And Dayo offers him a hand.

"—what do you think you're doing you filthy mudblood?"

Dayo flashes him a smile. "Helping you up." He winks at Victor.

"I don't need your help," he says, finishing getting up. He glares at Dayo and Victor but doesn't dare do anything more for fear of unexpected Professoral retribution. Crabbe and Goyle follow after him as he stalks off.

Okay then. To the Gryffindor common room, now that that's over with.

"Open it open it open it!" he says, bouncing, as soon as they get there.

He opens it.

It's very pretty, even to Victor's untrained eyes. Sleek and shiny, with a mahogany handle, it has a long tail of neat, straight twigs and Nimbus Two Thousand written in gold near the top. 

"Wow," Ron breathes.

"It is sort of unfair..."

"Why? It's a gift, people can get gifts."

"Well, all right."

They soon need to go down to the dungeons for today's Potions class, though. Snape looks particularly irritated by something, today, and is correspondingly more exact and formal.

Victor is the politest and most diligent student imaginable.

Then Snape will probably have no reason to be exactingly and frostily polite to him, will he?

Soon their lesson's over, and they're free for the day.

Victor would kind of like to go fly. But he isn't sure how to accomplish that. Is he allowed to just... go outside and fly around? It feels like there should be a rule against that but he can't think of one.

There are in fact rules against flying outside of flying classes or Quidditch practice but McGonagall told him in the letter he should meet Wood in the Pitch tonight at seven o'clock, so he'll presumably fly then.

Well. Then maybe he should just do that.

Hundreds of seats are raised in stands around the field so that the spectators are high enough to see what's going on. At either end of the field are three golden poles with hoops on the end. The pitch is empty of anyone other than him.

Well that's a little unnerving.

A couple of minutes later Oliver Wood arrives, carrying a large crate. "Hullo, Evans."

"Hello."

"Alright, so," he says, and puts the crate on the ground. "You're technically not in the team yet, we're having special firsty edition tryouts next week, but honestly if what McGonagall says is true you'll get in no prob. Now you were raised by muggles, yes?"

"Yes."

"Right." He opens the crate, revealing four different-sized balls. "Now, Quidditch is easy enough to understand, even if it's not too easy to play. There are seven players on each side. Three of them are called Chasers."