"Charlie's a cop. Chief of police, for whatever that's worth in a town with like six houses and a snowplow, but still. Likes going fishing and watching hockey and stuff. He's quiet. Ren's a kindergarten teacher and she likes - novelty and exotic spirituality and weird food and travel. She manages to be as embarrassing as a white anime fan with a box of Pocky, 'rediscovering her heritage' - I think it didn't interest her until her parents died and learning about it was no longer the conventional, 'done' thing. She's a scatterbrain, I've been handling things like remembering we're out of butter or that she needs to do the taxes off and on for years."

"They sound nice. Your mother in particular sounds adorable."

"She really is."

"...My mother is dead."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"I'm--alright now. But there's a reason I'm so keen on the possibility of resurrection, yes."

"If it's doable we'll do it. Although having been legally dead will probably be inconvenient."

"She probably won't object to living in an Avalon, if it comes down to it."

"That'd make it simpler. I want to eventually reveal all the everything to the broader world but that's the sort of thing you have to do very carefully."

"Oh, yes," he says, wincing.

"See, the trouble we will have that Hogwarts didn't is they knew where to get their students. They found people with potential and those were them. We have more choices, but no way to narrow it down particularly well."

"To be fair, the Wizarding World might have had fewer wars if they had a better metric for who had power than 'people with potential.' I'd rather have a hard time finding trustworthy people amongst the billions who exist than teach a near-random cross-section of humanity."

"We don't have any affordances for giving a selection of middle schoolers who are good in their foreign language classes ethics tests, though."

"True. I expect we can do better than random chance, though."

"We don't have affordances for giving a selection of middle schoolers any tests. Or, if we did, for getting them and their parents on board with magic school, even if we did it like Sunday school and not like a boarding school. Do you have something in mind?"

"Not yet, but it will probably be a long time before we're in a position to do this. I expect to think of something."

"We'll probably have to start with critter or otherwise in-the-know students."

"Probably, yes." He shrugs. "If absolutely nothing else, we can steer clear of people who are obviously a bad idea; I wouldn't have invited Draco Malfoy to Hogwarts based on his behavior as an eleven year old."

"Yeah. Although - that textbook wasn't hard to find. We might wind up with competition eventually, especially if all someone was waiting for was the idea, or there are reclusive wizards who might encounter people who encourage them, or something."

"...I'd still rather have found it than not. At least magic is difficult enough that you're not likely to become very dangerous to anyone but yourself without a great deal of effort. Most people don't enjoy this sort of work as much as we do."

"Yes. ...It's lucky we ran into each other, isn't it?"

"Extremely."

"I mean, imagine if you'd come in after I'd finished arguing with the shop guy - you'd have found the bookstore with one rune dictionary and no textbook. Or if I'd come in the next day, I'd have found the same thing. And we would have both had to work alone."

"That would have been so inconvenient. I'm sure we each could have made it work on our own, but this is so much more effective."

"Yes. But it also suggests that the potential to be interested might not be that rare."