Daisy Potter and the Love Triangle at Hogwarts (Book 1, Harry Potter ff)

Chapter 7 - First Day

When I woke up the next morning in my dormitory, I was quite surprised. I had had a distant thought that maybe it was all a dream, it was so impossible.

No one else was awake yet. Hermione, Lavender, and Parvati were still huddled under their bedsheets.

I yawned and threw on my Hogwarts robes. I was very proud of the blazing red and gold I was wearing.

I sauntered down the spiral staircase, and past all the other girls' dormitories to the common room.

There were very few people already up.

Fred and George were sitting by one of the windows.

"Hey, look, it's Daisy!" Fred said to George, and George grinned and beckoned me over.

"So, I guess you'll be wanting to know all the secret passageways and stuff? George asked.

"Yeah!" I said, surprised that they knew this.

"Well, on the first week, we'll let you explore, and find them out for yourself. If you haven't found them all by next Monday, we'll tell you them." Fred grinned.

"Challenge accepted." I smirked.

"Well, we'd better tell you about the doors and staircases. We don't want you to get lost, do we?" George said innocently. But I knew what he was up to ... he wanted to see if I'd use any of the doors' and staircases' secrets for pranking ... well, he's right!

So we went through a tutorial about how some doors were just walls pretending to be doors, how some of them you need to ask them politely if you want to get though them, and about how some open if you tickle them in just the right place. Also, that some of them are locked tight, and you'd have to use the spell 'Alohomara' to get through.

Then there were the staircases. Some of them move and switch to different places. Some just go somewhere different on a Friday. Most have missing, vanishing, or trick steps. There were wide, swishing staircases, and narrow, rickety ones. There were a hundred and forty two staircases altogether at Hogwarts.

I noticed that they didn't tell me exactly WHICH staircases and doors these were ...

I'd been hearing sounds of movement from the upstairs rooms for about ten minutes now, and Harry came thundering down the stairs with Ron at the same time Hermione, Lavender, and Parvati came down from our dormitory.

"Ready to go, Daisy?" Harry asked brightly.

"Ready to get lost, you mean." Fred and George chorused.

"You're on!" Harry and I said simultaneously.

Ron, Hermione, Lavender, and Parvati looked at us weirdly.

As we made our way downstairs, I remembered what Fred and George had told me. When I saw a vanishing step, I warned the others and jumped it. When we came across a door that wouldn't budge, I used 'Alohomara', tickled it, or asked it politely. We only went down the wrong staircase or corridor three times. We got down to the Entrance Hall amidst whispers of, "Look, there, it's Daisy Potter!"

"And look, there's Harry Potter!"

"Where?"

"Next to the kids with the ginger and the bushy hair!"

"Did you see their faces?"

"Did you see their scars?"

I met Terry on the way down the last marble staircase. He had obviously just come down from Ravenclaw tower.

"It's bloody brilliant!" Terry whooshed. "Its door is just like any other door, only you have to answer a riddle to get inside! And once you get inside, the common room's all like blue and library-like and everything, and there's this massive window looking out over the grounds, and-"