You know, for a literal ghost, Professor Binns wasn't too bad.
That wasn't to say he was a good teacher by any means, his lecturing style was extremely dry, and his explanation of magical history lacked the type of extensive sourcing I'd like to see, that was understandable when wizards tended to live to around two-hundred. Sources were less necessary given that their history had only started about five lifetimes ago, but I still would have liked them.
Still, while I wasn't really interested in taking notes, he did at least seem to know what he was talking about.
Well, I thought so anyhow. The book agreed with him, but I think he was older than it was.
Of particular interest to me was Emeric the Evil and his feat of domesticating a Welsh-Green Dragon to serve as his mount. There were a few recorded similar cases, all unitary and likely requiring a great number of enchantments, but still, that was badass, even if his rival did knock him off eventually.
Still, it seemed that his long droning voice was capable of putting most of the class to sleep, even on and their first day and when they were bustling with energy in charms just before lunch.
Still, what I was really looking forward to would come after class, as I waved goodbye to my sleepy compatriots, rushing towards the first floor, I made for the side-corridor with that blessed word.
"Library."
It was beautiful, utterly wonderfully beautiful, larger than even the university libraries of my previous life. I imagined that only perhaps national libraries would be so large.
Tens of thousands of books rested on thousands of shelves, some flying back and forth on tiny wings or by some levitation charm. Hundreds of rows of shelving rose up like the pillars of some holy temple of learning.
It was likely one of if not the single greatest deposits of wizarding learning in the world, and here I was at the gateway, free to peruse the vast majority of that knowledge. There must have been nearly every book ever written by a wizard here. wasn't that many of them to begin with after all, even if they were somehow universally literate.
"Ahem."
I turned to the side, where an older woman with glasses sat upright as a board behind a short wooden desk.
"Do not block the doorway. A point from Gryffindor for your discourtesy."
I sighed at the penalty, moving forward, to read the rather large sign labeled library rules, though to be honest most of them were quite ordinary, though the ban on scurrying was interesting, I had no idea what that even was.
Still, I did have a rough plan in mind. I had three hours until dinner, and in that time I wanted to get a basic layout of the library into my head. It would do me no good to just start devouring one section of knowledge to the exclusion of the rest after all. I needed to know where things were, and how I could find information on any given subject.
To that end, my trek began, as I took out a piece of parchment and began to map the place occasionally on tables and the like, labeling sections on things as wildly divergent as Romance Novels and Dark Creatures. All set to rows in a map that the library had been conspicuously lacking at the front.
It was about an hour in and sixty rows back when I found the Holy Grail.
About eight shelves thick, and with a small reading area in the middle, I found the Reference section. Why, I had never seen anything so beautiful.
Well, except the Castle, the Great Hall Ceiling, or the Tea that had materialized in front of me at breakfast. Nonetheless, I could barely contain my excitement, though I tempered my nerve shortly.
No reason to let things get out of hand now, I still had more than half a map to finish.
And boy was it a fucking map. The Library had a footprint easily twice the size of the Great Hall, and yet had no outdoor footprint whatsoever, leading me to believe that spatial enlargement charms were heavily involved in its construction. It took me another hour to just reach the border of the restricted section, with nearly 150 meters of shelving between myself and the front desk.
I couldn't enter, obviously, not right now at least, but I could read the section labels off of the shelving units and still add them to my maps without crossing the velvet rope.
That took about another ten minutes and left me with just enough time to wander back to references, as I had seen a book there earlier that caught my eye. "Form and function of summoning charms and their variations."
Strangely, however, I couldn't find it on the shelf where it had been only moments before, prompting me to gaze back and forth in consternation.
There couldn't be more than a dozen people in this whole place and they had just had to grab that one book.
Fine then. There were plenty of titles here of interest. I was particularly focused on those regarding magical charms and other fields of immediate import, such as Transfiguration. I collected a small pile from the section, including a particularly heavy and we'll sourced tome on permanency and reactivity in charms and enchantments, when I spotted the culprit who seemed to have absconded with most of the beginner level books.
Hermione Granger was leaving the front desk checking out a genuinely ludicrous pile of books, perhaps thirty-five in all, and I cringed as I realized that she had already managed to secure a monopoly on most of what I wanted to read before I had finished mapping the place.
I moved to stop her, but the librarian raised her voice again.
"Young man, you will not leave this library without checking those books out." She said plainly, causing me to narrow my eyes.
Fine then, I'd catch the witch at dinner, or in the common room. I had no need to rush, and it might just be a misunderstanding.
Still, I had a feeling in my gut that Hermione had taken my similar abilities and study potential as a challenge.
Turning back, I glanced across the library and cast a levitation spell on my own stack of books, I would need it. I headed back to the Reference section, though I planned to tour a couple of others as well in assembling my own doom-stack of knowledge. I intended to check out no less than she had to serve my own development.
If Hermione wanted to parley and share knowledge rather than hogging the books, that would, of course, be fine. She might have just been doing all of that out of her normal quest for knowledge I knew to expect.
But there was no way in hell I was going to let her get a leg up on me if she wasn't.
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win/win
