Apparation and Sirius' vault

[Grey Wolf]

No: HPFGUIDX 110502

Sarita Rosen  wrote:
> If I remember correctly, James tells Harry to go back to the portkey. > C=
ould he have turned it into a portkey even though he's not alive?
> 
> Sarita

This was seriously considered way back. In absense of canon, there 
really is very little we can say about how those soul images knew the 
cup was still a portkey. Let me see if I can remember the posibilities:

• The soul image creates the portkey: this is rather unlikely, 
unfortunately, since if ghosts have little power, how could a soul 
image have the kind of power that a portkey requires? Also, notice the 
Crouch Jr. had to take the cup himself to cast the spell that turned 
it/added the extra stop - he couldn't do it from a distance. By all 
accounts, the final duel and gold cage where quite far from the cup. If 
those ghosts had so much power, they could've blasted Voldemort into 
smitherins, instead of just holding him back. On the other hand, they 
did seem to have enough power to do just that, so they weren't 
completely devoid of power. Hows and whys abound here.

• Crouch Jr. added two stops: the most pressing question here is 
"why?". While the original theory, due to his own confession in the 
books, it does lack weight in the light of reasoning. I do remember 
that originally MD was a proponent of this, and Pip herself explained 
it away through Voldemort's fear of Harry, not wanting to turn the GG 
(Graveyard Gathering) into a "to death" fight if it turned out that he 
was incapable of destroying Harry. By having the way back, if Voldemort 
realised that destroying Harry wouldn't be that easy, he could heard 
him to the portkey with the help of the DE. MD has since abandoned this 
hypothesis, though, IIRC (excuse me, it *has* been over a year - I'll 
try to dig up my notes, but can't promise anything). The ghost could 
know about this due to some kind of psychic connection between the wand 
and wand user - thus anything Voldemort knew the ghost would know, sort 
of.

• Crouch Jr. added one stop on top of the original: I explained the 
reasons for this in my previous post - it's more logical, given the 
destination of the second jump, etc but does present a problem of how 
the ghosts would know. Maybe being magical energy creatures (rather 
than real ghosts, this are the result of the brother wands effect) they 
can tell that the cup is still magically charged and, since it was a 
portkey to start with, that would mean it would still have a jump left. 
Or something.

I won't lie to you - there simply isn't enough canon to decide. As far 
as I can see, this are really the three main options. Beyond that, it's 
up to everyone to choose. I prefer the third one, but since MD works 
with both second and third (and probably could be spinned to work with 
the first, but we haven't botheres), it is really of little relevance.

Hope that helps,

Grey Wolf, who wishes to remind anyone wondering what "MD" might be 
that they can look up for a short description in Fantastical Posts