The Triwizard Tournament Report
When you go to those term staff meetings, you usually don't expect anything special, because if you've been to more than one, you realize it's just a traditional meeting to remind everyone how the ball is rolled. But this term, the staff got to hear about more than just that. The Headmaster announced that we were invited to participate in an actual Triwizard Tournament with two other Hogwarts online schools!
The school Virtualna Bradavičarka from Slovenia was the one who came up with this idea and invited us and Bradavice from Czech to participate in the contest. Now the issue that we faced was that the event was scheduled to take place in early March, and we had about a month to choose our champion and the three assistants. Everyone present agreed that the best way to choose our representatives is by a short HOL-wide contest with a few mid-hard tasks. The Headmaster then asked for two volunteers willing to organize this; Prof. Tarma Amelia Black, having no life, stepped in right away, and when a certain bribe was mentioned I myself, Zoki Phantom, became her partner.
Since the schools had agreed that the official tournament's tasks should be similar to the ones from the Harry Potter books, we knew we'd have to come up with puzzles/tasks which would involve logic and knowledge of the said books. The first and easiest option was a logic puzzle, so we immediately decided to make that the first task; the only problem was that both I and Tarma aren't very good at creating logic puzzles (or at least not ones that make sense). This is when Prof. Cosmo B. Mott came in, as she is great at these things and was awesome enough to help out and provide the puzzle for us. I bet many people hate us for giving them a logic puzzle since not everyone is a fan of them, but I believe it was a great way to lower down the list of competitors at the bare start.
We decided to let everyone who tries a task and submits something to be able to continue to the next task, while everyone else would be disqualified. And in order to give everyone an equal chance at winning, despite their time zones, we thought it's best to post each task at a different time so all the tasks were posted exactly four days and eight hours after the previous one was posted. Furthermore, to make a bigger difference between the contestant's scores, we decided to give bonus points to the first 15 people who submit their solution first (the first one gets 15, the second gets 14, the third 13, and so on). Having divided the participants by house on a spreadsheet, it was very easy to see who the top people from each house were and who was at the top in HOL as a whole.
You would think a logic puzzle would stop our HOLers, but you're wrong! It was surprising how many people tried to solve it, and how many got it completely correct. This meant we had to keep the ball rolling and give them a different task for the second challenge, and Tarma was more than happy to prepare a hard wordsearch for them while I got the honor of creating the last task, a maze in the form of chain of puzzles (including word unscrambling, riddles, jigsaw, etc.). Some of them didn't manage to survive these two, but the scores of certain people were so close that nothing was sure till the very end. There were obvious changes between the results after each task, and even in the end the score difference between our four representatives was a single point! That's when we got to congratulate Prof. Jenny Lupin from Gryffindor who became our Champion, Tara Aurelium from Ravenclaw who became the 1st Assistant, Justine Provencal from Slytherin who became the 2nd Assistant, and Allison Jameson from Hufflepuff who became the 3rd Assistant.
Fame, glory, a shiny HOL award, and lots of house points is what each of them received. But their journey wasn't over; just a couple of days after this they had to represent our whole school at the official Triwizard Tournament! To make things even and fair the organizers consisted of members of each school (Chris Starling and Evelyn Lionn for Virtualna Bradavičarka, Selena E. Smithová for Bradavice, and Tarma, myself, and Prof. Ulol Kimil for HOL, though Cosmo helped out again too), although the official leader was Chris Starling from Virtualna Bradavičarka. The creation of the tasks was a huge challenge for us, especially since we didn't know what level of difficulty we should go with and what type of tasks we should make. We decided to go with a series of riddles for the first task, all of which would point at one ultimate answer. The riddles, poetry or prose form, were nicely thought out and written, though they may have been a bit easy as the results later showed.
Even though the champions (our very own Jenny, Helena Glaedr of Virtualna Bradavičarka, and Larrie Larstonová of Bradavice) finished this task quite fast, I'm sure they regretted all thoughts that the tournament might be very easy after they saw the next two tasks. Tarma managed to take her wordsearch to a much higher level by making it three times huger and with hundred words in it (with no word list provided!). As the champions themselves said, Tarma really made this evil and hard for them! To take away her fame the last task was created similar to the one I created for the HOL Champion choosing, just extremely more evil (expanded maze with lots of directions, harder puzzles, creative challenge included, etc.). If you hear people saying bad things about me, it's because they're still blaming me for this, though I decided I'm taking it as a compliment.
But it was truly great to see all the champions survive this torture, and all the schools should be proud of having such members because it really did take a lot of courage, effort, time, and thinking to get through all of it. Even with the help of their assistant(s) they must have been pulling out their hair at times, as almost everyone did when the tasks were made public afterward.
Also, everyone remember to congratulate Jenny and Tara for a job well done and bringing the Triwizard Cup to HOL (yes, we won!) if you haven't done so already. They proved worthy of having the titles they earned and are a true example of all the qualities Merlin possessed (courage, hard work, wisdom, etc.).
But the ending in general was fantastic — Larrie left us in awe with her artistic skills, while Helena let us enjoy her mind-blowing song composition, and Jenny showed true creativity, great sense of humor, and a great graphicing talent. No one lost in the end, because the whole tournament was fun to everyone, it brought the schools together, we all met different people and discussed the differences between our schools, and hopefully we will manage to continue this as a tradition in the future.
Congratulations to all three schools, to their champions and their assistants, and thank you Jenny and Tara for winning the Triwizard Cup!