"Anne, wake up! You're going to miss breakfast like this!"
Anne couldn't completely make out who it was from the voice she heard. Her eyes were still closed and she didn't really wish to open them yet, but missing breakfast would make her hungry and she'd rather not be hungry, so she forced them open. Padma was looking at her with a somewhat concerned look.
"She remembers my name? I hardly spoke with her yesterday... Oh wait, I remember her name. It's not that unusual actually when you think about it..."
After waking Anne, Padma hurried down out of her dorms and made her way towards breakfast. Anne was still somewhat sleepy, but she had already forced herself up so the rest of the ordeal wasn't all too difficult. She got dressed in her now blue robes (which she quite liked, contrary to most other muggleborns who wanted to continue wearing jeans and shirts), and lazily made her own way towards breakfast. She met Hermione by the entrance and waved towards her.
"Good morning. How's Gryffindor?" Anne asked.
"Hello Anne!" Hermione smiled. "Well, the only people I've met so far were by the dinner table yesterday, and my first impression is that... I'm still quite lost for words of it actually. You?"
"I'm not sure. I'm bad at reading other people, but they atleast seem quite determined to do well in their studies." Anne didn't quite agree with their determination, she never studied. Ever.
"That seems kind of nice." Hermione sighed, questioning herself if she shouldn't have wished for Ravenclaw instead. Anne did not agree that the qualities of her peers were nice. She would most likely be shunned as soon as they found out about her non-existant studying techniques.
"What happened with the sorting hat by the way?" Hermione asked. "From what I've read, the longest time that anyone has taken in 30 years with the hat was 4 minutes, and that was because the first-year was shouting at the hat for placing it in the wrong house. Taking 15 minutes is unheard of, and the hat only spoke two sentences!"
"That might explain why Padma remembered my name." "Well, me and the hat had a nice discussion about some philosophy. The rest is secret. Have a nice breakfast!" Anne smiled at Hermione and walked away.
Anne was happy. Really happy. They had cinnamon at their breakfast table. And lots of other good stuff. Like bread. Anne loved bread. However, she still couldn't get her iPod to work. Other students looked funnily at her as she stared at the black screen.
"What's that you've got?" Terry asked her with an interested look on his face.
"You don't know? It's a media player. It plays music into these two pieces here. I'm still trying to figure out why it doesn't work." Anne's gaze was still focused on the muggle piece of technology.
"Wow, so it transfers music along those black lines? That's actually kind of neat."
"Well, it would be if it worked. It's been completely dead since I the train ride here."
"What, you mean it used to be alive?" Terry said with a shocked look on his face. Anne chuckled.
"Terminology. No, you usually call anything that's out of batteries dead. While I'm quite certain it's still charged, it just won't work."
"Batteries? Charge?" He said with a confused look.
"Are wizards completely ignorant of electricity?"
"Well, I don't know what that word means, so I guess yes, they are." He felt mildly insulted.
"I thought that wizards would atleast know something of how the world supposedly worked. You about lightning? Lightning happens due to electricity. There's a difference of electrical charge between the ground and the clouds, and since nature is all about balance, tries to even out this difference. The result is a massive discharge of energy between the two points, producing lightning. I'm probably slightly off, but that's the basic idea of why lightning happens in nature. Most pieces of muggle technology uses electricity to work."
"Wow, so you've got lightning bolts inside of that small thing? Muggles must be crazy to carry around something like that!"
Anne actually laughed at his comment, and her eyes started tearing up just a bit. "The way your hair may sometimes stick up after you comb it is also due to electricity, but you don't have any lightning bolts there, do you? No, the amount of electricity in this is probably not even a millionth of what a lightning bolt has." She still couldn't stop her inward laughing of how Terry had interpreted her previous statement.
"Oh. Well, I suppose not even muggles could store lightning bolts."
Anne didn't bother telling him that he'd be surprised to hear of what some people did at research facilities. The two of them were quiet for a while.
"... Although I do know why it doesn't work. Most pieces of muggle technology just doesn't work around magic. It's probably due to that that most wizards just don't bother with what muggles are doing, it doesn't work around magic anyway."
Anna slightly panicked at this statement. "No music? No computer games? No internet?" Her whole world was crashing down upon her. "Okay, forget about any other long-term projects you had. Find a way to make the important stuff work here!" She eventually got over the shock and felt like talking again.
"How come no other muggleborns are upset about this?"
"I thought you'd already know why due to what we spoke about yesterday. Most muggleborns just forget about their own culture once they learn of that magic exists."
Anne still couldn't fathom the idea. "People stop associating with their whole family for magic? And I thought that I was 'heartless'..."
The remainder of their breakfast was quiet.
Anne followed the other first-year Ravenclaws to where their first lesson is Charms was located. "How come these people know the way? I don't think anyone else has been in this huge castle before, and we don't have any sort of map. When did these people find the time to memorize all of this?"
They opened a door to be greeted by a tiny man standing on top of a pile of books. Anne thought the situation was hilarious, but didn't say a word of it.
"Hello my dear Ravenclaws. I'm Professor Flitwick, and I'm the head of your house, and also your teacher in charms. Although, for this lesson we won't be doing much charmwork at all. Instead, think of this as nothing more than a meeting to get you ready for your time here at Hogwarts."
"If that's the case, why is it listed as 'Charms' on our timetable for this week?" Anne thought with some sarcasm.
The class was boring. They didn't even get to bring out their wands at all. Just sitting there and recieving some basic information that students always get at the start of a year. Anne didn't register much of it and remembered even less.
So, what's our next lesson? Anne asked Padma. She rarely bothered looking at her own timetable, it was easier and faster to ask people who already knew.
"Transfiguration with the Gryffindors." She replied. Padma gave her a wierd look. "Why didn't she know herself?"
Now that Anne actually had a map, she could find her way to the classrooms by herself should she wish to. She foresaw that she probably would, often.
Transfiguration class was held by... a cat? Anne was surprised by this. She hadn't seen any talking animals before this at all. When the cat transformed into Minerva, the other previously calm students gasped, and the previously surprised Anne became calm. "Ah, that makes much more sense."
"Good day students. I am Professor McGonagall, and I will be teaching you Transfiguration for as long as you are studying at Hogwarts. I'm going to warn you right now, Transfiguration is one of the most difficult subjects taught at Hogwarts. Not only difficult, but also dangerous. Should I see anyone fooling around inside my classroom, our outside it for that matter, I shall see to that you are not taking another Transfiguration class with me again. Is that clear?"
"Yes, Professor McGonagall" the other students said together. Anne was silent.
"Why Transfiguration is dangerous is simple to understand. Transfiguration can very easily turn bad. For example, should any of your body parts ever be transfigured, it is likely that you will have to amputate. Even if Transfiguration is not permanent, turning your body into a foreign element works quite a lot like frostbite. Also, because it is not permanent, you will never turn any material into a gas or into a liquid. You will never consume anything that has been transfigured. Is that clear?"
"Yes, Professor McGonagall" All of the students said together. The other students were just as vigorous as before. They did it out of compliance. Anne did it because she agreed that it was dangerous.
"Right then, your first lesson is going to be turning this these matches into needles. Wands out, grab a needle and start trying to transfigure your matches. In order to transfigure something, you need to have a clear mental vision of what result you want. Then you apply that to the object you wish to transfigure. Know that there are no wand movements or spell incantations within Transfiguration, it is instead a matter of will."
Anne raised her hand.
"Yes, Miss Valerian?" Minerva said.
"Real world objects have three dimensions. However, sight, as our mind comprehends it is almost strictly two-dimensional. While we can rotate an object and use several two-dimensional images to try and construct a three-dimensional object, our imagination is still two-dimensional as we see an object in sequences or parts, we cannot see all of the sides of an object at once. Given this, how should we imagine the needle?"
The whole class was silent. Hermione was probably the only one that understood all of it and thought it was interesting.
"Is she mental?" Anne could just barely hear the whispers of a red-haired boy from Gryffindor.
"I'm going to have a tiring year." Minerva thought. "It cannot be completely explained. That is why you train. See what works for you." She replied.
Anne nodded and grabbed her match. She even retrieved her wand from her robes.
Transfiguration wasn't as difficult as she had thought. Just imagine that what you're trying to transfigure already is the object you're going to transfigure it to, and Anne didn't have much trouble transfiguring her match into a needle. It wasn't as much visualizing as Minerva had put it, it was more a problem of convincing herself that it already was a needle. And Anne was easy to convince. Afterwards, just touching it with your wand changed it quickly.
"5 points to Ravenclaw." Minerva said.
Hermione wasn't far behind Anne, and managed her own transfiguration on her match. She also got 5 points from Minerva.
There was roughly 20 minutes left of the lesson, and Anne was starting to get bored just changing it back and forth between needle and match, so she put her wand away and started to try doing it without it. Hermione was once again giving her disapproving looks, but Anne didn't mind. As it turned out, doing it without the wand was much harder. She had picked up the match, held it in front of her eyes, then convinced herself: "This is a needle." If it had contact with her wand, it would change instantly. Without it, nothing happened.
"Well, isn't this great. I can't change this needle because I have convinced myself that I need the wand to change it. This would be much easier if I tried my first transfiguration without the wand."
Then she had an idea. Oh it was brilliant, in a sense, atleast for her. "What if I forget about all of this, and tell myself to do it without the wand and it'll work?" Then she realized that it wasn't much as brilliant as she first had thought. While she could (usually) choose whether to remember something or not, she couldn't choose to just forget it. That's like telling yourself: "Don't think of polar bears for one minute." It was some sort of ancient greek philosophy problem, though she didn't know the name of it.
So, memory manipulation was out. She couldn't think of anything else at the moment, so she raised her hand. Minerva came quite quickly, she hadn't been occupied.
"Yes, Miss Valerian?" Her face was neutral.
"What are we going to do next lesson on transfiguration?" Anne asked.
"Gluttunous." Minerva smiled to herself. "We'll continue with the match to needle transfiguration for two weeks. I assume that you want to move on to something harder, but simply learning faster than others does not give you special rights."
"Ah, so there's harder transfigurations? How does it get harder?"
"Well, eventually, the objects we transfigure will get bigger, or we will transfigure objects into animals or the other way."
Anne was shocked to hear the thing about animals, but continued with her 'interrogation'. "Ah, so bigger or just more complex things makes it harder?"
"Correct, but you will not be doing any of that on your own. I will be forced to remove you from our class should you attempt to." She said with a voice that would sound slightly threatening to someone that had such plans.
"Oh dear me, no, I wasn't. I was actually going to ask you for something easier than the match to needle experiment."
This surprised McGonagall. "I thought you already succeeded in this experiment. Why would you want to try something easier?" She didn't attempt to hide her curiosity.
"... Personal reasons." Anne answered after giving it some thought.
Minerva wasn't too interested in why. "Well, I'm then I'm sorry to tell you that this is the easiest transfiguration excersise that I know of. Otherwise, I would be administering easier ones to the students that still can't do match to needle."
"Makes sense." "Ok, thanks. In that case, do you have some untransfigured needles?"
"Why, yes I do." Minerva was aware that she couldn't give the girl harder excersises that the other students, but she had no qualms about giving her others that were equally hard. She wanted Anne's talent for transfiguration as much as possible. She reached for one of her pockets on her robes and retrieved some needles. "Was there anything else that you wanted to know, Miss Valeria?"
"Nothing. Thanks." Anne gave her a smile, and Minerva walked back to her table.
She quickly transfigured the needle into a match with her wand.
"As much as I would like to lit this match, I can't because that would produce gases that could be lethal once it turns back into a needle. No, I should try something else."
She snapped the match in half and waited until it would untransfigure. And there it was. She wouldn't have been able to snap it should she have attempted it while it was in undamaged needle form. She kept the other needles that she had recieved from Minerva. She would snap them later for her experiments then, so she put the lot of them into her pocket. By then, the lesson was over.