Closed Nobody told me there were tentacles Open More people good

Felix was laying on the ground when he heard a scream (he fell and then was too lazy to get back up). He sits up, a bit disoriented as he attempts to figure out where the sound came from.

That's a decently easy task. He stands, brushing grass off of his knees, and walks a short ways in one direction, quickly coming across the screamer. Said screaming kid is sitting beside the lake, staring at one of the giant squid's tentacles.

Felix is barely afraid of the squid anymore. He sees it through the common room windows often, so it's honestly lost all of it's scariness.

He decides to walk up to the kid, where she's still screaming her head off. Probably the entirety of Hogwarts has heard the sound by now.

Hoping not to startle her, he approaches and taps her shoulder lightly. "Are you okay or...?" his words trail off simply because he is still trying to figure out if she is screaming about the squid or something else. Maybe one of the grindylows scared her. She looks like she was dipping her feet in the lake, so that's a possibility.

He almost reaches his arm out to touch the tentacle, but has his shoes on, and can't reach without walking into the water a bit.

@Felix Hawthorne

She was reaching a peak in her screaming when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She jumped into the air thinking it was a tentacle. Don't question her logic. She was running away screaming in an instant.

It was only after she'd gotten about 20 feet away that she realized it almost certainly wasn't a tentacle.

She stopped abruptly and turned around. It was a boy. Older than her but not by a lot. She felt ashamed.

She looked back at the lake again and suddenly the tentacle didn't seem so scary. Her (small) natural curiosity took hold and she wondered if it was a giant squid or an octopus.

She turned back to the boy. She walked back and said "Ummmm..... sorry about that.... the... the tentacle freaked me out......." She lowered her head, sure he would be annoyed at her for messing up whatever he was doing.

She didn't like meeting people. Especially not when she had just screamed her head off about some random tentacle. She tried to hold still waiting for his response but she couldn't take it ran off. She hid behind a tree that was much too small to hide behind and hoped he wouldn't follow.

He tries not to laugh, he really does. But eventually, he does let out a quiet snicker. It's just a slightly absurd situation. To his credit, he didn't keel over with laughter, something he almost certainly would have done a year or two ago.

"It's fine." Felix answers, and successfully stops laughing. "The squid can scare people sometimes, but he's really not dangerous. It's actually quite neat when he comes up to the dungeon windows.". The first time he saw the squid's tentacle in the shallows, he had poked it, then nearly jumped out of his skin when it moved.

"Uh... what's your name?" he's pretty sure that it's something that starts with an 'S', but he really hadn't been paying attention during the sorting this year.

He had been pretty bored before this, and had been hoping for something to spice up the day. This is certainly not the average stroll on the grounds. Guess he got his wish, if not how he expected or wanted to get it. At least the kid isn't crying. He doesn't know what to do when people are crying. He just stands there awkwardly and hopes that it will stop. Screaming however, he can deal with.

@Felix Hawthorne

She heard him snicker and flushed up with humiliation. What a terrible way to meet someone.

"It's fine. The squid can scare people sometimes, but he's really not dangerous. It's actually quite neat when he comes up to the dungeon windows."

So it was a squid. She shyly moved out from behind her tiny tree. "Oh......." It was nice to hear that she wasn't the first person to get scared.... probably the first to scream her head off so loud that the whole school could have heard, though.

She got a closer look at the boy. Her original assessment of him being not much older than her held true. He was broad shouldered and his hair was curly and a little messy. His eyes were a yellowy-gray color and he had freckles on his face.

"Uh... what's your name?"

It didn't seem like he was mad, so that was a start. "I'm Silva... what about you?" She had never seen him before. Then again she hadn't seen most of the people at this school. She hadn't been at school very long. In fact she had only met three people. She really needed to start talking to people, but her shyness forbade it.

"...I really am sorry for disturbing you.." She knew she'd already apologized but she felt like she needed to say it again

“My name’s Felix. You didn’t really disturb me. I was just laying on the ground because I was too lazy to get up after I fell. So not really anything important. I am surprised there isn’t more people here though, that was literally the second-loudest scream I have heard in my life.” Felix takes a quick look around, to see if any other person is coming to investigate the noise. It does not look like it. Odd.

The girl seems embarrassed. Fair. Screaming loud enough for the entire school to hear you is generally and embarrassing situation, he thinks. Felix can’t say that he, personally, has ever experienced such a thing, but it’s similar to other situations him or people he knows have been in. It just seems like something that could possibly be embarrassing. Especially if you are new to said entire school. In his first week he had barely known four people, two of them he never really saw once he got off of the train, and one he barely talked to after that because he wasn’t really brave enough to approach when she was hanging out with her other friends.

“What house are you in?” Doesn’t seem like a Gryffindor, and he did pay some attention to the new Slytherin kids. That leaves Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, but his guess is towards Ravenclaw, because (yes, this is his generalization) mostly all of the Hufflepuff students he’s met have been pretty talkative and annoying.

@Felix Hawthorne

“My name’s Felix. You didn’t really disturb me. I was just laying on the ground because I was too lazy to get up after I fell. So not really anything important. I am surprised there isn’t more people here though, that was literally the second-loudest scream I have heard in my life.”

So he wasn't mad. That was a relief. She smiled weakly at him.

When she was younger she had gone camping. That was back when she had been in girl scouts. They had been sleeping in cabins and using a relatively nice bathroom. She had been going to the bathroom with one of her friends. She was leaving her stall when she had seen a huge black snake sitting right by the sinks. That was where her fear of snakes had come from. Ever since then she had been completely terrified of them. Tentacles were just too close to snakes for her liking so she was scared of them.

“What house are you in?”

"Ravenclaw.. you?" She hadn't been sure she would like Ravenclaw originally, but now she liked it a lot. She didn't think he was a Ravenclaw because she'd never seen him before. Maybe Slytherin or Gryffindor? She didn't really know anything about them except that Gryffindor was brave and Hufflepuff was really nice.

“Slytherin.” he answers, grinning.
He’s definitely glad to be in Slytherin. He hasn’t been sure at the beginning, but he really hadn’t known anything about any of the houses when he started at Hogwarts. Felix doesn’t particularly like having just the glass between the common room and the lake, because although he knows it probably magically reinforced, he’s just seen way too many movies where that is a huge basis for problems.

Felix also loves snakes. Sure, sometimes they’ve scared him pretty bad, and could be a threat to his chickens, but by themselves, they’re really neat.
One time, he and his dad had been putting down a tiny trampoline in the yard for the winter, and his dad had thrown him one of the boxes to put stuff in. A snake came flying out of the thrown box, and Felix’s first thought was that it’s head had been broken open, because there was a lot of blood around that region. He jumped out of the way with a rather embarrassing yelp. He could deal with leaving snakes, he could deal with blood, but for some reason that day, the idea of a bloody dead snake really freaked him out. It turned out that the snake had been holding a toad, which was still struggling around, hence all of the blood.

Another time, a huge garter snake had been slithering around the floor of the kybo, and he’d forgotten to bring his flashlight, so all he heard was the slithering and saw a few glints of scales. The park where he’d been camping was known for having many types of snakes, so it had unnerved him to not be able to see what sort it was. Felix had left that outhouse quick. All of the other Scouts had agreed that it was a bit freaky that there was a snake in the outhouse, and had asked the Scouter if he could get it out the next day.

@Felix Hawthorne

“Slytherin.”

She had seen the Slytherin table using a lot of green. Maybe that meant they were into nature? "Umm. What is Slytherin about?" She asked. She had only interacted with Ravenclaws so far.

She looked around. "It's a wonder nobody else heard the scream" It had been very loud... Maybe the grounds were just really empty today. She looked up at the sky. The sun was completely set. Uh oh. Looks like I won't be getting back to the common room before dark. She figured it was still probably only around 7, but with how much she got lost it would take her an hour to get back to the common room. She probably needed to start heading back.

Then again she had just met this boy and she didn't think it would be super nice to just leave right after screaming in his face. She decided to stay out a little longer. "So um... what year are you? At Hogwarts I mean.... I umm. I'm in my 1st year.. um if you couldn't tell..."

She felt her face heating up again. She was totally embarrassing herself. She had now encountered two major magical things at Hogwarts. The squid and a ghost. The ghost she had charged with her friend Yolanda. That had been embarrassing but she had done it with someone else. It had been kind of fun too. This time she'd just screamed. Why.

“Slytherin? To be completely honest, I have no idea what it’s about. Something about cunning and ambition or something like that? I don’t think that it really fits me that well in that case though.” Felix tilts his head thinking for a moment. It’s getting late. He should probably start heading back soon, that would give him a margin p leeway for random whims on the way tot he common room, but that’s not his main concern currently. His current main concern is- well actually, he doesn’t really know. He’ll go with being mainly, currently concerned about this girl, who screamed so bloody loud because of a freaking tentacle.

Anyways, Felix has broken curfew enough times without getting into too much trouble so far, and if he has not problem with breaking the curfew just a teeny bit on a regular night, he has plenty of time to get back to the dorms.

“I’m in second year. First was my guess for you, though I was betting on a eighty percent chance of being right about you being in first year, six percent chance you were actually in my year and I somehow never noticed you, and a fourteen percent chance that you were an older year. So yay! I was right about that, I suppose.”.

Silva’s face has gone pink, probably from embarrassment or something along those lines.

Huh. Silva. That’s a neat name. Sort of like Silias. His mind starts wandering, but he manages to catch it before it goes to far. He’s getting better at not losing himself in thought mid-convo. He and Matthew still have the deal of ‘whenever one of us gets lost in our heads the other can shake some sense into them’.