G. Lippert - JAMES POTTER AND THE VAULT OF DESTINIES

"Sounds pretty interesting to me," Jazmine admitted.

Norrick rolled his eyes. "That's 'cause you're a girl."

"Thanks for noticing," Jazmine replied sourly. "At least when Ralph says it, it sounds like a good thing." She smiled at Ralph across the room and his cheeks reddened. He coughed lightly and looked helplessly at James.

"Yeah," James nodded, struggling to stay on topic. " Artis Decerto is also about acrobatic kinds of stuff too. It's just a matter of using your whole body sort of like a tool or a weapon or a torpedo, whatever best suits the situation. You put both ideas together, and not only will you know what th e other guy is about to do, you'll already be getting yourself into position to defeat it."

"Like when you got between that Zombie Clipper and Bully last match!" Wentworth exclaimed, sitting forward. "And you pretended to have a Clutch under your arm so the Bully would aim a gravity well at you, but then you spun around up over the other guy at just the right moment and the Bully shot his spell at his own Clipper and knocked him right out of the course and then ran into him because he was so surprised that he didn't even see the other guy behind you until you went all topsy-turvy and they both crashed into the ring like a couple of blind Rafewringers!" His eyes bulged excitedly at the memory and then he sighed deeply, leaning back again. "That was beautiful."

"Zane sure didn't think it was funny," Ralph muttered. "Although he did admit that it was a pretty good move."

"Yeah," James agreed, nodding at Wentworth. "Like that."

"But how do we practice stuff like that?" another player, Luca Fiorello, asked from the corner near the window.

James nodded resolutely. "Good question," he admitted. "And you won't like the answer, but… well… me, Ralph, Zane, and Professor Cloverhoof have set up something in the backyard. It's not anywhere near as good as the one back at Hogwarts and Zane and Professor Cloverhoof only helped us build it because we agreed to let Team Zombie use it as well, but trust us, it's the best way to learn Artis Decerto . Come on over and take a look."

James led the team out onto the third-floor landing, where they all crowded around the window that overlooked the mansion's walled back garden. There was a moment of tense, puzzled silence. Finally, Jazmine spoke up.

"What is it?" she asked, frowning.

James sighed at the irony of it all. In the yard below was a haphazard clockwork monstrosity of wooden cogs, treadmills, pommels, swinging weights, and wand-studded barrels.

"It's called the Gauntlet," he admitted. "And it's about to be your worst enemy."

Classes at Alma Aleron, which had at first seemed exotic and strange, had by now grown routine and even boring.

James' favorite classes were Clockwork Mechanics, Advanced Elemental Transmutation (which was the American equivalent of Transfiguration), Theoretical Gravity (which was still being taught by Oliver Wood), and Magi-American History with Professor Paul Bunyan. Having lived the long and amazing life of a giant in the country's frontier days, the professor taught a lot of his classes by way of firsthand stories. Some of the stories, admittedly, were embroidered with obvious tall tales, such as the details surrounding the origin of the Rocky Mountains (allegedly piles of cast-off rocks cleaned out of the giant's boot treads with a redwood trunk) and the creation of the Great Lakes (claimed to have been dug out by the giant's footprints when he was wrestling Babe, the giant blue ox, for the last pancake of a particularly delicious breakfast). A Vampire boy had once deigned to challenge Professor Bunyan's tall tales, confronting him with the fact that while he was indeed quite large, he was nowhere near big enough to leave footprints the size of Lake Superior.

"Were you bigger back then, maybe?" the boy asked, a smile curling the corner of his mouth.

Professor Bunyan merely scoffed and waved a hand. "I was always the same size," he said, his dark eyes twinkling. "But the world was a lot smaller back in those days. It's a known fact. Just ask Professor Wimwrinkle."

James had a suspicion that Bunyan knew that no one would actually do any such thing, being generally terrified of the Mageography professor, thus his allegations were, nominally, safe.

Mageography was, in fact, near the top of the list of James' least loved classes. Only marginally worse, however, was Forbidden Practices and Cursology with the insufferable Persephone Remora. Remora had, it seemed, developed a bit of a fixation with James and his famous father. As a result, her attitude toward him seemed to swing between doting favoritism and spiteful jealousy. James never knew, on any given Thursday afternoon, whether the professor would gesture for him to sit close to her in the front row—where she would favor him with conspiratorial winks and infuriatingly condescending pats on the head—or glower at him darkly, annoyed and impatient at his apparent lack of awe for her accomplishments and her self-proclaimed 'dark wiles'. James' last essay had been returned to him with the incomprehensible grade of 'INSIPID +' scrawled across the top of it in red, followed by the handwritten comment, 'Yo u show mild promise IF you receive the proper tutelage. You know my office hours. See me.'

"She either has a crush on you or she wants to poison you," Zane whispered, peering at the handwriting atop James' essay. "And you never know. With her, it could be both."

"No way I'm seeking her out for 'proper tutelage'," James hissed from behind his hand. "I'll take 'insipid plus' for the rest of the year if I have to."

From the front of the classroom, Remora narrowed her eyes at him, her red lips pressed into a tight frown.

The rest of the semester's classes dragged on with varying degrees of boredom, challenge, and occasional strangeness. Muggle Occupation Studies, for instance, seemed to be the Alma Aleron version of Muggle Studies, but with a specific emphasis on learning about Muggle careers and working conditions. Most of the class-times were spent on discussions of the difference between such concepts as 'water cooler breaks' and 'coffee runs', 'cubicles' versus 'corner offices', elevator etiquette, surreptitious use of magic in Muggle surroundings, and how to converse about the sorts of things most Muggles seemed to be interested in, such as Muggle sports, television, and the weather. James didn't quite understand the point of the class since he himself planned to become an Auror like his father, but the teacher, a very fat woman by the name of Heather Wocziak (who, for some reason, nearly always wore a pink jogging outfit) insisted that Muggle occupational familiarity was "absolutely essential for all witches and wizards in the current social climate of magical-Muggle diversification". James accepted this with a sigh, secretly vowing to forget everything he was learning once the final exams were over.

Potion-Making class continued to be an intriguing challenge despite the noticeable lack of Petra as Professor Baruti's assistant. Besides teaching traditional Native American forms of potionmaking via visits to the ancient city of Shackamaxon, Baruti spent much time demonstrating potion techniques from many of the world's magical cultures, including Oriental enchanTeas, African steamcreatures, and Russian cold-soup tonics, most of which were made with a very potent clear liquor known as Stortch, known to melt cauldrons if they were not thoroughly pre-oiled with a thick coating of mucous eel slime.

James had once approached Professor Baruti after class and asked how things were going with Petra.