"See, I can't do experiments like that because I can't take stairs very quickly."

"Why not?"

"I fall! Like remember how I asked you to hold Amber on the boat."

"There really ought to be a spell or magic shoes or something for that but I can't think of any."

"I could probably invent one. When I'm older. Doesn't help Swan experiment now, though."

"Well, don't hoard your results and maybe you'll find useful shortcuts I can take instead of trying to run."

"Maybe I was planning to sell them and fund pushing adoption of an Igbo alphabet!"

"You can still sell them to people other than me if you like," she says generously.

"What I actually want to do is put together a complete theory of -"

"Way!" says the professor. 

"Yes, sir?"

"You were late already and have since exacerbated that disrespect by chattering."

"No disrespect intended, sir."

Miranda is promptly quiet and attentive.

He has enough brothers who have vivid and probably-exaggerated stories of horrible beatings for lateness, and even Timothy who does not exaggerate and does not tend to get into trouble with authority has come home for breaks with evenly spaced bruises. He will also be quiet and attentive. 

They are supposed to float things!

C'mon, things: float.

His pronunciation is very precise and the things should float on the first try but they don't.

Hers don't either. Nobody's do actually.

Karen manages it on the second though!

Swish and flick swish and flick what's the theory here about what the wand movement is actually doing, what's the relevant level of precision, is it the same for everybody, are people who do this with staffs or other substitutes doing something analogous, have variants on this been tested, what do they do...

"I've heard it can matter what your wand's made of, the precision thing."

(Miranda finally gets her thing to float.)

"That would be interesting; if not all wands are maximally precise is that just because affinity matters more or is precision a tradeoff with power or flexibility or -"

(He is told to practice getting the thing to float.)

(He does that.)

It's really unfortunate that the Charms professor prefers to suppress classroom discussion like this. Miranda supposes they can talk about it and look things up in the library later. Float float float thing.

Karen tries variants. Slower gestures, quicker words, smaller gestures, quieter words.

His thing floats! Look at it, it's floating, bounce-bounce-Zachariah's-judging-him-bouncing-isn't-dignified - he glares Zachariah down and starts trying variants too.

Miranda floats her thing with somewhat less of her attention and writes down what happens when Karen tries variations (usually the thing just floats normally; smaller gestures make it float lower and twitch less, though.) When Karen has run out of experiments Miranda works on getting her thing to follow her wand once it's been floated.

Then she sticks her wand back in her hair and tries her other wand.

Her thing shoots up to the ceiling and lodges there.

"...um."

"How'd you do that?"

"With my other wand." She puts it back in her hair and gets out her normal wand and tries to coax her thing back down.