Cho's summer, excepting her compulsory yet fairly uncomfortable visit with her aunt had been pretty good. She had visited her actual friend, she had gone to astronomy camp in Edinburgh after the horrors of sports camps and she had got in a fair bit of Quidditch practice in anticipation of try-outs. Her mum had also managed to negotiate a deal through Professor Sprout through which she would not take the train down to London, before taking the train back up to Scotland, only slightly further north than she had started off. Most Scottish students spent quite a lot of time complaining about how inconvenient it was, and questioned whether the train, which was passing Edinburgh anyway, could just stop there for a short time, enabling them to get to Hogwarts in a far less complicated manner. The Hogwarts staff had been asked about this idea before, and had of course been amenable, appreciative of the complicated journey that students North of the border faced at least twice a year, but it had been the ministry who had cited 'security concerns of the highest order' and the brief stop in Edinburgh had instead been transformed to 'compensation for tickets further north than Carlisle to London' for muggleborn students which Cho questioned the efficacy of. This year, however, Cho's mum had put her foot down. There was nothing remotely practical about her taking the day off work to apparate her down. Therefore, a compromise had been reached.

On September the first she did not board the train at 11:00 at King's Cross, and instead took the train into Edinburgh with her mum, who worked there two days a week anyway. Cho spent part of the morning going around John Lewis (they didn't have one in Dundee) to find herself some new stationery and sat in the café trying to look inconspicuous. Then in her mum's lunch break, she took her out for lunch before taking Cho to the station. The school had mentioned that the train would stop very briefly, but Cho hadn't expected it to be quite that brief. She and a group of other Scottish students ended up having five minutes to get on the train which was incredibly stressful, but far less time intensive than it had been for her in previous years. Then that night she went to bed, and sank into her bed not quite so eagerly as the rest of the students, as she had only woken up at 09:00 after a final late night of stargazing with her mum. Her mum had had a late start to the day.

The first meeting of the lunch club was slated to take place on the following Tuesday, and Cho arrived early. She had thought that she would be among the first, but clearly everyone else had arrived early as well, as she was the last to arrive.

"Alright everyone," said Professor Sprout, clapping her hands. Her stomach was churning with trepidation, and she hoped that none of them would feel too betrayed by what she had to tell them. "This week, we will be catching up on what we all did over the summer, and then next week, sans a monitoring charm and a few check ins, you will be left to your own devices."

"What?" Cho said. "I thought that you would be sitting in on meetings this year at least!"

"So did I," Professor Sprout said, "but it seems that by telling Professor Dumbledore that I want to head up an entirely new department of the school, I have given other teachers the message that I have endless time. I will instead be spending Tuesday lunchtimes supervising the gobstones club, which after an accident last year is very unpopular with Mr Filch."

"So we will be alone," Adrian clarified, "there won't be any structure or anything?"

"It was very helpful last year," Neville admitted.

"Last year you were all still getting to know one another, and I was concerned that you wouldn't have anything to talk about, but this year, as you seem to all be friends now, it would probably be more of a hindrance than a help."

"You're absolutely sure that you trust us to be responsible and not go the same way as the gobstones club?" Addie asked.

"You have set up a study group independent of me, and last year you met without me in the art room, I think you are all responsible enough to have a meeting without me."

The group seemed to have a completely silent conference before they looked to Cho for approval.

"Alright," Cho said. "Where will we meet then? We can hardly meet in your office without you."

"I was thinking the art room," Professor Sprout, thinking about how the sunny environment would probably be the perfect environment in which to meet up. "I will of course make sure that all the art supplies are put into storage, except perhaps some paper and pencils, but you won't need to worry about any toxic paint fumes. I will make sure of it."

"Will we still get the same soup and sandwiches?" Neville asked, clearly worried about his coronation chicken sandwiches.

"Yes," Professor Sprout clarified. "Everything will be pretty much the same, just without me and in a different room. You'll all be fine."

"We promise that we won't do whatever the gobstones club did," Addie said, as though Professor Sprout had been worried about the group least likely to set fire to a room resulting in it needing to be entirely rewallpapered.

"I am sure that you won't," Professor Sprout assured her, once again wondering how a group of thirteen year old boys had managed to set a fire of that magnitude with just gobstones and copious amounts of chocolate frogs. "Now," she said, holding out her notebook bound in brown paper to Cho, who seemed to have been selected as leader by the rest of the group. "I expect you to write a couple of sentences about what happens each week in the notebook. It doesn't need to be particularly detailed. All I need is a log of all the meetings. If you like you can also use it to track other things that you do in the back."

"I'll take good care of it," Cho promised.

"We'll all help," Adrian said. "Perhaps we could take turns?"

"I'll leave it up to you," Professor Sprout said, standing up and brushing crumbs off her trousers. "This is where I leave you all."

She would be back, she was pretty certain of that, but perhaps she could arrange afternoon tea at some point.

They all watched her go, before getting back to business.

"Alright everyone," Adrian said, "I have to admit that there are some parts of what people were sending that I am confused by," he got out a sheet of parchment. "Let's start."

"E1,"

"I thought that meant help," Addie said. "There's no H and no P, so I did everything except those letters."

"Well there's no way for any of us to know what the missing letters are – as there are quite a few – so we should take some time to think up a code to deal with this issue."

"Or we could assign some of the numbers to mean other letters," Neville suggested. "We could have 4 mean H and 9 mean P."

"Those are both more of a reach than 1 for pretty much any letter that is straight up and down," Cho said, recalling the all the times that she had needed to try and interpret what other people sent. Adrian had sent "DD16" as a request to Addie, and she still didn't know what it meant.

"What does "DD16," mean?" she asked, deciding to at long last seek clarity.

"Pudding," Adrian clarified. "I would have thought that was obvious? What else could it have been?"

"Well I thought that you were trying to change Addie's nickname from the incredibly simple "+E" to something far more complicated."

Addie raised her hand. "I also thought that," she said nervously. "I didn't know how to say that I hated it, so I just said nothing. I didn't think that "1-A+E-1+" really got the extent to which I hated it across. It's a terrible variation of my name."

"Oh," Adrian said touchily, "so none of you understood anything that I sent this summer. Did anyone understand anything I sent?"

"I did," Neville said, "or at least I think I did. It was hard to tell sometimes whether we were having the same conversation."

"Agreed," Cho said. "There were some areas in messages from all of you where I wondered whether I was entirely making up the meaning of what you had sent."

"So what I'm hearing here," Addie said, "is that we need a new code for quite a lot of the letters of the alphabet."

"I still can't believe that some of you didn't even understand what I was saying," Adrian kept on saying disjointedly. "Was I just talking to myself all summer?"

"Oh I don't think so," Addie said. "I only had my brother for company, so I was able to spend quite a lot of time doing problem solving, and I think I got almost all of it."

Cho got out a pen and a piece of parchment and started making a key, using the absolute joy of brackets to imply alternate meanings, thus creating carnage of levels hitherto undreamt of. After finishing this hellish invention, she gave it to Adrian, who was still clearly upset.

"Well, I think I've been able to sort out a solution to the problem," she told him brightly. "It's a key. Hopefully we will all learn it very quickly, and we will be able to destroy this so nobody can ever interpret it."

"This is absolutely awful," he said, looking over the list. "I know it will clear up some confusion, but I anticipate other confusion."

"Then we'll make up another code," Cho decided. "Who says that if one plan doesn't work you can't make another."

"Let us see," Addie said, and Cho passed it over. Neville looked at it over Cho's shoulder and the two of them grew whiter by the moment.

"I don't think I'll be able to remember any of this," Neville said. "I already struggle enough with what we have in place and remembering the password for the Gryffindor common room. I can't imagine myself ever being able to understand it properly."

"It is intimidating," Addie admitted, "but I like for things to be clear. A system like this would give us a formulaic way to communicate with each other, and will reduce confusion. No more wondering if words are other words."

"How about this?" Cho asked, typing a message into her calculator. "Let's see if any of you can understand what this says."

"D0-y0(π)-(π)πDE√5+AπD-ME" appeared on all of the other calculators pretty much instantaneously.

"Well that's an easy one," Adrian said, who had broken out of his stupor enough to join in with the efforts of the other two. "It says 'do you understand me'."

"I didn't get that," Neville said worriedly. "I really tried, but I think I'll need to practice."

"It's no bother," Cho said. "We are all going to have to practice, but if we don't ever try, we will never see if we can actually do it. Alright, here's another one."

They spent the rest of lunch time finishing off the entire plate of sandwiches, and doing more practice.

"I suppose I could get used to this," Addie said offhandedly.

"I don't know," Adrian said. He had just completely misunderstood a message and was becoming sullen again. "It may just be that I'm not built for this."

"Whatever it may be," Cho said, "we have an entire year to practice and get used to it before we have to go back to using it as our main method of communication. We are able to talk to each other in person at the moment, and we really should take advantage of that."

"So it's not urgent?" Neville said.

"It's not urgent," Cho confirmed. "If we have anything important to talk about at school, we can talk about it at lunch club or during study group."

"Thank goodness," Neville said, and his face cleared slightly, "I have to admit that I was worried for a moment there."

"It's not the most intuitive," Cho admitted, "but remember that the sooner that we all know this, the sooner we will be able to communicate in a way that is confusing to almost everyone else."

"We could think of it as a secret language," Addie said musingly. "Harry and I had one when we were younger so we could talk without Dudley understanding. It saved us from getting into trouble when he inevitably snitched to Aunt Petunia as he couldn't say exactly what it was we were saying to each other."

"Oh," Adrian said, "I have never had a secret language before."

"I suppose that it's one of the perils of being an only child," Cho said. "I didn't have one either."

"The only person I had around when I was little was my gran," Neville said, "and the closest we were to having a secret language was the bit of French that she taught me. It was mainly about food really though."

"I speak French," Adrian said, "but I suppose that if we learn this, it will be like we are all included in something, but just us. Nobody else. It will be like the library and the sandwiches. We don't have to let anyone else into it unless we really want to."

"I like it as an idea," Addie said tearfully, "Harry and I don't speak our secret language anymore, and it'll be nice to feel like that again."

"Oh Addie," Neville said in a similar tone, waving his hands in front of his face as though it would stop his tear ducts from doing their job, "you're setting me off."

"I'm so pleased that we're all friends," Cho said, with far more restraint than either of them, "the second part of last year was so different from all the time I spent at school before, and I'm so much happier now. I actually smiled because I was happy last year, not because I felt that I had to."

Adrian patted her lightly on the shoulder as if understanding what she meant. She supposed that he, like she, had been at Hogwarts longer than the others and understood the loneliness of being in a dorm of other people, yet not ever feeling like you had people there to support you.

"It's a good change, and a welcome one too," he said, with his face still mostly stoic. "Almost as welcome as hearing your brother got into trouble, Adelaide."

Cho's head shot around at that. "Did I see something about a house elf in your messages?"

"It's all a bit strange to me as well and I was actually there," Addie confessed. "You see, Aunt Petunia had baked…"

Cho strolled along the corridor in a state of happiness on her way back to the Ravenclaw common room. She knew for a fact that this year was going to be far more difficult than the last, but felt more prepared for it.

She went up to her dormitory where only Shauna was. She was lying on her bed, clearly unconcerned about the outside contaminants that she was introducing onto her bed, and reading a textbook. She looked up when Cho came in. Cho felt so happy that she grinned at her. Shauna wasn't someone she knew very well. She wasn't so openly hostile to her as the rest of the dorm was. She didn't really know much about her either. All she knew for a fact was that her father was Kingsley Shacklebolt, and a prominent Auror. She of course knew surface level facts about her such as that she had a pair of unicorn slippers and that she was better at Transfiguration than any of the rest of the Ravenclaws in their year, making her McGonagall's favourite Ravenclaw, but other than that, she drew a blank.

Shauna looked back at her as though surprised for a moment, before smiling back. "Good day?" she said apprehensively.

"The best," Cho said brightly, "I missed my friends over the holidays, so it was really nice to see them again. Quidditch tryouts are this afternoon, and I think I have a real chance."

She grabbed her broomstick from underneath her bed and grinned at Shauna, who smiled brightly back.

A/N: I wasn't going to subject poor Cho to that journey just for the sake of it. She needs her sleep.