The first other girl to get up is Sue Li, but the others are not too far behind.
The Professor walks over to the desk, where he builds a pile of books to stand on so he can see over it. "I am Filius Flitwick, Charms Professor and Ravenclaw Head of House! I'll start taking the roll call."
He starts calling names, one by one, but when he reaches Sarah Potter he squeaks and falls off his books.
"I haven't spent quite enough time in the magical parts of the world to have a good comparison. Kids go to school where we learn about math, science, history and english. Adults work at various jobs like teaching, selling people stuff, or making things. Sometimes people go out to eat. Muggles don't have the floo or apparition so instead they have cars and trains and sometimes planes to get where they need to go. Muggles also use pens and pencils instead of quills and paper instead of parchment. Sometimes we use computer or typewriters instead of either."
"Sure, I'll start with school. Math is a class where you learn to manipulate numbers. The simple maths we learned up to how old I am now were called arithmetic and algebra. Arithmetic is about doing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Algebra is about puzzling out how to rearrange a math problem so that you can solve it with arithmetic. I can try to give examples if those words aren't familiar."
"It sounds like each of you has a different level of background, I can keep going with the level of detail I'm currently trying for or I could get more or less detailed. I'd be happy to provide more clarification to any of you later if the whole group doesn't need to hear it."
"I'm told Dumbledore was involved in me being placed there. I don't know why I was placed there as opposed to with other friends of my family but it sounds as if a lot of people died in the war including some people who were close to my parents. As for why my relatives don't know more about the war, magic makes them uncomfortable and they aren't particularly curious people by disposition."
"Every muggleborn did," says Brian Mendel, one of the boys who got Sorted into her House this year. "Or at least I'd expect every Ravenclaw muggleborn to. What's the point of being in a magic school and not doing that?"
"I can't imagine living without magic," shudders Anthony Goldstein, another first-year.
"Well I couldn't do it but—cleaning stuff, can you imagine doing that by hand? Or cooking, dad has the coordination of a drunk opossum, if he had to cook by hand instead of by magic we'd all be doomed—well, guess mum could cook instead, she used to when she didn't know about magic, but it's been years," he explains. "And I've seen muggle toys—mum bought me some, said I should get to know some of my 'muggle heritage,'" he adds, with air quotes. "They're really boring—they don't do anything!"
"Muggles aren't violent and we don't kill each other, a prepared magical person wouldn't be in danger. We are basically muggles in psychology, we won't attack them. I don't care about cultures and ours is too old and slow anyway. I don't even know what it means to protect our economy and the person I was talking to didn't know either."
"I wouldn't discount the idea that the muggles could choose to fight or attack us if they knew we existed. People do awful things when they're scared and magic is pretty scary if you feel like you can't protect yourself. Even if you don't care about preserving cultures there are people who care deeply and will fight to keep their culture intact. Reading between the lines that was part of the reason for the last war."
"I think that's also making a lot of complicated things into a single thing," she says, oblivious to those feelings. "Like... yeah there will be horrible groups but there was Voldemort, that's not a muggle thing it's a human thing, it wouldn't get worse because muggles know about us."
"I didn't mean to claim that muggles are psychologically different from magical people. The history books I've read make it sound like magical people are pretty much the same. I'm not sure why you think that changing a major part of how people think the world works won't create new groups of scared desperate people. Maybe if you did things really carefully."
"...huh?"
But then it's 2:30 and the doors slam shut. The cat jumps from the table, turning into Professor McGonagall in a fluid motion that makes several students gasp in surprise.
(Her gaze may linger on Sarah for a second or two.)
"Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic you will learn at Hogwarts," she says without preamble. "Anyone messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been warned."
Then she wordlessly waves her wand and changes her desk into a pig and back again.
"I guess it depends on what you mean by evil. I think if everyone expects you to join with whatever dark lord comes along it's more likely that you will. Less dramatically, the same is true of people expecting you to be a blood purist, or more benignly read a lot if you've been sorted into Ravenclaw."