If they finished cleaning the room but still had time to serve, they'd be put to work turning table scraps and food scrapings into mulch for Hagrid's vegetable beds. This was a chore all three of them absolutely hated because the elves didn't allow for the use of tools in the process. In order to turn the left over bits of food into mulch they had to add wood pulp, hay, ash from the fireplaces, used straw, and buckets of stinky fertilizer none of them wanted to think about to the vat. The mixture had to be blended together manually which involved climbing into the tub minus their shoes and socks and stomping on it the way wine makers used to mash grapes. Nor could they avoid having to put their socks and shoes back on their soiled feet as they did have to walk through the Castle to reach their tower after the detention. And since the elves would do nothing more than hand them a damp cloth to clean-up with, they came out of those detentions covered in filth and reeking of all manner of disgusting things in desperate need of a good, long, cleansing shower. With Filch always waiting for them, there was no way any of the three would give him anything like deliberately soiling the Castle to assign them a new detention over.
What they hadn't realized was Hogwarts House Elves didn't work for the students. They worked for the Castle or for an individual adult in the Castle personally and every adult had at least one elf that answered specifically to them. Also Wizarding history was replete with tales of House Elves being the child care providers for their masters. This meant they could indeed deliver discipline to misbehaving students so long as the adult they answered to specifically gave them permission to do so. But because Hermione was a muggleborn and the Weasely clan had never owned an elf, the triad didn't know those stories were actually true.
And in this case, even the Castle was in favor of the Triad being disciplined harshly for their actions against Harry. Even Harry had a story of a House Elf harming a person to protect Harry personally. The elf that featured in his story personally hated all three of them with a passion. All three of them were almost positive Dobby was behind the disagreeable detentions they were currently serving. They were right. He was.
So no. Detentions with the house-elves wasn't fun. But there wasn't anything they could do about it until people woke up and realized they were the victims here. For all three, these detentions were just one more debt Harry owed them.
What spare time the three did have, they needed to do the massive amounts of homework they were being given. It seemed word had spread amongst the teachers how Harry was subsidizing the educations of the two Weasely children and they were now determined that his money wouldn't be wasted. The children would either buckle down and earn their patronage or they'd be dropped from the roster as failures. Tolerance was at an all time low when it came to their class work, essays, quizzes and exams. They piled the homework on them to make up for their slack in previous years. And considering all they really had was an hour each day, it was understandable they were falling way behind. Even the weekends didn't seem to give more time for homework as most those days were being filled with run-over detention time.
Nor did the Professors care Hermione wasn't one of the scholarship students. She too had taken coin from Mr. Potter. From what Harry had said during the Library Confrontation, she had tried to sabotage him in the classroom by making his completed homework unacceptable for turning in. That made her just as disagreeable a student as the Weasely duo. So the teachers were holding her to the same impossibly high standards as they held the Weasely duo. That they'd held Harry to in previous years. No longer could Hermione turn in work that meandered all over the place while barely touching on the assigned topic and was far longer than the asked for length. No longer did they even bother to read anything she wrote that was over the specified essay length. Each teacher measured out the assigned length of her turned in work and then only graded what she'd written to that point. Every inch beyond that length was a deduction on the assignment. And they were meticulous about it. Even if the cut-off line was right in the center of a line of writing, they would draw a red line through it and not count it as a part of the assignment to be graded. For the first time in her educational time, Hermione Granger was receiving failing grades. She didn't know what to do. How to react. She wasn't used to failing at schoolwork.
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