"Do you think he's up to anything else."

"Dunno. You're the Slytherin."

"Yeah."

We can go to China this summer, Minor's father replies. Transcription of Chinese adequate for incantations will be a challenge; a universal alphabet will be more of one. Both are worthy of your attention. And follows three pages of what he knows about Chinese and Muggle (they've all been Muggle) efforts to design an alphabet for it, followed by two pages about barriers to development of a universal alphabet - designing an alphabet that could accomplish the vast majority of living speakers would be much easier, though perhaps less appealing - and then much nitpciking of Minor's mapping of Hogwarts project and some followup questions Minor should ask his transfiguration professors and copper and zinc and speculation about which of Hogwarts' ambient magic might take issue with electricity and your eels are on the way, it turned out to be a challenge to get them delivered alive.

Minor reads the letter three times and drinks it up delightedly and then races off outside and off school grounds to build himself a voltaic pile.

Miranda's sitting outside herself - it's unseasonably warm and she doesn't like being shut up in the common room, given that her friends are mostly Ravenclaws - and observes him zooming by. She blinks, then goes over to see what he's doing.

"Hey! I'm going off school grounds and am probably going to get whipped for it, but it's for the best reason anyone has ever had short of, like, imminent disaster, want to come?"

"...why are you going off school grounds?"

"Have you heard of Alessandro Volta? He's a Muggle."

"No, what is it I would I have heard of him about?"

"Some kinds of living things produce electricity - I wish I could tell you more but that's about all we know about it - people thought it was something biological - except last year he figured out how to produce electricity chemically. By building this thing called a voltaic pile. And now people are building them everywhere, and experimenting with them, and my father sent me the letter Volta wrote the Royal Society and also the materials to build my own, and I did, and it didn't do anything, and Dad got it to work at home but not at the Ministry, so now we're thinking maybe magic is a kind of electricity, or maybe wards are disruptive to electricity, or something, and I really want a voltaic pile so I'm going to go off-grounds and build one."

"Do you not have Hogsmeade privileges, then, because if you do you should probably just wait until a weekend and try there."

"The Ravenclaw prefects are really picky about giving them to first years."

"You could tell me how to make one and I could ask Timothy."

"I wanna make one."

"Do you even know exactly where the edges of the grounds are?"

"No. I also don't know if that's exactly where electricity would start working, if that's even the reason it's not working - I'm importing some eels -"

"...eels? How are owls going to bring you eels?"

"My dad said he was working on it."

"Well," she says, "the offer to go build a thing and take notes in Hogsmeade if Timothy will give me village privileges is open but I don't think I will go wandering off out of bounds to see this one."

"...guess that's worth trying first."

"Probably, yes."

"Anyway, here's how to build it -" and he explains.

Miranda takes notes!

"Please tell me all about it?"

"Of course!"