I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good

[alt_sally_anne]

So, Harry asked me and Pansy to start a rumour about him. He wants us to spread it around the school that he did NOT put his own name in the Goblet and that it was definitely fixed to spit his name out, not Cedric Diggory's. I think he thinks it might make people harass Cedric less -- I'm not sure he's right, but it's worth a try?

But he doesn't want anyone know this originated with him (or with us), he wants it to be one of those stories everyone just repeats without knowing quite where it came from. Which is harder than he thinks it is, everyone pays attention to what they heard from whom and if it's sufficiently startling they'll work their way back up the chain. ESPECIALLY in Slytherin. And of course for something like this, there's the question of how someone KNOWS -- and if Harry doesn't want people knowing it came from him, the only other way someone would know would be if they saw what he wrote down. Who could've seen it? Peeves, or one of the other ghosts, or an elf.

That got me thinking that if we could arrange for Peeves to overhear it, he might take care of it for us. Especially if we thought up a funny rhyme about it. No one can do anything about Peeves or they would have done years ago. Of course, there's no guarantee he wouldn't spread who he heard it from, but he doesn't usually.

Does anyone else have other ideas? We could just tell Morag and let her tell Padma but we'd definitely need to have a made-up trail to point back to. Also, Padma loves to spread gossip but she'll twist anything about Harry, anyway, and she's already decided it was Cedric who fixed the Goblet somehow. (Never mind that if a student at the school COULD figure out how to jigger the Goblet he'd DESERVE to be the Champion given that this is a powerful and ancient artifact that was specifically designed to resist tampering!)

Comments

[alt_pansy]

Fred and George, I think if it came from someone older, people might be more likely to buy it. Could you start talking it up?

Maybe... I don't know... someone could claim to have been there when Harry wrote the name on the piece of paper, or saw it before he dropped it in?

Or we could claim to have overheard one of the visiting Professors talking about it? They'd deny it of course, but they would even if they did talk about it for real.

I do like the Peeves idea, too. We'd have to make it sort of mean for it to work though.

"Marvolo is a scaredy-cat
He put a false name in the hat
So when it spat his real name out
You should have seen Marvolo shout!"

Would people get that by "hat" I meant "goblet?"

"Harry Marvolo got a fright
When the Goblet picked him Halloween night
The reason is because, you know,
He really didn't want to go.
So when he had to put in a name
He put in a fake one, what a shame!
But the Goblet picked him anyways, boo hoo
Now what's Harry Marvolo going to do?"

...I may have to work on this some more.

[alt_ron]

Y'know, I think we could just tell Towler, and it'd get out pretty quick.

Oooh. I could complain about having to partner Bullstrode in Defence this week and say all she wanted to do was grumble about how Marvolo put, um-

ooh! what if we say Bullstrode says he put Peeves name in the Goblet!

And then she went on about how Marvolo hadn't taken any of it seriously at all and then he got to be Champion anyway and he shouldn't've done because there were people like her who should defs have been chosen instead.

How about that?

And if Peeves hears it, he might be put out and take off with it, too.

[alt_ron]

Cause, y'know, I did have to partner Bullstrode, and it's not a lark, that.

Not that she grumbled about Marvolo being Champion, mind. But she really is well random. With her hexes, too. And basically a nasty piece o work. I seriously don't know what that witch's problem is!