"Bad reasons are better than no reasons," she sighs. "There's been a war, recently?"

"It wasn't quite a war by Muggle standards - smaller, less organized - but there was a Dark wizard and he and his followers killed a lot of people. That's why Mum took me to Australia. But this last spring he was defeated and things are calming down."

"Last spring?!" Well. Guess magic isn't all flowers and candy, is it? "I think this is the closest I've ever been to a historical event."

"The last battle was actually at Hogwarts. All the students in years ahead of us were probably there."

"There's only really a homeschooling option if you have magic parents, but you could apply to an overseas school. I almost went to the Owly, which covers Australia. Beauxbatons is more likely than the Owly to take a British student who's never lived there, but you'd have to learn French."

She grimaces. "No, I don't think so, we don't really have the money to move." She sighs. "Well, I hope no Dark Wixen decide to terrorise the place while we're working on tidying it up."

"They're not that common. Last time was about fifty years ago and it was the same guy, he just spent the intervening time mostly dead."

"Mostly dead? How can someone be mostly dead?" Beat. "Well, I guess 'magic,' but I mean, uh." What does she mean? "I guess I'm just confused about what that means."

"I don't really know the details, I wasn't there."

She giggles, the first positive expression of emotion since the whole 'our government is a dystopia' revelation. "Fair." Her eyes are marginally lighter, again.

"Your eye color keeps changing. I thought it was the light but it's just changed while you didn't move."

"Oh, yeah, they do that. The thing with, like, emotions, they're the most sensitive part? I mostly can stick to a single colour and just change hues, and most people seem to think it's the light. Sometimes it changes a lot, though, but no one really ever called me out on it. Except the one time, but this one time is one time I'm fairly sure the government must've erased the minds of everyone present," she practically hisses.

"...I don't mean to downplay the badness of memory charms but usually it would just be taking a few minutes, not their whole minds."

Sadde sighs. "It was pretty bad. There was this bully, he pushed some buttons, I..." She looks fairly ashamed. "Well, his mum threatened to sue mine, I had to be pulled out of school, there was a whole lot of sh—stuff going down for a while, and then it all stopped suddenly. So, it was, er, more than a few minutes."

"Oh. Yeah."

"Bye!"

Miranda doesn't recognize him.

Sadde didn't expect her to! "Hi Miranda, hi Renée, it's Sadde," he explains to them.

"So, I'm curious, where exactly are we?" he asks. "Is this, like, a completely different place than King's Cross, or are we between bricks, or something?"