semi-closed RP: Camilla's first dinner party at Hogwarts
Sunday evening finally came, and with it, the appointed time for the dinner Camilla was giving to fulfill the Hat's bribe request. She did not have very high hopes, but the guests had been chosen with an eye to congeniality, so it should not go spectacularly awry. The wild card was the Sorting Hat itself, who had been duly invited as well.
Camilla was used to cooking by herself or with her brother Charles and her friend Francis, neither of whom were at Hogwarts, which was probably a good thing (in the case of Charles, a very good thing indeed, but one that certain exchanges at her Sorting had made her wary about). She found that the kitchens of Hogwarts were not conducive to this task, and ended up perched on a stool reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles while the house elves prepared the menu she had chosen, plus a dish intended for her vegetarian guests.
More elves readied the empty room she'd chosen, clearing cobwebs and making of it something not unlike a dining room, if you ignored the chalkboard on one wall. To herself Camilla could admit some awe at the gravity-defying candles, which somehow managed not to drip hot wax on everything beneath.
She already knew her guest list was down by one. An owl to Dawn asking whether she could borrow a copy of Liddell and Scott had returned to her some time later, dazed and tired, the message still clutched in its talons and sealed shut. While she had looked forward to getting to know the girl better, this made the task of determining seating a little easier. Camilla was unsure whether the Hat considered itself male (in which case it should sit to her left) or female (in which case it should sit to her right). In the end, she decided to assign it maleness in those terms. She wrote place cards herself, in that oddly jaunty hand, and the usual maroon ink. Really, if you were going to have more than six guests, and they didn't know one another well, you needed place cards. The formality of the gesture was tempered by the fact she'd used ruled index cards folded in half.
The seating was thus:
A last check on the kitchen elves' progress, and Camilla was ready to receive her guests. She looked as though she hadn't really worried about the evening: she wore a standard school uniform, mindful of the Hat's remarks at her Sorting, and she still carried carelessly in one hand her paperback of Tess. Looks can be deceiving. She did want to have friends here, of a sort, and she definitely did not want to anger the Hat.