Breathing a bit slower, Ginny rose from her bed and took out from her trunk her leather journal. She had found it in her Transfiguration book when everybody came back to the Burrow after her father fought with Lucius Malfoy in Flourish and Blotts, perhaps a present from the vendor who felt that with a family so poor she needed something for school. Once the dust had been cleaned off, the diary had revealed itself surprisingly virgin. Perfect to write down at the Burrow her dreams and hopes, particularly as the journal was made of a paper that absorbed all the ink! Since her arrival at Hogwarts, she used it more and more to unleash her frustration and her anger. It did not satisfy her as much as a full Bat-Bogey Hex in the face of the Boy-Who-Lived would, but it would have to do. Taking an old quill having formerly belonged to her brother Charlie, Ginny started to write how a miserable day she had been forced to endure.
Her surprise was total, when after the first paragraph, the diary began to answer.
31st October 1992, Hogwarts, Scotland
Passed the middle of October, the weather over the grounds and the castle of Hogwarts took quickly a turn for the worst. Many students fell ill after having assisted to the Potions class in the dungeons where the temperature of the cauldrons was not enough to erase completely the impression of cold. Few people dared staying in the open corridors, as the wind and the temperature made it a very unpleasant experience. Summer was definitely over, and now Autumn promised to be execrable. While the beginning of October had seen light rains, the raindrops were now falling without stopping for days. The water level of the Black Lake was rising so high it was submerging many students' summer spot, and the short travel to go to the greenhouses for the Herbology classes was a torrent of mud which made a hot shower in the Common Room extremely attractive afterwards.
As the Reserve Seeker of Ravenclaw, Alexandra was only supposed to train on the Sundays with the rest of the team, a fact she was really happy of. The last sessions had ended with her drenched to the skin so bad her skin had almost turned blue, her robes splattered in mud and her motivation to become the titular Seeker largely diminished. And the training Captain Roger Davies supervised was nowhere as insane as the one imagined by Oliver Wood. The Quidditch fanatic who captained the Gryffindor team was sometimes training his 'victims' five times a week. At every possible moment of the day and with an energy which was kind of frightening, the seven red-gold players did tiring sequences until they were comatose. But they were Gryffindors after all, and frankly, Alexandra didn't see the point to train so much when it degraded your academic performances.
The Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff teams had put a concerted effort to spy on the Slytherin one, and the Weasley Twins had directed the same effort for Gryffindor House. The result had been a morale-crusher. With their new Nimbus 2001, the Slytherin team was now timed at average speeds of 120 miles per hour. In ideal conditions -which were less and less present with the terrible autumn weather- Flint and his band of pure-blood brutes were seven greenish blurs, playing in another dimension and speed than the rest of the Hogwarts students.
The worst part was that she had been right from the beginning, according to Morag correspondence with her parents. The Nimbus 2001 had indeed been rushed too fast on the market, and they had a lot of defaults in their Braking Charms. They were several other deficient features only a Quidditch specialist like Morag MacDougal or Ronald Weasley could understand, but this was by far the biggest default. The Nimbus 2001 was only an imperfect, boosted version of the Nimbus 2000. It was a world-class broom, one who should only be available to Quidditch professional players. But it was not THE world-class broom everyone waited for the upcoming Quidditch World Cup. Many Quidditch League teams of England and Ireland had kept their Nimbus 2000, and now some Keepers and Beaters, who didn't need an inaccurate speed boost, were reversing to their former broomsticks.
But at Hogwarts, the defaults of the Nimbus 2001 didn't matter. The Quidditch teams of Ravenclaw, Gryffindor and Hufflepuffs had only two Nimbus combined for three teams...and one was belonging to Alexandra, who wasn't in the titular Ravenclaw team. And it was an old second-hand model anyway. The regular Ravenclaw players had four Cleansweep 7, two Comet 250 and one Comet 260. The Hufflepuffs played with two Comet 240, two Comet 250, two Cleansweep 6 and one Comet 260. The Gryffindors had the largest number of different broom models: two Cleansweep 5, one Comet 250, one Cleansweep 6, one Comet 260, one Cleansweep 7 and one Nimbus 2000.
Against the monstrous performances of the Nimbus 2001, only the Nimbus 2000 of Neville Longbottom was of any utility. The other brooms, Comets and Cleansweeps, were simply out-classed, out-performed and a lot of other derogatory commentaries some of the most fervent Quidditch addicts grumbled in the corridors.
"So that's why Malfoy is insufferable at the moment. Okay, more insufferable than usual on a normal day." Alexandra was currently busy telling Morag, as they left the Ravenclaw Common Room to go the Halloween Fest in the Great Hall. "The blonde git thinks there's no way his team will lose. According the unofficial bets the Professors say we aren't supposed to make, a Gryffindor victory is at nine-to-one."
"That high?" Wondered Morag.
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T/N: I have a Patreon! Webnovel will get 3 Chapters Every Day, and advanced chapters will be uploaded on Patreon.
It may not seem worth it now, but maybe in the future. Who knows!
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If you guys wanna check it out.