Chapter Five
Introductions
Including Courtney, there were thirty-six new students in Hufflepuff. Twenty girls and sixteen boys.
Genale and Lucas led them past the kitchen corridor until they arrived at a dead end. The area was mostly stone, with wooden planks attached to them and a stack of barrels on the ends. Some ropes hung from the planks for reasons Courtney could not fathom. Lucas tapped one of the barrels five times. Tap-tap taptap-tap. The lid of the barrel swung open.
"This is the entrance to the Hufflepuff common room," Lucas said. "Tap the barrel with the same beat you would use to say 'Helga Hufflepuff'. One tap for each syllable."
"Be sure not to tap the wrong barrel though," Genale added. "If you're not sure, ask for help. Do not guess if you don't know."
They crawled through the opening, which turned out to be far larger than it had appeared from the outside.
The Hufflepuff common room was a large, round room. Windows poured in sunlight even though Courtney was positive they were nowhere near the outside and that the sun had set by now. The walls were made from light brown and yellow brick that gave it a warm, earthy feel, and they had wooden shelves just below the windows. Overall, the best word to describe it was… inviting.
"Even though tomorrow's Saturday, there are still classes, since it's the first week, but it's basically just a couple days for meeting the teachers," Genale said. "The schedules for Hufflepuffs is on the wall there. Tomorrow, you have Defense Against the Dark Arts and Charms. And be sure to get a really good night's sleep after those, because the next day you have Astronomy at midnight."
"On the plus side," Lucas noted. "After this week, there won't be classes on the weekends."
"Welcome, first-year Hufflepuffs to your first class at Hogwarts," Professor Lochram said. "You should all have The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection by Quentin Trimble. This will be the class where that textbook is used."
When Lochram spoke, he was very loud and dramatic. Courtney had thought that the same tone yesterday was just for the start of the year. Now she was starting to think that this was how Professor Lochram always talked.
"Now," Lochram clapped his hands together. "Hogwarts is a very hands-on school. We focus very little on theory and a lot on practice. Therefore, the textbook will mostly be a guide, though you would do well to at least skim each chapter before we cover its material.
"So on that note, let's get down to introductions. The Dark Arts are the most feared form of magics. The spells and rituals that require permanent sacrifices. The curses that take extremely powerful healing spells to cure. The Dark creatures that haunt the corners of our minds. There is no way to stand any chance against Dark magic… except for this course.
"That is the purpose of Defense Against the Dark Arts. No matter how much time passes, how many Dark wizards fall, or how many noble, Light wizards triumph, Dark magic will always exist. And when that Dark magic comes, we will always need to learn to defend against it. With the right knowledge, nothing Dark will be able to stop you."
Courtney had to admit, even though his overly dramatic tone had seemed pretty unprofessional at first, it definitely did wonders in keeping the students' attention.
"I would like all of you to look around. For the next seven years, these will be the people you learn with. Your fellow Hufflepuffs. In future classes, you will occasionally have class alongside the Ravenclaws, the Slytherins, or the Gryffindors, but no matter what, your fellow students that you see around you will be in the same core classes with you for the rest of your education at Hogwarts. Know them well, for, in my class at least, you will be working together often."
So this was an introductions class. For the remainder of the class, the students talked with one another, as well as with Professor Lochram. By the end of class, Courtney had a decent knowledge of all thirty-five of her classmates. Tara. Polaris. Marco. Willow. Felipe. Carter. Lilah. Jonas. Nikki. Sadie. Koby. Rachel. Desmond. Flo. Mason. Henry. Elizabeth. Sun. Oliver. Elijah. Chloe. Amber. Imogen. Roy. Duane. Dekka. Beatrice. Nathaniel. Ryssa. Javier. Peter. Yasmine. Glenn. Justine. And Wendy.
When the class ended, the thirty-six students left the Defense Against the Dark Arts class and travelled toward the Charms room.
Author's Note: Many details appear in this story that are not in the Harry Potter books, or are even contradictory. Information such as the design of the Hufflepuff common room come from sources like Pottermore or the Harry Potter Wiki. Even though the books say there are around ten students per House per year, Rowling has admitted in interviews that she is dreadful at mathematics and always imagined there to be something like a thousand students in Hogwarts; the ten per House per year figure gives closer to 280. Here, the number of students corresponds more to the 1000 estimate than to the 280 estimate. If details used in early chapters are discovered to be inaccurate, as was once the case with Courtney's wand (originally made from blackthorn), these details will be changed to the best of my ability.
The end of the chapter, which listed the names of Courtney's peers, was made with the demographics of Great Britain in mind; that is to say, while I considered them to have a "standard" English name roughly 60% of the time, due to living in Britain, a good number of the students have names that originate from other nations, based on Britain's diversity (about 87% white, 3% African/Caribbean, 2.3% Indian, 1.9% Pakistani, 2% mixed race, and 3.7% identified as "other". Unfortunately, my sources are from 2011. For future reference, if any of you would happen to have more recent sources for racial demographics by region, this would be lovely). In addition, I made sure to have a healthy mix of modern names with the more classical names typically associated with purebloods; that said, I still felt that many pureblood students would still be more likely to end up in Slytherin, so the majority of these Hufflepuff students are Muggle-born or half-blood. And yes, that whole paragraph was a transparent means of letting you know who the other Hufflepuffs are.