Supernatural and the Philosopher's Stone

The Potions Master

Early the next morning, very early, I got up and got some extra parchment that I had, that wasn't my schoolwork parchment, and wrote a letter to my brothers saying that I was alright and that they didn't need to worry about me and that I was sorry that I hadn't wrote to them when I got here.

"Go find my brothers," I told Nightwish and she flew out the window after I strapped the letter onto her.

"Sariah?" Lavender yawned. "What are you doing up so early?"

"I was sending a letter to my brothers letting them know I made it okay," I said, sitting on my bed. "Knowing how they are and how protective they are."

She nodded and started to get up. Followed by Fay, Parvati, and Hermione.

Us girls started to get ready for school and then we headed out the door of the dorm and the common room.

"There, look."

"Where?"

"Next to the tall kid with the red hair and the short kid with the white-blonde hair."

"Wearing the glasses?"

"Did you see his face?"

"Did you see his scar?"

Whispers followed us from the moment we left the dormitory the next day. People lining up outside classrooms stood on tiptoes to get a look at him, or doubled back to pass him in the corridors again, staring. I wished they wouldn't, since staring is wrong, but I didn't say anything, and I was trying to focus on finding my classes.

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts; wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where everything was, because it seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits going to visit each other, and I thought I saw a pair of coats of armor was walking around.

The ghosts didn't help, either. It was a nasty shock when one of them glided suddenly through a door you were trying to open. Nearly Headless Nick was always happy to point new Gryffindors in the right direction, but Peeves the poltergeist was worth two locked doors and a trick staircase if you met him when you were late for class. He would drop wastepaper baskets on your head, pull rugs from underneath your feet, pelt you with bits of chalk, or sneak up behind you, invisible, grab your nose, and screech, "GOT YOUR CONK!"

Even worse than Peeves, if that was possible, was the caretaker, Argus Filch. Harry and Ron got on the wrong side of him on our very first morning. I needed to warn Dean  about him. Filch found them trying to force their way through a door that unluckily turned out to be the entrance to the out-of-bounds corridor on the third floor. He wouldn't believe they were lost, he was sure they were trying to break into it on purpose, and was threatening to lock them into the dungeons when they were rescued by Professor Quirrell, who was passing by.

Filch owned a cat called Mrs. Norris, a scrawny, dust-colored creature with bulging, lamplike eyes just like Filch's.  She patrolled the corridors alone. Break a rule in front of her, put just one toe out of line, and she'd whisk off for Filch, who'd appear, wheezing, two seconds later. Filch knew the secret passageways of the school better than anyone (except perhaps the Weasley twins) and could pop up as suddenly as any of the ghosts. The students all hated him, and it was the dearest ambition of many to give Mrs. Norris a good kick.

And then, once you had managed to find them, there were the classes themselves. I soon realized that there was more to magic than I let on.

We had to study the night skies through our telescopes every Wednesday at midnight and learn the names of different stars and the movements of the planets. Three times a week we went out to the greenhouses behind the castle to study Herbology, with a dumpy little witch called Professor Sprout, where we learned how to take care of all the strange plants and fungi, and found out what they were used for.