September 23, 1894 — Quidditch Pitch

Ben had been testing the charms all afternoon, but even now he was nervous there might be a break in one of them somewhere. Why couldn't magic come with color coding?

"This week we start working on elevation," he told the group once they'd assembled. They'd been flying lines and circles and loops around the grounds all month, at various speeds and angles — some, admittedly, far better than others. But aside from the one who also had Quidditch practice in the evenings, none of them had gone any higher than five feet off the soft grass. That changed today.

"First lesson: falling," he announced. "We'll have cushioning charms in place for all our practices, but a high enough fall will still hurt if you don't land right. You want your body relaxed, and you want to land on your back if you can — not your hands or your knees, and certainly not your head or your neck. So this is where we're practicing today — I've marked the edges," he explained. There was a cushioning charm over the ground, and a ceiling to prevent them from going too high. The dirt on the pitch had a outline of the square charmed area in bright pink chalk dust.

"Fly up as high as you like. There's a boundary midway up the stands that will stop you if you get too high. Then fall."

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— Five house points for anyone who helps a classmate work through fear of heights or other anxieties.
— injure at will but any injury will stop the class until addressed; tag me for intervention.

  

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MJ made this <3

Mister Crouch had to be crazy. The thought flickered through Chloe's mind as her eyes widened in both surprise and (understandably) horror. And to land on one's spine? Wouldn't that do serious damage? She felt she had read somewhere that it would.

Chloe almost opened her mouth to object, but surely they wouldn't hire someone who would maim them, right? He had to know what he was doing. She turned to the student next to her as she mounted the broom, "Do you think he will deduct points if we don't fall?" To fall off a broom voluntarily seemed the height of madness.

  

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Margaret very nearly didn't turn up to the next class of broom flying having taken several sessions to even get much further than bobbing along with her feet still touching the ground. Unfortunately she had found it hard to come up with a good enough excuse beyond the fact that her stomach was genuinely in knots about it.

And now he wanted them to fall off, deliberately? Her heart stopped when she heard that and she chewed on her lip. Maggie was three weeks into Hogwarts and she was finally becoming numb to most of the horrors, but this was too much. "I don't care if he does." she said quietly to Chloe Greene pushing her fear into anger at the this teacher. "I can barely fly, nor do I want to."

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