The next customer has a somewhat bewildered but interested look on her face, after catching the end of the not-shouting-match.

"Hello! I'm here for my wand! Because that's apparently a thing!"

And before the other girl can go somewhere else, Sadde looks at her and says, brightly, "Don't go anywhere!"

Sadde grins at the other girl and turns back to Ollivander. "My name might be Sadde Woods, yes, yes, I know, it's a pleasure to meet you anyway."

"Well, Miss Woods," says Ollivander, "try this one, there you go, give it a wave." He hands her a wand.

Sadde continues grinning, and takes the offered wand, and gives it a wave. That might not have been the very best of ideas, as it causes a small explosion somewhere close, which makes her giggle. "Ooh, can I keep this one?"

"Well - we'll see if anything else gets you a more refined response," says Ollivander, whisking it out of her hand and presenting her with another. "Holly and unicorn hair, nine inches, rigid -" He thwips his own wand in the direction of the explosion, tidying up the toppled boxes.

The girl pouts slightly but accepts the new wand, which fails to have any effects whatsoever. "I liked the other one better," she comments as Ollivander offers her yet another wand.

They back-and-forth like that for a while, with the wands more-or-less evenly divided between 'does absolutely nothing' and 'causes various kind of localised chaos and destruction' (Sadde seems utterly delighted whenever that happens). Eventually they find one that produces suitably pleasant sparkly effects—pine and dragon heartstring (of course), nine and three-quarters inches, fairly sturdy—and so Sadde has her wand! Except...

"So, can I get a second one?" she asks, grinning impishly.

Sadde laughs at Ollivander's reaction—she hadn't really expected a different one—and scoots, returning the other girl's smile with a grin of her own.

"So, hi, nice to meet you, I'm Sadde! But you knew that. What's your name?"

"I'm Miranda. Did you already want a second wand or were you just riling him up?"

"Nice to meet you!" she repeats," And neither! I caught the end of your—" she pauses for a second then decides to go with: "discussion, and thought it was a very sensible idea. I'm also a bit jealous because I didn't have that idea," she concludes, not sounding jealous or any other kind of negative, really.

She does another inexpert wand-wave, and predictably enough there are more explosions.

"So how does this work, exactly?" she asks no one in particular. "The whole choosing things? Are wands sentient?" She looks proud of knowing the word 'sentient.' "Don't they get jealous of other wands? Where did these ones come from? Did their original magical people get new ones? If they could get new ones why couldn't we?" The barrage of questions happens very quickly, and the pause after this last one should probably be interpreted more as one for breath than an indicator that she was done with questions.

"Well if they're not sentient then how do they choose?" she insists. "Is it just a match of, like, materials and personality? Is this like that personality-type thing, with broad categories lots of people can fit? What does dragon heartstring indicate? What about pine? And nine-and-three-quarters inches? Shouldn't we try to get a similar one to make sure there'll be a fit? Why did the other—Mr. Ollivander ask so offended when we asked for more wands, if they're not even sentient? Why not just give us another copy of a wand with exactly the same specs?" This time she has to pause for a few more seconds, she's quite out of breath.

(Incidentally, she has caused some more explosions.)

Sadde shrugs. "I think he'd probably have bit my head off if I asked him anything," she comments, and she does not say that this would also have prevented her from riling Ollivander up! Which had not been the main reason she'd asked but it had been a nice bonus.

Eventually she does find another wand that's not so openly hostile to her: dragon heartstring as well, hawthorn, nine inches. She beams happily and looks at Miranda: "No luck? What's your original one anyway?"

"Pine and phoenix feather," Miranda says, as the proprietress brings out an armful of "curiosity" wands and starts opening their boxes for her. Some of them are not even made of wood - there's ivory in there, and what looks like a solid sliver of unicorn horn, and dragon claw and what might be bone. Miranda picks up one of the least dodgy-looking and gives it a wave, then the next.

She pays the proprietress and watches Miranda's attempts with interest. Well, sometimes, anyway; other times she's watching her own two wands and grinning at them. She's a witch! That is just so cool.

Eventually she gets tired of staring at the two sticks of wood and devotes her full attention to Miranda, choosing this moment to ask, "So I take it you were born a witch, yes?"

"Yes? I don't think a person can suddenly start being a witch later on," Miranda says.

Sadde waves her hand a bit, "Yes, yes, I meant like, born knowing you were a witch—or, like, your family has magic—you know, you knew you had magic since always." She pauses a bit, and amends: "I mean, you knew what magic was since always."

She seems to be lacking some vocabulary here.

"I was brought up as a witch, yes. It's okay, though, you'll catch up, my mum is Muggleborn and she's done fine."

She tilts her head. "Muggleborn is someone like me, then? That didn't know much about magic before? ...does that mean you call people like my mum—people without magic, muggles?"

Sadde oooohs when she sees the pretty globe of warm light. After Miranda and the proprietress finish their transaction, she looks at the other girl and explains: "Someone did come, but I guess they forgot to explain the nomenclature? I think Mum and I might have derailed the conversation a little bit further than usual. What'd you get there?"

She does not have enough hair for that!

She spends a few seconds in silence as they start leaving the shop, then says, "...so I really want to talk to you a lot about all sorts of magical things but I have no idea how to do it without asking you to tell me a complete story of your life."

Miranda giggles. "I don't mind filling you in but I'm not sure the story of my life would be that useful! It has things in it like 'lived in Australia for a bit' and Muggles also live in Australia, I know, I saw them."

Sadde giggles too. "Yeah, but well, I bet there was stuff in Australia that you saw and muggles—that's a really weird word—anyway, muggles didn't see! And besides it's mostly the small things I want to know, like how cooking goes, and rent, and where you live, and what you do all day, and is there magical school before Hogwarts?"

"Well - is all your shopping done?" Miranda asks. "Because I live just down Plur Alley, if you want to watch me poach an egg and ask Mum about the landlord and her job. She's a schoolteacher for little magical kids."

She nods. "Yeah, it's all done, though I should probably tell Mum before going anywhere else. She told me to meet her at the bookshop after I was done with wands and other likely distractions."

"Sure. I got my books already but that was before I knew my second wand would be cheaper than my first one, I should get a couple more things there."

"I hadn't planned on buying a second wand but I had planned on buying something, Mum expected I'd find some nice trinket to purchase on my way back there." What she does not say is how rare the possibility of finding nice trinkets to purchase is in her life.

"Flourish and Blott's?" Miranda inquires, about to set off in a direction.

"Yes."

Miranda continues in that direction, then.

They arrive, and a tall blonde woman who looks nothing like Sadde and was standing fairly close to the entrance spots them, walks towards Sadde, and says: "This place is remarkable, there are—oh, hello, you've made a friend!"

"Mum, this is Miranda. Miranda, this is my mum, Laura," Sadde introduces.

"It's a pleasure," Laura says brightly.

"Pleased to meet you," Miranda says, offering a handshake. "Have you been finding your way around okay?"

The woman shakes Miranda's hand and smiles. "Yes, indeed, although I've mostly been here. This is truly amazing."

"Mum, Miranda invited me over so I could watch her poach an egg and talk to her Mum about the landlord and her job teaching magical children can I go?"

Laura blinks, then says, "I suppose there's no problem with that. Do you live nearby?" she asks Miranda.

"Yes, Plur Alley branches off Diagon at Fortescues's and I'm not even a block down from there."

"Oh, splendid! Well, how long are you planning on being there?" she asks her daughter, who looks at Miranda in turn. Laura laughs and continues, "You do have to get back home eventually, and I don't think I can exactly spend all day walking around the place waiting for you to leave."

"I didn't have any other plans besides school shopping today. Although I don't know if you want to hang out in my apartment all afternoon! We're still moving in and there's things not unpacked yet, and don't you still have stuff to buy?"

"Are you kidding me? It's a magic apartment! Of course I want to spend all afternoon there! Beats my boring old muggle place."

"Sadde!" Laura admonishes, before looking at Miranda again and gesturing at a bag she had left over there where she'd been standing before spotting her daughter. "Wands were the last thing on our list. How about I come pick her up in about a couple of hours, if that won't trouble your parents too much?"

"It's just my mum and she won't mind. Do you think you'll be able to find it okay? We're 15-J, Plur Alley."

"Absolutely. Very well, then, have fun, darling," Laura says, planting a kiss on top of Sadde's head.

Sadde accompanies Miranda on whatever shopping she has left, and there never was a more obvious muggleborn, giggling at the most trivial things and gaping a lot. Eventually they get to Miranda's place.

Sadde thinks the outside is charming and is in awe of the moving staircase. Over inside, she says, "Hi Miranda's mum! It's nice to meet you! Miranda told me you could tell me things!" She beams, then realises she was awfully nonspecific so she adds: "I'm muggleborn and I want to know everything about magic and how magical people live!"

"Okay! Hi Renée!"

Sadde walks over to where Miranda's preaching an egg and... blinks.

"How does it do that? Wait, dumb question, magic, it's probably very inscrutable. I bet if you try to peek it doesn't actually work."

"You can peek through the gaps in the knit actually but not under the edge. But it just looks like the water boiling really suddenly and the egg cooking really fast."

She blinks at that. "Huh," she says eloquently. "That's unexpected." She looks like she's committing that to memory for a second, then says, "So, tell me more, what's it like living with magic? Well, arbitrary magic any way, like, instant poached eggs, and floating stuff, and—" She interrupts herself and spins on her heels to look at Renée. "What about school? What do little magical kiddies learn?"

"I teach very young children, so it's mostly reading and writing and arts and crafts," Renée says, "a little arithmetic sometimes. But I do go over things like magical creatures and wixen folktales and so on, and they have toy broomsticks during recess."

She silently mouths "toy broomstick," picturing little magical babies flying around on little magical broomsticks and practically melts. "That's about the cutest thing on earth," she declares. She pauses her breathless squealing for a second to try to think of more questions, and is very happy when her brain obliges her by providing a dozen more. "What other jobs are there? How do you all hide? Are there many places like Diagon Alley, all squeezed up in secret places?" She stops at these three, having chosen them in order of appearance in her head, because she expects that if she just vomits her questions half of them won't get answered. She makes a mental note to ask for paper to write them all down, and maybe find a way to do the whole pen-pals thing. "Can I send letters here?" she asks when that occurs to her.

The girl drinks the information up, even if it's not too much more exciting than muggle stuff. "Oooh I didn't know owls could do that! I thought they were just cute pets," she says. "Most animals hate me, when I walked into the pet shop there were attempts on my life by three owls, five cats and twelve mice. I did get one white owl who didn't seem to hate me, though."

"Okay, if you have an owl you can give it a letter and it'll take it wherever the addressee is," Miranda says. "Mine is named Amber, what's yours called?"

"Richard! How do owls know how to find their destinations? Do we have to tell them? Or do they read the actual addresses?"

"Owls - well, the kind you get in wizard shops, anyway - are just a little bit magic about finding people. You can tell them where to take something if you don't want to address it, and I'm not sure I'd call what they do with the envelope 'reading', but they can use written too."

The girl nods. "Your mum said she taught classes to little children. What about you? Did you go to class until recently, too?"

"Yep. Mum taught me when I was her class's age and then I had other teachers, here, and then a different one while we were in Australia, and now we're back and it's all Hogwarts professors."

"...Your ears," Miranda says. "Are you a Metamorphmagus? If that happens when you sneeze how do you hide around Muggles?"

She blinks and raises her hands to her ears, and groans. "This hadn't happened in two years!" she complains, as they reduce back to regular human-shaped ears. She taps them to make sure they're the right shape and sighs. "And the answer to that is 'fairly badly.' That's part of the reason why I think my conversation with the Hogwarts representative might have been a bit different than usual."

"I guess it must've been. But that's cool, though, you'll figure out how to only do it when you want to eventually I bet, and most people can't do it. ...Anyway, some maths, a little stuff that Muggles call science but not a lot and we didn't mostly call it the same thing or do it the same way. Astronomy is more from a divination perspective, chemistry is all from a potions perspective, physics is all really basic and from a 'how stuff acts without magic around' perspective, biology's from a herbological or transfiguration perspective. Even for students who can't cast spells yet."

"I can mostly control it now," she says, and by way of demonstration has her eyes shift through a bunch of different colours before returning to the one she'd been wearing (clear blue). "It's just that sometimes, when I really lose concentration, or I'm really tired, or really angry, or really sad, or really frustrated, that it happens accidentally. I mostly get by. People tend to be awfully incurious though," she muses. Then she purses her lips and says, "Would you happen to have some pen and paper? ...or parchment and quill, I guess. I keep having these questions then forgetting them, and I should probably write down the stuff you say."

"Oh, I have pens, they're much more convenient than quills. It's worth knowing how to use quills in case you get a teacher who insists, but here's a ballpoint." Miranda hands her an ordinary Bic and a bit of parchment.

"Cool, thanks!" she says, and starts writing them down. After a while, she decides she's done, and beams up at Miranda. "So I have this list of questions and I think mum might tell me I'm being bothersome if I asked them right now," she explains.

"Well, I can probably answer some of them anyway."

She looks them over. "Well, I guess the one I'm most curious about is, why all the secrecy? I mean, just with the stuff from Diagon Alley it looks like magic could be used to improve on muggle lives a lot! Not to mention the whole thing where magic users are all misleading scientists everywhere, kinda. I mean, I'm sure there must be some pretty good reason for this, but I... haven't been able to think of one? And granted I've only been thinking about this for a week and I'm rambling, sorry."

"Yeah, um, I don't really agree with all of that. But the idea is - there's a lot more Muggles than wixen. And it would be really overwhelming if they wanted us to do magic things for them all the time. Also historically they didn't like us very much and sometimes set us on fire and there is absolutely no chance that Muggles have learned to be any nicer since then. Therefore they can't know we exist. It's... pretty dumb. But that's the idea."

She purses her lips. "It... I mean, surely we're not the first to think of this, right? Surely someone else has thought of this and tried something and failed, or something? I mean, maybe I'm overestimating how powerful magic is but it sounds like those things are... fixable."

"Nobody's tried recently. It's very illegal and if you show magic to an unauthorized Muggle they get memory charmed, which is awful."

She gapes. "They get what. They get what?!" She stops, closing her mouth and working some things out. "How freely do they use this power?" she asks, almost in a whisper.

"It's probably never happened to you. It... might have happened to anyone you rabbit earsed in front of besides your immediate family who said anything that a wizard noticed."

She looks ill. "That's very likely, yes," she says, mutely.

"But most accidental magic isn't that obvious and most people don't do magic in front of muggles even accidentally. So it's probably not happening quite constantly, but it means you'd have to get the law changed before you could do civil disobedience or anything."

She still looks fairly ill. "I..." she looks down at her feet, then at Miranda again. Her eyes have changed colour; it's almost unnoticeable, but they are in fact somewhat darker. "I think that sounds like a great idea."

"I think so too. But we're eleven. Well, I'll be eleven in two weeks. And I haven't thought of a way to get anybody to listen to me about it yet."

"I'm listening!" she says. "I wonder if other muggleborns wouldn't think the same? At least if we talked to them?"

"Well, Renée cares that I care but she doesn't think it's a particularly huge problem."

Sadde stares for a second, before blinking a few times. "Mum's gonna think it's a particularly huge problem," she comments. "Are there any other horribly immoral things going on with our government? Do they maybe burn kittens for fun on the street?"

"I have a list," says Miranda, and she goes into her bedroom to rummage for her list.

Sadde wonders whether she should follow.

"You can come in just don't read my notebooks," Miranda says over her shoulder. Rummage rummage.

Sadde comes in, and doesn't read her notebooks. "Do people frequently try to read your notebooks when they come into your room?" she asks a bit doubtfully.

She looks increasingly upset by what she's reading, a fact that can be discerned from how she's pursing her lips and how her eyes are becoming noticeably darker. She doesn't seem to have a lot to say about that, and even when she gives the notebook back her face looks somewhat focused, as if she's looking very intently at something invisible right in front of her.

"Since we got back I've heard rumors that some people are thinking about repealing the Statute of Secrecy," Miranda says encouragingly. "...Mostly because a lot of British wizards died in the war, we have a fair amount of international clout, and nobody wants a total population crisis, so if it were easier for people to go about having half-blood children that would help. Not for good reasons. But still."

"Bad reasons are better than no reasons," she sighs. "There's been a war, recently?"

"It wasn't quite a war by Muggle standards - smaller, less organized - but there was a Dark wizard and he and his followers killed a lot of people. That's why Mum took me to Australia. But this last spring he was defeated and things are calming down."

"Last spring?!" Well. Guess magic isn't all flowers and candy, is it? "I think this is the closest I've ever been to a historical event."

"The last battle was actually at Hogwarts. All the students in years ahead of us were probably there."

"There's only really a homeschooling option if you have magic parents, but you could apply to an overseas school. I almost went to the Owly, which covers Australia. Beauxbatons is more likely than the Owly to take a British student who's never lived there, but you'd have to learn French."

She grimaces. "No, I don't think so, we don't really have the money to move." She sighs. "Well, I hope no Dark Wixen decide to terrorise the place while we're working on tidying it up."

"They're not that common. Last time was about fifty years ago and it was the same guy, he just spent the intervening time mostly dead."

"Mostly dead? How can someone be mostly dead?" Beat. "Well, I guess 'magic,' but I mean, uh." What does she mean? "I guess I'm just confused about what that means."

"I don't really know the details, I wasn't there."

She giggles, the first positive expression of emotion since the whole 'our government is a dystopia' revelation. "Fair." Her eyes are marginally lighter, again.

"Your eye color keeps changing. I thought it was the light but it's just changed while you didn't move."

"Oh, yeah, they do that. The thing with, like, emotions, they're the most sensitive part? I mostly can stick to a single colour and just change hues, and most people seem to think it's the light. Sometimes it changes a lot, though, but no one really ever called me out on it. Except the one time, but this one time is one time I'm fairly sure the government must've erased the minds of everyone present," she practically hisses.

"...I don't mean to downplay the badness of memory charms but usually it would just be taking a few minutes, not their whole minds."

Sadde sighs. "It was pretty bad. There was this bully, he pushed some buttons, I..." She looks fairly ashamed. "Well, his mum threatened to sue mine, I had to be pulled out of school, there was a whole lot of sh—stuff going down for a while, and then it all stopped suddenly. So, it was, er, more than a few minutes."

"Oh. Yeah."

"Bye!"

Miranda doesn't recognize him.

Sadde didn't expect her to! "Hi Miranda, hi Renée, it's Sadde," he explains to them.

"So, I'm curious, where exactly are we?" he asks. "Is this, like, a completely different place than King's Cross, or are we between bricks, or something?"

"I don't know how it works," apologizes Renée. "I do think we are still in King's Cross, but not the conventional layout."

The boy takes a notepad and a pen from his pocket and writes something down there in response to that.

Miranda giggles.

Sadde looks up from his notepad with a smirk. "What?" he asks, and the tiny, tiny snow owl in the cage on the small cart he was pushing hoots happily. It is really incredibly tiny.

"Nothing, I just approve of notetaking. Your owl is adorable."

"I recommend making it so much of a habit that if you're ever seen without a notebook everybody you know wonders where it is," says Miranda.

"But how do I turn it into a habit in the first place?"

"...Be me, I guess. Only don't actually because that would be confusing and it's the first day of school."

"I said not to. I want people who meet me to actually be meeting me."

He grins, looking like himself again. "Sorry," he says, and writes something down on his little notepad again. "It was just a joke, I wouldn't actually impersonate unless you wanted me to."

"I'll let you know if I ever want to be impersonated."

"Deal!"

"Do you want to mill around or go find a train compartment?"

He shrugs. "We can find a compartment if you want."

Miranda hugs her mum and onto the train they go. It's not particularly full yet; they find one that is currently empty without trouble.

"Oh, that would've been useful! But at least we both found second wands at the pawnshop."

"Yeah. Maybe next year I can get a third one by pretending I'm a new first year." He's still examining his wand between his fingers when he asks: "Did you try playing with your wand a bit yet?"

"Little bit. We won't be allowed to use magic out of school later, but Renée said I could probably get away with it before I was formally enrolled."

He looks at her, then, pausing his fidgeting. "What'd you learn? What can you do? I accidentally set some stuff on fire and mum told me I couldn't play with it until I actually learnt how."

"Um, I braided some string with the spell Renée uses on my hair - I didn't want to point my wand at my head until I knew what I was doing - and I sort of mostly repaired a broken plate and she had to do it over again because there was still a crack, and I did sparks."

He nods, that old look of fascination about trivial things back on his face.

"We're allowed to do magic on the train, if there's something you want to try."

The interior paneling of the train car is wood, Miranda's trunk is wood, the floor is carpeted, and the cushions are upholstered.

"Eep!" Miranda ducks, although it hadn't been going to hit her. She falls off her seat.

"I'm fine," sighs Miranda. "Do you want me to go find a prefect who knows how to cast healing spells?" she asks the new girl.

"You're allowed to try things on the train," Miranda tells her. "But you might want to be careful. I'm Miranda and that's Sadde; what's your name?"

"It's cool!" Miranda agrees.

"My mum is," Miranda adds.

"I can answer questions you have while you're catching up on everything but I don't know all the little technical details Sadde sometimes wants," Miranda says.

"Sometimes ask for, then. Sometimes you just want to know that we can use owls for letters, that's not technical."

"I want Ravenclaw. Mum was in it."

"Slytherin or Ravenclaw, I think," Sadde says. He looks like he's about to ask something, but stops and writes something down on his notepad instead, getting his pen from the ground before that.

"...You should probably know that Slytherin has a bad reputation and a tendency to be full of people who hate Muggleborns," Miranda mentions. "The war may have changed some things, but probably not instantly and there would still be all the upper years to worry about."

"A lot of what the war was about was bigoted purebloods hating people," Miranda says. "And now the Dark wizard they were following is gone, but the beliefs aren't all. And he and most of his followers were Slytherins."

Miranda snorts. "How would you fix that one?"

Sigh. "There's a charm called a Memory Charm and it can erase memories. It's used much too often and on too many people but it probably won't happen to you."

"It depends on what its current form is, of course, I haven't assessed the situation in Hogwarts, let alone the Ministry or the general population."

"If it's very bad I'll probably have to to get anything else done, I'm hardly impeccably pureblooded for seventeen generations or anything. But I mostly want to concentrate on things like the use of memory charms. And one of the most promising ways to solve the bigotry would be to integrate with muggles anyway, so only a small fraction of the people you'd have to interact with most of the time would think it was anything less than awesome and special to be a muggleborn wix."

Sadde nods again.

"I did the usual things when I was little, moving toys and once I turned peas into chocolate, but Renée mostly like to talk about how my notebooks wouldn't open for anybody but me even if they got dropped on the floor."

"The usual things are still pretty novel to us muggleborns," Sadde points out.

Willow nods at that, then turns to Sadde and asks, "What about yours?"

"When I was a bit older than an year old—"

"—this happened—"

"—though mum never told me which way around it was."

"...You don't even know? What does your birth certificate say?"

He shakes his head. "No clue, mum never answered when I asked and hid it from me. She says it doesn't matter and she loves me anyway," he snorts, and Willow snickers.

"I mean, that's a better answer than 'stay what you were whether you like it or not', but she won't even tell you? That's terrible. Do you have other family who might say?"

"...nnnoooo," he answers, then shrugs uncomfortably. "I think she's afraid I'll go on a genderfeels loop about what my 'real gender' is and it'll make me upset, and this particular technical detail isn't one I'm too curious about at the moment, I reckon if I really want to find out she'll tell me."

"Or she'll figure this means you're about to go on a genderfeels loop and will refuse even more because she thinks you might be more upset," Willow points out.

"...or that," he concedes.

"Well, when you're of age she'll have to cough up all your documents either way, I guess."

"Yeah, that's part of the reason why I don't care much."

"Well, as long as it isn't bothering you."

"It's not."

"How often do you usually change? How do you want people talking about you when you aren't there to give a clue?"

"I usually stay a single gender for at least a day, usually around two or three days, but seven-day sprees or two-hour hiccups aren't unheard of. I don't accidentally shift—or I guess I should call it morph?—genders, but it's usually pretty random what gender I'm feeling like on any given day. As for talking about me, you can use the last one you saw me as, or 'they' if that's better."

"I'll probably use 'they,' I'll never remember what I last saw you as."

"Okay."

"I'm not sure yet if I'll remember or not," muses Miranda. "And yeah I think it's usually morph but people will know what you mean if you say shift."

He shrugs. "I can get used to morph, it's not like I've had much chance in my life to make a habit of talking about it any particular way."

"Do you not have a lot of neighbors?" wonders Miranda.

"I kinda had to be pretty secret for most of my early childhood, and then I got into the habit of hiding from them. Also there was always a whole lot of moving because of my little, er, accidents—"

"Accidents?"

"Yeah, like, morphing donkey ears unexpectedly and stuff like that. So, anyway, I never really got to know any neighbours I did have."

Willow giggles at the donkey ears.

"What about school?"

"School was a problem," he admits. "Most of the time people noticed my eyes had morphed colours I'd morph them back and tell them my eyes were weird and it was a trick of the light. As for the gender..." His face morphs slowly to something that's more-or-less between his boy-face and his girl-face, leaning more towards the boy-face, and then it shifts some more towards the girl-face. Given that he's eleven, the androgynous look is not too hard to pull off. "I used something like this, so it was more plausible that the changes weren't that supernatural." His face returns to what it was. "The donkey ears were more trouble, mum didn't let me anywhere near school before I was like five or so, and then most of the time the shifts happened when adults weren't looking so no one believed the kids. Except when it did happen in front of the adults, and then I had to change schools." He sighs. "There was also the bullying problem, most kids were okay with the gender thing but then some kids told their parents about it and they'd come back next week being bigoted and calling me a freak and a he-she and stuff like that." He doesn't sound particularly bothered by that, it sounds like just a fact of his life.

"Aw!" Willow says, and immediately moves to the other side of the compartment to give Sadde a hug.

Sadde is surprised! But he accepts the hug and returns it. "It's fine," he says.

He laughs. "Thanks!"

"People will understand what a Metamorphmagus is," Miranda says, "but might not understand as much about the gender thing, I'm not sure."

He shrugs. "I can deal with the bullying, I have a lot of experience. And I don't plan on exactly advertising the Metamorphmagic, but I don't plan on hiding it all the time either. I'll probably stick to these shapes and let people figure out what they'll figure out." He grins. "Besides, I'll have magic, now. That will significantly raise the upper bound on my creativity with bullies."

Willow giggles.

"It'll raise their creativity with you too," Miranda says. "You might want to learn counterjinxes just as a precaution."

He nods. "Of course, but I think I can do better with the same things. I always have."

"Hope so."

He grins.

So does she!

Miranda tries, but that doesn't stop her from falling entirely into the lake. The enormous man who's shepherding them around has to fish her out.

Sadde stifles a giggle. "Are you okay?" he asks.

"I'm," cough, "okay, I just slipped."

Willow beams. She didn't slip into the lake, but somehow she managed to get almost as wet at Miranda. She's looking pretty happy about this development, however.

Sadde looks around for one, and only spots the hardest one to miss. "Maybe he can help?"

"He isn't a teacher, he's the groundskeeper. Maybe he could do it but it's better to wait until we're out of the boats in case I just fall again getting out."

"Oh," Sadde says. "Yeah, I guess that makes sense."

Sadde was close by and heard the exchange. "You don't like your first name?"

"It's not that bad but I like Miranda better, and my first name only sounds right if it's pronounced with a Nigerian accent, and nobody here has one."

"Oh. What is it?"

"Ebele."

Sadde tries to mimic it, and fails pretty miserably. "Well I like Miranda," he says, and Willow giggles.

"I do too."

Willow is equally astounded, but her reaction to that is chattering endlessly about everything she sees, with a lot of ooohs and aaahs at the architecture and enchantments.

"I was sure he'd get Ravenclaw!" Willow whispers to Miranda.

"I hope he does okay in there," says Miranda.

"Me, too."

He seems like he's doing pretty okay, so far. He takes a seat between another firstie and an older year, the former grinning at him and the latter congratulating him with pats on the back, and watches the couple of remaining Sortings.

And then McGonagall puts her list of students away, and gives a speech about how the aftermath of the recent conflict should not cause them to indulge any impulses to infighting nor to neglect their all-essential studies, and then it is time for feasting.

Not as enthusiastically as Willow! She doesn't act as if she's surprised by the food, but she does act as if she hasn't eaten any food in a long, long time. Her plate is fuller than most around her, and she goes for seconds.

Miranda did not snack much on the train and did not have a big breakfast. Om nom nom.

Nom nom!

The feast goes on a good long while. Miranda, Willow, and one other girl ("Dwimmer, Karen!") are the only new female Ravenclaws this year; there are four boys. It's a small class. ...There are a lot of empty spots at all four tables. Miranda strikes up a conversation with Karen, who seems nice.

At some point, the older boy stopped talking to Sadde and now seems to be trying his best to ignore him for some reason. The other firsty looks somewhere between uncomfortable and fascinated, and is engrossed in conversation with a pretty relaxed Sadde, who seems completely unaffected by the older boy's behaviour.

Dessert indeed! Willow seems to have a hard time deciding between talking a lot and eating a lot, and frequently both activities happen simultaneously. She seems to like Karen, but then again, she seems to like pretty much everybody. Also food. She likes food a lot.

"Of course they are," she says, motioning other firsties into an orderly line. All five of them.

He bites his lip. That might be a problem. "What happens to students who are boys and girls?" he asks, fairly sure the answer will not be to his liking.

"...Students who are what?" the prefect says.

"House, year, and gender," says the prefect, turning to lead him and all the other Slytherin firsties to the dungeons. "So that's you and the other two boys in line all in one room."

"Yes, but I mean, where do they get the gender information? I'm pretty sure I didn't fill out a form about it."

"You didn't have to send in your name, either," she says.

"Yes, that's why I'm asking. If you tell me the answer is 'magic' then that will be very interesting."

"I assume there's magic somewhere to tell the house-elves how many beds to make," she says. "Do you always ask this many questions?"

"No, I typically ask more," he replies evenly, and doesn't ask any more questions. Mostly, he's pretty curious about what solution they'll have come up with for him.

The Slytherin dorm is cool, dim, and opulent. There's a thick glass window showing the lake from underneath; shadows of fish swim by. A fire is going, there are couches and chairs and desks and tables mostly around a well-cushioned wrought iron theme, and there are hallways going this way and that. "Girls with me," calls 'his' prefect, and another one says, "This way, firstie boys," and they depart down separate hallways with students who know which way to go.

He purses his lips, looking between both prefects, and finally shrugs and decides to go with the boys. Less of a fuss that way.

There are enough beds for all three of them.

Sadde scratches his chin at that, but decides it's too early to draw any conclusions.

"Lights out is at ten," the prefect warns them, "and no fussing with each other about who gets which bed or first shower in the morning or any of that rot, or you'll regret it."

That leaves him with the one in the middle; one of the other boys wants to be near the door and the other wants to be near their bathroom. One pops right out into the common room again to socialize; the other digs through his trunk and finds a wizard chess set, which apparently does solitaire by virtue of the pieces being animate.

Sadde debates introducing to the boy (the one he'd been talking to at dinner was the one who left), and decides that if the boy wanted to be sociable he wouldn't have started playing solitaire chess. Sadde decides to go to the common room as well.

They ignore him; apparently neither side of the conversation assesses him as a valuable reinforcement.

In the morning, his roommates clatter about getting ready for the day. The Slytherins and Ravenclaws have their first class, Charms, together.

Sadde...

Her Head of House is Professor Slughorn. The prefects mentioned last night where his office is; it's not far from the Slytherin dormitory.

She wonders if she has time before breakfast, or between breakfast and Charms, to go talk to Professor Slughorn.

Before breakfast will do if she can find the hall on her own and eat fast.

There are various grabbable pastries, and, at the head table, a Slughorn.

Sadde grabs a muffin! And, should Miranda and Willow be there and see her, waves at them, before stopping before her Head of House.

Wave wave nom nom wave!

"Woods," she supplies. "I'm one of the new students, and there's a tiny problem with the whole, erm, dorm thing."

"Is there? What is it?" Slughorn inquires.

"We-ell," she says eloquently. "I happen to be a girl—"

"—and a boy—"

"—more or less intermittently," she starts explaining. "Which, you see, conflicts a bit with the gender segregation thingamabob," she says, and takes a bite of her muffin.

"Last night I was a boy, so I slept in the boys dorm."

"Is there some reason you cannot continue to do that? While, of course, not alarming your roommates with - nocturnal femininity."

"Well, a few? I mean, I don't particularly care whether I sleep in the boys' dorm or the girls' dorm, though I do care some about having to always go to bed as a boy, but I can't exactly," she gestures at herself, "hide that I'm not a boy 100% of the time. So even if I did in fact always go to bed as a boy all the other boys would know that I was not, in fact, always a boy, and many times had not been a boy all day or for the previous few days, bedtime excepted." Om nom muffin.

Slughorn sighs. "Well, if being a boy at the times you are in the boy's room does not suffice for the other boys, send them to me," he says.

She shrugs, swallows the bit of muffin in her mouth, and says, "Alright. Also, question, am I allowed to eat at a table other than Slytherin's?"

"There's not formally a rule against it, but if the other students who belong to the table's House want you to leave you better had."

She nods, thanks him, and goes check if there's space for her with Miranda and Willow.

Lots. Miranda scoots so Sadde can sit between her and Willow. Karen's on Miranda's other side, and looks nervous about the Slytherin but doesn't say anything.

"Hi! Your girl self is really pretty!" Willow says during a foodless second. The foodless second ends.

"Thanks!" Sadde says brightly as she takes a seat. "Hello, there, I'm Sadde," she greets the other girl, then looks for non-muffin food now that she has the time to pay attention to it.

"This is Karen," Miranda says, when Karen doesn't introduce herself. Miranda is almost finished eating and Karen appears to have been satisfied with most of a cantaloupe slice and some toast.

Sadde decides she's not particularly hungry and just serves herself some hot chocolate and some toast. "Nice to meet you!" she tells Karen, apparently oblivious to the girl's discomfort. "So I guess we'll have Charms together," she adds conversationally.

"Yup. I'm looking forward to it."

Willow is not as oblivious as Sadde, but she's about as tactless. "Hey Karen, are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

Miranda sighs slightly and polishes off her hash browns.

Eventually even Willow finishes eating. "I'm so excited about Charms! I wonder what we'll learn."

"Probably the stuff from the books," Sadde points out reasonably.

"He might not go in order, though," says Miranda, shouldering her bag.

Willow grabs her own bag and pretends she's holding an invisible wand. "Maybe they'll teach us how to turn our wands into light sabers!" she says, and starts swinging her invisible wand-slash-light-saber around, producing accompanying sound effects with her mouth.

Sadde giggles.

"I don't think that's a real spell," says Miranda.

"...What's a light saber?"

"It's from this series of movies—er, do you guys have movies?" she asks as Willow continues doing her swooshes and zwooooms.

"No."

"Hard light?"

"That's weird," Karen says, but she looks more relaxed now.

Sadde smiles in a way that might suggest she wasn't that oblivious about Karen's earlier discomfort, and nods. "It's kinda weird, yeah, but kinda fun, too." She watches Willow savage three simultaneous enemies and laughs.

"Movies are pretty neat," Miranda tells Karen. "Maybe sometime if we hang out on a school break you can see one."

The desks are two per. Karen sits with Miranda. They get out their Charms books.

Karen gets hers aloft - temporarily - on the first try. Miranda needs to try twice to get a waft, but her third incanting has the feather levitating very cooperatively.

Karen leans over towards Willow to see what she's doing wrong.

There does not seem to be anything she's doing wrong consistently, but each time she tries it she does something wrong. The main meta-problem appears to be that the more frustrated she gets with her failures, the more mistakes she makes.

"Try doing it slower," says Karen.

She tries doing it slower, and this time she gets the wand movement wrong—too violent and forceful.

"...And gentler. Slower and gentler."

She tries that, too, but now her pronunciation is wrong, and she stifles a frustrated shriek at her feather after it fails to lift.

"You're getting mad at it and it's not helping."

"I know!" she snaps, then closes her eyes and starts breathing deeply. She opens them and focuses on the feather, swish-and-flick perfectly, "Wingardium Leviosa!" perfectly...

And yet, it continues to not float.

"Looky here you little stupid feather, you either float or I'm setting you on fire!"

"How would you set it on fire?" Miranda asks.

"I can probably fail at something around it, there's at least a decent chance it'll catch fire," says Sadde.

Miranda claps lightly.