“Goodbye, Mom.
Tonight I set sail, bringing along—hm, hm-hm—and my happy oar—”
A singing voice so off-key it could make a gramophone spontaneously explode echoed through the top-floor dormitory of Ravenclaw Tower.
Nora Fiteska shook out her eye-catching ice-blue hair as she carried out a round of “violent sorting” on the piles of magical scrolls and textbooks before her.
Her movements could hardly be called graceful.
In fact, they carried a trace of the brisk efficiency she had developed years ago while snatching bread in the orphanage.
Her wand was casually stuck into the ribbon tying up her hair, and the exposed tip was still stained with a few lingering silver sparks from yesterday’s failed experiment.
Crash—
A stack of Advanced Transfiguration Guidebooks was yanked from the shelf by her hand and hit the carpet with a dull thud.
The portrait of a wizard in a star-patterned robe on the cover shrank back in fright, but Nora did not even raise her head.
The tune in her mouth took an even more outrageous turn, somehow forcing the theme song of Happy Planet into something with the wild flair of a pirate ship setting sail.
“I’m telling you, Nora,” came the weak complaint of her roommate Evelyn from the bed diagonally across from hers.
She was sitting in front of an enormous silver mirror, painting her nails with moonlight-colored polish.
“Can’t you change songs?
You’ve been singing that tune nonstop since the first day we met.
Now, whenever I close my eyes, I can see a bunch of little brats in wizard robes dancing around a fireplace.”
“Nope.” Nora answered without looking up, her fingers nimbly stuffing a roll of parchment covered in ancient runes into a suitcase stamped with the Ravenclaw eagle crest.
“This is my last lingering attachment to the Muggle world.
After today, I might officially fall into the tragic fate of becoming a working stiff in the wizarding world.”
“That song doesn’t exist in the Muggle world,” Evelyn muttered, turning away and deciding not to bother with her anymore.
Strictly speaking, she was not wrong.
As a transmigrator who had been sent to this world eighteen years ago by a “truck driver desperate to meet his quota,” the first half of Nora Fiteska’s life could be described as the perfect example of “plans never keeping up with changes.”
At the orphanage named St.
Mary’s on the outskirts of London, she had relied on knowledge nearly forty years ahead of this era.
By telling sci-fi stories to the little brats and reselling the candy she had secretly saved up, she had nearly staged an early version of “the orphanage tycoon origin story.”
Back then, Nora’s mind had been filled with thoughts of sneaking out once she was a little older.
With the vague memories she had of the internet, finance, and real estate, she planned to make a grand fortune in this world that had not yet gone through several major economic crises.
She had even secretly mapped out her path.
First, she would go to America and get herself a degree from a prestigious university.
Then she would enter Wall Street and earn her first pot of gold.
Once she had saved enough money, she would buy a private island and retire, spending every day lying on the beach drinking coconut juice while mocking all the peasants still playing the stock market.
That was, until the year she turned eleven, when an owl carrying a thick, stamped envelope landed precisely on the windowsill of the orphanage director’s office and pecked at the glass with an extremely arrogant air.
When the matron shakily handed her the letter sealed with a capital “H,” Nora stared at the words “Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry” written on the envelope, and the grand blueprint of her financial empire instantly shattered into dust.
—Damn it.
This was actually the world of Harry Potter?!
That realization left her silent for three whole days.
As a die-hard fan who had read all seven Harry Potter books no fewer than ten times back in the day—and had not even spared the fanfictions—Nora understood better than anyone just how “exciting” this world was.
Exciting enough for people to die at the drop of a hat.
Exciting enough that you could be injured by stray dark magic just by walking down the street.
Exciting enough that one Boy Who Lived could stir up storms across the entire wizarding world.
Her dream of becoming a Wall Street giant?
Her plan for financial freedom?
In front of Voldemort’s iconic green light, they were as laughable as paper toys.
“So, from that day on, I set myself a small goal.”
As Nora spoke, she pinned a badge engraved with the Ravenclaw crest to her chest.
Her ice-blue hair slid over her shoulders with the movement, making her equally blue eyes look like sapphires submerged in water.
“Survive, keep a low profile, stay away from the main cast—especially that scar-headed one and his bunch of Gryffindor lunatic friends.”
Evelyn snorted, setting down her bottle of nail polish as she looked Nora up and down.
“Oh, please, Nora Fiteska.
If you were really capable of keeping a low profile, you wouldn’t have been forcibly saddled with the title of Head Girl for two years in a row.
And you definitely wouldn’t have scored O’s in every single subject on your OWLs and NEWTs, making Professor Flitwick so excited he practically jumps on the spot every time he mentions you.”
As her closest friend, Evelyn knew better than anyone.
Nora was great in almost every way.
The only problem was that every now and then, strange and incomprehensible things would pop out of her mouth.
What “main cast”?
What “future crisis”?
At first, Evelyn had even mistakenly thought that Nora truly possessed some kind of gift for prophecy.
But after getting to know her better, she realized that this was probably all just nonsense Nora had made up herself.
At the mention of this, the smile on Nora’s face collapsed slightly, revealing a hint of helplessness.
This really could not be blamed on her.
Back when she had first entered Hogwarts, the Sorting Hat had hesitated on her head for a full three minutes.
One moment, it was shouting, “Oh, this clever little head belongs in Ravenclaw!”
The next, it was muttering, “But the ambition and scheming buried in these bones are practically Slytherin.”
In the end, it was only because she had frantically chanted in her mind, Stay away from the snake house!
Stay away from Voldemort’s old nest!
that she was finally sorted into the House of Eagles, known for its wisdom.
After entering Ravenclaw, her original plan had been to become an unremarkable, average student.
She would slack off in class, hide in the deepest corner of the library after lessons to read random books, and firmly avoid participating in anything that might cause trouble.
But who told her to have gone through the “beating” of nine years of compulsory education in her previous life?
While those young wizards, spoiled by the wizarding world’s brand of “happy education,” were still frowning over simple formulas in Arithmancy class, Nora looked at those elementary-school-level additions, subtractions, multiplications, and divisions and nearly wanted to perform mental square-root extraction on the spot.
And so, in her very first midterm exam, she shocked the entire year by ranking first in every subject.
In her second year, because she could recite History of Magic word for word, Professor Binns named her his teaching assistant.
In her fifth year, during the OWLs, she received eleven O’s, breaking Ravenclaw’s record for the past decade.
That same year, under the unanimous recommendation of the entire House’s teachers and students, she became Ravenclaw’s prefect with a completely bewildered expression on her face.
By seventh year, the situation spiraled even further out of control.
Probably because her NEWT results were simply too dazzling.
Twelve O’s.
Even in the most difficult subjects, Ancient Runes and Alchemy, she received Outstanding marks.
The school board skipped the voting process entirely and shoved the badge of Hogwarts Head Girl straight into her hands.
“All I wanted at the time was to find a crack in the ground and crawl into it,” Nora said, pulling out a dark-blue wizarding robe and shaking the dust from it.
“Do you know?
Every time Headmaster Dumbledore looks at me with that ‘I have high hopes for you’ gaze, I feel a chill run down my spine.
Merlin knows I don’t want to be some ‘future star of the wizarding world’ at all.
I just want to quietly survive until the war is over.”