"Oh, gosh, yeah."

Hermione has a list of things to look up in the library, and this is now near the top. (Since she has not historically had trouble remembering everything on her lists, it is stored wholly in her brain, which is fortunate, because if it were written down it might have overflowed out of her trunk.)

(Bruce also has such a list but he knows he'll just end up in a pile of miscellaneous books regardless of what he's planning going in. Perhaps having a second person there will help.)

They ascend and ascend and ascend yet higher, past whispering portraits and silent statues and suits of armor bearing polearms, past beautiful stonework and rich tapestries and windows that look out on a lake full of stars, until they reach a corridor with a single enormous portrait, a larger-than-life image of a fat woman in a pink dress who greets them with a smile and asks for a password. Percy gives it, reminding them not to share it with anyone from another house, and the woman nods and then swings her frame out from the wall on a hinge, revealing a hole large enough to climb through into a cozily decorated common room. There are squashy red sofas, and tables and chairs for working at, and a fire going in the fireplace. And then there are yet more stairs to their dormitories, where every bed has noise-blocking curtains that can be drawn securely around it and someone's trunk underneath.

It's been a long day. New school, new friends, pile of good food. Time to sleep.

Everything today was awesome and overwhelming and Bruce is way too keyed up to sleep right up until the moment he's horizontal with the curtains drawn, and then he's out like a light.

Astute readers of a set of novels that certainly do not exist in this world may have had occasion to wonder how it is that, even though Head of House Minerva McGonagall generally does not enter the Gryffindor common room except under circumstances of considerable emergency, it is remarkably rare for students to oversleep. This is not, of course, caused by the student body of Hogwarts being improbably conscientious about their sleep schedules. It is caused by the fact that at 8am sharp on class days, it is no longer possible to be asleep.

GOOD MORNING, say the bells, bypassing such normal behaviors as "moving air in order to transmit information into human ears" and simply burrowing directly into one's skull like they live there. HELLO. I LOVE YOU. IT'S TIME TO BE AWAKE NOW.

Whoah, what, okay, he's awake and he's at Hogwarts and he needs several seconds longer than usual to go through all his memories and sort them into dreams and not-dreams. Hermione and Ron: real, thank goodness. Ghosts: real. Talking paintings: probably real. Talking pumpkin juice: fake. Dumbledore in his primary school classroom singing a song of nonsense words: fake. Alright, that's that dealt with, time for breakfast and CLASSES.

Ron's already out of bed when he gets the curtains open, and the other three first-year Gryffindor boys aren't far behind him.

"Morning Bruce Neville Seamus Dean!" He gets a chorus of "Morning"s back. 

Getting to breakfast isn't too difficult, owing to the dozens of grumbling bleary-eyed upperclassmen, also jolted out of their beds at the same time, who it is very easy to follow down the stairs (and down more stairs, and possibly down the stairs a little too fast if you're not paying very close attention to the number of them who automatically skip the trick stair without the hop passing through their brains at all, and around six consecutive left turns, and down more stairs -) and into the Great Hall.

The ceiling overhead is now a cheerful blue-grey - a brightness level which inhabitants of the island of Britain might call "sunny" and anyone from an actually sunny biome might call "overcast" - and gives the whole hall the distinct vibe of a morning outdoor picnic. The tables are piled with an only slightly less feast-like volume of food, ready to be served onto plates: sausages and bacon and toast and eggs and roasted tomatoes and beans and great tureens of porridge and pots of tea and pitchers of pumpkin juice and orange juice and milk and cream and possibly other things buried under the visual noise.

Excellent. "Why pumpkin juice? Do wizards just like it?" It's pretty good, in his opinion, but not so amazing that muggles are blatantly missing out.

"Nah, it's mostly a Hogwarts thing. Probably some headmaster five hundred years ago was obsessed with it and by the time he retired it was traditional."

"Ooh, probably it was the lady who was super into gardening," volunteers Hermione, plopping down next to them with a moderately substantial thump owing to the fact that she seems to have piled all of her textbooks into her bookbag. "Phyllida Spore, Headmistress from 1345 to 1408, she wrote the first edition of One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi. Pumpkins are number 538 and according to Spore eating a lot of them somewhat reduces magical accidents which judging from the several chapters devoted to it in Hogwarts, A History -"

She is interrupted at this point by Percy.

"First-year schedules!" he announces, waving them. "Here you are - one for each of you -"

"Looks like Transfiguration first . . . Potions last thing Friday, way to ruin Fridays . . . ugh, and it's with the Slytherins. Flying lessons don't start till next week. Lots of free time before and after Astronomy practicals, that's good, we'll get to sleep a bit."

Bruce also has all his books in his bag, because it's not like he knew what they had today any more than Hermione did; it occurs to him that if they'd thought of it in the general crush on the way out they could have brought half each and shared, but too late now.

"I'm so excited for astronomy! And I hope flying is fun. I don't know if it's going to be amazing or terrifying."

"Amazing!"

"Terrifying."

"He's just saying that, don't mind him."

"Well, whichever. How do we get to the Transfiguration classroom?"

"Fourth floor, east side, turn left at the fancy window seat."

"It says 'Transfiguration' on the door, you can't miss it. And watch out for Stobor."

"What are Stobor?"

"They're messing with you. They physically can't go an hour without doing something ridiculous."

"Oh."

When they're all finished eating he picks up his bookbag again, slinging it over his shoulder with both hands and looking rather like a tiny and overambitious Saint Nicholas, and all the first years schlep off to Transfiguration.

They get briefly lost on the second floor because the door to the staircase is pretending to be a wall and they walk right past it, but a portrait tells them where they went wrong and the second attempt works.