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Kina gave a small smile as the girl on the table snorted at her cousin's polite introduction, and took Andrew's offered hand. [color=f7941d]"The pleasure is all mine,"[/color] he said quietly to the two of them, and made towards the table. While he swung the strap of his satchel off his shoulders, a girl Bella who seemed to be quaking in her shoes and another Ravenclaw boy Morgan who looked like there was something weighing on his mind entered the room. By the time Kina had settled into his seat by the desk - taking care not to sit too close or else risk getting between the exchange between Hero and Morgan - with his satchel tucked neatly between his back and that of the chair, there were plenty of other kids who had come to join. Kina felt his eyes widen in bemusement, his mind scrambling to keep up with the stream of names that came paired with faces to place. 

When the flow seemed to ebb - though Kina had an inkling there would be more to come - he began to take out one of his textbooks from his satchel to lay it on the desk. His fingers grazed over the spine of [i]A History of Magic[/i] by Bathilda Bagshot, feeling by memory the smooth hardback it had been before becoming the crinkled surface it now was. Kina had cracked it open in his bedroom after the trip to Diagon Alley, and then stayed up the entire night reading it until his eyes were dry and in pain but eating up every word they traversed upon. Even then, he hadn't been able to finish the book. The hours between sunrise and sundown of that day had been spent by the windowsill in a feverish attempt to know everything he could have possibly missed. He didn't think there had been any other day better spent than that, flipping the last page with the last sliver of dying light, almost winded by the years of heritage that had blown past him in a flurry of words and paragraphs. 

The toes of Kina's scruffy sneakers swung lightly over the floor. He flipped the book open on his desk, never mind if he might be re-reading it. He knew with some odd certainty that the tales woven together in the text would come back to him as an old friend might - unfamiliar, and yet no stranger, illiciting odd memories that Kina could never distinguish from dreams. A second read would do Kina no harm.

One of the boys - Iorweth, was it? - mentioned in a thick cadence Professor Hagrid's lessons. He seemed to have a type of affinity to the class. Kina had come to Hogwarts expecting classes in stuffy rooms with PowerPoints on a screen, projecting images of fantastical and beautiful creatures like unicorns or perhaps an elf and slideshows with walls of information and facts about their biology and adaptations to the wild. 

Instead, they had stood outside a hut with a smoking chimney as Professor Hagrid - a large man, who towered over them with an untamed beard and who might have been intimidating by size alone if he hadn't also had eyes that twinkled and crinkled when he smiled, which was often - told them about sphinxes, and pesky pixies; mentioned a herd of centaurs he could invite to class one day ([i]as long as the planets were aligned and the stars didn't wink too ominously on the day itself, of course[/i]); waved to the sky as a silhouette flew overhead with a shrill echoing cry, casting a shadow on them, while Kina craned his neck to catch a better sight of the hippogriff before it disappeared.

It was a class that looked to be positively splendid, if Kina could begin to recognise the creatures by name before the end of the term. He looked down at the textbook before him, eyes catching onto words that sprang up from the page to him, bidding his distraction. Perhaps he should have brought the one by Newt Scamander instead. Or maybe he should start asking students like Iorweth for help in the subject. His sparse knowledge of Biology didn't stand to be applied much in Hogwarts.