The infuriating Miss Poppins

Chapter 2 - Order, Order

The attack of her heeled footsteps crashed and bounced against the pitted stone walls of the narrow fourth floor corridor. A bow-wave of Mary's fury lit the old iron torches just ahead of her. As her fury grew, she lashed out with her arms, the bursts of flame illuminating tapestries and the dark shadows of the cold stone passageway.

She had been sorted. By a hat. It wasn't even a cursed hat that at least made you want to do what it said, it was just a stupid charm. Wand magic! How pathetic. All the others had just eaten it up and gone off to bed with their stupid new identities. Mary slammed her heels harder as she turned the corner, denting the limestone ejecting small pinches of grit as she wandered around the castle. Furious. Furious. Furious.

The sight of a gryphon statue ahead of her, AGAIN, made her roar with anger. She was not aimless in her stomping, she had no choice but to take in the layout as she raged. The map had built itself in her head. This same statue was in 12 unique corridors, she kept lifting her head to see its stupid curved wings, anatomically ridiculous, beak-to-nose with her.

It had been an hour and a half since her neat black bun disappeared into the hat that had so offended her. She had approached the front of the warm Great Hall so impressed by the ancient magics around her, even the candles carried a magic she had never sensed before. It was all so alien and exciting! So much to explore, even the sorting hat's magic was different to what she expected.

If she was honest the description of the houses was a bit odd - the hat would make you brave and put you in Gryffindor, or cunning or wise, she could see why that's useful to start with, but how did it make you 'the rest'? Did that mean all other things than wise, brave or cunning? It seemed problematic, but this is a new magic she hadn't experienced yet.

As each student went under the hat it looked to just sit there doing not very much, until eventually the student emerged with their new robe colours announced by one of the four names, but other than that simple charm The Castle was casting, she could not see how the hat was changing the students themselves.

She got her answer as she walked up the steps, sat on the stool and the hat began to speak to her.

"Now then, Miss Poppins. There's a great curiosity here, my my and you understand the deep workings of magic, too. How unusual. I wonder..."

"Excuse me" she interrupted with her thoughts in the part of her brain she could feel the hat speaking to, "what on Earth does 'the rest' mean? I'm not sure if I want that." The hat was taken aback, and this reaction surprised Mary, too. She had assumed she was in conversation. Did the hat expect to just tell her who she was?

"Miss Poppins?" The hat could see her whole train of thought. "I have been sorting wizards for nearly a thousand years, it is not I who makes your character, but I detect it and evaluate you. Now please let me continue. You are brave, certainly..."

"What!!" Mary had interrupted again. "You 'evaluate' how? This is just a charm isn't it?" she removed the hat from her head to look at it. The Great Hall gasped. It hadn't announced a house yet. This was not normal.

As she rotated the hat in her hands, the tall, blonde witch at her side, Professor Merrythought, cringed and stepped forwards, leaning down to talk to Mary. Before she could speak, however, Mary had jammed the tatty hat back onto her head, patches and sewing squirming slightly into a more neat set of positionings. Professor Merrythought looked hard at the neat features of the little girl's blank face, she didn't seem very happy, but at least Mary was doing as she was expected to.

"I like blue." Mary stated simply, her mind totally clear of all the emotion that was present seconds earlier. The hat had been rendered speechless, not just by Mary's opposition, the first in its long years of sorting, but with the fact it could no longer read anything about Mary. It stalled. For several minutes. A silent battle between Mary's closed mind and the hat's attempts to penetrate it raged while from the outside all was serene and calm.

"RAVENCLAW" the hat eventually announced. The Ravenclaws applauded, perhaps slightly less enthusiastically than for the last Ravenclaw, given Mary's clear scowl at the announcement as she upended the hat off her head and landed it neatly back on the stool. None the less they had enough house pride to perform the ritual and Mary's robes turned blue on the inside as she joined their table.

She fumed again remembering. It had become quite clear that this school was much shallower than she had expected when she first felt The Castle's enchantment. The sorting ritual was easy to manipulate, there was no curse, just a silly charm. There was no house training, just a silly colour wheel. They didn't even make the statues different so everyone else could navigate by them. Just this same single statue they must have copied without any thought.

Mary was well aware that she was quite gifted in noticing details. For a while she considered that she had only met people who didn't care a single jot about all the signals she was sending them about her horror at their behaviour, but once she learned to speak her mind it became clear. People didn't notice anything. People had no standards. Putting at least 12 of these identical statues is just asking to make students late, at best incompetent, but I bet there's no protection on them either.

She glared at the statue of the gryphon, her newest evidence of the school's idiocy. She wanted trouble, yes, but she also wanted to fix the problem. She closed her eyes and let her fury build again, pulse pounding in her ears as they flushed a deep red. She had intended to twist the gryphon so that its tail feathers were pointing out and the beak scraped against the stone wall of its little alcove, however she felt much more resistance than she expected as she moved her nose to guide it. As if the gryphon intended to turn but was somehow latched like a gate. Once she found the charm, one of the feathers on the bird's left side was stuck in space, she popped the latch with her eyebrows and the statue turned and rose up, each brick the beak pointed at sliding out of the wall to create a spiral staircase.