She smiles and walks into the room.

The common room is a wide, circular room with arched windows hung with blue and bronze silks and a midnight blue carpet covered in stars, which is reflected onto the domed ceiling. It's furnished with tables, chairs, and bookcases, and there's a door—presumably leading up to the dormitories—by which stands a tall statue of a woman made of white marble.

She looks around and waits for the rest of the first years to get through the door. The prefects might still have something to say.

They do! Through that door are dormitories. Each year and gender has one. They can borrow these books but only for up to three days after which they are automatically summoned back to the shelves. That's all.

That all seems to make sense. She's going to look at the shelves a bit before she goes up to sleep.

She's not the only one. Cue lots of first-years staring at books in awe.

Well it is Ravenclaw. How are the books organized?

By topic and alphabetically, apparently.

Interesting. She'll have plenty of time to look through them all this year. Up to her room.

There are beds to be claimed.

Are they different from each other?

Only in how close they are to the door.

She'll take one closer to the door.

Her trunk is there waiting for them, she can drag it closer to her bed. The other girls do the same.

She probably remembers their names from the sorting. She greets them all by name.

Indeed!

"So you're Sarah Potter," says Mandy Brocklehurst. "What's that like?"

Sue Li and Morag MacDougal seem equally interested, but Padma Patil doesn't, and Lisa Turpin says, "Come on, don't pester her on her first day."

"I've been pretty insulated from my fame. Shopping for school supplies was overwhelming though. I got mobbed at the Leaky Cauldron."

"Well everyone wanted to know where you were," says Li reasonably.

"I know. I understand it. I just wasn't really expecting it."

"Should we stop?" asks MacDougal.

"I'm fine answering questions. Hopefully we can be friends and that requires getting to know each other."

"It does!" she agrees.

"But we have lessons tomorrow morning so how about we sleep first?" sighs Patil.

"Works for me. Um, how do all of you want to handle changing. Are you ok with people changing in the room or should we go to the bathroom to do that?"

"I don't care," Turpin shrugs. The others seem equally indifferent.

"I'll just change here then." She gets out a nightgown and changes before crawling into bed.