"Oh wow. Are most witches very old? Do you not have children often?"

"Half the children aren't witches! And if you meet a random witch she's probably between one and four hundred."

"...huh. That still sounds... are boredom, despair, and violence that common?"

"In the modern day violence is less common but there was lots of it five hundred years ago."

"I guess there was yeah."

"I think rates of boredom and despair might be dropping but nobody takes good data."

"Sounds hard to take good data when apparently the worldwide number of samples is 'low thousands'."

"There's greater witch density in Eurasia."

"Tens of thousands?"

"Maybe hundreds of thousands? I don't know."

"Maybe the internet knows it." Shrug.

"Witches are not early adopters, but there's probably an educated guess or five on there."

"Yeah that's what I'd be thinking. Like if you know at all that Eurasia has more witches then someone probably has finer grained information."

"I mean, we're believed to have originated somewhere in Siberia."

"Huh. Do you have origin stories? Or better yet, a documented origin?"

"We didn't invent writing any earlier than anybody else. There's mythology but unlike the goddesses it is no longer understood to be real."

"What, not by anyone?"

"Eh, maybe somebody, it's not popular."

"Huh, so very unlike the rest of mythologies currently in vogue out there."

"It's more like one of the ones not currently in vogue, yes. There's a D'Aulaire's book."

"I'm unfamiliar with it, I think."

"Well, get D'Aulaire's Book of Witch Myths out of the library if you're curious."

"Will do, thanks for the suggestion."

She finishes her food and puts her dish in the dishwasher. "All right, back up to the attic with me."

Atticwards!