AN: So this chapter was really hard for me to get into. I think I started and restarted it at least four times. It's also not my best work, I don't think, and it doesn't do a whole lot to further the plot, except for a couple parts, but...this is what came to me. It's a little weak, is all. I warn you, I edited not one lick of this, so please excuse any little mistakes. Yeah. Idk guys I'm trying. School is keeping me busy and exhausting my creative capacity: in literature we're finishing up a whole unit on philosophy and holy shit guys it's taking up a lot of my energy. Hopefully the next chapter will be better-I have bigger plans for it anyway. This was kinda supposed to be a Big Plot Chapter but it just didn't work out that way, you know how it is.

Marina never liked the Hospital Wing, and she was sure she never would. Despite the high ceiling and tall windows, it felt constraining, like Marina was being too closely observed. Perhaps there was some charm cast around the chamber that did keep an eye on the students stuck in the too-firm beds. Not to mention the smell of the Hospital Wing—Marina wasn't fond of the sharp smell all healing potions seemed to give off, and the place was full of healing potions. And Madam Pomfrey annoyed Marina, to top it off. Once last year Annie slipped on the wet stone steps out in the courtyard and broke her scapula and got a concussion, so Marina and Lark walked her to the Hospital Wing, where Madam Pomfrey promptly took Annie and kicked the other two girls out. They didn't get to see her for days afterward.

Despite all that, she walked right in through the open double doors. Quincy was her friend, and by Merlin's beard, she was going to visit him. Surely after three days he would be allowed visitors. Marina tried not to gag at the acrid air as she scanned the rows of beds, searching for the dark blot of Quincy against all the white sheets. Instead, the back of Gideon's ginger head caught her attention, and as he blocked her view of the person he was visiting, she stepped over to find out. It was probably Quincy.

He turned when he heard her shoes against the tile floor. "Hey," he called in greeting. "Quin's sleeping. He was awake earlier; sorry you missed him."

"That's alright," Marina said, going around to the other side of her friend's bed, opposite Gideon. She sat in the conveniently located metal chair. "Have you been here since your last class?" It was after dinner now, but Gideon seemed like he'd been settled in these uncomfortable chairs for a long time. He nodded in reply. "You skipped dinner?" she asked, raising her eyebrows. "Did you eat lunch?"

"I scarfed down something quick before coming here, yeah. Was dinner good?"

Marina crossed her arms. "You can't just skip dinner."

Gideon flapped his hand at her. "I'll grab something from the kitchens later," he assured her, an unconcerned tone to his voice as if it was no big deal that he just knew where the kitchens were.

She gaped at him. "How do you know where the kitchens are?" she hissed. "I thought that was supposed to be a secret!"

"Nothing stays a secret for very long if you listen to the Hufflepuffs talking amongst themselves enough. Not only is Hufflepuff House right near the kitchens in the basement, but they also share the passwords between them for absolutely everything: kitchens, prefects' bathroom—"

Marina was aghast, so she cut him off in the middle of listing all the secrets the castle had to offer that the Hufflepuffs apparently all knew about. "You can't just eavesdrop! Where's the fun in that? If you're going to figure out how everything works, figure it out for yourself." She frowned. "And anyway, isn't it sort of against the nature of a Gryffindor to just…steal other people's secrets like that?"

Gideon shrugged. "They're all technically communal spaces," he said. "It's not like I'm going to invade specifically Hufflepuff spaces or anything. The kitchens are open to all houses if they know how to get into them."

Well, she supposed that made sense. Still, she would've rather discovered it all for herself than eavesdrop and take advantage of what the Hufflepuffs knew. Where was the fun in that? Half the excitement of a secret was discovering it. Maybe she should be exploring the castle more often, if it had so many hidden rooms and features, or maybe she should actually read the giant Hogwarts: a History tome she had thought about picking up more than a few times. It had seemed like such a boring read before, but now Marina figured it might be worth it. As Quincy probably wouldn't wake up anytime soon, Marina wished Gideon a good evening and started the trek all the way up to Ravenclaw Tower.

She should work on her homework, probably. Flitwick had assigned a large chunk of reading, and there was alway History of Magic to teach herself. However, the fact that Hogwarts itself was an untapped source of adventure stuck in the forefront of Marina's mind, and she thought it would be worthwhile to mention it to Lark and Artemis; they probably knew more than she did about exploring the castle. In all likelihood, Lark's older siblings had already told her everything she could ever want to know. As soon as she pushed open the door to the common room, however, both Hogwarts and homework flew from her mind. Merlin, Alfred was snogging one of the older girls, right in the middle of the room in plain sight. She almost gagged.

When she was a kid and her mum drove her into London for something she had long forgotten, traffic into the city was exceptionally bad for some reason. As they slowly crept forward in the car, Marina spied police lights flashing ahead. Gradually, traffic trickled through the single open lane, directed by a policeman with a grim face, and Marina stared out the window at a three-car accident, the worst she had ever seen. Despite the gruesome sight of crumpled metal, smoke, and red flecked on the white car in the middle of it, she found she couldn't look away.

Watching Alfred engage in the most disgusting display of public affection she had seen yet at the school was like watching that car crash. She couldn't look away, even as she edged around the common room to where she had spied her friends sitting in their usual study nook. They were similarly horrified and transfixed.

"I did not need this today," Lark commented when Marina joined them. "All I was trying to do was work on my essay in peace."

"How did Alfred even manage to catch her interest?" Annie wondered aloud. "He's so terrible."

"Her boyfriend went to Hogsmeade with another girl," Artemis said.

Oh, yes, the Hogsmeade weekends. Another privilege of being a third year were the monthly excursions to the village just outside the school grounds. Marina hadn't gone in September, and she wasn't sure if she wanted to go this month either. Apparently they caused more drama than they were worth, especially if said drama at all involved Alfred Smith.

"I am absolutely dumbstruck," Lark said. "I want to know why Smith, specifically, but I also have no desire to know why Smith, specifically." She blew out a sigh and began packing her books up. "I'm going to the library," she said, standing and averting her eyes to the common room door.

In her dramatic way, Lark strode across the room, nose turned up. Artemis closed her eyes for a moment in a soft sigh before gathering her parchment and ink and following the other girl out of Ravenclaw Tower. With a cringe, Annie looked to Marina.

"We could go to the dormitory," she suggested.

It was then that Marina had a brilliant idea. "Would you like to explore the castle with me?"

Annie blinked at her. "Are we allowed? I don't want to get in trouble. They write home to your parents, you know."

"Do they?" Marina asked. She'd never been in trouble before that she knew of. Well, actually, there was that one time last year when she missed a step in Potions and blew up her cauldron and the debris fell into Annie's cauldron and blew it up too and Slughorn took ten points for "unreasonable damage," but Marina didn't count that, nor the small handful of times professors took points for catching her chatting in class.

"That's what I heard, anyway," Annie shrugged. "Maybe it's only for serious infractions or detentions or something."

"Well, I doubt they'll give us a detention for walking around before curfew. It'll only be a problem if we stay out too late," Marina reasoned. She blew her growing curls out of her eyes and turned to head back the way she came.

Annie quickly gathered what she was working on into her bag and trotted after Marina. Maia came too, woken from where she was sleeping amongst the girls by Marina's arrival. The trio ducked out of the common room and onto the landing in the hall, sparing only a small habitual glance at the lost-and-fountain (the clever nickname for the veritable mountain of lost items that Annie thought up), and then exited Ravenclaw Tower.

"So, where to?"

"The basement," Marina decided. "Gideon said the kitchens and Hufflepuff House are down there."

"When did you talk to Gideon? I didn't see him at dinner. Was he in the Hospital Wing when you went?"

Marina nodded. "He said he'd eat in the kitchens later, and I asked how he knew where they were, and he said if you listen to Hufflepuffs talk, you can learn a lot of things about the castle." She rolled her eyes, adding, "I'd rather not get my information from eavesdropping, but it's a starting place at any rate."

The girls—and cat—began heading in the direction of the Grand Staircase. "That's too easy," Annie said, shaking her head. "What about if we start at the top and work down, rather than down and then up? That way we know something for sure is waiting at the end, and we can find things without Gideon's cheating."

"He said he wasn't cheating," Marina said. They paused at a landing before going either up or down. "He said they're secrets that belong to everyone, since the kitchens are open to all the houses. And he didn't tell me the password, anyway, only that they're in the basement."

With a sigh, presumably because of Gideon, Annie gazed down over the railing. "The seventh floor is closer," she said, "and I just realized I don't feel like walking down all those stairs at this hour."

"When does anyone ever feel like walking up and down all these stairs?" Marina quipped, grinning as they began their ascent.

A painting on the wall snorted a few steps ahead of them. The ornately robed wizard in it looked down his nose at the explorers. "I've heard generations of students complaining about these stairs, and yet nary a single one has done a single thing about them."

"What do you mean?" Annie asked, pausing to face the portrait.

The wizard raised one eyebrow. "Blow them to smithereens and fly your brooms to class, is what I mean. Charm them all into chutes and ladders, if you'd like. One bright young boy once asked about something called an elevator, and if it does as its name implies, it would most certainly be an improvement."

"You know, I've never thought about changing the stairs," Marina mused. "They'd make more sense if they moved less, that's for sure."

"Exactly," the wizard said, his painted lips pulling into a smirk. "But that damned Ravenclaw woman—"

"Now, you stop right this moment!" cried the portly witch in the painting next to the wizard. "These here're Rowena's children, and I won't have you blaspheming her name within their hearing!"

"By Godric's teeth, you blithering dolt!" the wizard shouted. "I have watched far too many good students herded into the wrong corridor thanks to Rowena's architectural quirks, and all I desire is that some student with enough of Gryffindor's strong gut come to the conclusion—"

"You can't explode the castle! It's history!" the witch screeched. "How many times do I have to tell you—"

"And how many times do I have to tell you—" he screamed back, cut off quickly again by the witch's nasally voice.

Annie, Marina, and Maia, meanwhile, slowly crept up the stairs and away from the two portraits. By the time they made it to the seventh floor landing, the two figures were still arguing, and other paintings and the few students still out and about were grumbling and scolding and yelling for them to quiet down. Giggling at the ruckus, the girls—and cat, who was not giggling—started down the corridor, keeping their eyes open. Marina wasn't really sure what she was looking for, but she hoped they would stumble across something magnificent by accident.

The seventh floor, both left and right corridors, was a quite desolate place besides a few paintings and tapestries, with no classes taught there—Marina wasn't sure there were even any classrooms. Being in the left corridor, there wasn't much to look at even in the way of paintings. It was drafty, a little dark at this late in the evening, and looked too empty to hide many secrets. Not a single student or teacher or even ghost was in sight. Aside from a rather ugly tapestry of a clearly insane wizard trying to teach a few trolls to dance ballet, Annie and Marina called their seventh floor corridor expedition a flop, at least on the left side of the castle. When the faint chimes of the giant clock tower rang out 9:30, the girls decided they should probably be doing their homework instead of poking around in deserted corridors half an hour before curfew.

"Do you think Alfred's finished kissing that girl?" Annie asked as they trudged down the stairs past the sixth floor landing and to the fifth. She shuddered. "I don't think I'll ever be able to forget seeing that."

Marina hummed. "I hope so. Merlin, it makes me want to be sick just thinking about it."

To avoid any chance of further scarring, the girls skipped the common room and instead headed straight up to their dormitory. Despite never really being able to tell which tower is Ravenclaw Tower from outside the castle, Marina was pretty sure that by now she had the basic construction figured out. The common room itself was at the top of the tower, with its gorgeous high ceilings and tall windows. The little landing with the lost-and-fountain was like the central hub of Ravenclaw, allowing students to skip the common room entirely should they wish to, as two sets of stairs led off in either direction to the boys' and girls' dormitory towers, the girls' being to the right if you've just walked in from the rest of the castle. From inside the common room, the dormitory towers could be accessed by staircases behind a large statue of Rowena Ravenclaw. Somehow the staircases wrapped around the dormitory towers to allow access to all the rooms and the bathroom at the very bottom. It was quite nice to be able to avoid the common room, especially when one Alfred Smith may be within it, even if the outer staircases were quite cold in the winter.

After that night, Marina and Annie had little chance to go exploring again. Quincy was finally as conscious as a normal person was, and the girls spent the rest of the week visiting with him and catching him up on schoolwork in the Hospital Wing. Marina even began to tolerate the potent healing potion smell. Her tutoring took up an increasing portion of her attention, as well: Randy the second year Slytherin had sought Marina out in the hall after lunch, coming as close as she thought a Slytherin could to begging for her help with an essay he needed to turn in the next day. That was in addition to the hour she spent with him usually, and she pondered over how to get Levi interested in doing his work for Charms at least twice each day. Simply put, Marina was busy. Once Quincy was back on his feet and in class, a lot of her stress lifted off her shoulders, but she still had to make time to see and think about three students and her own core classes and her electives. Not to mention how Evan kept crowding into her headspace when she was trying to concentrate. He certainly made everything worse.

At the end of the month, the October Hogsmeade weekend had the student body all excited, and Marina was both relieved and oddly disappointed when Lark whispered a rumor that Evan planned to ask Emmeline Vance on a date to Hogsmeade. The Saturday before Halloween saw Annie rousing Marina bright and early, despite her requests—expressed quite clearly the night before—to sleep in alone.

Marina dragged open her eyes to meet Annie's pretty blue and very awake ones as best as she could. "Are you sure you don't want to come to Hogsmeade with us?" Annie asked quietly. Lark was still snoring. "I'm not going to share my sugar quills this time. You've got to buy your own if you want any."

Marina scowled at her friend for a long moment, while said friend smiled sweetly back. With a dramatic—but not too loud—sigh, Marina wrenched herself upright, pushing her wild hair out of her face. "You've convinced me," she grouched, and yanked a pair of sweatpants over her pajama shorts to brave the frigid stairway for her morning shower.

Hogsmeade turned out to be more fun than Marina expected, especially with Quincy and Gideon available to joke and tease and make willing fools of themselves. They got Butterbeers in the Three Broomsticks, though no tables were free and they had to stand at the bar, and Marina bought plenty of sugar quills, peppermint toads, and cauldron cakes to last until next month. At the end of the day, they walked home in high spirits, arriving back at the castle in time for dinner.

—

When the chill of December started to creep and settle into all the nooks and crannies of the castle, Marina realized her Transfiguration abilities were dropping with the temperature. Once again, she was stuck. The Draconifors spell shouldn't be so difficult, really; in fact it was hardly different from the Lapifors spell, which Marina had mostly mastered with less difficulty. She was inclined to give up, especially since McGonagall would be testing them over their practical mastery of it within a matter of days.

"Alright, let's see what you've got so far," Gideon said, pushing a quill of his across the library table. He had once again offered to help Marina to the best of his ability. So had Quincy, but he and Annie had gone off to look for a book they'd need for a History essay some time ago and hadn't returned yet.

Marina took a deep breath and eyed the quill. The nib was snapped, and the plume was a little ragged. She tried to imagine it becoming a dragon the way it was supposed to and pointed her wand. "Draconifors," she said, trying to sound convincing.

With a few sparks, the quill sprouted scales, but was certainly still a quill. The aggravated huff Marina let out ruffled both her own notes, Gideon's notes, and Artemis's notes, all of which were spread out across the table. Gideon sighed a gentler sigh and motioned with his wand and muttered the counterspell to rid the quill of its scales. Marina watched, tempted to put her head down and consider her Runes translation homework instead.

"You can turn this ink pot into a rabbit, can't you?" Gideon asked, producing a half-empty pot of ink and thunking it down on the table. He raised one eyebrow: a challenge.

Marina frowned and ran her fingers over the twisted end of her wand. "I told you I could. What I can't do is Draconifors."

"Let's see it then."

With some concentration, Marina transfigured the ink pot into a small white- and black-furred rabbit. As Gideon tried to explain that turning a quill into a dragon is no different than turning an ink pot into a rabbit, she watched the little animal hop about on the table. It was quite adorable, a miniature bunny with its bottom half all black, as if it were half-full of ink, just like the ink pot it used to be. Why couldn't she do that but with dragons?

It wasn't for lack of effort, or at least Marina thought it wasn't. She wanted to transfigure things into dragons just as much as she wanted to transfigure things into rabbits. And she knew how the spell was supposed to work—she'd done the calculations and studied the theory and understood the mechanics—she just couldn't actually make it work. Again. So where was the problem? She was doing everything just the way she was supposed to.

Maybe therein lay the problem: Marina wasn't putting herself into the spell, was she? With the rabbit, she was easily able to imagine a cute little bunny about the size of an ink pot hopping on the table, and then there was the rabbit. Now that she thought of it, her most successful transfigurations, to her recollection, were the ones she brought her own imagination to. Professor McGonagall liked to say that transfiguration magic was scientific, concrete, and left no wiggle room for individual flair, unlike charm work. But just because Marina was visualizing something didn't mean she was incorporating a personal style, did it? And after all, there was no set way for a rat to become a goblet; there were many kinds of goblets, and often no student would produce a goblet identical to someone else's. It must be the same with all transfiguring spells, right?

The problem may simply be that Marina couldn't easily imagine a viable dragon; she had never seen a real dragon and didn't know very much about them.

"Mina!" Fingers snapping in her face brought her out of her thoughts, and Marina looked up to see that Annie and Quincy had returned. "Mina, it's late, and Gideon said you've been forlornly staring a hole into the table for a while," Annie said.

"Oh. What time is it?" Marina asked, stretching her arm out from its previous position of holding her chin up.

Gideon shook his sleeve up and checked his watch. "About 9:40," he said. "I'm sorry we didn't get very far, Min."

Marina shrugged and gathered the various sets of notes covering the table. "It's alright. I think I figured out something to try next time, so it wasn't a total loss."

They talked about the upcoming Quidditch game and the most recent odd Divination class happening on their way out of the library before parting ways at the fifth floor landing. Annie and Marina bid the boys a good night before starting down the corridor that would lead them to Ravenclaw Tower. A painting warned them of the time as they passed; he was a kind but stern wizard decked out in the finest Baroque style, with his pocket watch always in hand.

"What did you think of to try?" Annie asked when they reached the girls' dorm. "It must be something good since you sat there lost in thought for such a long time."

"Well, I just realized that all the times I transfigure something well, I visualize the end product clearly in my head. Even though Professor McGonagall says that transfiguration doesn't have room for flounce and style, I think it helps to be able to picture it while you're casting the spell," Marina explained, bending down to pick up her pajamas off the floor next to her bed. "My problem with the dragon one is that I'm not picturing a clear-enough dragon. That's my hypothesis, anyway."

After classes the next day, Marina did test her hypothesis, and she was right. It did help to imagine a dragon as real as she could imagine one. The empty sugar quill box she practiced on did become a dragon, mostly, though it lacked proper teeth and claws. McGonagall assured her even later that her mastery of the spell was not perfect, but it was good enough, and good enough for McGonagall was more than good enough for Marina when it came to Transfiguration.

Despite her good luck with her most difficult class, Marina welcomed the Christmas holiday. Even though Professor Sprout assigned a section of textbook reading, Professor Sigma assigned three numerology charts, and Professor Traduce asked them to practice putting sentences together in ancient runes, Marina was looking forward to the break. After all, time away from Hogwarts meant time away from Alfred Smith and his weird girl drama.

From what Marina could understand from what Lark could understand, a fifth year's sixth year boyfriend-since-last-year went to Hogsmeade with a seventh year girl behind the fifth year girl's back while she was sick with the flu in the Hospital Wing in September. In retaliation, the fifth year girl (Marina thought her name was Ella or something) grabbed the nearest bloke in the common room that wasn't still prepubescent, which happened to be Alfred, and started snogging the daylights out of him. This was in early October. Since then, the fifth year girl (Ellie? Anna? Allie?) had been stringing Alfred along, using him to make her now-ex-boyfriend jealous so that the ex-boyfriend would come crawling back. The only problem was that the ex-boyfriend was now the boyfriend of the seventh year girl he went to Hogsmeade with as of late November. He was ignoring his ex-girlfriend, who was pretending to ignore him by snogging Alfred. Just before everyone left for holiday, Alfred asked the fifth year what their relationship really was, according to Lark, and the girl had just walked away without a proper answer. It all made Marina's head spin. How ridiculous could people really be? And these were Ravenclaws. Here Marina thought her house was supposed to be full of clever, wise people, but apparently not everyone was equally clever and wise in all areas of life.

Marina and Annie relayed all of this to Gideon and Quincy on the train home, to which the boys both reacted in a slightly horrified manner.

"Worse than the soap operas my grandmum watches, that is," Quincy said, shaking his head.

Gideon made a face and turned to Quincy. "Why would anyone watch an opera about soap?"

"It's a muggle form of entertainment," Annie said. "Soap operas are overly dramatic dramas that some muggles watch on the telly when they haven't got anything more interesting going on in their lives."

"Oh."

Gideon looked very marginally bewildered for the remainder of the train ride, and Marina caught him mouthing something that she thought might be "soap opera" to himself at least twice. When they pulled into the station, though, both real and fictitious drama were forgotten in favor of gathering treat wrappers and Maia and school bags and luggage. In the crowds on the platform, it was difficult to find almost anyone, but Gideon broke off first when he saw tall Fabian's red hair just above the other heads. That left the Jacksons and the Stewart-Lautrecs to find; one of Annie's parents would probably be waiting outside the platform.

When they did find their parents, Marina was surprised to see how very large her mum was. She didn't know why she was so surprised—after all, she was almost eight months pregnant. Still. It was…different. Annie's dad was once again sat on a bench outside of the magical platform, and he and Annie went off without more than a couple words exchanged between father and daughter. That worried Marina somewhat. Annie surely would be in poor spirits all holiday if her family wasn't going to talk to her. She rode home with Maia on her lap, thinking about her friend's troubles.

"Oh, darling, when we get home," her mum said, turning her head to talk to Marina in the backseat, "you'll have to excuse the mess. We're in the middle of transforming spare room into a nursery, and I'm afraid we've got boxes for storage all in the living room."

There certainly were boxes for storage in the living room. Marina peeked into a few to find the various pieces of dismantled furniture and decor all packed up with newspapers. It looked as if her parents were completely redecorating the whole room; even the curtains were folded into one of the boxes.

"Normally, we would shrink the furniture for packing," her papa said, coming into the house with Marina's trunk. "For long storage, it's safer to pack without shrinking charms so that there are no disasters if the charms do not last."

Marina nodded. "That makes sense." She sort of remembered Bobbie shrinking furniture when they moved into their current house from the small flat she and her mum lived in when Marina was very young.

Quincy came over only a day into the holiday, and he lounged on Marina's bed while she sat with Maia on her floor. "It'll be strange, having a baby in your house, won't it?" he asked.

"I don't know," she answered. "I don't know very much about babies and houses."

"My aunt had another baby while we were in school and my mum said they're coming to visit for Christmas. That makes three cousins on my mum's side, and I'm older than the oldest one by ten years."

"You'll have to tell me how that goes," Marina said.

Quincy shrugged. "It won't be so bad. They're only staying for three days. You've got to live with yours for years."

Marina rolled her eyes, stroking the length of Maia's spine and down her tail. "It won't be a baby forever," she said. "And we go away for school, so I only have to live with a baby over holidays. So really, I've only got to live with a baby for…" She paused to do a bit of mental math. "Six months of summer holidays, and about a month of Christmas and Easter holidays."

"Well, that's true," Quincy conceded. He shifted to lay on his stomach. "Do your parents know if it's a boy or a girl?"

"How would they know?"

"My mum told me once that muggles have a test for that sort of thing. They have this machine thing that can look through a mum's skin and organs and stuff to see the baby, and they can find out things like if it's growing right and if it's a boy or a girl. I expect healers have a spell or something that does the same thing."

"Oh." Marina made a face. "That sounds like something you can only do with magic. How in Merlin's name can muggles do that?"

"Maybe we'll talk about it in Muggle Studies. If we do, I'll let you know."

Christmas passed without incident, and Marina got double presents to celebrate her birthday and the holiday. Quincy reported back that babies are a right pain. They cry all night and day and smell terribly if their diaper isn't fresh and throw up the food they just ate all down your back when you try to burp them. But his new cousin was cute enough to make up for it sometimes, he said, especially when his aunt dressed her up with bows in her hair. Marina decided a baby's cuteness couldn't possibly outweigh the horror of vomit and poo and screaming. Nevertheless, in an effort to not make too rash of a judgement on her future sibling, Marina resolved to at least ask if her parents did know if she should expect either a brother or sister and what this kid's name would be.

Her mum smiled when Marina asked. "Your little brother's name is going to be Charles—"

"Michel!" her papa shouted from another room, perhaps from upstairs.

"We can't quite decide," Bobbie said.

"Both children could have names that start with 'M!'" Theo shouted.

"Or both our children could have names with meaning!"

"'Michel' has plenty of meaning!"

"Marina is named for your family! Our son should be named for my family!"

"But 'Michel' sounds better with Marina than 'Charles!'"

This was a debate Marina decided to stay out of, so she retreated to her room to work on her Arithmancy assignment, rolling her eyes as she went. Michel or Charles, what difference did it make? At least she knew she'd be getting a brother, even if his name was still to be determined.