The Fallout

As they neared the end of October, Harry had a better sense of what was happening in his new school. How? He started paying attention not just to his classes, but to how they compared with their assigned books.

Harry found that Professor Flitwick stuck the closest to the Standard Book of Spells, but he only covered forty percent of the spells in class for the chapters they'd touched on. The others they were expected to pick up on their own, a fact the Professor had not announced.

Professor McGonagall covered one example of each sub-type of transfiguration. Say match to needle. But there were many other exercises in the transfiguration text that Harry knew he needed to try. This book was supposed to last for five years, according to the things older students mentioned in the Gryffindor common room.

Snape seemed to skip around their text, but it took Harry a while to determine that. He wished the Professor would announce what their next class would be on. Harry would like to read what the text book actually said – and have more than a recipe chalked onto the board. All of the recipes Snape had given them so far were slightly different from the ones in the text, for some reason.

He wondered if they were more or less effective, not that he would ask the old grump.

What did it mean? No one was saying.

Harry decided he was responsible for what was said in class and in the book, no matter what the homework was about. He didn't see many others following the same principle, but it seemed correct to him.

The teachers seemed to be attempting to stoke interest in them, not enforce it or require it or even suggest it. Well, Snape appeared to be attempting to drown interest, but that was unlikely to be his real job. Perhaps his unpaid favorite hobby?

Harry wished all of the subjects clicked for him. But he had a way into studying them all. Defense touched on every other form of magic, perhaps excepting astronomy and divination. If Harry could keep himself interested in the one type of magic, he could find ways to learn all of them.

.....

On Halloween, every simple thing fell apart. All the goodwill in Gryffindor among the first years evaporated and it was Ron Weasley's fault.

Ron had a temper, a vicious one. Harry wasn't quite sure why it exploded that day, he couldn't get that part of the story. He'd laid into Hermione Granger for being clever and helpful, Parvati had been insulted for – well, Harry wasn't quite sure what Ron had meant. It hadn't sounded pleasant. Then he'd had scathing things to say about, and to, some Slytherins.

Which all reinforced what Harry knew about himself: Harry disliked people with tempers.

Ron found himself knocked to the ground and soaked in ink. And he hadn't even seen Peeves anywhere.

Harry went around apologizing to unhappy girls, even the Slytherins. (Harry didn't apologize to Malfoy on Ron's behalf. The big mouth could do that on his own if he ever wised up.)

Hermione only accepted Harry's apology because Ron had been cruel to so many people.

"It was just his time of the month," she said.

"What?" Harry asked.

"Nothing, Harry. Nothing." She had very pink cheeks.

Harry shrugged and went about his day. Hermione and probably some of the others got their revenges on Ron. Perhaps he'd learn some manners, perhaps not. Maybe that was the point of Hogwarts: letting people stumble into trouble and see if they could stumble out again before they lost fingers or an ankle or their sanity.

The first-year Gryffindors all attended the Halloween feast together – and they were all evacuated back to Gryffindor Tower when a troll got loose. Trolls?

That, too, had to be Ron Weasley's fault, Harry decided. The angry boy had jinxed all of them with his cursed mouth. Harry was sure of that.

The students in Gryffindor were locked in their common room, so Harry pulled out the first edition Trimble which he had checked out for a second time. He hadn't wanted to miss anything. Harry tried to find a corner that had some light. The common room really was too small for all the students in Gryffindor, at least when they were all locked in together.

He started by investigating what Trimble had to write about trolls, of course, but soon got less interested. They were rather easy to distract, so most troll keepers used illusions on them. Harry hadn't found much instruction on that kind of magic yet. It must be fairly advanced.

He paged through the first edition Trimble and found material at the back he wasn't expecting. He must have skipped it on his first read-through. It was only two pages long, but what pages they were.

Appendix AD: The Explorer's Best Friends and Enemies

One who travels the dark places of the world will realize that most spells are useless in a desperate moment. One can know dozens of spells and still fall into peril. However, one need not possess warlock-level strength to remain safe while exploring. In fact, I have taught these precautions to young people who have not yet completed their schooling at Hogwarts. These are particularly simple spells to learn, effective for novices. They are also spells that gain effectiveness the more familiar one becomes with them. So they start out as fairly useful and become much better with repetition. (For reasons I cannot explain, they have also become very uncommon to find in any ordinary curriculum. As an aside, politics is a game no one should enjoy playing because it is a game where all parties agree to lose.)