"But that doesn't work if things keep coming up." Nod. "I am accumulating the resources to take over the world. I have a lot of things in the air and while none of them involve harming any people lots of them involve collecting resources, including knowledge of illegal spells, including alliances with and favors owed to people who are hurting people, including blackmail material, including various things that aren't dangerous at all to anybody but on which I do owe people privacy."

"As a list of things that I should not be alarmed to find, 'miscellaneous' is not a reassuring one."

"I have never hurt anyone. I have never altered anyone's memories or their mental state or their priorities or given another person the resources to do that. I have not taken any actions that break the law, or encouraged anyone else to do that, though that'll definitely change someday. I haven't done anything that would be illegal if done to a human to a nonhuman person. I have been doing miscellaneous nonviolent legal consensual forms of favor-collecting and anything which isn't transparently that you may worry about."

"Okay."

"What do you think I should be doing differently?"

"Like, to have me stumble on fewer of your nefarious plots, or to be more successfully reassuring when I do?"

"To change everything about this myopic racist self-obsessed backward-looking society as quickly as safe and sustainable! I like you, Swan, but I'm not angling for your vote here."

"I did not catch the change in scope of conversation, that's all, calm down!"

"...the cost of not convincing you I'm not evil is that you are vaguely worried for the next couple years and then it becomes pretty apparent once I have opportunities to be evil and fail to take them. I don't particularly want to do that to you but there is a very definite limit to how much I'm willing to sacrifice to avoid it, that's why the scope matters."

"There's opportunity cost, I am not useless however twelve I am."

"I was expecting you'd continue to be willing to do non-evil things and would continue doing valuable magic development stuff either way, am I wrong there?"

"You're usually way better at having non-frustrating conversations."

"You're usually clearer on what you want from conversations. Would you like me to outline a couple nefarious plots so you have a picture of how they work?"

She takes off her bracelet and offers it to him.

He draws his wand. 

He hands the bracelet back to her. "Miranda, please."

She takes the bracelet and briskly departs.

He locks his door and changes its permissions and crawls into bed and massages his temples.

This one doesn't have an antidote, but it also doesn't have any suspicious ingredients for second years to nose around and find. It had seemed like a worthwhile tradeoff an hour ago.

Miranda goes straight to Minor.

"Hey - what -"

She holds out her bracelet. "Put it on real quick -"

He does.

"Timothy wouldn't and he drew his wand on me when I held it out."

"Well, that's terrifying."