Chapter 21

The chapter was named The Duelling Club.
== Plot ==
The next day, Harry realized that the "forgetfulness" the other day was caused by a proximity based fidelius charm. Once you get there, you forget about the stone completely. Additionally Dumbledore wrote a letter to Lord Slytherin concerning Snape being petrified, no mandrake being available thanks to Lord Greengrass controlling the trading, and thus not being able to be the Slytherin's head of house. He also asked whether he knew about a Slytherin monster at Hogwarts.
Harry decided to suggest as the ghost, the Bloody Baron as a new head of hose, and let the girls write a rewrite of the Chamber of Secrets of Hogwarts a history, concerning the monster and also charm silly girly things on it. Surprisingly Dumbledore in the end went with the idea of the Blood Baron as head of house. The following morning all four girls and John got a lot of recognition for their deeds, because Padma shared the memories to her father and from there it went through everywhere in the wizarding world.
For those accomplishments Dumbledore bestowed each of them some points. Next he announced the Bloody Baron as the new head of house and explained he would teach the potions lessons, because Snape had an accident. During the first lesson with Dumbledore, he started with Alchemy, his major field instead of potions, to show the students a little bit of that difficult magical field. In general Alchemy is permanent and had that magicals found about things, the muggles found out only centuries later.
The day on the duelling tryouts Harry meet again the Weasley twins to see what they did with the money he funded them. They explained him, that they usually did joke-stuff because they didn't know how to sell everything, but with Harry's involvement they could in theory finally go big. Thus they suggested a partnership with him and they agreed to Harry paying 240,00 pound sterling over the next 4 years with around 5,000 hours of work time.
While Harry was talking with the twins, Draco Malfoy tried to persuade Justin Finch-Fletchley to harm him in some way, but Hermione managed to diffuse the situation. Due to that interaction Justin wanted the wizarding behavior lessons as soon as possible, and lead Hermione to the different muggleborns to make them all agree to take the lessons. Hermione wanted to wait at least till Christmas, but to accelerate the program a bit. They first rounded up Kevin Entwhistle, before going to the Ravenclaw Sophie Roper and Gryffindor Dean Thomas.
At the Ravenclaw entrance they weren't let in, despite answering the riddle, because the painting did realize that the students were not Ravenclaws. Sophie turned up after the trio asked a by-going student to call for her, and she came with Terry Boot, Lisa Turpin and Padma Patil in tow. They first suspected that Hermione wanted to force a life debt on the witch, but Hermione explained she only wanted to discuss the Do's and Don'ts of wizarding culture. In the end the pureblood witches agreed it, but would come to some of those lessons, in case anything was explained wrong. Dean agreed without any hitch.
Harry has seen part of that interaction between Hermione and Justin, and went to the fideliused section in the library, where Daphne talked about a spell called Eye of Kilrogg, which could see through objects, but how to summon or use it was purged from the books. Daphne then tried the idea to talk to talking paintings, in case some of them remembered the old Divination magic prior to the purge. But she only found that all paintings in Britain are controlled by the Albion magic, and thus were told by the Wizengamot, who has partial control over it, not to talk about real Divination with anyone.
In the evening the Slytherin duelling tryouts started and Nott tried to rile up Hermione, but failed in doing so. When their duel was up, Hermione dominated it from beginning to end and simply exhausted the young pureblood, before she had to face Harry, who obliterated her. Following Harry had to face the whole duelling team because he claimed beforehand, that he could do and win it.
During the tryouts, the rest of the Slytherin house waited in the Slytherin common room, awaiting the final team. Tracey used that time to complain to Daphne, that they did not use enough effort to talk to Harry, despite him showing a lot of signs being powerful and cunning, like defeating Daphne in the DADA class or being neutral despite everyone ignoring him. Daphne acted her part and simply dismissed the accusations.
Finally the duelling team came, without Harry, but all were hurt, had damaged robes and were in general white in their faces. When Hermione joined her group with Daphne, she explained that 'Potter' defeated the whole Slytherin duelling team by himself, without ever getting hit once. Daphne acted again upon Tracey's accusation when Harry joined the common room. Many of the Slytherin's have been acting unfair towards Harry in the past weeks and each time Harry only smiled back cheerily, and most of them were, due to that, actually scared of him at that moment.
Part of the ostracism was also due to him wearing muggle clothing only, but now he had the finest robes possible on. He conjured a very comfy chair showing off his magical capabilities, simply sat down and pretended to read a book. Daphne then went over and invited him to join the Gray section after some playful small talk. Then all students from all the other groups did the same, before he started to join each one of them to talk about stuff.
At midnight Harry, Daphne and Hermione meet in the room of requirement, all three celebrating a perfectly executed plan with bringing Harry to the spotlight. Daphne there also stated that the portraits were a bust and they discussed, that by using his less superior holly wand, he could easier pretend to be Harry. With his yew wand he could channel way more power and while looking at it, he realized how he could solve the Divination problem.
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Category:The Foundations of Power