Here's chapter 2!

Like I had promised it's longer than the first one. There's still not much going on, but things will speed up when Eileen will arrive at Hogwarts, which will happen in the next chapter. I hope you will enjoy it. Again: if you spot language errors, please let me know so I can correct them. :-)

Contrarily to what Eileen had expected, the summer holiday had seemed to fly, and before she could notice, the 1st of September had arrived. Given that she lived in Scotland, she got to London by train. This was one of the points where she had doubts about the efficiency of the organisation at Hogwarts. She had heard that the school was localized somewhere in Scotland, so why couldn't she just go there at once? However, when she arrived on Platform 9 3/4, she was too amazed to think about organisation. The platform was even more crowded than Diagon Alley and Eileen couldn't help but get overexcited at the idea that she was part of such an incredible world. Next to her, she could feel that the rest of her family was equally amazed, and she felt a little twinge when she realized that she would be the only one of her family to become fully part of this world. Professor McGonagall had been pretty clear: neither her brother nor her sister had magical abilities. Apparently magic was unpredictable, and so was its appearance in the midst of Muggle families. She also felt sorry to leave her family until Christmas, and was a little frightened to feel lost without their comforting presence. Nevertheless, she was glad to be there and those somber feelings did not weigh a lot compared to her curiosity and her eagerness to discover the magical world.

As the time of the departure approached, Eileen eventually said goodbye to her family with some reluctance, torn between her wish to get to Hogwarts and the desire not to leave her loved ones. After the classic goodbye-I'll write to you-be careful-I'll miss you-have fun, Eileen stepped on the train, dragging her heavy luggage with her. At 11 o'clock exactly, she heard the whistle of the scarlet locomotive and was put slightly out of balance when it started to move. She could see her family wave to her and waved back. Her eyes started to prickle all of sudden, but she didn't know if it was because of the excitation, the parting or the nearly sleepless night she had had, imagining a thousand scenario's of her arrival at Hogwarts.

When she couldn't see her family anymore, Eileen set off. She dragged her heavy luggage behind her while looking for a free compartment. As she was in one of the last carriages, she had no trouble finding an empty one. For a moment she wondered whether she might have to set off and try to make friends, but she would have been incapable to guess which students were in her year, so she abandoned that idea pretty quickly. Somehow the train seemed to have made a jump in space, because instead of the London buildings, all Eileen could see through the window were hills and grass. She decided not to ask herself too many questions she wouldn't be able to answer and opened her luggage to take a book for the journey. On the top of all she had taken to Hogwarts she had put her most valuable possession: the box containing her wand. She opened it and brushed the wood with the tip of her fingers. Blackthorn, phoenix feather, 10 3/4 inches, hard flexibility. The urge to pick it up ans cast a spell was bigger than ever, but she didn't want to do anything foolish before knowing a little better how magic worked. After a while, Eileen closed the box of her wand again and picked up one of her textbooks. It may seem odd or nerdy for a student to start studying even before the beginning of the school year, but the truth is that Eileen was eager to get every bit of information she could about magic. Spells, potions, magical beasts fascinated her. To avoid any more temptation to use her wand, she didn't pick up her Charms or Transfiguration book. Instead, she took out "Magical drafts and potions", by Arsenius Jigger.

She had just started to read the description of a potion that could warm up a person suffering from hypothermia, when the door of her compartment burst open, letting three chatting girls come in. Their discussion stopped at once when they realized they weren't alone. The silence could have become awkward if one of the incoming girl, with impressively red hair, hadn't broken it: "Are those seats taken?" Eileen closed her book in a hurry and answered: "Oh no, you can take them." She tried to discreetly put her textbook back in her luggage (so as not to be "the book girl" from the start of the year) while the others took place. "What were you reading?" Attempt failed. Turning a delicate shade of pink, Eileen stammered: "Nothing...just something to keep me busy for the journey, you know…" Eileen felt she might have to change the topic of the discussion if she didn't want to get completely ridiculous by admitting she was reading a school textbook. « Anyway, I'm Eileen, » she let silence fall, before realizing that it might be more polite if she gave her last name too, « Eileen Green. »

The three girls sitting in front of her were called Lauryn Elswyck, Cassandra Leming and Marian Hawkens. Lauryn was the redhead, and seemed to be by far the most extravert of the group. Cassandra had brown hair and dark blue eyes. She carried her pet, a young beige rat, on her shoulder and seemed to be a nice person. Marian had blonde hair, greyish eyes and was described by Lauryn as an "uncontrollable genius" (which made Marian and Cassandra roll their eyes.) "I guess you knew each other before today?", Eileen asked. In fact, it was more a statement than a question: the three girls were obviously very close, far more than they could be if they had just met. "We all live in Chudley and our parents are friends, so we spent the biggest part of our chidlhood at each other's house", Cassandra confirmed, "Besides, I'm the unfortunate cousin of the ginger tornado sitting in front of you." The appellation "ginger tornado" caused Lauryn to push Cassandra slightly with her ellbow as a sign of protest.

Now introductions had been properly done, Lauryn pushed the conversation in the direction that interested her: "So, what house would you all like to be in?" The question surprised Eileen. She knew about the different houses from McGonagall's visit and the books she had been reading, but it hadn't seemed as if you could chose your house. "Aren't we sorted into those houses somehow?" Lauryn waved her hand as if she wanted to chase away a fly. "Yes, but lots of the people I know have been sorted into the house they wanted or expected, so I guess your preference does play a part in the sorting. I'd like to be sorted into Gryffindor: my parents went there, and my cousin is a prefect." One more new information Eileen had to deal with. Well, she was stepping into a new world, so it was normal that her first days or weeks would be filled with new informations. Seeing that Eileen wouldn't talk, Marian gave her point of view: "Gryffindor is allright, but I'd rather be sorted into Ravenclaw. That's the house of all the biggest inventors of the wizarding world and I've heard they have a private library behind a painting in their common room."

Both Lauryn and Marian were beaming as they were talking. Clearly they didn't even imagine not being sorted into the house they had chosen. Eileen turned to Cassandra, expecting her to give her preference about her future house. However, Cassandra surprised her by shaking her head: "I have no idea into which house I'll be sorted, and no idea into which I'd like to be sorted. The biggest part of my family went to Ravenclaw, but I don't really think it would be something for me. I just hope it won't be Slytherin." Cassandra's voice had turned into a whisper with the last sentence, like a child saying a swearword and fearing to be heard, or like a person saying a cursed word and expecting the skies to fall on her head if she says it out loud. "Why not? Does it have a bad reputation?", Eileen asked. At the sight of the three stunned faces, she knew that she must have said something stupid. Lauryn was the first to recover her speaking capacities: "Have you been living in a cave for the past ten years?!" The slight reproach in Lauryn's voice made Eileen turn crimson: "Not exactly, no, but my family's Muggle, so I lack a lot of knowledge about the magical world…»

This was one of the moments Eileen would have loved to become invisible and sink into the ground. She had managed to make a fool of herself and the train hadn't arrived at Hogwarts yet! Strangely enough, her answer seemed to have made Lauryn as awkward as Eileen was feeling. In the end, Cassandra was the one to break the silence: « Well, in that case maybe we should give you one or two basic informations about the wizarding world. » She stopped for a while, probably to determine how she could put what she wanted to say. « Have you already heard about the War? » Once again, the end of the girl's sentence was no more than a whisper. The capital W was audible in the emphasis Cassandra put on the word « War ». Though Eileen wasn't sure which war her future classmate was talking about, it was obvious that it scared her incredibly.

« Well, I have heard about the World Wars and the Cold War, but I'm not sure to know which one you're talking about. » The three girls sitting in front of Eileen exchanged puzzled looks. Clearly now they were the ones who didn't understand half of what had been said. Marian decided to take the matter in her own hands: « She's not talking about any of the wars you mentioned. The fact is, there has been a war that ended nearly two years ago. It was caused by You-know-who… Well, you don't know who, but it was a dark wizard. He had a groupe of followers and they claimed things like blood purity and other rather…nasty ideas. » Cassandra and Lauryn were shuffling on their seat, they weren't fond of the way the discussion was going. Eileen was too stunned to talk. She was trying to assimilate all these informations, in particular the fact that the enchanted world she was expecting to step into did have a darker side. There was one part she didn't really understand: « What do you mean by blood purity? » Lauryn made an irritated gesture while she answered: « It's a bunch of rubbish if you ask me. Roughly it means that they esteemed some families were worth more than others. Whoever had a pure lignage of wizards for centuries was superior to people of mixed origins or Muggleborns. I wouldn't pay any attention to people like them if I were you. » It was pretty clear she didn't want the topic to be discussed anymore and was getting tired of the discussion, Eileen nodded and decided she would look for more information later. Cassandra gave her a last piece of advice: « The link with Slytherins is that most of You-know-who's followers were ex-students of Slytherin. It's a house that's known to value blood purity and flirt with the limits of dark magic, so I would keep my distances from Slytherins if I were you, but if you do you shouldn't have any problems. After all they're only one of the four houses Hogwarts counts. »

That closed the discussion and the girls moved on to other topics they felt more confortable with. They decided to explain Quidditch to Eileen, which took a while since the young girl didn't understand the logic of having one ball that's worth 150 points. She felt as if catching the snitch was cheating, since there was nearly no way a team could catch the snitch and still lose. Soon the evening fell and they had to change. The unpleasant discoveries about the War were buried in a remote corner of Eileen's mind and she had decided she would not allow it to spoil her arrival in a magical school.