"The coolest? Cooler than all of the other things that there are?"

"Well, maybe not literally the coolest thing but it's still pretty cool." She reaches into a pocket and shows a shiny little needle. "This was not a needle this morning!" she giggles.

"Ooh that's cool! I could only get a kinda silvery-looking match."

"Mine was pointy but I couldn't eye it. So, that's your favorite subject? Way to not fight the metamorphmagus stereotype."

She shrugs. "I don't see why I should fight it! It's my comparative advantage!"

"That is entirely reasonable."

"I don't really understand why it is that just happening to be a metamorphmagus would help with wanded transfiguration."

She shrugs again. "I don't think it does, I think it's probably just a coincidence. Then again, I've never not been a metamorphmagus, so I don't really know what it's like or how one thing could affect the other."

"Maybe it helps with the underlying mindset somehow. Or maybe it has nothing to do with anything but metamorphmagi are too rare to collect statistics on."

"Is there a stereotype about metamorphmagi being particularly good at Transfig?"

"Yeah."

"How rare, exactly, are metamorphmagi? I guess rare enough that there aren't any others in our year, except maybe they're being even sneakier than I am about it, but in any case there are very few firsties so."

"I don't know any others personally and I don't think there are any more in the school right now."

"It's never been big. There are some homeschoolers, but not enough to throw your estimate that much. We do live longer than muggles assuming nobody curses us to death or something, though."

"Ooh, really? How much longer?"

"Not that much. Like a hundred and forty years on the high end."

"Hmmm, interesting. Do we age differently as well, or do we just get much older without dying?"

"We age about the same for the first while but don't accumulate as much damage from regular wear and tear. So your estimates will start being off past around fifty or sixty."

Very nom!

"I'm interested in healing; I might want to train in it some even if I don't wind up being a full time healer as a job."

"I'm not sure if healing spells tend to technically be transfiguration or not. Do you know if you can shapeshift injuries away?"

She shakes her head. "I haven't ever actually tried, when I was little I didn't have fine enough control to even be able to try, and then I never did try because of habit and also because it'd be suspiciouser to muggles if injuries vanished too quickly. Well, the kinds of injuries that tended to bother me the most, at any rate."