There's no troll in the dungeon || Patrol + Open

September 2nd, 1920
Hogwarts Castle, Dungeon corridors
11:32pm

There had been a noise. It was his job to find the noise.

It was the second night into the term and already reports of a strange noise coming from the dungeon corridors had been filed. How was it possible that someone had already complained of a noise in the hallway? More importantly, why did people already feel the need to drop things into his letterbox?

And so he walked, grilled cheese sandwich in hand, the bottom of his shoes echoing down the dark hallway with each step he took.

Emil was expecting the first week on the job to be somewhat quiet, really. His classes were one of the only things he had prepared for fully but his Head of House duties were more reactionary than he was used to. He knew there had been upheavel at Hogwarts just recently. Part of his deal in working at the school was to participate in repairing the wards that once held together the school. There were more gifted spellcasters staffed in the castle, of course, but few researched what he did. Few knew their way around potions as well as he did, he figured.

But all of that came second to this cursed role of wandering the halls, looking for some sort of rat or troll or mooncalf on the loose. It was his patrol zone and he'd be lying if he didn't hear the noises of someone sneaking about from his own office. But he never thought it rose to the level of taking action. He just wanted to eat his somewhat cold sandwich in peace as the finishing touches in his office were conjured.

He was so out of sorts, concentrating on conjuring and sandwiches that he had even forgotten to light up the hallway using his wand. Auras shined brightly enough no matter what amount of ambient lighting the corridors had. That fact seemed to have tuned him out to the fact that others might not see him wandering the halls, looking for the trouble that summoned him from the comforts of his office. That was until he heard the noise once more. At the corner of the corridor the unmistakable light of an aura flooded through.

'Yep,' he thought. 'Definitly not a troll.'

"Excuse me, young one." The man called out flatly, still under the cover of the darkness present in the dungeons.

"Do you mind coming out? I'd cast lumos but I've got my hands full with my sandwich, you see. I'd rather not reach for my wand if I have to."

She was making noise. She wasn't supposed to be making any noise.

Hera had left the dorms wearing slippers, to guard her feet against the cold, but quickly found that their soles clicked against the stone floors as if she was playing a game of Blind Man's Bluff against everyone in the castle. It was only her second night and, already, she was botching her small rebellion. Going back to her dorm to return the slippers had meant sneaking back in unnoticed in order to sneak back out again, to be able to sneak in a second time later. But the correct way to sneak out somewhere was to only sneak out and back in once each. Any extra sneaks was an extra risk of noises that got noticed.

Walking on the floor was one thing. Doors were loud. It was a rookie's mistake she'd made, and she hoped adding in more door opening to her night wouldn't cost her.

At first she'd tried burying the slippers into her pockets, except they were too fat to fit. Tiny slippers and fat pockets, that was the real solution! Though, lacking any of those, the girl had gone back, to put her clicking footwear inside by the common room entrance. Then returned to the darkness with one arm out to test the air around herself for wall decorations. Better to tap a sudden suit of armor that to blindly walk into it in the dark.

Hera's mother, Thea, would have shouted herself hoarse if she'd seen how purple her daughter's feet had become walking bare in the night. But that was part of the game, wasn't it? Alone, in an ancient castle, about as far from home as she'd ever been, it felt like Hera's bones could hear the wind in the draughty halls calling to them. Like the land equivalent of a siren's song, begging a lonely wanderer to take the risk...

... And just keep walking. You never knew what you might find. No parents were around.

But bones wouldn't hear any more than the song. Hera was careful to let her ears do most of the work as she gained another metre after another. This was born from experience. The first night sneaking out could never be about the destination. The first sneak was a mapping expedition. Gentle footsteps, listen. Gentle footsteps, and listen. A girl had to learn which wooden boards creaked, which stone tile was cracked, or how closely one could hug the walls without being abducted into a falling tapestry, somehow.

And nobody in the castle knew her enough to know that she was likely to be out of bed doing it. If Hogwarts was going to be a home for a year then Hera Redcliff wanted to know it like she knew her home. Knowing the tower for full moon nights wasn't enough.

Hera's outstretched hand touched a piece of armor on display. And, as she shifted her arm, her hard thumbnail tapped against another part of the metal with a clink that might as well have been a foghorn in the emptiness. Her brain's cockpit locked out all logic and promptly handed the keys over to blind-bloody-panic, as her mousey footsteps echoed below her sprinting legs.

She pressed her back to a pillar when the man's voice spoke. Something inside her hoped that the familiarity of the man's voice could mean that she had an advantage against a howler from her mum than if it had belonged to anybody else. But she couldn't know it for sure. The fact that nobody at the school knew her meant she, too, knew none of them.

Maybe the school had dungeons for a reason...

Be proper, her mother's nag-induced instincts said to her. Be proper. People are kinder to a proper girl.

Hera stepped around the pillar to reveal herself to the professor and gave a nervous curtsy. "Hello, professor Roan," she said. "Isn't it a nice night out?"

"Hello, professor Roan, isn't it a nice night out?"

The professor watched as his youngest, quite possibly smallest Slytherin stepped out of the pillar and into his view, curtsy and all.

'Hera... Redcliff, I believe. Yes, that sounds right.' The considerable decline of the roster this year left few for Emil to remember. Add to that that the tiny girl barely stood out among the small crowd of Slytherins that first night in the common room and it would be near-impossible for him not to know who she was. And then he noticed the other things.

Her feet were barefoot. That was a strange occurance in and of itself. "A nice night out?" he thought as his next step was to look around the dungeons for a window he must have missed during his walk. Had she actually been outside this evening, or was it just common courtesy misused? Then there was the casualness of her greeting. Surely the eleven-year old was aware of the curfew imposed on all students, and yet the casualness of her greeting left him wondering if it was just audaciousness or if she was another among the collection of odd birds in the castle.

And here he was, in charge of them. Emil might have underestimated how much of this job was actually teaching versus babysitting.

"Miss Redcliff, I don't believe we've had the... pleasure of meeting face to face." Regardless of whether it was or not, it would be polite to return her politeness. Merlin knew there were enough children in the castle who were rather rambunctious and a polite rule-breaker trumped a rambunctious one anytime. "I would have preferred to have met you personally under better circumstances, of course. Maybe not breaking curfew, or with shoes?"

He looked down at her, kneeling slightly to lower himself down to her level. There was no need to yell at the moment nor get angry. A first year on her second night sneaking out surely wasn't the best sign of what was to come behaviorally, but there was no death or destruction of property damage. Yet. As far as he knew. "Did you lose your shoes? Or your sense of direction? You're quite a ways from the common room where you should be sleeping, Miss Redcliff."