Arcturus immediately flew down at Richard's signal, and came to a stop and neatly dismounted in front of him, a clearly well-practiced, fluid movement. His face was flushed after the exertion of the acrobatics, and he smiled again, broadly. 'It's the most splendid broom!' he exclaimed. 'Thank you for letting me try it.' It might have been an old model by Richard's standards, but to Arcturus it was nothing short of a marvel.
After putting away the Nimbus 2000, he looked over the C-Class. The idea of racing classifications was a new one to him, but he could guess well enough at Richard's meaning. He had taken part in informal broom races, and local, amateur races open to all competitors, but professional, elite racers were a very small group in Arcturus' time, and the system Richard was familiar with was yet to be fully developed. Initially, the young wizard baulked at the idea of having restrictions placed on the broom – he wasn't a novice, he'd been flying for eight years! As soon as he heard the nature of those restrictions, though, his injured pride was soothed. A hundred miles an hour was more than double the fastest he'd flown before, and he wasn't even sure if he would want to get near that today, not on a new broom that he'd never used before.
Again, Arcturus did his checks, this time with a slightly apologetic look for Richard. 'It isn't that I don't trust your broom,' he explained, 'but it's a safety rule at home never to fly anything without checking the braking charm for yourself.' Spontaneous failures could happen even to the best brooms of Arcturus' time, and that made it important. Today, it also gave him a feel for the enchantments on the broom before he took to the air.
'I say,' he remarked then, 'is this one of the brooms that you've flown on personally? You said it's a Bluebottle, officially, and, well, you have that written on your jacket. And do you name all of your brooms, or is Miss Susan your particular favourite? And does the special sticking charm on the C-Class need to be activated mid-flight if I wanted to lay along it, and how strong is it? Strong enough that I'd need to end it first if I needed to make an emergency landing?' A lot of questions asked in a hurry, proof that Arcturus' eagerness was beginning to overtake his cautious politeness, that he might be relaxing a little now that he trusted Richard as a fellow flying enthusiast.