ALL NOVEL Winter is Coming
Inside the Ravenclaw Common room, a similar scene was playing. Ben was sitting on a chair with a pumpkin for a head. With a little bit of force, the pumpkin popped right off his head.
Looking at the panicked little kids in the room, Ben felt that all that work and gold had been worth it.
***
After taking a nice shower after his flying lesson, Ben made his way to the entrance hall. There, he found an empty broom closet and gulped down a seemingly empty bottle before taking the stairs leading down to the Hufflepuff Common room. Ben arrived at a basement corridor decorated with many food-themed paintings. After tickling a pear on the painting of a fruit ball, Ben gained entrance to the Hogwarts kitchens.
It was a gigantic, high-ceilinged room with five tables identical to the ones in the Great Hall above. The walls were filled with shelves containing a large number of pots and pans. The house elves were busy stirring pots over huge fires. All sorts of foods had already been prepared and had been served on the tables.
Ben took another swig of potion while casting [Muffle] and looked for the desert section. He doused every single dessert with Pompion Potion and quickly got out of there before any sharp-nosed elf sensed something.
The Pompion Potion used the Pumpkin-Head Jinx as the magical component. Pumpkin-Head Jinx trapped the head of the target in a pumpkin, essentially blinding the person and possibly suffocating him. To the outsider, it looked as if the head had been turned into a pumpkin.
The Pompion Potion covered the heads in a carved pumpkin and hence not blinding or suffocating, but it did disorient the person and made it seem like the head itself had turned into a pumpkin.
***
By the time Ben had finished reminiscing his brilliant plan to prank the whole school. Most of the students had already pulled their heads out of the pumpkin and calmed down a bit. To be fair, most third-year and above students knew how a Pumpkin-head jinx worked. It was only the first and second years just had had the fright of their lives.
"Merlin's saggy pants! Thought I was going to die there for a moment." Exclaimed Terry Boot.
"Bloody Hell! I almost peed my pants." Michael Corner cried looking around the room.
"For a moment I thought I was going to be a pumpkin my whole life." Anthony Goldstein said.
While they were catching their breaths and finding solace in the fact that everyone had suffered the same fate, Ben had been gulping down desserts and preparing a big pile of pumpkins on the table.
Once the pumpkin pile was big enough, he aimed at his three friends and yelled, "PUMPKIN FIGHT!"
Soon pumpkins were flying through the air from every corner of the room and the walls were painted orange with pumpkin juice.
Teachers were busy investigating the troll break-in and the prefects were quickly overpowered and covered in pumpkin innards. There was absolute mayhem in the common rooms of the four Hogwarts houses.
***
The next morning, the whole castle was buzzing with the talk of pumpkins, it was as if the troll incident didn't even happen. Everyone was shocked to know that it happened in every house and not even teachers were spared. Quirrell still looked like a pumpkin, it seemed he had taken to his character quite seriously.
Some muggle students believed that it was the evil spirits of Halloween that had caused all that mayhem yesterday.
The one person having a really bad day was Snape, not only was he missing a big chunk of flesh from his leg and had to limp, but he also had to figure out how someone managed to procure such large quantities of Pompion Potion inside the castle.
The password to the kitchens was changed and students were banned from even going near it. Everyone wanted to know who was behind it all, but Ben made sure to buy Fred and George's silence with all his remaining money, which wasn't much. It seemed they hadn't told anyone yet, which was quite considerate of them.
November brought with it a layer of frost that covered the whole castle every morning. The mountains around the castle had now turned icy grey and the Great Lake was covered with a thick layer of ice in the mornings.
Ben spent most of his evenings in the common room, near the fireplace and his free periods in The Room of Requirement practising magic and levelling his skills. He kept levelling his Illusion skill by spamming the [Muffle] spell throughout the day.
On weekends, Ben practised transfiguration near the lake. He had managed to learn the switching spell and could now consistently perform it on two small objects that were the size of an apple.
Switching spell was basically transforming two objects at the same time, into each other. It took a lot more concentration than the regular transformation. Every Sunday, Ben made an artwork that he made with pieces that he transfigured with the pebbles and rocks on the lake shore.
After the troll incident, he made a huge troll with transfigured tree bark and covered it with algae.
November brought with it the Start of Quidditch season, Ben was not as interested in watching people fly around the field as he was in flying himself. He still went to the first Quidditch match between Gryffindor and Slytherin. Since he already knew the result he decided to make some money out of it.
He went around the stadium betting that Potter was going to catch the snitch, not even Gryffindors were confident of that. Ben decided to have a sickle as the minimum bet, he made about ten Galleons when Potter almost swallowed the snitch.
He quickly disappeared from the Stadium before he got into trouble, there were Slytherins trying to argue that since Potter swallowed the snitch, he didn't technically catch it.
The next day, Ben sculpted a majestic Griffin clutching a snake in his claws. The Griffin was an enlarged replica of his toy figurine that he had sold to the store. A lot of Gryffindors complained that their house mascot was a Lion, and not a Griffin but Ben didn't care.
With a name like Gryffindor, if your mascot was not a Griffin, then shame on you. The same was the case with Ravenclaw, it was as if the wizards couldn't differentiate between a Raven and an Eagle.
A/N: For a long time, I thought Ravenclaw's mascot was a Raven. Extra chapters on Patre@n/DreamyApe. Help me pay my bills on time.