THREAD PURPOSE:
This "Easy-Read" thread will contain parts of the story as it is written so far. This will hopefully help anyone, RR oldbie or newbie, to follow the story.


THREAD POSTERS:
EDIT 8Apr: Those who write parts of the story. They will post their contributions twice -- first in the Discussion Thread, second in Easy Read.

Whose brilliant idea was it to have an Easy-Read thread?
Anto's and possibly his H/H Round Robin co-Mods.

Ri, who just started this thread so that it would be here, and to make things easier for the future Mods.

I'll go ahead and do this. (I am a Mod lol so it'll be fine). Thanks muchly for starting this! I appreciate it.

And here it starts...


--
The red quilts of the Gryffindor girls’ dorm felt soft around Ginny’s body. A soft September chill drifted in from the cracked window, letting in night sounds and the smell of autumn.

A sigh escaped between parted lips, and cinnamon eyes closed. Her mind hazy with the pull of sleep, Ginny’s thoughts could only brush over the workload waiting for her the next morning during class, OWLs, and the long, quiet summer at Grimmauld Place. In the months that followed Sirius’ death, the House of Black felt all the more grey and desolate, and one day wove into the next of rising, eating, and cleaning. Perhaps it was Harry’s far a way look, or her mother’s desperate worrying... The concerned glances Ron and Hermione would exchange, or Lupin’s furrowed brows when Harry would stoically stare into space...

Or perhaps it was just all of that, wrapped neatly into a package, that made the sunlight less radiant and the moon dim.

But it truly wasn’t all that bad, for nearing the school year, things had brightened up, if only a bit. Fred and George snickered over new candies and jokes, and Ron and Hermione stubbornly pulled Harry from his stupor, dragging him out of hiding, from laying about in his room all day.

Things were, Ginny was happy about, gradually getting better.

With a deep breath that relaxed her alert and tense muscles as it left her body, her divided attention left ponders, and drifted off into dreams.

--

Draco Malfoy laid down into his green quilts and pillows with a long, restful night on his mind.

Already a week into his sixth year of Hogwarts, the Slytherin was far from counting his lucky stars, and perhaps a nice sleep was just the ticket, though inwardly he scoffed at the idea. Surely a nice sleep would solve everything wrong in his cursed life...

Mentally, in the stark quiet of his drafty dungeon room, Draco began to count off the nagging thoughts that prodded his brain day and night.

His father was in Azkaban, sentenced for life under the evidence of allying with the Dark Lord. His mother was a wreck, and the first Quidditch game of the season was against Gryffindor. A game he knew he would loose, because Potter the Amazing Boy Wonder just had that sort of luck. The sort of luck that he didn’t.

With a frustrating disperse of air, Draco rolled onto his side and stared at the creases in his sheets, and those lines were the last he saw, dreams carrying him away from reality minutes later.

--

There was something about the smell of the air that was different.

It was warm with a touch of humidity, and now that Ginny could feel the rays of sun luring her unwilling eyelids open, she realized her bed was unnaturally harder than last night. With sleepiness, she wondered if she had rolled off of bed, even though she had not for years.

Coming out of a deep slumber, Ginny turned from her oddly uncomfortable pillow and kicked off the scratchy sheets that adorned her body. Vaguely, she wondered about what time it was, and if she had overslept...

Her muscles jerked awake and her cinnamon eyes were greeted with the strangest sight- not the red drapes that enclosed her bed, or the smooth ceiling of her dorm- but stone. At least, she thought it looked like stone, and it was much higher than the ceiling should have been. This stone was bathed in yellow light that issued from high window that stretched from the middle of the wall to the top, and it was immediate that Ginny’s heart began to race and stutter, for her bed was not the bed she knew, nor the ceiling, nor the windows.

Here the very important contribution I made:


When she took a closer look at the windows, she noticed that they weren’t really windows at all. They were just holes in the wall. What was going on?

Ginny slowly took a look at her makeshift bed, which turned out to be a stone bench. Ginny rolled her eyes and let herself fall back, wincing when she hit her head. She was probably having another one of those dreams where her family lost all the material goods they still had.

She rubbed her head, how can she feel pain in a dream? She sat back up again and slowly pulled herself off the stone bench. Ginny realized that she was much taller now.

Suddenly, someone walked into the room and upon looking Ginny saw that it was a beautiful woman carrying a pile of clothes. She made her way to Ginny who was standing there, dumbfounded.

"You should hurry. There is not much time," she spoke and left the clothes on the stone bench.

Ginny raised her eyebrows at the woman, who just stared at her. Ginny got the point that she had to change, but in front of a stranger? A slight blush crept on her pale cheeks. She pouted and looked at the woman.

"Uh, could you please leave?" Ginny asked shyly.

The old woman stared at her dumbly but left anyway. Ginny grabbed the clothes and studied them. It was a long, beautiful and sleeveless dress. The material felt like silk in her hands and this time she was sure that it was just that. Small strings were hanging of the edges glittering like gold. Maybe this wasn't one of those dreams where her family lost everything. Ginny grinned and dressed herself, first carefully donning the dress that was held together by golden clasps, as she found out, and then the soft leather slippers that looked a little like flip-flops, albeit very expensive ones.

She gazed out of the window and saw the sun rise. She could see it being reflected on something shimmering. The sea? It couldn’t be. Ginny blinked a couple of times and narrowed her eyes. She could definitely see water, but it was calm. She sighed and placed herself on the stone bench. Where was she?

Edit: Insert to make the Story-Line more understandable.
~Phoenixwriter
Edited to delete a repeated sentence. --Crystal 7/14

There was a small rap on the door, and the woman peeped her head timidly inside. "Miss? Are you quite ready?"

Ginny gazed at her, trying to put the pieces of this strange world together. She was dressed more superbly than ever before, a woman seemed to be waiting on her every whim, and the entire place was made of stone.

Well, it wasn't the Slytherin dungeon, that was for sure.

"Well, it depends. Ready for what?"

The older lady’s eyes widened. "Are you feeling all right? You're acting rather peculiar today.."

Ginny had to laugh. This was one of the strangest dreams she'd ever had.

"Actually, I feel wonderful. Wicked good, in fact."

"Wicked, madame?"

"Oh. You don't speak teenager? I feel simply great, then."

With a shake of her head, the woman swept up her own gown and exited the room. "Come along to breakfast. You must be famished."

Edited ~ Kristina

When her stomach emitted a low growl, Ginny noticed that she was indeed famished, so she shrugged and made to follow the woman out of the door – that was no door upon closer inspection, but rather a cascade of colourful pearls and marbles on strings that clicked and clucked when moving through them.

Ginny started to suspect that she was in some kind of alternate hippie universe when she gave the woman that had fetched her a closer look: she had long, black hair, darkish skin that looked as if she had been in the sun too long all her life, although it did not seem unhealthy. The woman, like everything else in the corridor whose shaded windows only left little light sneak in through small cracks in the strange tapestry-like hangings covering the openings, was bathed in soft, earthy light that made her bronze skin glow even more. She was wearing curiously little clothing, and that which she wore was rather…odd, to say the least: she wore no shoes at all and neither did she wear socks. Her chest – and only the most important parts of it – was covered with blue- and white-striped silk that was held together by what seemed to be golden chains with intricately detailed patterns of suns crafted into them. Her waist was hugged by more of the strange silk and chains combination and again it was not much and stopped at mid-thigh.

The woman’s ears were pierced and large golden loops hung from them heavily. Her hair was open, and a golden mixture between a tiara and a karate bandana was resting on her head, setting her dark eyes that were rimmed by even darker eyeliner into stark contrast. She also had lots of bracelets on her wrists and ankles that were jingling merrily with every step or other movement she made.

And even though Ginny had never seen so much splendour and expensive cloth – in this case, it was more splendour and less cloth, though – she thought that the woman seemed like a crossover between a gypsy and a stripper. Given the strange lighting and the – how to call it? – interesting smell the place had, of oriental spices, jasmine and rose oil, cinammon and lavender, Ginny’s impression of the place being a hippie fortress was justified, albeit wrong.

When they turned around a corner, they entered another corridor that had no access to natural light sources, and was therefore equipped with guttering torches that bathed their vicinity in an eerie light, and made the smooth and cold walls – Ginny had run her fingers along them at one point – look fascinatingly alive.