After Professor Snape finished his small speech, he left the common room in the same manner as the way he entered. This left no room for questions or disagreements causing the first years to break into muttering before Emily spoke, "This is how this house has worked since the start of the school. We expect you to hold the house values while maintaining the dignity and pride of Slytherin, meaning that any issue you may have with your housemates you sort it here and not in front of the rest of the school."
Damian who had opened a side door which was not obvious to the casual eye motioned for us to follow him, "This is the duelling room the professor mentioned. You of course will be allowed to use it when you have started classes since I am sure it would be humiliating to be easily beaten." Most were nodding along with him but a few who had disputes before arriving or had something to prove looked like they had sucked on a lemon.
The rest of the introduction was boring as it just went over various expectations and names of important senior students. After everything was done we were dismissed to our standard single bedrooms for the remainder of the evening. I unshrunk my trunk from my pocket and started to unpack after letting Azure out of her cage. I had made my room organised how I liked it with my books sorted alphabetically and everything that didn't need to be in my bag for the next day's lessons being placed on the other shelves.
I settled into my bed and snuffed out the candles, I then started to think about all the events that would be happening through the year. First, we would have the first DADA lesson with Quirrell which would prove to be useless. Then there would be the troll incident at Halloween and the Mirror at Christmas. Let us also not forget that Quirrell will give Hagrid the dragon egg around February. So this year will have some interesting events to break up the monotony of the school year.
I woke the next morning, dressed and made my way to breakfast to meet up with Daphne but much to my surprise Grace had also come since she and Daphne had developed a slight friendship. It was shortly after we sat at the table that Emily came and handed the three of us our class schedule, Daphne and Grace looked over it while I collected the breakfast I was going to have.
"Anything fun for our first day?" I casually asked the duo after eating a bite of my food. "We have Transfiguration first followed by DADA so it should be a fun morning. We then have History of Magic and Magic Theory in the afternoon which sounds like a drag." Grace replied before getting herself some orange juice to go with the jam toast she got. Meanwhile, Daphne pondered for a while before saying, "The only lessons you may be interested in fall on a Friday when we have duelling etiquette and an Alchemy introduction."
It was just as Daphne said the rest of the week looked quite boring as I took a cursory glance over the timetable. I had already studied the standard classes with Arcturus so I would most likely be able to do the work with little to no problems. "It looks like we have enough time to eat breakfast before we go looking for our transfiguration class. Do you know which teacher we have?" I asked since I had found that there were two groups one taught by McGonagall and the other had a different class. Unlike most classes where one would teach the younger years and one taught after OWL's Transfiguration was different since McGonagall loved to see the progress of people learning her subject.
It turned out no one knew who was teaching our class and we didn't get a chance to find out as we had to leave to find the class before the senior years even came to breakfast. It wasn't too difficult to find the room and it had a large sign on the door, it looked like any other classroom but what set it apart was a golden-coloured dog sitting by the side of the teacher's desk.
I took one look at the dog before finding a seat, watching as the rest of the class fawned over the dog by giving it belly and head rubs. It wasn't until the bell rang that people started to wonder where the teacher was, "where is our teacher?" Daphne asked knowing that McGonagall would never be late for her class. "He is already here," I say with a smile while indicating towards the dog, "He has been receiving head pats and belly rubs while in his animagus form." When the rest of the class heard my words they turned towards where the dog was only to see a tall man with a mane of blonde hair and a trimmed goatee barking with laughter.
The man finally stopped laughing after a few minutes and introduced himself, "My name is Sabastian and I will be teaching you Transfiguration for your time here. I am a bit of a trickster so you can count that your time in my class will be a bit less formal and a lot less boring." He then went about explaining the main principles behind transfiguration before starting the wand work with the classic match-to-needle exercise.
I was not paying much attention to what was happening in the class until Sabastion placed a match in front of me, "Thank you." I muttered. It was not difficult for me to complete this exercise since Daphne and I have been taught this due to our upbringing so we quickly and quietly transformed the match and went back to our personal studies. From across the room, I heard Sabastian's voice ring out "Nice attempt there Miss Granger you have managed to turn your match silver in colour but it is still wooden and dull, 5 points for Gryffindor and try to visualise exactly what you want the match to look like."