At first, the stairs of Hogwarts Castle remained still.
However, the wise Ms. Roine Ravenclaw believed that a static learning environment would limit people's thinking and end the curiosity of young wizards. So, it didn't take long before the other three founders were surprised to find that trying to find an unenchanted staircase in Hogwarts was harder than making a dead bird sing all the time.
What's even more frustrating is that Mrs. Roina, who had stopped looking for stairs, had started directing her attention towards the door in the castle, fortunately, finally finding the three founders who disagreed had joined her to stop her behavior.
Since then, the common rooms of Slytherin and Hufflepuff Houses have been moved to the first floor of the castle, so at least the students don't miss breakfast because they can't find their way. As for the culprit responsible for all this, Ravenclaw House didn't even live in the main castle.
On the contrary, Godric Gryffindor, full of adventurous spirit, after trying the changing stairs of the castle several times, closed the entrance to the first floor of Gryffindor Tower, so Gryffindor students had to enter and exit the common room through the hole on the eighth floor of the castle.
After a long time, the lion cubs of Gryffindor finally became the most familiar with the school's secrets. Of course, the cost is also present. Whenever there is a meal, the absence rate at the long Gryffindor table is always the highest of the four houses; at the same time, most of the absences and late arrivals are also from Gryffindor.
Of course, those boring old things can only be recorded in the pile of historical documents in the library that no one has ever paid attention to. But most of the little wizards at Hogwarts didn't know and didn't care why the stairs of Hogwarts Castle moved. In their opinion, this seems as normal as the sun rising from the east every day.
Why am I suddenly talking about this? It's because...
"So, where is this place? It should be, the fifth floor... right?"
It's another familiar three-way intersection.
Elena looked around with some uncertainty, tiptoed on the edge of the hallway railing, and carefully descended.
How is it possible that in so many years, a wise headmaster hasn't considered adding floor signs and classroom names to Hogwarts Castle?
It turns out that most of the portraits and ghosts in Hogwarts are not so reliable.
Except for those characters with clear self-awareness who appear in the original work, most of the ghosts and moving portraits are not so much a continuation of life, but rather echoes of the wizards who have lived in this world.
"Welcome to Hogwarts. I think you are going to have a very meaningful time here."
Right in the frame on the wall behind Elena, a middle-aged man dressed as a medieval noble dropped the monocle from his right hand and nodded compassionately. This was the third time he said it. In comparison, the portrait of the barbarian warrior who can do nothing but roar is now quite polite.
"Thank you, but now I'm lost. If you could tell me how to get to the stairs to the sixth floor, I would be very grateful."
The little silver-haired Lori turned and sighed helplessly, her eyes scanning the hallway. If she could ever become the headmistress of Hogwarts, the first thing would be to introduce a "lift" like the one at the Ministry of Magic in the school. Then, on each floor, label directions at regular intervals.
"Stairs? Oh, yes, the moving stairs at Hogwarts are quite interesting." The nobleman in the portrait raised his eyebrows, smiled gently, and whispered in a storytelling tone.
"Did you know that, in fact, in this era, many buildings with stairs that can move on their own have appeared? According to their form, they are divided into elevators, escalators, moving walkways... Which do you think is more suitable for Hogwarts?"
Unanswered by the characters in the mocking portrait, Elena distinguished front, back, left, and right, determined that the direction she was going to move was not the position she arrived in, and continued to ask absentmindedly.
"I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're talking about."
The medieval nobleman frowned, a bit confused, yet there was still nothing wrong with his manners.
"So change the question," Elena turned and suddenly said something unrelated to the previous topic, "The cat is sitting on the blanket because it's warm, what is warm?"
"I think, of course, because the blanket is very warm," the nobleman in the hat replied.
"Congratulations, you've passed a part of the Turing test. Your cunning has surpassed 30% of the portraits I've encountered." (Click here to see more about the [Turing Test])
Elena shrugged and praised in a instructive tone, unlike the artificial intelligence, it seems to be a portrait of a living human trace, many of which can pass through some of the original "human nature" memories to answer logical question.
but...
The beautiful lake blue eyes of the silver-haired witch blinked slightly and continued naturally.
"In addition to blankets made of animal fiber, there are many blankets made of acrylic and viscose. Acrylic is a type of fiber similar to wool in appearance, touch, elasticity, and heat retention, and is processed by spinning. Viscose fibers are obtained by extracting and reshaping molecules of natural cellulose fiber using "wood" as raw material."
"Excuse me, which is warmer, acrylic or viscose?"
Based on Elena's incomplete summary on the way, as well as JKR's description in the original book, in her opinion, the magical portraits that appear in Hogwarts Castle can be roughly divided into four categories.
The simplest category is that of common animations from later generations.
They simply repeat a scene, like a portrait of a decapitated elf or a picture taken by a magical camera.
The characters in them don't actually interact much with the outside world. With the "game progress bar" reset, some behaviors will start over and over again. The entire behavior is an independent and closed display window, no matter if it's noisy, swinging, provocative, or even tempting, it can't affect the characters in it.
This category is not very common in the castle, but Elena speculates that maybe the chocolate frog card should also use such magic. After all, if the characters on the chocolate frog card can respond to the question, then it is estimated that all the wizards when walking in the rivers and lakes, will be the same as in [Game King] or [The Witcher 3-Quinte], each person carries hundreds of wizard cards.
The second category is quite common, like a simple artificial intelligence.
You can ask them some simple questions. According to some mysterious magical principle, they will give some simple responses: like blinking, smiling, getting angry, and some responses stored in their question bank.
Elena estimates that this may be a bit similar to Siri, which had not yet been released at that time. To be precise, without mentioning Siri in most cases, even if it's QQ Xiaobing or the magical customer service [manual] of the goose factory, it's not as good.
Not to mention the Turing test, even a slightly more difficult math problem, or brainstorming can make them report several errors.
The third, and most common, is the existence of a noble in the portrait, in front of what Elena calls "echo of memory."
In Elena's opinion, they are somewhat similar to the memory drawn by Professor Dumbledore in the original book using the meditation stack. To some extent, the character's original character, a small amount of memory, and perhaps a bit between soul and memory, the mysterious existence called "human nature."
The part of the "human nature" portrait that is relatively complete can even smoothly pass part of the Turing test. At least some questions that require common sense or moral values in human society can be answered correctly.
Of course, it is quite common to answer questions that are not asked in this way.
After all, they really don't think like humans. If you're out of luck, the lost half-blood girl often needs to ask several portraits to find the way to the upper level.
And the easiest way to distinguish this is...
"I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're talking about."
Upon hearing Elena's use of [acrylic] and [viscose fiber] as keywords, the noble in the portrait said again, a few minutes ago, the phrase she had just said, even in the previous sentence, the girl had already explained the meaning of these two nouns.
"It's okay, I'm just passing the boring search time. Sorry, in short, thank you for your help." Elena waved her hand with a smile, without explaining much, thanks to the intuition of the ancestral woman of the Kaslana family, she intuitively chooses a direction to move forward.
Yes, after all, they are nothing more than an "echo of memory" that was intercepted.
No matter how far back in time they go, no matter what new things they are exposed to, they can no longer learn and understand, and integrate into the original "echoes of past memories" as precision instruments packaged ~ ~. For the entire world, from the moment they started moving in the painting, and even before, time has stopped forever and will never advance even a microsecond.
This applies even to Dumbledore's office, a portrait of the former male and female headmasters. What they leave behind is nothing more than the valuable experience and way of thinking of past people, not the supposed immortal soul originally imagined by Elena.
Of course, there is a fourth...
In the real sense, the level of the soul is involved, and the entire science of that previous life has not been touched, but only through some mysterious realms of inference and incomplete conjecture.
The eyes of the silver-haired witch blinked, and as she thought, the treasures in Hogwarts are not necessarily hidden in secret rooms. However, more conjectures can only be verified one by one after the formal start of magical learning.
The most important thing now is to find the way to the headmaster's office quickly.
If by chance the old horseradish discovers her fatal weakness, who knows what terrible moves she will come up with.
Come to think of it, the mix of the little Meiwa raised her head and looked persistently at a new portrait next to her and asked politely.
"Hello, I'm lost. Can you tell me how to get to the stairs on the sixth floor?"
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