The Cabin Was Supposed to Be Like This

The week after school started seemed to drag by. The Cabin's plans to open a Night School and prepare textbooks for its courses had filled the young wizards with enthusiasm.

Many of them gathered around Cabin's members, offering all sorts of suggestions, though most of them weren't very useful.

Gradually, each member of Cabin began to stand out for their own particular traits.

Anton didn't like noisy crowds, so he was usually accompanied by Draco, Harry, and a house-elf.

Anna had even less interest in socializing. Apart from Anton, no one could discuss magical questions with her, let alone the more fundamental aspects of alchemical machinery.

Yes, Alchemy itself was a vast field, every bit as broad as Charms. There were so many branches: those focused on the Animation Charm, those concerned with transforming materials, those devoted to Charms, and many more.

What Anna tinkered with drew on both Goblin-Made Mechanical Craft and wizarding Alchemy. That was what true loneliness on the path of magic looked like. There weren't many people in the whole world she could talk to about it.

More or less, the only people she could turn to were Dumbledore, Nicolas Flamel, and the other top alchemists in their small circle. They exchanged ideas in specialist journals and occasionally sent one another letters.

The busiest people were the Weasley twins, George and Fred. They had already gathered a group of friends to help at the Animal Paddock. Now they also hoped to write a guide to researching Magical Items, so hordes of young wizards followed them around, tending to the small animals, helping with experiments on Magical Items, and looking up sources in the library.

There was never a shortage of laughter around the twins.

By comparison, Neville had plenty of classmates around him, too. Since Harry