"Likelier to work in the colonies than in the Caribbean, but probably not nonsense anywhere, no."

"There's probably not enough house-elves to just outcompete it, are there. Whoever invented house elves was probably a bad person but now they exist and seem to prefer it."

"It's crossed my mind. I'm not sure if deliberately breeding lots more of them is ethical but even if it is, it may not be possible - conventional wisdom at least around here is that house-elves will have children more or less to match the needs and fortunes of the family they're bound to, you'd upset them if you tried to talk them into having lots more to hand off..."

"But it's possible to bind house-elves to non-families, like Hogwarts."

"Yeah, but here I think they manage their numbers for the needs of the school, and I bet they'd still be very distressed to be taken away from it? We could ask, I suppose."

"What I mean is that you could maybe get elves associated with something even bigger than a school, depending on what the exact criteria are. I wouldn't normally want to spike the house elf population but the specific alternative I'm considering is humans in the same situation, so."

"Elves in the service of the planet-spanning empire? Might work, I'll write home and ask..."

"Your family knows a lot about theoretical elf stuff?"

"No, but we have elves who are used to entertaining our annoying hypotheticals?"

Giggle. "I've only ever talked to Mum's friends' elves. They did get a little sick of me."

"You can find the Hogwarts ones in the kitchens but you'll stress them out with a lot of these questions. The family ones know me and won't panic that I'm going to set them free or hand them off or something."

"I wasn't planning to bother kitchen elves," Miranda assures him. "It's convenient that you have ones to ask."

"It is! I'd be happy to convey questions from you if you think of any."

"I'm mostly very generically curious but if I think of anything in particular I'll let you know."

"Sounds good!"

"...anyway, thank you for the leaf."

"You are very welcome and should not feel remotely obliged to help me take over the world in return."

"Not for the leaf, no. The leaf can be an early birthday present."

"I hope you are not expecting I can so easily be deterred from getting you an on-time birthday present."

She giggles. "September 13. Just barely early enough that I made the cutoff to come this year instead of next."

"That's lucky. I'm October and had to wait a whole other year and it was terribly frustrating."

"I suppose they have to have a cutoff, but I would have been so annoyed if I'd had to wait."

"They could let you test in or something!"

"Mum says it's something to do with magical maturity, but I think she may have made that up."

"It's all tradition. We worship tradition." Shrug. "Take care, Miranda."