There was a child standing alone in King's Cross station.

This wasn't a particularly noteworthy thing. There were loads of people, children included, bustling in all directions, in the British Rail station on this particular day.

This child, however, was holding a wheeled suitcase in one hand and a train ticket in the other. She stared at it in growing confusion. It said, in plain black and white text: Nine and Three Quarters. When she looked up and looked to her left, there was a sign that was marked as Platform 9. When she looked to her right, the sign was just as plainly marked as Platform 10. And none of the crowd was paying attention to a single lost looking child, it was an uncomfortable, familiar feeling.

She sighed, wishing, not for the first time, that she wasn't going to Hogwarts. Not because she didn't want to learn magic, she did. It wasn't the same magic that she was used to, but it was still magic. It was because she finally had a family after so many years alone. It wasn't the most conventional family - her parents were separated, but that was healing, slowly. After so many years bouncing around orphanages, having a family, simply having friends was something she couldn't let go of easily. She'd only had six weeks.

And they couldn't be here. Maybe that made it easier. Papyrus had driven, in his new convertible; he had repeatedly apologized for having the top up. But it was London, and it was rainy, so that didn't matter too much. Mom had sat with her in the back seat, while Sans sat with his brother up front. They'd had to let her out alone, though. And that wasn't fair... not to her, not to them.

They should have been able to walk to the platform with her. That's how it was supposed to be. That was before she'd even heard of the Ministry of Magic. About how they were not supposed to traumatize "muggles" (And she hated that term, too. How could they keep magic, something with the potential to help millions of people, out of reach of people who needed it?). They'd had wizard escorts when dealing with the majority of humanity (which is how Papyrus got both his car and his driver's license).

Dad hadn't liked it. In his opinion, the difference between being locked away and hiding wasn't very great. But he wasn't going to intentionally antagonize the humans on the surface... not on the first week of being there, anyway.

But that was partially why she was here. She wasn't an ambassador, she was too nervous around groups, and too young for that. Papyrus made for a much better ambassador than she did. But she had an invitation to Hogwarts, to join the 'Wizarding World'. And maybe that would help the monsters join human society in the long run.

But that invitation would mean specifically zero if she couldn't find her train platform. She was running through this line of thinking when she was bumped into from behind by a girl, maybe a year her senior, with red curly hair and bright green eyes. "Oh!" the girl said, in quick apology. "I'm sorry."

Frisk waved her hand, accepting the apology. When she realized that the other girl was carrying a very similar looking packed trunk, she held up her ticket in confusion.

"Oh! Platform nine and three quarters?" the redhead said, winking. "Sure, follow me." So saying, she walked over to a pillar between the two whole number platforms, and... stepped into it.

Blinking in surprise, Frisk walked to the place where the girl had been just a moment before, and pushed against the seemingly solid stone. She was rewarded with a very brief feeling of being out of sync with reality, much like she had felt when she accompanied Sans on one of his "shortcuts", and emerged a second later on, well, platform nine and three quarters, just as advertised. Stumbling, she nearly fell to the floor, only her practice with Undyne had kept her from toppling completely. If this was her introduction to the wizarding world, she was lucky the only person who noticed it was the girl that showed her the entrance.

"Ginny!" a voice called from further down the platform. "Where have you gotten to?" The girl gave a smile, and then hurried to join people that must have been her family. Frisk tried to follow, the girl had been the one friendly face, the one person who had actually talked to her, since she left Mom and her friends. But the girl had been swallowed up by the crowd.

Since she had no one to join, and no one to say goodbye to, Frisk was one of the first aboard the Hogwarts express. She picked an empty compartment, stored her suitcase. She leaned against the window, staring at all the children saying hello to friends and goodbye to family.

It only made her feel more alone.

It was most likely inevitable that the students on the Hogwarts Express would be discussing not one, but two recent prison breaks, and doing so loudly. There had been an older boy, with pale skin, blond hair, and a pointed sneering face that had emerged from his private box saying loudly how his father had assured him that the recent escapees of Mt. Ebott's barrier would be rounded up and returned to their prison shortly. "They were put down there for a reason, after all!"

He paused in his trip to the dining car to sneer at the student staring at him. She'd changed into her robes earlier than most of the others, maybe as an attempt to fit in. But her robe's lack of house emblem (though it did have a curious marking of three triangles, circle, and what looked like a pair of wings) marked her as a first year, and the wand gripped tightly in her hand was obviously no well polished Ollivander creation. It looked more like some simple tree branch then any kind of symbol for true power. He smirked at the child's cringe, and went on to collect his extra sweets.

The Express chugged on, with Frisk showing next to no emotion, watching the fields and forests race by outside with a dull expression. Around her, her compartment filled by older students she didn't know, other conversation raged. When they were not talking about the release of the Mt. Ebott monsters, it was the escape of Sirius Black from Azkaban...apparently a murderer, or Quidditch, a sport that Frisk had no knowledge of. There was no hope in joining in any of these conversations.

"Would you like something to eat, dear?" asked the woman who pushed the trolley. What Frisk really wanted was a slice of butterscotch and cinnamon pie, but that wasn't available. "That does sound like an interesting mix of tastes," she told Frisk. "Maybe on the way back." Frisk settled for a roast beef sandwich and pumpkin juice... though she wasn't sure how one juiced a pumpkin.

"That'll be seven Sickles," the woman told her. Frisk struggled with that. In the underground, it'd been the sensible ten silver pieces to the gold piece. The seventeen Sickles to the Galleon exchange rate was odd and confusing, but she eventually was convinced she'd gotten the right amount of change. She gave the woman a polite thank you, and returned to staring out the window. The English countryside's green fields zoomed by.

She finally became aware of her surroundings again when the train slowed and lights dimmed. Her curiosity had awakened, as the conversation of other students toned down to a nervous muttering. This informed her that this event was not a usual occurrence. The creature, certainly not a monster, that swooped in had no face, it seemed nothing but floating black cloak with a raised hood. It smelled though. It smelled of death.

It swept that hood this way and that, looking for something that it didn't see. Could it see? It seemed to have some sort of sensing things. When it didn't find what it was looking for, it seemed to focus on her. She could almost feel her soul, red and determined, gird itself for battle. But if there was a silver soul, or a soul of any color in that creature, she couldn't feel it. Any trace of a soul was lost against the inky blackness of its cloak.

It drifted closer, and she was overcome with a memory: A boy left behind, months ago. She could feel the boy's shirt on her hands, the pain in his eyes, the cracking in his voice. It was a scene she saw in her nightmares. The pain of leaving that person behind brought tears to her eyes. The tears ran down her face, just as the boy cried in that memory. And she was forced to shut her eyes, to lose herself to that pain.

The pain of leaving someone to a fate she considered far worse than any death. A life without love, or even hope.

In response, and without prompting, the branch, no, wand, that Frisk held lit its tip with a bright, fire red light. The floating cloak stopped momentarily, confused by this reaction from a child that should be incapacitated. A moment later, the wand emitted a ray of pure flame, striking the cloak and setting it alight. The cloak, in shock and pain of its own, fell back out of the train car. No student saw this, they were all lost in the sorrow of the cloaked figure's attack.

Malfoy had only been half right. This wasn't of the professional looking, highly polished wands found 'Off the rack' at Olivander's. Instead, and for the first time in a generation, Olivander had created a custom wand. The knobbly stick, a relic of Frisk's previous adventure, had been infused with a core the wand maker had never used before. And, although he didn't know it, when the wand was used for a sympathetic purpose, it might have just been one of the most powerful wands he had ever created.

After all, it wasn't every student of Hogwarts that carried a wand powered by her adopted mother's fur.

Arriving, finally, at Hogwarts, Frisk pulled out her suitcase, and trundled out of the train. She looked around for some hint of where she was supposed to go. She was about to make for the carriages pulled by things that didn't quite look like horses when she heard the shout.

"First years! First years follow me! Your luggage will be taken care of." It was a bigger man than Dad that shouted out to her, a bearded, beady eyed, giant of a man that was bigger than Dad. And he was leading the first years to a series of boats. They looked like the River person's boat, though this one had a lantern on the bow.

The sky had cleared, revealing a sky full of stars, and as Hogwarts came into view, Frisk was vividly reminded of the crystal cavern, where they stared with the monster kid (under a shared umbrella) at what they had both agreed was the best view in the Underground. Hogwarts was even bigger than Dad's castle.

There was a splash behind her. Someone had fallen into the water, but the giant of the man didn't seem alarmed. Only a few seconds later, the child was propped back onto the boat by what appeared to be giant tentacle. Was this where Onion-san had ended up? Frisk hoped not. That was the single most surreal conversation she remembered. Frisk pulled the robe tighter around her, the large lake had turned the fall air chilly.

When the boat ride was over, they disembarked and proceeded to the large main door of the castle. The giant-man had been joined by a positively pint sized man, scarcely bigger than Frisk herself. "Professor Hagrid," the small man said in greeting. "Professor Flitwick," he returned in surprise. "Where's Minerva?"

"Seeing to some ill students, Rubius," the small man responded. "There's been an incident already. I'll be handling the sorting, they're waiting for us."

Flitwick pushed the large door open. The doors opened into a great hall, with four long tables that must have been filled with a few hundred students. On the far side, there was a dais where the professors sat. In front of it, a single stool with what appeared to be pointed cartoon witch's hat. There were even ghosts, far more humanlike ghosts than Blooky or Mettaton. Torches hung, untethered to anything Frisk could see. The ceiling mirrored the night sky outside.

The combination of strange sights and the cacophony of noise was overwhelming to Frisk. She wanted to back out of it. All of these people, and they were all staring toward her and the similarly scared students around her. It was the second scariest room Frisk had ever seen. The scariest had been a slightly shorter hall with exactly one skeleton in it.

She recovered her composure in time to hear the hat finishing a song about the four houses of Hogwarts. A song she didn't really hear, or really remember. "Now, when Professor Flitwick calls your name, please come up, and we'll sort you into your proper house," Professor Hagrid told them, as Flitwick took his place on top of a large stool. "Applegate, Kristina..."

One by one, the students were called. They walked slowly up to the front of the hall, had the hat placed on their head, which then proclaimed their fate. They went back to the end of the tables after that, joining their newly assigned housemates. All too soon, Flitwick called out "Dreemurr, Frisk".

It was the moment she had been dreading. She could hear people muttering about what kind of name 'Dreemurr' actually was, and thought she spotted one girl at the Ravenclaw table that recognized it. She walked slowly up to the area in front of the dais to the stool, looking up at the professor. Flitwick's expression was kind in the way that only teachers could be. He knew the arriving students were scared and nervous, exactly how Frisk was right now. It had been easier to confront her father the first time, than it was to face this public spectacle.

She looked up at the dais where the other professors were sitting. Most of them were talking with each other, only half concerned with the sorting of students, but the one in the center, The Headmaster, was staring at her with a decidedly interested expression. He noticed her gaze and smiled benignly, his eyes twinkling.

Flitwick cleared his throat, regaining Frisks attention. The professor indicated the stool with his free hand, and Frisk climbed onto it. Then he slowly lowered the Sorting Hat onto the student's head.

"Hmph," said a voice in her head. Frisk sat still, curious as to what the hat would say. "The first instinct would be to say Gryffindor, as you've certainly done brave things in your past. But you don't think of yourself as brave." Frisk's memory flickered to Mom and Dad... neither of whom knew about a certain golden flower.

"You're good at puzzles and riddles, you even enjoy them..." Papyrus's face flashed in her mind... "But you don't treasure knowledge for knowledge's sake. Ravenclaw would not suit you."

"There's some part of you that wants power. But why? Ah... to help others. A specific other, to be sure, but others." After the train ride, she'd been trying to forget that face, but it bubbled back at her. "But you don't really desire it. Slytherin? No."

"In fact, you mostly value compassion. You think that the worst person in the world... could change. That anyone has the capacity to be a good person, if they would just try. Admirable for any Hufflepuff, but you will find that thought tested here. I think Helga and Godric would both have found you to be a valuable addition to their houses. It requires such extraordinary bravery, and humility, to offer compassion to... more than an opponent... to an enemy. Would you fight, though, if you needed to?" There was silence for a moment. More memories climbed to the surface, the battle with Asgore and... that thing. Memories of events that technically never happened (though if the hat detected that thought, it didn't say anything). "You would, wouldn't you?"

The child had become aware that this was probably the longest sorting of any student so far... "I've decided," whispered the hat. "and I think you have too. The best choice for you is..."