At the same time, four counties away, another child made the same realization.

The first social worker rocked the baby back and forth. The baby, offended, cried harder. He wanted his mother. He would not accept this inferior replacement mother who didn't smell right, no matter how much deceptive rocking she provided. "It looks like they haven't been back in days."

"And no one reported them missing?" her coworker asked.

"They were quiet, apparently," the first social worker said. "Kept to themselves. No note, no trace of where they might be... they're just gone."

"Who just disappears and leaves their baby to starve?"

The first social worker shook her head. She'd been working for child protective services for nine years, and what she'd learned is that no matter how unthinkable an action might be to take against an innocent child, someone would do it, and ten other things you didn't imagine besides.

"It looks like they loved him," her coworker said. "Look at all the toys. Books. Photos... they even have a journal about his first year of life."

Memories flashed through the first social worker's mind in spite of her attempt to repress them. "You never know," she said, trying to keep her voice steady.

"I guess you don't," her coworker said. "We should gather up this stuff, take it to his placement? It'll probably help the transition for him to have something familiar."

The first social worker nodded. "You do that and file the missing persons report, I'll keep an eye on him and try to find him a placement. Is that right," she said to the baby in a sing-song-y voice. "Am I going to find you a placement? Are you going to have a new family?"

The baby cried harder. The first social worker knew he was too young to understand English-- if his parents had even spoken English instead of Chinese-- but she couldn't shake the feeling that he was protesting the idea of having a new family. He didn't want a new family. He wanted his mother back. 

"You and me both, kid," she said. "You and me both."

Within a few weeks, the Wei file was closed. No family, no friends, no apparent source of income, and no sightings. They had disappeared as smoothly as if they'd never existed at all. After a few months, there was only one person who really remembered that the Wei family had existed at all. 

Ten years later--

Cyrus Wei was lucky. 

There were, admittedly, a lot of ways that you might assume that Cyrus Wei wasn't lucky. For example, most people would assume it was pretty unlucky to have both of your parents die when you were barely a year old. But if Cy's parents hadn't died, then he wouldn't be in foster care, and if he wasn't in foster care, he wouldn't be taken care of by Mrs. Irving. Cy was pretty sure adults were supposed to be constantly up in your business, asking where you were going and who you were with and what you were planning on doing there, and these were just not questions he felt comfortable answering for adults. But he and Mrs. Irving were on the same wavelength. Mrs. Irving thought that taking care of kids was annoying so she didn't. He got his three meals and a bed and new shoes when the old ones had too many holes to be wearable, and she got her money from the UK government, and otherwise they both minded their own business.

Kids with parents didn't get this sort of arrangement. 

But Cy was lucky in lots of other ways. He was brilliant enough to ace all his classes without doing his homework or, usually, showing up. If he was somewhere he wasn't supposed to be, which he was whenever possible, no one ever saw him. Sometimes he got annoyed at how uncool his clothes were, and then right when he hit the point of maximal despair he would always find an incredibly badass jacket or pants that he'd forgotten about. (You might think that being forgetful meant you weren't lucky, but Cyrus liked it. Forgetfulness just meant you were constantly encountering presents from your past self.) One time he'd gotten really annoyed at a teacher and then they'd gotten really sick and they had a nice teacher for the rest of the year.

No, from Cy's perspective, his life was just about perfect. After he left Mrs. Irving's house in the morning, he was free to do whatever he liked: shoplift at the mall, climb trees, read books at the library, break into abandoned buildings, hang out with his friends, take apart an old toaster he'd pulled out from the dumpster, try to build a railgun. 

He would have thought there was no way to improve it, but then he got the letter.

The letter did not show up in the mail slot in the normal way of letters. It showed up directly on his pillow one afternoon while he was out. 

The letter was not made of paper in the normal way of letters. It was made of thick translucent parchment and addressed to "Cyrus Wei, the northwest bedroom" in bright green ink.

The letter did not contain advertising or direct requests for money in the normal way of letters. It said, in handwriting perfect enough to come from a computer if computers ever had to re-dip their pens:

HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY

Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore
(Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorc., Chf. Warlock,
Supreme Mugwump, International Confed. of Wizards)

Dear Mr. Wei,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment.
Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July.
Yours sincerely,

Minerva McGonagall

Deputy Headmistress

The other sheet of paper in the envelope was a book and equipment list, asking him to buy a cauldron and robes and a pointy hat and several books on magic and to definitely NOT buy a broomstick.

That's a neat prank. Cy is impressed by this prank. It involves creative writing skills and breaking into his bedroom.

He puts the letter away securely under the bed, where he will definitely remember where he put it, and wonders what the prankster will do next.

About a week later a woman knocks on his door. She's tall and thin, with dark green robes and a bun, age somewhere between fifty and a thousand, and if she gives off an obvious air of being a witch despite not at this moment wearing a pointy hat, well, it's not as though anyone would dare call her out on it.

"Uh, hello." He belatedly remembers his manners. "Ma'am."

"Good afternoon. Are you Cyrus Wei?"

"Yes, ma'am. --Um, if this is about the thing at the hospital, I am genuinely very sorry about what happened, I didn't realize that the steam tunnels let out there."

Her eyes narrow a little but she says, "No, it is about the future of your education. Are you and your family familiar with Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?"

Ohhhhh whoever is organizing this is incredibly good at pranks. Cy Wei is in love with her now. 

"No, I'm not," Cy says, "because witchcraft isn't real and that's not a real school."

The woman smiles a little smile, just a bit too friendly to be a smirk. "Well. I am Professor Minerva McGonagall, and I am delighted to inform you that you are mistaken. May I come inside and offer you some proof?"

Oh man he has got to see this.

"Sure," he says, and lets her inside. Probably Mrs. Irving is going to be pissed that he let a complete stranger in her house but that sounds like a problem for Future Cy.

She enters the house with a graceful swirl of robes and shuts the door behind her, then looks around to make sure there are no other witnesses--

And turns into a cat and leaps onto the back of the faded sofa to smirk--it's definitely a smirk, on this face--at Cyrus.

"Holy fucking shit that's awesome. Do me next."

McGonagall returns to human form and says, "Unfortunately, that particular spell can only be performed on oneself. Would you like to be levitated? That's always popular."

"YES."

"--also holy shit you just violated multiple laws of thermodynamics, where did your mass go, can you create a perpetual motion machine, did it go to hyperspace, is hyperspace real, this is so fucking cool. Why doesn't anyone know about this? Why am I the person you're telling about it? Is this why I'm so lucky? Seriously how does any of this interact with physics at all, is there something quantum involved--"

She pulls a wooden wand from her sleeve and swishes and flicks it while saying "wingardium leviosa"; now Cyrus is floating about two feet off the ground. It feels like floating in water without the wetness. 

"When I transform my human body is stored outside ordinary space, yes. The initial energy for any spell comes from the witch's or wizard's own body, but unlike technological systems you can get out more than you put in. So yes, objects that move indefinitely are quite possible. And I am telling you all of this because you, Cyrus Wei, are a wizard, with a place in our secret world, and with enough study you can learn to do everything I can do."

Holy shit he's flying!! This is amazing. He is literally never going to travel any other way going forward. 

Ooh what happens if he tries to swim through the air? What if he tries to push off a wall? Can he flap his arms and go somewhere? What if he turns himself upside down?

This is the best day of his life.

He can't really get anywhere by swimming; if he pushes off a wall he drifts about a foot and comes to a stop. He can eventually figure out how to turn himself upside down, though, and then he's upside down!

McGonagall watches happily. 

Oh no he has run out of experiments. He should have thought ahead and made a list of experiments he wanted to do if he ever turned out to be able to fly.

He processes what McGonagall said. "I'm a what?"

"You're a wizard, mister Wei. Which means you get your own wand and you can come live at Hogwarts and study magic. But magic is very secret, so you mustn't tell anyone except your parents."

"Oh, I don't have those. They died." He sounds unbothered.

"My condolences. You may also tell your current guardians."

"Oh, I don't tell Mrs. Irving things. Then she feels like she has to have opinions. We're both happier if she has no idea what I'm up to."

360 degree circles in the air!

"Hogwarts is a boarding school. Surely she'll want to know where you're going. And she'll need to buy you school supplies and pay your tuition, though we do have scholarships for any families that are unable to afford them."

"All the money to take care of me comes from the government. I don't know if you have some kind of system to get the foster care people to pay you. --You could say I'm going to a regular boarding school. Because I'm smart."

It goes against every instinct of his eleven years to tell Mrs. Irving a secret, or indeed anything she doesn't strictly need to know.

"We can figure something out; you won't need to worry about the money. Are you worried how Mrs. Irving will react if you tell her?"

"Well, no, but then she'd know. And ask questions. And have to be concerned about things. And she doesn't want to have to pay attention to me, and I certainly don't want her to pay attention to me, so I'm going to help both of us out by telling her I'm at a boarding school for smart kids and she doesn't have to worry about it."

He's really not used to explaining this to adults.

McGonagall is kind of against any plan that involves a child with no designated non-her adults on the muggle-raised group Diagon Alley trip, but she's done it before and she'll do it again, and in the honesty of her own head Mrs. Irving doesn't sound like a particularly useful child-minder anyway.

"You are not required to inform your muggle guardian about magic so long as you don't do any in front of her that might lead her to run to a journalist. I will tell her the standard cover story we suggest for non-guardian relatives about a school in Scotland for gifted children. Is she home now?"

"If she was home I wouldn't be." Somersaults in the air. Cy belatedly realizes that some vitally important questions were left unanswered. "Why am I a wizard? What does it mean to be a wizard? Why are wizards secret?

"You are a wizard because your birth mother was a witch, and I will need to explain how she died. Being a wizard means that you have magic and that you must learn to control it, and that you are automatically considered a member of the wizarding community in Britain. Magic is secret because many muggles--people without magic--want to harm wizards, and because some wizards want to harm muggles, and a war between the two peoples could be terribly destructive."

"Which brings me to the matter of your birth mother. Before you were born, a dark wizard attempted to conquer magical Britain. Your mother was one of the few who fought back--and one of the many who died."

Okay Cy just found out about magic five minutes ago but that sounds like super bullshit. Lots of people want to hurt Jews but Jews didn't decide to pretend that Jewish people are a fairy story. Actually is that true, if members of oppressed religions were going around pretending they didn't exist he certainly wouldn't know about them. This experience should cause him to believe in more secrets. Maybe he should look into the Kennedy assassination.

This line of thought was disrupted by McGonagall mentioning his mom. 

"My parents disappeared."

"As far as the muggle government knows, yes. If we had told anyone they were dead, someone might have investigated, which would only have put that person at risk."

"...With all due respect, Professor, this is really something someone should have told me before I was literally eleven. I assume the dark wizard is not currently a problem."

"Oh, certainly not, he's dead. But I'm afraid his attempted takeover left the government in a certain amount of chaos, and I expect they lost track of you entirely. Fortunately Hogwarts has magical methods of detecting when a magical child reaches the appropriate age. Our school runs from age eleven to age seventeen, which is the wizarding age of majority."

"...do you... know people who knew them?"

She stares into the middle distance for a moment, mentally listing names. Dead . . . dead . . . might as well be dead . . . well he's not going to be at all reasonable . . . 

"I was one of your mother's teachers. She was very brave; she always took 'you can't do that' as a challenge. But she was kind, too. She helped her fellow students and never worried about what was in it for her."

That is more things than Cy has ever known about his mother. 

Well! That's definitely not being excited about magic powers.

"So! How do I learn magic?"

"The first step is to take you to Diagon Alley, the secret magical street where many of the best magical shops are, and get you your books and uniforms and a wand like this one. I'll be leading a group there in two weeks' time, with all the other children who grew up in the muggle world. Most of them have two muggle parents; magic runs in families but it can also go dormant for generations and crop up at random."

"Diagon Alley? Like, diagonally? Why."

"Because it's in a pocket of magically expanded space that only interacts with the rest of the map at a single point, and someone several hundred years ago thought they were very clever."

Cy would complain about this but if he's honest he would also name it 'diagonally.'

"Is there something I should do before then?"

"I will need to talk to Mrs. Irving. Will you be able to get to an address in London two weeks from today, or will I need to pick you up?"

"Oh, yeah, I can get there!"

He will just fail to explain how.

She is so very unsurprised by both the words and the silence after them. She gives him the address of the Leaky Cauldron. "It's magically hidden--muggles will think the shop on its left is adjacent to the shop on its right. You should be able to see it with no difficulty, but I will be waiting outside just in case. If you get lost, go to King's Cross station and I will come and find you."

"Okay!"

He thinks McGonagall should show him more magic now.

She will show off a broad range of magic--turning more things into other things and back, temporarily animating a figurine, producing colored sparks and a steady light--and answer any theoretical questions for about fifteen more minutes and then she needs to leave to go brief the next ten-year-old.

Cy has lots of questions and he's inevitably going to think of a dozen more questions as soon as she leaves.

--

Once she does, he flops on his bed.

Okay. So. Magic. 

Clearly the things he thought of as being lucky-- people not noticing him, people believing him that he's supposed to be where he is-- are in some way magic. Probably some of the objects he randomly finds are magic too, although a lot of them are just having a bad memory. Therefore, while wands might help with magic, they're not strictly necessary. Therefore, he can get a head start on figuring out how to control the fundamental forces of the universe. 

How does magic work? When he's accidentally done magic before, the key thing was that he really really really wanted something to happen. So maybe he should try wanting something.

Professor McGonagall turned into a cat without using her wand. So that's something you can definitely do without a wand.

He sits on his bed and thinks very hard about how much he wants to be a cat. Cats. Excellent animals. Small and furry. Sacred to the goddess Bast. People pet them, which Cy is in favor of, no one's really petted him since halfway through primary school when it started to get weird that he was the only one who wasn't a girl. He's a big fan of how they always land on their feet. He wishes he always landed on his feet. Maybe magic means you always land on your feet? It seems like there ought to be a spell for that. Or an amulet. Like Feather Fall. He wonders how many D&D spells also exist in the real world. Maybe the guy who wrote D&D was a wizard. Maybe Jack Chick was actually right that D&D gave you magic powers and he would have found out about his magic powers way earlier if he'd actually managed to get a group together to-- focus. Cats. He's supposed to be thinking about cats. Cats purr. They kind of sound like motorcycles. He wants a motorcycle. Maybe he could have a flying motorcycle. Could you get some kind of amulet of Permanent Wingardium Leviosa and then fly around on your motorcycle? That would be really cool.

--Okay. Maybe he needs a different approach to magic. 

He crumples up a piece of paper and puts it in front of him on the bed. "Wingardium Leviosa," he says, staring at the ball of paper and wanting it to move. 

The ball doesn't move. 

Maybe he has to enunciate. He always read in books about the importance of properly pronouncing spells. "Wingardium Leviosa," he says clearly, copying McGonagall's intonation as best he can.

The paper does not move. 

Cy glares. He is not going to be defeated by a crumpled-up paper ball. He is a long-lost member of a secret race of wizards and the ball is made out of tree corpses. "Wingardium Leviosa."

The ball wobbles slightly. It could have been a gust of air, except that all the windows are closed.

Cy bounces on the bed with glee, dislodging the ball. He can do magic. He can do magic. He can do magic. Fuck you, paper balls, you will be decimated by the might of the glorious wizard Cyrus Wei, pointy of hat and swishy of robe. Phenomenal cosmic power lies at his fingertips. The atoms dance to his will. He is INVINCIBLE.

The ball does not respond.

All right. Back to work. He has to figure out of he can do it twice.

--

Cy spends the next two weeks learning magic. He eats so little that even Mrs. Irving notices and begins to make concerned comments about him being sick. He stays up until he collapses and then sleeps for twelve hours. His friends leave increasingly worried messages on Mrs. Irving's answering machine. The security guards at the mall double up on their rounds, convinced that he must be up to something. 

He can't go invisible reliably, maybe because he doesn't know the words, but it works as well as it always did if he just counts on it being there. He can produce colored sparks and a light and send them dancing about the room. He can change the color of the sparks. He can levitate a paper ball and send it dancing around the room. He cannot turn into a cat, which disappoints him. McGonagall didn't even need a wand to do it so it can't be that hard. He just needs to figure out the right state of mind. (He spends a lot of time trying to think catlike thoughts. Lying in sunbeams is nice. It is very important to torture mice to death. Meow.)

--

The day before his trip to London, Cy goes for a morning walk because he can't think when he's sitting down and teaching himself magic requires a lot of thinking. (It is morning in two senses: it is 3am and also he just woke up.) He's levitated a stone and is carrying it behind him for practice. 

He isn't looking where he's going and he runs into a car. Then he blinks.

Known magic expert Yoda says that size matters not. The Force is everywhere, and from the Force's perspective lifting up a rock is the same as lifting up an X-wing fighter. Cy is pretty sure Yoda would not lie about magic. And Cy can levitate a pebble.

Therefore, logically, Cy can levitate a car.

He puts his hands on his hips and glares at the car. This car is on the ground. This car is not supposed to be on the ground. What does this car think it's doing, being on the ground, when Cyrus Wei, the greatest wizard who has ever lived, thinks it should be floating in the air. This car should be ashamed of itself. The sheer nerve of this, being susceptible to gravity. This is outrageous. Cy has a right. What is it thinking. 

He says, using the pronunciation that worked best for him: "Wingardium Leviosa."

The car wobbles.

Absolutely unacceptable. Wobbling is for paper balls on Cy's first day of learning magic. Cy has been learning magic for nearly two weeks. What does the universe think it's doing. This car will fly. "Wingardium Leviosa!"

And the car floats.

Cy's face breaks into a grin. Nice. 

Belatedly it occurs to him that:

1. Magic is secret and he shouldn't levitate cars in a residential area.
2. He is very good at levitating things but hasn't yet learned how to drop them. 

This thought distracts him from his attitude of aggrieved entitlement.

The car crashes to the ground. The metal crumples. The windows shatter. The tires are in places they are really not supposed to be. 

Cy blinks and then starts to walk away in his patented fashion: he is very innocent and he has nothing to do with whatever went wrong and he just happens to be walking in the 'away' direction for totally coincidental reasons, and also he's moving very very very quickly. 

When he's far enough away that it seems likely he's not going to get caught by angry wizards or car owners, he starts to skip. He can levitate a car. He can levitate a car. He has magic powers and he can levitate a car and he is the coolest person in the world.

Still, it's probably a good idea to get to London sooner rather than later. He runs back to his house, leaves a note for Mrs. Irving ("Meeting for boarding school! Be back tonight!"), and packs up his backpack with money and snacks and Cosmos and River Out Of Eden and Asimov On Numbers and Magic's Pawn and Enchanters' End Game and Faust Eric. Then he walks to the truck stop (levitating pebbles and branches and not cars along the way), sneaks into the back of the truck fueling up whose route he knows heads to London, bounces a little bit about how he can do this and no one else can because he's magic, and takes a nap.

Once he's in London, he spends the morning bouncing between restaurants looking sad at waitresses until they give him tea and a snack, and then heads towards the Leaky Cauldron. It takes him a moment to find it but once he glares at the universe and tells it that there is a tavern here and it will show him the tavern the universe cowers and he can see it fine. 

He can also see McGonagall, who smiles and gestures him to go inside. Inside is a tavern with a old toothless bartender and a girl his age with brown hair like an unruly cloud and eyes like saucers and nervously excited parents, and a very serious-looking boy his age whose parents look really excessively posh, just the absolute most posh, and like they would not be caught dead admitting they weren't totally in control of any situation in which they happened to be.

"Hello!" says the girl. "I'm Hermione Granger. Are you going to Hogwarts too? What's your name?"

"I'm Cy Wei! Do I have to worry about you exiting pursued by a bear?"

"No, but we are definitely in a brave new world that has such people in it! I am so excited about magic, I can't wait to get my textbooks, I wish I had realized that what I could do wasn't just coincidences so I would have had more time to learn about it! I bet the magic-raised kids already know so much stuff and I'm going to have to work to catch up." She makes having to work sound like a mysterious novel activity she's never tried but would like to experience just the once.

"I've been practicing! I can levitate a car."

Maybe he shouldn't have said that. Oops.

"Oh wow. I haven't dared try anything that big because I heard we aren't supposed to practice outside of school, but I can make a ripped piece of paper mend itself and I can shake a bag of buttons and have them end up sorted by colour. Did you get in trouble for the car?"

"I haven't told any adults and I'm not going to."

"I think they have magic ways of finding out. So what class are you most looking forward to at Hogwarts? Transfiguration is really cool, but charms is a bit broader, and I haven't gotten to see any potions yet, and herbology sounds really exciting!"

"Transfiguration! I want to figure out how to turn into a cat. I couldn't figure it out on my own. --Also Astronomy, I think wizards could probably use their magic to figure out all kinds of things about space we don't know yet."

"That would be really neat. I asked Professor McGonagall whether the telescopes were magical or if I could bring my mum's and she said they're enchanted to never get damaged or fogged up and hold themselves steady and you can tell them to point at one part of the sky all night."

Bounce bounce bounce. "Awesome! --What have you been reading?"

(This is the most important question, according to Cy, for assessing friend potential.)

"Well, for the last two weeks I've really wanted to be reading about magical theory and the history of the magical world, but of course I don't have my books yet, so I've mostly been reading histories of other things, most recently steam engines, and also the memoirs of someone who went to Eton because I wasn't expecting to go to boarding school at all, let alone a magic one. And then for fiction I've been reading Alanna: The First Adventure; it's about a girl pretending to be a boy so she can train to be a knight. What about you?"

"I've been busy practicing magic so I haven't been reading much, but on the way up I was reading about math and evolutionary biology and, uh, I don't actually know what Cosmos is about, the universe I guess. And also I'm reading Eric which is about a guy who tries to summon a demon but ends up summoning an incompetent wizard named Rincewind who is terrified of everything and can't do magic, and Magic's Pawn which is about this guy who falls in love with another guy and also there are telepathic horses, and Enchanters' End Game which is like if you took every fantasy novel ever published and averaged them together. --I like Tamora Pierce, she's great. I don't know anything about steam engines. The memoirs of someone who went to Eton seems like a smart thing to read, I'm never that prepared for anything."

"Oh, Magic's Pawn is good; I love the Companions. Would you like to hear some things about steam engines or Eton?"

"Yes!"

She will happily talk about James Watt and coal mines for a while! She's not directly quoting a book, it's more summarized and colloquial than that, but her eyes flick back and forth as she talks like she's reading an invisible book floating over Cyrus's shoulder.

"We should be friends."

How commendably straightforward of him! "Yes we should." 

Eventually the last group arrives (a black boy who introduces himself as Dean Thomas, with his mother), and the serious-looking boy introduces himself as Justin Finch-Fletchley, and they can all go into . . . a dinky little trash alley. But then McGonagall opens a magic arch in the wall and they can all go into actual Diagon Alley, which is lined with shops selling all manner of things from the normal to the bizzare and bustling with shoppers who cover a similar range.

"This way, everyone. Our first stop is the bank where you will all change your money; on the way I will explain the currency." She walks backward at the head of the group with more confidence than most of the rest of them walk forward and explains the undeniably kind of stupid undecimalized wizarding currency and how you should not try anything funny with it because the goblins enforce the related laws and (she adds approvingly) goblins have no tolerance for funny business. 

A woman in a blue cloak complains about the price of dragon liver; a cluster of boys crowd around the window of a broom store; stray cats pick their way between shoppers; owls swoop overhead.

Cy is trying to pay attention. He is trying so hard to pay attention. Unfortunately, he would have a diagnosis of ADHD if any of his foster care parents were paying enough attention and cared enough to take him to a doctor about it, and Diagon Alley is distracting as hell.

Ice cream shop! Cy is hungry because he only had snacks so far today and ice cream is also not really a meal but it tastes really good. A sign advertises cauldrons that are COPPER, BRASS, PEWTER, SILVER - SELF-STIRRING - COLLAPSIBLE and Cy wonders how many other convenient magical things there are besides self-stirring cauldrons, can you get frying pans that flip the eggs for you. Also why would you want a silver cauldron? Is it just to show off? Owls hooting-- did wizards have pet owls? Why? Were they sapient? Cy wanted a sapient pet owl. He overhears "dragon liver, seventeen Sickles an ounce, they're mad" and-- apparently dragons exist. Fuck owls, Cy wants a pet dragon. They're going to be getting all Dragonriders of Pern up in here. He's going to bond with his dragon and soar through the air and breathe fire on people who are annoying. Brooms-- he overhears a boy his age say that the new Nimbus Two Thousand is the fastest ever-- so they fly? Do witches literally soar through the air on brooms? What else about the legends of witches is true? Can he turn people into frogs if he doesn't like them? Cy fancies himself Granny Weatherwax although he thinks that he's going to be better at levitating cars than at headology. Human psychology is not his strong point. Everyone is wearing robes. Cy is wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt but people don't seem particularly startled by this-- he guesses that they know the Muggle kids are going shopping at Diagon Alley. Is Cy going to have to wear robes? He guesses he shouldn't have predicted that wizards would wear the same clothes Muggles do, but it's still really weird to think that he's going to be in what is basically a dress.

And there are bat spleens and eels' eyes, quills and rolls of parchment (why don't wizards have pens? is Cy going to have to learn to write with a quill?), potion bottles, globes of the moon, wands, and tottering piles of books that Cy stares at for two minutes and then notices that everyone else has already left and runs through the crowd to rejoin the group. 

There's a bank! It's white marble and very banklike, except that it's labeled GRINGOTTS, and there are two guards by the door looking ceremonial yet alert, and those guards are four feet tall with pointy ears and very long fingers and shoes that imply very long feet and generally don't look human. Also there's a poem on the door:

Enter, stranger, but take heed

Of what awaits the sin of greed

For those who take but do not earn

Must pay most dearly in their turn

So if you seek beneath our floors

A treasure that was never yours

Thief, you have been warned, beware

Of finding more than treasure there.

Cy will NOT shoplift from the bank, got it.

"Do you think Neanderthals still exist?" he asks Hermione.

"You mean like hiding in the woods somewhere? I guess if they can hide dragons they can probably hide anything but unless neanderthals are magic I don't know why they would."

"It'd be really weird if only the nonhumans we didn't have fossils of turned out to still exist."

"Not necessarily! If a species doesn't exist anymore, there's less to be gained from hiding their fossils, as long as the skeletons aren't obviously magic."

"Oh my god, Neanderthals could be magic. Do you think there's a book about it?"

"Maybe! I really want to get a book of all the species that wizards are keeping secret."

The parents have finished changing their money (McGonagall must have talked to Mrs. Irving at some point while Cyrus was busy with magic practice, because she took some out too) and they all get herded towards the robe shop.

This is the face Cy is going to be making in two months when he discovers that you get to Gringotts vaults via roller coaster.

"Do you think nonhumans have alien psychologies? --Is that racist? Shit, I don't want to be racist. Speciesist? I don't know how we would know if they do because lots of people historically have written books claiming that different races of humans have psychological differences they totally don't."

"Maybe we can meet some! Professor, are there any non-human students at Hogwarts?"

Professor McGonagall looks levelly at her for a moment and says, "Non-humans are not currently permitted by the Wizengamot to carry wands or attend wizarding schools." She definitely doesn't sound disapproving when she says this. She would never disapprove of a government policy, goodness no.

"That sounds racist. Or speciesist."

"Some people do think so, yes. The Hogwarts library has a number of books on interspecies relations in Britain and elsewhere." And it's also supposed to be on the History of Magic curriculum, but the combination of tenure and the ethereal retribution she would face if she brought an exorcist anywhere near Hogwarts make that rather irrelevant, don't they.

"Okay but those books are probably written by racists."

Cy wishes he had put more thought into how he would have figured out that scientific racism was wrong if he were born in the 19th century. Last time he read about Galton he had been distracted by the concept of reaction times correlating with IQ and had spent the next ten days randomly terrifying people to see how smart they were. 

She can't introduce him to the kitchen elves; for all that they're very orderly and sensible beings in themselves they're unfortunately easy to turn into a force multiplier for havoc, as the Spaghetti Incident of the past spring demonstrated quite vividly.

"I can recommend you books with a wide range of perspectives, including some written by non-humans themselves." By which she means goblins and merpeople--giants don't write anything down, centaurs don't talk to humans if they can avoid it, and if house-elves write books they keep them as secret as most other facts about themselves.

Cy is going to FIND SOME NONHUMANS and TALK TO THEM and IF NECESSARY RESCUE THEM FROM RACISTS AND BRING THEM TO A ZOMBIE MOUNTAIN TO LIVE AND GROW POTATOES. But not radishes. Radishes are gross.

He is immediately distracted from his new life plan by the existence of Gambol and Japes' Wizarding Joke Shop, which proudly advertised its stock of Dungbombs and Dr. Filibuster's Fabulous Wet-Start No-Heat Fireworks. "Hermione there's a joke shop!"

"Huh. I wonder if 'no heat' means you can't injure yourself setting them off or if . . ." And he can't hear the rest of the sentence because Hermione has moved to the other side of the group so she can stare through a bookstore window like she's waiting for her husband to return from the war.

Oh, that's even more important than whatever a Dungbomb is.

Cy has joined her. "Hermione, Hermione, I want all of them. Can we have all of them."

Hermione turns to look at her parents. Her father smiles warmly and says, "I don't think we can carry all of them, but we can certainly try."

"And books will be the last but one stop on our route for exactly that reason. Also, a great many of those books are already in our library; I will help you identify those that are not." And here is Madam Malkin's Robes For All Occasions.

But if they're in the library Cyrus will read them later! Cyrus wants to read them now!

Cyrus will go get robes even though he feels weird about wearing a dress.

Madam Malkin's contains two young women, a young man, and an authoritative-looking middle-aged woman who can be assumed to be Madam Malkin. It also contains a white-blond boy being measured by an animated tape measure who nods to the four new arrivals as they get set up with their own tape measures. 

"Hello. You for Hogwarts too?"

"Yeah! I'm Cy Wei. You?"

"Draco Malfoy. And between your clothes and your not knowing that, you must be the . . . new kids. I'll help you out: my father is Lucius Malfoy; he's on the Hogwarts Board and has the ear of Minister Jin."

Justin Finch-Fletchley looks at the rest of the group with an expression of embarrassed compassion, as though inviting them all to pity Draco for his tragic case of gauche-osis.

"Oh!" Cy says brightly. "My father is Robert Wei, and he's on the Big Rock Candy Mountain Board and has the ear of the Tooth Fairy."

"You're just making things up," says Draco disgustedly. "Typical muggleborn. Doesn't know anything and doesn't care."

"Hey!"

Justin Finch-Fletchley is trying so hard not to bust out laughing. Dean Thomas is making "talk talk talk" gestures with one hand on the side Draco can't see and Justin can, which is not helping Justin even a little bit.

"You know," Cy says cheerfully, "I really feel quite bad for you. A lot of sympathy. I might be a Muggleborn but at least I've accomplished something since my father ejaculated, you know?"

"I doubt that. You're probably all going to end up in Hufflepuff--if they don't wise up and decide not to let your sort in at all."

"I'm sorry," Cy says, "I'm a Muggleborn, I don't know anything, I don't have the benefit of your immense wisdom. What is Hufflepuff?"

Smirk. "Wow, they haven't explained the houses to you yet? I guess they really don't care. Everyone at Hogwarts gets sorted into Slytherin, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Gryffindor. Slytherin is only open to people from good families who mean to uphold those families' traditions; Ravenclaw is for people who care too much about homework, Gryffindor is reckless lunatics, and Hufflepuff is for losers who can't go anywhere else."

If Malfoy said two plus two was four Hermione would recompute it to check, but if he's telling anything like the truth she has a suspicion of where she will end up and it's not Hufflepuff.

Dean Thomas says, "What, they just say 'hand up everyone who's a swot, okay now hand up everyone who's a lunatic, hang on, we don't have enough beds in the Swot Building, some of you need to become lunatics now'?"

Justin says, "Maybe places in Ravenclaw are awarded by examination."

Cy also has his suspicions of where he'll end up.

"Oh, yeah, I'm probably a Hufflepuff then," he says. "I don't have any family to speak of and couldn't uphold their traditions even if I wanted to. --Say, what happens if someone from a good family marries someone from a bad family, or a Muggleborn like me?"

"Then they're a blood traitor," sneers Draco. "Proper wizards know better than to mix their blood with the likes of you."

Cy is instantly distracted from his point. "Oh, man, 'blood traitor,' that's metal, I want that as a tattoo."

"So what I'm getting here is that you're the product of generations of inbreeding that make the British royal family and pedigree dogs look like paragons of hybrid vigor." He eyes Draco critically. "At least you still have a chin. That's important. I suppose there'll be a magical cure for the hemophilia. Pity about the crazy aunt you have locked up in the attic, hope it doesn't get passed along to you."

It's almost imperceptible, but Draco actually flinches at "crazy aunt you have locked up". (Justin frowns a little at the bit about the royal family.)

"Ugh. I'm done wasting my time on you." He turns away, nose skyward, and is soon rescued by the arrival of a store employee with his stack of uniform robes.

"Not a good first impression of pureblood wizards," Cy says to Hermione.

"I really hope they're not all like that."

"I bet they're not worse than most rich people. Of course, I normally avoid rich people by not going to Eton and I don't have this option here."

"My parents are dentists and the kids at my school--my old school now, I guess--were all sorts. I guess wizards aren't any different, really."

Justin Finch-Fletchley is paying a reasonable and moderate amount of attention to a rack of dress robes, and then gets actually distracted when Dean Thomas asks him about football.

Cy is going to get measured for his robes and do his best not to fidget. (His best is not very good.)

Fortunately the tape measure is superhumanly good at its job. Hermione holds very still and soon all four of them have their own robes and hats.

"Oh, Hermione, you look beautiful!"

She looks at him like she thinks he's up to something. ". . . Thank you."

"The robe looks really great on you! I guess you were meant to be a wizard all along."

"I do think I like them better than muggle clothes. But that's not why I'm a witch. Well, probably not. Wizards don't know much about genetics."

"No, actually, it's all about fashion. The more stylish you look in robes the more magical you are."

Giggle. "I heard Headmaster Dumbledore is really powerful, so I guess when we get to Hogwarts we can check whether he's extremely well dressed."

Once everyone is enrobed and behatted they can start on a string of miscellaneous errands, collecting telescopes and cauldrons neatly prepacked with starter shelf-stable ingredient kits and protective gloves and quills and ink. Justin's mother says, "See, I told you those calligraphy lessons would pay off" and Justin asserts that she could not possibly have seen this coming but yes, with the benefit of hindsight, he is glad he had the calligraphy lessons.

"I'm going to smuggle in ballpoint pens."

"I'm going to learn penmanship. I just hope I can do it in time--I also need to study all my textbooks and do my next term of math."

"...don't they have math at Hogwarts?"

"They don't, it's awful, I'm two years ahead right now but if I fall behind a year every two years I'm going to be a year and a half behind when I graduate!"

"What the fuck. Mione, we gotta get math textbooks. And science, I bet they don't have science either."

"Science is easier to learn without a teacher and they have potions and astronomy and herbology but they don't have physics or general biology so we should get those. We can study together!"

"Just so you know I'm incredibly bad at doing homework."

"Making time to get all your homework done is a skill like any other skill! I can help you."

"No, the problem is that other things are more interesting than homework so I do them instead."

"Well at Hogwarts it will be magic homework; that has to be interesting."

"But I'm going to be interested in some different aspect of magic that isn't my homework. Or I'm just going to forget about it. Or I'm already going to understand the thing and they're going to make me want to do twenty problems about it anyway."

"I can remind you of stuff so you don't forget and then we can go study the things you're interested in when the homework is done. I don't know what to do about the twenty problems, though; when that happens to me I just find it relaxing."

"Well, if you find it relaxing, you can do mine for me."

"But that would be cheating!"

"No, it's cheating if I don't understand it and am trying to get a grade I didn't earn. If I do understand it, then why would it matter whether I was the one who technically did the work? I'd get the same grade either way."

"Because--because it's dishonest!"

"How is it dishonest? They're believing something true, aren't they? If they believe something true then by definition it's not a lie."

(Cy Wei has yet to have heard of Gettier cases.)

"Look, if you go to a professor and get them to say that they don't care whether you do the homework in their class or not as long as you know how to do it then it's fine, but I'm not going to lie and do it and let them think you did it."

"You're terrible, Mione! Terrible! I'm going to never speak to you again."

"Oh." She looks like her uncertainty about whether he's joking is the only thing keeping her from tearing up.

"Oh, no, don't be sad, Mione, I'm joking! We have to find out whether wizards are racist together, remember?"

"Okay. I will be friends if you want to be friends and not if you don't but you have to tell the truth about whether you want to be friends or not. And I would rather be friends."

"I'm just teasing."

"Usually people teasing me means they don't want to be friends but okay."

"Haven't you ever heard that if a boy likes you he'll pull your pigtails?"

"Yes, but--they never seem to do anything other than that. And they do do other things with their real friends."

"Well, then, I'll pull your pigtails and do other things with you. Problem solved."

"Excellent. I wonder if we'll be in the same house."

"Oh, has someone mentioned the house system to you already? I can explain in detail if they didn't."

"This asshole named Draco Malfoy did but I don't think he talked about it very accurately."

Has a lemon magically materialised in the professor's mouth? No, apparently not, because she launches into a speech.

"The Hogwarts student body is divided into four houses. While at Hogwarts, your house will be like your family: you will live together, attend class together, and be expected to look out for each other. The four houses are Gryffindor, the house of the valorous; Ravenclaw, the house of the wise; Hufflepuff, the house of the industrious, and Slytherin, the house of the ambitious. You will be Sorted into your houses at the Welcoming Feast at the beginning of term, in a process that is traditionally left as a surprise but which I assure you needs no preparation. Each house has two prefects in each of the fifth, sixth, and seventh years, as well as a faculty head; in addition to my other duties I am the head of house Gryffindor. Any questions?"

"Right, so I'm a Slytherin obviously, but I don't want to be in a house with that dick."

"Language, mister Wei. Unfortunately I feel obligated to warn you that the social environment of Slytherin is unlikely to be one you would consider welcoming."

"So I just become the most powerful one and then they'll have to be nice to me. They're ambitious, that's how it works, right?"

". . . I have every hope that you will apply yourself and excel in your studies."

Yeah. that makes sense, adults don't believe in ambition.

To the next thing?

To the next thing! And to the thing after that! And then to the bookstore!

Books!

Cy grabs Hermione's hand and tugs her towards the magical theory books. "Mione, Mione, over here, let's learn about the fundamental secrets of the universe."

Hermione follows but pulls her hand away so she can grab three history books off another shelf on the way. She's in a magical bookstore! It's like dreams about flying, it's like Christmas morning, it's like everything bright and lovely and her arms are full of books within a minute.

McGonagall loves her job.

Cy pulls down four books at once and tries to read them all simultaneously.

What kind of things are in the magical theory section?

There are big dictionaries of spells and their categories, and books of theory about those categories! Some spells are cast as a single event, others as a continuous process. Some spells do the same thing every time; others take input from the caster in some way. Some spells require specific states of mind; some spells can be cast even if you don't know what they do. Transfiguration has its own section. There are books on the theory of potion-making, with diagrams that look almost like the ones in chemistry textbooks but not quite. There are books on spell development that start with lists of other books the author expects their readers to have read and only get more esoteric from there. There are books on the various axes of magical power and what causes some people to have more of it and how one can reach their full potential (these disagree with each other on approximately everything). There are books on the interaction of magic with bodily health. There are books on alchemy that read like the ravings of mad poets.

Ooh. He's going to make a pile of a bunch of the theory books, especially the ones mentioned in spell development, and the easiest-looking spell development book, and whichever book about what causes people to have more magic power seems least like a self-help book.

Can he find anything about the ways that magic interacts with physics as Muggles understand it?

There isn't much of that but there's some; mostly relatively human-scale stuff like this survey of which things are faster/more energy-intensive/less failure-prone when done with magic versus without. Also the book on magical power that is technically least like a self-help book is one that claims that it is impossible to gain more magical power because it is determined solely by the purity of one's blood.

Okay, he's going to pick the one that's least like a self-help book and also has possibly useful advice.

He grabs all the physics ones and puts them on his pile and then is immediately distracted by wizard fiction. What kinds of fiction do wizards write?

Surprisingly similar kinds to Muggle fiction, except often with wizard protagonists. There are historical fiction books about wizards having adventures in ancient Egypt or the court of Richard the Lionheart; there are fantasy books about kids getting sent to universes where magic works differently or nobody has it and fighting evil; there are books about wizards in the future exploring outer space; there's a very popular series called The Adventures of Galath Lan that appears to be fictionalised accounts of the life of a person who actually exists.

Oooh, let's add some of those to his pile too. The Adventures of Galath Lan looks interesting he'll get the first one.

...

...

...

Cy Wei has a pile of more than twenty books. Cy Wei doesn't have any money.

Hermione also wants a lot of those books plus Hogwarts, a History and some less-fictionalized books about Galath Lan, and the Hogwarts library has some overlap as well, but there are still five or six not in either of those sets.

Cy Wei is going to... put the books back on the shelves looking like someone has just murdered his cat?

"While I'm here, I should make some new acquisitions for the library. We didn't come to have the best selection in the country by failing to keep it updated, after all." McGonagall walks down a few shelves and grabs eight books, which just happen to include all the theory books Cyrus had to put back and one on the history of human-merfolk relations.

Bounce bounce bounce. "Professor McGonagall, I love you."

She smiles a tiny smile as she rings up the books. Even if he does end up going the way of entirely too many slytherins, right now he's an innocent kid who wants to learn about his new world.

Will the Grangers take pity on their daughter's new best friend and get him The Adventures of Galath Lan?

It's a bit odd that there are fiction books about a person who is apparently Hermione and Cyrus's same age, but Hermione says "It doesn't seem fair that I can get all the books I want and he can't get any" and they cave.

Eeeeeeeee this is the best day of Cy's life. 

He's going to infodump at Hermione about everything he learned from flipping through three pages of various books and hope she infodumps back. 

She does! She infodumps while they are walking to the wand shop where they will get magic wands!

In the meantime she can barely see over her stack of books, which poses some difficulty in the bustle of the alley. Two six-year-olds are having a heated argument about whose turn it is with the toy hippogriff, and an old man has paused in the middle of the street to stare down a cloud in the sky overhead, and a stray dog has gotten hold of a string of sausages and darts across the street in front of Cyrus while running from the angry butcher.

Holyfuckingshit that's a dog. 

Cy's heart races and his palms sweat and it feels like his blood is pumping in his ears so loudly that he can't hear anything else, and regardless of what size it actually is it looks about six feet tall and like every one of its teeth is a fang.

He turns and runs without thinking about where he's going or that people might be looking for him or that he has no idea how he's going to get home. The only thing that matters is getting as far away from the dog as he can. He runs and runs and runs until he can't breathe anymore and then he collapses on his hands and knees and pants and feels a dread in his stomach that somehow the dog is going to get him. 

"Are you all right?" a boy says. He's Asian, like Cy. Cy has never seen this many Asian people before.

"I'm fine! Totally fine. Just, uh, practicing for a marathon. Going to need to work on my pacing. Does the wizarding world even have marathons."

"I don't know what a marathon is." The boy looks very skeptical that Cy is in fact all right but he doesn't want to challenge it.

"Sylvanus! What are you doing?"

"He ran into Knockturn Alley," the boy, who is apparently named Sylvanus, says. "I think he's a Muggle. He's definitely not supposed to be here. I want to make sure he's all right."

"Are you hurt?" the woman says, as angrily as possible.

"No, I'm not hurt, I'm totally fine, sorry to bother you, you can move along and I'll rejoin my group."

She rolls her eyes, kneels down, and inspects him. "He looks fine. Just scared. --Did you run into something you shouldn't have?" 

"No."

"I'm Mercy Wen. This is my cousin, Sylvanus. You should leave, this isn't a safe place for Muggleborns," she says, not unkindly.

"We'll escort you back to your tour group." She helps him up.

Whatever its other faults, Knockturn Alley seems to be entirely free of dogs, so Cy thinks he'd much rather stay here.

He doesn't want to admit this to Mercy. "What's Knockturn Alley?"

"Knockturn Alley is where you buy items related to the Dark Arts-- magic that hurts or controls people."

"Ooh!" Cy says. "Can you show me?"

"No, we can't show dangerous forbidden magic to a random Muggleborn eleven-year-old Sylvanus found on the street."

"You also look eleven."

"And I threw off my first Imperius when I was six years old. You don't even know what an Imperius is."

"I could know what an Imperius is. You don't know I don't."

"We're taking you back to your group," she says in the tone of a person who expects to be obeyed.

"Are you going to insult my ancestry on the way?"

"Not all purebloods are like that. Let me guess, you had a runin with someone unpleasant?"

"Some asshole named Draco Malfoy."

"New money. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the Malfoys certainly think there is, and they will raise themselves up by trying to tear other people down. And his house has albino peacocks in front."

"I want albino peacocks."

"I think albino peacocks sound nice."

"The point," Mercy says, "is that we're not all like that. My family believes that all wizards are equal, regardless of their background."

Sylvanus nods enthusiastically.

"All... wizards. What about goblins?"

"Well, goblins aren't human."

"They're still people! That's speciesist. And-- you said wizards. What about Muggles?"

"I don't want to be rude. I know Muggleborns love their families."

"Don't do me any favors."

"Well, they're just-- not our sort? In general, Muggles are simply less intelligent than wizards, they're crueler, they oppress women, they're covered in dirt because they bathe less. And of course they're not capable of magic and they don't leave ghosts."

"My dad was a Muggle. My best friend's a Muggle. Isaac Asimov and Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan are Muggles. You have no fucking clue what you're talking about."

"I understand the truth can be hard to hear--"

"No. Fuck you. I went and looked in the entire bookstore of Flourish and Blotts and you know what I didn't find? A single book about physics. Muggles know more than you about how the universe works and that's fucking embarrassing because you can probably cast a magic spell that works as a microscope. Muggles split the atom, Muggles went to the Moon. The only reason Muggles aren't blowing you out of the fucking water about magic is that they don't know it exists. I bet you don't even know what evolution is. Wizards aren't worthy to kiss the feet of Muggles."

This interaction is very frightening and Sylvanus is not sure how to handle it.

"...I think we're at your group," Mercy says politely. "It was a pleasure talking to you."

"Wish I could say the same."

"Ah, there you are," says McGonagall, who has clearly been headed in Cyrus's direction since he ran off. "That was ill-advised; you will be much safer if you remain with the group. Do you still have all your belongings?"

"Are you okay? What happened?"

"I... really don't like dogs."

She shrugs. "Well, Hogwarts only allows cats, so that's a piece of luck unless you don't like them either. Did you get bitten by a dog once or something?"

"Something like that."

"Ooh, look, that's the wandmaker's!"

It proclaims itself to be Ollivander's, Makers of Fine Wands since 382 BC.

"Has it really been here since 382 BC?"

"No, no, they've moved around a few times. I believe the family arrived in Britain with the Romans."

Oh good a conversation topic that isn't dogs. 

"I'm going to turn your hair green."

She would be impressed if he managed to change anyone's hair colour any time before the third week of class, and he's not going to manage it on her even then, but that would be exactly the wrong thing to say to him, so she doesn't. She also doesn't say "if my hair is going to be a ridiculous colour it had better be red. With gold highlights." Instead she says, "In you go," and holds the door while the four pile into the wand shop.

Someone who must be Ollivander looms up out of the back, his white eyes and white hair appearing first, anglerfish-like, before the rest of him. "Ah, here we are again. Hogwarts first-years. It's always such a pleasure. Who would like to go first?"

Hernione's hand goes up like it was fired out of a cannon independently of the rest of her.

"Me! Me me me me me me! I want cool magic powers!"

Ollivander flits around the store, grabbing half a dozen slim boxes from the Jenga towers of them that are his wall cubbies, and stacks them on a chair, then pulls one out for each of Cyrus and Hermione. To Cyrus he says, "Start with this. Sycamore and phoenix feather, ten inches, rather energetic. Give it a wave."

He waves his wand with incredible enthusiasm and accidentally elbows Hermione in the nose.

Hermione goes "YEEP" and drops the wand she's in the process of taking, says "Sorry" to Ollivander while picking it up, and is informed that it's "Unicorn hair and pine, eleven inches, very springy." Then Ollivander snatches back both of those wands and gives them new ones (Hermione moves to the other side of the rather small room).

That's very fair. 

Free of all concerns about elbowing people in the face, Cy is going to do his coolest dance moves with this wand. 

He generally gets about 0.6 seconds into a dance move before Ollivander grabs the wand back and swaps it out. He goes through yew and unicorn hair, several different woods and dragon heartstring, and a couple of hawthorn ones before he finally gets to "Hawthorn and dragon heartstring, twelve and a half inches, ready for anything." This one he gets to keep long enough to finish waving, and it lets out a shower of softly crackling white-gold sparks.

"Well done!" exclaims Ollivander. "That's the one that wants you."

"Awesome! Why does it want me?"

"Why does anyone want anything? It suits you. The wand always chooses the wizard, you know, and you'll never get as good results with another wizard's wand."

After a few tries of her own, Hermione ends up with vine wood and dragon heartstring at ten and three quarters inches, which emits a swirl of sparkling blue mist and a soft chime. She holds it like it's made of spun glass and asks, "How are wands made? Can other magical creatures be involved, or only the three you mentioned? How can you guess what wands someone should try?"

"Other wandmakers," he says disdainfully, "may use other creatures, but I only use those three. The process is much too long and complex to describe, but suffice to say it combines transfiguration, potion-making, carpentry, and art--and the last is how I know which wands to try." He starts handing wands to Justin and Dean, both of whom are fairly easy matches--he succeeds on Justin's first try and Dean's second.

"Juliet, I want to learn to make wands," he says to Hermione. 

Hermione blinks, traces back the nickname logic, and says, "Me too! I bet there are books in the library. We should ask McGonagall how more specialized education works." She darts towards the door to do exactly that.

He follows her. "I was planning to triple major. I hope they have triple majors in wizard college."

Wizards don't generally have college! Instead, they generally start out as trainees or apprentices in the job they want, and learn all the specialized skills on the job. McGonagall approves of this system; it makes it easier to learn whether you're suited for a line of work before you've put multiple years into preparing for it. Ollivander prefers to remain a family business, but there are other wandmakers on the continent who are less secretive.

"But what if I want to learn lots of different things?" He thinks about this. "Do wizards have academics?"

"Many wizards pursue scholarship independently, and there are journals in which they can share their findings. Once you're in fourth year, you will have the option of independent study projects under the guidance of a professor."

"I'm going to do that."

"So am I!"

"I look forward to it." 

Once everyone has paid for their wands (Cyrus's is covered by his scholarship), it's time to head back out of the alley. In the alley-vestibule-thing behind the Leaky Cauldron, McGonagall hands out train tickets and explains that the way you get to Hogwarts is by going to King's Cross the morning of September first and walking through a specific wall.

Frantic hand-waving.

"Can I walk through walls in general or just that specific one? What happens if I go check it out two weeks ahead of time?"

"Just that one; it's enchanted to only admit people who know it's there. If you arrive two weeks early you will have a very long wait for the train."

Cy is going to arrive two weeks early and check out the MAGIC TRAIN STATION.

"Beatrice, give me your phone number."

She laughs and tells him her phone number.

"That was a binding agreement, you know. You're going to be my friend forever now."

"Does that mean I can start calling you the names of random Shakespeare characters?"

"Only the villains."

"Okay, Sycorax. I'll see you September first!"

With one thing and another, the next few weeks pass.

Local rooftops go un-broken-into; local businesses go unshoplifted; for the first time in his life, Cy gets a library fine because he legitimately didn’t read the book and not because he forgot about it under his bed. Cy stops talking to nearly all of his friends. They stop by his usual haunts occasionally asking if he wants to come over or go watch a movie or go out for pizza; he waves them away with a “maybe later, I’m busy.” Eventually they stop trying. 

(It occurs to him, when he’s been at Hogwarts for a few weeks, that he should have figured out some way to contact them while he could. But there doesn’t seem to be any way to send messages to your friends from Hogwarts other than an owl, anyway. Hogwarts doesn’t want to make it easy to preserve your Muggle friendships.)

Mrs. Irving would be concerned, if she paid attention. Instead, she’s just vaguely grateful that she no longer has to deal with angry phone calls that obligate her to make some sort of gesture towards Cy being in trouble. 

Each morning, he collects his schoolbooks and departs to the park, the library, or the fish and chip shop with the lady behind the counter who’s the softest touch. He annotates them heavily, folds over the corners on the most interesting pages, adds exclamation points and question marks and “fuck you!!!!!”s to the corner. His notebooks are usually full of sketches of flowers and the night sky, math problems, plans for what he’s going to program next time he gets access to a computer, plans for homemade machines, notes on books he’s reading, half-finished terrible science fiction short stories, and pornographic pictures which show more imagination than anatomical knowledge. Now they fill up with his notes on magic: crossreferences and questions and ideas for experiments and ways that magical theory interacts with Muggle understanding of science. 

He fantasizes about the Hogwarts library. He writes and rewrites lists of books he’s going to read once he’s there, compiled from bibliographies in the back of the book. He makes lists of questions he’ll ask McGonagall when he’s there. 

Cy has a wand now. There’s no reason for him not to get a head start on learning everything. He tries the hardest spells in the books first, on general principles, and keeps trying until he gets them right. Then he flips through and looks for the spells that seem most useful: Alohomora to unlock doors; Lumos for dark places; Reparo so he stops walking around with holes in all of his socks. He doesn’t smash any more cars. 

Cy devours the wizarding fiction. Galath Lan seems like a prig from his book. People keep trying to tempt him to do the Dark Arts and then he’s very noble and refuses. Cy doesn’t see what’s so bad about the Dark Arts, anyway. Making everyone immortal seems like a noble cause. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re destined to save the world since you were a little kid, it turns you into an asshole. 

Cy stops bothering with most of his scams. But he figures out a dozen clever ways to get coins for the payphone-- magic, he concludes, is very useful for a life of petty crime-- and spends hours twirling the cord around his finger talking to Hermione. They talk mostly about magic and what they can figure out about the wizarding world they’re getting into, and as much about science as Hermione is willing to tolerate. From his anecdotes about his life, Hermione learns that Cy is a very busy person, which he makes time for by doing all of his homework in class and cutting school as often as possible. Cy swims and runs and climbs trees; he does various minor forms of juvenile delinquency, shoplifting and breaking into places he’s not supposed to be, mostly for the fun of it, occasionally for money, occasionally to get to use the university telescope; he reads voraciously, fiction and nonfiction; he takes apart machines and builds them better than before; he hangs out with his friends, who are universally female, and has informed opinions on lip gloss and boy bands and suchlike concerns of the female elementary-school set. He doesn’t volunteer any information about anything that happened before he was eight and moved in with Mrs. Irving, and is evasive when asked about it.

Cy heads down to London and checks out Platform Nine and Three Quarters. To his disappointment, it only seems to have a train twice a year. This is the worst public transportation Cy has ever heard of. He spends the rest of the afternoon exploring Diagon Alley, successfully avoiding both dogs and purebloods. He reads the first chapter of the dozen books he most wants to read, finds out what various potion ingredients look like in real life, plays with the owls, unsuccessfully pesters Ollivander with a dozen questions about wandlore, and lusts over a racing broom. Clarity or whatever her name was had told him he wasn’t supposed to go in Knockturn Alley, so of course he goes in. He encounters nothing more dangerous than a shop window full of shrunken heads and some potion ingredients of dubious provenance. 

And, after far too long a time according to Cy, he fills up half a suitcase with his meager possessions, shoplifts some posters to adorn his walls and polish and eyeliner to adorn his fingers, checks out a bunch of books from the library that he has no intention of ever returning, and sets off for the Hogwarts Express.

Hermione is willing to talk quite a lot about science, with occasional frequent tangents into history both magical and non-, and ties up her parents' phone line whenever they're not using it for work stuff. From her anecdotes Cy learns that Hermione is also a busy person: reading, sleeping, reading, doing homework, reading, eating while reading, reading things a second time to make sure she has them memorized, and writing essays nobody asked for which she occasionally tries to turn in anyway. At Cy's urging she asks for a microscope as an early birthday present and brings it to the train station, packed away neatly in her trunk under the clothing and the carefully tetrised wall of books. She's on the platform an hour early, before the train has even pulled in, and already wearing her robes (she came in with them under a jacket so they looked like a skirt, and has mostly smoothed out the resulting wrinkles).

Cy is wearing black jeans, a black tanktop, black eyeliner with little curliques under one of his eyes (he got distracted before he could finish the other one), and black nail polish (badly chipped). 

No one technically said he had to wear robes on the train. Technically. 

"Desdemona!" he says, and gives her a hug. 

She flinches involuntarily at the sudden human contact but then hugs back cheerfully enough. "Iago! I'm so excited, I could barely get to sleep last night! Did you know, I was reading about the Hogwarts Express and it runs on Muggle rails most of the way, but it's very slightly out of sync with the rest of reality so if there's another train in the way it can go right through it!"

"Oh, that's so cool! I wonder if you could make a roller coaster that way."

"What, that goes through itself? Oh, or you mean one that runs more trains on the same track so there's no line, because that would be cool. For people who like roller coasters."

"No, I mean, it looks like you're about to be run over by a train and then it just passes through you. That would be super fun."

"I guess I could see people who like roller coasters liking that? Anyway I want to try to catch the moment when it switches onto the secret line to Hogsmeade station; it's supposed to look like something if you're paying enough attention."

"Ooh, yeah! Let's watch for that."

He waves at the classmates he recognizes from Diagon Alley.

They wave back. Some other students, mostly already in robes, stare at him like he's a possum that somehow got into a convenience store.

He smiles back very cheerfully and raises his fingers in a V!

"Guess they're not fond of Muggle clothes," he says to Hermione.

"I guess not." Caring about clothes, especially about other people's clothes, was a favoured activity of the girls at her old school and she has never seen any value in it. At Hogwarts they'll all wear uniforms and nobody will care about her clothes anymore.

"The train should be here soon. I don't know if we'll be able to get a compartment that's just the two of us."

"If not we can meet new people! Who don't suck."

"Well, red trim on the robes is Gryffindor, blue is Ravenclaw, yellow is Hufflepuff, and green is Slytherin. And I know you want Slytherin and you're nice but it really doesn't have a very good reputation."

Someone with red trim on his robes asks his friend, rather loudly, "Why is that boy wearing makeup? Is he some kind of girlyboy?"

"They're just mad I look hotter than they do."

Across the train station, a phenomenally beautiful boy is standing next to a girl who is six feet tall and could break Cy in two across her tree-trunk thighs without much bother. 

He breaks into a smile as he spots--

A teenage boy who would be the prettiest person in this train station except that the Lans are there and they're cheating.

They hug like it would be physically painful to stop touching each other.

Next to them is another eleven-year-old, so similar in appearance to his brother that they could be twins who went through a time travel mishap, and equally phenomenally beautiful. He has a lightning-bolt scar across his forehead. 

He is staring expressionlessly at Cy Wei. 

Microexpression translation: that boy is incredibly pretty and I can't stop looking at him. What is this and how do I turn it off.

"Man, what is that guy's problem?"

Hermione, for her part, is staring at the boy with the scar. After a couple seconds she switches to staring out of the corner of her eye. "I think that's Galath Lan--he has that scar."

Several other students, mostly girls, form a clump around Galath Lan and start asking him questions, talking over each other in excited voices. Does he remember defeating you-know-who? What was it like? Is that how he got the scar? Is it true he's part veela? What does he do with his hair to make it that gorgeous?

Galath Lan stares silently out into space. 

Microexpression translation: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

"Yes, we're both part-veela," Rordan says. "Our hair is naturally like that, because we're part-veela. He doesn't remember defeating You-Know-Who, he was a newborn. The scar is from the backlash of defeating You-Know-Who, yes. Some of you are going to need to pay attention in History of Magic."

He begins to stroll casually away from Galath.

Edmund is lowkey herding the girls away from Galath. 

"Let's go get on the train."

"Yeah, good idea!"

Is there a compartment without anyone in it?

There is! But shortly before the train leaves the station, a round-faced girl with untrimmed first-year robes sticks her head in. "Mind if I sit with you?"

"Nope!" There are six seats in here; they have plenty of space.

"Hi! I'm Cy."

"I'm Hermione Granger."

"I'm Nora. Nora Longbottom."

"So what class are you most excited about? I've tried a handful of charms out of the book and they're fun but I'm really excited about potions and transfiguration too." She hasn't tried any potions because her parents didn't want her trying to balance her cauldron on the stove.

"I'm mostly hoping I don't turn out to be rubbish at everything."

"I'm sure you won't be rubbish at everything! And if you are, Mione can help you out, she's brilliant."

(Cy has decided to go back to the other nickname to reduce confusingness.)  

"So are your parents wizards? What's it like growing up in a magic house?"

"M-my Gran is a witch, yeah. It's alright. People keep expecting you to do accidental magic."

"Aw, it sounds way less fun if people expect it. I kept going invisible and I could get away with so much shit."

"Oh, wow. Everyone would have been so proud if I had gone invisible."

"I mostly mended things. And one time I dropped a huge bowl of peas and none of them spilled; that was fun. Probably the biggest thing was when I made all the kitchen light bulbs explode but that was also the worst."

"Ooh, why'd you do that?"

"I was reading a book about Margaret Thatcher."

"Oh no."

"My first time doing accidental magic my great uncle Algie was hanging me out the upstairs window by my ankles, and my great aunt Enid offered him a meringue and he accidentally let go. I bounced all the way across the garden, everyone was really happy."

"That sounds awfully reckless of your great uncle. I'm glad you're alright."

"Oooh, do wizards in general bounce when dropped? Mione, you should try hanging me outside a window."

"What? No, don't do that! It's not every time or he'd've dropped me on purpose way before then!"

"Oh."

"How good is healing magic?"

"It's really good, we live a lot longer than muggles. Though some of that might be our own magic making us heal better and not anything that healers do on purpose."

"How long do wizards live? Because muggle life expectancy has gone up a lot recently. At least in some places."

"Um, a hundred and ten, hundred and twenty?"

"Nice. --So probably we can drop me out of a window and see what happens." 

"Maybe with a teacher supervising?"

"Teachers don't let you do anything fun."

"Well, they let me do plenty of fun things, so I think it's worth a try." (The things are mostly various forms of reading and writing.) "Anyway, it's really cool that wizards live that long. Is it because they have better medical care or does being magic directly make you healthier?"

"Probably the second thing? My gran almost never needs to go to a healer, so they can't doing that much."

"Muggles live longer now because of vaccines, it could be something like that."

"Wizard babies do all get taken to healers a bunch of times, so maybe. Is it true that if muggles get sick the muggle healers have to cut them up and do things to their insides and then put them back together? Because that sounds like it would shorten someone's life too."

"Not all the time when you're sick. Only if you're really really really sick."

"Oh. Well, that's--less bad. Definitely less bad." She visibly casts around for a more pleasant subject. "Anyway, nobody's going to drop me off things anymore, once I got my Hogwarts letter it was clear I was a witch. Uncle Algie was so pleased he got me my toad, look--" she opens a little basket attached to the top of her trunk and her face falls. "Oh no, Trevor's escaped. I know he was there when I came aboard; he's got to be around here somewhere."

"Do you want help looking?"

"We can both help you look!"

"Thank you," says Nora. "I'll go forwards and someone else can go backwards and the third person can go whichever way?"

"The third person should go whichever way there's more train, and go faster than the other two."