#14 New Experiences

Oscar felt himself relax as soon as the warmth of the room hit him. Oh that was so much better than the horrible mess that was that winters outside. He couldn't help but wonder if he could just stay in the room and bask in the sunny day that the windows displayed. 

Sure, the water looked a little.. off. Creepy. But he loved water! So how bad could it really be? It wasn't like anything at Hogwarts would be dangerous enough to kill someone, right? It was a school! Schools were supposed to be safe, so it should be perfectly safe to just flop for a moment and enjoy the sun!

... Really, really creepy though.

Ugh, he should probably check what was going on with that before his dillydallying came back to bite him. No matter how tempting it was for him to ignore the creepy..

Okay, so it was the fact that he had already face planted the floor once that day that really stopped him from just dropping to lie down. Probably best not to hit his head again and chance actually hurting himself that time.

He looked over the pond, the buckets, and the plaque before he decided that was probably the place to start. Maybe it had some instructions on what he was supposed to be doing? Ah, it did!

"Well, that's ominous," he muttered after reading it. It was joking about the watery grave, surely. Because again, school! Right, it had to be a joke and it would just.. what? Hold him hostage under the water for a bit if he failed? Where he wouldn't be able to breathe.

Oscar had to resist the urge to back away to the door and run.

Brave? The room had found the wrong person for the job if it expected him to be brave.

Was running away actually an option? But then what if people found out and suddenly no one wanted to talk to the coward who had ran away from a challenge anymore? Going through the rest of his time at Hogwarts with no one willing to talk to him would be the worst. He would have to drop out. But then he couldn't just go home after dropping out, he would never hear the end of it from his grandparents. He could hear the howler telling him what a disappointment he was already.

Oh no. He was going to have to do the task.

He scrubbed his hand down his face, wishing that he could time travel and never have entered the room. There was nothing for it though, he just had to try to not die. He really didn't want to die.

He pulled his jumper and beanie off, leaving them in a pile by the door with his boots. He did not want to get them wet, or worse, lose his beanie in the creepy water. He hesitated for a moment before he stripped his jeans off too. He was the only one in the room and wet jeans were just horrible. He knew that well enough from the time he fell in the pond back home while trying to get a closer look at the fish.

Oscar slowly walked towards the pond, his wand strapped to his arm like a childhood safety blanket even though apparently magic would not help. But what did that really mean? How could magic not help? Magic was awesome!

He crouched down to test the water with his hand, not quite willing to just jump in. Okay so it felt like water, that was a good start at least. It really was dark though... Oh, what was the harm in trying a spell? It wasn't like it could make the situation worse. (Please don't make the situation worse!)

"Lumos," he said, waving his wand and expecting the familiar light to appear to pierce the water.

Nothing.

"Ohhh, so that's what it meant. Thanks room, real helpful." He was not grumbling as he put his wand away again, not at all.

He saw nothing else that he could do but to jump into the pond. So he did. He took a breath and then down he went. And down, and down... All the while chanting in his head that he was just swimming in the pool at his grandparent's home and that anything he felt was just one of his cousins trying to grab his ankle to pull him down again. Right, that would work. Nothing dangerous here, no sir. Just a regular summer day swim.

He had underestimated just how deep the pond was though, and how hard it would be to find the bottom. He ended up resurfacing with a splutter.

At least nothing had tried to kill him yet. He had to find an upside somewhere!

He took a moment to breathe and try to find some confidence once more before he flipped around and headed back underwater with a strong kick.

His fingers brushed the kelp on his second attempt as he tried to blindly feel for the bottom of the pond. If he could feel that then surely he had to be near the bottom, right? He fumbled for a moment before he resurfaced a second time.

The third time had to be the charm! He had a plan half formed in his mind now and he was going to see it through.

Down he went for the third time, aiming straight down for around the same spot as before. This time as he brushed the kelp he followed it down, his hands leading the way blindly again until he felt something different.

The stone bed!

He quickly grabbed the first one that he could wrap his hands around and twisted around to try to head back to the surface once more.

Movement in the water that did not seem to come from his splashing had encouraged Oscar to find a last burst of speed to reach the surface. He had his stone and managing that much had filled him with a new determination that he could politely say 'no thank you' to death. Which was great, he would have hated for his parents to get a letter saying that he died on Christmas day. They would have cried and Oscar did not want to be the reason someone cried.

His new bit of confidence about not being killed did not mean that he stuck around in the pond any longer than he had to though of course. As soon as he could he was scrambling out of the water and rolling away from it to lie on what had been dry floor until he appeared.

He stared up at the ceiling for a long moment, just breathing with his stone clutched to his chest as he tried to wrap his mind around the fact that he had managed it.

Did that mean that the watery grave line really had been an exaggeration and that he had panicked for nothing? After mulling that line of thought over Oscar decided that he would like to think so. He wanted to cling to the thought that the school was a safe place to be, if only so he didn't feel the need to jump at every shadow going forward.

So yes, to him that had all been a joke played by the room designed to spur people on. A mean mean joke designed to give poor innocent Hufflepuff's heart attacks. It was better for his state of mind to believe that.

Once he no longer felt in danger of his heart beating out of his chest, Oscar lifted his stone so that he could look it over. He wondered what was so special about the stones that the room wanted one in a certain bucket.

The stone offered him no explanations (a talking stone was hardly a stretch on what might be encountered at a magical school, they were sorted by a singing hat after all!) so he finally gave up his inspection and stood up. He glanced over the plaque, just to check that he understood the next part right, before he approached the buckets.

Black or white.

He looked between the two, unable to settle on one to toss the stone into. Why was that such a hard decision? Surely he had done the hard part already. He was not going to ip-dip-do his decision again! Last time he did that he ended up in a room that joked about killing him!

...

"Oh for Pete's sake," he grumbled before he gave in and burst into another round of 'ip-dip-do'. "Black it is."

With that he dropped the stone into the black bucket and hoped that it was not going to blow up as a final surprise.