Turning Items to Portkeys

[Grey Wolf <greywolf1@jazzfree.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 52080

Celebrimbor wrote:
> I was just thinking, what does it take for an item to be turned to a portkey? The reason I'm wondering this is to bring a new theory to that old question. Why didn't Moody just turn any old item of Harry's into a portkey? Well, I think that maybe it takes a lot to turn something into a portkey. Perhaps it needs to be a special sort of item that was pre-made to turn into a portkey. I mean, we know that the cup already was a portkey that was supposed to bring the champion out to the clearing outside the maze, and all Moody did was give it an "intermediate" stop location.
> 
> Celembrior

We don't know what it takes to turn an item into a portkey. The point 
of why didn't Crouch!Moody simply enchant Harry's toothbrush into a 
porkey the second day of school has indeed been raised before. The 
answer that seems most plausible is that Hogwarts anti-apparition 
charms (that we know exist) include anti-portkey'ing charms (which is, 
after all, a form of object-based apparition).

You have mentioned the theory of the intermediate step, but that is 
based on another theory - that Dumbledore controls the permeability of 
the anti-aparition charms in some way that allows him to create a 
portkey that can be used inside Hogwarts in some way or another. 
However, we don't know if either of these theories is true - there is 
very little canon for it, except the fact that, somehow, Harry and 
Diggory are portkeyed out.

The theory goes like this: Voldemort needs Harry. Since Little 
Hangleton, wherever that might be, is possibly quite a ways from 
Hogwarts, Harry has to be portkeyed there - a normal abduction would 
raise so many alarms so quickly it would probably be too risky to pull 
off. However, apparating is difficult enough that you probably wouldn't 
want to try it with a passenger, and of course you can't attempt it at 
all in Hogwarts grounds.

However, Crouch!Moody learns that one of the little surprises for the 
TriWizard tournament is that the final cup *will* portkey the winner to 
the entrance (not a bad idea, after all, the winner should be the first 
to get to the cup, not the one that is waiting for him besides the 
entrance, not to mention the danger of the champion being waylaid in 
the way *back* by some of the delightful monsters). Thus, Crouch 
conceives the idea that, using the auror privileges of his disguise, he 
can get close enough to the cup to introduce the extra step. Since the 
anti-aparition charm will be suspended in the case of this cup (by 
using methods undisclosed but that probably require being Dumbledore), 
Crouch can tamper enough with it to make it go to the Graveyard (but 
not enough to delete the original destination, the outside of the 
maze).

So, the short answer is: we don't know how portkeys are created, but a 
good guess is that it doesn't take that much - during the Quidditch 
World Cup Final, several hundred porkeys where prepared in a matter of 
days to allow returns. My guess is that the anti-aparition charms of 
Hogwarts stop Crouch from creating his own, more than any complexity of 
the spell. And, no, I don't think you'd have to manufacture objects 
especifically to be portkeys - the entire idea of charms is to enchant 
an object. Besides, one has to assume that, at some point, the cup was 
*not* a portkey (or the shoe, for that matter), and that is was later 
on enchanted to be one. And even if this was the case, Crouch - or 
Voldemort, for that matter - could've certainly found the way to get 
hold of one of those pre-prepared portkey-objects (in the form of a 
toothbrush, or a quidditch ball, or school suply) and hand it it to 
Harry in some moment during the year, so I doubt suh objects are the 
reason for having to wait for the cup.

Hope that helps,

Grey Wolf