11. Facepalm-time
It took a bit of time to learn to distinguish between magical items created by the Room and real-world magical items brought into the Room.
If they were going to sneak something past Crouch as Mad-Eye, they needed to learn curse-breaking, as well as the ability to replace those curses to hide what they had done. They had learned a little, the basic detection spells, in Seventh-year classes.
This required much more detailed knowledge and skills. Instead of stopping in late afternoon after silent casting practice, they worked on learning curse-detection and curse-breaking right until dinner.
Thus, The Professor started bringing them items from the Room of Lost/Hidden Things — the first they had heard of such a room — to practice their ability to identify the spells, remove the spells, and recast them. S/he brought them simple items, at first. Toys, never-run-out-of-ink quills, and other stuff, gradually working up to cursed daggers, jewellery, and books.
Unlike their school lessons, they started working on the curse-breaking for most of a "day", with their other projects compressed into smaller segments. They even started working on them in the evenings. Having mastered the spells they thought they needed for silent casting freed up more time for occlumency and transfiguration.
This went on for several Hogwarts days. Each day that they saw Mad-Eye in school, as they learned to distinguish what magics they saw, they saw more details in the magic that surrounded him. As expected, he had a shield-spell on his flask as well as his clothes.
Also, as expected, every time he left his office, which had attached living quarters, he sealed the door with alert, locking, and defensive spells. The walls, floor, and ceiling were also protected by defensive spells and alerts.
As an experiment, they placed a series of trap-spells on the floor into the Great Hall, both at the main entrance and The Professor's entrance. The spells were harmless and merely changed each person's hair to match their House colours, or school colours for the foreign students.
Mad-Eye noticed and stopped before entering, watching carefully as others preceded him. Then he turned around, took a sip from his flask, and went to his office, where he called a house-elf to bring him lunch.
While they were trying to find a way to capture Crouch, they continued their other projects.
That Friday night, after five "months" in the Room working on it, they managed a complete transformation into a merman and mermaid — fish-tail combined-legs and fully-functional gills.
Making love as a merfolk wasn't nearly as much fun as people, they decided.
They had based their appearance on the mermaid in the Prefect's bathroom. They hadn't needed it to solve the clue from the First Task, but hey, why not check it out, anyway? As a result, their own bathtubs had taken on a larger appearance, with several choices of scented water beside pure.
They knew their appearance didn't match the merfolk in the loch and were more like the Mediterranean merfolk, but that was alright. As far as the books in the library said, the merfolk didn't have the same sort of rivalries that humans did.
After finishing all the school spells, they had spent a "morning" session of silent casting concentrating on defensive and offensive spells, which behaved quite differently under water, as well as the bubble-head and warming charms for breathing underwater and avoiding hypothermia. The last, Harry wouldn't need as a merman, but . . . just in case.
With the merfolk transfiguration, and silent-casting, mastered, they decided that they next wanted to try for dogs. They would have preferred cats, but cats the size of a Fourth-year boy or girl on their hands and knees were huge compared to a normal cat. Dogs? Not nearly so!
They could evade pursuit or sneak around as dogs without drawing any attention. They decided that Grimms would do nicely. Hermione would be the same fur-colour as her hair, brown. Harry, unfortunately, would be black and instantly recognized by the wizards and witches as a creature to avoid. A simple fix for that was the colour-changing charm. He could easily become a nondescript brown or blonde dog.
To the Muggles, both would simply be big dogs.
The advantage to the Grimm was that they could use it, with black fur, to spook the wizards and witches. The wizards and witches were unclear on whether Grimms were real or spectral aspects! They would try to dismiss the sighting as their imagination or just shadows — especially at night.
The Professor was able to find them a spell that was almost an invisibility spell, but not quite. It made them a slightly-blurry see-through, but if anyone really looked at them, they would see their shape. Otherwise, they wouldn't be noticed — especially if they were standing or sitting still. Perfect for faking a "spectral" appearance.
The Professor brought them two wrist-bracelet wand-holsters from the Room of Lost Things. They used runes to make the bracelets invisible, impervious, unsummonable, auto-sizing, and extremely comfortable when worn. The resizing meant that whatever form they transformed into, as long as it had an arm or leg, they would have their wand at hand.
They had discovered that in order not to be naked when they transformed back, they had to learn to take clothes with them. Which meant casting a spell after they transformed. It gathered and shrank everything, and stored it in a tiny space they had reserved just below their skin.
That meant, with a bit of additional effort, they could selectively not take items with them.
Plus, they altered the bracelets so that the base of their wands touched their wrists while holstered; they could cast with their wand no matter the transfigured form they took, as long as they had an arm or leg for it to fit around.
With silent casting, no one would ever expect it!
Their curse-breaking was proceeding apace. The objects brought to them by The Professor were getting more and more complex.
Saturday, Harry started exploring Black Loch. Rather than attract attention by going to the loch's edge, he went to the boat-dock below the castle where the First Years disembarked on September First. He sat on the edge of the dock, performed the transformation, then slipped into the water.
The water didn't feel icy cold! On the contrary, it was only a little too cool to be really comfortable especially when moving. Perhaps that was the difference between the Black Loch and Mediterranean merfolk? The Black Loch merfolk were a bit more immune to the cold waters of the north?
It was remarkably silent, at first, as he soared over a strange, dark, foggy landscape. Unlike the water in the Room, he could only see a short distance, not more than five or ten yards around him. New scenes continuously seemed to loom out of the oncoming dimness. There were forests of rippling, tangled black weed, wide plains of mud littered with dull, glimmering stones. He decided to swim through the shallows around the loch, frequently popping his head up to verify his location in the loch. Going deeper would be later.
Gradually, he became aware of other sounds. There were odd bloops, clicks, clacks, creaks, and thumps.
Small fish darted past him. Several times he thought he saw something larger moving ahead of him. However, when he got closer, it usually turned out to be nothing but a dense clump of weeds or a large, blackened log stuck in the mud.
Passing one such log, making it sway slightly, he heard it creak as it rubbed against a rock. That identified some of the creaking and scraping sounds he heard — inanimate objects rubbing against each other as the irregular current moved them
It took several hours to swim the perimeter of the loch, and he was quite tired when he launched himself onto the dock. After transforming back, and casting both a warming and a drying charm on himself, he started back into the castle.
He had spent the entire morning in the loch, and barely made it to the Great Hall in time for lunch.
"How was your swim?" Hermione asked, smirking as he sat back down.
"Wet," Harry said dryly.
Ron was staring at him in shock. "You went . . . swimming?"
Harry rolled his eyes as he loaded up his plate, he was very hungry after all the exercise. A fish-tail helped him swim, but even a just a walk around the Loch was tiring, as he knew from experience.
"The next task is in the Loch, swimming is required."
Ron nodded, then frowned. "Didn't you say at the Burrow that you didn't know how to swim?" He glanced at Harry.
Harry nodded. "Yeah, I didn't. Fortunately, Cedric told me the password to the Prefects Bathroom as thanks for telling him about the dragons before the First Task, which has a bathtub as big as a pool and big enough for Hermione to teach me."
Ron stared at him in shock, slack-jawed, displaying his current mouthful of food. "Pool?" he sputtered, "Hermione?" He glanced over at her.
"She's taught me enough so I won't drown once I get off the shallows," Harry continued, then took a bite of his lunch.
"Why didn't you tell me about that?" Ron said, his ears turning a bit red and a jealous tone crept into his voice.
Harry shrugged and swallowed. "Every time I asked if you wanted to study with us, you said no. We didn't spend any more time in the Prefects Bathroom than we needed to, we didn't want the Prefects to notice us and change the password. So, no hours and hours of fooling around like we did at the Burrow's swimming hole." He paused. "The password is pine fresh, if you want to take a peek."
Ron wasn't mollified with that, though, and spent the rest of lunch stabbing angrily at his plate in silence.
However, Harry challenging Ron to a chess game on the way to the Common Room put him in a better mood. Hermione just rolled her eyes.
Later that afternoon, after losing three games in a row. Hermione dragged him off to the library. "You'll never guess what I found," she said teasingly.
She smirked at his raised eyebrow. "A map of the loch!"
"No!" he said, shocked enough to stop walking.
She smirked again, then sighed. "It's an old map. I think it was made in the late eighteen-hundreds. I'm sure a lot of the details have changed, but the larger features, like the location of the merfolk village and the giant squid's home area, are probably still the same. We can make a copy of it, waterproof it, and you can check out how accurate it is. At the least, it'll help you navigate underwater."
After retrieving the map, and duplicating it, Harry wanted to go flying to see what he could see in the waters of the loch from above. Unfortunately, after only a few minutes, he realized the sun was too low on the horizon to make out any details beyond the shallows, the rest was hidden in shadows. He had to give-up that idea until noon tomorrow. With the sun overhead, he would be able to see much more.
He returned to the Common Room and spent the evening with his friends, giving a bit of help to the few still working on assignments, and just killing time until curfew.
He did put his finished "camouflage" ring on Hedwig before curfew. He couldn't tell any difference once he put the ring on her leg, but The Professor had assured him it would work exactly as he wanted at keeping Hedwig's owlness a secret from Muggles and her uniqueness from wizards and witches. To prevent any one bird from being seen too frequently in one location, the ring rotated between the three choices.
That night, The Professor had them remove their legilimency-protection necklaces, as he had done periodically over the months in the Room.
Harry felt the delicate probing for what felt like several minutes but he knew from experience it was only a few seconds. When The Professor withdrew, Harry glanced over at Hermione to see her Professor also stopping.
Hermione's Professor said, "You've spent the equivalent of over three full years in here, and mastered occlumency. Only an attack by a powerful legilimens could break through to see any of your memories. The next step is to build a fake persona outside your shielding that an intruder will mistake for the real you. To learn how to do that, you need to become a legilimens, yourself."
The two Professors began teaching them how to cast a mental probe, and how to keep a layer of surface thought present to distract an intruder from the shields. They spent only an hour each "day" on that, the remainder was split between their transfiguration work, curse-breaking, and extending their knowledge of runes to make an improved version of the Marauders map.
Tuesday was Valentine's Day, which Harry fortunately remembered. He managed to get Dobby to get him some roses and a vase, which he gave to Hermione when she came down the stairs from her dorm-room. She stuck one in her hair, and took the vase upstairs.
Breakfast was the normal soppy-mess of cards, chocolates, and gifts being exchanged that it usually was on this day.
Harry skived off classes and spent the morning swimming in the loch, comparing and updating his map, as needed. As before small fish flickered past him, larger ones kept their distance. Light- and dark-green weed stretched ahead of him as far as he could see, a yard deep, like a meadow of very overgrown grass. Harry was staring unblinkingly ahead of him. He was trying to discern shapes through the gloom, trying to see the things on the floor of the loch that the map indicated should be there. Abruptly, he realized, the dark shape rising ahead from the deeper weeds was a merman.
It was a bit tense as they both stared at each other. As the textbooks had shown, the merman bore no facial resemblance at all to the painting of the mermaid in the Prefects' Bathroom, being fiercer and more fish-like.
He had a grayish skin and long, wild, dark green hair. His eyes were yellow, as were his broken teeth. His ears were more like curved fins. He wore a thick rope of pebbles around his neck. Despite having nostrils, his mouth was slightly open. Harry assumed he did that to suck in more oxygen-bearing water, unlike the gill-like slits in Harry's cheeks and down the sides of his throat that served him that purpose, in addition to his nose.
The merman had a long powerful, silver fish-tail, easily longer than his torso, that barely needed to move to hold him in place. His tail was much longer than Harry's.
The merman had a trident, and Harry appeared unarmed. After a moment, the merman said, "Who are you?"
"I'm Harry, one of the Champions in the Triwizard Tournament," Harry explained. "I'm exploring the Loch so I won't get lost during the Task."
The merman swam closer. "I am Douglas," he said. "May I look closer?" he gestured at Harry's body. Whatever he had been told about the Tournament, he knew there were no merfolk involved.
Harry nodded. "Yes," he added, in case the mermen didn't use that gesture.
The merman moved close enough to inspect Harry's gills arranged from just below his ears down to his shoulders. He looked quite surprised at the slits in Harry's cheeks that opened as he inhaled, and the lower ones that opened on exhale. The slits allowed Harry to keep his mouth closed most of the time.
Then he slowly moved down, studying Harry's body quite closely all the way to his tail.
He flipped up to face Harry. "Come," he said with a gesture of the hand not holding the trident.
They started off slowly, which quickly became fast with little effort, following the slope of the loch-bottom as it went deeper and deeper. The light from above became dimmer and dimmer at the edges of Harry's glasses, until it approached a dusk-like quality where colours faded into greys.
Fortunately, Harry's glasses kept the light as bright as day, letting him see much further than he suspected the merman could — not that it was that much of an improvement.
As they sped through the water forests of rippling, tangled black weed, wide plains of mud littered with dull, glimmering stones suddenly loomed out of the oncoming darkness. They swam deeper and deeper, out toward the middle of the loch.
It wasn't long before Harry saw a large rock emerge out of the murky water ahead. When they got closer, he could see carvings of merfolk on it. They were carrying trident spears and chasing what looked like the giant squid.
Did they not get along with the Giant Squid? They did use the same resources for food, though, didn't they? Was the carved rock a warning to the Giant Squid that this was the edge of the village?
Stone dwellings soon came into sight, heavily stained with algae on all sides. Here and there at the dark windows appeared Merfolk. Doors, apparently, were merely slightly larger windows as he saw small children darting inside openings barely big enough for them to fit.
While the children watched from inside, some of the adults emerged to study him better, clutching trident spears in their hands.
The two continued, with Harry staring around at the sights. The dwellings became more numerous, and closer together, with gardens of weed around some of them. He even saw a grindylow tied to a stake outside one door! Was it a pet? Or destined to be someone's dinner like the chickens he had seen around the Burrow? A crowd was slowly collecting and following them, talking softly to one another.
Eventually, they approached what looked like a merfolk-version of a village square. Houses lined the sides, and a gigantic statue of a merperson, hewn from an enormous boulder, took centre-stage.
At the opposite end of the roughly round area, were three merfolk, mermaids. Clearly someone had darted ahead of them and warned others they were coming.
Harry's guide slowed and halted a couple of yards from the three. "My elders," he said, nodding at them, "I bring you one of the Champions from the Tournament, Harry." He turned to Harry. "Harry, these three are our Chieftainesses, Sabrina, Anaella, and Cordelia."
Harry looked at them and, not knowing what else to do, tried to bow as he said, "It is a pleasure to meet you."
"You are a wizard?" the mermaid on the left said, Sabrina.
Harry nodded. "Yes, I used transfiguration to make myself into a merman."
At their puzzled looked, he added, "Like this." He flexed his wrist and his wand popped out of its holster. He pointed it at his left hand and concentrated.
The obvious webbing and claws receded to leave his hand, and up to his elbow, appearing as it usually did as a person.
The cold of the water he expected, that it wasn't as severe as he had thought it would be was a pleasant surprise.
He grinned at them, mouth closed because he didn't know if showing teeth was a good or bad sign.
"Like that."
The three swam closer and inspected his left hand, then his right. That led to them looking at his gills and working down to his silvery tail. His fins were shaped a bit differently to what was usual for the Black Loch merfolk.
The three settled back and exchanged looks. "Are you here for some reason related to the Tournament?" said Anaella, the one on the right.
Harry was surprised, surely the Headmaster had already worked a deal out with them! Then he realized they were playing dumb in case he hadn't figured anything out yet, although his presence in the Loch should have shown otherwise.
He smiled, again. "The clue from the First Task told me to expect the ones running it to take something from me and that I will have to retrieve it from Black Loch."
The three nodded. "We cannot tell you anything more than you can discover on your own," said the middle one, Cordelia.
"I would not expect you to, I was just exploring the Loch to get familiar with it." He pulled the water-proof map from the small pouch on the belt over his shoulder. "I found this in the library in the castle and wanted to see what was different and what was the same since it was made."
The three mermaids, and his guide, moved to look at it as he unrolled it. They pointed at several features and mumbled to each other. "We have a map, too, it's on the wall, there," Cordelia finally said, pointing.
"May I look?" He didn't want to assume and have them get upset at "helping" him.
"It is available to all who would explore the Loch," Anaella said.
"Excellent. Thank you for your hospitality." He didn't want to imply they were helping him in the Tournament, just in case.
He re-transfigured his hand and arm into a merman's, then moved over to the indicated wall. It was actually very large, easily as big as he was. From some of the markings on the map, and the tags hung on a few of the numerous hooks that dotted it, it was clear that they used the map to warn residents of dangerous areas, and where good hunting and harvesting areas were, at the moment.
It took him a moment to orient his map with theirs. Then it was easy to copy their map, replacing his. Just as easy was adding the spell that updated his map to match theirs in real time.
The crowd watched as he moved around. He swam back to the three Chieftainesses. "You might see me, again, between now and the Task. There might be a few things I want to investigate further."
"We will not disturb you," Sabrina said, "as long as you do not disturb us."
"Thank you, again, for your hospitality," Harry said. "I'll take my leave of you, now." Matching action to words, he began swimming straight up. He wanted a visual reference for where he was in the loch.
He was rather close to the middle of the loch, which, according to both maps, was not the deepest part of the Loch. That was where the Giant Squid held court.
From the skull-and-crossbones markings on their map surrounding the Giant Squid's "home," it was clear that the Giant Squid wasn't on nearly as good terms with the merfolk as it was with the wizards and witches.
Or, they didn't want their children to go into that area for a look at the Giant Squid, and annoy it.
He spent the afternoon after lunch flying his broom over the loch. It was interesting just how many details on the floor of the loch were visible with sun overhead — or as nearly overhead it could get this far north. Hermione reluctantly accompanied him. His persuading argument was, "You know Riddle will be after you, just for being my girlfriend, if nothing else! Knowing how to competently fly a broom might be a lifesaver in the future!"
He grinned, "You always have your wand with you, so you can always cast softening charms on the ground if you ever fall off your broom."
He paused a moment, then added, "You know, maybe that should be our next transfiguration project — birds. But in the meantime, we need to make you comfortable on a broom."
That night, in the Room, they decided they had mastered the Grimm form and started on birds. They also decided to try to find a way to manage their sizes.
After finishing silent-casting, the next step was, naturally, learning how to cast wandlessly. That one, they first worked primarily on finite and protego, and its variants. Then they tackled stupefy and other spells they might need in an emergency.
They made significant progress in their curse-breaking skills that night, too. The stack of curse-free items had grown considerably. Both now had apartment trunks akin to the tents they had seen at the Quidditch World-Championship. Hermione had amassed a small fortune in abandoned rare books.
"We should collect all the textbooks and arrange them by year," Harry suggested. "Then sell them at the end of the year for students to use next year for less than the used-stores' charge."
Hermione nodded. "That's a good idea. The snooty Pure-bloods would all pass because they use their parents books, but the other students' families would appreciate saving the money." She thought a moment. "If we tell people a month before the end of school what we have to sell, they can make sure they have the money on hand before getting on the Express."
She grinned. "Then we can donate the money to the school to get new brooms as Professor Hooch has wanted to do for years."
.o\O/o.
On Saturday, with only six days to Second Task, they discovered that there simply wasn't a way through the spells on Crouch's room and office — they checked while he was teaching a class. The alert spells were set such that if one was disabled, a second alert on another wall triggered at the disappearance of the magic, instead. Similarly, circumventing the alert ran into a second one that triggered because it detected additional magic when it shouldn't have.
That night, in the Room, they discussed what they should do.
"His office and room are like a fortress!" Harry said exasperatedly.
"We can't use portkeys or apparition," Hermione said, "those are prevented by the spells on Hogwarts."
"He even has anti-house-elf shields up!"
"And we can't ambush him outside his office, he'll see us well advance."
"He only drinks from his flask, and he always checks his food for anything that doesn't belong."
"We can't use a trap-spell; he'll see it before he gets to it."
"We can't hide a trap-spell in something else, the only spelled things in the corridors are the suits of armour and the paintings. And he never touches them."
They sighed and stared at their breakfasts.
Hermione suddenly looked up from the table.
"The paintings!" she said slowly, her eyes flicking back and forth, her brow furrowed in thought.
She looked up at Harry. "Could we use a painting to ambush him?"
"We'd probably have to make one of our own," Harry mused. "All the current paintings report to the Headmaster, so if any of the people in them noticed what we were doing, they'd tell him. Who knows what he would do? At the very least, he'd lock us out of them."
He sighed. "Plus, I'm terrible at painting," he said sourly.
Hermione nodded, but then she said, "Let's check with The Professor, first, before we give up."
A moment later, they were explaining their problem to Professor Hogwarts.
"The paints are specially treated with a potion before starting," The Professor said. "After the painting is finished, it's treated with another potion that makes the whole receptive to receiving an impression of the person being painted. Then a special spell is used to capture the experiences of the person and place them into the painting. The better the painter, the better the result." S/he paused. "It usually takes years of practice to become proficient at making workable portraits."
Hermione frowned. "What if we took a picture and used a switching spell to replace the . . . chemicals . . . in the picture with the paints used in a painting? Then used that impression spell."
The Professor stared at her. "That might work. No one has ever done that before."
They spent a few minutes discussing ideas on how to turn the painting into a trap-spell set for Crouch/Moody.
Harry suddenly stopped and stared at The Professor. "Professor," he said slowly. "Is there a way for us to sneak into his room and stun him without a big fight?"
The answer was so simple they both ended up banging their heads on the table.
.o\O/o.
The thick walls of the room made it as quiet as only an underground room can be. No faint sound of wind, voices carrying through windows, or footsteps and voices of people in the corridors could be heard. It was so quiet that you could easily hear your own breath as it moved in and out of your lungs, no matter how quiet you tried to be. Not to mention your heart beating and the blood rushing through your veins if your hearing was really good.
The room was dominated by a massive four-poster canopy bed, easily big enough for three or four people to relax in without crowding. The curtains were, of course, pulled closed to conserve the warmth of the bed's occupant.
Suddenly, in the headboard against the wall, there was a flash of red flying across the barely hands-width distance to the head of the person sleeping in the bed. Then the covers over the person flew to the foot of the bed. Before the sheets had time to make half the journey, the man was levitated and disappeared into the headboard.
It took less than a second, the blankets hadn't even had time to settle completely before he was gone.
.o\O/o.
Harry and Hermione stared at the man bound to the chair. He appeared to be in his early forties, with pale, slightly-freckled skin and a mop of straw-coloured hair. His face was lined, which made him look much older than his true age, which was thirty-three. He had the Death Eater mark on the inside of his left arm.
"Well, he certainly doesn't look like Mad-Eye, does he?"
Hermione shook her head, and lifted the small vial she had. "Three drops, right?"
"Right."
The Barty Crouch's confession under Veritaserum was amazing. That Barty was such a quick-study, powerful in his own right, and an incredible actor was very impressive.
Disturbingly, though, his face was alight with diabolical mania the entire time as described how he had ambushed Moody, and his master's plans, despite his voice being in an emotionless monotone. He was a true Death Eater, through and through.
"What do we do about Moody?" Harry said.
"Nothing. If we do anything, who knows what Riddle will do in response? He might flee and we'll never be able to predict what he does next. As it stands, we know where he is right now, what he plans to do, and when."
"We could replace Moody with a golem, and leave Crouch thinking he gave Moody the Draught of Living Death, and make sure he has an adequate supply of hair to finish the year, easy," Hermione suggested.
"If Crouch is at all accurate in his portrayal of Moody, what makes you think Moody wouldn't immediately blow up that plan as soon as he was well enough?" Harry countered. "What makes you think he would listen, for even a second, to anything a fourteen- and fifteen-year-old told him?"
Hermione grimaced. She had to concede Harry was right. Moody would ignore anything they said and try to capture Crouch, Riddle, and Pettigrew.
Which would be a disaster.
Especially if Riddle died. With his remaining six horcruxes, it was only a matter of time before he returned. They wouldn't know when or where. At least, right now, they knew where he was and what he planned.
Perhaps, when they got closer to the Third task, they might be able to ambush Riddle, and dose him with the Draught of Living Death. That would get him out of their hair and give them time to find and destroy all his anchors to life.
"What do we do with Crouch, then? Are either of us good enough to cast an obliviate that he won't notice?"
Hermione pursed her lips. "I doubt it." She grinned. "However, there's another solution," she said teasingly.
She laughed at his raised eyebrow. "The fidelius, and confundus charms. With the fidelius, we say his interrogation under veritaserum was real, then, after we give him the antidote, hit him with the confundo and say it was all a dream. Not only won't he be able to tell anyone, he'll think it a dream and not something he needs to mention to anyone."
It took them eight "days" to learn the spell well-enough to cast it properly. Hermione would be the secret-keeper. Before they cast it, though, Hermione had another idea.
"Barty is not stupid, if anyone notices how much magic we've learned, he would. We should make that a secret too," she said. "We should say something like, Harry and Hermione have learned magic and skills beyond their year-mates, or something similar."
Harry nodded, "But won't he see how far we've gone in transfiguration when I do the Task?"
They finally decided on wording they thought would work.
They cast the fidelius, followed that with the confundus, then gave him the antidote to veritaserum. Another stun spell, before he completely recovered from the antidote, completed the set. He would wake normally, and never suspect a thing. Plus, he would not notice any magic or knowledge they exhibited that was beyond their year-mates, except transfiguration.
They hoped.
They would know by his reaction the next time they saw him.
Fortunately, despite spending a bit under nine "days", total, with Crouch in their custody, it was slightly under four-and-a-half hours of time in the rest of Hogwarts. Thus, well before dawn the abducted Crouch, Junior, flew back out of the headboard, and the sheets and blankets were flung back over him.
No one, not even him, would ever suspect that he had been taken from his room.
That the Room of Requirement had complete access to the rest of the castle while they were in the Room in expanded time was a revelation. They just needed to concentrate on where they wanted a door or window to appear in the castle, and there it was. The only difficulty was the interface. While to anyone in the castle, Crouch seemed to fly out of and back into his bed, to them in was a long thirty seconds. Speed in one was not equal to the speed in the other, or the wizard would have been violently torn apart into a mist of blood, muscle, organs, and hair.
Fortunately, everything inside his body was maintained at the same time-frame. Whether it was sped up to match the Room or kept at the Castle's rate until he was entirely in one or the other, they didn't know. They suspected it was set by which one he started from.
They spent the rest of the night, four-and-a-half "days", in the Room working on wandless casting, owl and hawk transfigurations, legilimens abilities, and curse-breaking. The curse breaking was more for the challenge than anything else. They continued runes and arithmancy every other "day".
Wandless casting was much more difficult than they anticipated, and tired them out much faster. After protego, they concentrated on the spells that they thought would be useful in battle: expelliarmus; pello, the Banishing Charm, and its opposite, accio, the Summoning Charm; and dissilio, the Blasting Charm.
.o\O/o.
The next day, in the castle proper, there was not a whisper of anything unusual happening the night before. Crouch/Moody attended all his classes, and made an appearance at dinner. He didn't seem to react negatively on seeing them when he entered the Great Hall. However, unfortunately, they knew he was a consummate actor, as he had proved, so that really didn't prove anything one way or another.
On the other hand, he hadn't fled the castle to warn his master that his plan had gone belly-up. Nor, according to Dobby, had he visited the owlery to send a message.
It looked as if they were in the clear.
By the time their DADA class was over on Thursday, they were fairly certain the wizard remembered nothing, or, if he did, he thought it was a dream. The fact that they had cast a blurring spell on their faces, bodies, and voices while hiding under Harry's invisibility cloak behind the wizard had probably helped.
If he did ever suspect something, he couldn't use a pensieve to determine who they were.
.o\O/o.