And he is escorted to the drawing room. "Roly will be telling Master George you is here."

"Thank you." 

He sits.

Roly bows and vanishes.

And a man comes in, somewhere between thirty and a healthy wizarding sixty. He looks - pleasantly surprised, which is strange. Perhaps most teenagers who ask questions don't show. "Hello," he says. "Why are you here?"

             "I plan on ruling the world."

"No one's ever pulled that off."

            "I must have some reason to think I'm better than them."

He sits down, comfortably. "So," he says, "a problem with doing favors for people who want to grow up and be a Dark Lord - maybe someday they decide it wasn't a favor, or that they don't like owing favors -"

           "That," says Timothy, "is the sort of problem I'd solve with snap uncannily accurate character judgments, which isn't a skill I've been able to teach. I don't want to be a Dark Lord, if that matters."

"Just want to resist it, no interest in learning it -"

           "...some interest in learning it."

"I don't trade in promises of future favors, even if my niece does."

          "I wasn't expecting you to. What do you want?"

"I'll put you under. Four hours. If you throw it off, good for you. If you don't - no complaining. If you suffer experimental spell damage in the meantime - also no complaining."

          Nod. 

"You can come back until you can get it."

         "How long does it typically take -"

"Oh, people vary. First day, sometimes. Some people never get it. It does get easier with practice."

         "Those are very generous terms."

"I have heard good things about you." Which is true but incomplete.

          "I accept," Timothy says.

"Imperio."

He goes home.

He destroys the letters.

He practices all summer. By the end he can make spiders dance on the walls.

Miranda and Karen both write to Minor about Muggle theater and arrive together with all three applicable parents on September 1.

Minor has sunburns and rugburns and moderate proficiency in Russian and Mandarin and some new ideas about the wards. He hugs them both.

Hugs! "Did you figure out the voltaic piles?"

"No but I have some theories and once I can do wards myself or pay someone who can do I I'll be able to narrow it down."

"Did my last letter reach you, the owl wasn't back this morning."

"- no, don't think so -"

"Oh well, it wasn't anything perishable, it'll find you eventually."

"But the poor owl'll have to turn about in mid-air! Michael met a girl in China and they made plans to elope and live on a tropical island and then they decided they hated each other. I told him he's getting predictable."

"Does he actually plot things out with these girls in advance or does he just have a knack."

"I think ...has a knack, picks girls who're looking for the same thing as he is? Timothy explained it to me once when I was ten as, like, there's a kind of person who believes that their relationships have to be serious or they're - an unmarriageably careless sort of person - but doesn't actually want serious relationships - and so people like that want to have relationships that are superficially serious but safely understood to be something else. And Michael dates people like that. I think Timothy's waiting for people to get to the age where they're looking for actual seriousness but I'm not totally sure, he didn't say."

"Oh, that makes sense."

"It's kind of dumb but I guess most of the dumbness is the part where people'll think you're an unmarriageably careless kind of person."

"Well, why is that what they think, is it dumb or is it actually usually that way?"

"I don't know, I think people change a lot between sixteen and, like, twenty or twenty-two when they're usually getting married and probably there are a lot of better sources of information about whether someone's careless than whether they had flings in school? Like, you could ask Timothy."

"I will write that down and then it will be there in ten years, I guess."

"Mmmhmmm." And he wants to tell them about Chinese.

"I still barely speak Igbo!"

"Well, I want to know about Chinese."

Oh good!

Chinese is interesting.