Silencing charm! Very very long letter to his father! And he settles in and starts reading.

Cam asks Bar for a meal recommendation, which he buys with counterfeit and eats while he works.

The future has lots of stuff and he has absolutely no scientific education. This is very interesting reading.

"Do go ahead and ask if something is too void of context."

"I've just been presenting it all to my father as a puzzle, I bet there is enough context and it's just that I'm not good enough with it and he'll be able to come up with an explanation."

"I will be very surprised if Introduction to Concepts of Programming published in 2038 has enough context for people in 1802 who are not personally Charles Babbage. Maybe not even him, when was he -" Looks it up. "He's currently thirteen in your world, so likely not even him."

"I will tell him that you said that and then he will try twice as hard. Might still be beyond him, I don't know, but there's also enough here that I'm not in a hurry to get to Introduction to Concepts of Programming either."

"Well, there's 'information-theoretically possible to extract value from' and 'enough'."

"Okay, okay, what is programming and why would Charles Babbage be able to do it."

"He invented the concept. Maybe unless you count Jacquard, who may have done his bit already, but Babbage is more directly relevant to computers. Programming is how you get computers to do things that are not 'sit there' and 'inefficiently heat the room'."

"And computers are your little stick thing -"

"Computers start as monstrosities that take up entire rooms and can barely add two-digit numbers. Eventually they are my stick thing that obeys my thoughts and is cryptographically secure against demons and can hold more writing than the entire human race has as of 1802 produced."

"- wow -"

"I'm fond of my stick thing."

"I bet. Any guesses as to why they don't work in Hogwarts -"

"Are there other things that likewise won't?"

"There's the thing Minor's constantly toying with - with the voltaic piles - he got electric eels in to check if they worked, they work fine, so it's something else going wrong with voltaic piles -"

"Brains work on electricity too, so it can't be electricity generically, eels or no eels. I suppose wizard brains might run on magic, so the eels rule out 'wizards are the only organisms with brains to set foot on the grounds'... metaphorical feet..."

"There're wards to stop Muggles from coming to Hogwarts but I don't think they'd die if they did. I could fetch Minor, ask if he's gotten anywhere on the theories."

"If you have sparrows on the grounds - nonmagical ones, I mean - then electricity generically is not the thing. And lightning, do you have that."

"We have both lightning and sparrows."

"So orderly inorganic electricity, or something. Does clockwork behave?"

"I have never heard complaints about it misbehaving and there are five Ravenclaws in the family."

"I don't know what a Ravenclaw is, except in the uninformative orinthological sense."

"Students at Hogwarts are, at the age of eleven, sorted into one of the four Houses by a magic hat that reads your personality and places you accordingly. The houses are Slytherin, the house of ambition and cunning, Ravenclaw, the house for the love of knowledge for its own sake, Hufflepuff, the house for the classic virtues - perseverance, hard work, justness - and Gryffindor, for bravery and passion."

"That sounds like an interesting sociology experiment except for the involvement of the magic hat."

"There're real personality differences. Everyone knew my father'd be a Ravenclaw by the time he was three, and I am told it became obvious I was a Slytherin around the same age, though when I was six I heard that most Ministers of Magic have been Hufflepuffs and started pretending to be driven by hard work, justness, and so on - fooled some people, did not fool the hat -"

"...that is adorable."

"Know alternate universe versions of anyone else well enough to guess their houses?"

"I don't think I'll award myself any points for figuring that the one of your brothers who at least in Elf form is named rather presciently after his dad is a Ravenclaw too?"

"That's Minor. And yes, he is."

"Do people literally name children 'Minor' in your era?"

"...yes? Is that something future people find objectionable."

"It's not a serious social controversy or anything but it is deeply unfashionable. Your name ages pretty well and does not call into question whether you will experience paradox upon reaching the age of majority."

"Timothy, Michael, Theodore, Aaron, Minor, James, Samuel."

"James is a girl's name now."

"...huh. And no special resemblance to the lookalikes' names - it is more than just lookalikes, really, isn't it -"

"Name resemblance - exists? It is not overwhelming. And I thought that was clear at this point."

"I am struggling to think of explanations, but - yeah, does sound like it. Anyway, Michael's a Slytherin with me, Theodore's a Gryffindor, Aaron and Minor and Samuel are Ravenclaws, James is a Hufflepuff - twins don't usually split, they were a little disappointed - my parents were both Ravenclaws -"

"I am not closely socially acquainted with the Elf versions but all right."

"- the war, or -"

"The war. They seemed like nice enough people, we had a good working relationship."

"Maybe once everything is resolved I will go check in on them. I sort of doubt they're okay and - maybe it'd help if they were needed to fix my world."

"Maybe."

Reading! "Can I have my notebooks back to copy them really quickly, I want to make some edits -"

"Yeah." Cam shoves them across the bar surface. "The ruminating on who to marry is startlingly unromantic; 2179 frowns on mixing politics and marital status. I don't actually know how Elves feel about it."

"If you got rid of all the hereditary titles you could probably mostly stifle political marriages but I can't imagine there'd stop being practical ones."

"Admittedly the case - though a lot less so post-scarcity, much less tempting to marry for money at that point - but it's customary to at least heavily frost the decisionmaking process with at least a pretense of affection."

"Once I pick someone I'll court her, I just - can't seem to grasp the appeal of using feelings to choose someone instead of developing them for someone you chose."

"I suppose that's pragmatic" and also totally a cover but in 1802 some people don't know yet when they're seventeen probably and maybe it doesn't actually match.

He taps his notebooks a couple times - "Okay, I think they should now count as Not Magic, and you'd be faster at copying them than I would, want to try -"

Notebooks?

Notebooks!

"Thank you!" Tap tap tap and he hands them back over and starts annotating the copies.

And commentary on world domination ensues.

Eventually he is hungry.

He may avail himself of either the bar or the demon but neither reads minds.

"I may have spent all my money on presents for the whole school, can you do a snack?"

"Sure, what do you want?"

"What do they eat in 2179?"

"Eating meat that used to be an animal is frowned upon, and there is a global trade in fruit and spices and stuff, but nothing's jumping out at me as intro to 2179 cuisine..."

"There's meat that didn't used to be an animal? Or do you just mean 'conjured'-"

"Conjured or grown in a vat."

"Huh. Uh, I'm not picky - I can also have someone hold the door and head down to the kitchens and grab something -"

"How about pizza," suggests Cam, handing him a plate. He makes one for himself, demonstrates how to eat it.

Pizza is weird. He likes pizza. "Wow. Thank you."

"You're welcome." Nom.

"Get anywhere on magic you can use?"

"Lots of nice-to-haves, fewer gamechangers. At least given the presence of daeva, who can already do free energy and stuff."

Nod. "If anyone in Hell would be entertained by being an endangered dragon reserve that'd be great but - yeah, doesn't solve your root problem. What are the magical effects Valinor had before -"

"A timefucking thing, made everything grow ten times slower without feeling like it. And decay just sort of didn't happen, when I packed their ships full of food for them they were confused by the cans..."

"They want to grow ten times slower without feeling like it?"

"I'm not sure it's unanimous, to be fair."

"Decay's probably doable but - house by house -"

"How long would it take?"

"I don't know, I could send some owls and get you an estimate."

"...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."