Muggle Concepts: Part 1.  Flight: Hypothetical Reconstructions of Muggle Behavioural Models Regarding (see diagram 3.b.i).  First Theorem: Malarkey's Maxim (see footnote 3 5/6).  Bird-Based Flight: Mechanical Broomstick Mechanisms (see Figure 4).  See also Aerodynamics, Muggle Conceptions of.  As much as Elly loved her Muggles, the train couldn't arrive at its destination soon enough.

There was a knock on the door, and the door rolled back to reveal the same cartful of sugar delights that Elly had always remembered as being just a little bit larger.  "Hungry, anyone?" came a cheerful voice from the hallway.

"Pumpkin pasties!" squealed Alfie with joy, rummaging through her pockets for some loose Knuts.  Snape twitched slightly.  "Want some too, Ee-ee?"  Elly shook her head.  Alfie was twenty-one, and hid the strong librarian streak within her rather well at times.  Too well.  It terrified Elly to think of her trying to manage a classroom full of little screaming troll-goblins.  Little screaming troll-goblins with wands.  Elly shuddered.  Everyone knew teachers were old, cranky and lived out their days complaining about their jobs in the mustry dark staff room and having no social lives.  Some of them probably hadn't left Hogwarts in centuries, not even over the summer.  It all made her feel very small and doomed and un-teacher-like.  They were both doomed.

Eloise, Eloise, what have you done? she moaned softly to herself.

Elly had been really and truly jaw-floor-voiceless stunned only twice in her life.  The first time was the day, not so long after her eleventh birthday, when an owl crashed into her parents' front window, leaving behind a few white feathers and a letter with her name on it.  The second time was the day many years later when the very same owl - older now, and somewhat wiser - had arrived with a second letter addressed to her:

Dear Miss Adalbert,

We are delighted to offer you the position of Professor of Muggle Studies at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  Although you had initially applied for the temporary position of Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher while our current instructor is on sabbatical, several other vacancies have also come up recently and we would be delighted for you to join our teaching staff.

Yours raspberry-cordially,

Albus Dumbledore

PS Your friend Miss Rockbank will be joining you in the position of Ancient Runes Master.

Of the two, Elly was not sure which had been the greater surprise.

It had been quite a shock to realize at age eleven that the bed-time stories her father had told her as a little girl about dragons and goblins and people who could turn into animals, which she thought she had thoroughly grown out of, were actually true.  Looking back, the whole event didn't seem to be such a shock to him as it had to the rest of the family - he acted almost as if he had expected it.

Her mother, on the other hand, had been furious.  She had already made plans for Elly to attend the same school she herself had gone to years before - had gone through all the preparations, had even bought the uniform, which was pink plaid and had a bow at the collar.  Her first reaction to the letter had been to call the police to report it as a nuisance prank, and she hadn't been pleased when her husband assured her over dinner that it was perfectly genuine.  Elly, whose only concern at the time was to avoid spending seven years dressed as a stuffed teddy bear, had managed to wheedle her mother into letting her go despite having no real idea of what Hogwarts - or even a wizard - was.

It certainly wasn't all she'd expected it to be.  She'd never had illusions of herself shrinking down into a cat or a dog or a purple pony and sneaking through the streets solving mysteries and making mischief.  She was never one for fantasy, and had never once while at Hogwarts read a single Flash the Flying Unicorn book, those criminally sappy fantasies about a flying blue unicorn with a big jewel in the middle of her forehead that her friends used to stash under their beds.  The very idea of a unicorn flying was enough to make her shudder, much less one that was blue.  And while she didn't doubt the existence of dragons and phoenixes and the like, she never really expected to ever have the opportunity of meeting one.  But still, she had always pictured there being more - opportunities as in the wizarding world.  A stable job helping to keep the gears of society in motion.  A nice little desk at the Ministry of Magic.  Spotless and organized, tucked into a cozy corner somewhere.  Maybe even a window.

The problem with wizards however, is that despite their ridiculously long life-spans, retire just isn't a word in their vocabulary.  Nepotism frequently is, she had discovered, along with cronyism and graft and all those other nasty little words hanging out in the dark alleys of the dictionary.  Her search for some decent, steady, bill-paying work was turning out to be nowhere near as simple as it sounded.

Elly had never really considered teaching as a career, but since jobs weren't exactly coming out of her ears, when she heard that the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts was taking a year off to do a little research in the field - somewhere on a sunny Caribbean beach, no doubt - she jumped at the chance.  She didn't expect to get the job, of course, but she had sent off an owl with her short list of qualifications (one year in Estonia researching vampire potatobats, two in Iceland studying the properties of puffling feathers) and hoped for the best.  And then, she got the letter.  And was stunned.

These were the only two surprising events in Elly's life.  It was almost with regret that she realized these only surprises had come by the afternoon post.  A sudden longing for true excitement swirled up within her, the irrational desire to leap up in her seat and do something utterly and completely crazy that she would probably regret for the rest of her life:  screech out an Estonian love-yodel at the top of her lungs, transmute Malarkey's Maxim and every last Muggle Concept into tiny dancing hippogriffs and Snape into a large, pink bunny with a plaid bow around its neck.  She squashed it immediately under several pounds of ten-letter words.