My Little Owl.
I’m so glad you’re having fun and making new friends.
Writing this letter, I won’t deny I’m a little envious (in the best way) of all the magic. The train trip alone is something I wish I could have accompanied you on. You’ll have to indulge your old mother and tell me everything!
Luna seems to be a lovely girl. I bet that she sees things differently from us, having grown with magic. Ginny sounds like she’s a handful, but isn’t she your age? She’s too young to be worried about boys.
I don’t want to scare you from making friends, but I hope you’re careful with the ones you make. I know it can be lonely and it broke my heart seeing you all alone in school, but remember what happened last time. I do encourage you to try and be friends with Luna and Ginny, and if things don’t work out, stay strong my Little Owl. You’ll make many other friends. I know you will.
The castle, from what little you’ve described, seems the perfect place for adventures. Now, listen well: I’m in no way saying you should go exploring. You should not go trying to find magic and secrets and trouble. Wink wink.
The sorting ceremony reminds me of something I heard from your father once. He was sorted into Huff Poof, I think it was called. We do have a few of his old things from school days stashed in the basement. I can look for anything interesting if you want me to, or we can leave it until you are back from holidays.
And about holidays, it is early, but do invite any new friends you make to celebrate with us. I want to meet all of them (no matter how many).
I’ll be waiting for your next letter.
Stay safe, my precious daughter, don’t cause too much trouble, and have fun.
With love, always.
Mum.
Taylor held the letter to her chest, holding back the sobs. It was silly, mum hadn’t even said anything that warranted this reaction, but Taylor couldn’t help it. She missed mum. Ugh, what was she? Five years old?
She wiped the tears and snot, took deep shuddering breaths, then started composing her own letter.
Taylor wrote about breakfast, the howler, how she wanted an invisible flying magic car. She complained about Snape and Binns classes, and detention. She wrote about reporting the professor’s behaviour to her head of house, and how magical his class was and the fifteen points she earned for being a hard worker. She also wrote about the afternoon adventures, the mad flight from Peeves and Filch, the trophy room, detention with Flitwick instead of Snape and how it wasn’t detention at all. She wrote about watching the stars and wishing mum was there.
There might have been a few more tears.
The letter ended up nine full pages long. If things kept going like that, Taylor was going to need to write home for more paper, start using parchment, or find a spell to duplicate things. Those existed, right? She sealed the letter, and offered it along with a few treats to a very awake Nap.
“That’s for mum again. Can you deliver it?”
The bird accepted the treat then the letter with a hoot.
Once Nap had flown away, Taylor crawled in bed. She was tired and hadn’t the foggiest idea what time it was, but she didn’t feel like sleeping. She felt like crying.
This time, she didn’t miss the intruder and she hugged back as fiercely.
“It’s okay. I know.” Luna said again in a mirror of the previous night.
In the moments before she fell asleep, Taylor had a plan she was sure would work out. Her biggest issue with using her bugs around the castle was that she wanted to see and experience things by herself first, but she now also wanted to listen to the other classes and learn things ahead of time. The solution was so easy it almost smacked her in the face.
During breakfast, she was going to sneak a few bugs into every student and teacher’s robes. Small, discreet ones that no one would notice. Hidden there, she wouldn’t see anything, and with students going to the classroom, the concentration of bugs would be more than enough to listen, and later see, if she chose to. It was the perfect plan!
Taylor blinked and it was already time to wake up. She groaned, eyes crusty and mouth dry. Luna had already left and Mira and Harriet were trying, without much success, to whisper their conversation.
How much sleep had she got? Having a late night class one day, followed by classes in the morning after was madness.
She shambled out of bed and zombied through her morning ablutions and getting dressed. She followed the throng of students out of the dormitories to the Great Hall and sat at Ravenclaw’s table, leaning against Luna with her eyes closed and trying not to fall asleep again.
“What’s wrong with her?” A voice she didn’t recognise whispered to someone nearby.
“Cried the whole night,” another voice answered. By the accent, it was Mira.
Taylor wanted to complain, maybe defend herself, but Luna shushed the nearby people and patted her gently on the head. Taylor focused on her bugs and bugging everyone in the hall to avoid falling asleep.
Next time she opened her eyes, the great hall was almost empty and the food had vanished, aside from a small plate with eggs, sausages and toast. Nap was napping on Luna’s head, and her friend held onto a white sealed envelope, which she handed over as soon as she noticed Taylor was awake. Taylor stowed her mum’s letter with an embarrassed ‘thank you, Luna’ then turned to the breakfast and started digging in, still feeling way too tired.
“I wish there was coffee,” she mumbled between bites. Taylor wasn’t a coffee girl, having always preferred tea, but she heard about how it helped wake up on days like these.
“Why don’t you ask?” Luna chirped.
Taylor craned her neck to look at her friend, then at the almost empty room. “Ask who?”
“The castle!”
Taylor huffed, but why not. She turned to the table at large, and fought on a blush. “Can I have a cup of coffee, please?”
She wasn’t expecting anything. Her power did a small flip, not unlike someone blinking, and Taylor almost fell out of the bench when a steaming cup of coffee appeared near her food.
“What? How?”
Luna looked smug, but also surprised, while throwing a peppermint humbug into her mouth.
With narrowed eyes, Taylor took the cup and sipped from the black drink. And promptly spat out most of it. It was so bitter. How could people drink this stuff? She tried another sip, and the taste didn’t improve, it got worse instead.
“Could I have some sugar and milk, please?” She asked again and this time wasn’t surprised when her power reacted, and when a pitcher of milk and sugar cubes showed up.
Taylor added milk, then sugar, then a bit more sugar and only then decided the drink was drinkable. She didn’t think she would be obsessing much over coffee, but maybe it would help with the sleepiness.
The coffee helped, the morning classes helped more.
The first one was Herbology with Slytherin. Professor Sprout was a dear and Taylor liked her instantly. She was the perfect mixture of approachable and eccentric grandmother that for a brief moment, Taylor regretted not being sorted into Hufflepuff. For this first lesson, they were working on preparing a mixture of soil that would be used on potted mandrakes by the older students.
Playing with dirt wasn’t something she imagined doing in magic school, but Taylor enjoyed the work, even if it was messy.
What she didn’t enjoy was the amount of whispering and conversation about her and Luna, and the bits of dung she had to pluck from her hair and Nap’s feathers because of Slytherin students.
With the bugs she had sneaked and spread about everyone, she could feel and hear every student inside the greenhouse. The Slytherins were watching, gossiping, and tossing off-hand insults. They knew she’d complained about Snape to Flitwick, and now the whole house had decided she was enemy number one for some reason. There were whispers, hushed talks, even prank plans she’d been picking up from students in green.
That same boy who had almost picked a fight with Nneka before the sorting was now spreading rumors about her. None of them good, none of them true. Taylor hadn’t badmouthed Snape, nor was she spreading rumors about the man. And no, she hadn’t taken Nap to the class trying to sabotage the professor’s potions, that was absurd.
Another duo, a Callum Finch and Isolde Blackthorn were the main culprits behind all the dung throwing.
Unfortunately, Taylor knew how this worked. She couldn’t do anything about them because anything she said would be her words against the whole Slytherin house. Still, she’d have to think of a way to discourage them or it would only get worse.
Instead of putting out with gossipers and rumormongers, she delved into the bugs she had spread among the castle student population. There were many other classes to listen to and absolutely no need to pay attention to what was happening in herbology class. Only, it felt like a third of the castle was talking about her. Everyone seemed to know she called out Snape on his bullshit and got out of detention without any real punishment. Older students seemed too busy to pay attention to the happenings of the first year, but younger ones buzzed with gossip. Hufflepuffs students were ambivalent about the whole thing, most of them seemed glad that at least someone decided to say something about Snape even if the other first years still looked scared of the man.
Gryffindors, on the other hand, had decided Taylor was an honorary member for the sheer gall of facing the brooding vampire. Many, very loudly, also declared they’d visit her funeral and shed tears in her honor.
Ravenclaws seemed on the fence about the whole thing with Snape, like they were waiting for the other shoe to drop, while Slytherins, well, the less said the better.
The spat with Snape wasn’t the only rumor floating about: their adventure in the castle hadn’t gone unnoticed. Some students believed they had trashed the corridor and hurt Mrs. Norris. Some commented on how peculiar (read: mental) Taylor and Luna’s behaviour had been that afternoon.
That whole adventure had earned them a new nickname: Luna was now Loony Lovegood, and Taylor was Loony Two, or Loony Too, depending on who you asked.
It was annoying.
After herbology, their next class was transfiguration, this time with Gryffindor.
It was another magical class: Being able to transform into an animal, changing a desk into a pig and back again, and all the infinite possibilities. It was amazing, even if McGonagall was scary. Thankfully, the woman didn’t seem to mind Nap’s presence at all aside from a piercing glance.
Sadly, there was no grand spell being taught at the start of class: The professor explained the theory about the five aspects of a transfiguration spell (weight, viciousness, wand power, concentration, and an unknown variable), then she set them to try and change a matchstick into a needle.
As was becoming usual, Taylor sat with Luna. Mira and Harriet sat together a couple of tables away, and Ginny sat with Nneka.
Instead of trying it immediately, Taylor reviewed everything she knew about the subject and theory. According to the Magical Theory book, transfiguration benefited greatly from a good visualisation of the whole process. It wasn’t enough to think the matchstick should be a needle, she needed to visualise the change happening at every step of the way.
She spent the better part of a quarter hour just looking at the matchstick and trying to see it change in her mind. Students around her were sending strange glances in her direction, but Taylor tried not to feel self conscious about it.
Nneka was the first to manage a small change to the matchstick, which earned her five points to Gryffindor. What Taylor didn’t understand was why Nneka looked at her after getting the points and why she looked smug.
When Taylor decided she could see the whole transformation clearly in her mind, she finally tried the spell. And nothing happened.
That lit a fire in her tummy and Taylor went back to refining her visualisation. She’d get it right, it was only a matter of time.
By the time class ended, Taylor had made progress, her matchstick looked thinner and silvery, but nowhere near what a needle should be. That earned her, along with the whole class, extra homework in the form of more practice.
At lunch, Taylor learned the folly of bugging every student in the school. She wanted to scour her memory and douse her burning face in cold water. She made a mental note on her plan: Do not bug older students, just the classroom. It was safer that way. For the rest of the lunch she was too embarrassed to look anyone in the eyes, more so the ‘late’ older year lunch arrivals.
Afternoon class Defense Against the Dark Arts was something Taylor had been looking forward to. Lockhart was a famous wizard and had done a lot of things in his books. If he could teach them a fraction of all that, it would be perfect.
And it was another useless class.
The first part of the class was a quiz about the books. Fifty-four questions all centered on Lockhart that read more like gossip rags than magic instruction. The man even looked disappointed that most of the students didn’t know his favorite colour.
Then, instead of teaching them magic, he decided to re-enact a scene from one of his books, enlisting students to play roles and do no magic at all. What a sham. Worse yet was the homework: A twenty inch long dissertation on Lockhart’s adventures in Voyages with Vampires including explanations on how and why he did what he did.
Not an ounce of magic practice planned.
For the rest of the afternoon, Taylor was too busy with practicing her transfiguration and writing a History of Magic and Potions essay due in the next day to go exploring. That didn’t prevent her from listening to everything around the school with bugs. She never had realised it before, but she could do so many things at the same time without any issue at all. So, a small part of her mind took care of writing the History of Magic essay, while another part listened to the other ongoing classes.
Sixth and Seventh year classes were a lot smaller than their early counterparts, with students from every house attending class together. Sixth year students were learning how to cast nonverbally. The theory about nonverbal casting sounded easy, but the hour and half that Taylor paid attention to that lesson, none of the students managed to do it.
Seventh years were talking about such advanced concepts that Taylor couldn’t make heads or tails about anything at all.
Another part of her mind was paying attention to other subjects. From what she heard, those were electives starting at the third year:
Arithmancy, going by the explanation, was a mathematics based magic class about numerology and even predicting the future. It sounded interesting and the Professor sounded strict but not mean. It just looked like a difficult class. She’d need to go back to studying normal mathematics, if the numbers the woman was quoting was any indication, or maybe get a calculator. That’d help a lot.
Divination on the other hand looked silly. Looking into crystal balls, reading tea-leaves, interpreting dreams. Would that help her interpret the dreams about the other bug controller? It was something to keep in mind.
Muggle Studies was another that looked out of place and time. The professor was talking about things that were ancient by normal standards like they were commonplace. When was the last time the professor even left the magical world? And how can they misname firearms by calling them firelegs?
Study of Ancient Runes was another class that Taylor really wanted to participate in, but unless she got her own course books, it didn’t look like she’d learn that much by spying with bugs. Most of the class work was trying to decipher, well, ancient runes, with the professor expounding on them from time to time. Absolutely fascinating.
The last class was one outside the range of her bugs. Care for Magical Creatures wasn’t inside the castle and the bugs she sneaked on the students caught the conversation while they were going there, but not the class. The students in question would be helping with the thestrals, some sort of invisible skeletal horse.
After dinner, she huddled in one of the corners of the common room still working on homework. She had her new troupe of blue-flying-friends sneak into the charms classroom by one of the windows, light up a candle and picked up reading from where she had to stop the previous day.