"Together?" Fred asked as he looked back at George beside him, his tone relaxed as if he were asking if he wanted to join him for breakfast or something like that.
" This is the first step towards being a champion." George said smugly.
The Weasley twins stood at the bottom of the steps, with their eyes fixed on the black hovering door. The pair smiled at each other and stepped upon the black seemingly mirror-like steps -
"I thought it is going to be slippery, unexpectedly I can stand steadily, A good start George." Fred said loudly and braggingly, deliberately for the people nearby to hear.
They walked the seven steps and stood in front of the big black door, slightly stumped for a moment.
"How are we going to get in?"
"Push it open by hand?"
"Oh, that's so un-magical." George said, but Fred had already reached out his hand and pushed hard against the center of the black door, surrounded by a black mist.
"No reaction--" Fred said, but his eyes suddenly widened as his whole body faded like a phantom, and George immediately grabbed him by the shoulders, and both got sucked in together.
The people gathered around held their breath and waited in silence -
"Did they succeed?" Ron asked hesitantly, somewhat unsure.
" They simply just went in, and have to face the unknown test." Hermione said, and she asked thoughtfully, "Are they both together now, or did they got separated?"
"Is there a difference?" Dean asked nervously, "I do wish we can be together, don't you, Seamus?"
"Yeah." Seamus grumbled, and pulled an Irish Quidditch team badge out of his pocket, which he wore on himself, "It's my lucky charm."
Harry glanced at the clover badge, knowing that Seamus and his mother were die-hard Irish fans and that the team's victory in the Quidditch World Cup finals over the summer had delighted them to no end. In fact, he and Ron had bought the same badges, and it can shout out the name of every player on the Irish team, but now that the magic had diminished, and the sound had become feeble, so Harry tucked it into his sock.
Neville's little round face tightened, and he clutched his wand in one hand with a death grip.
After half a minute--
There was movement in the quiet black door, and the twisting black mist boiled up, like a boiling cauldron, gushing out a large amount of black mist. Like a gaping maw, it covered the entire gate. And two shadows were thrown out with a great force, they are Weasley twins, they tumbled, made a crooked, not quite regular, curved arc, and so on, in the moment of landing, where they got held up by an invisible force, removing part of the force from falling.
"Ouch!" George pressed on top of Fred, and the two rolled on the ground twice, covered with dirt and grasses.
The young wizards first froze, then burst into laughter.
"That was wonderful! Thanks for bringing us the entertainment Fred and George, but unfortunately it wasn't exactly the great opening-" a voice suddenly interjected the laughter, so loud that it rumbled through the ears of those around him. The crowd instantly vacated a circle, revealing a male wizard with long locks of lurid hair.
He is Lee Jordan, one of the Weasley twins' lossy friend, who served as a Quidditch commentator after losing the selection process for a certain position on the Gryffindor team in the early years. Lee Jordan has a cheeky personality and likes to talk big. His most recent out-of-the-ordinary comment was publicly stating in the common room that he would use his skin colour as an advantage to sneak inside the Uagadou group and spy on secrets of their Champion for Hogwarts.
"It would be nice to learn a trick or two of novel magic." He said, at the time, with great longing.
...
At this moment, Lee Jordan stepped out with his wand against his throat while casting a "Sonorus" to speak. Then he shouted, "Next, I, Lee Jordan, the Quidditch commentator who will be out of work for a whole year, will give you a wonderful commentary!"
The other students were a little dumbfounded, but the Gryffindor students did give him a few slaps on the back.
"Ahem! Thank you, thank you! You guys are just too enthusiastic ..." he pretended to bow around, "Let's interview the two people concerned first and get some first-hand information, you should want to know a bit of the inside story too, right?" Lee Jordan asked.
The students quieted down, and a few dumb seniors paused for a moment to hear some useful information.
Fred and George got up from the ground, their faces were frozen with horror, then they heard Lee Jordan's words, so they showed a wicked smile as they looked at each other.
"Oops, it's not okay to reveal much--"
"Especially the difficulty!"
"Does it require fighting?" Lee Jordan interjected and asked.
"Uh ..."
"Yes, it was a tough fight."
"But you guys look so clean, the dust on your robes is from when you got thrown out." Lee Jordan gave a sceptical look, but of course, it could have been faked, he and the twins had always worked well together.
"How so," Fred sighed, "that's Professor Hap's magic, from a Master of Memory magic - think about the Professor's stone basin ..."
"Oh, I get it!" Lee Jordan said, "You are fighting in the world of thinking!"
The two held their breath, "You're right!"
"So what did you guys encounter?" Lee Jordan asked with great interest, "I think the others would like to know it as well." The young wizards listened more attentively, secretly wondering what dangers they might have encountered, so they could refer it for themselves.
"We, uh, ran into a snake!"
"A snake?" Lee Jordan asked.
"Yeah, a particularly large snake that could reach up to the ceiling ... George, you tell them!"
"Well, I think ... it had three heads and stripes."
In the crowd, Hermione muttered, "Three heads and with stripes, A Runespoor? But they are generally only six or seven feet long, and their descriptions don't match well."
Other students echoed the same sentiment, always feeling that Fred and George's descriptions were ambiguous and incorrect.
"Maybe they've been altered by Professor Hap in private." Ron speculated, and Harry and Hermione nodded thoughtfully, "It's certainly possible."
On the other hand, Lee Jordan sent Fred and George away cheerfully, they withdrew their magic and lowered their voices to discuss.
"What do you think about the Professor's test?" Fred said.
"Hitting people where it will hurt and seeing how we respond." George said without thinking.
"I think so, or we would not have gone bankrupt seventeen times in a row ..." Fred shivered, "that feeling is so terrible and very real, completely got immersed in it, did not even realize that there is a problem. "
"Wait, you said seventeen times? But I only failed fifteen times!" George's eyes widened.
Fred looked at him hesitantly, "Did you count it wrong?"
"Definitely not, it's like a vivid memory!" George said heartily, "I suspect I'm going to have nightmares tonight."
"So, we're experiencing different visions?"
"I suppose so."
"Good," Fred nodded, "let's exchange the reasons for our respective business failures, so when we head back we can write them down in a notebook! These are lessons."
A seventh-grader walked up the steps, reached out and touched the black door, and was sucked in.
Lee Jordan narrated, "A third person went in! After knowing, he was about to face a big snake with three heads - oh, off-site information tells me it might have been a mutated Runespoor, thank you - he still stepped up! Amazing courage! One more question, is he a Gryffindor senior?"
The Hufflepuff students clamoured, and Lee Jordan said in a panic, "Uh, it doesn't look like ..." He hastily changed the subject, "A third volunteer has gone in, and let's speculate on how long he'll last -Oh, my God!"
A figure was thrown out immediately afterward, after rolling a few times in midair, he landed lightly on the ground. The seventh-grader slumped to the ground with a horrified look on his face, his empty right arm waving wildly abruptly behind him as if he was waving a wand, and chanted, "Protego! Protego!" Even Lee Jordan, who came over, received a punch on the face, and half of his face immediately swelled up.
"Hiss~ Calm down, calm down! My God, come on, a few people come here and pull him away!" Lee Jordan shouted, covering his face.
It took a while before the somewhat hysterical student got taken away by his friends, with a dispirited look on his face. Lee Jordan couldn't able to ask him what he had gone through, but everyone had their own ideas.
"Probably eaten by that big snake." Ernest Macmillan, a student from Hufflepuff, said to his best friend Justin finch-fletchley.
"Don't listen to him," said an aside Susan Bones, "He also said last year that Sirius Black turned himself into an orange and got purchased by Filch ..."
"I just said that casually!" Ernest Macmillan a tall athletic-looking man said "Besides I was inspired by Hannah, who said that Blake could turn into a flowering bush!"
Hannah Abbott furrowed her brow and looked at him with an unkind eye.
"... also, you said the year before that Harry Potter was the heir to the Chamber of Secrets." Susan Bones continued uncaringly.
Ernest yelled under his breath, "I've apologized to Harry! Apologized in public!" Justin tugged at him, his sleeves nearly rolled up, revealing a pair of short, chubby hands.
Ernest muttered disgruntledly, "Isn't it just an aunt who is a Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement ..."
Susan Bones glared at him, but they didn't get into a fight, as the seventh-grade Hufflepuff student returned, with legs as limp as spaghetti. His friend inquired him, "What the hell did you go through?"
"Like, like a Runespoor snake!" He said with chattering teeth, "It was even scarier than what those Weasley twins said! It kept chasing me, followed by other creatures, and I didn't see it clearly, I just ran and threw Impediment Jinx behind me, and ..." he gulped and gasped, "I saw a mouth."
"Whose mouth?"
"No, I don't know, I went straight into its mouth, I just remember a mouth full of fishy yellow teeth, tightly closed, and then, then I came out." He shivered as he finished his encounter.
The young wizard of Hufflepuff grimaced a little, and at that moment Cedric Diggory took a deep breath and said "I'll try!"
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