what's happening to me? open

Mary was quiet for a little, but seemed to snap back into it fairly fast. Hopefully she wasn't bored. Wait, she wasn't bored, was she? That would be bad.
She seemed to have been doing that a lot though, going quiet or just not replying right away, even from the start of all this, so it could just be her thing. Felix used to do that a lot too. Got too busy in his head and forgot what he was doing. Maybe she was like that?

Whatever it was, she asked another question. "I've heard the Slytherin dorms have live snakes for decorations. Is that true?"
See, that would be interesting for sure. Might have some ethical problems there though. How would you even keep the snakes in place? If they were just roaming around some kid would probably mess with them and cause issues, but he didn't know how much space they needed if they were confined.

"There's not any decorative ones, as far as I know. Dunno if that'd be allowed. It'd be like someone eating their country's national animal. It's probably happened but it's also probably frowned upon by a lot of people." Was it? Was there any rules about that? He didn't really know, but figured it was a safe guess anyway. It did seem a little weird to have a snake as an emblem and then mistreat actual snakes.

"There's a few people with pet snakes though, and sometimes they're out and about." It was mostly just the parseltongue students that had snakes (there were others who had them at home, but weren't allowed to bring them). That seemed unfair, but it was probably just a safety thing.

"Honestly most of the decorations are pretty default, and anything else has been put up by students, so it's more inside the dorm" really, he'd only been in the Regulus dorm, so he couldn't exactly speak for the others. However, the people in his dorm definitely seemed to enjoy decorating, and sometimes that leaked out into the common room as well.

"True. Hogwarts does kinda put those books to shame." Mary said next. Felix considered that for a moment. That had been part of it, but there were other things that bothered him too.

"It's mostly logistical problems, actually. For the ones that cover more magicky subjects, at least. Like, there's some things that just wouldn't work. Before I knew about magic I could just go all oh it's magic it's unexplainable, deal with it," sure, hand-wavey magic and science stuff had still bothered him before, but he ignored that for the moment and continued. "But now I know there's stuff that just doesn't happen. Or isn't possible. So there's less, you know, plausible deniability" Unless there were other active magical systems in the modern world, there was a lot of books that would just be debunked immediately by the professors.

"And, I mean, there's some fantasy books that are still way more interesting than this. I mean, I've been here three years and have yet to see a single dragon. Meanwhile I can pick up the most generic book and bam!—" he mimed an explosion, "—there they are. Smaug, mainly. But some others too."

He crossed his fingers. "Still holding out hope for that in real life though. Someday."

At Mary's time comment, Felix went to check his watch, and it turned out he didn't have his watch. Well, that sucked. Whatever, he looked up, and it certainly did look like it was getting later. Not too late, but it was definitely darker then it'd been when he'd first showed up here. "Yeah, getting a bit later at least. Think we should start heading in?"

Felix didn't know how long they'd been out here. He'd kind of just been wandering aimlessly before talking to Mary, and then he'd lost track of the time.