The first-year assignments didn't stump the new little wizards at all.
Everyone quickly made their way into the common room.
And then—
A boy and a girl Prefect each gave a speech to really make their existence known. Both were pretty eloquent, earning a round of smart, lively applause from the rest of the common room.
Satisfied, the two started assigning dorm rooms to the new first years.
There were only seven first-year boys in Ravenclaw this year.
Maybe it was the Prefects being considerate, or maybe he was just lucky tonight, but after forming one four-person dorm, Ian got assigned to the three-person room.
What a coincidence.
The Niko who'd left a deep impression on Ian at the feast earlier, and a boy with green hair, had become Ian's future roommates for the next seven years—not sharing a bed, at least.
The decor inside the dormitory matched the tones of the common room outside. Five desks were lined up in front of the window, and each bed was curtained with flannel drapes.
"Ian Prince."
After shoving his suitcase under his bed, Ian took the initiative to introduce himself. His two roommates were busy digging through their own luggage.
"William Smith. I remember you! It took you a whole ten minutes with the Sorting Hat." The green-haired boy had a decent scatter of those freckles European kids always seem to love.
Not too many, though.
"Was it really that long? All I remember was chatting a bit with the Sorting Hat." Ian was a little surprised, shaking hands with William, the freckled boy who'd just stuck out his hand.
"I felt like it went so fast, too. Maybe the Sorting Hat steals a bit of our time. Maybe that's how it's lived so long."
The little Black wizard joined in the chat as well.
"My name's Michael Jordan."
He added his self-introduction.
"Great name! You must be really good at Quidditch." Ian wasn't one to hold grudges—right up until he saw little Niko pull out a huge bag of fried chicken legs and French fries from who knows where.
"You guys want some? I snuck a bunch away during the feast." Michael dumped the food out on the table, grabbing a drumstick for himself and tearing into it like mad.
"You've got a bag with the Enlargement Charm on it! I read all about them in some extracurricular books!" William, the green-haired kid, looked at the little pouch on Michael's bed with wide-eyed wonder.
Ian just stared hungrily at the steaming chicken drumstick in Michael's hand.
Good lord!
No wonder the food vanished so fast from in front of him at the feast. Now he'd finally found the culprit!
"Yup, my mom gave it to me as a back-to-school gift a few days ago." Michael chewed his drumstick, looking a little sheepish as he spoke.
"I don't know why, my mom's never let me eat this kind of thing when I was growing up, but it's so good..." he added, squirting a bit of ketchup onto his food and popping it into his mouth.
A very unique way of eating fries.
"My mom didn't get me anything, she's a Muggle, and only my dad's a wizard. But my mom's in charge at our place."
"Mom handles the money too—maybe she's just smarter than the rest of us. But we're super poor. Whatever money we have, it all goes to raising my little brother and sister."
William hesitated a bit, but finally grabbed a handful of fries and began eating them slowly and carefully.
"Half-Blood, huh. Not bad. I'm from a Pure-Blood family, but I never met my father. He died when I was really little."
"They say he died fighting the Mysterious Man. My mom always cries that he fell the night before dawn." Michael's voice sounded a touch sad.
But—
That didn't slow down his drumstick demolishing, not one bit.
"He must have loved you." Ian offered him a few words of comfort.
"Yeah, he really did. I always knew he loved us. He only joined that fight because I was born—he wanted to make the world a safer place for me."
Michael finally choked up enough that he actually stopped eating.
"At least you're better off than me. I'm an orphan—I've never met either of my parents." Ian decided it was his turn to join the "who's got the toughest life" contest.
As expected—
He was rewarded with two pairs of sympathetic eyes.
"Man, you're really pitiful."
"Here, have a drumstick."
Both of them admitted defeat instantly. Michael even handed Ian a drumstick—if Ian was honest, he'd have preferred some watermelon jelly more than all this chicken for a midnight snack.
"No thanks, I'm on a diet."
Ian shook his head and declined, glancing at Michael's bed. The bag looked very much emptied out—not a scrap of watermelon jelly in sight.
Clearly, Michael really had wolfed it all down at the feast.
"You're so skinny, and you still want to diet?"
William's eyes went wide.
"If I were you, I'd eat more. You're way too thin." Michael nodded emphatically, stuffing the rejected drumstick into his own mouth.
"I gotta eat—my mom says I'm still growing my brain!"
Not gonna lie—
This kid could really pack it away.
"I need to review my textbooks. No way am I getting called on by a professor and not knowing the answer tomorrow." William organized his things, then started pulling out his textbooks.
He clicked on his little desk lamp, sat down, and started studying like his life depended on it.
"You really don't have to stress. Even Pure-Blood kids don't actually learn much magic before coming here. As long as we pay attention in class we'll be fine."
Michael, satisfied and full, headed toward the bathroom.
"True that."
Ian thought the black kid had a solid point. William, though, clearly had his own ideas, burying himself in studying Magic History at his desk.
"Why are you sitting at the desk now too?"
Michael, done in the bathroom, came out and found Ian parked at a desk as well.
"Just writing a letter home, so the adults at the orphanage don't worry about me. They're really good people." Ian showed him the piece of paper on his desk.
Michael leaned in, looking suspicious, but then realized Ian really wasn't secretly studying—he was just writing a letter with his feather pen.
[Respected Professor Yelena:
I am now settled at the Hogwarts Genius Youth Academy. The students here are all very kind, and the professors really are experts in their fields.
I hope you're not worried. Please tell Daniel and Joey that no one has judged or bullied me because of my background. The whole school has a wonderful academic atmosphere.
If…]
The letter wasn't finished yet.
Michael only glanced at it, not reading closely.
"I guess maybe I'll write a letter to my mom tomorrow, too." He looked inspired, yawned, and headed for his bed.
Out like a light.
Guess that's a kind of talent, too.
With his roommate's gifted snoring filling the room, William put in some earplugs and kept studying, while Ian carefully chose his words for his "all's well" letter to the orphanage.
Because Hogwarts was special—and the school had cast Confundus Charms on the adults at the orphanage—Ian could only try to disguise Hogwarts as an elite Muggle academy as best he could.
Not an easy task.
After all—
He had to imagine what a student life at a Muggle "elite academy" even looked like; if he accidentally wrote something like "all the rich kids eat takeout braised chicken rice every night," that'd get weird real fast.
"Scratch, scratch, scratch~"
The feather pen made quiet little noises.
William's desk lamp was super bright—maybe some kind of Muggle device he'd modified on his own. Ian wrote the rest of his letter by that light, washed up, and went to bed.
William kept grinding away solo.
Outside, a fine, rustling rain had started to fall.
In the quiet of the night—
Tiny flashes of lightning danced across the sky. In that brief, faint glow outside the window, no one noticed: a pair of unusual eyes were watching the dormitory.
Clinging upside down to the eaves, pressed tight to the tile, a strange creature with blue wings, half-reptile, half-huge-butterfly, kept itself hidden and kept its gaze fixed on Ravenclaw's dormitory. In those small, weird eyes, the reflection showed a peacefully sleeping Ian… and that little head of his.
〔ps: Thanks to the awesome readers for their comments—I've already fixed last chapter's issues. Really, I just wanted to show that if you spell things out logically, there can be multiple answers to a question!〕