"Can these kids hurry up? I'm not a happy person when I'm sober."
"They'd better not come to you for drinking advice."
Casey and Ro sat together at the Slytherin table with the other fifth years. Despite her sleep on the train, Ro looked ready to collapse; Casey was more than willing to give her a hard time about it, and had been until the first years walked in for the Sorting Ceremony. Some of the first years were casually searching for older brothers and sisters at the house tables. Casey always felt more sympathetic towards the ones who were visibly shaking with fear, the ones who obviously had no idea what type of environment they were entering.
The first student was sorted into Ravenclaw, and a loud cheer erupted from the corresponding table. Casey's sister, sitting on her left side, leant in towards her. Laura Niccals was a second year Leg student with dark auburn hair, brown eyes and a pale complexion, startlingly different from Casey's own. "Casey, I still don't understand how we were sorted into Leg? I don't think the Sorting Hat even recognises it as a house."
Casey nodded in assent. "Y'know the Grindylow tank near the spare room? Grindylows usually get really aggressive around humans, but are more submissive around Merpeople. Five hundred years ago, some bright guy theorised that Grindylows became more submissive around humans that were competitive and good at water sports. Great. He identified some other traits, I dunno, but they all sound stupid. So anyway, as they make their way to the Sorting Ceremony, the first years walk single file past the Grindylow tank. Meredith kinda pretends to be feeding them as the first years walk past, and takes note of the students that make them calmer. After the feast, she and McGonagall talk to the prefects and organise for the Grindylow students to be put in our dorm. Everyone thinks that we're in the special dorm because we need help studying. I mean, Karen and Paige don't need extra help for anything, so that's not completely true."
"So instead of being sorted solely by the Sorting Hat, we're also sorted by a Sorting Grindylow? Sure, that doesn't overcomplicate things at all," Laura replied sarcastically.
A peal of laughter escaped from Ro's lips and echoed around the hall. "Surely not."
"Oi! Nerd Dorm!" whispered a male voice from further down the table. "Pipe down, some of us are actually trying to pay attention to the sorting."
"Piss off, Shane," Ro replied, poking out her tongue and smiling. The boy called Shane was surreptitiously playing a game of Exploding Snap with his neighbour on the seat between them; muggle cards rendered the game almost pointless, but didn't draw the same attention as the regular cards. Shane smiled back at Ro and returned to the game.
Casey rested her face on her palms. "Merlin's beard, they've started already." Ro elbowed her sharply in the ribs, wiggling her eyebrows suggestively. "Can they hurry up and bring the food out already? You really do need a drink."
"I knew you'd come round eventually."
O0o0O
From her seat at the Ravenclaw table, Paige watched with mild fascination as Ro became steadily more drunk throughout the evening. She was pretty sure that alcohol had never been served at a Hogwarts feast - at least not recently - but that wouldn't stop Ro from having a good time. It hadn't in the past. Paige considered the manner in which Ro had entered the train compartment that morning, stumbling through the door and practically falling onto the seat. Even then she had shown signs of being hung over, despite the fact that her vicar parents had confiscated her liquor. Paige was torn between disappointment in her friend's drinking habits, and admiration of the fact that she must have actually studied to find a spell that turned water into wine.
"Paige, are you okay?" Hayley sprawled herself across the table and grabbed a chicken drumstick. The mountain of chicken drumsticks in front of her remained untouched.
"Yeah, I'm fine," Paige sighed. "I'm just worried about Ro, I think she may be drinking."
Hayley shrugged. "That's just Ro though, isn't it?"
"That might be part of the problem," Paige said thoughtfully. "If we keep on excusing her behaviour because she's drunk, it just encourages her to continue drinking."
Come on, it's the first day back, don't try to turn her whole life around tonight. Casey's not going to let her do anything stupid." Hayley reached across and grabbed another drumstick.
"What's wrong with the ones in front of you?" Paige asked.
"Those ones are spicy, I don't like spicy food," Hayley replied. Paige rolled her eyes and swapped the plates of drumsticks. They ate in silence for a few minutes, both hungrier than they had cared to admit on the train. Dessert eventually came round, and the remaining food on the table was replaced with pumpkin tarts, blocks of ice cream and mint humbugs. Across the table, Luke finished giving a sixth year Ravenclaw student a blow-by-blow description of a Quidditch match.
"Did you have a good holiday, Luke?" asked Paige.
Luke laughed, shaking his shaggy brown hair out of his eyes. "Yeah, of course I did! The Wasps won."
"Is this the match you saw with Natasha?" Hayley said, "Have you asked her out yet?"
"Are you serious? We've been dating for a year now."
"I know, I just think you guys are really cute together."
"Thanks, so do we." Luke gave a maniacal wide-eyed grin, and Paige laughed at him. "What, you don't think I'm cute?" he asked in feign shock.
"I think you're a lunatic!" Paige said, still laughing.
The rest of the meal passed relatively quickly. Hayley and Luke discussed various aspects of the match between the Wasps and the Harpies, with occasional input from Paige. The Ravenclaw prefects shot dirty looks at Luke throughout the evening; still under the impression that Professor McGonagall had made a mistake with the prefect badges, they perceived Luke as the 'enemy' due to the fact that he didn't sleep in the Ravenclaw common room. When Professor McGonagall eventually gave students permission to return to their respective dormitories, Luke did himself no favours by stating that he was going to return to his dorm instead of helping with Ravenclaw's first years.
"What's the point of that?" the female prefect asked, colour rising in her cheeks. "Do you have any interest in the wellbeing of the first years? Why aren't you, like, the Nerd Dorm prefect?"
Luke backed away slightly and raised his hands. "Uh, Nerd Dorm isn't actually recognised as a Hogwarts house, it's just a different common room. Anyway, you guyse are better choices for Ravenclaw prefect than I am, I don't even go to the common room that much."
The prefect continued as if she hadn't heard Luke speak. "Why are you even a prefect at all? You're practically useless! You're a waste of a prefect badge, you give us a bad name!" she shrieked, attempting to punch Luke in the chest. The other prefect, slightly worried by her outburst, attempted to hold her back with minor success. He looked as if he was even more shocked than Luke.
"Is there a problem, Miss Ritchie?" Professor McGonagall strode down the hall with a roll of parchment in hand, trailed by Professor Belacqua and Karen.
"He," the prefect growled, pointing at Luke, "is not qualified to be a prefect, he hardly enters the Ravenclaw common room and is not making the effort to help with the first years. I want this fixed immediately!" she shouted, stamping her foot for emphasis. Behind her, Paige and Hayley shook with silent laughter.
"You can bring the issue up with me tomorrow, Miss Ritchie, but for now you will stop making a fool of yourself in front of the rest of the students and show your first years to the common room." McGonagall turned to the Ravenclaw first years and read a few names off her parchment. Luke turned to Professor Belacqua.
"Hey Meredith, how're you going?" he asked happily.
"Was that really necessary, Luke?" Meredith Belacqua asked, trying and failing to keep a smile off her face. A full head and a half shorter than Luke, she was thin but well-toned; she had chocolate brown eyes and matching hair that fell to the small of her back. Having only been teaching for the previous four years, she still acted more like a student than a teacher at times, and as such many of the Leg students fondly referred to her by her first name.
"I didn't even do anything though, she just started yelling at me!" Luke cried.
"Okay Luke," Meredith laughed and waved Karen over from her conversation with Paige and Hayley. "Now, I'll need one of you to come with me to gather our first year students, and the other to go back to the common room and deal with the third years. Any preferences? Karen?"
"First years, definitely." Karen shook her head in exhaustion. "I don't think I have the energy to deal with the third years tonight."
Luke shrugged. "Fair enough, I didn't want to do first years anyway. They look like a bunch of whiny brats if you ask me. Ow, stop hitting me, Karen!"
"Okay, the password's 'aquamarine'. See you later." Meredith waved at Paige and Hayley while Karen greeted the three first years left in her charge. Meredith then hurried after McGonagall and the Gryffindor students; Karen followed at a more leisurely pace with the first years.
"Lame," Luke sighed as he, Paige and Hayley made their way to the Leg common room.
O0o0O
The corridor directly below the trophy room was filled with empty class rooms that appeared to have been abandoned for a century. Mould and residue made the windows almost opaque, and within the classrooms, chairs, desks and cupboards were covered in a thick layer of dust. House-elves had abandoned this part of the castle an age and a half ago.
"Loiterers, stop loitering!" Luke said confidently. Students tore themselves away from the windows; others popped their heads out of various classroom doors. While the students rarely thought about the empty classrooms throughout the year, their first day back at the castle filled them with renewed curiosity, which was usually sated while they waited for the prefects to arrive with the password.
Luke knocked on a door half-way down the corridor. While the other doors were a musty brown colour, this one was dark blue - the only sign that this door was any different. "Aquamarine," he stated. "Also, a request for the password to be changed from 'aquamarine' to 'psychedelic death metal doom'."
"Request denied," the door replied in a deep monotonous voice. It swung open, and light flooded from the doorway.
"Well, that settles that," Luke said. He stepped back to allow the rest of the Leg students in first. Alec gave him a knowing smile, and Luke raised an eyebrow in return. "What are you laughing at?"
"Psychedelic death metal doom? Really?"
"Hey, it'd be a better password than 'aquamarine'." Hayley rolled her eyes and entered the common room with Paige. Alec and Luke followed them in. As they walked through the doorway, they heard a faint hum, just within hearing range. Their uniforms changed from those of the bigger Hogwarts houses to the purple and grey of Leg.
"I've always wanted to know how that transfiguration spell works," Paige wondered to herself.
Hayley replied, "Ask Meredith, the next time she renews it. Won't she be doing that when the first years leave the common room tomorrow?" Paige mumbled in assent.
Around the room, students who had been unable to speak at the feast greeted each other enthusiastically. Josh and Casey collapsed into the plush purple armchairs in the corner of the room, and Ro walked through one of the dormitory doors on the right-hand wall. Standing around the fireplace were five third-years, all of whom were still wearing uniforms of the other houses. Luke sighed and walked towards them. "Who did the thing?" he asked. The third years took in his prefect badge and towering height, and looked at each other nervously. "Is there anyone else who did the thing?" Luke indicated towards their ties, and they all silently shook their heads. "Okay," he shrugged. "I want your shoes off, cloaks off, robes off, ties off. We're doing five laps of Sterling. C'mon, let's get moving."
The third year students looked at each other, mortified, and slowly took off said items of clothing. Several other students stopped what they were doing and stared. When the third years had only their trousers and shirts on, Luke led them through the door opposite the dormitories, to the pool room. A few seconds later those in the common room heard a series of loud splashes. "See? It wasn't that hard," Luke said, loud enough for the common room to hear.
"Surely he didn't push them in," said Alec, walking to the pool room door to see what was happening.
"He better not have," Natasha replied, her voice full of warning. She then knelt on the floor next to Paige, who was folding the clothes on the floor into neat piles. Behind them, the common room door swung open and Meredith led the first years into the middle of the common room. Some students, still laughing at the third years, escaped to their dormitories; most stayed in the common room to greet the first years and listen to Meredith's familiar welcoming speech.
"Welcome to the Leg common room," she announced, smiling. "Our house colours are purple and grey, and our mascot is a giraffe. Leg is different from the other houses, as it wasn't established by one of the Hogwarts founders. This room isn't even mentioned on any building plans or in Hogwarts: A History. From what we can gather, our founder Legolas Leg was a Hufflepuff student at Hogwarts approximately one hundred years after the school was established. She stumbled across this room quite by accident in her second year, and she and her friends used it as a place to study in peace. Leg only established itself as a house five hundred years ago, with a very particular goal in mind."
Meredith then led the awestruck students through the door on their left. Their mouths fell open as they entered a room almost as big as the Entrance Hall. The room had three pools in it; the closest half of the room held a small waist deep pool and a fifty metre lap pool. The third pool took up the far half of the room, and was as deep as it was wide. The shortest wall was covered with partitioned shelves. Each section of the shelves was assigned to a student, and held five plain white towels. Perhaps the most surprising sight was the large egg sitting on a pedestal in the middle of the room. The first years milled around the entrance of the room as Meredith walked towards the lap pool.
"Luke!" she cried, and the third years stopped swimming, turning to see if they were being spared the rest of their punishment. "What are you doing?"
"What?" Luke asked, "I'm dealing with the thing!"
Meredith looked at the third years and gave an exasperated sigh. "Heads under the water, guys, make sure you're breathing properly." She then returned to the first years, who were still huddled in a small group. "This is the pool room. It wasn't part of the room that Legolas found, but was later built to accommodate the leviathan egg." Meredith pointed to the egg in the middle of the room. As big as a muggle van, it seemed to thrive on the attention of everyone who entered the room. "This is the egg of the Vermillion Whale, an endangered species of whale highly valued by ancient witches and wizards. It was harvested for its body parts, mainly its teeth and fins, as they were key ingredients in potions of dark magic. We in possession of one of two eggs laid by the whale, so it is our responsibility to make sure that if the egg hatches, it does so safely. We also have to teach it how to be a whale, and get it safely to the ocean."
"Yeah, if it hatches." Luke walked over from the lap pool. "The egg's been here for five hundred years and hasn't hatched yet. His name's Carlisle."
Meredith smiled and turned back to the first years. "Every year, Leg's prefects give the egg a name, and if it happens to hatch during that school year, that's the name that it will be known by. But yes, the egg hasn't hatched in five hundred years, it's unlikely to do so soon. Moving on… There are three pools, this one here is Egret, it's the smallest one, only about waist deep. It's mainly used for games and beginner swimmers. The lap pool that the third years were just in is Sterling, where we do most of our swimming training - usually before breakfast. The big one up the back is Tome. That's only used for training about once a month. It's predominantly the whale's - Carlisle's - pool. If he starts hatching, the egg will roll off the pedestal into that pool where he'll have enough room to swim for a month or two. Of course, you're allowed to swim in that pool in your free time if you feel comfortable with it, just tell one of the students in the higher year levels." The first years all nodded, yawning. Meredith led them back into the common room. "For the first week, I'll let you settle into classes, but from the second week we'll start swimming training. The boy's dormitories are through the left door, and the girl's dormitories are through the right."
When all the first years had filed through the dormitory doors, Meredith turned back to the rest of the students still in the common room. "Hey guys, excited to be back? Is someone keeping an eye on Ro?"
"Yeah, she's gone up to the dorm," Casey said, "She was about to collapse from exhaustion after dessert."
"I still want her up tomorrow morning for training," Meredith said sternly. "How's your brother, Josh?"
Josh gave her a disdainful look. "Steve? He thinks he's in a fucking band. They suck, let me tell you." Meredith frowned slightly at him, and turned to talk to Alec.
"Well, I'm going to bed," Casey said, stretching. "G'night." She followed Natasha to the fifth year dormitory. Ro was fast asleep, and Paige and Hayley had just finished putting their clothes in their drawers. Natasha quickly claimed a bed, leaving Casey with the one next to the window.
"Hey, Casey!" Karen pulled a sepia poster out of her trunk and held it up. On the poster, five people sat on bar stools, playing various instruments and occasionally stopping to write something down. The words 'Manic Pixies' were printed across the bottom of the poster.
"I didn't know you liked Manic Pixies!" Casey's eyes widened appreciatively.
"Of course I do, they're the best. "Hey, doesn't this one look like Josh?" Karen asked, pointing to one of the guitarists.
Casey laughed. "Don't let him hear you say that, he gets really annoyed whenever I bring it up." Leaving Karen to her posters, she pulled the curtains around her four-poster and retrieved her bathers from the top of her trunk. Tomorrow, she would begin to prove that she was the right choice to enter in the swimming competition, and nobody would stand in her way.
A/N: I've had this chapter done for a week, sorry for not putting it up yet. Uni stuff got in the way, y'know? I will probably be a month in between posting chapters, I love any type of feedback. If there's something you want me to focus on in the next chapter, just leave it in the comments. Hogwarts belongs to J.K. Rowling, Legolas is a rip-off of Lord of the Rings.