"The coolest? Cooler than all of the other things that there are?"

"Well, maybe not literally the coolest thing but it's still pretty cool." She reaches into a pocket and shows a shiny little needle. "This was not a needle this morning!" she giggles.

"Ooh that's cool! I could only get a kinda silvery-looking match."

"Mine was pointy but I couldn't eye it. So, that's your favorite subject? Way to not fight the metamorphmagus stereotype."

She shrugs. "I don't see why I should fight it! It's my comparative advantage!"

"That is entirely reasonable."

"I don't really understand why it is that just happening to be a metamorphmagus would help with wanded transfiguration."

She shrugs again. "I don't think it does, I think it's probably just a coincidence. Then again, I've never not been a metamorphmagus, so I don't really know what it's like or how one thing could affect the other."

"Maybe it helps with the underlying mindset somehow. Or maybe it has nothing to do with anything but metamorphmagi are too rare to collect statistics on."

"Is there a stereotype about metamorphmagi being particularly good at Transfig?"

"Yeah."

"How rare, exactly, are metamorphmagi? I guess rare enough that there aren't any others in our year, except maybe they're being even sneakier than I am about it, but in any case there are very few firsties so."

"I don't know any others personally and I don't think there are any more in the school right now."

"It's never been big. There are some homeschoolers, but not enough to throw your estimate that much. We do live longer than muggles assuming nobody curses us to death or something, though."

"Ooh, really? How much longer?"

"Not that much. Like a hundred and forty years on the high end."

"Hmmm, interesting. Do we age differently as well, or do we just get much older without dying?"

"We age about the same for the first while but don't accumulate as much damage from regular wear and tear. So your estimates will start being off past around fifty or sixty."

Very nom!

"I'm interested in healing; I might want to train in it some even if I don't wind up being a full time healer as a job."

"I'm not sure if healing spells tend to technically be transfiguration or not. Do you know if you can shapeshift injuries away?"

She shakes her head. "I haven't ever actually tried, when I was little I didn't have fine enough control to even be able to try, and then I never did try because of habit and also because it'd be suspiciouser to muggles if injuries vanished too quickly. Well, the kinds of injuries that tended to bother me the most, at any rate."

"I can write Renée, she knows some first aid and might know if it's a charm or what."

"That sounds good!" Pause. "How quickly can broken bones be mended by magic, in general?"

"It depends on how badly it's broken. Not that long, though, like a few minutes if it's only breaks and nothing worse."

She puts some more food in her mouth and chews on it thoughtfully. "I'm now considering breaking something just to see if I can morph it better," she says. Then something else occurs to her. "Metamorphmagi live just as long as regular wixen, though, don't they?"

"Yeah, of course."

"Wixen in general treat injury pretty casually - you'll notice that we fly without helmets, even the Quidditch players who have angry balls actively trying to kill them - so you are not likely to have to deliberately break something to find out what the deal is."

"Hmm, I think if we could just Transfigure injuries away, we could probably Transfigure old age away, right? I mean, otherwise Metamorphmagi would be immortal, and we wouldn't live to 140 we'd live to always. Unless there's a cultural thing against immortality? ...a very, very strong cultural thing, that would make literally every wix who has ever lived not want to Transfigure themself youth and health?"

"...Well, can you turn into a five-year-old?"

"There, uh, kind of is a cultural thing. You-Know-Who wanted to cheat death and if it were that easy he probably would have done it even though he wasn't a Metamorphmagus. ...Well, I guess just being young and healthy wouldn't have stopped somebody from killing him, he didn't actually live to a hundred and forty even, but still."

"I'm not sure what the attitudes before him were except that they didn't result in commonplace immortality. I'll be interested in your experimental results though."

"I'll be sure to tell you all about them."

"Sure," says Karen. "Like, most of them can't pick up and walk, but a lot of them can wave around. There's a tree on the grounds that will hit you if you get too close, it's called the Whomping Willow, don't go near it."

"Huh," she says. "Most of them? So are there any that can in fact pick up and walk?"

"Runner beans, that I know of, maybe there's more, Professor Sprout will know."

Willow giggles.

"Not as such, no," she says. "I'm just thinking about whether plants that can move hate me as much as most animals do."

"Why do animals hate you?"

"I have absolutely no idea!" she says brightly. "They just do. I have no scars to prove it because those I know I can morph away, but if I couldn't I'd have lots! I think the only reason Richard doesn't hate me is because all the other owls in the shop seemed to want to pick on me as much as they picked on him. We're kindred sooouuulllssss."

"Well, then I guess it depends, whether the plants will hate you too, but if you smell weird or you're loud or something then plants which can't smell or hear might like you fine."

"I don't think noise level is as constant a part of me as the number of incidents with animals in my life would imply. Scent might be it." She steals a glance at the corner where she saw movement from. All seems quiet. "I think I wanna test that," she whispers.

"What are you gonna do?"

"Maybe you should just ask Professor Sprout..."

The moving plant rustles. It is hard to impute communicative intent to a plant's rustling.

Well, if she wasn't out of Sprout's sight before, she sure is after the plant seizes her around the waist and yoinks her towards itself in a way that might seem huggy were it not so thorny. ...And poisonous, that feels poisonous.

"Aaaahh!" Sadde cries out, certainly loudly enough for other people to hear.

"Sadde!"

Sprout whirls around and fires a spell at the plant. It drops Sadde, who she flicks her wand at to summon her out of the thing's reach. "Do not approach the Venomous Tentacula! You - Miss Swan - bring her to the Hospital Wing at once," Sprout says.

"Yes Professor," says Miranda, setting down her jar of seeds and carefully helping Sadde get up.

"I'm not sure if this is even a useful result, because apparently nobody else is supposed to approach it either," Miranda remarks as they depart the greenhouses for the castle.

"Yeah," she says, looking greener by the second. "Should prolly try to look for friendlier sorts." She makes a mental note to look into plants that tend to not be openly hostile, at some point in the future.

"Maybe ask Sprout. If plants hate you she probably needs to know that anyway."

She nods weakly but doesn't actually say anything.

Sadde feels much improved! And, given that she's in the company of someone who might know, asks: "Madam, can I ask a question?"

"Of course, Miss Woods."

"Can Transfiguration help with healing? Like, if I break a bone, can I Transfigure it better? Or, say, would a metamorphmagus be able to morph bruises away?"

"Transfiguration is generally not as good at healing as specialized charms, and I am not an expert in metamorphmagi, but I believe it is possible to apply transfiguration principles to the subject if one has a talent for that."

"Cool! And are there, like, types of injuries for which no specialised charms exist, so that Transfiguration would really be the best choice?"

"Not injuries, no. I suppose there might be diseases so obscure that I haven't heard of them with this property but more often than not such things are just beyond magical healing altogether. Miss Swan, you may go." Miss Swan goes.

She nods thoughtfully. "Okay! Thanks!" Then Miranda goes and—" Wait, does that mean I may not go?" she asks.

"You should stay here until your next class, possibly longer. Magic alone cannot do everything and you will need some rest."

"Oh. Okay, I guess I can skip learning how musical Singing Mustard is," she says, shrugging. "I just have a date with the Library later today and it'll be very cross if I don't show up."

"I am sure you will be well in time to visit the library today."

"Good!"

And then Madam Pomfrey is distracted by the victims of a potions accident.

The kid yelps. Madam Pomfrey assumes it's a response to a wand jab and apologizes perfunctorily.

"Are you doing okay?" Karen asks.

"Yeah! And I have experimental results!" she announces.

"Oh yeah, what happened?"

"So I couldn't exactly turn five or twenty-five while I was in the Hospital Wing, but I turned twelve-and-ten-months and then ten-and-ten-months, or maybe the other way around, I don't remember. Anyway, it feels..." She pauses to think about it. "Weird. Like, it feels like this is not the way I'm supposed to be. After doing it with the age thing, I noticed I feel the same thing when I morph stuff like donkey ears or a duck beak or whatever, only much less so. So, like, there's some sense in which I'm supposed to be this age and not some other age, and this species and not some other species, but there's not any sense in which I'm supposed to be a boy and not a girl or vice-versa. Or, I dunno, any given ethnicity or eye colour or hair colour as opposed to any other."

"Huh, that's weird. How long do you think you could stay like that if you did really want to?"

She shrugs. "No idea. It felt uncomfortable but not too much? ...the best analogy I can find is wearing clothes that don't fit you but in your brain. Maybe it gets worse the longer I stay that way? Or maybe it's proportional to how far from what I'm "supposed to be" I am, or both. I still haven't really understood which kinds of things we get for free and which we don't with magic. Anyway, it bears testing. "

"Yeah, you could go around with bunny ears for as long as you can stand, and when anyone asks you how you got them you can say someone you don't like hexed them on."

"What are you thinking?"

She shrugs. "I'm thinking about getting the bunny ears or whatever and then... keeping them. Even after people try to unjinx it. I wonder how many people I can freak out with the unfixable curse before they catch on."

"Well, the teachers will know," Karen says.

She pouts. "Ruin my fun, why don't you."

Willow giggles.

"Well, it might not have got around to all of them yet."

"Well, Professor McGonagall and Professor Slughorn definitely know. Unless they gossip the others don't, but if they don't gossip I don't see the appeal of even being a teacher."

"If they wanted to gossip wouldn't they be reporters?"

"Well to gossip in general I suppose, but I mean I can't imagine spending the largest part of my life teaching teenagers and prepubescent kids magic and not gossip about them. I bet they even talk about which students are gonna end up together and stuff."

"That would be so weird!"

"Did you have to practice to get their voices?"

"Their voices in particular, no, but voices in general, yes," she says with her own. "By now it mostly feels like an incomplete full morph? I only have to think about them and their voices and what they look like but not morph completely into them, kinda."

"So that means if you morph people you can learn things about them you wouldn't necessarily be able to describe? Like if they have a birthmark or something."

"I guess so? I never really checked, and metamorphmagic has some opaque limitations. Like, I can't really turn into any animal completely, even if I can turn many parts of my body into other animals'. But morphing into people is not too difficult, even without thinking about the specific anatomical features I'd have to copy, so yeah, I think so."

She stares at nothing for a second then says, "I hope post-pubescent me is reasonable enough to not want to morph into her crushes to, er." She clears her throat.

"Oh my god."

"Okay leaving that aside," snickers Karen, "can you be, like a mermaid? Or can you - turn into 'whoever I'm thinking of right now'...?"

"No to the second—I still have to have a goodish mental image of what I'm gonna turn into to do it, it's actually sorta like Transfig. I dunno about the first, though, I can turn into people I've only seen pictures or videos of, and can copy features of animals I've only ever seen in books, but I can't turn into fictional humanoid creatures. Now that I know several of them are not in fact fictional I don't know how that will affect magic, if at all."

"Can you turn into an elf? Or, like, get pointy ears like an elf's, I'm pretty sure that's all that's visually different."

She thinks about it and covers her ears with her hands so no one will see it. When she uncovers them, they're still normal-looking, but she says, "Yeah, that I can do. But that's different, it's just the ears, it's like turning any other part into an animal's. Are elves real, by the way?" she asks the resident purebloods.

"...Yyyyeah but their ears don't look like that. At all."

"What do they look like?"

"House elves - I'm not sure why the adjective; there may be other kinds but if so they're hopelessly obscure - are yea high and they have huge, slightly flappy-looking ears, big eyes, weird noses, and heads too big for their bodies. Wizards use them for domestic tasks, with, by and large, the elves' enthusiastic agreement."

She raises an eyebrow. "Really? That's... interesting? And really peculiar. Are they artificial?"

"I'm not sure. They might be sort of domesticated, like dogs only magical."

"Are House Elves trained from birth to perform those domestic tasks, like seeing-eye dogs are? Are they sentient?"

"They're sentient, and they can talk and everything, and I have no idea how they raise their children but I guess they must train them - probably the parents, not the wizards."

"Huh. It sounds—kinda weird, that a whole sapient species is used for domestic tasks?"

"Yeah, it's very weird, but I've met a couple of them and they are very emphatic that it's what they want to do. I mean, they could be lying but following up on that doesn't seem like the highest priority since they'd need some reason to lie about it, like 'not wanting me to butt in'."

"I guess," she says uncertainly.

"Hogwarts has elves," Karen says. "I'm not sure how you'd find one, but you could maybe do it and then talk to them if you want."

"Alright, I guess. I'll go by your words that they're happy."

"There was a scandal when I was little that my cousin's elf thinks is really funny where an elf did want to be freed and got it - his owner had to be tricked though - but he died in the war. The elf not the owner."

"...that doesn't sound very funny," Willow opines.

"Well, my cousin usually leaves out the part where the elf dies later."

"Erm, yeah, still not seeing it."

Sadde nods.

"I'm probably telling it wrong."

"Purebloods are probably more likely to find the concept of free elves inherently hilarious."

"You might be able to meet an elf if it would make you feel better by leaving a note with your laundry."

She nods. "That might help, yes."

"Um, and I could look it over for you so you don't accidentally insult them or something."

"That might also help."

"Although Karen has more house elf experience than I do."

"It's not like we have one, but we might know more people who have them, I guess."

"I think it's probably faster to talk to Hogwarts' elves, but if that's a dead end I'll ask."

"I meant she might also be good for consulting about the notes."

"Oh. Yes, that'd be very good. Any suggestions? I mean, any reason why just going with 'Hey I'd like to talk about potentially unpleasant topics with a House Elf, I am a muggleborn and therefore likely to accidentally offend you so send someone with a tough skin' or the like wouldn't work?"

"It's... not the most diplomatic."

"Maybe something like 'I've never met an elf before and want to ask some questions, if there is anyone who isn't too busy' and let them fill in the blanks."

"I feel like it's kinda misleading, when I know I'm likely to offend them or some such, not to tell them that upfront. I mean, I'd feel misled if I were in their place."

"Most people who aren't muggleborn have met elves before."

"Alright, then, I'll defer to your expertise."

"I mean, you could try saying that you might offend them but I'm not sure there's a polite way to say it straight out, especially when you're already in the situation of only wanting to talk to somebody because of their species."

She nods. "You're right, as always," she says, grinning.

"No thanks, I should probably manage to do more than silvering up my matches before picking anything new up."

"I already checked out enough books to last me a couple days."

"I'll come, I have one to return."

"Alright! Good night, guys!" she says to the two who aren't coming with.

"Good night!"

In the morning, after Sadde has been to the bathroom and come back, there is an elf sitting on her pillow.

"It's mr. Sadde today," he says automatically. "And, erm, yes. I had a few questions."

"Turvy is being here to answer Mr. Sadde's questions."

He tries to think about an appropriate order for the questions and decides to go with: "What do House Elves in general do? As in, specifically?"

"An elf is finding Mr. Sadde's note while doing laundry, sir, and elves is also making food, and cleaning, and sometimes we is being asked to do other chores as needed."

He pauses to consider this. "Is this a species thing? As in, do all Elves do those things?"

"Yes sir."

"Why?"

"It is being our nature, sir."

He blinks. "Can you elaborate on that?"

"What does Mr. Sadde mean, please?" the elf asks, tilting her head.

"Well, erm, what exactly does it mean for it be your nature? What parts of you make you all do that as opposed to something else? What would happen if you did in fact do something else? I don't think humans have any, er, behavioural traits that are 'in our nature' so I'm having trouble conceptualising, here. Even reproduction's kinda optional."

"Turvy is not sure what you is meaning, still, Mr. Sadde, Turvy apologizes. Elves is doing chores because chores is what elves is for."

He blinks. "So the very idea of not doing chores is, what, unthinkable?"

"We is not doing chores every minute of every day, sir, we is resting sometimes, and Hogwarts elves has summers with not much to be doing unless families is borrowing us, but elves is not quitting."

He nods. "Okay, then, I change my question to quitting being unthinkable. Erm, I'm sorry if I'm being offensive or something, I'm just really curious and really muggleborn. Er. What I mean is, what do you feel, inside, when you think about quitting?"

"Turvy does not want to quit, sir, Turvy is a good elf."

He nods, slowly. "So... doing chores makes you happy...?" he concludes tentatively.

Turvy does not look like this is quite correct, but she nods anyway.

Sadde is paying enough attention to notice. "What would you describe as your... emotions... around the concept of doing chores?"

"Turvy is not being sure how to answer, sir."

"Can you try anyway? Even an uncertain answer with lots of qualifiers is better than my utter and complete confusion. You don't need to, though, if you don't want, or if it's too difficult."

Turvy bites her lip thoughtfully, then says, "The most important thing for an elf is being a good elf, Mr. Sadde, and that means chores."

Okay, that's something. "How do you know that being a good elf means chores?"

"That is how elves are, sir."

"Right, I know, but like. Is this something your parents told you? Something wizards told you? Something you've observed around and learnt? Or something you just feel inside or know instinctively? Or maybe something completely different?"

"All of those things," Turvy concludes after a moment's thought.

He thinks about it some. "Do you think you could describe the instinctive feeling a bit more? I understand the other parts, but this one is more novel to me."

"Turvy is not so good at describing feelings like that, sir, Turvy is sorry."

He nods. "It's okay, I already got a lot of information from that, you were very helpful! My other questions are mostly cultural and I should probably go grab breakfast before class starts, but one last question: do you know another elf who would be better at describing feelings like that, and if so, do you think they'd be willing to talk to me about them? It's totally okay to say no."

"...Turvy is not knowing if Winky is being good at talking about feelings but Winky is certainly doing it very much," Turvy says. "Turvy can be asking her if Mr. Sadde likes."

Turvy stands up on Sadde's pillow, bows deeply to the other boy, and then vanishes with a loud CRACK.

"Why?"

"Because I'd never met one and was curious!"

"Muggleborn!" he says, grinning, and then he laughs at the shocked look on the other boy's face. Sadde claps him on the shoulder once as he's leaving and goes to the Great Hall.

His Ravenclaw friends are at breakfast. "Did you get an elf?" Miranda wonders.

"I did! She was very helpful! I think there's a good chance a significant part of their makeup was either designed or strongly influenced by humans."

"Why do you think so?"

"Well, she seemed to act as if there was some sort of... strong instinctive component to their preference for doing chores. What she said is still consistent with purely social or cultural drives, I guess, but if that were the only thing I'd expect there'd be Elves who just don't want to do the same thing in spite of upbringing and society and stuff. Well, I guess it's also possible that they just have a generally submissive mental makeup that humans co-opted for their own uses, but that just passes the bucket to why they have this generally submissive mental makeup in the first place."

"I mean, you aren't wrong," says Miranda, "but I notice you aren't wondering why mustard sings."

He blinks and thinks about it for a few seconds. "Well, prodding my brain, it seems like I just assumed singing mustard must be mostly artificial, because muggles have had a lot of success creating artificial plants and not so much artificial sapient beings. I mean, the only instance I knew of of sapient beings was humans, and humans just evolved, so that's my starting point for other sapient beings, whereas it would surprise me not one bit if wizardkind made singing mustards. Actually, I'd be quite surprised if I found out we hadn't."

"Do you also think wizards made merfolk and giants and centaurs and hags and goblins...?"

"I'm not sure it's actually chores in particular. You could probably get an elf to do other tasks, they'd just need different training. And weird things do evolve. Cats domesticated themselves because humans were attracting rodents and it was convenient to coexist with them. House elves could be like cats, only we wouldn't put up with cat behavior from anything that could talk so they're submissive and obedient."

He scratches his head. "I guess. Do we offer House Elves anything like that? Like, are there any intrinsic advantages to living with us? They can apparently teleport, so I assume they can pretty much choose where to live, unless that teleportation power is really restricted or something."

"I'm not actually sure how much magic house elves can do besides Apparition. But their masters do feed them and shelter them. They could maybe survive in the wild - or at least they could if they wouldn't be really depressed about it all the time - but they might have some deficiency in, say, figuring out what to do next after doing a thing, or forming societies big and interconnected enough to prevent inbreeding, or something like that, and they solved those problems by getting humans to fill in. I'm not sure about any of this, you understand, I'm only guessing."

"...What's 'evolving'?"

"It's like how you breed a plant or animal to be the way you want it, except instead of you it's things like food scarcity and weather, and instead of the way you want it it's whatever makes the thing better at dealing with those things."

"I think that's probably the shortest explanation of evolution I've ever heard," Willow pauses her eating to say.

"Yyyyeah, and before I learnt about magic I was pretty sure all things that are alive evolved one way or another, at least until humans started doing the whole 'society' thing if you wanna exclude domesticated animals from the definition of evolution."

"Sometimes magic just does weird things. It's not all wizards doing things, other magical creatures have their own. But the general principle isn't a bad guess. As long as you remember that weird things can be advantages in a weird enough situation."

"I guess. At this point we should probably just hit the library and see if anyone's ever written anything about it, I don't know if we can actually argue ourselves into a conclusion. Although I do have another interview with an elf later."

"The first one didn't know what you wanted to know?"

"I asked her to try to describe to me what it felt like, this whole 'elves must do chores to be good elves' thing, but she said she wasn't good at describing feelings. She said another elf called Winky might, since she talks about her feelings all the time, or something."

"Huh."

"'Huh' is right," Sadde nods.

"Figuring out all the details of how you feel is kind of hard even for humans and the elves won't have a lot of practice being the kind of detailed I think you want," Miranda says. "Don't expect too much."

He scratches his head again. "I mean, observably you're right, but it feels kinda weird to me. I usually know what I'm feeling and why. I guess maybe the whole thing involved in not becoming The Incredible Hulk whenever I got annoyed when I was little helped with that, some."

"Yeah, I'm really good at it too and that's why I noticed that most people aren't."

"Do you have a convenient explanation for why you're good at it like me or is it just a you thing like the notebooks?"

"Oh, the notebooks are how I'm good at it. I write down what I'm thinking and pick it apart until I know how it works."

"Yeah, I go through the big ones pretty quick doing this on top of class notes and reminders to myself."

"I almost never take notes," he says as he finishes writing on his 'pad, then tilts his head a bit, looking at something he wrote on it. "By the way, I started reading my new books last night, or well one of them anyway, and on the introduction it said that we can't normally transfigure things into gold, but it didn't really go into why. Do you know?"

Karen answers: "I think gold and a few other things - I know food's one - are things you can't conjure up and can't or shouldn't transfigure things into. Or, not real gold, anyway, leprechauns can make fake gold that vanishes later."

"Magic has some really weird limitations," he comments. "The book also mentioned something called a 'Philosopher's Stone' that could turn base metals into gold, but it said that the only known maker of this Stone thing died a few years ago and that the Stone was destroyed." He looks up from his notepad, pocketing it. "I wonder why no one ever made another one of it? Apparently that's not a hard limit of magic, if there's some workaround."

"Well, is that really useful anyway? If you tried to sell all that gold you'd have angry goblins after you and the value would drop anyway. Maybe it's hard and nobody bothers."

"If I tried to sell all that gold in a wizarding market, maybe, but I bet I could sell enough to muggles to be rich enough that any other projects of mine would be significantly easier, and no richer. But in any case, my interest is mostly academic, circumventing rules of magic sounds fun."

"I think I'm starting to see why you think you were about evenly divided between Ravenclaw and Slytherin," Willow comments innocently.

Sadde grins. "The Hat agreed, it was pretty surprised when I chose to go to Slytherin anyway."

"Why'd you do that?"

"Because it sounded fun!" he says brightly. "You should've seen the look on this one Slytherin boy's face this morning when he caught me talking to Turvy and I told him I was muggleborn."

"...Well, I hope that works out for you. You don't get to change your mind later."

He shrugs. "I've been mostly hanging out with you three anyway. And there's this one other boy our age who doesn't seem to mind I'm a muggleborn. He's mostly—confused about a lot of stuff, really. His name's Jacob. The other girls our age seem nice, too."

"I'd worry more about the older years."

"I'm pretty used to bullies who are older than me. Granted, not like five years older, and without magic, but this time I can hit back with magic as well! And I can do it with magic they're not expecting, even! Like yesterday, when I was in the Wing, I think I creeped out this Hufflepuff kid by doing this." And he does the lizard tongue-flick thing to illustrate.

Willow eeps and giggles.

"Did the Hufflepuff kid hex you?"

He laughs. "No, Madam Pomfrey was poking him with a wand and I think he thought it was just his imagination."

"So why did you want to freak him out?"

He shrugs. "Because it'd be funny? It caused him mild temporary discomfort that he'll likely forget if he hasn't already, and made me giggle then and now, and I'll probably giggle about it some more in the future."

"Okay, now I'm more worried about you being in Slytherin. People in other Houses are going to be predisposed not to assume anything you do is intended harmlessly."

"Mmm, even if most things I do are in fact actively helpful? Make it more than twice as many things, since apparently people tend to focus on a bad thing about twice as much as they focus on an equivalent good thing."

"I think a reputation as being a minor trickster figure even if you're usually trying to be a benevolent one is dangerous if you're a Slytherin. We know you, but random Hufflepuffs don't, and Gryffindors might think they do, which is worse."

He giggles. "You know, the idea of Gryffindors randomly hexing me in the hallways is kinda funny. It'll probably not be as funny when it actually happens, though. How about I'm only a trickster to Slytherins and benevolent to non-Slytherins? Or at least, Slytherins I dislike, Jacob's okay."

"I mean, I don't think other Slytherins are necessarily safe either, but it's better, anyway."

"Yeah sure, but I think they're bound to hex me in the hallways anyway just because I'm muggleborn, so I get to keep my fun at only a slight increase in the total amount of hexing going on."

"Yeah."

"And at least some types of hexing are bound to be fun, right? It can't all be blood-pouring-out-of-your-ears or people wouldn't do them ever at all, and I like frustrating bullies so the thought of not minding the milder ones when they try to bully me and get confused when it fails is funny all on its own. I speak from experience here," he says, and giggles some more.

"Some of them are fun. There's one that makes you dance."

"I got Renée to cast that on me once to see if I could actually dance. I couldn't."

"Oooh I want to try that one!"

"Also I have a probably broader definition of fun than most people, what with the whole trickster vibe I got going on here."

"I know the incantation if you want to try the dancing hex - or it might be a jinx, I don't remember - but I don't know how to undo it."

"Mmm, not undoing it wouldn't be as much fun, eventually I'd need to go pee."

"Yeah, you'd probably have to dance your way to an older student or a teacher to get it undone."

"Yeah, I think I'll just be surprised when someone decides to hex or jinx me randomly. It's bound to happen, eventually."

"Yeah, I think it's pretty common."

Out come the schedules!

Apparently the Ravenclaws have Potions and Charms in the morning and Defence and a free period in the afternoon, while the Slytherins have Flying and Charms in the morning and Transfig and Defence in the afternoon.

"Oh cool, we have Charms together again! And I have fffllllyyyyiiiing that must be so much fun!"

"Flying is great!"

"I kinda really wanna hit evil metal balls with a bat, whyyy don't they let firsties play Quidditch?" he whines.

"They did once, but that was Harry Potter."

"Of course you get to break the rules if you're Harry Potter," he sighs.

"Yeah. But you'd probably want to learn to fly a little before trying to play anyway, wouldn't you?"

"Didn't he have to learn to fly well before trying to play?"

"No, Harry Potter was just really good from the moment he touched a broom, I think? But, you know, he's Harry Potter."

"You know, I've been putting off getting books on the war and him but this lack of cultural context is really starting to get old."

"Why've you been putting it off?"

"Mostly because I wanted to go to all other classes and see if there wouldn't be any other things I'd want to read books on first so I could prioritise better. Other than Flying, I've had all classes, though, so it's Transfig and War for me now, I guess."

"I'd recommend something but I don't know of any good ones. It was so recent."

"I'll probably try to check something out at the library after lunch. I'll also get a book about the Philosopher's Stone, I wanna know if there's anything useful I can learn about breaking magic's rules."

"Sounds interesting."

Karen is still nervous around strange Slytherins and Willow's an obvious Muggleborn, so Miranda addresses him. "Hello."

He looks just as nervous as Karen! And he says, "H-hello. Um. You're Sadde's friends, right?"

"Yes. Is something wrong?"

He looks around as if to make sure no one's looking at him, then says, "Yeah, one of the older Slytherins, um, he jinxed Sadde."

Miranda sighs. "Where is he and what was the jinx?"

"He's in a room just by the DADA tower," the boy says, still looking a bit terrified and glancing over his shoulder every now and then.

"...And what's wrong with him, is he speaking in iambic pentameter or stuck to the wall or what?"

"I'm not sure, he was like floating, the older students said I wasn't supposed to worry about a mud—er, Muggleborn, and said it was for his own good or something and that if I told a Professor they'd do the same thing to me!" His voice becomes a squeak by the end of the sentence.

The boy looks panicked, as if it had honestly not occurred to him that they might go to the Professors instead, but he decides there's nothing he can do about that so he leaves.

Willow watches Miranda get up and decides to do the same, looking worried.

Miranda goes up to Professor Spukhafte. "Professor, our friend was jinxed and he's near your classroom."

The Professor peers at her. "Really? How inconvenient," she says, with a quite strong German accent, and sniffles. "Let's go check on him, ja?" And she gets up and walks quickly towards the exit of the Great Hall.

Miranda follows as briskly as she can, which isn't very.

Willow is brisk! And is proportionally more likely to tripping and bumping and other similar sources of injuries.

Sadde points to his mouth, opening it to show his tongue stuck to its roof, and giggling some.

"You can't fix that yourself, huh?"

He shakes his head, still giggling.

The Professor's wand twitches once more, and Sadde's tongue is free.

Sadde's giggles turn into howling laughter.

Sadde lifts his index and middle fingers, still laughing too much to reply.

The Professor sighs and fixes that, too. "Well?" she asks, her W sounding like a V. "Who's responsible for this?"

There are a few giggles still in his system, but eventually he recovers enough to sit up. "If I tell you, you'll punish them, and then they'll come after me harder and I won't have time to concoct my revenge," he says, and giggles some more.

Miranda snorts.

"Mister Woods," she says dryly, calling him 'Voods,' "it is against school regulations to cast magic on other students in the hallways, and perpetrators must be punished!"

"Sure they must," he agrees reasonably. "So I'll punish them when I come up with something sufficiently hilarious!"

"You do not have permission to go after other students either, Mister Woods, no matter how justified you may be!"

He thinks about it, then shrugs. "Okay, then I don't remember who it was. I didn't see them very well, etcetera."

Miranda facepalms.

Willow grins.

Sadde giggles some more and starts collecting his stuff again. "Can you help me with this?"

Miranda helps him pick up objects.

"Like what?"

"Did you know," he starts conversationally, "that the Philosopher's Stone also produces a thing called the Elixir of Life?"

"Okay, now I don't know why there aren't a billion of them."

"Yeah, apparently it's really hard to do and/or the guy's instructions are fake or incomplete. No one has been able to do it ever, and now the guy's dead and the Stone's destroyed."

"Why? What happened to it?"

"The book was really vague about it, but apparently the guy wanted to destroy it? To avoid tempting other people? And because he was 'ready to move on'?" That last part is decorated by air quotes.

"After six hundred and sixty five years? Seriously?"

"Aren't there books about this guy in specific that might have more?"

"Yeah, I was gonna try to find some after Defence but then that jackass Arens decided turning me upside down was a funny idea." Pause. "Well, he was right, but he could've had better timing."

"I'm glad you happened to like the set of jinxes he picked," remarks Miranda.

He giggles. "Well, I think he only meant to turn me upside down, but when I wasn't suitably upset to his tastes he langlocked me, and when even that didn't help he said 'Well if you find this so funny you won't mind this' and that's when he cast the laughing jinx. He eventually got bored that I wasn't begging to be let down and left, which in retrospect maybe wasn't a very good idea but then again I was upside down, unable to talk, and giggling helplessly."

"Your sense of humor is very strange."

"Thanks!" he says brightly. "There was one other thing I thought might interest you in that book."

"What?"

"Apparently there's another theoretical thing like the Stone except this one cures all illnesses, called the Panacea. No one's ever made one, but it seems to be one of those things most think is possible except they haven't found out exactly how to do it. Kinda the same vibe the Philosopher's Stone had in the 1200s."

"Does the Elixir of Life not also do that?"

He shakes his head. "No, it only makes aging not happen."

"So you'd need both of them to live particularly forever. Maybe the Stone guy was sick and he just wanted it to sound good."

"Hm, is he likely to have caught any diseases on his 666th year of life that he hadn't ever caught before and that no magic could cure ever?"

"There are incurable diseases. They're not very common but they exist, and it could have taken that long for him to get one, I don't think one in five wixen eventually gets something that bad so it must be uncommon enough."

Miranda did not finish eating and votes plan D.

It seems, from an inspection of alchemy books, that the Philosopher's Stone has generally been more widely sought-after than the Panacea. Since only one guy made that one, it's possible the Panacea is actually easier... Are there actual instructions anywhere?

That certainly sounds interesting to Miranda right now.

It sounds terribly interesting to Sadde as well!

Willow has mostly checked out, she has decided she should focus on studying the stuff she's actually failing at in class rather than theoretical research for the future.

That is very interesting. And does seem like the sort of thing that mostly would be left to upper years because the firsties would take one look at "crush, then vanish, ingredient" and skip the step altogether; it's bad enough in Potions where they dice when they should mince and squeeze when they should wring. But if this is just plain how alchemy works Miranda can accept that and kinda wants to try it.

Sadde wants to try it as well! But he's not so sure that alone would be a good reason not to allow young students to practice it (not that magical society has the most reasonable or sensible rules). Are there perhaps unwanted side effects or particularly dangerous consequences for failure?

Well, the high temperatures are kind of a big deal. The wandwork is beyond most first years and many second years; Miranda can't cast a Vanishing Charm yet. And sometimes final products look exactly right but are in fact total disasters and you can't tell until you try them.

"He's your head of house," Miranda points out. "But if you want me to ask first I will."

"Yeah, which means he's the likeliest Professor other than Spukhafte herself to have heard of my incident today and of the fact that I refused to give names."

"Okay, I'll ask."