章節 356: Fight Club
For a moment, Oleandra thought her speech had completely flopped, but then Fred and George cried out, "hear, hear!" and applause filled the room. Reactions to her speech seemed to be positive all around; except for a few people: Cho Chang's friend looked thoroughly outraged; Theo Nott looked rather bored— he kept looking at his watch; and Zacharias Smith looked offended, for some reason.
Oleandra scanned the room for more familiar faces; Ginny looked torn, but Tracey… she was looking at her strangely, as if she were seeing Oleandra for what she truly was for the first time.
"Well, go on, Harry!" Hermione whispered in his ear, giving him a small push in the back. "Make your case!"
Harry reluctantly stepped forward, since Hermione was pushing him in the back, and cleared his throat.
"Er… I'm Harry Potter," he said as he tried to remember the speech he'd just come up with. "I was also a Triwizard champion, and, er… I learned a lot of Defence spells practising for the third task with Ron and Hermione." He took a deep breath, before continuing. "You know, I've had a lot of help, and I'm lucky to still be alive. But even if you won't have me, I'll still try my best to teach you what I know."
Everyone clapped; some more enthusiastically than others.
"Well, there you have it," said Hermione. "Raise your hand if—"
"Wait, this was all your idea," Oleandra interrupted her. "Aren't you at least going to try?"
"Me? A leader?" Hermione said quickly, blushing furiously. "I couldn't possibly! Besides, I'm no duellist. I'll leave that sort of thing to the two of you, if you don't mind…"
Oleandra wasn't convinced that Hermione wouldn't make a good leader, but she didn't insist, so the time to vote finally came and went.
Unsurprisingly, since Oleandra wouldn't teach them runic magic and since she couldn't teach them any defensive magic, Harry won with a landslide. But losing didn't matter to Oleandra, because her true goal had never been to lead a study club…
While Oleandra wasn't 100% on the Order of the Round Table's side, she did agree with many of their philosophies, so she had no qualms doing a little extra work for them. Part of her job as a member of the Order was to find and recruit prospective members whose values matched the Order's.
Oleandra's speech had allowed her to identify a few promising candidates, judging by their positive reactions: Ron, Hermione, Dean Thomas and the two Creevey brothers.
It wasn't much, but it was a start…
"Now, we just need a name for our club," Hermione said brightly. "It ought to reflect our activities and foster a feeling of team spirit and unity, don't you think?"
"Can we be the Anti-Umbridge League?" said Angelina hopefully.
"I like this one," Oleandra remarked.
"Ooh, I know!" squealed Dennis Creevey. "We should call ourselves the Justice League!"
That name was already taken, so they had to pick another one.
"How about the Ministry of Magic are Morons Group?" Fred suggested.
"We could abbreviate it to the Morons Group!" George added.
"Why not abbreviate it to the Ministry of Magic, while you're at it," said Alicia Spinnet in annoyance.
The discussion was getting off topic, so Oleandra chimed in with her idea.
"How about we call ourselves the Remedial Class?" she proposed. "Since Umbridge won't teach us Defence, we're behind on our studies. RC for short?"
"Out of the question," Hermione said hotly. "I agree that the name should be low-key to avoid attracting unnecessary attention, but it's unrealistic for some of us to be attending remedial classes!"
"In that case, how about the Defence Association?" said Cho brightly. "DA for short, nobody will know what we're talking about."
In that case, why not just abbreviate to RC and completely skip saying remedial?
"That's a boring name," said Tracey dismissively. "Theo, do you have any ideas?"
It was quickly becoming apparent to Theo that unless he came up with a satisfactory name, they would be doing as much magic in this club as they did in Umbridge's class; that is, none…
"The Alchemy Research Club," he said succinctly. "ARC."
"What does Alchemy have to do with Defence Against the Dark Arts?" Cho shot back. "That's an even stupider name. DA is short and to the point."
"DA could also stand for Dark Arts," Ginny pointed out. "Which is the opposite of what we're trying to do here, isn't it?"
"Oh yeah…"
"I hadn't thought about that…"
It turned out that finding a good name for a group was difficult, so to avoid wasting too much time, Harry ended up going with Oleandra's suggestion as a provisional measure: RC (Temp), which was short for Remedial Class (Temporary Name).
To the Muggleborn in the room, RC (Temp) sort of sounded like a name for remote-controlled thermostats club, but since way too much time had already been wasted on voting for leaders and on choosing names, their concerns were waved away.
Hermione pinned the piece of parchment with all of their signatures on it to the wall and wrote across the top in large letters, sighing all the while:
RC (Temp)
And so, the name was made more or less official, and the first RC (Temp) meeting started in earnest.
"Right," said Harry, racking his brains for spells to teach, "shall we get practising then? I was thinking we should start with Expelliarmus; the Disarming Charm. I know it's pretty basic, but I've found it really useful…"
Oleandra was incredibly doubtful of his first choice of spell; she was actually stronger in combat without a wand in hand, but then again, most people couldn't do magic without one. But surely, an enemy of Voldemort's calibre could manage wandless magic, rendering disarming moot… Not to mention, Expelliarmus was quite a mouthful— it took quite a while to pronounce this spell.
Since she didn't want to undermine Harry's authority on his very first lesson, Oleandra kept quiet. Others, however, had no such scruples.
"Oh, puhlease," said Zacharias Smith, making a great show of his disapproval by crossing his arms and rolling his eyes obnoxiously. (Goodness, was that what it looked like when she did it?) "I don't think Expelliarmus is exactly going to help us against You-Know-Who, do you?"
"I've used it against him," said Harry quietly. "It saved my life in June."
That shut him up pretty quickly, though Oleandra suspected that Smith would have protested some more, had he known that Harry's and Voldemort's wands were brothers, and had he known what occurred if such wands were forced to fight each other…
Any beam-emitting spell would have saved Harry's life, really!
每周推薦票狀態
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