He grins. "Anyway, Winky visited yesterday."

"How'd that go?"

"It was... curious. Turns out the reason Turvy said she was talking so much about her feelings was because she was, erm, crying a lot all the time about her dead ex-masters."

"Oh poor thing!"

"Wasn't pretty," he nods.

"They get really attached, especially if their families are nice to them."

"I don't know if they were so nice to her," he says. "I mean, one of them actually fired her."

"Oh no! The poor elf!"

"Yeah, fired and then they died, she was pretty inconsolable at first. Eventually I got her to talk about her feelings, though."

"Was she better at it than Turvy?"

"She was sufficiently good," he shrugs. "From what I gather, she has a very very strong instinct about what a 'good elf' is supposed to do, no two ways about it, no possibility that something else might also be a good way to be an elf. The actual skills related to it, her mum taught her, but she said that there wasn't ever a time when she didn't know what it meant to be a good elf. Or that she didn't love her Mr. Crouch."

"That doesn't mean it wasn't acquired. I can't remember not knowing how to read, but that just means I wasn't forming episodic memories that young."

He nods. "That's true, I suppose. She also said something to the effect of it just... being obvious, or something. The 'what a good elf is' thing. She said that it was obvious, but she didn't know how it was obvious, were her words, I think. Anyway, the least horrifying hypothesis here is that they're in fact artificial. If they're domesticated then it's likely that there are terrible side effects to their psyche because of it, and if they're just brain washed that's terrible all by itself. She mentioned one elf who was a terrible elf and who tricked his master into freeing him but he died last year. I wonder if I could find elves that dislike their masters and get their opinion on the matter..."

"They must be vanishingly rare."

"And embarrassing. Nobody's going to tell you their elf is terrible."

"But it sounds pretty important? I mean, there's a pretty non-negligible probability that we have an entire species of brain washed creatures here. Except there's nothing I can do about it before I'm at least as famous and about five times as influential as Harry Ducking Potter."

"I mean," says Miranda, "yes, this is very creepy, but. House elf origins are really obscure; so probably wizards are not actively doing things to each new baby house elf. The house elves who actually exist in real life today prefer to be how they are. And it might be completely impossible to stop them-as-a-group from being that way without eradicating them as a species, which they would and should object to. It is extremely likely that you could spend a huge amount of time getting to the bottom of it and not having anything at the end other than a really good reason to think some dead wizard was a really bad person. Nothing actionable."

"I knoooow!" he groans. "Magic should fix all the things not make there be more things to be fixed." Sigh.

Pat pat.

"There's lots of projects that you can get somewhere with. And if you want to make house elves your thing too you can, it's just probably lower priority than getting good at magic and politics."

He sighs again. "Yeah. I guess fixing Slytherin could be my training grounds for politics," he muses.

"It's... ambitious."

"Stop the presses, boy who chose to be Sorted into Slytherin is ambitious," he deadpans.

"The joke was intended."

"Am aware," he grins.