After eating they got their timetables and headed to their first class. Transfiguration. Flora was excited to see Professor McGonagall since she had stuck up for Flora over the summer. There was a cat on the desk when they walked in, and Star immediately ran over and tried to play with it. The adult cat, who turned out to be McGonagall, did not care for this action, and gave a slight hiss. Flora went to collect her stray kitten and hurried back to her seat with Neville.

The lecture was extremely interesting. Both Flora and Hermione took pages and pages of notes. It was the practical portion of the class that was more difficult. Hermione managed to turn her matchstick into a needle quickly, but Flora still hadn't managed it by the time class was over.

McGonagall praised Hermione for completing the spell, and awarded Ravenclaw ten points. Flora was the only one who noticed that Draco had completed his first, so she wrote a short note and passed it to him.

Your transfiguration was good too, you get 10 Flora points.

Draco pocketed the note with a smile.

After lunch, they went straight to potions, the class Flora was most looking forward to. Both because she was excited to see Snape and because most of their classes were with the Ravens, so she would almost always had Hermione and Draco with her. The class itself was fun, but Flora couldn't help but notice how mean Snape was. He had never been so unkind in front of her before, and it made her blood boil. He hadn't been unkind to her personally, in fact he'd basically ignored her very existence, but his treatment of Neville made her want to punch him in the face. After the class, Neville seemed defeated. But at least they were done for the day. They all headed to the library, where Flora finally got to check out the book the sorting hat had suggested to her.

Magical Sensors Through the Ages. After hours of reading and rereading and copious amounts of notes, Flora finally understood why she could see magic in a way the others couldn't. It was a recessive gene. Both her parents had to have the gene for it to be active in her, but that didn't mean that either of her parents had been sensors. It was really rare, too. There had only been about ten cases documented, and each one had been treated horribly by the magical community. Some were killed, but most were driven into hiding. Flora decided that it would be best to keep this to herself for now. Snape probably suspected, but she doubted he would say anything. That only left Bill.

Hermione burst into the library after her charms class with the lions and had to drag Flora out, kicking and screaming. She'd been so wrapped up in the book that she almost forgot dinner, and had to put off writing Bill until after dinner.

Bill,

The sorting hat told me about a book in the library, Magical Sensors Through the Ages. I finally got my hands on it. It seems that people who can sense magic like me are not exactly liked by the magical community. I would appreciate it if you would keep the information between us for now. Professor Snape probably knows, because I had to get a teacher to sign off on me checking the book out, but he hasn't said anything.

Ron seems a little out of his depth in Slytherin, and I haven't gotten a chance to talk to him. Maybe you could write? I know he looks up to you. Classes are going well so far, but I'm still struggling to channel my magic. Hope to hear from you soon.

Flora

After sending the owl off, Flora thought briefly about sending a letter to Remus, but decided against it. Better to keep the secret close for now.

The buzz of activity around the castle didn't take as long to get used to as she thought it would. The colors were a little distracting at first, but she quickly got use to them. She soon discovered that there was a lot of ambient magic in the castle. Kids are always giving off magic they don't mean to, specifically when they're emotional. And usually this background magic would dissipate, but the castle held onto and stored it. In the walls and the floors and the artifacts. Magic given off by an emotional student fifty years ago could be picked apart and examined if you knew what to look for. She even began to identify spells just from their colors.

Every witch and wizard has their own color, of course, but certain types of magic had colors too. Charms were different shades of pinks and purples with the occasional pale yellow, transfiguration was all darker tones, and defense spells were silvery. She quickly learned that the colors the other kids could see, and the colors Flora saw were different. Intent made a difference as well, if your intending to harm someone there was red mixed in. The book didn't go over any other types of intent, but it did say that sensor magic is similar to goblin magic, a piece of information she would store away for later. There's always a burst of color that everyone could see, but the lingering colors were the one's only Flora could see. It was a bit frustrating to learn who could see what, but Flora had always been a quick study.

There was one spell that Flora saw everywhere, and she spent a few days trying to figure out what it was before the twins gave her the answer. They'd put compulsion charms on certain seats at the Gryffindor table, and those who sat in the seats were trapped there.

Compulsion charms. In weird places. Like the door to the third floor corridor. Dumbledore had specifically told the student body to avoid it, so why had someone put a compulsion on it? There was also a compulsion charm on some random empty classroom. Flora had gone in, but there hadn't been anything in there. It was suspicious, and she'd be on the lookout for more. The Prophet had even been compulsed, but only once.

As the months flew by, Flora had gotten into a nice routine. She had tea with Hagrid every Saturday morning, then sign practice with Cedric (though that ended as soon as they found a spell that imbued her and everyone else with knowledge of sign; the only downside was that the spell made you really tired for about an hour after it was cast, while your brain stores the information), then study group with her friends. The group had originally just been Flora, Hermione, and Neville, but they quickly folded in Draco, Ron, the twins, and their friend Lee.

Draco was a bit of a mystery. He could switch between cruelty and kindness in the blink of an eye, and Hermione didn't like him. He'd agreed to be nice to her, but Flora still caught him scoffing or rolling his eyes at what she said. Draco said that it was because she was so ignorant of pureblood culture. Flora told him that if the purebloods actually taught muggleborns about their culture, then they wouldn't be so ignorant.

"/You don't get to hide away all your secrets and then be upset when people don't know them,/" she'd said, and Draco had run off to owl his father immediately.

Ron was another mystery. He'd been pleased after getting sorted into Slytherin but none of the other snakes liked him, so he spent most of his time alone at first. He'd blown off Flora's early attempts to include him as pity, and only agreed to join the study group when his grades had started to fall. He and Draco fought a lot at first, but then bonded over a mutual love of chess. Chess turned out to be the first step in getting the Slytherins to like Ron. One of the girls, Daphne, had come over an insulted Ron's strategy while he was playing with Draco. Ron glared back at her, but invited her to watch the rest of the game. Then he beat Draco in three moves. Daphne looked appalled, and ran back to report to the other Slytherins.

Flora was doing pretty well in her classes. She got top scores on all of her papers, but she was still struggling with performing spells. Professor Snape had been giving her private lessons on silent casting, which did in fact involve a lot of meditating. Her accidental magic was still giving her trouble too. If she had a nightmare, she'd wake up to everything in the dorm floating spinning around the room. She'd changed the colors in the dorm room too and a prefect had to be called to change it back.

Cedric tried asking her about her nightmares, but she didn't want to talk about it. Flora wasn't very close to the girls she shared a room with, Susan, Hannah, and Megan, but after a particularly bad nightmare Susan had come up and said that her Aunt also suffered from nightmares. She promised that no one outside of Hufflepuff would hear anything from her, and even offered to write her Aunt about the potions that helped her.

Flora's best class was potions. She was the top of their class in it, and she loved getting praise from Snape. She saw him daily for her health potions, so he ended up being the adult she spent the most time with. Cedric, a third year she'd learned, kept escorting her to Snape's office every night for her potions.

Snape was similar to Draco in that he could be incredibly kind to her one moment, and short with her the next. She didn't really know what to make of it, but she had other problems to deal with. Specifically, the third floor corridor door.

She knew she should ignore the compulsion, but she couldn't help it. The compulsion itself was strong, but that wasn't what made her decide to breach the door. She needed to know what game Dumbledore was playing. While exploring the castle with the twins after hours, she opened the door. After seeing a three headed dog, Fred slammed the door shut and dragged Flora away. She mentioned the dog to Hagrid at their next tea and he had gotten really agitated about it. He knew something, but he wasn't saying anything.