"I don't know offhand where one would find this information if anyone even has it. I certainly haven't heard any satisfactory answer to the question."

"Alright, thank you for your help Ms. Pince."

"You're welcome, dear."

Sarah walks over to a table and sits down. "Well that's disappointing."

"I didn't really expect much different, to be honest."

"Yeah, I guess. I'm just used to science where there's usually an answer or at least 'people are trying to find the answer but it's complicated.'"

"There are very few of us. Like... how many people are even scientists of any given type? How many—what are they called—the ones that study fossils..."

"I don't actually know. I never met one but I haven't met that many people."

"Well, those—how many of those are there? And there's, like, six billion people in the world. And almost no magical people. So maybe there just aren't enough of us to do much science."

"Yeah, that makes sense. It doesn't stop it from being disappointing though."

"If it wasn't all a secret muggles could help."

"That's true, I'm not sure how much that would help though. It depends on how many experiments muggles could actually do without wizards to help them."

"I'm sure we could get lots of teams with just one wizard to do stuff for most things."

"Maybe. I don't think I know enough to judge."

Shrug. "Definitely better than zero."

"I worry that there might be good reasons for magic being secret I haven't learned yet."

"Yeah, but... if so, no one explains them when I ask."

"The only reason I've heard is that there aren't enough witches and wizards to help all the muggles. I don't know if that's true though. I heard it from one of my roommates."

"I heard that it was because muggles would kill us all, or to protect them from us, or protect our culture, or protect our economy..."

"Why don't you find those compelling?"

"Muggles aren't violent and we don't kill each other, a prepared magical person wouldn't be in danger. We are basically muggles in psychology, we won't attack them. I don't care about cultures and ours is too old and slow anyway. I don't even know what it means to protect our economy and the person I was talking to didn't know either."

"I wouldn't discount the idea that the muggles could choose to fight or attack us if they knew we existed. People do awful things when they're scared and magic is pretty scary if you feel like you can't protect yourself. Even if you don't care about preserving cultures there are people who care deeply and will fight to keep their culture intact. Reading between the lines that was part of the reason for the last war."

"There are six billion of them, it makes no sense to talk about them like they're just one thing."

"I'm sorry for not being more precise. I meant some groups of muggles, including maybe some governments." Sarah feels that Dayo's objection is uncharitable.

"I think that's also making a lot of complicated things into a single thing," she says, oblivious to those feelings. "Like... yeah there will be horrible groups but there was Voldemort, that's not a muggle thing it's a human thing, it wouldn't get worse because muggles know about us."