Mia Potter was the other Potter. Looking almost identical to her mother, she was a force to be reckoned with. But there was only one person who could reckon with her, and his name was Draco Malfoy.
In which the youngest Potter twin finds herself fa...
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"Your attention, please!"
When the feast had been demolished, and the last crumbs had faded off the plates, leaving them sparkling clean, Albus Dumbledore got to his feet again. The buzz of chatter filling the Hall ceased almost at once so that only the howling wind and pounding rain could be heard.
Mia looked around the Hall. The Great Hall seemed somehow much more crowded than usual, even though there were barely twenty additional students there; perhaps it was because their differently coloured uniforms stood out so clearly against the black of the Hogwarts' robes. Now that they had removed their furs, the Durmstrang students were revealed to be wearing robes of a deep blood-red.
"I would like to say a few words. Eternal glory, that is what awaits the student who wins the tri-wizard tournament. But to do this that student must survive three tasks. Three extremely dangerous tasks."
"Wicked," Mia and Fred said together as they grinned.
"For this reason, the ministry has seen fit to impose a new rule," he went on, "to explain all this we have the head of the department of international magic cooperation Mister Bartemius Crouch."
But at that moment, there was a deafening rumble of thunder and the doors of the Great Hall banged open.
A man stood in the doorway, leaning upon a long staff, shrouded in a black traveling cloak. Every head in the Great Hall swivelled toward the stranger, suddenly brightly illuminated by a fork of lightning that flashed across the ceiling. He lowered his hood, shook out a long mane of grizzled, dark grey hair, then began to walk up toward the teachers' table.
A dull clunk echoed through the Hall on his every other step. He reached the end of the top table, turned right, and limped heavily toward Dumbledore. Another flash of lightning crossed the ceiling. Hermione gasped.
The lightning had thrown the man's face into sharp relief, and it was a face unlike any Mia had ever seen. It looked as though it had been carved out of weathered wood by someone who had only the vaguest idea of what human faces are supposed to look like, and was none too skilled with a chisel. Every inch of skin seemed to be scarred. The mouth looked like a diagonal gash, and a large chunk of the nose was missing. But it was the man's eyes that made him frightening.
One of them was small, dark, and beady. The other was large, round as a coin, and a vivid, electric blue. The blue eye was moving ceaselessly, without blinking, and was rolling up, down, and from side to side, quite independently of the normal eye, and then it rolled right over, pointing into the back of the man's head, so that all they could see was whiteness.
The stranger reached Dumbledore. He stretched out a hand that was as badly scarred as his face, and Dumbledore shook it, muttering words Mia couldn't hear. He seemed to be making some inquiry of the stranger, who shook his head unsmilingly and replied in an undertone. Dumbledore nodded and gestured the man to the empty seat on his right-hand side.
The stranger sat down, shook his mane of dark grey hair out of his face, pulled a plate of sausages toward him, raised it to what was left of his nose, and sniffed it. He then took a small knife out of his pocket, speared a sausage on the end of it, and began to eat. His normal eye was fixed upon the sausages, but the blue eye was still darting restlessly around in its socket, taking in the Hall and the students.
"May I introduce our new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher?" said Dumbledore brightly into the silence. "Professor Moody."
It was usual for new staff members to be greeted with applause, but none of the staff or students chapped except Dumbledore and Hagrid, who both put their hands together and applauded, but the sound echoed dismally into the silence, and they stopped fairly quickly. Everyone else seemed too transfixed by Moody's bizarre appearance to do more than stare at him.
"Bloody hell, it's Mad-Eye Moody," Ron said as the others turned to him.
"Alastor Moody?" Hermione asked, "the aura?"
"The what?" the twins asked confused.
"Dark wizard catcher," Ron explained, "half the cells in Azkaban are full thanks to him. He's supposed to be mad as a hatter though these days."
Ignoring the jug of pumpkin juice in front of him, he reached again into his traveling cloak, pulled out a hip flask, and took a long draught from it. As he lifted his arm to drink, his cloak was pulled a few inches from the ground, and Mia saw, below the table, several inches of carved wooden leg, ending in a clawed foot.
"What's that he's drinking do you suppose?" Seamus asked from next to Harry.
"I don't know but I don't think it's Pumpkin Juice," Harry said as Mia looked at him and then at back at the man.
"After much deliberation," Mr. Crouch said standing up as everyone looked at him, "the ministry has concluded that for their own safety no student under the age of seventeen shall be allowed to put forth their name for the tri-wizard tournament."
Mia's blue eyes looked over at Fred's and George's mutinous faces.
"This decision is final."
"That's rubbish!" Fred and George yelled as the rest of the hall became unsettle and began booing as Mia laughed. "You don't know what you're doing!"
Dumbledore put his hand up and the entire hall fell silent.
Mr. Crouch has worked tirelessly over the last few months on the arrangements for the Triwizard Tournament," Dumbledore continued, "and they will be joining myself, Professor Karkaroff, and Madame Maxime on the panel that will judge the champions' efforts."
At the mention of the word "champions," the attentiveness of the listening students seemed to sharpen. Perhaps Dumbledore had noticed their sudden stillness, for he smiled as he said, "The casket, then, if you please, Mr. Filch."
The Hall was filled with a silence so absolute that nobody seemed to be breathing.
Filch, who had been lurking unnoticed in a far corner of the Hall, now approached Dumbledore carrying a great wooden chest encrusted with jewels. It looked extremely old. A murmur of excited interest rose from the watching students; Dennis Creevey actually stood on his chair to see it properly, but, being so tiny, his head hardly rose above anyone else's.
"The Goblet of Fire!"
Dumbledore now took out his wand and tapped three times upon the top of the casket. The lid creaked slowly open. Dumbledore reached inside it and pulled out a large, roughly hewn wooden cup. It would have been entirely unremarkable had it not been full to the brim with dancing blue-white flames. Dumbledore closed the casket and placed the goblet carefully on top of it, where it would be clearly visible to everyone in the Hall.
"Anyone wishing to submit themselves for the tournament merely write their name upon a piece of parchment and throw it in the flame before this hour on Thursday night. Do not do so lightly, if chosen there's no turning back. As from this moment the tri-wizard tournament has begun."
