A bird was sitting outside the window. It was pure white and had that weird U-shaped tail which meant it was a swallow. I didn't know swallow came in white. Go figure.
"Sir. Sir. Sir. Sir!"
I startled before shaking myself out of my thoughts and looking over at Paddy. He was standing on the edge of my desk looking down at me where I was sitting in one of the two armchairs I had in my bedroom slash office.
"You appear somewhat pensive master, is anything the matter?" He asked lightly.
"Hm? Oh, no… just… it's the 25th." I answered him absently.
Paddy looked momentarily confused before I saw a light come on behind his eyes. "Ah."
"Yeah.... Ah. Tomorrow it will be four years since I came here," I told him.
"And I entered your service," Paddy stated proudly.
I smiled a bit at that. He had a lot to be proud off after all. Paddy had come a long way from the dirty young elf dressed in rags that had volunteered to enter into my service four years ago. His formerly unruly hair was now neatly cut, combed and slicked back. Also gone was the broken speech that that most house elves spoke in. Now he spoke in what the locals would call proper Queen's English, much to my personal relief. The rags he once wore were long gone now as well, replaced by a fair approximation of a formal butler's suit.
I couldn't help but smile a bit at the memory. Getting Paddy to wear a uniform had required some thought and a lot of trial and error before I was able to find the correct loopholes and orders required to get passed the house-elf tradition that prohibited them from wearing normal clothes. See, normal house-elf clothing was made up of discarded pieces of cloth, such as pillowcases, clothing rags, and bits of strings and other do-dads that they might find discarded around the place. So long as it wasn't obviously someone elses property it was free game. I got around that by just buying some black and white pillowcases and then loudly proclaiming (in the presence of Paddy) that I hereby disavowed any claim of ownership of those pillowcases from now unto perpetuity. Then I had Paddy fashion the pillowcases into a rough approximation of a traditional butlers outfit.
After that came the hardest part. I had to convince Paddy that what he had made was not clothes but "uniforms", making sure to put a heavy distinction between the two. It had been a challenge and I'd only managed it after I sent Paddy to Buckingham Palace to observe the servants there, something that I'd continued doing since he seemed to both enjoy it and learned useful things from it. But it had got him into that first uniform. Then over the years, I'd replicated the actions a few times with various items until his uniform matched those of an actual butler, down to polished leather shoes and white gloves. It had been a long journey, but one that had been well worth it.
"I suppose so," I told him with a smile before heaving myself out of the armchair and walked through the bedroom door to my Workshop, note the capital W. Paddy wasn't the only one that had come a long way after all.
The once bare classroom was now much changed. Now it was filled to the brim with four years' worth of effort on my part. Feeling a bit nostalgic I decided to wander around a bit. Right as you come off the circular staircase from the landing was my leatherworking section. I smiled a bit. I've never read a story that mentions that there was a large selection of extra-curricular subjects available after regular classes were over for the day.
Unsurprising I suppose. They were only hinted at in the original books and none of the three would have been interested in attending them. Ron and Harry wouldn't have cared due to simple laziness and Hermione wouldn't have bothered because it didn't count towards your OWLS or you're NEWTS. Bit shortsighted in my opinion, but that was one of her flaws.
I generally thought about the extra-curricular classes as trade schools because most of them lent themselves to prepare the student for any of the various trades and professions that didn't in some way involve government work. Some of them were likely very familiar to anyone that had gone to muggle school, such as art and music, both muggles and wizard styles, as well as wood and metalworking classes, there was of course a sewing class as well. Then there was stuff that most schools wouldn't have, like leatherworking and old-style blacksmithing. And then there were, of course, more magic related classes, such as Ghoul Studies, Magical Theory and even a class in Xylomancy. That was a type of divination that made use of twigs or sticks to tell the future. I have no idea how it was supposed to work and hadn't much of an urge to find out.
I'd spent most of my time in the Leatherworking and sewing classes, with occasional forays into Magical Theory and Metalworking, and I'd peeked into Blacksmithing enough to know I didn't have much talent for it. I didn't feel I had enough time to dedicate the effort needed to fix that deficiency with all the other stuff I had piled high on my various plates. Most of the extracurricular classes are only accessible for third years and above. Though you could get a special dispensation to attend most of them earlier if your grades were good enough. Seeing as I had a bevy of free time on my hand, and my grades were top notch, I'd talked to Big D after my first year and asked to be free to attend what I wanted.
The classes were far less structured than the regular mandatory subjects, there was no set attendance for one and students were pretty much free to come and go as they pleased. And the teachers assigned helped and guided the students on a more individual basis. This worked because a fairly small amount of students took advantage of the opportunity offered, preferring instead to apprentice to established businesses once they got out of school. Not a particularly bright decision, but as it benefited me who was I to complain? I had a sneaky suspicion that the muggleborns didn't know too much about these classes to begin with, because there were almost none besides me in there.
Right across on the left side of the room was a walled-off section that contained my potions and chemistry lab. I'd decided to close it off because of the fumes and the less the pleasant smells that tended to result from both disciplines. The room was connected to one of the windows and I'd put I'd put up a semi proper ventilation system for the lab to suck all the toxic shit out of the place and outside. There were charms that were supposed to be able to deal with the issue but I felt like it was safer just to blow it out of the room altogether, just in case.
Beyond my leatherworking station was my Enchanting area, it was far more haphazard then either of the other two because I'd kept changing it around depending on what I was working on. The only permanent feature was three large desks surrounding a central area that generally contained my latest project. Currently, that happened to be a huge ass homemade magical microscope. The microscope wasn't what I was currently working on, that particular item was significantly smaller.
To the left of my Enchanting area was my storage, which consisted of three rows of shelving that was heaping with a plethora of different devices that I was either working on or didn't want to get rid of for some reason. I popped open the hatch on a lacquered wooden case; inside was a selection of rings resting on a traditional red velvet pillow. These had been the product of my first foray into the wonderful world of enchanting. Not anything impressive or complex, nothing like my current rings. I kept them mostly due to nostalgia at this point. I traced a finger along one of the rings before closing the box up again and moved on.
Beyond the shelving, right by the wall, was a slim staircase that led to the second floor. I'd constructed that myself last year after I ran out of room on the main floor. It served as my dining room and as a place to relax. I liked sitting up there reading in the evening since the room was positioned to catch the afternoon sun.
I clomped upstairs and looked around. The room, or platform, was haphazardly decorated with a large corner sofa, a large hexagonal table, and three mismatched leather armchairs. A small circular table was located up to the right, near the edge of the platform, which served as my dinner table when I didn't eat in my office.
And above that – my ceiling! My very much enchanted ceiling! It was much in the same vein as the great hall, but unlike the hall, it didn't show the outside. Why settle for a mundane sky when you could have the whole universe on display above your head!? A universe worth of stars and galaxies swirled above in an ever-changing dance of light. Right now the illusion above would change through several different vistas on a three-hour rotation. The current view was actually based on a scene from one of my favorite old movies, Contact. It was a slowly spinning vortex of cosmic dust with a bright burning center. Around it was a field of burning stars that was far brighter than anything that could be seen from Earth. Like in the movie, once this particular view came to an end it would do so by the appearance of a shower of meteors that would fall into the burning center of the vortex.
"Not too shabby if I say so myself," I said to… myself.
"Talking to yourself again, sir?" A slightly nasal voice interrupted my thought, making me startle and turn to the couch was a familiar black tabby with piercing green eyes lay observing me. "An early sign of madness, no?" The cat taunted.
I snorted. "Very funny Maurice."