(He has no comment on the question of arming children with deadly weapons. This seems likely to invite the possibility of getting sucked into a discussion of current politics with baby Slytherins and he also specifically promised not to do that.)

"Hm.  I stand corrected on that, and that alone, then, though I must still wonder where the word came from."  It is so annoying to be wrong.  She dislikes it.  She will have to go look up vermillion's etymology later.

Yes, don't engage with the politics, Septimus; she's being subtle.  Well.  As subtle as her fellow baby Slytherins will understand, anyway.  (To wit: "How many of your parents are so desperate that they'll throw you away if they think it will serve their goals?  I think it's too many.  Especially since it doesn't look like they're winning, now does it?")

So, these kids are eleven. By and large they sincerely believe, and a single vehement speech no matter how charismatic will not change their minds, that their parents love them. They are making faces ranging from "excuse the fuck out of you, my parents love me" (Avery) to "oh no, do you want to meet my mom I bet she is better than yours" (Wilkes) to "lmao sucks to be you" (Mulciber).

Karina Dolohov, specifically, is fully and cheerfully and accurately aware that her father, the closest thing Voldemort has to a military commander of his scattered forces, loves her very much and also would sell her to Satan for one (1) corn chip if it was a corn chip he happened to need for the war, which, fortunately for her, he is currently, in fact, winning. 

She is absolutely not saying anything suggesting a single inkling of strategic knowledge within three hundred yards of Septimus bloody Weasley, so she smiles a tiny sharp smile, as the end-of-class bell rings, and before any of her classmates say anything really stupid, very pointedly diverts them by reaching for the only nonpolitical thing Ophelia just said, to whit: "Oh, I love curry. Have you been to India or only had the imported kind?"

Oh, yes, that implication is at least three layers deep.  They'd need to actually think about it to get there.  (And it hardly means that their parents don't sincerely care about them.  It just means that their caring doesn't ward them from stupid.)

"Unfortunately I have not had the chance to encounter a curry in its native environment before, no.  You have?  That's neat."

"Yeah, we went there on holiday a few years ago, it was really cool." Out of the classroom with them as Weasley's next class filters in. "There's this witch who does an invite-only tasting event with dozens of different kinds of peppers. Some of them can actually kill you unless you get a special cooling charm first, it makes sense they'd make good weapons if you - what was that word you used? Aerosolized?" She pronounces the unfamiliar word with careful dis-intent, hand off her wand, just in case it's a spell.

"Goodness, that could be worse than the reason you never have fire next to a can of hairspray.  Which is that the can can explode.  Ah, yes - aerosolized - hmm.  How much do you know about - solids, liquids, gases, and the mixing thereof?  Because I can say 'you put the actual oh-no-my-eyes bit of the pepper in one part of a container, and then some air that's been pressurized' - basically, squished tight, like - I don't know if you've seen Muggle party balloons, ever, but if you take my word for it that the thing where you blow into one and it expands and if you don't tie it off it'll go pfvhfvhvfbhvbt all over the room is also a consequence of pressure - oh, or frogs, possibly that's a better example.  The way they have the thing in their throat that goes whoomp and then they force alllll that air out to ribbit.  Or just how you can go - pah - with your own lungs, maybe.  Anyway.  You squish some air into a bottle that's smaller than the size it 'wants' to be, you run it over or through a liquid like water or the stuff that makes spicy peppers spicy - there's a bunch of steps for doing this safely so your bottle of air doesn't blow up that I'm leaving out so don't try it, and I have to imagine that it's pretty easily defended against if you're a wizard that knows what you're doing, I saw something about a Bubble-Head charm? - and the air just picks up these really tiny droplets of spicyness and gets them all over other people.  And the technical term for those really tiny droplets is aerosols, from, well, air, and the sol- in solution, the chemicals terminology for stuff that's - carried within other stuff, I suppose."

"I could probably talk about the difference between a solution and a suspension but I believe that's a bit much."

Blink, blink. "I'd ask why you're not a Ravenclaw but that would be a stupid question actually."

"The Hat did offer."

"It's Potions, next, isn't it?  I have to admit, I'm excited to actually try brewing; I've not had the chance, prior.  They don't let eleven-year-olds do anything really fun in Muggle science classes.  Unless the baking soda and vinegar volcano trick is something you think is neat, but - well, it's neat, but it's not very useful.  I suppose there's any utility you could get out of it, though...hmm."

Karina is busy processing with mild horror the phrase muggle science classes, as the group wanders in a Great-Hall-ward direction for the lunch break that precedes Potions, so Annette is the one who says, cheerfully, "Oh, me neither. You gotta be really rich to set up a private potions lab that's safe for kids apparently." 

"My mum lets me help with hers all the time, I've got loads of practice," Avery interjects, smugly. 

Mulciber rolls his eyes. "Which is why you have two brothers instead of four." 

" ...... yeah, well," defensive frown, "cooler ones, though?" 

Annette looks fascinated. "How would you tell. Can you count coolness." 

Shrug. 

"Huh, I wonder why that is.  Certainly it's hard enough to set up - proper ventilation and suchlike, but what sort of things go wrong that it's so uniformly dangerous?  There's recipes I'm pretty sure I could manage on the stove at home, with decent cookware, but the textbooks don't talk about errors and their potential outcomes very much.  Neither did my mother's notes, actually."

"Potions explode a lot," explains Karina, sighing. "My dad said, assume any deviation from the recipe will probably explode, unless it seems like that's obviously really stupid in this case and there is no possible way it should do that, in which case assume it will definitely explode." She's not looking forward to Potions at all. 

"Ah.  So you'd want...hm...

"Something like a cauldron for one's cauldron, really, that's - meant to absorb the blow of a mishap, and channel it away - and some sort of protection from spatter?  Something like...

"I'd start with - a big block of something alchemically inert, or, stone or something, and then - just sort of carve a cauldron-sized hole out of it.  Cut it in half along a diagonal, so that the force of the explosion, reflected by the cavity walls, tends to throw the mess away, maybe recess the cauldron into it just enough that you've got a lip of material projecting over the cauldron's rim such that you can use the bit of the flat top as a work surface and let gravity do the work of putting the ingredients in, as you finish chopping them...

"Probably I'd also add a fume hood."

Karina nods thoughtfully along with this idea, and then says, in the sage tone of someone reciting a proverb, "And then you die."

Annette giggles.

" - really though, that does sound cool, I'm just saying, there's a descriptive phrase for people who think that if they are clever enough they can do things that usually kill adults in first year, and that phrase is 'dead before their twelfth birthday'. I don't know what about that plan kills you, it just sounds like the sort of thing that if I said it to my dad he would say 'if you predictably die doing that I'm writing TOO STUPID TO LIVE on your gravestone'."

Karina actually really wants Ophelia to live long enough to revolutionize, like, at least three academic fields. It's going to be so cool. But man, she really wishes awesomecool once-in-a-generation geniuses weren't so... like this. Why are they all like this. Is this what it felt like to be her dad in school with the Dark Lord Himself. Augh.

"Trust me, I'm not planning on trusting me to test lab safety equipment!  That's asking for trouble.  Or rather, if I do involve myself in developing such a thing personally, I'm not going to be conducting any tests that involve wilful potion abreactions in close proximity to my precious, precious face.  I think I might broach the idea to some of the shopkeeps Hogwarts recommends - Wiseacre or Mulpepper, probably, both of whom seem to have their heads screwed on right when it comes to - being meticulous.  And of course safety equipment is also not something to rely upon.  It's not - a part of the procedure, it is your panic button for when things go wrong.  It's good to have that margin, but - it can fail as much as anything else can, without proper maintenance or in unusual conditions.  You shouldn't trust it to save you from yourself.  Care and caution are the bywords of running any experiment whatsoever, let alone ones that can kill you if you mess up."

Considering headtilt. "Yeah, that seems like a decent plan. If you can get Wiseacre to take you seriously I bet he knows how to build a contraption like that without breaking your face more than an acceptable amount."

"You'd look good a little exploded though," contributes Annette helpfully.

"Don't be weird," Karina chides her.

"Sorry, sorry."

It is lunchtime in the great hall as they arrive in it! Lunchtime apparently means various upperclassmen already embroiled in homework, muttering to each other varyingly-incomprehensibly over an array of light picnicky fare. Some 2nd-4th years have chess sets out, some of the 5th-7th years are arguing over newspapers instead or additionally, and the vibe is, while not entirely bereft of the formal Welcome Feast's sense of continuous high stakes verbal manuevering, at least a little bit chiller on that front.

Lunch options range, to the eye of one raised on primarily mundane cuisine, from the reasonably normal (ham and cheese sandwiches, boiled eggs, sliced apples and carrots, walnuts) to the slightly odd (blackcurrant jelly doughnuts, rabbit and spinach hand pies) to the distinctly bizarre (cold jackalope sausage, bright blue plums).

"No offense taken, Annette.  There certainly is something to the aesthetic of the lightly singed mad alchemist."

She'll end up with something of a sampler - fruits and vegetables, mostly, one of the rabbit-and-spinach pies, as well as that blackcurrant jelly donut for after she's finished.  (They didn't often have fresh foods in the house; they just weren't worth the cost.  She's going to enjoy the casual availability of fruits.)

...Maybe she'll heat a jackalope sausage up, too, because she's vaguely curious what that tastes like.

A quick little wand gesture and a quiet incantation - Flagrate Gelide - and a puff of blue flames lands in a teacup, at a reasonable temperature with which to warm food, but not hurt people whatsoever.

"I'm surprised they bother to have jackalope sausage here; I was under the impression that they're endemic to the Americas.  I suppose teleporting makes it rather easy to transport even perishable goods."

Several of her classmates squint puzzledly at her, and then one of the upperclassmen says, helpfully, "'Perishable' is the Muggle word for foods that go bad really fast without preservation charms."

"Do sausages do that?" says Avery, peering doubtfully at his own plate.

"I don't think so actually? That's sort of the point of them, isn't it?"

"They do somewhat; Muggles keep most of their meats in the frozen and cold sections of the grocery because it'll go off otherwise - get bacteria growing on it and whatnot - but not quite as readily as fruit and vegetables.  There's some ways of preparing meat that'll make sure it keeps, long-term, even without preservation charms, freezers, or other such things - jerky comes to mind.  I think it's the salting.  I've not particularly studied this, though."

"Huh."

"You planning to get a Muggle studes OWL?" wonders somebody else.

"What would you even use that for?"

"If you want to do things without magic, or when you can't trust magic - and sometimes you do - Muggles have absolutely been busy figuring out how to do - a million different things - for the past few centuries.  And there's a lot more of them working on it than there are research wizards.

"I don't believe Platform Nine and Three Quarters was the first train station at King's Cross, either, if you're looking for practical examples."

"Nine-and-three-quarters, no, yeah, but the Express is older than King's Cross," pipes up the nearest person who actually reads History textbooks in addition to falling asleep in History class, which is a third-year several seats down. "Hogsmeade Station's about fifty years older. Installing the Express was the largest Concealment Charm ever performed in Britain!"

(Evidently, the textbooks talk about this as an academic achievement on the part of the wizards who performed the charm, and not, you know, extra-grand theft auto.)

"I guess that's pretty useful," allows the person who asked.

To be fair, it could have been legitimate insinuation into existing infrastructure, except as regards its inevitable infringement upon traditional rights-of-way.  She didn't see any pedestrian crossings.

Though perhaps the wizards, being wizards, just did some absurdly convoluted thing with space --

Ha, as if.  But maybe there is some fancy magical thing happening.

"What I have to admit I'm curious about is where she came from.  The Express, I mean.  And how she's crossing - what, more than half the country? - without the Muggles mysteriously discovering that roads don't work through there anymore.  You'd think the surveyors would be up in arms, or the hikers - this random line somewhere that things just Do Not Cross, especially if they're people.  The math oughtn't work, come to think of it; if you vanish a building, just scrunch it all up into a fold in space, where does it go in the city planner?"