“Yo!” a blond boy with a haircut mirroring Justin’s waved his hand at Justin and me. “Hector, right?”

  “Yes.”

  He and another boy rose from their chairs and approached, extending their hands.

  “Ernie Macmillan,” one introduced himself. “Let’s get acquainted.”

  “And I’m Zacharias Smith,” said the second, nearly blond boy.

  “Hector Granger,” I replied, shaking their hands.

  “Shall we talk or sleep?” Zacharias asked, casting a tired glance at us.

  “Sleep, of course,” Justin replied. “Tomorrow’s Potions.”

  “On the first day? A nightmare!” the boys groaned in unison, and Justin pointed at my school trunk, which stood beside the bed in one of the niches.

  “Looks like you’ve been assigned here. We’ve got four guys in our year now.”

  “And the girls?”

  “Two.”

  “So few?”

  As we began preparing for bed, I learned where the proper bathroom was—besides a shower or bath, that is. The shower is shared and located at the end of the corridor; a bath doesn’t exist at all, unless you count the pool reserved for the older students.

  “They say,” Justin began when everyone was climbing into bed—Zacharias had already passed out without even closing the curtain to his nook—“that the late seventies and early eighties were tough years for kids. There are fewer of us now than in previous years.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, they say it was a full-on civil war by local standards. The numbers aren’t huge, but given magical Britain’s tiny population, when you convert it to percentages and coefficients…”

  “You sound so smart…” A pillow whizzed from one niche to another.

  “Ow…”

  “Go to sleep already, and…”

  ---

  Morning in the new place didn’t trouble me at all. The elf in me had wandered for centuries, greeting each day in a new spot. Part of the dwarf’s memories felt a twinge of sadness at how much the layout and design of the faculty common room resembled hobbit dwellings. Well… a dwarf may be a dwarf, but how I itch to call him a gnome!

  I woke before the others—habits and schedules are hard to break. After a quick warm-up, I headed to the shower, where a couple of guys were trying to shake off an obvious hangover, dunking their heads under cold water. Ignoring them, I completed my hygiene routine and returned to the room. The others were still asleep, but time waits for no one! According to the schedule I’d found among Hermione’s books and notebooks, breakfast was nearing. Spotting a metal round tray on the table, I grabbed it along with a nearby spoon. With a simple magical construct to amplify sound, a swing, and a strike—

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The metallic clang echoed through the room.

  “Get up!” Another strike. “You’ll sleep through Potions!”

  That last phrase hit the boys’ consciousness far harder than the clanging, sabotaging their sweet slumber. They jolted awake and shuffled to the shower like sluggish sleepwalkers, returning soon after with clear displeasure in their eyes.

  “We’ll be late, or we’ll have to rush breakfast,” I shrugged, unembarrassed.

  Justin walked to his alcove, pulled out his wand, and cast *Tempus*, revealing an illusory clock face.

  “Indeed.”

  Quickly donning the school uniform—trousers, shirt, a tie in faculty colors, a dark jumper with sleeves and the Hogwarts crest, and a robe with a yellow lining—we stepped into the common room. The atmosphere buzzed with life, though students didn’t linger long, leaving as soon as they’d gathered their comrades or finished packing their school bags.

  “I was starting to think I’d have to wake you lot,” the Prefect approached from the side, flashing his signature smile.

  “No need,” Zacharias muttered, glaring at me, his tousled blond hair left uncombed. “Hector already woke us in the cruelest way.”

  “And how, if it’s not a secret?” Cedric asked.

  “He banged on the iron tray like a lunatic and yelled, ‘Get up!’” Zacharias grumbled.

  “Uh-huh,” the Prefect said with a dismissive wave. “That’s nothing! I know a tricky spell—Hector, I’ll show you later…”

  “No!” the boys shouted in unison, recoiling half a step.

  “Okay, jokes aside,” Cedric said, pulling several thin sheets of parchment from the inside pocket of his robe and handing them to us. “Your schedules. And this is…”

  He handed me an extra sheet.

  “Fill in the additional subjects you’ve chosen. These forms were completed in second year, but, well, you understand.”

  “Of course. Got a quill?”

  We stood near the exit from the boys’ wing, those round doors still irking me—I hope I’ll get used to them. Beside us was a table cluttered with various office supplies and odds and ends, including inkwells and a couple of quills. We approached it, and I laid the form on the table, deftly dipping a quill in an inkwell and filling it out with swift precision.

  “Wow!” Zacharias exclaimed, unable to hide his admiration. “My father would’ve built me a monument in my lifetime for handwriting that gorgeous!”

  “Indeed,” Cedric nodded, smiling. “The Hogwarts invitation letter looks like cheap scrap paper next to this.”

  “It just came out that way,” I said modestly.

  No surprise there—writing with a quill is one of those daily habits an elf picks up over a lifetime.

  “Well then,” Cedric said, taking my form and briefly admiring the handwriting before continuing, “I entrust our new guy to you.”

  As soon as the Prefect turned toward the gathered first-years, my classmates dragged me back to our room.

  “Did you get the schedule?” Justin asked, more rhetorically than not.

  “We did,” Ernie nodded, having been mostly silent lately.

  “Let’s pack our bags now so we don’t end up scrambling like everyone else later,” Justin suggested.

  “Makes sense,” I agreed, eager to try the tactic myself.

  As we prepared for the day and returned to the common room, I couldn’t help but notice that almost no one carried a standard school bag—the dress code here seems less strict than with the uniform. My personally enchanted triangular backpack wouldn’t stand out too much, then.

  We weren’t the last to reach the Great Hall for breakfast, nor the first, so the hum of students filled the air from all sides. As we took our seats at the Hufflepuff table, plates of porridge, sausages, buns, and other breakfast fare appeared before us. Ernie Macmillan, noticing me scanning the faculty tables and the students seated there, launched into a monologue about the school’s current “political” situation—who was who, a certain Harry Potter, a half-blood who’d offed the local Dark Lord as a baby, and all sorts of tidbits I’d mostly pieced together from Hermione’s books. True, I’d had to read between the lines in those books, but now I at least understood who boasted what blood status, which Houses paid lip service to ignoring it while secretly caring deeply. To my delight, Hufflepuff didn’t fuss much over such things, though in practice, pure-bloods still held more social weight. Nothing new. Still, my observations naturally led me to some conclusions on a different matter.

  Support and read two weeks ahead of WN at:-patreon.com/FanficWorld