Breakfast at Hufflepuff's open

The cold morning light beamed through the large oval windows of the great hall, and the background was abuzz with quiet conversation. Plates of scones, triangles of toast, eggs, an assortment of honey, jams, cheese and butter were laid out on the table. There was also hash, bangers and mash, oatmeal, salad, yogurt, fruit and veg bowls, pancakes, pots of tea and cups of coffee.

Janet sat at the Hufflepuff table hunched over a warm caffe mocha drizzled in chocolate syrup. Sure, it wasn’t the most nutritious breakfast, but Scottish temperatures were dropping lower every day - a far cry from the heatwave that had plagued England for the last three months. The cup was like. her own little portable heater. She shivered and hugged it closer. She got a bit too close and accidentally dipped her nose into it.

She immediately sat up and wiped the foam away, remembering she was currently an active participant of public society, not a member of the ambient furniture. She was sat near a group who were chatting about an upcoming trip to Hogsmeade village. Janet only knew it was where the Hogwarts express had stopped, and learned from listening in that it had a high street that third years and above could visit weekly. Janet sat straighter as they made mention of fake permission slips and maps. A map would be just what she needed to get around in this maze of a school.

At times she felt as if the corridors we’re alive and shifting about on purpose. Spacetime seemed warped and somewhat distorted in the wizarding world. The insides were always bigger, space borrowed, twisted up and stuffed about. Physics seemed like a wizard’s plaything. It was uncanny. Janet was overwhelmed with all the constant change and sheer chaos of it all – with all the flammable pomp and show and flying objects and students appearing and disappearing.

Asking someone for the date was a census on inconsistency. Sometimes Janet thought that Hogwarts had to be isolated in its own great big hourglass-like time-turner, like a castle in a snow globe. It certainly explained away its medieval qualities and the dated clothes; some wizards even dressed in polycarbonate buckled chrome monstrosities like they’d travelled back from a future of terrible fashion. The thin line between past and future seemed eroded and incorporeal.

No sooner than had Janet gotten her Hogwarts letter, she'd inherited her deceased grandma's parseltongue collection. The only book in the collection that mentioned Hogwarts was a novel called Ensnared by Salazar: a Legacy of Love in the Dark by Avalina Broderick-Shustermuck. The school was a footnote in a few chapters involving a chamber of secrets in the castle. The chamber was described as a grand architectural marvel of marble columns, with a romantic network of canals maintained by entrancing men and women whose lower halves were snakes. Apparently, it was where Salazar Slytherin trained his dark parseltongue apprentices, so it had an enchanting garden of giant snakes, evil plants and a gothic shadowed library bursting with whispering scripts written in the parseltongue language.

This interpretation was unique to the novel, as it was described in Hogwarts, a History and in A Study of Recent Developments in Wizardry as a decrepit inaccesable ruin located deep in the toilet plumbing that housed the smelly corpse of a Basilisk. Janet thought the chamber of secrets was the worst kept secret of all time, but the information on it was so bizarre, conflicting and cryptic that she just had to unearth more of its secrets. If it was underneath the school, the dungeons were her best bet. But, she didn’t want to get lost again.

She listened for more about this map, however the conversation had moved on. Drat. Janet licked more foam from her coffee. She had potions in the dungeons today. According to the dubious novel, speaking in parseltongue in a very specific spot in the dungeons revealed large wooden double doors engraved with snakes that slithered away to reveal a green tiled entryway lined with narrow water ducts and huge exotic wide-leaf plants.

It was charmed to have sunlight shining down on a flowing marble waterfall in the middle topped with a statue of Salazar Slytherin, which guarded the rest of the chamber. Apparently, you had to prick your finger on the trouser snake of the statue and let your blood drip into the waterfall. If you were a pureblood another hallway would reveal itself, but if you were a muggleton, the statue would turn into a snake and swallow you and bowel move you out of there. If finding it was as easy as hissing in some corridor, Janet just had to try. Call it Hufflepuff instincts.

First period was her first flying lesson though. As Janet was zoned out in thought, she didn't realise she was staring unseeingly at some poor student. Mortified, she snapped her gaze down and noticed her mocha had finally cooled enough to drink. She blew at it and took tentative sips, slipping into a comfy daydream about soaring through the clouds on a broomstick. But that didn’t sound very comfortable. Maybe it had a bicycle seat. Padded with bristles. Maybe skateboards could fly.

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