October 17
About 7:10 am

Rising early on a weekend always had its benefits. The first major benefit was the very limited presence of students that were up in the morning on a weekend. For whatever reason, most students found it more enjoyable to stay in bed to rest more. Whether or not this was by choice, or based on their condition before resting was irrelevant. Since there were less students about, that generally meant that you could venture around the castle wherever you wanted to, within reason of course. Naturally, all of the good places to relax would have barely anyone in them yet.

The second major benefit was the simple fact that there were no classes on the weekend. That certainly made everything all the more enjoyable. No classes meant no extra work that had to be done. Typically, it meant time for the students to hopefully complete their work before the new week begins. Despite their work effort, the idea of no classes for two days was always enjoyable for any student, even for Addison. It was probably a good thing that she would normally finish her work before the weekend even began, so she didn't have to stress over it later.

So, when Addison woke up early on that Saturday morning, she was happy that she didn't have anything that needed to be completed just yet. It was certainly always a good thing. Knowing that she wouldn't be able to fall back asleep, she quietly got out of bed. Whenever she awoke early, she had to keep quiet so her sleeping dorm-mates didn't wake up. They were able to get along, but it was never good to be the reason for why the other girls woke up in the room. It simply led to blame, which was definitely never good.

Soon after fully waking up, Addie figured that she could do some drawing. If she hurried, she may even be able to catch the sunrise as it was happening. Trying to stay as quiet as she possibly could, she pulled some clothes on and quickly exited the room with her bag. She quickly walked through the Ravenclaw Common Room, and left the quiet room completely through the portrait hole.

It took Addison a few minutes to fully walk all the way downstairs to the Ground Floor of the castle. But, she managed the rather long trek. It was even faster than normal without a lot of students traveling up and down the stairs at the same time. Walking along the Ground Floor, she stopped at a window near the Great Hall. Setting down her bag, she sat down on the window sill. She slipped her sketchpad and a pencil out of her bag. Opening up to a fresh sheet of paper, she awaited the full sunrise to begin.

Asher Grin wasn't typically an early riser.  He found it easier to never go to bed in the first place, though he usually tried to get at least some sleep, if only because there wasn't much else to do once he'd finished his books.  Last night however, he hadn't been able to sleep at all; he couldn't get his pillow right, the moon kept finding a crack in his drapes, he was hungry . . . finally he heard the birds begin their raucous symphony and decided to go get some breakfast.  The halls threw his footsteps back to him, and the castle he usually considered homey, suddenly seemed too big and strange.  Without realizing it, he'd tiptoed his way down to the Great Hall.

Closing the huge door quietly behind him, he glanced up at the ceiling.  The morning was grim and glowed softly with the false dawn's light as the sun continued to lurk just beyond the horizon.  A few strands of pink light had only just begun to show.

The massive room was almost empty, and only a few early risers had made their way to breakfast: a few quidditch players, one or two bag-eyed insomniacs and the occasional bushy-tailed anomaly.  Some people had already been and gone, their empty bowls and platters scattered across the tables, waiting to disappear in a moment.  So far the pickings were rather slim.  There was some yogurt and muesli, a bit of fruit, some oatmeal.  Asher helped himself to a little bit of everything, plopping it all into the same bowl and stirring vigorously.  He tended to eat everything in one mucky mash and insisted it almost always tasted fine.

About to sit at the Ravenclaw's long table, he noticed an older girl from his house--what was her name again? Alison?--sitting on a windowsill.  Beyond her still figure, the sun had begun to rise, its light coloring last night's clouds with red and gold.  What was she doing?  Sketching?  His curiosity propelled him forward as he swallowed another spoonful of his dreadful mash.

"What are you drawing?  The sunrise?"

It didn't take long for the sun to rise at all. The second that it did so, Addison was already busy sketching the sun in her sketchpad. Due to the small time window of opportunity that the sun actually rose in the sky, she had to work fast at accomplishing her artwork. Yet, she had to balance rushing to get every last detail with creating artwork that actually looked like the object that she was drawing. After all, she only held a pencil, which only had one color: gray. Sure, she could use shading to accomplish the same thing as an actual color, but it often times took longer than actually painting.

Despite all of the time that she had spent at Hogwarts thus far, Addison still used muggle practices with her artwork. It was her preference after all, since she could only use the muggle way earlier in her life. Besides, the extra work quite frankly didn't really bother her that much at all, which was probably from the muggleborn blood in her. Nevertheless, she did know some things with regard to art and magic. She just chose not to use them.

When she created her artwork, Addison was quite oblivious to what was going on around her. It just consumed her thoughts, and brought her whole attention to the task at hand. Of course, her perfectionism didn't help either, since she wanted her work to come out exactly as it was supposed to come out. Actually, she wanted it to come out the way that she wanted it to come out. So, it didn't always match what was supposed to be done to begin with. But, if that was the idea that she had in her mind, it was very hard for her to try to change it.

Therefore, it shouldn't have been too much of a surprise that Addison paid absolutely no attention to anyone walking around her and into the Great Hall. She didn't hear the slight increase of early birds, which were just like her. No, she didn't hear any of that. Her mind was completely lost in her own little world.

"What are you drawing? The sunrise?" a voice called out of her.

The second that she heard the first question, she immediately jumped in her spot. Since when were there other students with her in her own mind? Oh right, this was Hogwarts, where you could always have someone come up to you at anytime. People, like her, that tried to seclude themselves in their own minds would often find themselves surprised by others. But, this voice that just disturbed her belonged to a younger boy from her house. She couldn't quite remember his name in the fog of her own mind, so she simply nodded to his question.

"Yes, I was just trying to draw the sunrise, before it fully rose over the horizon," she responded.

Asher nodded respectfully over a mouthful of breakfast.  Occasionally you got muggle artists at his parents' B&B looking for someplace distant enough to lose the rest of the world.  As a kid, he'd learned that most artists didn't mind too much if you watched, so long as you were quiet about it, and he'd spent many long hours creeping up on the busy muggles, eager to watch as a landscape emerged magically out of a pencil.  One guy, an old guy who his parents explained in hushed and flustered tones was American, had once tried to teach him a bit of it.  The old man kept telling his parents what an imagination their son had--he comes up with the darndest things . . . he's got a whole magical world in his head!

Now he tilted his head to examine the older girl's work, immediately recognizing the view from the window and the low-clinging clouds that had turned from mourning-dove grey to pink and gold and were now rendered in graphite on her page.  He wasn't used to seeing images that didn't move--even most of the very old and much stained paintings in the shed breathed slowly, though he had to squint to make out the source of the movement.  There was one muggle photograph back home, of his grandfather in his army uniform.  He'd always thought there was something very quaint about the still images the muggles made, though his mother found them eerie and kept the photograph of her father in her dresser drawer, where she didn't have to watch it watching her.

"Nice," he said, aware that some artists got antsy if you stared at their work too long without saying anything.  "I like how you got the forest."  He did too; she'd really managed to capture its brooding (and intriguing) gloom.  His spoon scraped the porcelain as he chased the last morsels of the horrible mash.  "I'm Asher.  I've seen you around but I don't remember your name and I don't think I should call you that-artist-girl.  Sounds a bit rude." 

During her attempt to capture the sunrise to the best of her ability, Addison drew way more than the sun rising with the contrast in shading to help denote that the sun was rising. She was able to capture the forest, and managed the slight glimmer of the lake in the distance as well. For the short time frame, she figured that it came out pretty good. Considering the fact that the sun already was starting to pass from its brilliant display of colors in the sky. So, her work was pretty much the best that she could do at that moment.

Even before she came to Hogwarts, Addison wasn't a fan of showing off her artwork. Being too self-conscious, she was worried that the other students would think that her work wasn't good enough. She was afraid that her version of perfection wasn't good enough to muster the scrutiny of her peers. Even with the few other artists at Hogwarts, she still wasn't particularly too comfortable with showing off her work. At the very least, a fellow artist would at the very least appreciate what she was trying to do any way. That was a major plus.

Addison smiled when the boy complimented her work, when she was just putting the finishing touches on her art. "Thank you," she responded. It was always nice to hear that someone liked her work. She couldn't help but giggle, when he mentioned refering to her as 'that-artist-girl.' In all retrospect, there were far worse names that she heard out of other kids mouths, and even 'that-artist-girl' didn't sound particularly too bad. "Nice to meet you Asher, I'm Addison. I've seen you around as well, and I quite honestly wouldn't care if you called me that, as long as I knew that you were referring to me," she responded with a laugh. She probably shouldn't be encouraging the name calling, but it was a rather funny prospect nonetheless.

Asher appeared to give this some consideration, at least for a moment. 
"Nah," he decided.  "Addison's nicer, rolls right off the tongue.  Have you had breakfast yet?  The oatmeal's pretty good with the yogurt." he added helpfully, waving his spoon in the general direction of the dining tables.  A few more 'claws had filtered in, many of them nose-deep in their books.  Asher was planning to return last night's reading material during his study period before lunch so that he could get his hands on Magical Muggles: Mirrors, Smoke and Slight of Hand, a book he'd had his eye on for a while.  Every time he'd gone in to get it, someone had borrowed it, or was reading it, and he'd finally just reserved it.  Hopefully it was worth it.  "Hey, it looks like they've put the rolls out!  Took them long enough.  Do you usually get up so early to do your sketches?"

A smile appeared on Addison's face when Asher confirmed that her name rolled off the tongue. "Why thank you," she responded. Quite frankly, she never really took the time to think about her name and why her parents might have named her as such. For that matter, she never had the desire to do so. As a muggleborn, it would have probably been for far different reasons, rather than her halfblood or pureblood peers. Nevertheless, it was surely a way to get sidetracked into a rather random tangent.

"No I haven't yet," Addison shook her head and giggled at his suggestion, "Really? I have never tried a mixture of oatmeal and yogurt. I've had an assortment of nuts with yogurt. So, it must somehow resemble that then, I guess?" she offered as a guess. Certainly the cool yogurt and the hot oatmeal was a strange mix. Yet, it appeared as if it at least had one fan in Asher. For that matter, these weird combinations would probably intrigue anyone, not just someone like her.

Looking away from Asher for a moment, Addison noticed that a couple more students appeared to be awake. Notably, they appeared to be Ravenclaws. It seemed like her little trip in the early hours from the Ravenclaw tower managed to wake up all of its occupants by the site of it, except for possibly her dorm mates from what she could tell. Her eyes darted back to Asher when he sounded excited of the appearance of rolls for breakfast. "They always seem to be quite popular. I like dunking them myself when possible," she commented. She shook her head before stating, "Not always. I guess that it's based on my inspiration at the time."

"Really?  Dunking?  I usually just make sandwiches,' Asher mused, gradually coming around to waking up.  In the meantime he peered groggily at the world and his thoughts gravitated largely around food.  Dunking seemed like a novel concept from the wrong end of a sleepless night, so he determined he would give it a go sometime in the next ten minutes.  For now, he was curious.

"So you were inspired by the sunrise?" he asked, glancing at the quickly dissipating sunrise.  "Are you one of those artists what only draws landscapes?  We got a lot of those at the Cottage," he explained.  "There was this one guy who only drew clouds.  He was a bit strange, to tell you the truth."   And boring.  Asher had been six at the time and had followed the muggle around for days, convinced that the man was joking, or trying to trick him.  After almost a week he'd nearly died of boredom and given up: the man really truly only ever drew clouds, for hours on end.  Sometimes, when the muggle was feeling particularly adventurous, he made a foray into watercolors.  It had been depressingly mundane.  "Not that there's anything wrong with landscapes.  My aunt used to be a landscape painter, but she quit because she was rubbish and grandpa wouldn't pay for her to go to art school."

"Yes, dunking. You'd actually be surprised by the variety of sauces and liquids taste pretty good with a roll," Addison mused with a nod. Despite how strange these mixtures sounded, or even appeared to be, it all depended on how the different food items reacted to each other. Plus, the taste certainly helped matters. At any rate, any strange food would be appealing if its taste is good enough.

Addison shrugged at Asher's question. "I wouldn't say entirely inspired, more like desired to draw the sunrise. Naturally, using colors would help capture the sunrise better than what I just did. However, any masterpiece takes time, and occasionally many drafts. As for only drawing landscapes, no, not just landscapes. Landscapes are easier to draw, since you don't have to find a subject and then force them to be still. I could attempt those based on memory, but then I might not capture everything. Quite frankly, I like creating entirely different pieces of work," she rambled on, and then simply stopped before she bored the younger boy. She highly doubted he would be the type to have stimulating conversations about art, creating it or just simply viewing it.

She listened as Asher described a bloke that only drew clouds. Indeed, that was sounded like a strange choice, yet it was an interesting proposition. "It would be strange too, if all that he did was draw simple clouds. That bloke could've drew things out of the clouds. But, it sounds like he didn't, huh?" she questioned. "I'm sorry to hear that your aunt quit. Landscapes could be useful," she commented.

"Eh, chemistry suits her better," he shrugged, thinking of his straight-faced angular aunt.  She held little truck with the nonsense some artists got up to and he couldn't imagine her getting on with any of the southern-pansy artistes he'd met over the years.  Though he thought she might like Addison a mite better.  The girl seemed to treat art with the same seriousness as his aunt treated chemistry, not as an all-consuming frenzied (and fashionable) passion, but as an important line of inquiry to which she had dedicated herself. 

Asher grabbed a basket of rolls off the Gryffendor's table (it was at hand, and he wasn't intimidated by the sleepy protest of the fourth year sitting there) and offered Addison first pick with the automatic courtesy of an innkeeper's son.  "You know, it's funny, but I haven't noticed that many artists around Hogwarts.  I sort of expected more of the Ravenclaws to take an interest, bein' as that's the kind of thing we'd take an interest in."

Addison tilted her head slightly to the side when Asher mentioned chemistry, which was a muggle subject typically taught in a muggle high school. It was supposed to be a class that she would have eventually taken, if she didn't possess her magical ability and stayed in the muggle schooling system. Of course, it was perfectly fine that she was at Hogwarts, learning about magic now. Naturally, it was something that she would like to continue, through the rest of the three more years in Hogwarts after her current one.

Addison's mind was brought back to reality when she saw Asher grab a basket of rolls. Considering how she wasn't particularly paying attention before hand, she found the action to be rather strange, not knowing where it came from. But, she quickly noticed that he was offering her a roll. "Thanks," she replied as she grabbed a roll out of the basket. She shrugged at his question. "I don't think it is just a Ravenclaw thing. For that matter, not all artists are willing to be seen working by others," she reminded him.

"Huh." Asher tried to imagine one of the Slytherins drawing, in private, and could only come up with the image of an old-fashioned (read 'medieval') portrait painter working by the crackling light of an ominous fire.  His perception of Slytherins was a little skewed.  "Hufflepuffs I'll grant you, but I'm not so sure about the other two.  Anyway, what are they doing, painting in broomclosets?  Even then, I'm sure I'd have seen more of them.

"Or," Asher paused, mind stumbling upon another bout of fancy.  "Maybe they're all part of a top secret Order of Artists and they meet by the light of a full moon to draw dastardly pictures of landscapes and--and wear scarves or something.  Seems like a very Hogwarts thing to do," he explained with a shrug.  "It's probably been going on for centuries.  You know what, I take it back.  Slytherins are definitely into art."

Addison shrugged at Asher's comment. "Just about anyone could, even if you can't imagine it right away. It all depends on what they like," she responded. Hearing about painting in broom closets, she giggled. "Don't let their small size fool you, they are quite comfortable too. I personally would love to paint in there, presuming you could still view the scene you want to paint while in there of course," she smiled. She never thought of going into the broom closet to paint. The only problem with that, was that she could be interrupted by Qudditch players. So, it wasn't entirely secluded.

"You forgot painting clouds," Addison interjected with a giggle. "If that is when they might want to do their work, then I quite frankly don't see too much wrong with that. I usually am too tired to do that, so I probably wouldn't be painting by the light of the full moon. But, certainly, I would wear a scarf, yes," she responded, not being able to help the giggles that came out. "If it was done for centuries, I'm sure that it would happen more often. For that matter, I might even be doing it, if it was that popular," she smiled.

"But anything can be popular if people have been doing it f'long enough," Asher pointed out.  "If Professional Frog Fancying had been going on for  five or six centuries you'd have all sorts'f wizards standing up to carry on the tradition." he added, wisely repeating his mother's wisdom.  It applied well enough to all the muggles that came to ask their fortunes, even though nine out of ten of them thought it was utter squit. 

"Although, I wouldn't mind sneaking out at bull's noon[1] to go do art in secret," he reasoned, not one to throw a good idea out with a lecture.  "Could be excitin', y'know?"

1.

midnight

Addison shrugged when she heard Asher's wise comment. "True, if it is a long standing tradition, there would be plenty of people trying to carry on the same legacy. But, there could be a few people that don't want to carry that legacy and might want to change it. Or, at the very least, do something different from everyone else. After all, not everyone will follow the lead," she responded. Assuming anything like that would actually happen, she wouldn't want to assume what she would do in that case. But, if artists at the castle awoke at midnight to paint, she probably wouldn't follow that lead. Unless, of course, there was something that she wanted to capture only at night. Or, she could just be a restless soul.

She couldn't help but to giggle at his acceptance in wanting to go out a night. "Really now?" she asked through her giggles. "It would probably be an interesting endeavor," she mustered after calming down a little. "I'm sure it would be."