"The trick is, it takes cooler and cooler things to get the feeling, but all you have to do is keep learning how to do cooler stuff all the time."

"Exactly. And now I'm going to magic school and I get to, and, I mean, I could have learned computers, too, but I'd have to spend a long time just getting to be able to understand stuff that isn't new to me as a finished thing even if I didn't already know how to put it together. All magic is new to me except my little poems which they don't even teach here because they're too trivial, so it starts sort of at full speed, you know?"

"Yeah," she says, nodding, "I get what you mean."

"Tomorrow I get to learn to fly," says Bella, squirming with joy.

Tony giggles. "You're really cute!"

"Well, I'm excited! I didn't know people could fly. Why did I have to take a bus here, anyway, why didn't we all go on a - a train of broomsticks or something?"

"...Because that would be hilariously impractical?" she suggests.

"Not so good for mass transit?"

"The latest in flying mass transit is still Thestral-drawn carriages," says Tony. "Those're flying winged horses you can only see if you've seen somebody die."

"Why can you only see them if you've seen somebody die?"

"I dunno," she says, "because they're magic and that's how they work?"

"Is there nobody who figures this stuff out?"

"Sure," says Tony, "but I am not that person."

"Oh. I'm going to have to spend a lot of time in the library, I think. Can thestrals see each other? Can animals see them?"

"I'm pretty sure they can see each other or I have a hard time imagining how you'd get new Thestrals," she says. "No idea about other animals."

"But you have to see a person die to get to see them, not, like, a spider."

"Yeah."

"That is weird. Do people who aren't humans count?"

Tony shrugs helplessly.

"Sorry," laughs Bella. "Just, you're there, and the librarian isn't back from vacation till tomorrow morning so I can't go look it up in the library right now."

"It's cool," she laughs.

Bella writes all of her questions down for later. "It would be only fair if you interrogated me, but I suppose I don't even maybe know anything you really want to know."

"I don't really have that many pressing questions about, like, stuff," Tony admits.

"Well, if you think of any, you can ask me," Bella says.

"Deal."