((OOC: Thread starting in the Salem dorms but taking place in this location))

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Mace, after checking water for the puffs, set about gathering up cardboard boxes. Boxes stuffed to the gills but lightweight from simple charm work. Inside the stacks were the different sized victrolas, music boxes, a wireless radio and plenty of tunes. For boxes high, enough to block his vision but Mace got by using peripheral vision.

He staggered under his load across the Salem dormitory. In their common room he based the giant wireless they tuned for stations back home in the states. Remember that frequency, right. Out of the corner of his eye Mace caught sight of Cain Abernathy in a chair.

With almost calculated precision, Mace struggled with his stack of boxes until it tilted. The top one, filled with records, began to fall in Cain's direction.

"Thanks for catching that Abbers," Mace said, straightening. "Why don't you give me a hand, follow me." Mace set off to leave the common room.

Cain sat idly in the common room, quill in one hand and parchment on his lap, watching Mace, and the stacked objects he was looking through, with curiosity. The tilting of the tower made him tense, and as it toppled, he leapt forward to catch the falling box, stumbling slightly at its weight before righting himself and looking into it curiously. "Records?" he asked, but Mace ignored him.

With a last wistful look at all the other equipment, he followed Mace out, putting on a burst of speed to walk alongside him. "Um, Mace, where are we going?" he asked, "And why am I carrying a box of records?"

He shifted the box slightly so that it was more comfortable for him to hold. "And what are we doing?" he added, unable to fathom what Mace would need all that strange equipment and a box of records for. And why he needed assistance, not that Cain minded helping. It was just that he'd quite like to know what he was helping with beforehand.

As Mace led Cain along the third floor from the dorms, his fellow Salemnite asked questions. "We're going to a place where we can talk freely and we aren't talking freely until we find that place," he answered, using his periferial vision to place where he was at in the castle's layout. As Mace adjusted to classes here he had gauged the levels of traffic on each floor, which places were popular and which were not. There was this one stretch of the third floor that was always dimly lit, the doors looked unused.

"Here," Mace said when they were well alone from the sounds of Castle life at the end of the empty hallway. "Catch the door please, Abbers."

Frowning in slight irritation, Cain nevertheless followed Mace's footsteps, although he noted that they could definitely have taken shortcuts on multiple occasions. Not knowing their destination, the journey seemed to take longer, and when they finally stopped, Cain almost sagged with relief because he was beginning to loose feeling in his fingers.

Catching the door with his foot, Cain let it shut before turning and looking around the room to see if it held a clue to what Mace had planned. It didn't.

"So," he started, placing the box on a table and sitting next to it, "Why can't we talk freely in the corridor? Or the common room? And why are we being secretive?" At least, Mace was being secretive and he assumed that soon he would be expected to be secretive as well.

"And what's-" Cain broke off, realising that he was asking too many questions and that waiting for Mace to explain was probably the best idea.

Inside this door at the end of the corridor, things looked rather dim and derelict. Windows bricked up, chained trapdoor on the floor that suggested you didn't want to go down there. Rather cozy. Mace wouldn't have even left a dog in here.

He unloaded his boxes and got to answering Cain's questions as he set equipment up at the corners of the room. "What's your take on Pigwarts here?" Mace began, misnaming the school. "Profs, staff, the whole student body compared to us, for instance."

"As for the talk, well we could talk in the corridor but then we couldn't do this, hence the secretive. You remember Sunday after classes started here, the 6th?"[1] Victrolas and music boxes for each media were arranged in order, and Mace began tuning them with the right spells.

1.	Good Morning Hogwarts

"Hmm- oh, they're all quite nice, I guess," Cain replied, shrugging. He didn't really understand what Mace was getting at, if he was getting at anything.

Instead, he looked at the windows with dissatisfaction. An idea occurring to him, he walked over to them and tapped the first lot with his wand.[1] Now there was only a ripple in the air to suggest that they existed, and he grinned, going along the row and repeating the charm. It wasn't perfect, but it meant that there was light in the classroom without having to get rid of the bricks. Minor adjustments to the décor finished, he turned back to Mace.

"Yeah, you just disappeared," Cain said, trying not to sound accusative. "So you were doing this?" he guessed.

"Can I do anything to help?" he asked, although he didn't really know what Mace was doing, so helping would be quite difficult. And thinking about it, he had only vague ideas about what they were doing- it involved opinions, music, strange equipment, and staying in unpleasant rooms.

1.	Using a Disillusionment charm, for which there is no specified incantation.

"You guess. Alright, so it's not just me." Mace whistled a short tune, as if Cain's noncommittal answer had given him great insight. "I mean, we knew coming into this tournament that the BBs and Strangers," spoken with a long 'ang' sound, "were going to be the most stiff of the schools. One militant, one posh. Is Hoggywarts, though less stiff then those of course, more stiff or less stiff than you imagined?"

As Mace put the finishing touches on connecting the ensemble, as it grew more familiar each time he did it, he considered it was too late to tell Cain how anything else was done, though he had set himself to making things transparent.

"Pick a song," he gestured to the box of records. "Whatever you like. I got a mixed playlist from the last contributors."

"I guess less, but I was sort of expecting stiff English manners like Gran's always banging on about," Cain muttered. Actually, what she was usually doing was telling him that he needed to have proper manners, or telling him about how English people were really polite and withdrawn. Cain hadn't really noticed a lot of that since he came to Hogwarts.

"I was just expecting people, you know?" He said eventually, frowning and sticking his wand back into his pocket. "Probably more stiff if I'd thought about it," he conceded eventually. While they were mostly like the Salemites, there were also a few who were... aloof.

He walked uncertainly over to the box, passing over some rock and jazz before finding a track by Simon and Garfunkel[1], and holding it up, "This any good?" he asked.

1.

The Boxer