"What do you even transfigure kittens into?"

"Dishware, usually. If you can untransfigure it and still have a live kitten then you're doing the precision work correctly."

"Dishware. Huh. Are kittens actually harder than rodents -?"

"No - new species are harder than familiar ones, larger creatures harder than smaller ones, but mammals are all about as complicated."

"Gotcha. How many kitten casualties are there usually?"

"Uh, it takes most students a couple tries and there're always one or two who can't get it for the life of them. - even if future people feel very strongly about kittens I assume they feel more strongly about slavery, right, I can stop personally and mysteriously hint that scrupulous avoidance of kitten death will advantage people but it'd be a silly battle to pick beyond that -"

"I mean, you ask people to rank a list, sure, if they hear about the kittens first they maybe make that their life mission and don't drop it in the face of other priorities."

"- really."

"Animal lovers. Very susceptible to kittens. On account of they're so cute."

"I will advise everyone not to mention the kittens to people from 2179."

"Rodents are more defensible."

"Which is to say, less cute?"

"That and they're prey animals and some animal lovers aren't that hypocritical."

"- okay. Dare I hope we can safely continue chopping up Mandrakes?"

"Dunno, what's that?"

"They're plants with roots that look - and cry and so forth - like human children."

"You may need to maneuver around champions of mandrakes even if you are very sure they are nothing more than eerie facsimiles."

"We're not really very sure. I looked into it for a while and they're definitely not smarter than human babies, which is good enough for me, but -"

"Infanticide is also unpopular but abortion is okay but mostly on bodily autonomy grounds..."

"Maybe you have better antidotes and we can phase the Mandrakes out."

"That's what they're for? Antidotes to what?"

"All kinds of magical effects - undoing all kinds of curses and transfigurations, petrification, most kinds of poisoning -"

"We do not have anything on deck for the curses, transfiguration, or petrification, for, uh, obvious reasons. I mean, angels can do transfiguration and petrification type things but that's different."

"I wonder if our counters work on things that angels changed."

"Could get awkward, since if an angel turns somebody to stone they are then just stone, i.e. dead and waking up in Limbo."