Chapter Two

Wingardium Leviosa was not a spell for the faint of heart. Had we begun with that, I might have understood my reasonable frustration. Instead, we began with an even simpler spell. One that came naturally, and was merely an extension of a wizard's naturally ability to make sparks fly from the tip of one's wand. The Lumos spell was quite a simple twirl of the wand. At least, Professor Flitwick had assured it, and quite a few Ravenclaw had gotten it at the first try, just as much as the Hufflepuffs had.

"Lumos," I muttered for the umpteenth time, glancing at the slightly shiny tip of my wand. I was doing something to it, clearly, but it wasn't working as well as I intended it to. At most, I had a midnight light's glow of worth, while the others ranged from vibrant colors to bright torches.

"Lumos," I insisted, the light glowing a bit stronger. I glanced at the wizard doing the movements on the spellbook. The flick of the wrist, the little twirl, they all made sense in retrospect, but I couldn't manage to get the movement down just right. If I had, I'd be shining along with the rest of the class wouldn't I? Still, as I glanced past the wizard's movement and into the spell's description itself -and the horrendous cursive writings used, seriously, would it kill them to invest in a printer?- I read a passage that left me puzzled.

The longer the spell is charged, the brighter the light. A wizard's ability to naturally select the most appropriate of glows for the right setting varies based on their control of their magic.

How did one even go about charging spells? They didn't work on a mana system!

I could try to maybe scrunch my eyebrows, put effort in as if I had to go to the loo, think really hard about it, and then... "Lumos!" and a shining, dazzling, lightsaber's worth of crimson light shone from the tip of my wand with such a bright intensity that I actually let go of the wand and clutched my eyes, which teared up from the abrupt change in luminosity.

"Who did that!?" Filius yelled as I whimpered softly, massaging my eyes. "Mister Umbrus? Are you all right'"

"I'm fine," I muttered, "My eyes sting," I added as I kept them closed, massaging them ever so slightly with the palm of my hands.

"I suppose they would," Professor Flitwick's voice came through, "That was quite the strong Lumos spell, perhaps tone it down a little. Five points to Ravenclaw, for such a...brilliance." There were a few cheers from Ravenclaw's side. I spend most of the remaining lesson rubbing my eyes and trying to get the image of the crimson wand out of my seared retinas.

I quietly accepted that my next lesson would be spent with my nose in my book to better read. At the same time, it was also a successful survival strategy against Voldemort's mind-reading abilities. Professor Quirrell wouldn't read my mind without reason, but I couldn't discount Voldemort being paranoid enough to try to gather all information on Harry Potter that he could manage to, even from the first years.

At least, if I were a paranoid overlord I'd rip the minds of everyone around me to ensure no detail eluded me, and since he was stuck on the back of Quirrell's head, it wasn't like he had the ability to do much else.

Thus, no eye-contact, and nose in the book. Quirinus Quirrell had also been a Ravenclaw, and while it didn't show, he did give Ravenclaw five more points on average than he did the Hufflepuffs. Though nobody took offense to that. We were the ones asked to suffer through a half-hour long question before giving a one minute long answer.

I groaned as the lesson dealt mainly in the theoretical applications of magic. My eyes had barely recovered from the previous lesson, but still there I was, trying to decipher the unknown words.

The Gnome is a cowon? Common gardn...garden, pest. I'd eventually get used to it, but seriously, this couldn't stand.

I had a priority. I had to find a spell that turned words from cursive into something far more readable. Hell, I would be fine with a magical typewriter you could feed books to in order to get the equivalent back in something other than cursive. This was the kind of cursive that was all flowery and twirly, and it made it doubly hard to read through.

The age of machines needed to arrive to Hogwarts on the double, and if not the computers, at the very least the industrial revolution of typewriters!

"Damn it," Anthony Goldstein grunted, "DADA lessons are going to be headaches."

"W-W-Why w-w-would you say th-that, An-Anthony!?" Michael Corner answered, mocking the professor.

The morning lessons were done for the day, and thus it was time for the lunch break. "Professor Flitwick gave us three feet long homework," Terry Boot groaned in turn. "The older years said he was a good professor, but they didn't mention how much homework he'd give."

"We have until Wednesday to do it too," I added, vaguely recalling the timetable, "It's when we have our next lesson with him."

"We can get the homework started this afternoon and finish it tomorrow," Anthony Goldstein suggested. "Might be a good chance to look at the school library."

That was a great idea, and was going to be my plan too for the afternoon. It wouldn't hurt to follow a group and act all social and stuff. I also had to get a list of wizardly sweets from a book and find out the one used as a password for Dumbledore's office.

Maybe, once I had spoken with the headmaster, I could finally get a great weight off my chest.

Potions, double-potions, meant cauldron usage. Single hours were meant for theory, and double hours for practical. Our first lesson dealt, as an exception to the norm, with everything related to cauldron safety delivered with such a drawl and a scathing glare that it made everyone shrink away from the cauldrons as if they would chop their hands off if they as much as dared breathe wrongly in front of them.

"Now who can tell me the properties of a bezoar?" he asked, "Which of you dunderheads has actually read the book? Which has a modicum of brain matter into his skull?"

Some Ravenclaws actually raised their hands, and thus Severus Snape picked a random Hufflepuff who had done its very best to shrink from the glare sent its way. "Miss Abbott?"

"I-I," there was the thinnest of voices coming out from the girl, and nothing more.

"I suppose ten points from Hufflepuff," Professor Snape said, quite coldly. He then turned and looked straight at me. I stared back, with the most tranquil of expressions. "Mister Umbrus?"

"The bezoar's a natural remedy against poisoning of all kinds, found in the stomach of a goat-"

"Enough of your blabbering," Professor Snape said curtly, "We will now practice scrubbing the cauldrons to perfection, a much needed skills for those of you who will never amount to much more than muck-cleaners."

I had to give it to him, as he waved his wand and made all of our cauldrons dirty like hell...

...he just knew how to make someone hate him as if he were the angry Cinderella step-mother.