapped his fingers. "Actually, have you tried using that bubble head spell to see if you can breathe really high up? Does it work for that as well?"

"I'm not really sure how to test that safely," Harry admitted. "It's easier with water because you can see that the bubble is there. But it should work, and maybe you could test it with a Muggle pressure gauge or something."

He frowned. "But you couldn't use it by itself, in space, or you might explode."

"Yeah, exploding would be bad," Ron nodded. "...Merlin, now I want to see if it covers my whole body when I'm a squirrel. That's another charm to learn..."

Harry hadn't yet managed to work out if there was a pattern to what the House-Elves made on any given day, but it did seem like there was a lot of fish related stuff for lunch today. (Out of the available choices, Harry mused for a bit and then decided to have something made with shellfish and pasta.)

"Did you see the bit with the grindylows?" Dennis Creevey asked, halfway through some fish and chips. "What were they like?"

"Harry didn't see any wild grindylows," Colin reminded his brother. "That was the ones who were following the Champions."

"Oh, right," Dennis realized. "Still?"

"The tame ones were a bit odd," Harry admitted, thinking about the ones he'd seen with collars and string in Tiobald's home village.

He supposed maybe they were like guard dogs, or something. You could have guard dogs that were safe and that didn't make wild wolves not dangerous. (Well, unless they were actually wargs, in which case they were still dangerous but not really either wild or tame – just independent.)

"Do you think we have Potions this afternoon?" Neville asked. "Probably, right?"

"Almost certainly," Hermione told him. "I know we skipped Charms even though we probably could have had it, but Potions is after lunch and nobody would think the Champions would be down in the lake until mid-afternoon."

"Maybe we'll do Gillyweed," Neville mused. "There's got to be some way of using it in potions that isn't just, you know, eating it."

"It might let you breathe better when you're high up?" Ron suggested.

That sort of idea got swapped back and forth for a bit, but then Ginny came and sat in one of the nearby free seats.

"Did you hear?" she asked, a bit breathlessly. "Rita Skeeter's been arrested!"

"Blimey, not before time," Ron muttered.

"What for?" Neville asked. "Gran said that she's always been a pain, but she knows the libel laws really well and she never quite says anything you can actually get her for."

He shook his head. "She said she tried, once."

"Well, she definitely broke the law on this one," Ginny said. "She's an Animagus, but she didn't register – and she got caught using it to listen in on people just earlier today. Luna said that she got all the details from an anonymous source and she's going to be writing it up and putting it in the Quibbler."

"I wonder if Hogwarts actually attracts illegal Animaguses," Harry frowned. "That's two who've been caught here in the last three years."

"Don't remind me," Ron said. "But there's more legal Animaguses here now than illegal ones."

"The right word's Animagi," Hermione said. "I think. Anyway, what was Rita Skeeter's animal form?"

"Some kind of beetle, apparently," Ginny said.

Dean started coughing and laughing, mumbling something about bugging people, and Neville gave him a thump on the back until he wasn't choking any more.

For his part, Harry suddenly had a very good idea about what had happened to Rita Skeeter.

If he was right, it probably involved the Smiths' copy of the Marauders' Map, Tyler being worried about his sister, and getting a bug out of her hair. But that was just a guess.

AN:

Well, it's not quite uneventful as far as Second Tasks go, but it's not far off.