"You seem like a perfectly fine gentleman from what I've seen, nothing unbearable so far."

"We're both weird queer kids with superpowers, though, I think that helps. Like, common ground. But I hate sports, and that seems like the only thing these guys like, so I don't have any common ground with them, besides which I'm a weird queer kid."

"Hmm, I think common ground is part of it but not all of it. But without common ground it's way harder to do it yeah and it's not like I'm saying you should be friends with people who suck at you, I'm doing that but that's because I have a cunning plan to reform a quarter of the young population of wizarding Britain, but finding people who don't suck and then being friends with them is like at least five times better than that."

"Oh."

He considers. "You don't suck. Or it doesn't seem like you do yet."

"I think I don't! I think you don't, either. So that's easy on both of us." Grin.

"Yeah."

Xan floats onto the bed and lies across Sadde's lap. "Maybe we should be friends."

"That's what I was getting at, dummy," he says, rolling his eyes and booping Xan on the nose.

"Well, I wanted to make sure!"

Xan lies there for a minute. "Not sure what you... do with friends, honestly."

"Same stuff you do alone but with more people? Also stuff that needs more people, like... have they invented board games yet, like real ones not like chess and stuff."

"There's board games. The Kents have Scrabble and Risk, but I'm not big on either."

"No those are the boring ones. You know what I wish I had? An extended bag. I would never walk away from home without everything I own if I had one and then I could just show you magic stuff."

"That does sound neat. We've got a library in town, if you like reading and don't mind that it's got about a hundred books and five of them are Bibles."

"I do like reading! And I bet the books here don't even try to bite you for it."

"Books that bite?"

"To be fair the only one I met that tried to literally bite was this year's Care of Magical Creatures book. Most textbooks are not that dangerous. Also the book won't bite if you just pet it before opening it."

"...why would you make a book that can bite people? That's-" Xan struggles for a word.

"I don't know, classes haven't started this year yet, but given that it doesn't bite if you pet it I think it's meant to be some kind of object lesson about caring for animals?"

"If you want to teach people lessons from a book then write the lesson in the book, that's what it's for."

"It doesn't bite that hard, and I'm pretty sure wizards are hardier than muggles—but yeah I guess. I haven't tried to read it yet though because spells are more interesting."

"Agreed. Animals are nice, I like them, but magic."

He considers.

"What's your favorite spell?"

"The telekinesis one," he replies immediately. "It's super useful and most wixen don't use it ever at all, it's a waste."

"Yeah, that sounds like a winner. That's the, uh, 'Wingardium' one?"

"Yeah. Don't ask me why I have to use the weird words and wand motions, I don't know how spell invention works."

"It is awfully weird. I wonder if it's just, what's it called, optimization? Like, you make a random gesture and say something weird, and see what happens, and you adjust it and see what changes? But 'Wingardium' sounds like something you'd make up if you were going for something that makes things fly, it doesn't sound properly random..."

"I don't think so, the incantation for that cold fire I showed you is Caeruleus Inflamarae and the one for a lot of fire is Incendio. It's some sort of fake latin."