"I'm so bored," Harry complained. Almost whined.
"Nobody's tried to kill you in months, huh?" Dean observed, where he was quietly drawing in a sketchbook on one of their slow afternoons toward the end of October, in comfy chairs in the common room. Seamus and Ron were across the room playing chess, Hermione had talked Neville into helping her in the library with her investigation into recreating Sirius' mirrors, and the rest of the girls were in a corner giggling over teen magazines from both Earth and Vanaheim.
Harry had been trying to work on his D&D campaign, but he was getting bored drawing rooms on graph paper and figuring out how to make the fights in each different and interesting while still making some level of sense for the haunted abbey aesthetic he was going for. "No. Well, maybe. It's just weird that it's almost Halloween and, well, not much has happened."
"You could have had a girlfriend," his best friend chided. "Really takes your mind off of the lack of ghost snakes or shapeshifting murderers in the castle."
Harry shrugged. "I've talked to Susan Bones a few times. But since we haven't had a Hogsmeade day yet, seems like inviting her too early would make it awkward. We'd just be in class every day like, 'Yep. That date's going to be cool. Anyway, can you pass me a trowel?'" He realized that he was complaining too much and asked, "You and Padma doing okay?"
Dean nodded, still focused on the sketch, saying, "It's hard to find time to do much, other than what you see just hanging out with everyone. But I think it's going well. Looking forward to Hogsmeade. I wonder if anyone will show up."
"Sirius says he's heard they're at least keeping troops patrolling the train tracks. So maybe this will be the only place traders want to come this year."
"So no chance of you getting to leave a bad date to fight a bunch of marauders again."
"Hey, it was a good date until the marauders," Harry argued. "And maybe I'd be able to talk Susan into helping so I'd know we'd have that in common."
"You know, if you haven't asked her, she might have already been asked by someone else."
"Really? Crap," he realized his friend was right. "I guess there's always elves or witches from the other schools as a fallback."
Dean actually looked up from his pad to joke, "Sexy Eastern European singles are in your area. Warning: there's a small chance that they've already sold their soul to Dorammu." They both took a beat to imagine, before he asked, "Shouldn't they have been here already?"
It was, in fact, not until the day before Halloween that the first of the schools were set to show up. Dumbledore announced it at lunch that Friday. "I've just received word that Beauxbatons should be arriving in time for dinner this evening. The convergence that opened between Vanaheim and Alfheim was quite some distance away, and they've been traveling by carriage for several days. I trust that we will make them feel welcome when they arrive, and understand that they may be suffering road weariness… well, sky weariness." He glanced down the table at Trelawney, currently at medium-goth level so she could ramp her outfit up hard for Halloween. "I'm assured the omens are good for Durmstrang to receive a more convenient connection that will have them here in time for the selection of challengers."
The school was having a hard time focusing on afternoon classes, so it was not entirely ideal that Harry had two periods of Snape after lunch and then had a last period of defense. Snape had viciously kept everyone on task, and Moody had snarled, "Yes, elves are very exciting," to cut through their gossip as he stomped into the room. "Very exciting for them to get into your mind."
"Bewitched! I was bewitched!" Ron attested. "At the World Cup. Elven glamour! I was bewitched!"
Lavender made a face and looked like she was considering giving her boyfriend a punch, but Moody nodded, "Yes. Glamour. A kind word for a power that would be unforgivable if a witch did it. With so many elves about to be in the castle, and with our lessons about dark magic, Dumbledore thought it might be a good idea to train you to resist mental influences. So, today, we're starting out small and seeing whether you can resist some low-powered compulsions."
As he was setting up a device on the table, Hermione asked, "But… is there any magic you can do to us that wouldn't, itself, be unforgivable?" Moody didn't actually care about raising of hands as long as he wasn't interrupted unduly, which was really saving her a workout in his class.
"In a courtroom, probably. In Hogwarts, which really kind of has its own laws, hard to say," Moody shrugged. He'd been healing up over the last several weeks and didn't even wince when he did that anymore. His face was also a less raw pink, new scars fading into the rest of his skin tone. He still seemed to need the cane, however. "There are also a number of non-dark charms that affect the mind, if not as strongly. But for maximum legality, today we'll be using an enchanted item. Lot of loopholes on that."
He stood back and opened a large jewelry box displaying a bluish, palm-sized triangular stone with rounded corners, and some kind of face etched into it that reminded Harry of the demon dogs from Ghostbusters. "I'm not touching any mind-controlling stones," Neville declared.
"Huh. Fair," Moody allowed. Harry was becoming increasingly certain he'd gotten the story at some point. "Anyone that wants to, this is the Charm Stone. Old piece of trickery that's apparently been in the school vaults for centuries. Gets into your head when you touch it, and traps you in a daydream. Nothing too serious. If you're up for it, I want to see if you can touch it and break free on your own. If you're not out in a minute, we'll pull you off. Any takers?"
"Someone with dark eyes should go first," Harry suggested, wary of any kind of stones that might control someone's mind. "For reasons."
Moody shot him a grin at the precaution, and pointed at Hermione, "What about it, Granger?"
On the spot, she whispered to Harry, "Double-check I'm still me after," before heading up. At Moody's direction, she lightly put her hand on the stone in the box and then just stood in place, swaying slightly. The professor had turned over a small sandglass to count out the minute as she touched it, and when all the sand finished falling, he lightly grabbed her wrist and pulled her hand away. "Oh. Can I try again?"
"After the rest of the class has had a go," he told her. "See, you can't just be smart enough to think your way out of this kind of magic. You have to be sure about what's your mind, and what's coming from outside. Constant vigilance. Next!"
"It really did just seem like a nice daydream," she explained as she sat down among her friends. Harry gave her a good sharp look, but realized that unless it actually turned her eyes blue, or made her act in an obviously unusual manner, he'd have no way of knowing if she was still under its control.
About half the class had gone before Harry decided to try his luck, and so far everyone had needed to be freed after a minute. "Huh. Figured someone would have broken out by now," Moody frowned. "Give it a go, Potter."
Almost as wary as Neville after his own run-in with the yellow Stone, Harry touched the new object gingerly. There was no immediate sense of a universally powerful construct attempting to reach in and reprogram his brain, so that was a relief. Instead, it was just a subtle caress, trying to make him imagine what it was going to be like to meet a bunch of elves in a little while. It might be neat, to see some actual elves that weren't trying to kill someone he liked, as part of some weird conspiracy or prophecy. Would they be like the elves in Lord of the Rings or D&D?
Before he could get too deep, there was a flicker of pain in his scar (much less than when it had been defending him from the other Stone), and his vision went slightly orange. It was enough to remind him what he was supposed to be doing, and he let go of the stone and took a step back.
"Not bad!" Moody congratulated him. "Only about ten seconds. See, Potter can do it. Next!"
"You might try it, Nev, if you want to show off," Harry suggested, quietly. "It's not nearly as powerful as… the other one. You might have built up a resistance."
"Thanks, Harry, but I'd just as soon not risk it," Neville disagreed.
A few other people in class were also not planning to risk it, so after fifteen had gone, there was time in the period for another round. That time through, most of them managed to escape on their own, used to the compulsion. Most of them still took nearly the whole minute. Harry, for his part, wasn't even caught his second time.
"And now you see the trick of it," Moody explained, packing up the box toward the end of the class period. "It's hard to prepare for something that's never been done to you before. Your enemies will try to get you with things they know you haven't seen. And you should do the same to them! The Midgardians have a saying, though: Fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice, shame on me. If someone gets you, it's up to you to figure out how they won't get you again the same way." He thought about it for a second and said, "But when you're really ready for trouble, they don't even get you once.
"Homework for next week is to pay attention to what you're feeling when you meet an elf, and figure out how you might block it out. And, unless I'm mistaken, you'll have a chance to start in just a few minutes. Dismissed!"
They tried to get the students to stand together in front of the main entry gate by houses, all formed-up and proper for the incoming guests. That lasted about ten minutes, and then the neatly-separated four groups began to mingle, and the prefects gave up on keeping order (though Percy might have held it together through sheer Weasley stubbornness). In the waning light of the chilly afternoon, they especially weren't going to stop girlfriends hugging onto their boyfriends for warmth, which was how they reacquired Padma and Luna in the center of the Gryffindor clump.
Harry figured they'd gathered them a little too early, and that some kind of showmanship was at play to have the elves arrive out of the sunset just before dinner. Cold and increasingly-hungry voices suddenly raised up as various people with keen and roving gazes noted a speck appearing above the horizon in the west. It swiftly grew, and questions were asked. Neither Hermione nor any of the Vanaheim natives had expected a flying craft. "Maybe it's an Asgardian skiff?" Harry mused, Hagrid having eventually told him how he'd been delivered to his Aunt's house as a baby.
Nobody was expecting them to be riding in an actual fairytale castle being towed by pegasi. As the incoming "aircraft" just got larger and larger, Harry was sure he noticed the edges of its gravity-defying towers flicker against the waning sunlight, and figured it was mostly an impressive illusion around a smaller core. But still, floating any kind of building well enough to be towed by flying horses was pretty impressive. By the time its apparent size began to visually rival Hogwarts, it finally seemed to be already there and coming in for a landing: the perspective had been very hard to figure out.
The snow-white aerial equines casually landed in a large area of flat, empty grass not far from the road into Hogsmeade (and not quite in whomping distance of the willow that guarded the secret passage to the Roaring Rampart that Sirius had eventually told him about). Landed and stopped, the new "castle" was the kind of thing that would make perfect sense on the cover of an old fantasy novel, with spindle-thin towers rising without buttresses and delicate stonework curving in ways that defied normal expectations about gravity and shearing forces. If it was actual stone being held together with magic instead of illusion, Harry was ready to be really impressed. The core structure, that he expected to be the true building, was still at least as big as his home in Encino.
As a warmly-clad and presumably-elven footman got down and unhitched the pegasi to lodge them in the stables attached to the building they'd been pulling, another such individual in dark blue exited from the structure's high doorway, bowing as the students from Beauxbatons filed out behind him. Well, they were preceded by the largest woman Harry had ever seen, since all the frost giants and dwarves he'd encountered were men. A little taller even than Hagrid, she was richly dressed like a Vanir society maven made at the wrong scale, high-heeled traveling boots somehow not sinking their six-inch length into the soil.
"I wonder if she's half-jotun, like Hagrid," Hermione mused, attempting to puzzle out her features.
"Can fire giants crossbreed, or are they actually elemental?" Harry mused. "Or maybe her father was a dwarf?"
"She could be a flora colossus under a glamour," Luna figured, snuggled into Neville's robes for warmth. "Daddy always thought the survivors might have hidden on Alfheim. They have trouble communicating with people that don't know their language, though, so I guess we'll find out."
She didn't seem to have more trouble communicating than a thick French accent, calling out to "Dumbly-dorr!" as she strode onto the road and toward the gathering. Behind her, a dozen students in pale blue robes followed, each looking to be in their late teens. "I 'ope we find you and your school well."
"Which one did you meet?" Hermione asked, scoping out the elves.
Seamus shrugged and Ron admitted, "Hard to say. Could be any of the girls, I guess, since they look different all the time?"
"The tall one with the silvery-blond hair," Lavender pointed out while rolling her eyes. "Boys."
"Guess they only brought the students they thought might make challenger," Dean observed of the older-looking elves. He still had one arm around Padma who was at least trying to stand back up and look like she was being polite for the new arrivals. "Sorry, Harry. Guess there aren't any our age."
He shrugged and said, "Unless some of them are our age and are using illusions to look older. I guess that means sexy witches are out too."
"Awww," Seamus groused. "I'd really been bankin' on sexy boy witches. Warlocks?"
"No, that's a Vanir government term for wizards," Lavender corrected.
Speaking of the students of Durmstrang, the giant woman who was seemingly named Madame Maxime had barely asked whether they'd arrived yet before there were gasps as people noticed some kind of cataclysm down the grounds in the lake. A large whirlpool had formed in the center and was turning the entire body of water into a churning cauldron. "I hope the fish and the giant squid are okay," Luna observed. In moments, the spin cycle suddenly ended, and the lake spat a huge object up into the air as it returned to level.
It looked like the head of a particularly-vicious black battleaxe, made on a scale even bigger than Madame Maxime. As it oriented sideways and glided to the ground at the edge of the lake, it became clear that the "blade" was a giant wing and the small "butt" was the craft itself, still likely large enough to serve as a small house if properly-appointed and if Durmstrang had brought about as many people as Beauxbatons. The craft itself didn't really seem to be able to fly under its own power, if only because they'd tried to bring a spaceship into Vanaheim where electrical devices didn't work. "I wonder if they're going to be able to get it out," Harry mused. As it settled onto the shore, in the last of the day's light Harry thought it looked less smooth than he'd expect from such a sleek craft, like it had been heavily patched and repaired over the centuries. "Huh. I wonder if that's some old dark elf ship and they can only get it to move with magic."
They did, indeed, have a similar number of students as the elven school, each seeming to be some flavor of Slavic under their bulky dark robes. Harry and Hermione waved at Viktor, when they spotted him near the front of the pack, and he gave a thin smile that didn't show his teeth and raised a hand to them before the man leading hissed something, probably about appearances. Viktor resumed a properly-dour look but nodded in their direction.
The presumed-headmaster who'd cautioned Viktor was normal-human-sized unlike his counterpart, and looked like he was straight out of central casting for "evil grand vizier corrupting the king." Dean couldn't resist muttering, "And your beard is so… twisted." Everyone nearby that had seen Aladdin chuckled.
Either the Ministry or the Norns having conspired to get both of the rival schools to Hogwarts in time for dinner, the entire student body plus their guests headed into the great hall. Each of the house tables had been extended so there was room for another school, with two extra places (one oversized) set at the staff table. The Slytherin table was looking intently at Durmstrang with its selection of dark magic users, as if expecting them to budge in with them, but Viktor Krum spotted Hermione and Harry and headed after them, his classmates shrugging and following him over to the Gryffindor table.
"Is okay?" he asked, gesturing to his classmates.
"Yeah, we told everyone you were cool," Harry nodded. The rest of Gryffindor gave brief consideration to whether they wanted a bunch of witches associating with them. But then they saw that their rivals in Slytherin were pissed that they were getting ignored. Between that and Harry's endorsement, they all spread out and made space.
It wasn't clear why the elves chose Ravenclaw. Maybe it was just Luna's extremely-interested expression.
"How've you been?" Harry asked Viktor, as he settled in and the food appeared for dinner.
"No dark elves. Can't complain," their friend nodded. He had casually slid onto the bench next to Hermione, and she gave a slight smile but then concentrated on her food. "Here?"
"Really boring. No dark elves—at least since we got to school. Though we should tell you about the World Cup," Harry explained. He then introduced all of his friends and anyone else around to Viktor. Viktor haphazardly introduced another four of his own classmates that were in gesturing distance at the table.
It turned out that, in Durmstrang, Viktor was toward the lower end of English competence but the higher end of avoidance of dark magic. Mostly, the discrepancies evened themselves out. The worst offender for dark magic use was also a very-personable Russian named Vasily who spoke perfect English, which got him a lot of leeway as he was interrogated by the Gryffindor upper-years. The worst at English was a very cute Finnish girl named Oona that could communicate just well enough to assure people that she hadn't made any witchcraft deals. She'd wound up surrounded by lower-years and was getting aggressively taught English by the Creeveys, who had found out she had relatives that worked at Nokia and wanted to know if she was interested in promoting their father's task management application to her family to pitch to the cell phone company.
A boy named Havel Poliakoff was precisely at the wrong spot for both ease of communication and interest in the dark arts—he spoke just enough English to make it clear he'd made too many witchcraft pacts—and resolved to sit with the Slytherins for subsequent meals where he'd feel less judged. Even Cormac McLaggen wound up vocally disapproving of his life choices.
The Ravenclaw table seemed to be having a distraction issue. Up close, the elves were, indeed, perfect. About the only thing stopping them from rating tens was that their glamours were struggling to keep up with a whole room full of horny teenagers: it turned out that the trick to being truly beautiful was minor and well-placed flaws. An intense amalgam of what everyone around you found attractive caused too much of an averaging effect. It was honestly hard to tell the elves apart, save by height and rough coloration, since they were each a flawless and symmetrical average of the desires of everyone around them.
They did have pointy ears, though, so that was neat.
The girl from the world cup that Lavender had pointed out seemed to be the standout. She'd inserted herself among the Ravenclaw upper-years, and both Robert Hawking and Roger Davies were intensely interested in everything she had to say. "The other elves. They're jealous of her," Parvati observed, as they were finishing their dinner.
Before anyone could examine that further, the lights in the room dimmed dramatically and Dumbledore stood. "I think we're ready. Bring it in, if you would, please."
The doors into the hall opened, and Filch came in pushing a large rolling cart bearing a huge chest of old wood and bronze banding. To either side of it, two officious-looking men walked. One was tall and had obsessively-parted graying hair and a thick mustache almost like toothbrush bristles. The other had graying blond hair and looked like the very stereotype of someone that had peaked as captain of the high school sports team. "Barty Crouch and Ludo Bagman" Ron quietly explained to his friends. "Crouch is the games guy, and Bagman owes the twins a bunch of money from their bet at the world cup."
"Thank you for coming, Bartemius and Ludovic," the headmaster confirmed, as they reached the front of the room. "Argus, if you could set up the relic?" A small but sturdy plinth had been placed right in front of Dumbledore below the teachers' table, and Filch opened the chest to remove a large goblet that seemed to have been rough-hewn from the heartwood of some ancient tree. As soon as he set the unadorned grail atop the plinth, blue flames erupted from its mouth and reached five feet before settling down to a dull rush of heat. "Thank you, Argus. Everyone, this is the Goblet of Fire. An ancient vessel carved from a discarded branch of Yggdrasil, it can make choices that bear the will of the Norns.
"I have warded this area with an age line to prevent those too young from approaching. Anyone else is free to consign a paper with your name signed upon it to the flames. Please take care that your handwriting is legible, and include the realm for which you are competing: Vanaheim, Svartalfheim, or Alfheim. You have through the Dísablót feast to enter; at that time, the Goblet will select the three challengers.
"I, once again, wish to impress the danger of this challenge. If you enter, you are committing yourself to seeing it through, no matter the risk. Good luck to all of you!"
"An age line!" one of the Weasley twins snarled.
"We'll figure out a way," the other insisted.
"I must enter name, and then back to ship," Viktor announced. Mostly to Hermione, he said, "But then, see you tomorrow?"
"Good luck!" she agreed.
As Viktor scribbled his name on a scrap of paper and strode over to the Goblet to toss it in, he wasn't alone. Nearly everyone age 17 or older in Gryffindor was heading over, as well as quite a few of the upper-years of the other houses. "Tough luck, Harry?" Cedric asked, as he hobbled by. He'd mostly healed from his gunshot wounds, but still seemed to need to use his cane for full mobility.
"I may have a plan," Harry grinned at the Hufflepuff boy, who nodded bemusedly and then went to put his own name in. He was just behind the elf girl that had been at the World Cup, and had a quiet, friendly conversation with her while they waited their turn for the goblet.
"How?" Ron insisted. "I want a chance, too!"
Seeing that he had half the lower-years' attention, Harry admitted, "I think I can get names in. Hermione, if it's connected to the Norns, it's not going to pick one of us if we're not the best choice for the school, right?"
"I suppose," she said, half-distractedly, still watching Viktor with his slightly-ungainly walk leaving the great hall. She suddenly caught up to the conversation and said, "Wait. What? Harry, there's an age line for a reason. Don't get yourself killed. Don't get anyone killed."
"Look," Harry gestured to the people in line but was speaking to everyone paying attention, which was perhaps twenty people, "it's probably going to be Angelina. Or Cedric. Maybe Bole or Derrick." There were hisses at the last two Slytherin names. "But I may have a way through the age line. Only give me your name if you actually think you might qualify, and you're sure that you won't die." He nodded to Hermione as if that solved everything. She made a sour face.
That night, over a dozen scraps of parchment with underaged Gryffindor names in hand, Harry slipped back into the great hall, wrapped in his invisibility cloak. He'd used his father and godfather's magical map to make sure that the coast was clear. The age wards were a sullen teal light, chalked in a ten foot radius around the goblet. "He'd have put a guard if he didn't want me to enter," Harry insisted to himself. His aunt was going to be so mad that he'd played into one of Dumbledore's schemes, but this seemed to be the most interesting thing going on for the year and he was bored.
Wrapped in the fully-magically-bonded Potter cloak, the age line didn't detect him any more than mortal eyes could. A handful of names was consigned to the fire, which hungrily consumed them in a gout of blue.