Among the Portraits

[Scarlet Frost]

Hands on her hips Scarlet looked at a portrait on the wall in the fifth floor corridor and it mimicked her stance and looked back at her, for once she had decided not to go to the pitch to fly, and probably glad she didn't there was a summer storm happening outside, so she preferred to stay warm, even though she did enjoy flying through the clouds when they were bucketing down rain, it was exhilarating.
She continued her staring contest with the portrait for a while longer until she finally huffed and crossed her arms 'I know one of you open, and since you like to be so vocal, why not tell me' she said, it refused to respond so she walked down the hallway a bit 'I will get my uncle you know, if you don't tell me' she wondered if they feared him, he after all uncovered them when he was at school with her mother.

The Clouds outside rumbled and she looked at another painting 'C'mon, tell me which of your little friends is a portrait hole' she asked, unlike her mother she had no partner in crime to do things with, instead she had to do it all on her own.

 

[Lucas Woodlock]

Lucas was tired, between the early morning solo Quidditch practicing and the late nights in the library trying to catch up from what he wasn't paying attention to in class, he was tired. The weather didn't permit him to be out practicing so Lucas spent the morning wondering around the castle. He had done some exploring with Aaron and with Zara but there was still so much of it that he hadn't seen, he desperately wanted to change that. The problem with not knowing his way around the castle was that it easy to get lost, especially when the staircases did what they want and he was pretty sure every corridor looked the same and that on occasion the same corridor would lead to different places.

Somehow Lucas ended up on the fifth floor, it wasn't somewhere he spent a lot of time so it wasn't very familiar to him. He looked around for a few minutes when suddenly he heard a voice, it sounded vaguely familiar so he made his way towards it. It wasn't long before he was able to put a face to the voice and realised it was Scarlet and she seemed to be talking, rather angrily, to portraits. "Scar?" He said, referring to her by a shortened version of her name, a habit he had picked up from Zara. "What are you doing?" He asked looking from her to the portraits.

 

[Scarlet Frost]

Scarlet kept on glaring at the portraits, watching them move and ignore her, some of them scoffed at her as if they were above such a demand. She heard someone call her name and she turned and smiled 'Oh Hey, Lucas' she said he questioned what she was doing and she turned back to the portraits 'Just trying to get one of THESE Portraits to talk, The school has hidden Portrait holes everywhere, well not quite everywhere' she added correcting herself 'I want them to tell me where the entrance is so I can explore them my Uncle and Mother would go through them when they came to school here'
Scarlet gestured over to the window near by which was soaking with the rain pouring down from outside 'Bad flying weather isn't it' she commented, she Hadn't had heaps of Interaction with Lucas, he seemed like an Interesting boy, and he liked Quidditch which made him alright in her books.

 

[Ms Fortune's Portrait]

Felicity Fortune's home portrait was hung on the Sixth Floor corridor, but in living up to her name, it had unfortunately fallen from it's position for the fourth time in just that week. Until it was picked up and returned to it's proper place, the woman of the painting departed it's frame, traveling further down the corridors and its works of art, until finally she reached a garden landscape on the floor below hers. Seating herself at it's empty table, Ms Fortune helped herself to it's endless supply of tea and enjoyed the quiet of the castle. That was, until a very young girl disturbed the peace. So many of these students thought it fine to harass the enchanted paintings. It was not.

"Would you mind terribly if you were to escort the young miss elsewhere, perhaps?" Fortune chimed at the arrival of an equally young boy, hoping to get them both moving along before the girl did anything too drastic. She'd been knocked out of one painting that morning already, she didn't need another repeat in one day.

 

[Lucas Woodlock]

Lucas looked at the girl with a curious look and then proceeded to eye the portraits. "Somehow I doubt the portraits are gonna come out and tell you if they cover a secret passage, that would be cheating no?" He grinned at her. He turned his attention to the windows and nodded at her comment about the weather, "Yeah, I'd rather be out there flying too, but here we are, so you say you're trying to explore?" Lucas stared at the portraits and before Scarlet had a chance to answer his question one of the portraits decided she needed to pitch in. "I'm sorry, is she bothering you?" He asked addressing the portrait. "Are you bugging the portraits Scarlet?" He asked grinning, Lucas hadn't spent a lot of time with the girl but he knew she was a big fan of Quidditch, and apparently a better player than he was, but so far he liked her.

 

[Scarlet Frost]

'You never know' she said 'Maybe there would be a nice portrait who would want to offer up the location of their portrait hole so they got more visitors' she added looking sideways at the portraits who seemed to move like they weren't going to give up their secrets. Lucas agreed with her wanting to be outside and she chuckled 'I'm trying to explore but i've hit a bump in the road of course, The Castle is so big it's bound to have a few secrets'

She heard a Portrait respond and she moved to look at it 'Hey, You can talk to me you know.' she said since it requested that Lucas would move her, Lucas came to her rescue and she poked her tongue out at the back of his head 'Simply Inquiring, not bugging at all.'

 

[Ms Fortune's Portrait]

Fortune had high hopes of a reprieve from the girl's interrogations of the portraits once the boy had arrived, but they could not move along any sooner. "Not bugging at all, she says!" The lady of the painting responded haughtily, lifting a porcelain teacup from its saucer. "Her patronus may very well be an insect with the amount of "bugging" she has been doing! Not a single please I've heard from her since I got here. The young lady has gone so far as to threaten us with some relative of hers! The impudence!" Indeed, how would the Gryffindor girl have liked it if random strangers bothered her all day. Most of the portraits lacked passages to conceal in any case. Felicity's own portrait hole was safely away on a separate floor, but with her frame knocked off, it wasn't too difficult to uncover. The young one was looking in all the wrong places. Shaking her head, the woman placed her teacup back down, acidentally spilling a few hot drops of the beverage onto the otherwise white tablecloth. "Oh, bother. The things I have to put up with."​

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