Chapter Two... 'My Reflection'
Cho ran through the rooms... they were repeating themselves over and over again. It was her home back in the muggle world. There was her Daddy and her Mummy and even Patch the Dalmation dog. But the rooms, they just didn't seem to end.
"Mum! Dad!" Cho cried, tears streaming down her face as she tried to make sense of what was happening. But in an instant, she saw her parents fall to the ground one at a time, she saw them fall down to their death. Patch barked before keeling over too, that was to be his last bark.
She kept running, she didn't want to look back. She saw her friends, Nicole, Ben, Amy, Marty, Jake and Panda were just a hundred metres away. She reached out to them, using every muscle in her body. But they just kept getting further and further away. She dared to look behind her and found what was terrifying her... what was making her run. It was herself chasing after her.
Cho sat up in bed, startled with beads of perspiration dripping off her. Panting for breath she looked around the room and found everything was normal, or at least how it was meant to be. She collapsed back down on the pillow before instantly straightening herself up again. What was the time? She looked at her beside table. 8:43. Oh no! Quidditch Training!
She jumped out of bed and threw on some clothes before quickly shoving her hair into a messy ponytail. She grabbed her boots and broomstick out of the cupboard before running down the stairs that connected the common room to the Girls' Dormitories and collided with Ben on the way out of the Ravenclaw Tower.
"Running late too?" he remarked as they sprinted towards the Quidditch Pitch.
All she could so was nod in reply as she struggled to keep up with his long strides.
They made it just in time but arrived to find the rest of the team already there. Cho ignored the winks and wolf whistles they recieved but luckily (in some respects), their captain Bella Trisse was in a grumpy mood and made them all shut up quickly.
They began their warm up exercices which consisted of flying round and round in varied formations and working as a team to move the Quaffles up and down the pitch between goal areas. Quidditch was the one time Cho really felt alive. She breezed through the air, not a care in the world because up here... among the clouds, no one cared how she looked or what she was wearing or who she was hanging out with, up here, the only person that mattered was her.
"Good flying Chang!" called Trisse from the opposite end of the pitch. "Watch it there Saunders, nearly dropped it!"
Cho held back a giggle as she saw Ben try to pull off a tricky move known as the Starfish and Stick but did so unsuccessfully causing him to lose his balance and very nearly, go crashing to the ground.
The Beaters Ben had mentioned in his note were astounding. Sugar and Barley Wheat were a couple of Third Year twins who were zooming around like there was no tomorrow. They were in one corner of the field, perfecting their 'Dopplebeater Defence' and quite well too. Cho was admiring their work when a bludger came whistling past, skimming her cheek and bringing her back to reality. She stopped concentrating on what everyone else was doing and did her routine training which was catching the Golden Delicious Apples that had been charmed to act like the Golden Snitch. She raced around, darting in and out of the other players until she'd managed to collect every single apple and had them sitting quite cosily under her yellow jacket.
"Okay team, come back down!" said Trisse after about an hour of flying time.
Each of the players slowly descending until touch down and huddled around Trisse in a small circle.
"Okay team, you know what we have to do this year. We have a fantastic team. One of the best we've had for years... I even overhead Dumbledore and McGonagall talking the other day and they reckon it's the best team Ravenclaw have had since 1923. Now all we have to do is work hard, train hard, play hard and win!" Trisse said, very determined.
This put Cho and the others in determined moods too. She was right. It was a good team. Great even. With Cho as seeker, Trisse as Keeper, the Wheat twins as Beaters and Ben, Kelly Shortail and Basil Bomp as their Chasers they were ready for one hell of a Quidditch year!
* * * * *
Cho watched in absolute disgust as Ben shovelled down three bowls of cereal and seven pieces of toast with raspberry jam splattered over the top.
"I think I'm going to be sick," she remarked as she watched the jam ooze down his mouth.
"All right," he said with his mouth full. "As long as you don't do it over my toast."
Cho tried to avoid watching his bad table manners and looked back at her own breakfast which consisted of two pieces of toast with butter. She watched the butter melt into the hot bread and took a small bite. It didn't taste so wonderful. She put the remainder down and waited patiently for everyone else to finish eating too.
"Aren't you hungry after all that training today?" asked Trisse who was watching her from the opposite side of the Ravenclaw table.
"Not really," admitted Cho. "Just don't feel like it."
"All right," replied Trisse. "Just eat one bit. Don't want any of my players to faint in the sky."
Cho nodded and forced down a bit of toast. She immediately wanted to throw it all up. Maybe she was sick. Come to think of it, that crazy nightmare last night seemed to have affected her.
"Have I got a temperature?" she asked Nicole who was seated on her other side.
Nicole lifted a hand up and rested it on Cho's forehead. "Hmm... a little bit, but no major meltdown. Maybe you should say Madam Pompfrey in the Infirmary before class."
Cho shrugged it off. She didn't feel that under the weather. Infact, her day was beginning to look rather happy.
She waited for her dirty dishes to be removed before collecting her books and heading off to her first class of the day, followed by at least a dozen 'Cho-Wannabes'.
* * * * *
Friday was one of Cho's favourite days of the week. Why? Because it meant the end of the week and a Hogsmeade trip the next day. She loved Hogsmeade... no student didn't really. Because it was the end of the week, classes always went quicker. Well they did for her. Instead of concentrating on what they were meant to be learning, they all just passed notes and chatted in hushed whispers about what they were planning on doing on the weekend and what they wearing to Hogsmeade.
It was lucky that Cho was a naturally gifted student, the main reason she was put in Ravenclaw. She still distinctly remembered the sorting hat saying 'Ah.. what a brilliant mind' when she'd first started out in Hogwarts. Because she was so clever, Cho didn't have to pay nearly as much attention to class as people like Nicole... or Ben did for example. She picked up information and stored it in her brain even if she only heard it passing by. Cho was able to pluck it all out at crucial exam time too and remember it as if she'd heard it just a second ago.
"Miss Chang, may I ask you where the Mingollover Tree originates from?" said Professor Sprout.
Cho looked up from the note she'd just recieved from Marty across the room ('Do you think the black top would go with my new jeans?'). "The Mingollover Tree comes from the Sahara Desert Professor. One of the very few plants that survive there as it thrives on extreme weather conditions."
"Well done Miss Chang," Professor Sprout beamed at her. "You should consider becoming a Herbologist!"
"Uhh... I'll think about it," replied Cho, knowing there was not a chance she ever wanted to become somebody who talked to trees all day.
The rest of the classes were quite similar to that of Herbology. More gossip, more chatter and more excited giggling.
Cho thumped up the stairs to the Girls Dormitory ready for a hard earned shower. She grabbed her silk pyjamas and white towel and headed into the bathroom, locking herself in.
She pulled her hair out of it's ponytail and stripped off all of her clothes. As strange as it was to stand there naked, she did and examined every part of her body.
She pulled out her wand and pointed it at herself. "Wetaiahmass Cresendo!" A little green counter appeared in the air and started flipping back and forth until it had determined her exact weight in kilograms. '52' blinked the glowing green numerals.
Cho stared unhappy at herself before running the shower taps. Perhaps if she was just to get down to 50. Yeah, that would be much better!
Author's Note: Are you all getting a bit worried about Cho? I should think so! I myself am beginning to wonder how secure Little Miss Popular really is! I really sincerely apologise for the chapters being so devastatingly short but I have plans... don't you worry... there are plans! I'm not sure how to do the weight in 'pounds' because here in Australia we use 'kilograms' so I don't know how to calculate it. I don't think you use kilos in England so I know my story is inaccurate there. Putting that aside though, if you want to know more about the Quidditch moves I used, I looked in 'Quidditch Through the Ages'. In the last few pages it describes a bunch of famous tactics and some of those were included. I really wanted to write this fic I guess because I wanted to entwine a theme from our world ('muggle world' you might call it) into something in Harry Potter Land. So what do you think? Flame if you want to but remember I'll only laugh at it unless it has some reasonable purpose, content and evidence to back it up. Cheers!
Cho ran through the rooms... they were repeating themselves over and over again. It was her home back in the muggle world. There was her Daddy and her Mummy and even Patch the Dalmation dog. But the rooms, they just didn't seem to end.
"Mum! Dad!" Cho cried, tears streaming down her face as she tried to make sense of what was happening. But in an instant, she saw her parents fall to the ground one at a time, she saw them fall down to their death. Patch barked before keeling over too, that was to be his last bark.
She kept running, she didn't want to look back. She saw her friends, Nicole, Ben, Amy, Marty, Jake and Panda were just a hundred metres away. She reached out to them, using every muscle in her body. But they just kept getting further and further away. She dared to look behind her and found what was terrifying her... what was making her run. It was herself chasing after her.
Cho sat up in bed, startled with beads of perspiration dripping off her. Panting for breath she looked around the room and found everything was normal, or at least how it was meant to be. She collapsed back down on the pillow before instantly straightening herself up again. What was the time? She looked at her beside table. 8:43. Oh no! Quidditch Training!
She jumped out of bed and threw on some clothes before quickly shoving her hair into a messy ponytail. She grabbed her boots and broomstick out of the cupboard before running down the stairs that connected the common room to the Girls' Dormitories and collided with Ben on the way out of the Ravenclaw Tower.
"Running late too?" he remarked as they sprinted towards the Quidditch Pitch.
All she could so was nod in reply as she struggled to keep up with his long strides.
They made it just in time but arrived to find the rest of the team already there. Cho ignored the winks and wolf whistles they recieved but luckily (in some respects), their captain Bella Trisse was in a grumpy mood and made them all shut up quickly.
They began their warm up exercices which consisted of flying round and round in varied formations and working as a team to move the Quaffles up and down the pitch between goal areas. Quidditch was the one time Cho really felt alive. She breezed through the air, not a care in the world because up here... among the clouds, no one cared how she looked or what she was wearing or who she was hanging out with, up here, the only person that mattered was her.
"Good flying Chang!" called Trisse from the opposite end of the pitch. "Watch it there Saunders, nearly dropped it!"
Cho held back a giggle as she saw Ben try to pull off a tricky move known as the Starfish and Stick but did so unsuccessfully causing him to lose his balance and very nearly, go crashing to the ground.
The Beaters Ben had mentioned in his note were astounding. Sugar and Barley Wheat were a couple of Third Year twins who were zooming around like there was no tomorrow. They were in one corner of the field, perfecting their 'Dopplebeater Defence' and quite well too. Cho was admiring their work when a bludger came whistling past, skimming her cheek and bringing her back to reality. She stopped concentrating on what everyone else was doing and did her routine training which was catching the Golden Delicious Apples that had been charmed to act like the Golden Snitch. She raced around, darting in and out of the other players until she'd managed to collect every single apple and had them sitting quite cosily under her yellow jacket.
"Okay team, come back down!" said Trisse after about an hour of flying time.
Each of the players slowly descending until touch down and huddled around Trisse in a small circle.
"Okay team, you know what we have to do this year. We have a fantastic team. One of the best we've had for years... I even overhead Dumbledore and McGonagall talking the other day and they reckon it's the best team Ravenclaw have had since 1923. Now all we have to do is work hard, train hard, play hard and win!" Trisse said, very determined.
This put Cho and the others in determined moods too. She was right. It was a good team. Great even. With Cho as seeker, Trisse as Keeper, the Wheat twins as Beaters and Ben, Kelly Shortail and Basil Bomp as their Chasers they were ready for one hell of a Quidditch year!
* * * * *
Cho watched in absolute disgust as Ben shovelled down three bowls of cereal and seven pieces of toast with raspberry jam splattered over the top.
"I think I'm going to be sick," she remarked as she watched the jam ooze down his mouth.
"All right," he said with his mouth full. "As long as you don't do it over my toast."
Cho tried to avoid watching his bad table manners and looked back at her own breakfast which consisted of two pieces of toast with butter. She watched the butter melt into the hot bread and took a small bite. It didn't taste so wonderful. She put the remainder down and waited patiently for everyone else to finish eating too.
"Aren't you hungry after all that training today?" asked Trisse who was watching her from the opposite side of the Ravenclaw table.
"Not really," admitted Cho. "Just don't feel like it."
"All right," replied Trisse. "Just eat one bit. Don't want any of my players to faint in the sky."
Cho nodded and forced down a bit of toast. She immediately wanted to throw it all up. Maybe she was sick. Come to think of it, that crazy nightmare last night seemed to have affected her.
"Have I got a temperature?" she asked Nicole who was seated on her other side.
Nicole lifted a hand up and rested it on Cho's forehead. "Hmm... a little bit, but no major meltdown. Maybe you should say Madam Pompfrey in the Infirmary before class."
Cho shrugged it off. She didn't feel that under the weather. Infact, her day was beginning to look rather happy.
She waited for her dirty dishes to be removed before collecting her books and heading off to her first class of the day, followed by at least a dozen 'Cho-Wannabes'.
* * * * *
Friday was one of Cho's favourite days of the week. Why? Because it meant the end of the week and a Hogsmeade trip the next day. She loved Hogsmeade... no student didn't really. Because it was the end of the week, classes always went quicker. Well they did for her. Instead of concentrating on what they were meant to be learning, they all just passed notes and chatted in hushed whispers about what they were planning on doing on the weekend and what they wearing to Hogsmeade.
It was lucky that Cho was a naturally gifted student, the main reason she was put in Ravenclaw. She still distinctly remembered the sorting hat saying 'Ah.. what a brilliant mind' when she'd first started out in Hogwarts. Because she was so clever, Cho didn't have to pay nearly as much attention to class as people like Nicole... or Ben did for example. She picked up information and stored it in her brain even if she only heard it passing by. Cho was able to pluck it all out at crucial exam time too and remember it as if she'd heard it just a second ago.
"Miss Chang, may I ask you where the Mingollover Tree originates from?" said Professor Sprout.
Cho looked up from the note she'd just recieved from Marty across the room ('Do you think the black top would go with my new jeans?'). "The Mingollover Tree comes from the Sahara Desert Professor. One of the very few plants that survive there as it thrives on extreme weather conditions."
"Well done Miss Chang," Professor Sprout beamed at her. "You should consider becoming a Herbologist!"
"Uhh... I'll think about it," replied Cho, knowing there was not a chance she ever wanted to become somebody who talked to trees all day.
The rest of the classes were quite similar to that of Herbology. More gossip, more chatter and more excited giggling.
Cho thumped up the stairs to the Girls Dormitory ready for a hard earned shower. She grabbed her silk pyjamas and white towel and headed into the bathroom, locking herself in.
She pulled her hair out of it's ponytail and stripped off all of her clothes. As strange as it was to stand there naked, she did and examined every part of her body.
She pulled out her wand and pointed it at herself. "Wetaiahmass Cresendo!" A little green counter appeared in the air and started flipping back and forth until it had determined her exact weight in kilograms. '52' blinked the glowing green numerals.
Cho stared unhappy at herself before running the shower taps. Perhaps if she was just to get down to 50. Yeah, that would be much better!
Author's Note: Are you all getting a bit worried about Cho? I should think so! I myself am beginning to wonder how secure Little Miss Popular really is! I really sincerely apologise for the chapters being so devastatingly short but I have plans... don't you worry... there are plans! I'm not sure how to do the weight in 'pounds' because here in Australia we use 'kilograms' so I don't know how to calculate it. I don't think you use kilos in England so I know my story is inaccurate there. Putting that aside though, if you want to know more about the Quidditch moves I used, I looked in 'Quidditch Through the Ages'. In the last few pages it describes a bunch of famous tactics and some of those were included. I really wanted to write this fic I guess because I wanted to entwine a theme from our world ('muggle world' you might call it) into something in Harry Potter Land. So what do you think? Flame if you want to but remember I'll only laugh at it unless it has some reasonable purpose, content and evidence to back it up. Cheers!