The room would obviously be a comfortable common room, perhaps Slytherin's, save for the bizarre texturing. No color graces the black and white surfaces. The white is the color of aging paper, the kind you might find in a cheap blank journal from the 1940s. The black is the color of ink.
In fact, it's not just the color of ink, but ink itself. It's easy to tell on a closer look: textures that are, at first glance, meant to approximate stone or fabric are actually made of very small cursive writing, all spaced to give an illusion of shading. It's as if someone was extremely extra about their crosshatching.
It would be an interesting effect just for a sketch, but, in motion, it's jarring. The entire room gives the appearance of being a papercraft, made of handwritten pages torn from the same book. The only actual light in the space comes from where a fireplace should be, and this directional light casts actual shadows on the three-dimensional paper furniture and walls. But, instead of a fire, there is a single rectangle of bright white paper. Behind it lies a hazy impression of a world that has color. The frame is mostly filled by what is perhaps a human face topped with red hair, blurred to near-incomprehensibility by the interface.
On a paper couch across from the "fireplace" relaxes another figure of more realistic substance, though lacking any color. The black and white image of a handsome teenage boy wears a frown and what seem to be slightly old-fashioned robes with a Slytherin patch and a prefect's badge.
From the portal to what must be the real world, a girl's voice echoes as her words scrawl handwriting across the white void. "I just don't know how to get him to notice me, Tom. I tried to bump into them in the library, but he just spent all his time looking at the books on the bookshelves, one by one. It was a little weird. Ron and Hermione were doing homework nearby."
"Familiarizing oneself with the library is good practice, honestly," Tom's cultured tones issue forth from his mouth and replace the girl's on the portal. Despite his pleasant tone, he rolls his eyes in annoyance, clearly feeling as if this conversation is beneath him. "You could ask him if he's found any exciting tomes."
"Oh, I couldn't just walk up and ask him that," she writes. "Then he'd know I was spying on him. And I get all flustered when I talk to him anyway."
"You're going to have to get over that, Ginny," Tom insists. "In the meantime, did you learn any more from old Rubeus?"
"About Harry, or about the rooster?" she asks, at the strange transition in the conversation. "I still don't get why you're so interested in chickens."
He winces, his face changing to a calculating look, as if he realizes he's been too forward in his questioning. "You can learn a lot about magical beasts from simple animal husbandry, Ginny. But I remain curious how the basic livestock at a gamekeeper's hut on the edge of the forest fare against the beasts within."
"He did say that something gave the rooster a scare a few weeks ago. So he loaned it out to somebody that will hopefully keep it safe," Ginny writes. Her voice trembles as if she's on the verge of recovering a memory.
Tom's face darkens even further. In a notebook that doesn't seem to be connected to the real world, he jots down, "Who has the rooster?" Above it, what must be his previous thoughts on the subject sit:
Get girl to talk to that oaf and observe for roosters.
Have girl strangle rooster. (Botched!)
Test if girl can open Chamber and call the serpent.
Build up control over girl for Halloween.
"I'm glad to hear it's okay," he lies. "You should use that as a subject to check in on. You say that your brother and his friends go to tea with Rubeus. If you befriend the big man, you might get invited too, and then there's your in."
"You're right! You're so smart, Tom. Thanks! I'm going to bed, now."
"My pleasure," he says, his face indicating it's anything but.
The light from the portal dims, as if a cover is folding over to block it out, plunging the strange paper room into darkness.
Within the pitch black, the boy promises himself, "Soon."
Loud techno-industrial music is muffled in the dank, dark alley, lit only by a flickering streetlight and bits of color from the upper lights of the club on the other side of the wall. This seems to be a decaying warehouse district, but fashionably-dressed young people stride by the entrance to the alley, clearly out for a night of clubbing.
Near the mouth of the alley, an unkempt figure moves, revealing itself as a terribly ugly old woman. She sees a young man walk past, alone, and tries, "Ein Pfennig? Ein Pfennig für eine alte Frau?"
Nonplussed, he offers, "Gewiss, Madam. Ich kann ein bisschen entbehren… Mein Gott!" He leaps back as he gets a better look at her face, impossibly pox-ridden with sharp teeth revealed in her eagerness for a meal. Her clawed hand whips out, lightning fast, to try to grab him, narrowly missing his natty clubbing jacket. He screams for help, "Ein Räuber in der Gasse! Ein missgebildeter Räuber!"
Snarling at her botched grab and hearing the sounds of young punks organizing to chase her off of their patch, the figure races, far too quickly for an old woman, deeper down the alley, kicking garbage cans and detritus over in her haste. She leaps perhaps twice her height into the air, catching on a second floor window in the building opposite the club, and pulling herself into the space.
She grumbles, winding through night-dark corridors of what is some kind of floor of offices in the abandoned brutalist building. In a room in the back she coaxes an old lamp to life, revealing a bizarre hybrid of a monster's nest and an old woman's boudoir. Hand-knitted old quilts and lacy pillows drape over smashed office furniture to make a rudimentary bed, and gnawed bones pile up in the corners. They're mostly animals, but some are disturbingly humanoid.
Speaking of animals, a fat gray rat squeaks in surprise as the light turns on, and the woman growls in anticipation. Perhaps she'll at least get something to eat tonight. She smashes her own furnishings out of the way with a guttural roar as the rat flees beneath the structure, and hisses in dismay as it finds a hole through the wall. Hoping the rat is trapped in the office next door she charges out…
And is dismayed to find a short, pudgy man in the hallway, just out of easy leaping range, pointing a wizard's wand at her with his left hand. "I'm not afraid to use the killing curse," he announces, though his voice trembles at the confrontation and his eyes dart, planning an escape if she calls his bluff.
"You have me at a disadvantage," she says with a heavy German accent, backing down but narrowing her eyes in contemplation as she tries to turn this situation to her advantage.
"You're the hag they call Schöne Margarete, yes?" he asks. In the shadowed light from her bedroom, he looks like he's lived a hard life, but may only be in his thirties. Thinning hair and ratlike facial features belie his lack of emaciation.
"That is me, yes," she agrees. Clearly, a wizard was waiting for her, and this could be a problem. "And who are you?"
"An… associate of a man called Quirinus Quirrell," he explains. "I understand you had a run-in with him a couple of years ago."
"Might have. Thin young man. Not good eating. Fast with a wand, like you," she lists.
"Excellent," the wizard nods. "I want to know where you sent him after your run-in. I'm… looking for someone I know he found."
The room is overly posh, particularly if one's sensibilities for decoration haven't updated since the 1800s. Marble flooring is barely visible beneath an enormous woven rug. Quality wood paneling extends up to be replaced with elaborately-patterned green wallpaper in a color that, coupled with the Victorian styling, should make any historian worry whether its creators used arsenic to achieve the shade. Perhaps the barrage of picture frames nearly totally concealing the paper would limit the damage of toxins leaching into the air. Each frame features portraits or news clippings featuring moving photographs of the same man and what must be other people or situations of import.
The man, himself, sits at the enormous walnut desk in the center of the room, resting in a overstuffed executive chair of fine leather. His gray, rumpled hair is evidence of his advancing age, and his bulging midriff evidence of his expensive tastes. Well, the robes the same green as the wallpaper suggest that his tastes may be expensive but not particularly refined. He shuffles some of the mountain of parchment that shares the desk with a number of fanciful awards and other bric-a-brac; likely gifts from people of import.
"Hem. Hem. Minister, do you have a moment?" a woman's voice clears her throat and then simpers through the office's doorway.
"Certainly, Dolores," the Minister allows. "Just finishing up some work on the, um. On the disposition of the wardens."
"Excellent, that's what I wished to speak to you about," she agrees, entering the room. If he is aggressively green, she is offensively pink. Perhaps the choice of robes that are the color of bubblegum is to counteract the rather amphibian cast of her features: in any kind of earth tone, she'd put others in the mood that if they were flies, she might swallow them. She takes a seat in his (far less elaborate) guest chair, frowns slightly at the simple wood of the seating, and continues, "I was thinking that we could use the circumstances to our advantage."
"How do you mean?" he asks, regarding her with a mix of trepidation and keen interest. Evidently, her ideas are often horrifying, yet useful.
"Well, there's a murderer on the loose," she suggests. "And hardly anyone could regret a few changes to improve the ability to catch him. Perhaps limitations to the privacy and mobility of certain… elements… that might harbor him?"
"I hardly think that Sirius Black is going to be found hiding among the hags and werewolves," he tries to dismiss her concerns with a frown. This may not be one of her better ideas, but instead be another attempt to forward a pet agenda.
"Where else would he hide?" she counters. "He was raised a Sacred Twenty-Eight pureblood, so those would be his established connections, and none of them would harbor him after what he's done. None of the middle class, either, after what he showed he was willing to do to a Pettigrew. He'll have to hide amongst the lowest elements."
"Which is why the aurors are rolling Knockturn Alley over in a way they never have before," the Minister explains. "They already have warrants to search any premises they find there. Based on your own suggestion, he's unlikely to know any werewolves outside of the city that he can hide with. And if we get a clue that he does, then the warrant would override any right they have to privacy in their homes anyway. I can't sell the legislation you want on this pretext." He softens his denial, "But, if you have something more specifically targeted to this matter…"
She sighs, admitting that he's correct, takes a moment, and suggests, "We believe he's trying to make his way to Hogwarts, yes?"
"He was overheard excitedly muttering about 'Harry' and 'Hogwarts.' We assume that he might try to finish what You-Know-Who started and go after the boy. Buggered why he decided to do so now."
With a fly-catching smile, she suggests, "Well, we've always wanted more fingers in Dumbledore's little pie. Why not use that crisis to install some kind of permanent oversight? We'll need someone to manage the wardens anyway, and when Black is captured, they could just… stay."
The Minister strokes his face of evening stubble in thought, then nods, "Lucius had already mentioned that, as head of the school board, he had some concerns with the rumors from last year and Dumbledore's competence. The only question is who we have that's loyal but can be spared for the posting."
"I have some names you might consider…"
Harry woke up to the sound of Ron's particularly-loud alarm clock as a sign the second-year boys should get moving. The strangely-vivid dreams were already fading, leaving only deep worries about forces moving against him. He needed to make a move to get his quest log under control before it became a whole avalanche of problems.
Was it weird that, of the scary things he could remember, the one that would continue to stick in his nightmares was the froglike woman in the pink robes?
Translations:
"Ein Pfennig? Ein Pfennig für eine alte Frau?" A penny? A penny for an old woman?
"Gewiss, Madam. Ich kann ein bisschen entbehren… Mein Gott!" Certainly, ma'am. I can spare a little... My God!
"Ein Räuber in der Gasse! Ein missgebildeter Räuber!" A robber in the alley! A deformed robber!