Letters

To Harry Potter,

Hi, it was nice getting your letter, I had already thought that you had forgotten about it.

I going to ask you whether you were joking about the troll, but mum got a letter from Hogwarts about it.

I know of course who Neville is and Ron wrote a letter to mum in which he noted that he had become friends with him. Can you believe that you are actually in the same class as the boy-boy-who-lived? Isn´t that amazing. I really hope to meet him in person.
I think Ron also mentioned this Hermione, but only in like one sentence and I don´t think he likes her very much. Could you tell me something about her?

You must´ve not had the greatest of Halloweens if fighting a troll still makes the top spot. Either that or you are an adrenaline junkie I guess, hehe. Sorry that came on meaner than it was meant.

How are your classmates in general? Ron is going on about how awful all the Slytherins are.

I´m sorry about your parents, I didn´t know. Guess that makes being in the same house with Neville even more exciting for you.

Hedwig is beautiful by the way. I wish I could get an owl, but don´t you dare pulling one of those these things are free on me or my mother again. I have asked Mr. Blotts and there have not been any free books at the store for almost five months.

Thanks for the books again anyway, they have been very interesting, but there is lots of stuff in there that I don´t really get yet.
How does this quick casting and this spell-changing-Ritual work exactly?

Sincerely
Ginny

To Ginny Weasley,

Yeah, I´m really sorry it took so long until the first letter. Since Hedwig seems to be happy to have something to do I´ll make it up to you by sending you the next letters fast. 😊

Hermione Granger is a friend of mine, we met on the train and she has saved me from failing my homework at least a dozen times already. She is a little (reads: very) socially awkward and a bit of an overachiever. She managed to knock herself out with a spell she was able to quick cast already when we had just started learning the spell.

I guess I skip ahead and answer this right away while I´m on the topic already.
As you probably know you are only able to cast a certain number of spells quickly. At the start of the year you get a book from a mysterious room in which your quick-cast list is. You can quick cast every spell you have on that list by saying it´s basic formula and using the correct wand movement. It is a little more tiering than slow casting the spell, but it takes like no time if you compare it with slow casting. To get a spell on that list you have to be able to slow cast it without much problem. Then you do the spell-changing-Ritual which is basically like casting the spell even slower and with more care and without it´s effect, instead of casting the spell this puts the spell on your quick-cast-list. It´s all very tiering and the teachers had to explain it at least half a dozen times until anyone in class who was not named Hermione understood what they meant to tell us. Now that I think about it, shouldn´t you already know this from your parents or brothers?

As for Neville, he is a nice guy, but I´m not sure what all the hype is about, he is a bit goofy and very clumsy, but I overall like him. The only problem is that while he did off the moron who killed my parents I can´t help but think how much better my life would be had he done so a day earlier, which makes it kind of awkward to talk to him. Also, I know that he kind of lost his parents too at that day, so it would feel very untactful talking about it with him.

Let´s see, what´s next. Yeah, my Halloweens are for some reason always the worst day of the year for me, and not only because it´s the day my parents died. By now I think it might actually be a curse or something like that.

On the topic of classmates, I´m overall pretty happy to say that most of them are very friendly. There are a few mean people in Hogwarts, but no one who is worth of any real notice so far. The reason your brother thinks that all Slytherins are evil is that he hates Draco Malfoy. While Malfoy is an idiot it is not like he is really evil or anything like that. Some of the Slytherins are actually not that bad, and while I wouldn´t call any of them a friend yet I wouldn´t rule out the possibility just yet. Blaise Zabini helped me in our second Flying lesson, but since we only share one other class and I won´t partner up with anyone but Hermione in potions anytime soon we haven´t talked in like a month or so.

Speaking of flying, your brother has for some reason made it into the Quidditch team and has been lording it over us for the last two hours since it has been announced that professor McGonagall got a permission for him to play even though he is still in first year.

I don´t get what all the fuss is about with Quidditch. The first game is next week so I will see it for myself I guess. Then again Seamus Finigan told me something about Hogwarts still playing by the old rules of Quidditch which for some reason means that a game could be over in minutes or take hours. I´ll have to ask Hermione what that is all about at some point. While she hates flying with a passion she is sure to know the rules of Quidditch, considering how many Quidditch books she read in her panic before the first Flying lesson. :P

Anyway I´ll be off, or I´ll be too late for dinner.

Looking forward to your next letter.

Harry

To Harry,

Hermione sounds nice. I´d guess my brother is as always jealous or something and that is the reason he dislikes her. Maybe being on the team will finally cure him from that. He would always get upset if I got anything he didn´t, the book for example put him into a right fit for a day or two, until he realized that he would go to Hogwarts in less than a month.

Thanks for explaining the quick cast thing. While I´m not sure I get how this stuff works yet I at least understand the concept now. I think my parents tried to explain it to me a few times when I was younger, but since I was like six or seven at that time they decided that it would be easier to just answer with "you´ll learn that at Hogwarts" ever since. Also, it´s not like I asked them often. I kind of just excepted that they sometimes could do stuff with magic and at other times wouldn´t bother to use a spell.

I can explain the differences between old school quidditch and the "new" rules for you.
In the past a game would end when the seeker caught the snitch, but while doing so is still a pretty hard thing to do, the brooms got faster and increasing the speed of the snitch along side them would have become stupid at some point. Instead they made it, so the snitch would be a lot better at changing directions then the brooms, so that it would still be a hard thing to do and also decided that a game would have new rules on how to end. There now is a set time limit of two hours for a game and a snitch only gives you fifty points. The game also ends when one team catches the snitch for the third time or if one team reaches five hundred points or more. The only other significant change is that the bulgers now have a spell on them so that they don´t hurt people any longer, but instead just knock them aside, slow them and make them lose the Quaffle if they had it.
This changed the game so that seekers would sometimes decide to stop searching for the snitch and instead help their team to score for a while and made it so that their brooms went from being purely for speed to some degree of manoeuvrability. It also decreased the number of deaths to almost zero.

I don´t really know why Hogwarts still holds onto the old rules, but since school children can usually not afford top of the line brooms it´s kind of ok I guess.

I hope you will come around to the game, because it is a lot of fun, both to play it and to watch it.

Was there anything else interesting so far?

Ginny

To Ginny,

You were right, Quidditch is amazing, even if we lost. Ron is apparently really good at catching the snitch, but not to great in searching for it.

We sat with Hagrid the groundkeeper and he had some binoculars with him, and I have to say that those make the game so much more interesting to watch.

I could imagine that the game would be way more fun with the new rules, because like it is it kind of feels like the seeker is the either the only important player (along with the beaters I guess) or he doesn´t matter at all.

Hagrid invited us (Neville, Ron, Hermione and me) to tea after the game and it was delicious.
Though I must advise against his rock cakes.

As for your last question, the headmaster told the school about a forbidden corridor of certain death and in it is according to Hermione a Cerberus that guards a trap door. Ron is hellbent on finding out what that is all about and is drawing Neville into this craziness. I thought not much of it, but for some reason Hagrid let slip that what the Cerberus is protecting is only important to the headmaster and some Nicolas Flamel chap. I really wish he had not said that, because now Hermione has a mystery to solve and is helping Ron with this idiocy, and with her help, Ron and Neville might have a real chance to get to the bottom of this.

While Ron and Hermione will likely never be close they are at least on friendly terms since Halloween. And since she is helping him with his stupid death wish he has been pretty nice to her lately. I wonder how long that will hold, but I will enjoy the peace while it lasts.

Personally I´m more interested in the room in the restricted room in the library, but I have no idea how to get in there. Fred and George said something about never having managed to get in there since that first time in first year, but didn´t say much beyond that. Did they ever mention anything about it at home?

Anyway, Ron told me that you will be gone to Romania or something over the break. Of course, his story was more about how unfair it was that you would be able to visit Charlie which is something he had always dreamed about.

Anyway, I guess that means that this will be my last letter to you this year. I really enjoy writing these more than I had thought. I hope you will have a merry Christmas, even if you may not get a white Christmas. They way it has been snowing here, we will most definitely get one.

Harry

To Harry,

Thanks, I wish you a merry Christmas as well.

I really hope my brother doesn´t get himself killed in his first year, or mum and dad may decide not to let me go next year.

Fred and George never mentioned the room as far as I know, but if the room is open once a year, isn´t that a way to get in?

I hope you´ll have a nice break

Ginny

AN

Sorry this is so late. Hope you had some fun. Please review.