"Nope!" says Darren brightly.

"Rats. You're not a very good magic eight ball, are you."

"You've caught me! You're better off with a normal magic eight ball, really."

"They're not even really magic. You are." Pause. "Can you do useful divination spells?"

"Eeeh. Maybe? Haven't tried to, I've been focusing on obsessively learning all of the runes I can before I specialize."

"Is the number of runes known to be finite?" wonders Bella.

"No idea! I want to find out, though!"

Bella laughs. "Well, if it isn't, you're going to have one heck of a life project."

"Yeah - I figure I'll end up specializing soonish, but I still have the sneaking suspicion that there are other options for specializations available and I just honestly don't know about them yet."

"I'm not sure I follow?"

"Things to - do and focus on. I know I want to try and make more medallions, but there might be a rune that lets me cure all diseases ever, and if I focus on medallions I would never know. I don't want to throw myself into one thing without full knowledge of as many options as possible."

"Oh, that's like eighty percent of why I jumped straight on 'found Hogwarts', can you say multiplier effect?"

Darren giggles. "Yeah, I can, and I know what it is, too! Why do you think I'm teaching you, aside from you being awesome and magic being awesome and there being an obvious option of combining them? I'm mostly just cautious, honestly."

"I do approve caution, I plan to be somewhat careful about what kind of students I take - although not about advertising the place."

"Good, good. Very reasonable of you!"

"I'm super reasonable, I will be much better at Dumbledoring than Dumbledore."

"You'll be really good at putting innocent babies in terrible, abusive homes?"

"No, see, that was a way in which he was bad at Dumbledoring. I'm using 'Dumbledoring' to refer to his actual job description and not his extremely dubious methodology."

Darren snickers. "There we go, that's the answer I was looking for. I'll share Dumbledoring with you and not get snippy about it."

"Excellent, you'd be much worse company if you got snippy."

"I really would be! Thankfully I don't seem to be in a situation where I would get snippy."

"I'm glad. Your company would be a huge loss."

Darren blushes and giggles. "Thank you! You're lovely company, too."

"I would imagine that's why you asked me out, yes."

"Yeah, that's the general idea of how dating works, or so I'm led to believe. I could be wrong. The point could be to ask out horrible people and try to test your own patience. "