Hide and Seek || Open

Day two of working at Hogwarts hadn't gone so well. Somehow, Leslie had managed to cause a minor explosion in the Great Hall, and he had been trying to keep a low profile ever since. He did not want to get a reputation as one of ‘those teachers.‘ He had always been that sort of employee, the inadvertent trouble-maker, but it wasn't his fault. Nothing was ever deliberate; things just tended to go wrong around him. His mind would wander, or he wouldn't take something important into account, and the next thing he knew, disaster had struck. It had gotten him fired from every other job he'd had, not that he had cared about any of them. They had all been inconsequential things. He had taken those positions solely for the sake of appeasing his mother and sisters, just to prove that he was doing something with his life other than frittering away the family fortune on travel, or art supplies, or parts for quirky inventions that never quite worked as intended. This, however – teaching was something he actually wanted to succeed at. This had real meaning, which was why he had taken extra care over the last few days not to cause trouble. Here he could share his knowledge and all his intellectual fervor with fresh young minds who were eager to learn. Professor Sterling genuinely wanted to provide his students with that, to inspire new generations of thinkers to go on to make discoveries of their own. It was a way of giving back for everything Hogwarts had done for him. At least, that was the hope. That was how he had sold Dumbledore on a risky choice with tenuous references. Besides, he was teaching Art not something critical like Transfiguration. How much could really go wrong with paints and canvas? He was about to find out.

Despite making an effort to avoid any other mishaps, a part of him must have been ill-fated, like some sort of disaster magnet. Minding his own business wasn't enough to prevent it, or perhaps, he ought to have minded his business a little more closely. Sterling was ambling down the corridors with hardly a care in the world. He was on his way to go set up a few last things in his classroom, and so he was heavily laden. It proved to be very unfortunate that the last supplies he was bringing in were the photo chemicals. His arms were bursting with canisters of sulfates, acidic solutions, and saline potions all used in the development and printing processes for photographs. That was when he saw the imp. More correctly, that was when saw the imp in the nick of time to avoid crushing it beneath his boot... But not, unfortunately, in time to save himself from teetering dangerously. For some reason, unpreventable calamities never moved at regular speed. Sterling watched in slow motion as the canisters tumbled, one by one, out of his flailing grasp. They burst open across the floor. There was a hiss of smoke, an exclamation of "oh bugger" from the Professor, and the unmistakable sound of the co-mingling chemicals eating through the masonry, and perhaps a bit of his shoe, for he experienced a sudden breeze across his toes.

When the smoke cleared, he found his suspicions confirmed. There was a large hole in the middle of the floor and a much lesser one across the front of one boot. The silver lining, such as it was, was that the stone had not entirely dissolved – which was to say, the hole did not go all the way down to the floor below. It was just a great, speckled pit in the center of the hallway. He frowned despondently at it for a moment. Looking up, he found himself staring across the pit at a vaguely-familiar but unidentifiable face. A man with only one hand had skidded to a halt before him like something out of a limerick or a vaudeville play. "Well this is a bit awkward," Leslie intoned with a knack for understatement. "Have we already met, I can't seem to recall. I'm Sterling, the new Art Professor. Would you mind not mentioning to anybody about the floor until I fix it, Professor...?"