Flying is the beeeeeeeeeest.

Mrs. Stark tucks them into a nice little photo album and displays them to the children.

"Course not," says Tony. "It's a wizard photograph, not a video."

"No?" says Tony. "They do - that." She waves illustratively at the photo album. "What's wrong?"

"How does it do that? It's not something I did but it's the sort of thing I'd do, how does it know what I'd do?"

"...Magic?" she suggests.

"But the mad scientists found that magic that looks into people's heads doesn't work on me, so is this doing something else, or...?"

"It's not looking into your head," says Tony, "it's just - I don't know, actually, I never thought about it."

"Mrs. Stark? How does it work?" asks Bella, looking at the photos with deepest suspicion. When it turns out that Mrs. Stark has left the room she hops up and goes looking for her.

She hasn't gone far; she's sitting in a comfortable chair in another room, typing on a laptop.

"How do wizard photographs know what I would do when I didn't do it?"

"How do they guess?"

"With magic," she says dryly. "I don't know any more off the top of my head, but someone might have written a book about it that I could find with a little digging."

"I would like to read that book."

Maria shrugs. "All right."

"But it's not reading my mind somehow?"

"If they could read minds, they would guess a lot more accurately," she says. "Now, portraits, portraits are a different story. A magical painting with the right infusions can preserve a more or less accurate copy of someone's personality, and they can talk and remember things. I don't know how it's done, but I don't think Legilimency is involved. There might be some of the same magic that goes into Pensieves... do you want me to look that up, too?"

"Yes please. Are there any portraits I can talk to around here?"

"Not any you'd want to meet," says Maria. "The last Lalonde to get her portrait done before she died was a nasty old lady with strong opinions about blood purity; I've had her frozen in an attic since my wedding. And then there's Grandma Antoinette, but she only speaks French."

"...And she hasn't learned English? Why not?"

"She... lived in France?" says Maria.

"Right, but if she's recorded and she can talk sense at all shouldn't she have been able to learn English?"

"No one's ever suggested it," says Maria. "Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever heard of a portrait learning a language. They probably can't."

"...Can they learn anything?"

"Oh, people's names, who's married who, that sort of thing," she says.

"Hmmm." She produces her notebook and scribbles a note-to-self about portraiture. "What's a Pensieve?"

"A device for storing and examining memories," she says. "I have one upstairs I could show you, as long as you promise to be careful with it."

"I will. How do you store and examine memories with it?" asks Bella. "Does it only work on your own? I wonder if mine even come out."

"There's a spell, but it might be a little beyond you," says Maria. "Did the mad scientists not try it already? Maybe they didn't have one on hand."

"I guess they didn't. This is something people can do to you? There just keep being more horrible things."

"It's convenient for double-checking my math," shrugs Maria.

"Double-checking your math?"

"When I'm working on something complicated, I pull out the memory of writing it all down, watch it again, and check for mistakes."

"It takes objective memories?"

"Yes," she says, setting her laptop aside. "Yes it does."

"So not thoughts, just - what was actually going on around you?"

"From a third-person perspective - you see yourself doing whatever you were doing at the time; you don't see it out of your own eyes."

"Oh. That's not so bad at all. I want to try it."

"You can try looking at mine," says Maria. "Please don't experiment. There are easy wordless spells and tricky wordless spells; pulling out memories is one of the second kind."

"Okay. I don't want to mess up my memories, definitely."

"It's one of those things that's easy once you have the hang of it, but dangerous until you don't. Like Apparition."

"Okay." Phoenix heads in the direction of the stairs to go have a look at the Pensieve.

Bella crosses her arms carefully behinds her back and peers into the silver stuff. "It's pretty," she says.

Bella staaaaaares.

Bella doesn't understand the math, but she's fascinated by the magic. "How far can you go from where the person whose memory it is is?"

"Depends on the memory, and the person. Usually not very far. The next room, or shouting distance in an open area, is about the limit for most recordings."

"Can you see farther than that? Can you see things the person didn't know were there even at the time, like somebody hiding? Can you look behind and under stuff? When you walk around are you your same size in the memory?"

"Why don't you try it and see?" she suggests. "The memory's not long, and you'll come back out when it ends."

Bella inspects the contents of the room. She tries touching things.

Touching things to examine their textures works just fine, but her fingers won't smudge a line of chalk or press down the peeling label on the eraser; if she exerts enough force to move something, it resists, and if she exerts still more, her hand will go right through it.

That's interesting. She tries sticking her head through a desk drawer to see if she can inspect its contents.

It's dark in there.

Of course. She pulls her head out and goes on checking out the way the memory works; she tries holding her hand still in the path of Mrs. Stark's moving elbow.

The same rules apply in this case: it will push her hand out of the way, and if she declines to be pushed, it will go right through her.

She starts looking behind things, and at things that would not have gotten Mrs. Stark's attention - dust motes swirling in the light, objects under the desk.

It's all right there, perfectly visible.

Interesting. Is there an open door? She wants to test the boundaries of the memory.

She could always walk through the closed one.

She does that.

She tries walking into the silver.

Bella overbalances and falls on her rear. "Ow."

"The exit can be rough," Maria says sympathetically. "Although not usually that rough."

"I'm not very graceful. I'm okay flying," says Bella. "Just not on the ground." She hauls herself up. "That's really cool. Are they expensive?"

"More than they probably should be," says Maria. "In theory, you can keep your memories in any old bottle or dish, but a proper Pensieve comes with preservation spells and that handy preview you saw."

"Can you go in and look at them if they're in a dish? Can you put them back after you take them out? Do you still remember them, in your head, when they are in there?"

"You can go in and look at them in a dish - oh, that's another thing the Pensieve does, though: stabilizing spells to make entry and exit a little less rocky and ensure the vessel doesn't break when you come out. You can put them back after you take them out, no matter where you put them. How much of the memory stays in your head depends on how good you are at pulling them and whether or not you want it to; if you're not very good, it'll still be there, just with most of the detail faded. If you're good and you want to, you can pull one out completely or copy it without affecting the original at all."

"How do you learn without messing up your head?"

"Very carefully," she says dryly. "About the same way you learn to Apparate, actually."

"Do you have to be seventeen for this too?"

"There isn't an official age; not nearly as many people use Pensieves as Apparition," she says. "It would be a good idea to wait a few years, until you have a solid grasp of charms."

"Okay," says Bella. There are certainly other things she can learn in that time. "Thank you for explaining."

"No problem."

Bella proceeds to be lost in thought.

She can be lost in thought downstairs. Off they go.

At the bottom of the stairs, she asks, "Ghosts are real, right?"

"Yep," says Maria.

"Can they learn things?"

"I don't personally know any."

"Oh. Is there a good way to meet one?"

Maria shrugs.