For the Greater Good || Tom Riddle ||

Chapter Two: The Banquet

"Now, please settle down. I am sure you are all quite famished. May the banquet begin!"

The feast was greater than anything Gwendolyn could have ever imagined. The golden goblets filled with sparkling, bubbly drink and mouth-watering delicacies appeared out of thin air. Sweet aromas wafted about the room, surely coming from the stacks of confections that sat atop the lacquered table. Everything looked so delicious, Gwendolyn didn't quite know where to start.

She was startled when her thoughts were interrupted.

"Where are your robes?" a polite voice asked inquisitively.

Gwendolyn looked down at her red cloak with a slight frown and shrugged. "I didn't have much time to stop by-" she paused for a second before looking at the dark haired girl sitting next to her, "-Diagon Alley, is it?"

The girl nodded.

"Well," she continued, "I didn't have much time to make a stop to purchase my robes. I was hoping Headmaster Dippet could lend me pair to wear in the meantime. We didn't have separate Houses at Durmstrang so I wasn't expecting such segregation of colors," she said as she gestured around the Great Hall. The different Houses' colors were all prominently featured.

The dark haired girl let out a small laugh. "I am not so sure I would want to wear your coat either," she jokingly poked at the material. "The lining looks awfully itchy."

"Oh, trust me. It is," Gwendolyn deadpanned.

The girl smiled. "You can borrow some of mine for the time being, don't worry," she said as she extended her hand. "Jane, Jane Thompson. I am a sixth year here."

Jane. A Muggle name.

"You can call me Gwen."

The girls shook hands and exchanged small smiles.

A boy with cow licked, mousy, russet colored hair and a freckled face framed with glasses peered around the side of Jane's head. "Did you hear my earlier comment about the Hatstall? Well, even if you did, you probably didn't understand what I meant," he explained with a breathy chuckle. "A Hatstall is an archaic term for a student whose sorting took more than five minutes, because the Sorting Hat found them to have a personality equally suited to different Hogwarts Houses," he recited, as if reading out of a dictionary.

Gwen dipped her brow and smiled slyly as she grabbed a buttered roll off a pewter plate. "Really? How interesting. And here I have always thought myself to be a stick-in-the-mud."

"It seems the Sorting Hat found something quite different," Jane mused. Her stare flitted to the left and she cried, "Where are my manners! This is Simon."

"Simon Selwyn," he introduced with a quirky, crooked smile.

Gwen nodded and replied with pleasantries. "Nice to meet you."

"So," Simon questioned, "if you don't mind me asking. Why do you have an English accent if you attended school in the north? Do you have family from around here?"

The question caught Gwen slightly off guard, but she regained her composure. "I was raised by my grandmother, and she was raised in England. We lived here briefly when I was a child."

"Hmm." Simon blinked. Gwen noticed that his green eyes were rather large, almost as large as an owl's! She could also tell he was a very curious and slightly peculiar boy. He had a smidge of jam on his sleeve and an ink stain on his white collared shirt. Gwen also noticed that his tie was crooked. She desperately wished he would fix it.

"Do tell," he continued with genuine enthusiasm, "do visitors to Durmstrang actually have to comply to memory charms that erase their knowledge of how they got there? Is the place really that secretive?"