Chapter 165: Babel and Opening Day

Angelina Johnson and Alicia Snippet sat in the AID office in front of the big desk. They looked at each other and then behind the desk.

"So team names," they heard, "have you decided what you want to call yourselves?"

"Y-Yes," replied Angelina, "The Remembralls.. . no one would be able to forget us."

"For us, it's Sonic Brooms," said Alicia.

"Those are two good names," came a nod of approval, "much better than what Cedric and Eddie chose, what kind of name is Trolling Bogeys," before looking to the left and saying, "please not the names down."

Both girls looked to their rights and saw Quinn standing on a barstool next to the glass wall, noting their team names down on the notepad.

"Remembrealls with two L's, right?" asked Quinn.

".. . Yes," replied Angelina.

She then looked behind the desk where Luna Lovegood sat, looking at them.

"What's the color scheme? I hope it isn't gold and red; that would be unfortunate," she asked. "If you haven't decided, let's first decide the logo before we reach the color scheme as coordinating colors then would be much easier."

"O-Oh," replied Angelina, a sixth-year replied to Luna, a third-year.

Quinn glanced up from his notepad and looked at the two confused girls. "Don't look at me; she's the one in control here; I'm just the note taker. I suggest that you communicate with her well because she'll be the one who'll be designing everything from your quidditch uniform design to your logo before everything goes to production. Especially the logo because it'll be literally everywhere, you really don't want to mess that up — take my word for it, you won't be happy if you mess the logo up."

Luna glanced at Quinn and put her hand out. "Show me the notes; what're you writing."

Quinn handed the notepad to Luna, who flipped through it before looking at him, "I told you to write their team names, I didn't ask for brief notes on conversion theory in organic transfiguration.. . you even made diagrams." She looked up and bluntly said, "I will do it on my own. You can leave if you want."

Quinn nodded with a sad expression, and when Luna looked down on the notepad, trying to make some sense, he glanced at the Gryffindor girls and winked.

"I will see you guys later," he said, "Luna, there's a list on the table with the timings of other teams' arrival. Please wrap these two up before the next duo arrives."

"Hmm," replied Luna.

Saying that, Quinn left the office with a smile on his face, hands in his pocket. After a long time of being swamped with preparations for the tournament, he finally had free time.

"Now, I know why people hire other people," he comfortably groaned while stretching his hands up, "work becomes so easy with other people doing it for me."

His new team had taken a lot of work off his shoulder. Now he only needed to communicate with the vendors, and that was just written communication. Every other thing was handed to the students he had selected as unpaid (some paid) interns.

He hummed his way through the corridors, and before he knew it, Quinn was standing in front of the Room of Requirements. He walked past the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy, and on the third time, a metal gate with intricate and ornate metalwork appeared on the opposite wall.

"Oh my friend, it has been a while," it had been a week, "I've missed you."

Quinn's palms rested on the locked door, and on his touch like the vaults in Gringotts, the metal design onset into a massive transformation of shift, and before long, a click was heard indicating that the door was now unlocked. He pushed the door open and stepped inside into a stark white room.

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As Quinn stepped through the threshold, he felt potent magic sweep him — to be accurate, as Quinn stepped into the room, he entered a ward that stripped every speck of dust and grim on his body and clothes. Quinn wasn't strange to this feeling as he had one inside his workshop, but this one was multiple times more robust than his.

"She overdid it — I think my skin hurts," he smiled, thinking about what he assumed was Rowena Ravenclaw's work.

The room's walls, floor, and ceiling were all stark white, with no spot disturbing the white. Quinn walked to the two brown wooden tables in the room and stood in between the two, which stood side-by-side to each other by length.

He glanced at the left long table, and on it sat ten identical table lamps equidistant in a line. Every lamp had a one-foot rectangle strip of metal sheet turned into an MLE light source. Below each lamp sat thick tomes, each of them looking more ancient than the other. One such book beside Quinn gently turned a page on its own before the lamp above flashed a bright red light for a single second.

Seeing this, Quinn turned to his right to see the other long table, but on this one sat ten modified designs of MagiFax. He walked behind the table, and behind each MagiFax sat two stacks of papers, one blank and the other printed. He watched as a blank sheet was sucked into the machine, and a printed sheet came out — the contents were the same as the tome beneath the lamp that Quinn had just seen.

Then he looked to the further right to see what at a glance looked like a 20x20-ish grid of paper stacks arranged neatly on the floor. One of the printed stacks behind a modified MagiFax lifted off the table and gently floated to the floor, landing on an empty spot, joining the grid of other stacks.

「Project Babel」

The Library of Babel, written by Jorge Luis Borges, was a story about a library that contained every book to be ever penned in the entire universe. Quinn was a devout bibliophile, dreamed of owning such a place, and was ambitious by nature. He set out to build something similar to the Library of Babel — a library with every knowledge about magic ever conceived and written down.

The aim was grand, and he had to start somewhere — he had already begun when Lia gifted him his first set of magic books in French. Ever since then, Quinn had coveted magic books: The books that his grandfather George had brought him during their travels, the books he to this date regularly ordered, tomes inside the vast Hogwarts library, and.. . the ancient tomes that sat hidden inside the Room of Requirements.

The stark room in which he stood was a room that Quinn had requested from the Room of Requirments: "A room that only I, Quinn West, could enter with all books and tomes marked by Room of Requirements." His wishes were answered by a room that only Quinn could open, and it existed even when he wasn't present, just like the Room of Lost Things existed when someone wasn't inside.

He looked ahead of the tables and saw the result of the second part of his request. Bookshelves upon bookshelves upon lined up in the room, each filled with esoteric and old knowledge: some that were considered vile and dark, some that were looked at as "right" magic, some lost to the world, some disproved, some that were then rare but now commonplace knowledge — but all of them held some nugget of magical wisdom that interested Quinn.

The books in here were so old that the Room of Requirements had added automatically added a sterilization ward without Quinn asking for one, and even if he wanted it gone, he couldn't remove it — the books came tied with the warding magic.

Quinn had built this room and the setup at the start of the year. He knew that it would take time to copy every book even when his copy system worked round the clock, all day, every day.

"I just hope I cover most of it by the end of this year." The following year was when the Room of Requirements was found, and Quinn had built this plan taking in that possibility.

He didn't know the whole story, but Dobby, the Malfoy house-elf (now-ex), worked as a Hogwarts employee. While Quinn hadn't talked to Dobby, he knew from the house-elves that he did know that Dobby was still a Boy-Who-Lived fanboy. If somehow, the Room of Requirements was revealed to any other student, Quinn's access to it would be restricted. Thus, this year, with everyone invested in the Tri-wizard and interschool quidditch tournaments, Quinn decided to finish making copies of every book branded by Room of Requirements.

"Let's get to work," he clapped and sat down at a big desk but not before taking ten books from the bookshelves.

There were two types of books inside the Room of Requirements.

The first type: regular books with the same number of sheets as printed pages — meaning that if there were a hundred pages worth of content in a book, then there were a hundred sheets of parchments in the books.

The second type: charmed books that held lesser pages than the actual content. An example of such books was all the books that Alan had given Quinn; those books only had around thirty pages, but the content was worth three hundred pages. The ink would shift to transform into different pages.

While the copying setup could cover the first type but the second type, that Quinn had to take care of on his own. He kicked back and started to read the book page-by-page while multiple fountains opened up and started to record everything that Quinn read.

He had long hours ahead of him.

- (Scene Break) -

"H-He really changed the stadium, didn't he," said Tracey as she sat down.

Daphne, who sat down beside her, looked around the new quidditch stadium and nodded, "With people actually sitting inside, you can actually see the changes that had been made."

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Both had been inside the stadium once before, but at that time, everything was covered in scaffolding and covers, but now they saw the true glory of the new stadium.

Today was the opening day of the quidditch tournament, and Hogwarts students, along with outsiders, had already filled most of the stadium, with only a few seats remaining that too were being quickly taken by their incoming owners. The stadium had been re-constructed, the seating capacity had been increased, and the stands had been raised into an elevated setting instead of a previously comparatively flatter one. Even the lowest seats were raised above for a better watching experience.

"Where is Astoria?" asked Tracey looking for her best friend's younger sister.

"She's going to watch the game with her friends," replied Daphne.

"Is she still miffed about not getting selected in a team?"

"She got over that in two days," said Daphne shaking her head, "what did she expect? She hadn't picked the broom more than a handful of times ever since she got better; no way was she going to get selected."

The younger Astoria had tried to get into four different teams recruited via tryouts but failed to get into any of them.

"She has been pretty active these days," commented Tracey, "it seems like Quinn's treatment is working well."

"That it is." Daphne had told her best friend about her sister's condition. "I need to remind Astoria that her next treatment date is coming. All of us have been so busy that I almost forget about it."

Tracey was about to continue but saw the pitched and pointed, "Look, Quinn came out."

Daphne, along with many others, looked towards the pitch to see Quinn dressed in royal blue and gold robes.

.. .

"Welcome.. . all," said Quinn looking at the crowd greater than he had addressed during the first task, "I'm Quinn West, and today, I welcome you to Silver Moon Printing MagiTech presents Tri-school quidditch league — TQL."

Along with the edge of the quidditch pitch and below the stands hung multiple banners of varying sizes, all stark white at the moment. As Quinn opened the tournament, every banner shifted — an ethereal design of a blue night sky with a silver crescent hanging in the sky. If one would look closely, both the sky and the moon designs were made from printed paper with actual readable content on every inch of all banners present in the stadium.

"It's my pleasure to kick off this event today in all your presence," smiled Quinn while walking on the pitch, "I'm sure you'll are aware of the Tri-wizard tournament currently being held at Hogwart; as such, we have the exciting opportunity to host Baeuxbatons and Dumrstrang for the school year — but because of that, we had to cancel the quidditch season to make space for the Tri-wizard tournament.. ."

Boos were thrown from the entire Hogwarts crowd — no one had been happy about that particular decision/announcement.

"See? That's what we at AID thought as well," grinned Quinn, "so we decided to bring it back along with certain twists to make things interesting after all, we've players from three schools."

There were cheers of approval, showing the joy and happiness towards just the fact that quidditch had returned.

"Before we start, I would like to walk everyone through the new rules that this league and tournament will be following for all its games," announced Quinn before placing the first rule in front of them,

"Every game played will have a total duration of two hours —" There was a lot of murmur in the stands, "— unlike the standard rules which allow games to go as long as the snitch isn't caught, we(I) decided that to impose a time limit on the game; this way, the teams will have to think about time which will give rise to all kinds of interesting scenarios."

Quinn didn't stop and continued because the second rule change was tied to the first change.

"The second rule is for the seekers and golden snitch," announced Quinn, "a standard golden snitch is worth a whopping hundred and fifty points — an amount that could turn the tides of the game in an instant.. . sounds exciting, right?"

Crowd aye-d in agreement about the rule change when a seeker locked onto the snitch, the flying was definitely the most fun and exhilarating with the seeker flying literally weaving in and out the game — with the risk of getting hit by others.

"In this tournament, we've decided to change the worth of the golden snitch from a hundred fifty to a lower fifty points. In return for decreasing the snitch's value, we created another home role or provision for the game: as I previously said, the game will end after two hours and not when the snitch is caught; therefore, we've decided that every time a snitch is caught, a minute later, another snitch is released for yet another fifty point chance. That way, the seeker gets to play while staying a considerable part of the game."

.. .

"Oh my, what a smart idea," said professor quidditch-nut, "the snitch would be needed to be caught thrice for a seeker to get the same level of control over the game; this will relieve a lot of pressure from the chasers, beaters to increase the point game — maybe this is a good chance to see a slower-paced game with more passing and teamwork.. . interesting, truly interesting — I wonder if the teams have thought about chaser-beater routes and beater-to-beater cross-team defensive options.. ."

In the professor's box, the professors stared at McGonagall as she droned about the new possibilities that the rule brought in.

Aurora Sinistra, the Astrology professor, leaned towards Lily Potter's side and whispered, "I bet that today she is going to speak more than she speaks in her classes."

Her voice, as it turned out, wasn't as low she had planned, and many professors (sans McGonagall, who was too involved) laughed and snickered at the comment. Let's just say that even the professors who weren't that interested in quidditch were going to have a good time.

.. .

"What do you think about this, James?" asked Sirius Black, pocking his mate in the side, "seeker won't be the most popular position if these rules were imposed everywhere." Which Sirius liked as he played as a Beater who didn't get appropriate recognition, well he was okay with it as long as he got to swing his bat and flung bludgers towards smug chasers.

"I don't like it," replied James, "do you know how hard it is to first spot a snitch? Those things don't shine as much they should. Even if we do spot them, it's only one out of three-four times when you're able to follow it — catching the damn thing is another shitstorm.. . this doesn't make sense."

"I like it. Everything will depend on chasers, beaters, and goalies. You guys can just have fun flying while we actually play."

"I can play chaser if I want."

Sirius scoffed, "Your stupid face would be the first I would've hit with a bludger — it would've been supremely satisfying."

".. . We were on the same team."

"I know."

.. .

"Now, I'll not waste any more of your time and introduce the teams that will be participating in the much anticipated open game sponsored by WesternForge Constructions," shouted Quinn.

Smoke started to escape out of two tunnels opening to the pitch, and from inside came the players on their brooms, shooting to the sky as fireworks lit the stadium up.

"I present to you.. . Trolling Bogeys led by Cedric Diggory and Treacherous Barons led by Victor Krum.. . The battle of champions is afoot!"

Quinn West - MC - Glorified photocopier.

Luna Lovegood - Designer - Out!

Minerva McGonagall - Quidditch Nut - Omoshiroi!

FictionOnlyReader - Author - I don't like the pacing and structure of this chapter.

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