"How good a reason is good enough?"

"If people're in harm's way and you've already tried to find me normally? I trust your judgment or I'd just have the door deposit you back in the common room like it does for everyone else."

"Okay."

Second years get to handle mandrakes!! Mandrakes, as always, provoke some idle discussion of what if they're actually psychological babies that sure would be something.

Miranda doesn't know very much about babies, but she's sort of worried they're just very weird adults. She observes them nervously.

They act like babies.

So they can't count, do anything that seems like it might be communicating more complex thoughts than "that's bad", imitate mildly complex behavior like clapping or waving -?

Nope!

Okay then.

Ravenclaw and Slytherin have History of Magic together.

Yay! Miranda has managed to make friends, approximately, in her own year and own House, but Karen and Minor are her favorites.

And the History of Magic professor does not mind if you pass notes as long as you don't mind if she occasionally enchants them to read their contents out loud, so as long as they want to discuss magic experiments they can chatter all class. And they do want to discuss magic experiments, magic experiments are very satisfying.

Magic experiments are great! What has Minor been up to, Miranda has been playing with her overpowered wand and can make quite a loud noise if she Vanishes things with it.

He did some mostly-aesthetic work with the strings-and-beads model of Hogwarts over the summer and now it's stabler and you can endeavor to navigate it with the beetles they're turning into buttons in Transfiguration. And the stint in China let him try their style of casting, he can't get anything more interesting than a spell that does pretty much Lumos but with whiter light but he finds excuses to use that one all the time.

Oooh, he should totally teach them that one.

He totally will!! Zachariah asks to learn and Minor says 'sorry, no, I promised not to share it with strangers.'

Eyeroll.

He doesn't have to like them.

And she's allowed to roll her eyes.

"Do you like him?"

"He's fine. Sometimes we partner in Potions and he likes hearing Nnenne's Muggle stories."

"Are they interesting stories?"

"Some of them are."

"What sorts of interesting things're Muggles doing aside from voltaic piles?"

"Discovering asteroids. But most of it wouldn't interest you, it's just about Nnenne's Muggle friends going to church and having to darn their socks and stuff, he thinks it's neat."