"...owls?"

"...how does 2179 do long-distance communication?"

"Demons for interplanetary priority because we get around lightspeed, computers for everything else. Owls? Pigeons are faster even if you have to use birds for some reason, and they home, how do owls find people?"

"I've never heard of them having any trouble with it..."

"Owls," mutters Cam. "Are they at least magic owls."

"I don't know. Muggles know about owls, so they're not magical creatures by our definition, but maybe they're different than your world's owls."

"Do Muggles know about mail-carrying owls? How do you handle packages?"

"Shrink them, usually. I do not think Muggles know about mail-carrying owls."

"But you don't know if someone is enchanting the owls before they begin their careers."

"I know everybody, I would know if someone did that professionally. But it's possible owls are descended from owls so enchanted, or that being around wizards makes them smarter, or something."

"I suppose I could try making a postal owl but if it worked I'd then have a demonic owl."

"I can have someone look it up, the Care of Magical Creatures professor might know."

"It's not important exactly, it just. Sounds stupid."

"It works well enough. I think Muggles just have people carry their letters to each other."

"It works. People can, like, read addresses."

"So can our owls! I have quite a few letters to send anyway, you want to meet the owls when I do?"

"Sure, why not, I would love to meet your literate owls."

He folds a piece of paper into a paper airplane, taps it, opens the door, and lets it fly off. "I'm fetching my little brother, he can go to the Owlery and get the owls."

"The paper airplane trick is cute."

"Can't do that for correspondence, they don't stand the weather well."

"You can't waterproof a piece of paper?"

"That's trivial - wind's a little harder, but can still be done - but the more charms on the paper the faster the flight and finding ones will wear off."

"Why?"

"Classical answer's that spells that aren't carefully designed to overlap well interfere with each other just slightly, eventually altering effects slightly - which doesn't matter too much if it's a light or something, it might be a little dimmer or occasionally flicker, but a flight and navigation spell that's a percent off is no good at all. There's a competing theory that the problem's really the divination - navigation on those is technically a minor divination, it's going to my brother rather than to a fixed location and even if I were sending it to, say, his favored study spot the spell would need to navigate Hogwarts."

"Why is your school named that."