With the Christmas holidays over, Hogwarts Castle, already bustling to begin with, became even livelier as all the students returned.
After a Christmas break of intensive training, on the first day of the new term, Fred and George demonstrated an extraordinary way of going downstairs in front of the other students.
Ignoring the moving staircase as it began to rotate and connect to another platform, they cast invisible Impediment Jinxes and happily hopped down like they were playing hopscotch.
This unique way of descending, unrestricted by the moving staircases, naturally became very popular among the Gryffindor students.
However, most students who had mastered the Impediment Jinx could not, like Fred and George, casually ignore the moving staircases and leap all the way down to the first floor.
Their actual circumstances were much the same: simply looking down from the platform made them dizzy, let alone having to land steadily on invisible obstacles after casting the Impediment Jinx.
Even when they started practicing from lower floors, accidents happened easily.
Not only did they risk injuring themselves in a fall, they could even land on passing students and drag them into the Hospital Wing with them.
Fortunately, broken legs—or even broken bones elsewhere in the body, or bones being removed outright—were not serious problems for wizards. A dose of Skele-Gro could basically solve them.
Still, going to the Hospital Wing and regrowing bones both took time. Losing that time before class caused quite a few Gryffindor students to be late.
Being late often meant losing points, and when it was Gryffindor students who were late, Snape certainly would not go easy on them.
By the end of the first day of the new term, the hourglass representing Gryffindor in the House Cup had lost quite a few more points.
If this continued,