Disclaimer: Harry Potter, all related characters and settings belong to J. K. Rowling.
Chapter Four: Tests
The first test managed to quieten a few of the would-be deatheaters. They looked up at the prisoner next to me with interest. It was my job to explain to them.
"This test had three sections. Each one using a different one of the forbidden curses. If you do not know how to use these or you can not work out which curse to use then you have failed this test and you will most likely never be strong enough to become a deatheater. Firstly, you shall make your individual prisoner feel pain. Marks are given for how strong the pain is and for how contained. Secondly you shall make your prisoner tell you the most embarrassing moment of his or her life. Lastly, you shall kill your prisoner. Points for how quickly it happens." I showed them and then they started, without any of the others being able to look at them to work out what to do, by placing them in a soundproof small room.
They went in alphabetical order. The one who stood out almost immediately was Kevin Tizz. The highest scorer with almost full points.
The last one to go was Ginny. I tried to avoid her eyes when she was getting ready to perform her task but I don't know if she even saw or recognised me. She gave no indication of doing either.
To both my surprise and my despair, Ginny knew exactly how to use the curses. I remember all my scores for the tests and she beat me at this one easily. The second highest in the group so far.
Trying to ignore this I went back outside to the rest of the group. "Now is the time where you can gain extra points after the first two. You will be tested on skills that only some deatheaters posses but that might be useful to you. Firstly, step forward if you can do an invisibility spell on a Human." About ten people stepped forwards and I made them perform the spell on me to check. Only four of them were able to. The rest lost half of their points. The rest got five each. "Who can perform an invisibility spell on themselves?" I asked, this time noone could, or pretended that they could.
The second test was to test how strong the will of the people were. "You must stay in a small area with a dementor for up to five minutes. Anyone who casts a spell shall loose all of their points so far. If you last less than a minute you get no points. One point for one minute or more. Two for two minutes or more and so on until five minutes has passed. The dementor will not touch you or kiss you. When you need let out, bang on the wall three times and the door shall be unlocked. For the untrusting among you, who should be everyone, the dementors will not bang on the wall themselves."
A few people lasted only ten seconds or less in the room. Most were between two and three, Kevin Tizz lasted five and Ginny was at four minutes, fifty seconds. The time had come for the second point catch-up.
"Who here can turn into a different type of animal?" Not many people moved forward. Ginny was one of them. You shall get ten points for each animal that you can turn into. Begin."
I was intrigued to see what animal Ginny could turn into. When I was living at home I had never heard anything about it. It turned out to be a snake. I panicked when someone turned themselves into a large spider and I could see most of them trying to withhold sniggers. They wouldn't be laughing during the next test.
It was to test how good agile they were. They would be placed into another room, with the thing that was their biggest fear, well, it was an apparition of it but they were not aware of that and, if they had been, that part of their memory had been erased before the start of the tests. Just like their fear had been recorded straight from their minds. They had to dodge the apparition for five minutes. Starting with a score of fifty, every time it touched them then they lost five.
Ginny's fear was an apparition of a werewolf. She lost all of her points and quite a few of the ones from before when, for the first two minutes, she froze and the werewolf just kept patting her arm constantly until it had to chase her.
The point catch-up had finished. Now the tests were going to get hard and serious. If they did not pass these ones then there was a slim chance that they would be alive after it all finished. I found myself torn between two emotions. Half of me wanted Ginny to pass the tests, to be able to live. The other half wanted her to fail, not so that she would die but so that she was not capable of becoming what I had turned into. A dark monster.
"This test will see how strong your mental ability is. You have two minutes to complete a correct sequence of ten given shapes. Guessing will most likely mean that you will fail. The room is spell proof and there is another deatheater in there with a mute placed on him before he entered. You will need to take the positions out of his mind to get the right sequence. Five points are given for every shape in the correct place and, if it is all correct then you shall get an additional fifty points." My suspicions about Kevin Tizz were heightened when he got the sequence correct instantly. Ginny got the first nine shapes right but ran out of time on the last one.
There was one more test to go. The hardest. The memory of it still haunted me. You had to sit alone in a completely dark room and a screen would appear with your impersonated loved ones saying how disappointed they were in you for various reasons. It also showed you killing each of them in various ways. You didn't even know what was going to happen in the room before you went into it, so that people did not have time to prepare if they were at the back end of the alphabet, over the ones at the front. They knew the door was unlocked however, so they could leave at any point. A lot of them left the instant they got there when they saw what was on the screen.
It was all fake but it was the one that had been the worst for me. I had stayed through the entire thing to get the extra points that I had needed but it had hampered my performance until the poison incident when I was captured by the ministry of magic.
After about half an hour it was all over. Idiot patrol was over and all of them were put back into the large room where they had started. It was different now though. Before, they were confident. Sure that they were going to survive. Now, however, noone looked sure. They were right to be as well. Most out of every group of newcomers never made it.
Someone handed me the final results.