Author's Note: I'm rather fond of the Triwizard Tournament...

Amoral solution to the Second Task and slight tonal shift at the Third. Just noting that in advance.

Devours-Fleshly-Bipeds cleaned her teeth with one claw as she waited for this silliness to be over. As a well-trained dragon, she was more than used to fleshly bipeds showing her off to their kindred… very well and good, so long as they kept their distance.

It helped that they'd put an extra-strong dose of sedative in her steak this morning.

As she regarded the noisy hordes and fantasized about which ones would be tastiest, a projectile came sailing towards her nest. Without thinking, she smacked it away with her tail, only for it to explode into smoke.

Her infrared vision rendered that useless, but now her blood boiled. One of these stupid bipeds was plotting to sneak in and take her eggs!

As she reared up and looked for intruders, she noticed a peculiar heat signature at the edge of her nest – an egg that, while warmed by body heat, had no outline of the hatchling within. A frustrating tragedy, but a common one: not all dragons made it through development. Then she looked closer, and the smoke cleared enough to allow her to use color vision.

Why, that was no egg at all! It was some nondescript golden blob! She roared in fury and batted it aside. Did these bipeds think she was a fool? They must have sneaked it in as she napped! Treachery, egg-stealers, vermin! The moment she laid eyes upon it, she saw right through their scheme!

As she howled and displayed her massive jets of fire to any foolish bipeds who thought they could make good on their scheme to steal her eggs, a certain biped crept closer to the golden forgery where it lay discarded on the side of the arena and made good on its escape. Let it, the would-be sneak-thief! Let it carry to its kindred the tales of her might!

While the other three contestants were preparing to dive into the Black Lake, onlookers noticed Harry Potter backing away and looking rather nervous.

"Er – Mr. Potter?" Bagman said, sounding more panicked by the moment. "You – you aren't afraid of water, are you?"

Despite ripples of laughter, Potter stood his ground. "Ah – no, that's not it," he said, checking his watch. "Oh, by the way, everyone! If I'm right, you really don't want to dive in there."

As one, the three other Champions turned to him. "Why?" Diggory asked at the same time Delacour cried, "My seester eez down zere!"

"Well, if I didn't botch the project, you'll find out in one… two… three."

The surface of the Black Lake trembled, and something barely-perceptible seemed to change. After a few seconds more, onlookers realized what that was.

The water level.

As the decline sped up, all eyes were on Potter. He shakily smiled, then shook himself and grinned broadly. "Fleur, Viktor," he said to the two foreign Champions, "you don't know this, but Hogwarts has got a rather daffy design. I mean, one of our Common Rooms even had a window looking straight into the lake. Real structural issue, don't you think? All that water, just outside, just waiting to rush in–"

"Had, Potter?" screamed Pansy Parkinson. Slytherin was not the House of the Cunning for nothing: her housemates were all reaching the same conclusion, as proven by the gasps of horror, shouted death threats, and swooning sobs.

"Had, yes," Potter said blithely. "Pretty well-reinforced. Took me a lot of studying – and Hermione's help, of course – to figure out how to rig up a spell that would take it out, not give away any obvious signs of its presence, and only go off at a certain time. Such as 'right as this Task was about to start'."

"How did you even get in?" an older Slytherin boy shrieked. Potter's grin only widened.

"Well, as you know, I'm a Parselmouth, and Salazar Slytherin left in a lot of backdoors–"

"ONE THOUSAND POINTS FROM GRYFFINDOR!" Severus Snape screamed as the lake continued its steady descent.

"Severus, calm yourself," Dumbledore murmured, though he had gotten into the Slytherin spirit of things and turned a grayish-green. "You know the Hogwarts charter only allows us to give or take two hundred points at a time."

"Two hundred points from Gryffindor, two hundred points from Gryffindor, two hundred points from Gryffindor, two hundred points from Gryffindor, and two hundred points from Gryffindor," Professor Snape hissed, to muted Slytherin cheering. There were few left who were cool-headed enough to be cheering. "And furthermore, expulsion–"

"Ah, but you forget, you can't expel a Champion," Potter said brightly, waggling his finger at Professor Snape. "It's all part of that magical contract, remember? And, by the way, assaulting a Champion outside of a Task is an offense against the Tournament and judged by its magic accordingly."

The professor looked as though he might consider it worth it. As the Lake sank lower, Potter turned back to the other Champions. "Wait just a bit longer, and I think we can just wade in and get them," he said, pulling out a pair of Omnioculars and twiddling the dials a bit. "Hey, I think I can see them already! Big rock at the bottom of the lake?"

As he passed the Omnioculars to the curious other champions, the judges could only stare mutely and try to work out how to score a solution like this. None of them quite knew how to respond.

None except one, that was. Karkaroff leaned back in his seat, arms crossed and eyebrows raised. "If you expel him, Dumbledore, we'll gladly take him at Durmstrang," he said, a rare smirk gracing his face. "Creativity and ingenuity is far too rare in the youth these days, I find, and wherever it appears it must be rewarded." He leaned forward, his smile disappearing, and raised his voice. "Viktor? Viktor! Why didn't you think of this?"

With the lowest score of the Champions, Harry Potter was the last to go into the maze.

Or rather, he would have been if he had any interest in doing so.

"Two hundred points from Gryffindor," Professor Snape muttered reflexively as Potter checked his watch. "Two hundred…"

"Severus, we all know you don't really mean that," the Headmaster said gently. Slytherin's Head of House turned a baleful gaze upon him.

"It was bad enough when we found ourselves merely underwater, thanks to Potter's machinations," the professor said in a dead voice. "When we merely had to resort to Gillyweed just to retrieve our belongings, when we merely had to find emergency accommodations in Hogsmeade until the dungeons were drained and the lake refilled… And shall I now sit in silence, waiting for this maze to turn into a sinkhole so that Potter might just stroll across its surface to his prize once more? Slytherin will not become a race of mole people." The Weasley twins promptly and loudly thanked him for the suggestion for their next prank, and he gripped his wand and began to hyperventilate.

"Don't be absurd, Severus… if this maze were to suddenly cave in, which of course it will not, I daresay it would collapse on top of the Hufflepuff rooms." The Headmaster turned to the audience. "Fear not," he said, aiming his benign, grandfatherly smile at one suddenly-pale subgroup in particular. "We made certain to protect the Third Task against tampering. Both the Triwizard Cup and the pedestal upon which it stands are thoroughly shielded from external enchantment, devious disturbances, and–"

There was a blinding blue flash, and a large disc of earth deposited itself outside the hedge maze. Upon it, completely undisturbed, were a pedestal and Cup.

The judges looked at Potter. He looked back at them, eyebrows raised.

"You know, you were preparing the hedge maze for a month," he said to them. "All I needed was to sneak out over a few nights and turn all the ground in the central area into one giant remote-activated Portkey." He shrugged. "Oi, it's really your fault for not being more original. If you'd placed the objective in an area a bit off-center, I'd have egg on my face."

"Monsieur Potter," rumbled Madame Maxime, "you have turned zees 'onorable Tournament eento l'farce."

"It was a farce from the moment someone Confunded your wonderful and impartial artifact into sticking on an extra Champion who hadn't even started studying for his O.W.L.s," Potter said sharply. "All I've done is refuse to play along and help you save face." A moment later, his anger slipped beneath the façade of amused indifference once more. "Well, that's all then," he said, walking onto the disc of dirt and stepping towards the Cup. "Really great, hope not to see you all next ye–"

He was cut off mid-sentence, for the Cup turned blue as his fingers brushed its handle, and an instant later both were gone. The judges looked towards the spot where the Champion was supposed to appear, and their skin crawled more with every second that the insolent boy did not reappear.

"Must have had a bad interaction," Moody said gruffly, taking a swig from his flask. His tongue flicked out over his lips before he continued. "Two Portkeys right next to each other – bad things happen that way, bad indeed. Boy's got no one but himself to blame. We may never see him again – Take a lesson, children! Constant vigilance!"

"Alastor, are you feeling quite all right?" the Headmaster said, flicking a glance towards his longtime friend as the other judges began to murmur about doing something to track Potter. "I daresay the worst that could happen is that he'd end up in the middle of the maze through some sort of inversion effect. And, should that be the case, I am certain we'll see red sparks any moment now."

"Yes, yes – right," Moody murmured, his magical eye whirling about furiously. "Just so. No one but himself to blame. As you said, Albus, the Cup was tamper-proof… no one interfered with it, we saw to that… you're precisely right…"

But there were no red sparks, and several minutes passed as the bewildered judges huddled together and attempted to determine what they would do if the boy could not be found – or, for that matter, how the Task would continue in the absence of its objective. After all, the Cup could not be found either –

Then there came another blue flash, and boy and Cup returned. And a few other things with them. Fudge, who had been the first to look up, let out a long, loud scream that did horrid things to his chances of reelection.

Unjustly so, because braver men would have rediscovered their soprano youth at the sight. A gargantuan snake lay in a loosely-coiled heap on the boy's left, its hide ripped open and spine broken in several places; still, it somehow, horribly still lived, and hissed at the staff table with eyes full of gleaming malice – far too intelligent for a mere animal. To the boy's right, a black dog of monstrous size was savaging a man who lay on the ground, his continued life only made evident by his feeble moans.

The boy himself was carrying a bundle that, incongruously, he seemed to be holding in a chokehold; as he turned a burning gaze upon the judges, his face was twisted by agony, fury, or both. "You know, sir," he said sardonically to the Headmaster, "it's not this I mind. You already hired him on three years ago, so it's nothing new – I'd just have liked a bit of notice, that's –"

Snapping out a Shield Charm with his free hand as the judges drew their wands, he turned and nodded swiftly to the dog. "Show them his arm!" he ordered, and the dog swung up its head, the man's mostly-attached left arm still between its jaws.

Even through the blood and teeth marks, the Dark Mark was clearly visible.

Now the judges' repugnance and horror was of a wholly different sort. "Harry," the Headmaster began as the dog placed one large paw on the prone man's head, "such brutality – it is sinking to their level, we must endeavor to –"

"To what, sir? To give everyone a second chance?" The boy laughed bitterly. "That's what I said last year. He can tell you. I gave this vermin a chance, and this is what he did with it." With that, he grabbed the contents of the bundle by its apparent neck and flung it upon the table. "Look! It's a boy!"

Now it was Karkaroff's turn to let out a mindless scream as the cloth fell back, and the face of what lay within became visible. The Minister was mute, his face white and frozen as that of a corpse, but a puddle had begun to grow beneath his feet.

"Eez zat–" Madame Maxime swung her massive head around and narrowed her eyes at the Headmaster. "Dumbly-door, what does 'e mean, 'you already 'ired 'eem on'?"

"I fear Harry is a bit agitated," Dumbledore said as a grown man began to cry next to him (and Ludo Bagman lost the power of intelligible speech), "and he is grossly misstating an exquisitely complicated and nuanced–"

"He was growing out of the back of my Defense professor's head," Potter said directly to Madame Maxime.

Between the impotent curses that the thing on the table had begun to hiss at the judges and the Headmaster's pious evasions, Madame Maxime was looking most unimpressed. "Monsieur Moody," she said, "seence your countrymen are unweelleng or unable to talk, would you say – zees eez normal by Eengleesh standards? Greendelwald eez just anozzer guest lecturer to you, no?"

The hardened Alastor Moody looked nothing so much like a schoolboy who desperately wanted to be anywhere but where he was at that instant. His good eye darted from the creature on the table to the wizards and giantess around him, then rolled back and stared at the sky as though some merciful divine intervention might strike him dead.

"You – well – you've obviously been very vigilant, boy," he said to Potter in a blatant and desperate attempt to change both the subject and the center of attention. "How? You didn't – you couldn't have – How would you have known?"

"Know? Oh, I didn't know, but - let's just say someone took the danger to my life seriously, and had me put a contingency plan in place in case more went wrong than just the Tournament," Potter said, holding out his wand hand. When he turned it over to show the palm, it became evident he was wearing a skintight, flesh-colored fingerless glove: it wrinkled slightly on the underside, and a faintly-glowing crest was emblazoned upon the palm. "There's a lot of money tied up in old families – lot of reason for someone to go kidnap their heirs. So some of the old families came up with a solution." He waved the crest before them. "Of course, most kidnappers worth their salt will strip a hostage of all useful items and bind them from head to foot the moment they've got their hands on them. That's the magic – sorry, Muggle saying – of this little device. It's got practically no magic worth mentioning, so little that it won't show up on most detection spells, but you can activate it without twitching a muscle – just send the faintest pulse of magic into your palm, and it does its duty. Which is to do nothing more, and nothing less, than to send a cry for help… that can be used as a target for blind Apparation."

"But – but I thought those were only designed to be used for heirs," the Minister said, his voice slurred as though his mouth had gone numb. "I – I thought the distress call only went to the head of the family – something like that. I – I daresay I'm not an expert, of course – And – er, do pardon me – it's been so long, I hardly know – but – I – isn't that the Black crest?"

Potter gave him a mirthless smile. "And this is Peter Pettigrew," he said, pointing to the man on the ground, whose face showed no more awareness than that of a weak and wounded animal. "I think that's rather important to note, since he's supposed to be dead and all." The dog woofed eagerly. "No, we went over this before we came back, you cannot correct that," the boy said sternly. "Not until he goes to trial." He turned bright, boyish eyes upon the Minister. "And you will do that, won't you, sir? I mean – he can't run away anymore. No more hiding. And I'm absolutely certain, sir, that you'll do the right thing, and make sure that this double-crossing Death Eater receives exactly what he deserves."

"The dog–" the Minister gabbled. "Isn't that–"

"-helping to make a citizen's arrest of the Darkest wizard Britain has known for a century, and one of his followers who has long tried to make a fool of the law?" Potter said with unnatural sweetness. "Yes, yes he is, Minister, and it's extremely perceptive of you to notice. What a good boy." He patted the dog on the head, and it raised its bloodstained muzzle and looked up at him with utter devotion.

"Yes – right," Fudge murmured, his eyes rolling back in his head. Bagman had reached that point some time ago and was now rocking back and forth in his chair, smiling in blissful imbecility. Karkaroff, at least, had recovered himself.

"I'm pleased to announce your transfer application to Durmstrang has been approved, boy."

Now it was Potter's turn to look confused, for once. "But I never submitted one."

"Now, now, boy, let's not bother with trivialities," Karkaroff said blandly, placing a hand over the mouth of the cursing thing on the table. "It's been approved. We'd be honored to have you. In fact, we'll even hire your mutt on as a mascot. Perhaps even as a professor, for that Hogwartsian touch." The dog growled at him. "Well, that's no way to start off a job interview, is it? Already mouthing off to your employer. Not a very professorial disposition – mascot it is…"