Written for the Scavenger Hunt in The Golden Snitch (prompt: Quidditch Practise in 'my' school).
Word Count: 507
Brooms vs. Trees
Quidditch Practise in Koldovstoretz was completely awesome, but also different than it was in any other place, Alyona supposed.
It had to be; after all no one else used entire uprooted trees instead of broomsticks. At least not to her knowledge and her knowledge about that was quite extensive.
Even the RQL—the Russian Quidditch League—used broomsticks. Otherwise they would either never be allowed to play with any foreign team or would have to train twice the amount of them. And, uh, no thank you.
Playing on broomsticks had to be so boring, she was lucky her parents had not sent her to Durmstrang like they had debated. Alyona would choose a tree every time without a second of hesitation.
It was a whole lot of fun and opened countless new possibilities for foul play that weren't even included in that British book—Quidditch Through The Ages—that her roommate, Manya, had shown her. She'd gotten it from a British friend of hers she made over some sort of letter exchange program. Manya had sent the Russian version in return and the two of them had gotten in a heated discussion over the usefulness of uprooted trees in Quidditch.
Alyona did not even think about where she stood in that particular discussion.
Uprooted trees were just so much more useful, especially from her perspective, the perspective of a Beater. You could grab a broomstick too, sure, but it was quite hard to hit them with a bludger or something. That was no problem with their trees. Alyona herself currently held the school record for doing this.
The point being, in Alyona's opinion, Koldovstoretz was by far the most exciting place for Quidditch practise.
She had always loved to watch her brothers and sisters play and then—three years, five months, two weeks, and four days ago—she too had gotten the chance.
And boy, she was good at it.
She had no qualms to brag about it to anyone who listened to her long enough—the number got increasingly smaller for some reason—in any given moment.
Just last week—in a real game against their rival team and not in a simple practise—she had managed to distract the opposing team's Seeker long enough for Vladimir—her team's Seeker—to catch the Snitch instead. And they other guy wasn't even hurt, just stirred off-course, but that was enough, as they had been racing for it before.
Alyona was very proud of that. It brought her close to her dream of being the best Beater in the entire RQL.
During this particular practise, she was trying to learn a new move with her fellow beater, Sasha. One of them would aim for the other one's tree where it would bump off and more towards their intended victim.
Pretty basic, but also pretty awesome; just the way she liked her moves to be. It was no use for a Beater to overcomplicate their movements. Their goal wasn't to escape, to follow or to catch; it was to hit.
And Alyona loved that more than anything else in her life.
Please tell me what you think!
~Marvelgeek42