"...you'll tell me that you were practicing the Imperius curse but not how you learned it?"

"One of those things endangers people other than me. And one of them you already knew."

"Is there anything I should know."

"I'm not going to hurt people. But it'd be insane to go for something as high-profile as Minister, let alone higher than that, without knowing how to protect myself."

"How d'you throw it off."

" - practice. I tentatively expect you'd be good at it, it's - adjacent to Occlumency, and a willpower thing, and a carefulness about tracing your thoughts thing."

"How much practice -"

"Supposedly varies from 'first try' to 'months'."

Nod.

"I will not recommend to you that you do what I did, and I will not refer you to resources to do it. If I learn of a better opportunity I'll tell you."

She nods and leaves.

He turns the mouse into a teacup, makes tea. 

Twimble receives Timothy's note and awards Miranda fifty points for alerting Timothy to the plight of the merperson, which is about 10% of what the first-years who were tormenting it lost in the first place.

Miranda goes to Winkelstern with her notation system and he suggests some small changes and awards her ten points for it, which she feels does not fully account for how useful it is. She makes a point of handing out notated translations of every spell they do in Charms at the start of class - she gets a third-year Timothy introduced her to to demo the spells in exchange for teaching her the system before anyone else in her year gets a look at it.

It catches on; it's pretty useful. 

Minor notices that Miranda's a bit subdued.

Well, she isn't going to volunteer an explanation.

Maybe she found the merperson thing really upsetting.

That is her explanation if one is solicited. You can't just fish people out of the lake to look at them.

Yeah, no kidding. Idiots.

She is not sure anyone has apologized to the merfolk, Minor has talked to them before and knows how, right?

Yeah he picked up the language first year. He bet Timothy communicated something but he'd be happy to go for a swim and apologize and assure them the students involved were punished and so on.

That would probably be a good idea unless merfolk are the random vengeance types and can't tell humans apart or something.

"I don't know if they can tell humans apart but they seemed pretty reasonable when they were teaching me their language."

"Maybe I should come with you to be obviously a different color from the other humans or something?"

"Sounds good."

Miranda learns the Bubble-Head Charm and off they go.