FIC: Hogwarts: All Sales Final - 12/34
Start of the story, including summary, full ratings, warnings, pairings etc. Here
Disclaimer: I own nothing that you recognise. J K Rowling retains all copyright.
Chapter 12
Rowena stumbled into the Great Hall the following morning. She was half asleep and from the look of things so were most of the students and several of the staff.
Helga was yawning widely and Salazar looked positively grumpy. None of them could be described as a morning person by any stretch of the imagination. Though Rowena suspected that in Helga’s case it was probably more likely she’d been up all night preparing lesson plans and simply lost track of time.
“Whose idea was it that we start classes so early in the morning?” she asked with a yawn of her own as she took her seat between Salazar and Godric.
“This isn’t early,” Godric replied with a bright smile. “I’ve been up for three hours already.”
“Bully for you,” Rowena muttered with another yawn.
Rowena was half-heartedly toying with her bacon, whilst wondering if she could squeeze a nap into her timetable when the morning post arrived. There was nothing like the appearance in the room of several dozen screeching owls in flight to wake a person up.
A large long-eared owl swooped towards her and she ducked to let it pass her by. It landed on Salazar’s plate with a thump.
“Anything interesting?” she asked a moment later after he’d read the letter.
“Mother says good luck on my first day and to behave myself.” Salazar rolled his eyes and passed her the letter. “It sounds like she thinks I’m one of the students.”
Rowena snickered as she tried to wrestle the last of her bacon back from the owl that had decided to commandeer it as its own. She eventually gave it up as a bad job and the smug bird wolfed down the rind with relish.
“So, what else is in the letter?” she asked. “You’re frowning so there must be something you’ve not mentioned,” she added when Salazar remained silent.
“The usual,” he finally muttered. “Father sends his regards, reminds me of the large portion of the family fortune that’s been invested in the school, and wants to know why I’m not married yet. He’s also helpfully provided a list of all the relatives of our students whom he considers suitable candidates.”
Rowena swore under her breath.
Salazar reached for his cup of mead, took a long swallow and immediately spat it all back out as he choked. “What is this revolting muck?” he spluttered.
“Ah,” Godric turned to them with a smile. “I see you’ve just discovered the delightful taste of pumpkin juice.”
“What?” Rowena asked. “Where’s the mead?”
“Well,” Godric began. “I thought perhaps drinking alcohol before teaching the students might be a little…er…inappropriate.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Salazar cut in as he wiped down the table. “Most of these children will have been brought up on mead and ale. Not this muck!”
“Well, I’m not going to question how they’re raised at home,” Godric continued. “But here at Hogwarts they’re not going to be finding any alcohol. And the faculty will only partake of wine with the evening meal, and then in strict moderation.”
“It isn’t very nice,” Helga commented from the other side of Godric after she’d taken a hesitant sip from her own cup. “Are you sure there isn’t another alternative?”
“Nothing wrong with pumpkin juice,” Godric said. “Great stuff! Guaranteed to put hairs on your chest. My mum used to swear by it. Drank nothing else.”
“Didn’t your mother die of suspected food poisoning?” Rowena reminded him as she quickly put her cup back down and pushed it away. Even the Slytherin owl was giving the juice a wide berth.
“That’s entirely beside the point!” Godric scoffed as he took a healthy swig from his own cup.
-o-xXx-o-
Most of the students were still eating when Godric summoned all the staff into the antechamber off of the Great Hall.
“So, do we all know what we’re doing today?” he asked as he looked around the room. “Er…Wait a minute! Where’s Professor Plunkett?”
Everyone shrugged and looked around the room, perhaps hoping she might suddenly be found to be hiding underneath one of the chairs or something.
“I’ve not got my first class until this afternoon,” Helga said. “I’ll go check she’s all right and introduce her to her first students.”
Godric nodded in thanks. “And everyone else knows what they’re doing today?”
“My first class is afternoon lunch too,” Salazar said with a smirk. “Rowena what’s on your timetable today?”
“Transfiguration with the fourth years first and then Ancient Runes with the first years after that.”
“Excellent,” Godric beamed about the room. Several people backed up slightly at his enthusiasm. “I have the first years for Care of Magical Creatures first so I’ll bring them to you as soon as we’re done at the lake.”
“The lake?” asked Helga warily. “Don’t you think they saw enough of the water yesterday?”
“There’s all sorts of fascinating creatures in the depths of that lake. Why last month I caught more than half a dozen grindylows.”
“Yes, that’s all well and good, but weren’t you supposed to be catching fish at the time?” Salazar smirked as Godric floundered about for an excuse.
“I really don’t think that grindylows are suitable for the first years to study,” Helga pointed out cautiously. “Some of them can get quite nasty.”
“What the first years?” Godric asked.
“The grindylows!” Helga clarified, not entirely sure if Godric was joking or really being that dense.
“I’ve got it all under control,” Godric assured her. “I wasn’t planning on teaching them about the grindylows yet anyway. There’s a giant squid in the lake too and I thought we’d make it a class project to find it tame it. We could have the first tame giant squid in the country.”
Helga put her head into her hands and muttered something unintelligible. Rowena meanwhile took the opportunity to duck out the door and make her way to the Transfiguration classroom. She wished she’d known about the residents of the lake earlier, having been swimming in the waters on numerous occasions throughout the summer.
-o-xXx-o-
Rowena looked at the fourth years as they stood waiting outside the door to the Transfiguration classroom. A few of them looked like they’d been standing there a while. She tried to look authoritative as she swept past them. She was only a few minutes late and how was she to know that the students had a better sense of direction than she’d given them credit for?
She opened the door with a tap of her wand. One of the Ravenclaw boys accidentally trod on her foot as he ducked ahead of her to hold the door open for her with a smile that would best be described as fawning.
“Thank you,” she murmured as she limped by him, adding as an afterthought, “five points to Ravenclaw for showing good manners.” She’d catch up with Salazar in the points game by lunchtime at this rate.
Once the class had taken their seats Rowena began the lecture she’d been preparing for the last two weeks.
She’d decided that because the students were coming from all walks of life it was going to be easier to start each class with a short test of the abilities of each student, just to ascertain where they were at magically.
She’d gathered various items for the students to transfigure and intended to go through them one by one during the course of the first lesson.
“Are there any questions?” she asked after she’d explained the lesson plan to the students.
She looked around the room and saw that half the students seemed to be whispering amongst themselves, two were doodling on their parchment and one of them was picking his nose. She wondered how she could enthuse in them some modicum of excitement for the subject she was so looking forward to teaching.
It was then that she spotted a raised hand in the third row.
“You have a question…er…?” she flushed slightly as she realised that not only had she forgotten the girl’s name, she was one of her own Ravenclaw students as well.
“Rosalyn, Professor,” the girl replied.
Rowena nodded and smiled gratefully. “And what is it about the lesson that you don’t understand?”
“Well it’s not that,” Rosalyn said with a nervous glance at the girl sitting beside her who seemed to be on the verge of giggles for some unknown reason. “Erm…it’s…er…”
“Don’t be nervous,” Rowena assured her, giving her a dazzling smile that she hoped would calm her down. “Just ask your question and I’ll do my best to answer.”
Roselyn nodded before continuing in a rush. “Well Professor, Eliza Flutterbug told me that Mary Pickles had told her, that she’d overheard Barney Cutts telling the Dingle twins that Betsy Totterton had told him that she’d heard from Rufus Richards that Clare North - that’s Clare in the second year with the curly red hair, not Clare in the first year with the ponytail - that she’d told him that Isolde Harbutt had said she’d seen you and Professor Slytherin holding hands under the table at the feast last night.”
The class drew in their collective breath and turned to look at Rowena with rapt attention. She experienced for a moment that rare feeling of pleasure as every student in the room gave her their undivided attention. Not one student was doodling, not one student was whispering, no one was doing anything except look directly at Rowena.
“I’m sorry, was there a question in there?” she finally asked, having somewhat lost the train of the girl’s babble around the point of the Dingle twins, whoever the heck they were.
-o-xXx-o-
Rowena may have felt marginally better about the way her own lesson was going had she known the problems Helga was suffering around this same time.
Helga, who should have been enjoying a relaxing morning was instead standing at the door of the Divination room with a crowd of students behind her waiting for Professor Plunkett to let them into her sanctuary.
“Professor Plunkett, I have your first students here for their Divination class!” she called through the closed doorway, much to the amusement of the students gathered behind her.
“Maybe we should ram it,” one of the boys suggested.
It said something about Helga’s frustration at this point that she actually seriously considered his suggestion for several minutes.
-o-xXx-o-
“You see before you the Great Lake,” Godric said to the cluster of first year students standing in front of him.
“It’s not that great,” one girl said, thoroughly unimpressed with the view.
“Lake Windermere’s way bigger,” her friend agreed.
“Well, there are a lot of big lakes out there,” agreed Godric. He was rather anxious not to get too side tracked in the first of his lessons. “However I think you’ll find that this particular lake has a lot more to offer than Lake Windermere.”
“Does it have the Loch Ness Monster in it?” one boy piped up eagerly as he peered into the waters from a rather precarious position on the edge of the shore.
“Er, no, that would be in Loch Ness,” Godric said with a frown.
“My mum says that the Loch Ness Monster is made up to frighten naughty children,” one girl chimed in knowingly. Several of the others nodded in agreement.
“Actually the Loch Ness Monster is a Kelpie and we’ll be learning all about them in a couple of years time,” Godric announced.
“Are you sure?” the girl with the knowledgeable mother asked. “Because my mum says that all the reports about the Loch Ness Monster are made by men who are on their way home from the taverns.”
“My dad said he saw Nessie once,” another student said. “He wanted to stay and study it.”
“Was he on his way home from a tavern?”
“No! He’d gone to see a man about getting another manticore as ours gets a bit lonely.”
“You have a manticore?” another boy asked in awe. “Wow! They’re really rare and really dangerous.”
“You dad sounds weird!”
“He is not, he’s the biggest expert on magical creatures in the world!”
“Ahem,” Godric interjected as wands were drawn. Everyone ignored him.
-o-xXx-o-
Salazar was just checking that Madam Gudgeon was fully stocked with healing potions when the first casualty of the term was brought in.
It was probably a lucky coincidence he was there at the time. He dealt adeptly with the boy with a broken nose whilst idly listening as the boy explained that his father wasn’t a drunk who saw all sorts of oddities after a night down the tavern.
After sending the student back to his class Salazar turned his attention to the unconscious Madam Gudgeon. He finally decided against leaving her on the floor and levitated her onto one of the beds before returning to his chambers to finalise his plans for the afternoon’s Potions class.
Chapter 13
Disclaimer: I own nothing that you recognise. J K Rowling retains all copyright.
Chapter 12
Rowena stumbled into the Great Hall the following morning. She was half asleep and from the look of things so were most of the students and several of the staff.
Helga was yawning widely and Salazar looked positively grumpy. None of them could be described as a morning person by any stretch of the imagination. Though Rowena suspected that in Helga’s case it was probably more likely she’d been up all night preparing lesson plans and simply lost track of time.
“Whose idea was it that we start classes so early in the morning?” she asked with a yawn of her own as she took her seat between Salazar and Godric.
“This isn’t early,” Godric replied with a bright smile. “I’ve been up for three hours already.”
“Bully for you,” Rowena muttered with another yawn.
Rowena was half-heartedly toying with her bacon, whilst wondering if she could squeeze a nap into her timetable when the morning post arrived. There was nothing like the appearance in the room of several dozen screeching owls in flight to wake a person up.
A large long-eared owl swooped towards her and she ducked to let it pass her by. It landed on Salazar’s plate with a thump.
“Anything interesting?” she asked a moment later after he’d read the letter.
“Mother says good luck on my first day and to behave myself.” Salazar rolled his eyes and passed her the letter. “It sounds like she thinks I’m one of the students.”
Rowena snickered as she tried to wrestle the last of her bacon back from the owl that had decided to commandeer it as its own. She eventually gave it up as a bad job and the smug bird wolfed down the rind with relish.
“So, what else is in the letter?” she asked. “You’re frowning so there must be something you’ve not mentioned,” she added when Salazar remained silent.
“The usual,” he finally muttered. “Father sends his regards, reminds me of the large portion of the family fortune that’s been invested in the school, and wants to know why I’m not married yet. He’s also helpfully provided a list of all the relatives of our students whom he considers suitable candidates.”
Rowena swore under her breath.
Salazar reached for his cup of mead, took a long swallow and immediately spat it all back out as he choked. “What is this revolting muck?” he spluttered.
“Ah,” Godric turned to them with a smile. “I see you’ve just discovered the delightful taste of pumpkin juice.”
“What?” Rowena asked. “Where’s the mead?”
“Well,” Godric began. “I thought perhaps drinking alcohol before teaching the students might be a little…er…inappropriate.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Salazar cut in as he wiped down the table. “Most of these children will have been brought up on mead and ale. Not this muck!”
“Well, I’m not going to question how they’re raised at home,” Godric continued. “But here at Hogwarts they’re not going to be finding any alcohol. And the faculty will only partake of wine with the evening meal, and then in strict moderation.”
“It isn’t very nice,” Helga commented from the other side of Godric after she’d taken a hesitant sip from her own cup. “Are you sure there isn’t another alternative?”
“Nothing wrong with pumpkin juice,” Godric said. “Great stuff! Guaranteed to put hairs on your chest. My mum used to swear by it. Drank nothing else.”
“Didn’t your mother die of suspected food poisoning?” Rowena reminded him as she quickly put her cup back down and pushed it away. Even the Slytherin owl was giving the juice a wide berth.
“That’s entirely beside the point!” Godric scoffed as he took a healthy swig from his own cup.
-o-xXx-o-
Most of the students were still eating when Godric summoned all the staff into the antechamber off of the Great Hall.
“So, do we all know what we’re doing today?” he asked as he looked around the room. “Er…Wait a minute! Where’s Professor Plunkett?”
Everyone shrugged and looked around the room, perhaps hoping she might suddenly be found to be hiding underneath one of the chairs or something.
“I’ve not got my first class until this afternoon,” Helga said. “I’ll go check she’s all right and introduce her to her first students.”
Godric nodded in thanks. “And everyone else knows what they’re doing today?”
“My first class is afternoon lunch too,” Salazar said with a smirk. “Rowena what’s on your timetable today?”
“Transfiguration with the fourth years first and then Ancient Runes with the first years after that.”
“Excellent,” Godric beamed about the room. Several people backed up slightly at his enthusiasm. “I have the first years for Care of Magical Creatures first so I’ll bring them to you as soon as we’re done at the lake.”
“The lake?” asked Helga warily. “Don’t you think they saw enough of the water yesterday?”
“There’s all sorts of fascinating creatures in the depths of that lake. Why last month I caught more than half a dozen grindylows.”
“Yes, that’s all well and good, but weren’t you supposed to be catching fish at the time?” Salazar smirked as Godric floundered about for an excuse.
“I really don’t think that grindylows are suitable for the first years to study,” Helga pointed out cautiously. “Some of them can get quite nasty.”
“What the first years?” Godric asked.
“The grindylows!” Helga clarified, not entirely sure if Godric was joking or really being that dense.
“I’ve got it all under control,” Godric assured her. “I wasn’t planning on teaching them about the grindylows yet anyway. There’s a giant squid in the lake too and I thought we’d make it a class project to find it tame it. We could have the first tame giant squid in the country.”
Helga put her head into her hands and muttered something unintelligible. Rowena meanwhile took the opportunity to duck out the door and make her way to the Transfiguration classroom. She wished she’d known about the residents of the lake earlier, having been swimming in the waters on numerous occasions throughout the summer.
-o-xXx-o-
Rowena looked at the fourth years as they stood waiting outside the door to the Transfiguration classroom. A few of them looked like they’d been standing there a while. She tried to look authoritative as she swept past them. She was only a few minutes late and how was she to know that the students had a better sense of direction than she’d given them credit for?
She opened the door with a tap of her wand. One of the Ravenclaw boys accidentally trod on her foot as he ducked ahead of her to hold the door open for her with a smile that would best be described as fawning.
“Thank you,” she murmured as she limped by him, adding as an afterthought, “five points to Ravenclaw for showing good manners.” She’d catch up with Salazar in the points game by lunchtime at this rate.
Once the class had taken their seats Rowena began the lecture she’d been preparing for the last two weeks.
She’d decided that because the students were coming from all walks of life it was going to be easier to start each class with a short test of the abilities of each student, just to ascertain where they were at magically.
She’d gathered various items for the students to transfigure and intended to go through them one by one during the course of the first lesson.
“Are there any questions?” she asked after she’d explained the lesson plan to the students.
She looked around the room and saw that half the students seemed to be whispering amongst themselves, two were doodling on their parchment and one of them was picking his nose. She wondered how she could enthuse in them some modicum of excitement for the subject she was so looking forward to teaching.
It was then that she spotted a raised hand in the third row.
“You have a question…er…?” she flushed slightly as she realised that not only had she forgotten the girl’s name, she was one of her own Ravenclaw students as well.
“Rosalyn, Professor,” the girl replied.
Rowena nodded and smiled gratefully. “And what is it about the lesson that you don’t understand?”
“Well it’s not that,” Rosalyn said with a nervous glance at the girl sitting beside her who seemed to be on the verge of giggles for some unknown reason. “Erm…it’s…er…”
“Don’t be nervous,” Rowena assured her, giving her a dazzling smile that she hoped would calm her down. “Just ask your question and I’ll do my best to answer.”
Roselyn nodded before continuing in a rush. “Well Professor, Eliza Flutterbug told me that Mary Pickles had told her, that she’d overheard Barney Cutts telling the Dingle twins that Betsy Totterton had told him that she’d heard from Rufus Richards that Clare North - that’s Clare in the second year with the curly red hair, not Clare in the first year with the ponytail - that she’d told him that Isolde Harbutt had said she’d seen you and Professor Slytherin holding hands under the table at the feast last night.”
The class drew in their collective breath and turned to look at Rowena with rapt attention. She experienced for a moment that rare feeling of pleasure as every student in the room gave her their undivided attention. Not one student was doodling, not one student was whispering, no one was doing anything except look directly at Rowena.
“I’m sorry, was there a question in there?” she finally asked, having somewhat lost the train of the girl’s babble around the point of the Dingle twins, whoever the heck they were.
-o-xXx-o-
Rowena may have felt marginally better about the way her own lesson was going had she known the problems Helga was suffering around this same time.
Helga, who should have been enjoying a relaxing morning was instead standing at the door of the Divination room with a crowd of students behind her waiting for Professor Plunkett to let them into her sanctuary.
“Professor Plunkett, I have your first students here for their Divination class!” she called through the closed doorway, much to the amusement of the students gathered behind her.
“Maybe we should ram it,” one of the boys suggested.
It said something about Helga’s frustration at this point that she actually seriously considered his suggestion for several minutes.
-o-xXx-o-
“You see before you the Great Lake,” Godric said to the cluster of first year students standing in front of him.
“It’s not that great,” one girl said, thoroughly unimpressed with the view.
“Lake Windermere’s way bigger,” her friend agreed.
“Well, there are a lot of big lakes out there,” agreed Godric. He was rather anxious not to get too side tracked in the first of his lessons. “However I think you’ll find that this particular lake has a lot more to offer than Lake Windermere.”
“Does it have the Loch Ness Monster in it?” one boy piped up eagerly as he peered into the waters from a rather precarious position on the edge of the shore.
“Er, no, that would be in Loch Ness,” Godric said with a frown.
“My mum says that the Loch Ness Monster is made up to frighten naughty children,” one girl chimed in knowingly. Several of the others nodded in agreement.
“Actually the Loch Ness Monster is a Kelpie and we’ll be learning all about them in a couple of years time,” Godric announced.
“Are you sure?” the girl with the knowledgeable mother asked. “Because my mum says that all the reports about the Loch Ness Monster are made by men who are on their way home from the taverns.”
“My dad said he saw Nessie once,” another student said. “He wanted to stay and study it.”
“Was he on his way home from a tavern?”
“No! He’d gone to see a man about getting another manticore as ours gets a bit lonely.”
“You have a manticore?” another boy asked in awe. “Wow! They’re really rare and really dangerous.”
“You dad sounds weird!”
“He is not, he’s the biggest expert on magical creatures in the world!”
“Ahem,” Godric interjected as wands were drawn. Everyone ignored him.
-o-xXx-o-
Salazar was just checking that Madam Gudgeon was fully stocked with healing potions when the first casualty of the term was brought in.
It was probably a lucky coincidence he was there at the time. He dealt adeptly with the boy with a broken nose whilst idly listening as the boy explained that his father wasn’t a drunk who saw all sorts of oddities after a night down the tavern.
After sending the student back to his class Salazar turned his attention to the unconscious Madam Gudgeon. He finally decided against leaving her on the floor and levitated her onto one of the beds before returning to his chambers to finalise his plans for the afternoon’s Potions class.
Chapter 13