Fitting In

Ginny Weasley slid down one of the banisters of the main staircase. It was getting close to the end of the first term of her first year and Hogwarts was turning into everything she thought it could be. She had been worried and anxious at first because of all the stories her brothers had told her; needing to wrestle a troll to get into Gryffindor, three-headed dogs in abandoned classrooms, evil teachers, killer trees, and Slytherins. She had one problem with that Parkinson girl in her first month but the bat-bogey curse, which Bill had taught her, kept that horse-faced girl from bothering her again.

The other thing she had been anxious about was Harry Potter. Bill had always read to her and Ron from the Harry Potter Adventures books when they were little and Ginny had the image of this incredible warrior that she would get to meet in her head. She knew and was a bit envious that her brother Ron would get to be classmates with him. Then right before Ron was set to start school, it was announced that Harry would be delayed a year.

Ron had been upset, he had a whole plan set up in his head that he would be best friends with The Boy-Who-Lived and go on incredible adventures together; to fight Dark Lords, capture dragons, and wield legendary swords. Now that dream was gone for him but Ginny was happy to take on that duty in his place.

Ron had grown up a bit during his first year at school. He still spoke without thinking but had reigned it in a lot. He focused on his work more than he did in primary school. At first, Ginny was a bit confused; Why he didn't want to play with her right away when he came home at the end of the year and did all his summer homework before starting to goof off with her? If Hogwarts could change Ron that much, what would it do to her?

Just having the motivation to claim the dream of going on Harry Potter Adventures was enough for her to change. The night before her journey to Kings Cross Station, she made sure she was fully packed and ready to go. Her family panicked in the morning when they couldn't find her, only to discover that she had already eaten breakfast, loaded her trunk in the car, and was waiting for them while they scrambled around at the last minute like they did every year.

This was a huge break in the Weasley tradition of last-minute preparations but she was a break in tradition herself, being the first Weasley girl born in several generations.

All of Ron's decision to abandon his dream of being Harry Potter's best friend hadn't totally gone away, as when they arrived at the station, he led Ginny on a search of the train for the elusive Potter. They had of course read about his heroic return in the papers where he had defended a girl, Ginny's age, from Lucius Malfoy of all people. Ron had some choice words to say about the man's son with whom he shared classes. She could tell from her parent's reactions to the article and Ron's insults that they disliked the man as well, as it took much longer than usual for her mum to wash Ron's mouth out with soap.

They did end up finding Harry Potter and the girl he had defended, who he introduced as his sister. Ron ended up not being interested in making friends with Harry and left Ginny by herself. Harry was different from how her brother Bill and her mum had described what he would be like. They had told her that Harry would be powerful but lonely. That he would need someone like her to help him feel normal as he didn't have a family of his own. That turned out to be the opposite as he had Lyra and a demiguise for a brother. He didn't seem dismissive of her though and was looking to be friends.

After the shakeup of the Scamander House, Ginny thought for sure she would get sorted into that house. She loved animals, her family, and learning new things with her hands rather than from books.

Flashback:

"Ginevra Weasley!" Newt Scamander called out.

Ginny hesitantly took a step forward, being the last of the first-year students to be sorted. From that first step, she strode with confidence to the stool and let the hat slide down on her head, covering her eyes.

"Hah! Another Weasley!" a voice appeared in her head. "Seven of you now. Well, I know just what to do with you!"

"Wait!" Ginny called out with her mind, unable to move her mouth.

"Wait for what? You are a Gryffindor, like your parents, like your brothers, right?"

"I thought I might be something else, can you at least look?"

"That statement itself makes you deserving of another look. Maybe Ravenclaw for you, as they tend to consider all their options before making a decision."

"Ravenclaws don't have a lot of friends, I want to make lots."

"Just because some of Rowena's students tend to keep to themselves doesn't mean that you will. All that you need to have is the desire for knowledge and the drive to go after it. Having friends can only help you in that pursuit. Your house does not define you, they are there to help you grow into the person you want to be."

"I want to go on adventures, I want to be daring like my brother Bill, strong like Charlie, ambitious like Percy, crafty like Fred, innovative like George, and calculating like Ron."

"You know, that sounds to me like you want to be in Gryffindor. Though your lofty goals would also make a fine Slytherin."

Ginny scrunched up her face at the suggestion, "No, anywhere but Slytherin."

"You know, even though we are having this conversation, I can see into your mind, scanning your surface thoughts to find what house will best suit you. So I know where you want to go, we are talking so you can work out your feelings. So tell me, why do you want to go to Scamander?"

Ginny was silent in her mind for a while. She knew that the hat was on her head but didn't fully realize that it was also IN her head. Her father had told her about legilimency, but she hadn't thought that an old hat would be capable of doing it.

Hearing her thoughts, the hat responded, "This isn't legilimency. Imagine your mind is like a deep ocean with most of your memories at the bottom. When you think of something relevant to your current experience, those thoughts rise to the surface like air and I look for the bubbles. So tell me, why Scamander?"

"Well, I guess it's because of the adventure. It would be something amazing to be a part of. It's like I can see the possibilities of being part of something that great."

"And?..." the hat prompted her.

After a long silence, she admitted, "I want to be in Harry's house."

"Why?"

Ginny didn't think she needed to put it into words, the hat could see why but also said that she needed to work out her feelings.

"Because he's Harry Potter! I've been hearing about his adventures before I could read them myself. My mum said he would be lonely because he didn't have parents growing up. Because he needs a family and my mum said that we could be that for him."

"That is why you want to be in Scamander. Now think, how many other children that I've sorted so far tonight have thought the same thing? How many do you think I put in Scamander for those reasons?"

"Two?" Ginny guessed with false hope.

"You know the answer to the question," the hat told her. "Now about what your mother said, you know now that she was incorrect. He has a sister and a brother. He has a family, you can be his friend without being in his house."

Ginny could feel her eyes watering.

"Tell me child, when you heard about his adventures in your books, what did you like about them the most?"

Ginny thought back to the stories, particularly when her brother Bill had read them to her. He always made the stories seem alive, using transfiguration and charms to bring them to life. One of the things he would always do was use amazing voices for all the characters. Though whenever Harry spoke, he would always ask her to read those parts. It made her feel like she was going on those adventures and like she was the hero of the story.

Without waiting for her to say it out loud, the hat told her, "You want to be the hero of your own story, is that right? Would you prefer to be in the background of Harry's?"

Ginny understood the message, if she wanted to go on adventures and be the best person she could be, she couldn't ride on someone else's coattails.

"So where should I go?" Ginny asked.

"You wanted to give Harry a family but he already has one. Do you want to have all the qualities of your brothers? Go to yours and learn everything about them that you would like to be. When you are finished learning, then become the best Ginevra Weasley that you can be."

Ginny could feel a few tears on her cheek now.

"You are a Gryffindor, so call it out in your head as I announce it aloud."

Within her mind, she yelled as loud as she could while the hat did it for the whole hall, "Better be… GRYFFINDOR!"

When the hat was pulled from her head, the roar of applause exploded from the room. Ginny ran down the steps to the table of red and gold to find Percy waiting to give her a big hug. Then she moved to Fred, George, and Ron for their turns before sitting down in her house for the first time.

Back in the present, Ginny finished running down to study in the Great Hall. Over the past term, she had gotten to be better friends with her neighbor Luna and a few other students in their year. Today, she was just meeting with Luna though. Luna had withdrawn a bit after her mother had died which made her hard to talk to but since arriving at Hogwarts, she had started to open up again.

Luna was an absolute genius when it came to charms, so here they were in the Great Hall studying the intricacies of the locking and unlocking charm when it was used for more complex mechanisms. While the magic of the charm would find whatever caused the lock to open or close, the more complicated the structure of the lock would need different amounts of power put into the spell at the base level.

There were dozens of other students working in the hall, so there was a lot of background noise. Sometimes it was helpful to have the noise as long as it wasn't too loud. When she was at home, there was always some amount of noise, whether it was her dad tinkering with muggle stuff, the twins blowing something up, or just the ghoul in the attic moaning. So having background noise was cathartic for her to work.

While she was focused on her work, she was snapped back to the present when she heard Luna say, "Who's a princess?"

Luna had turned around and was facing Cho Chang and two other Slytherin boys at the next table.

The three snakes looked back and forth between each other and Cho said, "You haven't heard yet?"

Luna smiled, "I hear many things, but I haven't heard of any princesses at Hogwarts yet."

"She's not a real princess, Daphne Greengrass froze another girl in a block of ice, so I called her an ice princess."

"Oh that's nice," Luna said with a pleasant expression on her face. "Who's the Ice Queen?"

"What?" a boy in the Slytherin group blurted out.

"Well, it makes sense, that if there's an ice princess, there is also an ice queen too. Maybe a prince and a king as well," Luna explained.

"No, there's no other ice royalty, I just made it up right now. There's only an ice princess," Cho remarked.

Ginny was giggling a bit at the exchange. Luna always was perfectly logical, even if sometimes it was her own brand of logic that was being used.

The Slytherin boy chuckled as well, "I like it. All hail Daphne the Ice Queen! Long may she reign!" he muttered softly.

Ginny thought this was a great idea and yelled even louder, so everyone in the hall could hear, "All hail Daphne the Ice Queen! Long may she reign!"

After that, quite a few other people around the room repeated the message adding their personal praise to the Ice Queen.

Cho groaned, "Fine, Ice Queen it is."

"Hurray!" Luna exclaimed, then spun back around to keep working on her charms assignment.

Ginny smiled and got back to work as well.

In a different part of the castle, Hermione Granger was absorbed into another project. Ravenclaw was the perfect place for her, though deep down, she knew that she needed to have been in Gryffindor first.

Her first year in the House of Lions had been torture. No one else seemed enthusiastic about learning magic, not like she had been. It had completely baffled her, all of her classmates were in magic school, with magic classes, and performing magic all the time, yet they treated it like it was boring. They complained about being forced to do magic homework. Even her housemates teased her relentlessly for her enthusiasm. So she tried a different approach, she tried helping them.

That just made things worse. She studied extra hard to make sure she knew all the material perfectly and practiced practical magic in secret so she would get it right on the first try in front of others. However, when she tried to help her classmates they just got angry with her. They acted like she was trying to show them up, not help them. When she heard Ron talking to his friends about how she had no friends of her own, everything just snapped. It was just like primary school, no one wanted to be friends with the smart girl, why was she fooling herself to believe that it would be different here?

She spent the entire afternoon and evening crying in the bathroom… and then the troll came.

Truthfully she didn't remember much about it, just the smell, the fear, and the pain. The teachers told her what happened later and the more she thought about it, the more their stories became her memories. When everything was said and done, she was happy to have a magic arm instead of nothing, it was just one more magical thing in her life. Though when she looked at her parents, she could see the pain in their eyes at the sight of her.

Then the clicking made things even worse.

With every move she made, the sound followed her around. People followed her around and poked at her arm, others asked her to take it off to show them how it worked. Finally, she only returned to her dormitory to sleep. The rest of it, she spent in the library studying in the main room or hiking her way to a small room she found in the stacks to practice her magic alone.

Things did start to look up a bit. Just before the first term ended, the library started a project to update the catalog and create searching spells to aid in research. The librarian asked her to help with writing book summaries. She was happy to do so and the librarian praised her work. She didn't care about the points she was earning for her house as the other students would probably just think she was trying to show them up again. When the catalog tower was built, she started studying the runic enchantments that went into it, and even though she wouldn't be able to take the Runes elective for another two years, she checked out all the books on the subject and started to self-study.

Towards the end of the year, grades started being published. Hermione was surprised to see that she held the top spot in her year. She hadn't been paying attention to how well she was doing, but with the amount of study and practice, it really shouldn't have come as such a shock. Though the number one spot did get her a lot of attention as it was hardly ever held by someone outside of Ravenclaw, and certainly not by a Gryffindor.

She was approached by some of the Eagles from her year who seemed intent on testing her to see if she really deserved her spot. Professor Flitwick seemed particularly interested in trying to get her involved in some projects with other Ravenclaws. That was when she learned about the tower. How did she not know about a private library at the top of the castle? The Ravenclaw Tower was like a dream come true and from that point she spent any time she wasn't working on the library project doing her studies up there. It saved her time for her practical magic not to have to hike all the way down to the first floor, to her hidden spot in the library, and just use their room for that purpose.

When the year came to a close and she was given the top spot in the class, an older girl named Penelope offered to tutor her over the summer, and by the time she got back to school in the fall, she was close to being able to pass the first year Runes material. Then in the new year came the Scamander resorting, while she felt saddened that she would leave Gryffindor, it was the perfect opportunity to rise above her problems.

Flashback:

"Hermione Granger!" Newt Scamander called out her name.

She nearly fell while running up to the stool to get the sorting over with as soon as possible.

The hat settled on her head and she heard its voice in her head like the time before, "Welcome back, Miss Granger. For the record, I wish to apologize for my part in your situation. Had I been able to foresee your predicament, I would have sent you anywhere else, even Slytherin."

"It's OK Mr. Hat, I can go where I belong now," she spoke back in her mind.

"Well, I'm going to mention that you do have a choice in this, and your ambition would make you an excellent Slytherin, but I know you won't be happy there, right?" The hat paused to see her mental rejection of being in Slytherin. "Right, so let's put you where your incredible gifts will be received with celebration instead of scorn."

Hermione's mood brightened as the hat called out "RAVENCLAW!" and she heard her new housemates cheer.

Then all that joy was stolen away when Vincent ripped her cloak from her shoulders and she fell on the floor in front of everyone.

Hermione shook her head and tried to get back to her project. She would occasionally flash back to that humiliation, and she didn't know how to handle it. Now that the library project was over, she needed something else to occupy her free time, and she got it.

Right after the library project was unofficially completed, Roger Davies - the Ravenclaw quidditch captain, called for a meeting of the Ravenclaw R&D teams. Officially, everyone in the house was part of it but it was really just a few select groups and individuals who would take commissions from other students who needed some tricky spellwork done. Sometimes, the requests would be from a business outside of Hogwarts and it was a good way to find work and gain references in the real world.

However, when Roger asked for help designing quidditch gear, everyone bowed out. While quidditch was important, it wasn't that important in their house. If you weren't already on the quidditch team, it was even less significant. Penelope saw Hermione's desire to do something and accepted the job along with her. Though it wasn't until after they had accepted that they learned the catch, they'd be working with the Weasley twins.

She barely got to know the two of them while in Gryffindor but they made sure they were known by everyone in the school. There wasn't a single person amongst the staff and students who hadn't been a victim of one of their pranks at some point. Every winter, they would enchant snowballs with a bludger charm to chase after people and Hermione had gotten hit with a few just the other day. Though they had helped her make the tracer potion for the library project. Even though they were incredibly annoying, no one in Ravenclaw doubted their ingenuity. However, it was a source of constant gossip as to why they were always so low on the class rankings.

The first meeting for the project was going to take place in less than an hour and Hermione was already hard at work. When Roger told them they were going to design helmets, she immediately realized another reason why she never liked flying. No one wore protection while flying, even when playing murderball (Quidditch). Her mother always liked to tell the story about when her father bought his motorcycle and she wouldn't let him near that deathtrap without first purchasing all the best safety gear on the market. Brooms were like flying motorcycles and didn't have any of the safety equipment.

So she had sent an owl to her father asking for pictures and catalogs of motorcycle gear. As an afterthought, she sent a second owl with requests for other helmets used in any other sports. Just as she was about to go to sleep that night she thought about how it must sound for her father to get all these strange requests so she sent a third owl with an explanation of the project so her parents didn't think she was going to do anything dangerous.

A few days later she received a package crammed with magazines, catalogs, and photos of her father in all his gear along with a note from her mother chiding her for getting her father interested in riding again. Now she was going through the information that she received and putting together a small presentation for the meeting to show the different types of head protection that were currently available so they could just modify something that currently existed instead of creating a new design from scratch.

Twenty minutes before the meeting, Penny came to fetch Hermione. She had a couple of spellbooks with her and stared with curiosity at the stacks of papers and pictures that the younger student had prepared.

"Why that hat ever put you in Gryffindor, I will never know," Penny commented.

Hermione responded with a sad smile, "Where are we going to meet the twins?"

"Some room on the fifth floor," she waved a folded note.

Following the instructions, they ended up at a blank wall halfway down the south corridor on the fifth floor. Consulting the note, Penny turned around to see a tapestry of a ballet dancer posed on her. The dancer had her head nearly shaved and was wearing a golden outfit standing on a golden ribbon.

Penny gave a deep sigh and bowed to the dancer. The dancer on the tapestry flattened her feet and bowed back, then stood on her toes and raised her arms over her head. Penny mimicked the pose. The woman on the tapestry proceeded to do four more poses which Penny mirrored back before they heard applause from behind them. Spinning around, Fred and George were standing in a doorway clapping.

"Did I really need to do all that?" Penny asked.

"Of course you did!" said the one on the left.

"We take turns doing it ourselves when we visit this room!" said the one on the right.

"When Hogwarts finally has a dance, we will be the belles of the ball," Tweedledee said while performing a very complicated one-leg stance.

Tweedledum stood on his toes and thrust his chest out with his arms behind him, "If you are interested, she'll teach you the entire ballet, you don't even have to enter the room, she'll go for hours at a time."

Hermione was fascinated, she remembered when she was a little girl that her parents had signed her up for ballet classes and had taken a few pictures of her in a pink tutu that they would show to guests when they wanted to embarrass her now that she was older. Though after her first lesson, while waiting for her parents to pull the car around, she picked up a book on the history of dance in the waiting room. In the second class, she didn't even make it to the dance floor and just spent the whole class reading about fifteenth-century Italian ballet.

Penny had a look that combined annoyance and astonishment at the two redheads while she followed them into the hidden room. The room had a round table in the center with four chairs, but the edges were what was interesting. There were stained glass windows along one wall with ballerinas in various poses etched into the glass. Below the windows, and in other places, were dozens of mannequins with articulated joints, some had costumes on them and others were bare. There were also individual body parts on mounts - arms, legs, torsos, heads, and some which were strange combinations of multiple body parts that didn't exist in nature. On one end of the room, there were various-sized cauldrons and a large blackboard with some arithmantic calculations.

Both Penny and Hermione were gawking at the room in awe. This was everything they could possibly need for their project, how had these two clowns found such an incredible room? The arithmancy on the board was incredibly advanced, Hermione could only understand the mathematical notations, the magical formulas were beyond her. Penny seemed to be working through them and when she finished her mouth dropped open.

"Do you know what this spell will do?" she asked their hosts while gesturing to the board.

"Well, we were trying to modify the water-making spell to create liquid marshmallows," said the one standing next to Penny.

"But I think we made it to create fluffy marzipan instead," said the one sitting on a shaggy purple couch that hadn't been there a second ago.

"That's exactly what it does. Why would you possibly want to do either?!" Penny asked in an indecipherable tone.

"Why not?" both gingers said together.

Penny's left eye twitched independently of the right as she stared at the two of them.

Hermione found her voice, "I only have a million questions about all of this but the one I need to know right now is - Which one of you is Fred and which is George?"

"Well, our little Lionclaw, we will tell you just this once who we are and you'll have to figure it out next time on your own, I am the illustrious George Weasley."

"This is the only time you can be sure I am telling the truth, young Ravendor, I am the stupendous Fredrick Weasley."

Penny took the opportunity to whip out her wand and cast two nearly simultaneous spells. The first one splattered green paint on George and the second one hit Fred with light purple.

"It will disappear in four hours," Penny told them as they started to cast counterspells on the paint. "Don't bother trying to get rid of it, I invented the spell, so it has a very specific counter."

"Well played," complimented George.

"But we will have our revenge," Fred said with a dark undertone.

"Can we just work on the project?" Hermione asked.

The twins looked at each other and nodded, "To business!"

Fred opened a chest next to the table and cold air wafted out of it. He pulled out four bottles of butterbeer and placed them on the table, then they all sat down. Hermione hadn't had butterbeer before but had heard about how good it was from others. Muggleborns described it as a frothy cream soda that made you feel warm inside even if it was cold in your mouth. She watched the other three tap the caps with their wands to have them pop off and vanish before she pulled her wand out to repeat the action. She took an experimental sip and nearly spat it out. It was delicious, but way way too sweet. She forced herself to swallow her sip and then slowly pushed the bottle to the side.

"I'm going to assume that the students of Rowena have done more background research than we have," George started. "So let's see what you've got."

Hermione and Penny exchanged a glance, and while they didn't have the mythical communication connection that the devils before them possessed, Penny just gave Hermione a nod to present her information.

Hermione took a deep breath and pulled out her expanding (non-magical) folder of information and pictures then started her presentation.

"Our task is to design a better kind of helmet for the Hogwarts quidditch teams that can be worn for all positions. The current helmets that are used by the keepers are incredibly basic in their design and are basically leather hats with cushioning charms on the top and ear covers. The other positions will complain that this helmet will limit their visibility but I don't see the issue. To me, it seems like it is just uncomfortable and they think it makes them look like dorks."

Fred and George chuckled a bit at her assessment and nodded along.

"I think the first thing we should tackle is the design of the helmet before working on the cushioning and spellwork that will increase the visibility. I have collected several designs for helmets in muggle sports that could be purchased in the muggle world and then enchanted for quidditch."

Hermione laid out the pictures of motorcycle helmets, American football helmets, and cricket helmets.

Pulling one more, "This muggle helmet is the closest to what quidditch keepers currently use. It is for a sport called rugby, and it still offers more protection than the keeper's helmet without magic or sacrificing visibility."

Fred and George passed around the pictures and seemed to engage in bits of silent communication, not saying anything out loud.

"Also, if we ever get into other equipment," Hermione added, "I'm sure there would be good possibilities for more aerodynamic uniforms instead of wearing robes. For example…" she pulled out the photo of her dad in his full motorcycle gear.

"Woah!" Fred exclaimed, "This is like armor! How do muggles move in this?"

"It's actually lightweight, and since it is made in sections, there is no sacrifice to flexibility," Hermione explained.

"This is wicked… but let's stick to helmets for now," George interrupted.

"Good plan," Penny agreed. She pulled out the books she had been carrying. "I dug through the Ravenclaw library and found a few books on older versions of cushioning charms. Using more basic spells would allow for easier enchanting without causing runic or charm arrays to fail. One of the reasons why new helmets haven't been introduced is that more complex cushioning spell arrays will fail over time or as a result of repeated impacts. No one wants to have a helmet stop working in the middle of a six-hour game without warning."

George pulled out a very old-looking book that didn't even have a name on the cover, "That's also the problem that has happened with the visibility issue. There have been attempts to have helmets with disillusionment or invisibility enchantments on them but they also will not last long enough for an extended quidditch game. So my evil associate and I thought why not try something stronger and longer-lasting? Why not use curses?"

"Because they're dangerous?" Penny said in a way that wasn't actually a question.

"Well of course they're dangerous," Fred replied. "However, we figure that if we work with the smartest of Rowena's flock, we have a chance at getting past that hurdle."

Hermione was very interested and was staring at the book in front of her. Then she noticed the red tag on the base of the spine.

"This is from the restricted section!" she exclaimed.

"Let it never be said that Hermione Granger isn't observant," Fred remarked.

"How did you get it? Which teacher would give you a pass?" Fred just smiled back at her.

"That's not important," George interrupted, "Would you like to read it?" He nudged the book towards her just a little.

A great dilemma was in front of her. It was from the restricted section and certainly taken without permission. However, it was a book, and knowledge shouldn't be restricted. How did they even get it? The restricted section was warded, could she get in herself? No, that would put a detention on her spotless record. But the twins had gotten away with it, maybe she could too? No, it was too risky… though this could lead to the success of her project. Hesitantly, she reached out and picked up the book.

Penny smiled a bit at her little protege's first step into the dark side of learning. Eventually, all Ravenclaws needed to cross this threshold but Penny would make sure she didn't fall too deep into the well of dangerous knowledge. Knowledge was power and the unprepared would get themselves burned.

"That book is a compendium of curses," George informed her. "They are curses that specifically pertain to visual effects. We have gone through it already and found many many things that could be modified for pranks but cannot see something that would relate to our project. Though, maybe we just need a different set of eyes on it. Additionally, we will need to meet over winter break and if you find something worthwhile in the book, we will need to smuggle it out of the castle."

"And you thought that having a young, muggleborn, bibliophile would be the perfect mark to smuggle it out for you?" Penny asked.

George looked a bit guilty and hesitant to agree but Fred jumped on it, "Exactly! George and I are searched by teachers at least once a day, and even more when we are entering and leaving the castle. So yes, an adorable and innocent little Ravenclaw, who has more books of her own than all three of us combined, would be the perfect person to smuggle something out for us."

Hermione was a bit overwhelmed. First, she was meeting with the terror twins of Gryffindor, then she was holding a restricted book, and now she was going to steal a book from the library. She dropped the book on the table and started to back away. This was too much.

George could see the look on her face and tried to calm her down. "You're not stealing the book, it is just borrowing it. We are planning on returning it, and we don't even know if there will be a spell in there we will want to use yet." He picked up the book from the table and passed it to Penny, "Take a look through it and see if your clever eagle eyes find something that we missed, and then we can go from there. We will take your cushioning books and Hermione's helmet samples and see what we can make of those. Let us know if you find something and we'll meet back then."

Penny took the book and slid it into her bag. "Sounds good, we will look through this as soon as we have the opportunity."

She stood up, and Hermione followed her to the door which, on this side, had a small handle.

"One more thing!" Fred stopped them, "I have two messages for you Penny," he said with a wink and passed her two envelopes.

She took them and walked out into the hallway. Once the door was closed, she opened them and smiled while rolling her eyes.

"What is it?" Hermione asked.

Looking down at the younger girl, she knew her curiosity needed to be satiated. "They're from Ollie and Percy, both of them are inviting me to the next Hogsmede weekend for Valentine's Day."

"Will you go with either of them?" Hermione asked, sensing the prospective romance involved.

"We'll see. First, let's get back to the tower and take a look at this book of curses."

Hermione thought that was a good plan for now. Reading a new book beat a potentially romantic situation any day of the week.

Author's Note: I love this chapter. I really want to expand on all the Weasleys. I didn't like Ron in canon, and despite being a bit of a dunderhead so far, he will get better. Percy will always be a bit of a ponce, but he's also a big brother. Fred and George are two of my favorite characters. Their ingenuity makes them perfect subjects for character development along with their twin magic and the possibility of developing them into separate people instead of just one unit. Ginny needs to be everything her brothers are and more. I don't anticipate her having a central role in my story but I guess anything is possible.

Hermione will have a greater role than Ginny, and while I have already decided on a few magical characteristics and two possible ships for her, I don't know her middle or ending yet for this fic.

I've always liked Penny as a good big sister for various characters in fan fictions. Same with Gemma.