She blinks at that. "Huh," she says eloquently. "That's unexpected." She looks like she's committing that to memory for a second, then says, "So, tell me more, what's it like living with magic? Well, arbitrary magic any way, like, instant poached eggs, and floating stuff, and—" She interrupts herself and spins on her heels to look at Renée. "What about school? What do little magical kiddies learn?"

"I teach very young children, so it's mostly reading and writing and arts and crafts," Renée says, "a little arithmetic sometimes. But I do go over things like magical creatures and wixen folktales and so on, and they have toy broomsticks during recess."

She silently mouths "toy broomstick," picturing little magical babies flying around on little magical broomsticks and practically melts. "That's about the cutest thing on earth," she declares. She pauses her breathless squealing for a second to try to think of more questions, and is very happy when her brain obliges her by providing a dozen more. "What other jobs are there? How do you all hide? Are there many places like Diagon Alley, all squeezed up in secret places?" She stops at these three, having chosen them in order of appearance in her head, because she expects that if she just vomits her questions half of them won't get answered. She makes a mental note to ask for paper to write them all down, and maybe find a way to do the whole pen-pals thing. "Can I send letters here?" she asks when that occurs to her.

The girl drinks the information up, even if it's not too much more exciting than muggle stuff. "Oooh I didn't know owls could do that! I thought they were just cute pets," she says. "Most animals hate me, when I walked into the pet shop there were attempts on my life by three owls, five cats and twelve mice. I did get one white owl who didn't seem to hate me, though."

"Okay, if you have an owl you can give it a letter and it'll take it wherever the addressee is," Miranda says. "Mine is named Amber, what's yours called?"

"Richard! How do owls know how to find their destinations? Do we have to tell them? Or do they read the actual addresses?"

"Owls - well, the kind you get in wizard shops, anyway - are just a little bit magic about finding people. You can tell them where to take something if you don't want to address it, and I'm not sure I'd call what they do with the envelope 'reading', but they can use written too."

The girl nods. "Your mum said she taught classes to little children. What about you? Did you go to class until recently, too?"

"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.