Disclaimer: Hogwarts and all you recognize belong to JKR. I
infringed with the best of intentions.  Dedications: To Chelle-
sama for being my beta and my twin. To Arabella for writing
'Before the Beginning'. To Sugar Quill for being a great place.
Notes: This borrows many, many wonderful ideas from Arabella's
'Before the Beginning', like the meaning of the house colors and
the sett. So go and read it! Read it now! GO! READ! She
graciously allowed me to use her ideas (which was good, I'd
already written the fic) and now I love her forever.  Sett:
badger burrows. The Eurasian badger has the largest and most
complex setts, often inhabited for thousands of generations, and
continually enlarged, they have multiple rooms and as many as
twenty different entrance holes, though the record number of
entrances is over one hundred.  To be Hufflepuff  "So, you've
been sorted into Hufflepuff." The young man standing in the
center of attention of the Hufflepuff common room nodded
thoughtfully. "Ashamed of that, are you?" He