Flying is the beeeeeeeeeest.

Mrs. Stark tucks them into a nice little photo album and displays them to the children.

"Course not," says Tony. "It's a wizard photograph, not a video."

"No?" says Tony. "They do - that." She waves illustratively at the photo album. "What's wrong?"

"How does it do that? It's not something I did but it's the sort of thing I'd do, how does it know what I'd do?"

"...Magic?" she suggests.

"But the mad scientists found that magic that looks into people's heads doesn't work on me, so is this doing something else, or...?"

"It's not looking into your head," says Tony, "it's just - I don't know, actually, I never thought about it."

"Mrs. Stark? How does it work?" asks Bella, looking at the photos with deepest suspicion. When it turns out that Mrs. Stark has left the room she hops up and goes looking for her.

She hasn't gone far; she's sitting in a comfortable chair in another room, typing on a laptop.

"How do wizard photographs know what I would do when I didn't do it?"

"How do they guess?"

"With magic," she says dryly. "I don't know any more off the top of my head, but someone might have written a book about it that I could find with a little digging."

"I would like to read that book."

Maria shrugs. "All right."

"But it's not reading my mind somehow?"

"If they could read minds, they would guess a lot more accurately," she says. "Now, portraits, portraits are a different story. A magical painting with the right infusions can preserve a more or less accurate copy of someone's personality, and they can talk and remember things. I don't know how it's done, but I don't think Legilimency is involved. There might be some of the same magic that goes into Pensieves... do you want me to look that up, too?"

"Yes please. Are there any portraits I can talk to around here?"

"Not any you'd want to meet," says Maria. "The last Lalonde to get her portrait done before she died was a nasty old lady with strong opinions about blood purity; I've had her frozen in an attic since my wedding. And then there's Grandma Antoinette, but she only speaks French."

"...And she hasn't learned English? Why not?"