By the time the rest of the Ravenclaws made it to breakfast, Luna was nearly finished with her eggs. When she finished eating, she removed The Standard Book of Spells: Grade 1, and began trying to levitate her fork. This time, she was almost certain it had moved an inch or so, when Alexander Troy came over and sat next to her.

"Hello, Alexander." she greeted him, still focused intently on her spoon.

"Hi, Luna." he said, "And just Alex is fine."

Luna nodded. "Wingardium Leviosa!" she said again pointing her wand at her fork. Alex looked at her funny. "What are you doing?" he asked her, looking confused.

"I'm trying to make my fork levitate." She explained to him.

"Oh. Okay."

As they were talking, Luna noticed there was a commotion at the Gryffindor table. Luna looked over interestedly as a red-haired boy, sitting next to a boy with dark hair and glasses, looked in panic at a red envelope he was holding. She could see people begin to laugh as he gingerly opened the flap of what Luna now realized was a howler.

"Why does that boy look so nervous?" Alex wondered aloud.

"It's a howler." Rolf answered from across the table where he must have sat down while they had been busy watching. "It should explode just about now-" he was interrupted as the letter began to scream at him in a shrill female voice louder than Luna would have thought possible for a piece of mail. Something about a car and Harry Potter and the Ministry.

Rolf and Alex winced in sympathy for the receiver of the howler. Meanwhile, the heads of houses were walking up and down the spaces between the tables, giving people their schedules.

When Professor Flitwick got to her, he nodded. "Yes, Luna Lovegood," he muttered to himself, as he waved his wand over a blank piece of paper, on which Luna's schedule magically appeared. She had Transfiguration first period, but it didn't start until a little later, Luna noticed, examining her schedule, and it was only 7:45. So she set off to the library.

When she entered, the first thing she noticed was the smell. It smelled exactly like any library would, of paper and ink and wooden shelves and leather bound books. There were dozens bookcases, dozens of shelves, hundreds of books. Luna inhaled deeply, breathing in the scent.

Browsing amongst the shelves, Luna noticed a section labeled 'Muggle Fiction' which she went over to. Extracting from a shelf a Sherlock Holmes novel "The Hound of the Baskervilles," she went to check it out, was glared at by the bat-like librarian, Madam Pince, and stuck the book in her bag so she would have something to read later.

She wandered down a corridor before sitting down on the bottom step of a marble staircase and beginning to read. She didn't look up again for another half an hour, when, noticing the time, she stood up and put her things into her bag, walking towards the Transfiguration classroom.

She arrived three minutes early, and took a seat in the second row of desks as the rest of the Ravenclaw students came in.

"Good morning to you all. I am Professor McGonagall." she looked at the class, and promptly turned her desk into a small horse, and then back. The class looked a her in was. "That was brilliant." Luna heard Alex say from the back of the classroom. "Thank you for that kind assessment, Mr. Troy. Over the course of this year, we will be working with transfiguring small, inanimate objects. Of course, It will not be until at least 6th year that we will be transfiguring furniture into animals. That type of magic is highly complex, and it takes years to master." The class looked slightly disappointed at that. Now if you would all turn to page 1 of A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration. Mr. Troy, if you would be so kind as to read for us."

.o0O0o.

After Transfiguration and History of Magic, Luna went back to the Great Hall for lunch. History of Magic was taught by a ghost name Professor Binns, who had droned on for the full period without stopping once. Luna had found it excruciatingly dull, listening to him lecture, and had abandoned her note-taking attempts after 10 minutes. She highly suspected there was a nest of wrackspurts in there, her brain had felt fuzzy from the very beginning of the class.

Arriving in the Great Hall, she took a seat at the Ravenclaw table. She could see Rolf and Alex talking a little down the table, but she didn't want to interrupt them.

She let her eyes wander over the room. At the Gryffindor table, she could see Hermione from the train sitting with the boys who Luna assumed must be Ron Weasley and Harry Potter.

As she scooped lasagna onto her plate, she thought about Rolf and Alex. They had been nice to her, but they had clearly formed a closer bond between the two of them. She wondered if that still meant they were friends with her. She had never had a friend before.

.o0O0o.

When she arrived to Defense against the dark arts with the rest of the Ravenclaws, there was no teacher in the classroom. When the Gryffindors came, with whom they shared the class, their teacher was still not yet there.

The walls of the classroom were decorated with dozens of autographed photos, all of the same man. There were close-ups, ones of him brandishing his wand at some unknown danger, and one full sized one the height of a real person.

Luna spotted Ginny from across the room, and walked over to her. "Hi Ginny." she said brightly. "We met on the train?"

"Hi, Luna." Ginny said. Luna was glad she remembered her. "Do you know where professor Lockhart is?" she asked as they sat down at adjacent desks.

Just then, the lights dimmed dramatically, and the class quieted, though whispered conversations continued between some students. A voice echoed grandly from the doorway of the darkened classroom. "Gilderoy Lockhart: Best-selling author, Order of Merlin, third class, Honorary Member of the Dark Force Defence League," the voice said, "five-time winner of Witch Weekly's Most-Charming-Smile Award. And… your Defense Against the Dark Arts professor." The lights turned back on, revealing the teacher who had bowed at the start of term feast.

He was fairly handsome, Luna supposed. He had wavy blond hair and exceptionally straight, white teeth. He was wearing overly extravagant robes with a flamboyant purple cape. "Hello, my pupils. I, Professor Lockhart, would like to welcome you to Defense against the dark arts. In this class you will see many things, some of which may shock you, some of which may terrify you. This class." he said pompously strutting about the room "is not for the faint of heart, nor those weak of mind." Finishing off his speech, he sat down at his desk at the front of the room. "Today, we will be taking a small quiz." the students in Luna's class looked worried by this. "No need to be alarmed. It is merely a few short questions to gauge how well you know your teacher. That is to say, me."

Luna was a bit worried about that. She knew nothing about him. She had never read one of his books, and had never heard of him until Dumbledore's speech.

As Lockheart handed out the "short quizzes", which were in fact 3 pages with 54 questions on them, Luna leaned over towards Ginny. "Do you know anything about this man?" she asked her quietly.

Ginny responded whispering "yeah, my mum's a fan. We went to a book signing in Diagon Alley. We've got some of his household books at home. Gilderoy Lockhart's Guide to Household Pests, that sort of thing."

Luna nodded in response as she looked to the first question of the test: What is Gilderoy Lockhart's favorite color?

Having no idea, she wrote purple (the color of his cloak) and moved onto the next question: what is Gilderoy Lockhart's greatest ambition? She answered that he wanted to be Minister of Magic, despite, once again, having no idea. The next question asked what, in your opinion, is Gilderoy Lockhart's greatest achievement to date? She thought about it for a moment. Luna had an excellent memory, her father told her she had been bitten by a gnome as a child which must have contributed to that particular talent. She wrote down the credentials he had given them and continued taking the quiz in this manner until the teacher called "Time's up! Please bring your tests to the front to be graded!"

Sighing, Luna brought her parchment to the front and laid it on the stack of papers already on the desk. She felt for certain she must have failed.

Lockhart flipped through the papers, as he told them "Well done, although hardly any of you got question 12 correct," he continued pacing the room going on in the same manner "and very few of you knew my birthday. Tsk tsk." he sat down at his desk and removed a quill from his desk and graded them relatively quickly.

When he finished with this, he handed out the quizzes. Luna looked apprehensively at her face-down paper, along with the rest of the class. She flipped it over to see a 42/54.

Ginny glanced over to see Luna's paper, most of the class was doing the same to each other, comparing scores and such.

As the class was dismissed, the first years filed out, and Ginny caught up with Luna. "How'd you do so well?" she asked her "I thought you didn't know anything about him."

Luna looked at her and responded "I didn't know, I made it all up." which made Ginny laugh, and together, they walked down the hallway.