But now she has Potions class to go to. She should probably get up and do that. Not going to class counts as mucking up, so she makes herself get up and get dressed. Can't muck up. If you do, you can't be a witch.
That thought turns the rest of her hair white.
"Um, walnut is supposed to mean intelligence and innovation - I'm not just complimenting myself, they all mean things like that - and hazel means self-control and understanding your own feelings, and pine means independence and introversion and being going to live a really long time, and rowan is for being pure of heart and supposedly rowan wand owners never go Dark, and willow means potential. And I don't know what chimaera or whatever Miranda has would mean, but unicorn hair is supposed to be consistent and hard to turn Dark and doesn't like to change owners, and phoenix feather is the least common of the Ollivander kinds and it sometimes does useful things on its own, and dragon heartstring is powerful and quick to learn how you do magic and of the Ollivander kinds it's easiest to turn Dark."
"Potential and reliability, I guess? Huh. I'll take it," she says with a smile. "Do wand lengths mean anything?"
"People think longer wands might mean stronger personalities? I'm not sure if there's anything to it and anyway it's not consistent, if you break a wand you can get one of a really different length that likes you just fine. I think it's a coincidence Miranda's are both almost the same."
"Potions is the weirdest class to be having this conversation in," observes Miranda. "How do we want to pair? I think we're supposed to pair. I wonder where Professor Slughorn is."
Jenny seems to have perked up while talking, and Emma's hoping having a new person to chat with will distract her, but she's hardly going to say that out loud, in front of Jenny.
(Why no, Emma's shyness around New Person is not at all a factor. Nope.)
"Cool. Um, I got the time right, right? Professor Slughorn should be here soon? Now? Ish?"
And with that, Professor Slughorn appears with a sunny smile on his walrusy face. They will be making a simple potion today, which does nothing but smell very different from any of its ingredients, as an introduction to some basic potions principles. He makes no issue about inter-House pairing.
Emma quietly begins assembling ingredients per instructions. They're not the most thorough instructions she's ever seen, but it's not exactly a complicated recipe.
Jenny makes a couple piles, but starts to panic rather quickly. She looks at Karen with a meek, for her, expression. "Er, am I doing this right?"
"It's my first day too! Let's just - go slow," says Karen, and she starts narrating what she's doing, reading aloud the labels on things and the instructions on the board and assembling more piles and starting to chop up the lily petals.
Miranda, meanwhile, helps Emma some, but seems more interested in reading their textbook about the theories they're illustrating than actually making the potion. It's not like it's going to do anything useful.
"Thanks," Jenny says weakly. She starts measuring out Standard Ingredient into a phial. "Sorry, I'm sorta new to magic. Like, all of it."
Emma's unbothered by this. Potions is just following directions. She is very good at that. As she grinds up some mistletoe, she peers over Miranda's shoulder. "Anything interesting?"
"Yeah, actually. There's an entire little appendix about potion smells and why they smell like things. Apparently most potions don't smell like their ingredients, which... is good, because some of them you have to drink and most potions ingredients aren't that tasty."
"Muggleborn?" asks Karen. "That's okay, you'll catch up. We know stuff from our parents, but we've none of us got to try things before."
"Yep, Muggle," Jenny agrees. 'Muggleborn' is new to her and she files it away. "It's... there's just a lot, you know? There's all this general stuff I don't know. Like Potions being wandless! If Potions is wandless, where's the magic come from?"
"Nothing about this specific potion. But apparently mistletoe is in a lot of potions that wind up smelling funny -" Miranda starts shredding something that needs shredding. "It also does other things, but this is one of them."