16 November 1992, Hogwarts
After all, the match against Slytherin was in a few days and Neville wanted to be ready. Neville wanted to show Malfoy and the entire world, that it didn't matter how much money he threw at everything. Neville would still be the superior seeker. Oliver Wood and the rest of the Quidditch team were putting their faith in him, and he will not disappoint them. He had trained day and night for this. What could go wrong?
Harry woke up that morning not looking forward to the rest of the day, even if it was a Sunday. He could see where things were headed, and it wasn't something he wanted to be a part of. It all started with a Quidditch game two days back, and things really started to heat up then.
Tracy had dragged him and his friends to attend the match since it was often the most interesting one of the entire school year. The Gryffindor Slytherin rivalry was really heated when it came to Quidditch, and it showed.
Longbottom and Malfoy had spent almost two months doing nothing but training for the match, granting everyone a little break and a very calm school year. Harry knew that after the game things would go back to the way they used to be, but he didn't expect things to explode like this.
Yeah, the game was mostly dominated by the Slytherins because of the brooms Lucius Malfoy donated to the Slytherin Quidditch team, but then, of course, a bulger started targeting Longbottom for some reason and ended up almost killing the boy by knocking him off his broom and hit him in the head after he had fallen. The young celebrity found himself with severely broken ribs, a cracked skull, and legs that were pretty much crushed. He ended up in the infirmary and wasn't seen since. Oliver Wood, of course, had complained that the ball was obviously cursed, and Madam Hooch agreed with him.
To be completely honest, if Harry didn't know that a House Elf had done it, he would have been impressed. Quidditch equipment is notoriously hard to enchant or curse because of the countless enchantments that are filling it to the brink. If a student had done it, they would have needed to break into Madam Hooch's office without being noticed by the wards, add a curse that is so woven into the enchantments of the bulger that it would be unnoticed by the flying instructor during her the standard pre-match detection. If a NEWT student could pull it off, Harry would have raised his eyebrows in surprise.
Now, House Elves work on a separate magical system. The Potter scion didn't really understand how it worked, only that it had different properties and rules. Honestly, he didn't have the time to research properly, even if he was planning on getting a house elf, the moment, he has an actual place. They were dead useful, after all. But since they were a complete unknown in terms of magical potential, it would be possible for a house elf to curse the bulger.
Anyway, the match was cancelled, since the Bulger was obviously cursed, but there was no proof that any of the Slytherins had done it. But worst of all it was proclaimed to be a tie with no points for either house. Considering that the entire Quidditch tournament is calculated using the sum of points that each house has after all their matches, both Gryffindor and Slytherin were penalized, and weren't happy with the results.
Harry had heard murmuring the previous day of Slytherins saying that the Gryffindors did this so that they wouldn't lose as badly because of their new brooms, the Gryffindors said that it was obviously done to take out their 'star' seeker. Tensions were brewing, and no one was happy.
And if that wasn't enough, Dean Thomas was attacked and petrified just the night after the game. So, yeah, things were obviously getting serious, and it was threatening to turn Hogwarts into an all-out war at any moment. All it would need is a spark to light things up.
To be perfectly frank, Harry was not looking forward to it, especially since he was in the middle of exploring the gift that his magical crest had given him. The repository of spells remained the same, and obviously limited, but the actual gift just activated at random intervals.
When the spirit of Ignotus Peverell mentioned that he didn't try most magical fields, he didn't think that he mentioned divination of all things. It wasn't really as much of a sham as he thought it was going to be, but it definitely was relatively unreliable. Sure, there were fields like scrying that give out tangible results, but seeing the future was so fickle that it rarely ever meant anything.
All Harry had gotten were some weird dreams about a giant snake eating a black lion the night before Dean Thomas was attacked, and a sudden vision of the boy frozen in his place the moment it did happen. It could be helpful in the long run, but so far, all the books he had read about seeing the future seemed to be nonsense. But at least, Harry had a halfway dependable way to know when an attack happens exactly, which is something he could leverage.
But outside the unreliable gift that his ancestor had given him, Harry was also blessed with a single design, a single theory, so to speak. One that would allow him to craft a weapon that could possibly kill a Basilisk. But the materials needed for something like this were so unattainable, that he had only one contact that could help him get them, Arcturus Black.
Harry hated that he had to rely on a virtual stranger for something like this, but he had no choice. Well, there was the Room of Hidden Things, but the chances of that working were minimal.
The Potter scion was already at a disadvantage since he has lost the entrance to the chamber. From what he could understand, the entire place was in some kind of pocket dimension that was activated using a password in Parseltongue. It was why it was so easily moved away by Riddle, and Harry had checked but there seemed to be absolutely nothing out of the ordinary underneath Moaning Myrtle's sink.
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