An institute of knowledge

Untitled Part 7

If Sirius thought that the castle looked impressive for a muggle school from the front, having a full tour of the place made him convinced the grounds were possibly bigger than Hogwarts'. It helped, of course, that night was beginning to fall, setting a dark tone to the school.

The first order was, of course, the library. Occupying all of three floors with an intensely gothic vibe to the tall, imposing shelves, he had seen at least three teenagers littered among them, heads buried in thick books and flipping the pages in a feverish manner.

Exiting the space and going down the third floor hallway, he was introduced to the classrooms where teachers taught languages, their boards covered in white chalk. Glowing computer screens at the back were the only illumination, but he could still see that several words in various languages had been carved into the ornate desks.

Also in the hallway were the teacher's offices, some of their doors only half closed. The one at the end was apparently the office of Mr. Harte, his godson's head teacher and the lecturer for Advanced Linguistics. He just barely caught a glimpse of a pale, handsome looking man shuffling through his desk before he was whisked to the other side of the floor, through a cramped corridor. Here he bore witness to the dozens of students that were apparently determined to stay up all night, sketching and painting and sculpting while whispering to each other furiously.

Climbing the stairs to the fourth floor, he was surprised to see that there were only two large rooms. The reason was soon discovered when it was pointed out that these were gyms; and well equipped ones at that. Each one had bench presses, basketball hoops on either end, and markers clearly defining what he could only recognize as places for tennis nets. The one on the right also had fencing gear hung on the walls, as well as the teacher's office right across from it.

The fifth and final floor had an extra extension going in two places. The fork on the right led up to the Roost, wherein the only Falcon in their company broke away, apparently heading for his friends, while the fork on the left led to the Lookout Tower, where students stayed up during Saturdays to observe the open sky. It didn't even surprise him to see, at that very moment, someone coming down from the Roost with a notebook in one hand and a full telescope in the other, before heading up the Lookout Tower.

Accompanying the tower were even more classrooms, these ones dedicated to physics and astronomy. There were also two laboratories, and one of them had a small, south Asian female staring at the blackboard, muttering underneath her breath while looking at equations he couldn't even begin to understand. She had dark circles underneath her eyes, and the whites looked bloodshot and tired. Similar to all the other levels, the teacher's offices had half closed doors, and as the group headed back down to the 2nd floor, he snagged a bit of a conversation that, to him, felt like it was spoken in a different language.

"Quantum mechanics states that wave particle duality..." he shook his head and followed his godson.

The 2nd floor was split into four: the Cliffs facing the front, the math hall facing east, the history and culture hall facing west, and the Chemistry classrooms, laboratories, and offices facing the back.

The Cliffs were full of students in their night wear, sitting in front of their dorm rooms and arguing with each other passionately. The math hall also had two students having a heated debate, while a third one did his work quietly in the corner. In one of the history classrooms, he saw an exhausted looking female sprawled over a bench, fast asleep, while one of the Chemistry laboratories had two students grinning maniacally over a vial of glowing green liquid. He would have voiced his concerns if it weren't for the fact that his godson had already pulled him down to the first floor, which held all administrative offices, the Dining hall, the biology classrooms and offices, several laboratories, a room full of plants, and a separate corridor heading to the performance hall and practice rooms.

He was really just getting used to the fact that there were students everywhere at this point. A poke around the biology hall found a young girl taking meticulous notes on several plants at once, several soon to be graduating students debating hotly with three different teachers, and a single male drawing a huge diagram of a heart on one of the boards.

In the performance hall, on a spectacular stage surrounded by two levels of seating, an orchestral pit, and genuine silk curtains, a young man was putting on a performance for his gaggle of friends in the audience, twirling and flouncing his way across the stage. He could also faintly hear the sounds of what sounded like an entire ensemble warming up somewhere else.

Heading outside through a side door saw that it was most definitely night now, and there were, once again, students milling around.

At the back were the stables, with two students acting as stable hands brushing down the horses there. Sitting on the roof were two students staring intently at the sky, pointing out stars to each other.

Going around the east side saw a small coffee shop embedded into the side, and several students laying and sitting on the grass in front of it, enjoying their drinks and chatting to each other.