Character: Madam Pince
Prompt: Book
She knows she's not the most popular person at Hogwarts. She sees the frustrated glares that the students throw at her, hears their muttering as they're ushered from the library. They get fed up with her when she hisses at them to quiet down, roll their eyes and laugh when she gets angry with them. And she knows for a fact that they don't feel the same way about her books that she does. They think it's funny, but that's just because they don't understand.
Irma Pince has always had a passionate, irrational love for books. There's just something about the smell of old pages, the creaking of an ancient spine. Libraries, in particular, have always fascinated her. When she was a student at the school, she used to pace the aisles for hours, absently running her fingers across the gold-embossed titles. She would pause every now and then to pull one from its shelf, blow the dust off the old leafs of paper and wonder. Who had held this book before? Who had read it, and what had they learnt? How did that stain get on the page? Had the book been well-loved, or had it been neglected?
So when the time came for her to decide on a career, there was really only one option. Even now, when she spends long days brandishing her feather duster at misbehaving students and watching them suspiciously as they try to sneak a peek at the Restricted Section, she still loves this place. There's a certain peace to it, a tranquility. She's so harsh about their talking because she wants to find a way to preserve that. She wants them to appreciate it too, wants them to understand that the books in a library hold more stories than what's written on their pages.