Open Exploration on the mind

Gryffindor. Gryffindor. Gryffindor. Gryffindor. The single word continued to reverberate around Chase's head on repeat. Gryffindor. He hadn't been expecting to be placed in Gryffindor, that's for sure. Gryffindor. He wasn't sure what to make of this revelation. Gryffindor. How did he fit the makings of a Gryffindor? He barely even liked to go outsides sometimes, he wasn't really adventurous, and courageous? He spent half of his life scared of his own family, locked away in his room. Not exactly Gryffindor qualities. Maybe the hat had been malfunctioning and somebody would come and find him soon and tell him about the mistake.

Chase sighed to himself as he pushed open the doors of the castle and made his way out onto the Great Lawn. He had decided to venture outside today, not wanting to waste his first day inside, and maybe he'd even be able to make a friend. He would have to get started on that quickly if he wanted to achieve his personal goal of making enough friends to make a new family, and he would have to start planning ways to never have to go back home again. Maybe the Headmaster would let him stay at Hogwarts over the break. With another sigh, Chase plopped onto the ground and took a quick look around.

Peregrine had a new book in hand, this time about a dragon prince. It was a companion piece to the unicorn princess series and of course, because it involved dragons, Peregrine was naturally enthusiastic about it. Uncle Gaius had bemoaned how trashy it was, of course, and Peregrine had hastily agreed - but he had relented and bought it for her when she had said it was a guilty pleasure. If she really was a Gryffindor, she had to be a little bit more honest and speak her mind more. And not be so anxious about the people around her.

Of course, that was easier said than done, and in her aimless wandering while reading her foot suddenly hit the side of a person on the ground. Peregrine jumped back, bringing her book up to her face and then slowly, cautiously peering over it to the person she'd accidentally kicked. "Oh, Merlin, I'm so, so sorry," she blurted, face reddening with shame. The book didn't help matters in the slightest.

Chase was lost in thought as something rather hard suddenly made contact with him, sending him sprawling over onto his side. Before he even sat up, he found himself getting angry, and blurted out the first thing that came to mind towards this new person. "Oi! Watch where you're going will you! I'm sitting right here!" He said, anger plain across his face, all thoughts of Gryffindor gone from his mind and just a single unrelenting thought that he needed to make this person regret their decision to absentmindedly wander into him. "Are your eyes painted on or something, it's not like I'm some kind of dwarf!" He stood up now, and immediately turned to face them, leveling a glare right into their eyes.

Chase would probably regret acting like this later, but for now he couldn't see past the indignation this careless person had leveled upon his person by not paying any attention to where they were going. He was reasonably tall for his age, definitely not the kind of person that you would somehow not see unless you just weren't paying any kind of attention at all. Chase suddenly spotted the book that the other person was holding, and all of a sudden he was curious what she was holding and what it was about, the single string of curiousity overriding his previous outrage. "Is that a book? What is it about?" He asked, like all of the mean things he had said before had never happened.

Peregrine knew she'd messed up and could basically feel her soul leaving her body with shame. This was yet another thing she'd play out in her head as a reminder of times she'd done things that were embarrassing or shameful. She wanted to sink into the ground, mumbling 'sorry' a couple of times. But that wasn't the bold Gryffindor she was supposed to be. If she stood her ground, though, then she'd be falling into the trap of letting her temper get the better of her, like when she'd have enough of Percy and snap at him (and be the one who got in trouble, even though he was the one pushing her buttons to the point where she would get mad). "Who sits on the ground just in the middle of the lawn anyway," she muttered in between apologies. But when he suddenly changed tone, Peregrine was somehow equally as annoyed by that. She practically snapped the book behind her back, narrowing her eyes. "None of your business," she shot back, before sighing. No, that was too rude. "Dragons."

Chase scrunched up his nose at the girl, and completely skipped over her response about him sitting on the ground. In his mind, it didn't even require a reply at all. He was entirely focused on the book now, and was about to start pleading his case for finding out what book it was when she relented and gave him a single word, which sent his eyes wider than the moon as he started moving around her to try and get a better look at the book. "DRAGONS?!" Chase practically shouted at the girl, deciding then and there that he was going to get that book out of her hands so he could have a look at it. "I love dragons! Can I look?!" He said, and then added, completely forgetting his earlier thought about ignoring her sentiment, "You owe me since you very rudely ran into me when I was just minding my own business living my best life on the lawn and along you came, your head in a book and your mind off somewhere else apparently!" and then stuck his tongue out at the new person, holding out his hand expectantly for the book, completely oblivious to how he may have come across.

Well, Peregrine's opinion might have gone up a point or two at a fellow dragon fan, she couldn't lie. "You do? Do you have a favourite? Personally I really like the Antipodean Opaleye, especially because it's from here but they're really beautiful," she rambled, her own annoyance briefly subsiding at a potential fellow fan of the fearsome. "But I've really been into Hebridean Blacks lately," she continued, before abruptly being brought back down at what the boy was saying. He had a point, but also if living his best life was lying on the lawn his life must have been pretty boring indeed. And the book was a guilty pleasure, and certainly not something a boy would understand. "N-no, you can't look," she hastily added. "Not at this one. I...haven't finished it yet and I...I...left my bookmark in the dorms." Phew. Nailed it, Peregrine.

Chase gaped at the girl when she asked if he had a favourite, how was anyone supposed to pick a favourite dragon when they were all so cool?! "How can anybody pick a favourite dragon?! It's like being asked to pick a favourite dinosaur! They're all so cool! Well actually a T-Rex is pretty cool but they're all really cool!" Chase said, waving his hands in the air wildly as he spoke. He didn't think he understood this girl at all! He frowned when she mentioned that she didn't have a bookmark, what did that have to do with anything?! He just wanted to look at the book. "I just want to look at the book!" He couldn't believe the injustice of it all, and then a thought came to him and he started looking around, and spotted a small flower a small distance away. "Wait here, I have a solution!" He said, and ran off to pluck the flower and then ran back, and after he caught his breath for a moment he presented it to her. "Here, you can use this as a bookmark!" He said, completely oblivious to the fact that he was giving a girl a flower, only being focused on its potential use as a bookmark. "Now can I look at the book?! Pleaseeeee?" He asked with a pleading look on his face.

"Oh, dinosaurs!" Peregrine nodded enthusiastically, she had never learned too much about them compared to magical creatures but of all the muggle creatures that existed dinosaurs were definitely the coolest. "Do you think a T-Rex could breathe fire? That would be awesome!" she squeaked, her eyes practically shining with excitement. Peregrine almost got whiplash at the sudden solution the boy came up with. Giving her a flower. No boy had ever given her a flower before - well, that wasn't entirely true, Jasper had sent her a yellow rose last year but that felt so impersonal in comparison.

That just made Peregrine remember that the reason she was extra embarrassed. The book was fairly tame for the most part. The dragon prince had been exiled from his clan after being framed for the death of his father by his scheming brother, and had teamed up with some more unlikely creatures to survive and restore his honour. Uncle Gaius had said it was derivitive drivel written by some hack writer from Australia, but Peregrine was more forgiving. No, the reason she was embarrassed was because this was the chapter where the prince and the dragon princess were about to kiss. That would just be awkward. But he had given her a flower. Even if she didn't yet know his name. "...fine," she ultimately relented, deliberately slotting the flower in a few pages earlier and closing the book to hand it over. "But please be careful, it was a present from my uncle..."

Chase's encounter with this person hadn't started off well, but now that she wasn't actively kicking him in the side he had decided that she wasn't half as bad as he had been thinking she was. He barely even remembered their earlier altercation, but that could likely be summed up to his terrible attention span. Usually it only affected himself, his own thoughts flicking in and out at the speed of light to the point where he didn't really remember what he had been doing before they had started talking about dinosaurs. His eyes went, somehow, even larger at her question. "COULD YOU IMAGINE?!" He bellowed as he imagined just how cool it would be if T-Rex's could spew fire, making what was likely the coolest dinosaur even cooler.

However, all thoughts of dinosaurs quickly left his mind as the girl relented and allowed him to look at the book and he cheered, visibly excited that his idea with the flower had worked, and still painfully oblivious of what it could look like that he had given her a flower at all. He immediately flicked open the book, a little less carefully than he probably should have, straight to a page not too far from where she had put her bookmark and grimaced as he realised what was happening. "Oh my god, are they going to KISS?!" Chase asked the girl, immediately wondering what kind of book she had been so attached too. He continued to flick through the book however, trying to find a particularly fun part about a dragon. He then suddenly froze, and turned to look at the girl, realising they had been talking this entire time without giving her his name. "I'm Chase, by the way. First Year Gryffindor!" He added the last word with a bit of a sigh, as his earlier thoughts about his own house began to flicker back into existence.

Peregrine beamed, this was like when Percy was actually willing to play ball with her on magical creatures and not just tell her chimeras weren't as cool as aliens. She couldn't fathom how someone could be so completely and utterly wrong, but she had to be the mature one and be nice to her brother. But sometimes it got to be her turn to indulge the special interest. "Right? I bet that some dinosaurs were magical," she added, enthusiastically. Peregrine sighed, almost dreamily, as the thought of riding a giant, fireball spewing, ferocious dinosaur around crossed her mind. "Awesome," she said, almost oblivious.

All of Peregrine's vague attempts at salvaging the situation had been for naught, it seemed, and the colour drained from her face. "W-well, it's just, you know, he needs a good reason to go fight his evil brother," she explained, looking down at her shoes and briefly questioning why she'd even gone outside. He was possibly more over the top than Percy, and she was struck by the desire to forcibly wrench the book out of his hands. But she simply clutched at the side of her robes to stop herself from starting a fight. That was the last thing she needed on her first proper day back at school. "Oh!" she exclaimed, realising she had been awfully rude being caught up in the moment. "I'm Peregrine. Second year Gryffindor." She tilted her head. "Um, you don't seem that excited about it...did your dormmates fight?" she asked, remembering her own first night. Then she realised she was prying, and that was awfully rude regardless of her feelings. "Oh, um, sorry, I didn't mean to assume..."

Chase couldn't help but stare off into space as the girl mentioned magical dinosaurs. "OMG! COULD YOU IMAGINE A FLYING T-REX THAT COULD BREATHE FIRE?!" Chase basically screamed to the world, but who could blame him? That would seriously be the coolest thing ever! His mind was racing with all of the possibilities that could come from this revelation that they had had. "Surely we have to do some research on this?! There has to be something somewhere!" Chase said, before immediately taking off in the direction of the door, and then running back when he realised that he had not elaborated at all about this, and he still had her book in his hand. Chase didn't always like to think things through, instead choosing to just follow the first thought that came to mind.

Before he could, Chase noticed that the girl, Peregrine, seemed to suddenly lose her gusto and became a bit embarrassed, was it because of the book? It didn't seem that bad, like it was about dragons! He just didn't understand why they were kissing?! Like yuck. He didn't want to read about that! Yuck! But the dragons were cool! "Is something wrong? Is it the book? It's an awesome book, mostly! Just not the kissing! Gross!" He said, his voice a mix between fascination, excitement, and concern. He heard her question and shrugged in response. "Well, like, no! Nothing like that, I just don't understand why I'm in Gryffindor? I don't think I have any of the things Gryffindors are known for??" He said with another shrug.

Peregrine was practically bouncing on the spot with excitement. Chase got it, she decided. "No way! I was totally thinking the same thing!" she almost squealed. She hadn't been able to have a good theorising session about cool magical creatures in a while. "I've looked into some dragons that might have existed, but there's gotta be some way to get more information on magic dinosaurs," she agreed, although she hesitated for a moment as he ran off, awkwardly reaching out and trying to broach the subject of getting her book back. After the Penguin thing, she'd learned she had to try and speak up sooner.

"Oh, um, no it's fine, I mean, my uncle says it's kind of trashy anyway," she admitted, feeling a little smaller. Peregrine knew she had to stop making herself small, but at the same time she always seemed to be expected to. She knew a boy wouldn't get it, though. Uncle Gaius was a boy and he hated it. But he was also just kind of picky sometimes. "Well," she paused, moving her awkwardly hovering hand to stroke her chin. "I don't know why I am either. I thought it was because my mum was. But maybe it's because we like cool stuff like dinosaurs and dragons?" she offered, not entirely convinced.