"Yep. Mum taught me when I was her class's age and then I had other teachers, here, and then a different one while we were in Australia, and now we're back and it's all Hogwarts professors."

"...Your ears," Miranda says. "Are you a Metamorphmagus? If that happens when you sneeze how do you hide around Muggles?"

She blinks and raises her hands to her ears, and groans. "This hadn't happened in two years!" she complains, as they reduce back to regular human-shaped ears. She taps them to make sure they're the right shape and sighs. "And the answer to that is 'fairly badly.' That's part of the reason why I think my conversation with the Hogwarts representative might have been a bit different than usual."

"I guess it must've been. But that's cool, though, you'll figure out how to only do it when you want to eventually I bet, and most people can't do it. ...Anyway, some maths, a little stuff that Muggles call science but not a lot and we didn't mostly call it the same thing or do it the same way. Astronomy is more from a divination perspective, chemistry is all from a potions perspective, physics is all really basic and from a 'how stuff acts without magic around' perspective, biology's from a herbological or transfiguration perspective. Even for students who can't cast spells yet."

"I can mostly control it now," she says, and by way of demonstration has her eyes shift through a bunch of different colours before returning to the one she'd been wearing (clear blue). "It's just that sometimes, when I really lose concentration, or I'm really tired, or really angry, or really sad, or really frustrated, that it happens accidentally. I mostly get by. People tend to be awfully incurious though," she muses. Then she purses her lips and says, "Would you happen to have some pen and paper? ...or parchment and quill, I guess. I keep having these questions then forgetting them, and I should probably write down the stuff you say."

"Oh, I have pens, they're much more convenient than quills. It's worth knowing how to use quills in case you get a teacher who insists, but here's a ballpoint." Miranda hands her an ordinary Bic and a bit of parchment.

"Cool, thanks!" she says, and starts writing them down. After a while, she decides she's done, and beams up at Miranda. "So I have this list of questions and I think mum might tell me I'm being bothersome if I asked them right now," she explains.

"Well, I can probably answer some of them anyway."

She looks them over. "Well, I guess the one I'm most curious about is, why all the secrecy? I mean, just with the stuff from Diagon Alley it looks like magic could be used to improve on muggle lives a lot! Not to mention the whole thing where magic users are all misleading scientists everywhere, kinda. I mean, I'm sure there must be some pretty good reason for this, but I... haven't been able to think of one? And granted I've only been thinking about this for a week and I'm rambling, sorry."

"Yeah, um, I don't really agree with all of that. But the idea is - there's a lot more Muggles than wixen. And it would be really overwhelming if they wanted us to do magic things for them all the time. Also historically they didn't like us very much and sometimes set us on fire and there is absolutely no chance that Muggles have learned to be any nicer since then. Therefore they can't know we exist. It's... pretty dumb. But that's the idea."

She purses her lips. "It... I mean, surely we're not the first to think of this, right? Surely someone else has thought of this and tried something and failed, or something? I mean, maybe I'm overestimating how powerful magic is but it sounds like those things are... fixable."

"Nobody's tried recently. It's very illegal and if you show magic to an unauthorized Muggle they get memory charmed, which is awful."

She gapes. "They get what. They get what?!" She stops, closing her mouth and working some things out. "How freely do they use this power?" she asks, almost in a whisper.

"It's probably never happened to you. It... might have happened to anyone you rabbit earsed in front of besides your immediate family who said anything that a wizard noticed."

She looks ill. "That's very likely, yes," she says, mutely.

"But most accidental magic isn't that obvious and most people don't do magic in front of muggles even accidentally. So it's probably not happening quite constantly, but it means you'd have to get the law changed before you could do civil disobedience or anything."

She still looks fairly ill. "I..." she looks down at her feet, then at Miranda again. Her eyes have changed colour; it's almost unnoticeable, but they are in fact somewhat darker. "I think that sounds like a great idea."

"I think so too. But we're eleven. Well, I'll be eleven in two weeks. And I haven't thought of a way to get anybody to listen to me about it yet."

"I'm listening!" she says. "I wonder if other muggleborns wouldn't think the same? At least if we talked to them?"

"Well, Renée cares that I care but she doesn't think it's a particularly huge problem."

Sadde stares for a second, before blinking a few times. "Mum's gonna think it's a particularly huge problem," she comments. "Are there any other horribly immoral things going on with our government? Do they maybe burn kittens for fun on the street?"

"I have a list," says Miranda, and she goes into her bedroom to rummage for her list.

Sadde wonders whether she should follow.

"You can come in just don't read my notebooks," Miranda says over her shoulder. Rummage rummage.