Welcome to Wolfshaw Academy!

[Alex Rathwell]

Bugger.

Long practice meant that the slight smile on Alex's face didn't even falter - despite the torrent of swear words going on inside his skull. (He wholeheartedly hoped Mr Beaumont couldn't do Legilimancy.) "Ancient Egypt," he started, and frowned.

Egypt, Egypt. Ancient Egypt had Pharaohs and pyramids and camels and... ah! "The Ancient Egyptians," he said carefully, "Used magic to protect their pyramids and stuff. Like, they had Muggle traps like fake floors that made people fall through, but they also had curses and stuff. The Muggles actually notice this a bit," he added, remembering something he had read once, "And they had heaps of stories saying that they were cursed. Which they were."

Whew! Saved by his (admittedly dubious) memory!

[Mr Ira Beaumont]

Ira listened to Alex's response, which had started out sounding very deliberated but had gotten smoother towards the end. Curses seemed to fascinate students to no end; he'd remembered being very enamoured of stories of cursed objects and places when he had been taught magic. And now, he himself was cursed, after a fashion. Ah, irony.

"Excellent, Mr Rathwell," Ira responded, "Five points to Findel. The Ancient Egyptians are most well-known for their curses, which have lasted through the centuries to even have effect today. But the Ancient Egyptians also excelled at the healing arts and what we would call 'mundane magic', though of course their methods were far more rudimentary than ours today. I'd like you all to turn to page fifteen in your textbooks..."

He began to elaborate on the early Egyptian spells, getting the students to follow along in the textbooks, and he began to outline pertinent points on the blackboard. Maybe this teaching thing wasn't so bad after all...

[Petra Rathwell]

...No...way...

She wouldn't scowl, she wouldn't scowl, she wouldn't scowl...

Petra kept a firmly neutral expression on her face as Alex gained points for something that he didn't even really know and had come up with or vaguely remembered on the spot. What was even more annoying that he was relatively on the right track, and he got more points than her for it, even though she'd used proper language and he used words like "stuff" and "heaps".

Much more irritated than she would admit to anyone, Petra shoved the whole thing out of her mind and concentrated on taking notes.