Grayson Wright
June 03, 2024 3:24 PM
Welcome to Aladren! by Grayson Wright
After the Feast, the Aladrens were gathered up by a tall and rather ordinary-looking wizard with graying hair, dark eyes, and an expression which somehow managed to hover between affable and anxious at almost all times. Just under sixteen years earlier, he had taken this job with every intention of remaining in it only a short time, and he was still trying to figure out how, exactly, it was that he was now three weeks away from his fiftieth birthday and still here.“Hello,” he said as he gathered up the Aladrens. To the first years specifically, he added, “I’m Professor Wright, head of Aladren - welcome to the House. If you’ll follow, follow me, I’ll take you to our common room and dormitories.”
The route was so familiar now that Professor Wright would not have been surprised to discover he could walk it blindfolded. Nevertheless, as he guided the new members of his little flock along, he made sure to point out details, useful bits of knowledge someone less familiar with the school could use to help navigate, until they reached the doors of the library.
“Most of your classmates,” he informed them, “will only hear that it's forbidden to tell outsiders about where the entrances to their dormitories are. You, though, will need to keep two secrets – most importantly, where the actual entrance to Aladren is, but also that the entrance is hidden here, in the library.”
He led them into Tarquin’s domain. “Unfortunately, I have to remind you that the library itself is not part of your common room, and you should follow all the same rules as every other student when you are inside the library," he informed them. "But I'd expect no less from anyone Sorted into Aladren. Neither will our librarian, Mr. Fox-Reynolds. So, on we go."
Sonora was young, as far as wizarding schools went, and its location had been even more remote from society when it was built than it was now; a regrettable consequence of this was the absence of the sort of ancient grimoires and hand-illuminated bestiaries that one might find in the libraries of the ancient European schools of magic. It did, however, contain rather good copies of a fair few of them, plus a wealth of more recent material, and thus it was a bit of a walk to the back wall and the section dedicated to zoology and magizoology. Once they finally reached it, he scanned the shelves and found the book he was looking for.
“The key to the door is here,” he said. “It looks like a book called Birds of Prey, and it has three horizontal velvet bands on its spine. To come in, you put your hand on the spine, like I’m doing now, and pull as though you were going to remove it from the shelf, like – “ he pulled on the book – “this.”
There was a sound of stone on stone and then the shelf began to move, first forward toward them and then outward, revealing an entrance. He gestured through it. “After you,” he invited the students.
The shelf slid back into place behind them as they entered a spacious room decorated primarily in blue and black. The color scheme was somewhat reminiscent of a bruise – or, given the study habits of some of the residents, perhaps the dark bags that could form around the eyes of someone who didn’t sleep enough for too extended of a period of time – but the furniture was comfortable and the space well-lit. The room was dotted with sets of tables and chairs, a few sofas, and bookshelves on several walls. He had looked over the shelves when he took over as Head of House and had made a few additions, so the common room library covered a variety of interests students might have - subjects related to magic, but also other subjects, including history and literature and Muggle math and science. He had also decided to have several periodicals delivered to the common room for general use. The first issues of these, along with hodgepodges from earlier deliveries and his own, older collection of such things, were on a few stands around the room. He led the new kids to the rug in front of the hearth and waved for them to take seats in the immediate area. Since he was not exactly declaiming to a vast crowd here, he took an armchair himself so he was more or less on their level instead of looming over them from the rug.
"Once again, welcome to Aladren," he said. "As your Head of House, I hope you'll come to see Aladren as a second home. This is our common room - where you can sit, meet with others in our House, do your homework, play some chess or other board games…more or less anything you want, so long as it isn't so loud it disrupts everyone else, and if it's not anything that will end with me being forced to explain to the headmaster why unidentified substances appear to have permanently bonded with the ceiling here,’’ he joked. “And of course you’re allowed to spend time with friends or relatives in other Houses in school common areas, like the Gardens or the MARS facility, of course.”
"My office is through this door here. There's an outside entrance from the corridor around the bend, too, if you're with someone from another House or just already passing that way." By which he really meant: if you'd rather not advertise to everyone in the common room that you want a word with me; he assumed that would be obvious enough without an explicit statement even with first years. "If you have any questions about the school or any other concerns, you're welcome to come talk to me - as Head of House, my job is to act as your default contact on the staff, and to act as the middleman between you and the administration, when that's needed," he explained. "However, any professor would be happy to help you if you prefer, or if I'm not available, and our House prefects are also here to help you. Their names are Phillip Carson – who’s also just become one of our Head Students; well-done, Phil – and Gwendolyn Brockert and Nausicaa Scapetello.”
He was fairly certain he managed the last name as smoothly as the first two. Miss Scapetello was one of those students...she didn’t say or do anything overtly disrespectful enough to cross the line into rule-breaking, but it was hard not to pick up on the idea that she regarded the rest of the school with something less than fondness. He suspected it would be better, much better, for the new students to mostly stick with Phil and Gwendolyn, who were either much more easygoing children or at least better at faking it, but he couldn’t exactly say that, could he? Best just to move along. They were Aladrens, anyway, not Teppenpaws; going to the prefects crying over homesickness was not really a practice which had seemed terribly common when he'd been a student here, and nothing about the state of the House that he could observe from his current, admittedly half-adjacent position made him think that was too likely to have changed.
"The dorms are through that door over there." He pointed. "When you get in, you'll see there's a hallway that goes two ways. Dorms for girls are down the hall to your right, and dorms for boys are down the hall to your left. You can only walk down the hallway that contains the room you've been assigned to. If you walk down the other one, you'll fall through the floor and end up back in the common room. They tell me it's not a very soft landing, so I'd recommend you don't do that," he said matter-of-factly. "On a similar note, beds are enchanted to be one-occupant-only and it's not an especially pleasant rule to break, either. Your room has your year number on it, so it should be easy to find. The second years will be in all your classes as well as being your neighbors, so I'd recommend being good neighbors," he added. "Curfew every night is at ten, breakfast becomes available at 6:30 in the morning. You'll need to be inside Aladren between those hours, though as long as you're reasonably quiet, it's up to you to decide when to sit in the common room and when to go to bed." This would be an early test in self-management for them; he expected a lot of droopy heads as students from all Houses experimented with the new freedom within the first month, but they'd probably learn soon enough...and then unlearn it, of course, as soon as they started approaching their CATS, but that was still four years in the future.
"That's a lot of information, I know, so you'll probably be glad to hear that's the end of this speech," he said. "If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them. If you don't have any questions, though, then this meeting is adjourned - you can look around the common room, or go see your dorms. Your trunks should be in your rooms by now." The elves had a way of timing things to a nicety; it was a bit disconcerting, really, if he thought about it for too long.
OOC: OOC: Welcome to Aladren! You can now post your character on any of the boards, though they do not have access to other common rooms outside of HoH offices. You can also continue your conversations at the Feast thanks to the magic of what we call "fuzzy time" - as long as two threads are supposed to happen at different times in character, you can write them at the same time as an author. If you have any questions, just ask in Chatzy or on the OOC board or in Discord. Have fun!
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Grayson Wright
Welcome to Aladren!
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