"Bigger than it looks," Hagrid says.  "Lotta wizarding buildings are.  Come on."

He leads her inside, through the creaky door.  The inside is pretty cramped - and dark and shabby - but it does indeed look a bit too big to fit inside the building she saw from outside.  There's a stairway, too, and it didn't look like any of the buildings on this street were more than one story.  There's a few people at the bar, a few clustered around little circular tables.  Everyone, including the barman, seems to be dressed either like flamboyant stage magicians or differently-colored Gandalfs.

WOAH.

She spins around, staring, eyes wide, forgetting briefly that Staring Is Rude.

No one seems to mind!  A few people who notice look endeared.

"Hagrid!" the barman calls merrily.  "Can I get you your usual?"

"Can't today, Tom," Hagrid says.  "Need to use your fireplace."

"Hogwarts business?" apparently-Tom asks, and Hagrid nods.  He ushers them both into a back room.

She can be disrupted from staring long enough to be ushered!

Hagrid hands Tom a few little brown coins and murmurs, "It's her first time, use the nice stuff."

Tom nods, and takes out a wand, and jabs it toward the fireplace, and a fire blazes up; he tosses in a pinch of some fine white powder from a jar, and the fire turns bright green and blooms yet higher.

Hagrid stoops into the fireplace, standing comfortably inside the emerald flames.  "Come on in next to me," he says.  "'S perfectly safe, don't worry."

That makes her a bit worried, paradoxically, but she tries to squash it as she scootches in next to Hagrid, leery of the flames at first.

She may be reassured as she approaches that no matter how close she gets to the flames it never feels more than comfortably warm.

"Right, hold on tight," he says, offering his hand.  "Might feel like you're flying or falling, that's what's supposed to happen."

She takes his hand and crowds in, gripping tight.

"Right then."  He clears his throat and says, enunciating distinctly, "Saint Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries!"

The fire flares and swirls around them, and the Leaky Cauldron shoots away into darkness - they're rocketing through green flames and hot wind and occasional streaks of light -

She gasps, clinging even tighter.

Gradually the wind and the streaks of light change direction, until they're racing toward something instead of away from something - and then the something is a point of fireplace-shaped light, growing larger -

She squeezes her eyes shut, instinctively bracing for impact.

There's a rush of sound and light and - no detectable lurch, but all of a sudden she's not moving.  As though every part of her body stopped moving at once, so she had no way to feel the change.

She cracks her eyelids open.

They, she and Hagrid, are standing in one of a row of fireplaces along one wall of a wide, airy hospital waiting room.  There's a short line at a desk on the opposite side of the room, and rows of seats between it and them, full of people.  Most of them don't look visibly ill, but here and there there's someone with an odd injury or symptom.  A man in gray has sprouted white feathers where a beard should be; a worried-looking woman has a little boy with bright-green skin in her lap.  A stern-looking man with crimson robes and a silvery right hand is discussing something with a red-haired woman in forest green, both of them examining one of the fireplaces; the silver-handed man murmurs something about wards.

"All right, Harriet?" Hagrid says.

"Yeah, I think so."

"Bit frightening the first time," Hagrid says.  He takes her to the line, and talks with the receptionist, and the pair are directed to Ward 12 on the first floor.  It's actually not that different from a muggle hospital room, except the bed looks more ordinary and the light is more incandescent and it's less aggressively modern.

She shifts around, nervous and quiet.

In a few minutes, a wizard with forest-green robes, a matching pointed hat, and a piece of parchment that seems to be held rigid by magic lets himself in.  "Hi there!  I'm Healer Pendleton.  Are you Harriet?"

"Yeah. Harriet Evans. Are you the doctor?"

"More or less!" Healer Pendleton says.  "We're called Healers in the magical world, but our job is similar.  Now, I understand you're coming here from the muggle world, and you spent most of your childhood with no contact with wizardry or magic?"

"Yeah. Except weird stuff happening around me, I guess."

He nods.  "Almost all wizard children experience some accidental magic before they begin their formal education, often when they're scared or upset.  Usually we like to keep an eye on muggleborn children even before they go off to school, but I understand there was some unusualness in your case...?"

"Normally Hogwarts can find muggleborn children anywhere in the United Kingdom," Hagrid explains, "but the castle didn't know you existed until a few weeks ago.  We're still not sure why," he adds to the Healer.

"Is that bad?"