"Criminal." He digs through his bag. "So this is the score for something you'd sing, something you'd play with chords is going to look more complicated -" and he sings every note between explaining how the notation works - "now this isn't actually well designed for a vocal arrangement, but you'd need something like this if you had the whole arrangement -"

Miranda is very attentive and takes notes.

He likes talking about music. He might even enjoy it more than having absurd doomed romances. "So musical notation is mostly what-to-do-over-time, which I think you'd preserve for a spellcharting system, right?"

"Yeah. There's - different degrees of freedom, but I think something loosely similar where location of a symbol corresponds in some way to location of the wand and then it's modified with other stuff and then you write 'smoothly' or whatever on top works."

"I'm super excited to see what you come up with."

"Do you want to consult on intermediate drafts?"

"For sure!!"

"Okay!"

And she goes off to work on that.

Ares has a split lip. Tyche does not consider her favor discharged.

Does Aaron know what happened this time?

Was talking with Phelps under a privacy muffler, looked at Corner funny, got punched.

...okay, this time Timothy's going to try to waylay Corner.

Corner can be most easily waylaid on his way out of Charms Club.

Does he care to help file all these papers Timothy's inexplicably left too late, Timothy'll make a Hogsmeade run for him.

Oh yes he needs things.

"What for?"

"Dad has this tiny owl, doesn't like to send anything bigger than a book, so I'm already out of some stuff. Chestnuts mostly, I eat a lot of chestnuts - if the elves weren't on neither-seen-nor-heard I'd just ask them -"

"There's a portrait - still life of a fruit bowl - on the second floor. Third floor on Thursdays. You tickle the pear, it opens to the kitchens."

"Oh. Thanks. Well, I can help you file stuff anyway if you like."

"You can let me know if you think of anything the elves can't fetch you." And a little while later, "I heard why you punched Trembley the first time, why'd you punch him the second time?"

"I know he was talking about me. Or my family."

"Gonna have a long seven years if you try to handle that by punching people."

"I don't care."

Nod. 

"How do you sort these ones, are they by subject -"

"Yeah, and then alphabetically. What's your favorite class so far?"