Harry Potter and the Protectors of Hogwarts

viii. of the head of slytherin

The last weekend of September had arrived and most of the students were in bed. With the exception of Harry, Neville, Ginny and the Creevey brothers (who had overheard Ginny complaining about doing the extra running in the morning) who had settled into a routine of getting up in the morning, including weekends, for jogging around the pitch. At first there was complaining, mostly on Ginny's part, they had had eventually agreed that it was worth it.

And it was. Compared to the rest of the students, Harry and his friends were considerably less red in the face and less sweaty after Killian's class. Killian of course noticed Harry and Neville's efforts and made them work even harder. For this reason alone, she punished the class by making them all run harder and for longer. Dean and Seamus were one of the few who could keep up, Dean as he admitted to playing football whenever he could, and Seamus who often joined him in the summer. So keeping up wasn't exactly hard for them.

Ron had declared Killian a sadist, which had only made her laugh and then told him run another lap, he kept his mouth shut after that. Killian made them do all different kinds of races, 100m, 200m, 500m and 1500m, then she added relay races in which they had splint into groups of four each, and had to run with a baton to the next person.

She had even set up a long jump and a high jump course. The long jump pit consisted of a long rectangle drawn on the grass (they were still meeting at the Quidditch pitch) 16ft long by 2ft wide, followed by a sand pit 7ft long. No one was spared the treat of having sand all down their clothes and inside their shoes, and Filch was often found muttering about students and teachers alike.

The long jump bar was also met with very little enthusiasm. Everyone had to line up five feet away from the jump bar, and Killian had mockingly started them all at one foot insisting they all take turns, slowly raising the bar half a foot each time. That was easy, even for Parvati and Lavender, until they reached 3ft, and everyone, even the tallest of them couldn't jump without the bar falling on top of them. Killian had insisted they all try again until they could, but after nearly 3 turns each, only 3 students could move. Sadly, Harry wasn't one of them.

Disappointed at their lack of effort, Killian punished them by making them run 2 laps around the pitch before the end of lesson. Ron's heartfelt groan was echoed by most, even Hermione.

Despite the bruises Harry had received trying to make the high jump, he quite enjoyed the challenges of the lesson. As did Dean who enjoyed the workout, and was quite vocal about his approval about the physical activities finally included in the Hogwarts curriculum.

Harry's other lesson were going well also. They were still given lots of homework, essays of up to 2ft long for each lesson. (Honestly," Ron could be heard complaining, "I'll be dead before Christmas at this rate). In Charms they had started learning healing charms. Flitwick had demonstrated using a fake skeleton, explaining of they got the charm wrong on a real arm, then they might have remove the bones and re-grow. Harry remembered the sensation of Skele-Gro vividly.

In Transfiguration they had started conjuring, of which only Hermione succeeded on the first try. Ron's efforts were exceedingly funny, as his attempts of conjuring up a plain white handkerchief looked more like a used crumpled tissue. Harry thought he might have actually seen a bogie on it as well.

The Slytherins were slowly coming out of their shells. There were no snide comments, yet, but they were sniggering and smirking. Harry wished the peace had lasted longer.

But of course, what he was more than happy with was Quidditch practice. Harry's initial idea that he had come up with at tryouts was working well, and the others enjoyed experimenting. Harry's idea was that they all try to plat different positions, even if they weren't good, they were at least adequate. He thought that this technique would be good to confuse the other teams, and Harry scheduled the practices as often as he could. By working together with Katie, he had come up with some workable plays, which were easy to perform with all the extra practice they were doing. Their Slytherin match against Slytherin would be very interesting.