Quote:
Originally Posted by
HOPEendures 
Hope had finally finished the long and extremely tiring climb up ALL those stairs. Maybe they could put an escalator or something in the castle. She should start a petition for that. Maybe pull some Gryffindors in on it. After all, they too had to climb up all the stairs. She had seen them do it.
She turned down the corridor and to her surprise she found Gwen sitting there at the door. She gave her a small smile. "Hey Gwen. Whats up?" Was there a complicated riddle today? She had heard rumors of a first year in constant struggle to answer them. She turned to the knocker and it recited the riddle to her.
"A man without eyes sees plums on a tree. He neither takes plums nor leaves plums. How can this be?" IT WAS! YES! A CHALLENGE! Yet...it wasn't too challenging though. Hmmm....
Gwen sighed half in relief, half in frustration. Good, someone was here to help her, but she might feel doubly stupid if another first year could figure it out and she herself, could not.
"Hi, Hope." She gestured to the knocker.
"I can't get the riddle. I thought it might have been that he had a friend with him, but apparently that was wrong."
Hope was pretty smart, right? She usually had correct answers in class, and she just acted smart. She stood up and waited while the knocker repeated the riddle for her classmate.
"Um, could you maybe not tell anyone that I couldn't get it? It's just, there are already rumors because I have to wait so often." Which definitely ensured Gwen would never be out after curfew, because she certainly wasn't going to sleep in the hall.
She turned the riddle over again in her head trying to catch a misplaced word or something that would clue her in, but she couldn't find anything.
"A man without eyes sees plums on a tree." Maybe she should start with that bit? How did a man without eyes see?
Memory maybe. Maybe it was a tree that he thought had plums on it because it had when he could see? And now it had no plums so he couldn't take or leave any? She repeated that theory to the knocker who again said nothing, but didn't grant her admission. Great. Stupid twice and once while Hope was here. She was beginning to think that the knocker had a thing against her and simply wouldn't open because it was Gwen and the knocker knew as well as she did that she wasn't a real Ravenclaw.