The Sorting Hat didn't have much to do in between its annual Welcome Feast sorting duties besides sit around and wait to do it all over again with a new batch of children the next year, so it was very surprised to be suddenly picked up in the middle of the night by unfamiliar hands and, with an apologetic mutter of, "Sorry, but the spell will only allow me to communicate with a single being before sending me home, and you're the only one I can trust to remember and pass on the message to the right person," placed on a head full of memories of events which had not yet come to pass.
The hat first read through centuries of worth of memorized future history and then the personal recollections of Hermione Granger, known as the Brightest Witch of Her Age, eventually witnessing the second rise of a Dark Lord, the resulting war, and its aftermath upon a Wizarding society too divided along House lines to ever properly mend itself back into the unified whole it should be, and finally Hermione seizing the sole desperate chance available to travel back and put things on a different path, only for the spell to malfunction and overshoot her desired temporal destination, landing her centuries before the birth of Albus Dumbledore, who she felt she needed to warn about Tom Riddle.
"I will ensure that the necessary change happens," the Sorting Hat assured Hermione, who, with her message having been communicated to a single being as per the rules of her spell, was rapidly fading out of the current time, and the Hat received a brief feeling of gratitude from her in return before the witch disappeared completely, leaving the Sorting Hat to drop to the floor, but it had no intention of waiting until after the birth of Albus Dumbledore to warn of how wrong Wizarding Society could go, nor did it intend to communicate its message directly, because no one ever listened to that sort of advice anyway; instead, the Sorting Hat intended to correct a more systemic pattern it had identified from Ms. Granger's memories, and to that end, starting with the very next Sorting of Hogwarts students and continuing with every Sorting thereafter, the Sorting Hat called out nothing but, "Hufflepuff!" for every child whose head it was placed upon, regardless of any child's inclination or teacher's argument.
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The hat first read through centuries of worth of memorized future history and then the personal recollections of Hermione Granger, known as the Brightest Witch of Her Age, eventually witnessing the second rise of a Dark Lord, the resulting war, and its aftermath upon a Wizarding society too divided along House lines to ever properly mend itself back into the unified whole it should be, and finally Hermione seizing the sole desperate chance available to travel back and put things on a different path, only for the spell to malfunction and overshoot her desired temporal destination, landing her centuries before the birth of Albus Dumbledore, who she felt she needed to warn about Tom Riddle.
"I will ensure that the necessary change happens," the Sorting Hat assured Hermione, who, with her message having been communicated to a single being as per the rules of her spell, was rapidly fading out of the current time, and the Hat received a brief feeling of gratitude from her in return before the witch disappeared completely, leaving the Sorting Hat to drop to the floor, but it had no intention of waiting until after the birth of Albus Dumbledore to warn of how wrong Wizarding Society could go, nor did it intend to communicate its message directly, because no one ever listened to that sort of advice anyway; instead, the Sorting Hat intended to correct a more systemic pattern it had identified from Ms. Granger's memories, and to that end, starting with the very next Sorting of Hogwarts students and continuing with every Sorting thereafter, the Sorting Hat called out nothing but, "Hufflepuff!" for every child whose head it was placed upon, regardless of any child's inclination or teacher's argument.