Surveying the School Solo

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 anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot

- Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

If adjusting to the idea that wizards and witches exist was a challenge for Hui Ming, it was nothing compared to the odd and often borderline insane ideas that the wizards seemed to treat as mundane and commonplace. It was enough to drive the generally quiet Chinese boy to tears.

But even wizards themselves could not compare to the absolute monstrosity that was Hogwarts itself. After the summer, the bespectacled boy had hoped for some sanity. Access to information in the library, more teachers around, and supervision would surely quiet everything down. Alas, the bespectacled boy’s plans for normalcy were foiled, yet again. This time, it was by the school itself.

Hogwarts loomed large and had a mighty reputation in the wizarding world. And Hui Ming was quickly understanding that this reputation was well earned. Just as he had started abhorring the magical world, the magic of the school itself seemed hell-bent of pushing that abhorrence to outright hatred.

[i[Nothing[/i] about this school made any sense: staircases that led to some place one day lead somewhere completely different on another. Doors would hide themselves, or lock themselves unless tickled, or not be doors at all but walls pretending.

W h a t

Then there were the portraits, whose living subjects could not only interact with the world, but move freely from one portrait to the other. It was enough to make someone’s head spin. Or it should have been, but it appeared that he was the only one fazed by these eccentricities.

Determined not to be the only one who seemed out of his depth by this apparent chaos, Hui Ming had decided on his first day of classes that he would spend some time to familiarize himself to the rabid nonsense that was this castle, and that is what he set out to do: systematically scout and map the accursed castle, multiple times, until he could navigate it on his own without issue.

Exploring the ground floor had been simple enough; the library, the two halls being the main locations of interest on the floor. It had not caused him much problems at all. Buoyed by his initial success and brimming with confidence, the first year had attempted to explore the first floor on the weekend. Surely, if he could familiarize himself with the ground floor in a couple of days, the first floor could not be that much more difficult?

Hui Ming had been certain that he was in for a day of exploring abandoned classrooms. At worst, he had expected that he would end up bumping into a senior or a professor. Troublesome, but how bad could it really be at the end of the day?

Instead, he found himself in what was clearly an abandoned and long-forgotten section of the school, and no idea how he had come here. He had just been wandering the corridors and looking into the many, many, many classrooms that were in this school.

It made sense, in a way. Clearly, the castle had been converted from its initial use as a fortification. Ming very carefully did not think about the alternative – the idea that the castle had been designed for a much larger student populace than the 700* or so in attendance, and the numbers had been whittled down for some reason or another – and nodded to himself. With the school being as underpopulated as it was, there would be several sections that were is disuse and thus neglected and allowed to fall into disrepair. These unused and forgotten places would surely be the best place to make a small hidey holy, away from prying eyes should he need it.

It was that thought process that led Ming into the abandoned bathrooms on (what he thought was) the First Floor.