The Thestral SocietyNumber of People: 1 (1
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Next Visit to the Town Hall: 2nd January +
The hall was larger for wizards than for muggles; or at least, larger for those who had The Sight.
The eyes of muggles would simply glide over the space at the back of the building where the extension was, glazing over if anyone tried to force them to look at it, unless they were specifically trained; but it
was possible for a muggle to be able to see these things if they built a tolerance for the specific charm.
The town hall was a separate building. Firley Hall had been built on the site of a traditional magical court, claiming the land before it could be taken over by a muggle developer, and preserving the site. The cellar had a large hall with a variety of natural objects and plants for those traditional rituals (and was even rented out for those muggles who showed a genuine interest in magical practice, even if they misunderstood things or weren't producing magic; most of the wizards in Camden, at the time the decision was made, found it exciting to see people seeing magic as positive in recent years), but the rest of the building had been devoted to more modern function.
It was a fairly traditional-looking building, Victorian-esque looking, made out of beige brick, metal roofs, and tall windows with black metal frames. The bricks formed wide, gentle arches above the highest window, combining the windows on different floors into single frames of brickwork. It was three stories for muggles, and an extra tower at the back for wizards, and a few dormer windows added where the roof rose higher in the middle. If a wizard squinted a little, they could normally see the two at the same time, and there were several incidents with muggles had been spotted taking a second glance at the Hall, then rubbing their eyes, muttering under their breath, and dismissing what they saw as "just seeing things".
There was a neat iron-wrought gate outside the front of the building, with fixed letters, old, golden paint starting to chip off slightly; it had seen better times. Within the gates was a garden that seemed to be larger on the inside - because it
was - with a marked out area for a variety of sports for children in the front (including space for playing broomball), framed within a border of tall fir trees (hence the name) to hide any cases of accidental magic or illegal broom height. There were several trees, some good for climbing, and a dusty, grey-tinted greenhouse in one corner with the sorts of plants that had to be harvested
just before a potion was brewed, one window in one corner cracked through from a stray tennisball, because working class magical people typically cared enough about their neighbours to want to learn about their sports and let them share their interests with you.
During the weekend, most of the rooms were given over to essentially be a weekend school with optional attendence, to help give pupils a bit of a headstart into their magical studies before secondary school, so the hall was almost entirely packed during weekends. Most evenings there would also be several rooms used for different activities and meetings, but some evenings just always happened to be less occupied than others, and some floors less occupied than others; this was just the nature of how bookings worked out in a place like this.
The site was an easy walk away from Camden Market, as most places in Camden were, but a slightly easier walk to Regents' Park, and close to the canal, the road outside following the path of it. Just to one side of the site, outside the office block belonging to some obscure insurance firm, was a zebra crossing, and thus there were frequent honks from irritated drivers, raging at all the passersby who just wanted to mind their own business too.
The gutter outside was deep and wide, with cracked concrete below the kerb of the pavement. When it was rainy - which was a small majority of days, in the UK, and a large majority of the days that were warm enough to want to use the pavement rather than just take the tube into work - there was a wide puddle directly outside, and any car that went by too close or too fast if anyone was waiting there would result in a completely soaked through set of clothing and the wet dusty smell clinging to them for the rest of the day. This was less of an issue for a wizard or a witch, but it was still annoying, as the muggles all around them would notice if they just immediately removed the dampness.
In autumn, the gutter was always filled with leaves, and they would splay out so far across the pavement that it looked more like mud than tarmac,
In winter, cobwebs built up in all the upper corners of every room, as the spindly buggers took shelter from the cold within the heated internal spaces of the building.
In spring, the roof in one corner would regularly spring a leak and it was weirdly resistant to magic, seeming to break again at least weekly.
In summer, there was a flock of pigeons that advanced into the owlery in the back of the building, and they had to be carefully removed and placed into a series of boxes that were
laid out for them instead during May.
But there was an old charm about the building, despite all its flaws.
Perhaps visitors could sense the accumulation of magic somehow.
Perhaps it was just that the old building had a lot of personality.
Perhaps it was that the wizarding children who had wizard scouts there every Wednesday evening liked to put their drawings up in the windows and to hang out little signs of thanks to whatever the visitors had taught them about that week.
Perhaps it was just the feeling of importance the sight had, as a community hub for the magical community within Central London, that wasn't owned by the Ministry.
In any case, the charm was there, and tangible, and took away from all the flaws of the site.
The rent for the room really had been a steal.
Amelia Okoturo had booked the room a month ago. It had taken about that long to fully sort it out and fully sort out the logistics of the space. Checking how many people could attend while complying fully with both magical and non-magical safety law took a while, and Amelia was very skilled with her charm work, so it wasn't overly hard for everything to be sorted, but it certainly took a while to be comfortable with the legality.
It wasn't that the hall was kept in bad condition, but that the condition it was generally kept in was more suitable for things like training young wizards to duel in safe ways or for tutoring children who were behind in their maths; crucially, activities that didn't require discussion of magic where muggles might be, and Amelia wanted to be entirely sure that the muggle spouses or parents of members were able to come to visit. It was especially important that the muggle parents of young muggle-borns could enter the room to pick them up from whoever was trying to teach them about magic to the extent that they could go to a magical secondary school or afterschool courses, even. There were a lot more regulations to ensure that that was safe, but one of the most important things that Amelia wanted to achieve was, at least locally, cutting down the gap in education between muggle-borns and non muggle born children.
There were now several books on wizarding law kept on a windowsill opposite the door.
The room was on the third floor, about as large as the average classroom, near the end of the corridor to the right of the main stairwell. There was a closer stairwell too, a little darker, and with slightly uneven stone stairs. There wasn't a lift, sadly, but one was being fitted in, of sorts, into the back of the building. Magic made that sort of thing a lot easier. It wasn't a case of anyone intending to be cruel to disabled people; the thought that people who couldn't use floating charms to go up a floor simply hadn't entered the designer's thoughts previously. The lift would take a few months to build, even with magic, but it had been approved quickly, and work had already started a few days before. There had been a few accountants who hadn't like it, but when Amelia had argued that there would be fewer costs if muggle parents felt like their children could learn about the culture of wizards as there would be fewer magical accidents they would have to repair, the decision was made a lot more quickly.
Things hardly ever happened if you couldn't argue money.
There was a gently melancholy feel walking through an empty hall. Amelia had got here early, before the first meeting had actually began on the night of her birthday. She could afford to get here early. Much of her work was during the night, and her job would actually start
after the end of her new society's meetings.
This had the downside, however, of meaning the building was largely empty as she arrived.
There was a receptionist to check her in, and there were two rooms downstairs, running an afterschool magical craft group for younger children. The group was relatively well known in the community, thanks partly to a catchy but annoying song about their initials released several years ago. At the end of school, parents who had longer work hours might allow the group to look after their children for a few hours and provide them with stimulation as well as a safe environment with snacks and drinks to do their homework in, if they chose to. It tended to be mostly younger children attending, as they were the ones who couldn't be trusted for so long at home on their own without parental supervision, but there were a small number of teenagers, too.
The sounds of the children quickly died down as Amelia ascended the stone stairs, with their black metal railing, up the four flights (for the stairs to each floor were divided in half to allow the grand heights of the ceiling), past the dull red walls at each level.
The whole building could do with a slight renovation, as it was a bit too dark, and the windows a bit too dirty for an ideal setting, but the used rooms weren't maintained poorly by any standard.
Booking a room on the top floor had a few reasons. The main drawback was the issue with lifts, but for the first few meetings, were a disabled magical person to arrive, Amelia was sure she was capable of helping them up to the top floor with a few well-placed charms. This was not a long-term solution - the lift was - but it was something. The reason that Amelia had given was that it was further from the children's afterschool activities, so the two groups were less likely to disturb each other. The real reason was that she had visited a few times before while checking different locations out, and she'd discovered how to get up to the dormer rooms properly, and how rarely used they were. If a homeless wizard found them, that person could at least be found
somewhere to sleep until a proper home was available, because goodness knew the Ministry of Magic had no welfare programmes. It wasn't ideal, but it would be a big help to someone in a desperate situation, without there being any risk of someone better off exploiting them in their own home.
She was here to truly give to the community, not just to pose at doing that.
The stairs on the "top" floor; that is, the last floor that muggles were able to see without assistance of some kind, was focused around a reasonably long corridor with a few turning off points. There was a set of loos just to the left of the main stairs up (male, female, and a unisex disabled loo and baby changing; why did people have to be disabled in most places to get a right to a unisex loo? Why did people lose their right to a unisex loo once they learned how to use a toilet?). Directly opposite the landing for the main staircase, there was a single set of glass double doors and a fancy-looking room beyond. That
had been the local area's mayor before, but the Ministry of Magic had claimed a lot of the previously democratised power spread out among wizards within the last century. London as a whole didn't even have a magical mayor anymore!
If Amelia ever got high political power - and she wouldn't - that would be one of the earliest things she'd want to correct.
The stone floor against Amelia's flat shoes made a satisfying tapping noise, echoing slightly. The last few steps she took at a run, bouncing up them as she went.
She turned around the corner, swinging the bag of shopping she'd got from Tesco for snacks earlier outwards from the momentum - there were bound to be hungry people at these meetings - and continued down the corridor.
The window at the other end of the corridor looked out over a short terrace of houses, and out to the road beyond that. This one looked out to the carpark linked to the flats beyond. It wasn't a fantastic view in either direction, but Amelia could tell already that if she were to
really press herself against the corner of the window, she'd be able to look out to the river. Amelia had picked a room at the back for the sake of the view of the canal. It wasn't a great view, but it
was a view, and she thought it might be calming to some people, and the rooms were the same price at this time for now. If the schedule changed next year, perhaps the room would need to change to a cheaper option, but this worked for now, and she still wanted to be near the loft if that happened.
The room needed a bit of setting up before the first meeting; not very much, but a bit.
There was a fold up table (in the sense that it was scrunched up like origami and needed magic to be corrected) in one corner, and a stack of chairs - actually comfortable ones, not those hideous metal frames with itchy red cushions on top - beside. The room was currently empty, bar for this, but this could be changed over time, to something more cheerful.
The door itself was a thick, traditional wooden door made out of dark wood.
Amelia had paused outside the door, now becoming aware of her pause. She wasn't sure exactly how to handle being a leader like this. While she'd been on her school's student council back in the day, firstly, she was never going to refer back to that part of her past if the person she was talking to wasn't aware of her past already, and, secondly, that really didn't compare to this. Trying to get the headmaster to make unisex loos and to let trans students wear their gendered uniform of choice (how did she not realise then?) really wasn't the same thing as organising an entire social support group.
But Amelia was not an overly nervous person... anymore.
She took a deep breath, and pushed the door open, and immediately turned to using her charm work on the furniture to lay things out as she wanted; table in the middle, snacks on top, chairs all around.
She slung her wet coat over one chair (relegated to a corner for now), and unfurled her umbrella again beside it, propping it open to try. She tried using a charm to dry her hair, which wasn't a complete success (charms hadn't been her
best magic in school), and tried finishing the job with her hands, squeezing the hair out. It wasn't perfect, but at least she didn't look like a drowned diricawl after that work was done. She was tempted for a second to remove her shoes, wet as they were, but she felt like that might make a bad impression, so opted out of it already.
The meeting, and any visitors with it, were not due to arrive for another few minutes, and that gave enough time to do a little decoration, at least.
Conjuration charms were not her greatest strength, but she produced several adequate bunches of flowers, as well as a few spare cushions.
And now she was left with the room as she wanted; fancy wooden table in the centre with a vase with white flowers as its centrepiece, and snacks around it. The chairs were a mix of colours, and quite how they stacked on top of each other would be almost impossible for anyone to mentally visualise, but was best compared to the clipping through models in a glitchy game. Now they were laid out around as almost armchairs with colourful fabrics and a soft feeling to it. There were several metres of space on either end of the table, and if needs must, if the table-space ran out somehow (which Amelia was not expecting to happen), then Amelia could always extend the table a little with magic. For a first meeting, she was in no way expecting to have all the chairs filled, and she was also not expecting to have to come up with some way to compensate for that.
There were three windows; two on the long side of the room, at the back of the building, and one at the side, looking out at the carpark again.
But that was a little drab, and a view Amelia didn't particularly like, so she looked at it a moment, considering, and then opened up her phone - what sort of elitist snob wizard thought they were above the genius of muggles, anyway? - and looked through for a picture she liked. After several minutes of scrolling (...well, actually several minutes of deleting all the pictures of her and her most recent ex-boyfriend, as of two weeks' ago), she came to one she actually liked. It took four attempts to get the charm right-ish. It wasn't
perfect, but there was bound to be someone who could manage it better attending at some point, and there
was a slightly pixelated view from the top of that time she went to Mount Snowdon. The white mountain snow was a far better view than a carpark, and the white brightened up the room far more than the drizzle outside, and grey clouds above did.
Well.
She'd done what she could now to make the space into what she wanted it to be, and the only thing she could do now was to wait, and hope someone had seen the notice she'd put in the front hall of the building a month ago.
[ Amelia O. puts posters out in the community hall asking for any interested members of the community; in magical ink, of course ]
[ Amelia O. checks around Tesco Express for food (hunting) ]
[ Simon has to designate food portions probably. They're all in the right order at least. Pizza seeds are valid ]
[ Also Simon has to accept that I've not done refs yet and idk when they'll happen ]
[ I will add in my advent stuff split between here and kanaka helu in my next post for either but this is me claiming my rights for each of them, claiming them proper, as well as like... actually being a post. ]Head
Amelia Okoturo | Female (AMAB) | 29
↪ ST- F8 / HS - LC / HC - 23 / EC - E3 / X / wizard | First Aider
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