"Oh, I think they just expanded the thing that lets them tell when people are doing underage magic, for that."

Sadde doesn't shriek. There is no outburst of emotion. That is because Sadde has spent the last ten years of her life learning how to control that kind of thing. She's not perfect at it, yet, of course, but she's good enough that her only reaction is a visible darkening of her eyes—in fact, they turn quite scarlet—and a scowl.

"There is magic that tells the government when I'm doing magic," she says, deadpan.

"...Sadde, that's how they knew you were a witch," Miranda points out. "You wouldn't have got a letter otherwise."

"It had not—" she closes her eyes. "It had not occurred to me that this magic would go beyond just telling whether someone has magic or not." She opens her eyes, and they're blue again, then looks at Miranda. "You really don't think that should be on your list?"

"What list?"

"I have a list of things that are wrong with society," Miranda says. "And I don't actually know that they're doing anything with it besides identifying magical children, detecting underage spellcasting, and having a record if it turns out that someone committed a crime. None of which are exactly list material except that they could be more generous about underage casting if there weren't a Statute of Secrecy. I know the spell can expand to surveil other things but except for the time when the Ministry was taken over by Dark wizards I don't have reason to believe that it is. Except general pessimism but that doesn't make it a priority."

"Hm."

"And I'm pretty sure they don't have enough people to actually pay attention to all the stuff that it registers. They just want to know if it happens in an unexpected way that means it's a new wix," says Karen.

"...I guess."

She's still clearly fairly uncomfortable with the idea.

"I have other lists," Miranda says. "It's in there. It just didn't make the top tier."

She sighs. "I guess it's not that high a priority as long as we don't have a totalitarian government, but I'm pretty terrified that we had a totalitarian government until five months ago."

"Yes, the susceptibility to totalitarian governments is bad, I'll give you that. The trouble is that magic makes it a lot easier to sneak around and control people, and even Muggles sometimes have problems like that, anyway."

Sadde shudders.

Willow looks fairly uncomfortable about the topic as well. "So how did this guy take over the government?"

"I don't know, I wasn't here and I'm not in the government."

"I was here, but... the newspapers weren't ever really trustworthy and I never liked reading them anyway."

"That," she says, "sounds like a pretty important thing to figure out to prevent this from happening again." She sighs. "But I guess it's not that high priority. Maybe I should just take over the government myself to make sure other people don't."

"I understand the temptation," says Miranda. "There's time to learn more before you can get anywhere close, anyway."

"Yes, there is. I have to learn how to reliably float a ducking feather before attempting to take over a government, that's for sure."

Willow has a fit of giggles over 'ducking.'

Karen shakes her head and attends to her chicken.

Sadde resumes eating as well. She's not even sure what she's eating anymore, she has managed to quite forget.

Willow does not exactly need to remember what she's eating to eat a lot of it, and that she does.

"Are you just an inherently hungry person?"

Willow looks at her, with a mouth full, then swallows it all. "Yes! Also there's so much here, at home we'd always eat so healthy and green and here I can eat dessert with gluten!"