She is all over it at lunch.
"Okay, so, Transfig is just about the coolest thing," she says first thing to the Ravenclaws as soon as she sits at the table.
"If there are Hufflepuff-type evil kids I'm not sure you can stop them by declining to save Slytherin's reputation."
"Well if right now they're all going to Slytherin because that's where the Hat defaults to putting evil kids, they might not be as effective at evil as they'd be if they went to Hufflepuff instead."
"Well, the Slytherins aren't as effective at evil as they could be because everyone's suspicious of them, so your project will be helping those ones too."
"But my project isn't just rescuing their reputation, it's restoring Salazar's legacy! The glory of old! Or some such. You know, untangling 'cunning' from 'evil.' Though I guess that'd be invariably true. Hmmm." He shrugs. "I think it's still a net good, though, if this is what the world looks like when we have witless Slytherins running the place I am definitely not impressed and need to fix it. Of course, if we do end up taking over the world then that'll be moot and just my altruistic act of the day. Or something."
"I don't think I'd describe the situation as witless Slytherins running the place. The Headmistress was a Gryffindor and the Minister of Magic was a Hufflepuff."
"Even more reason to get some actually decent Slytherins! Although I like the Headmistress, she looks competent, if a bit uptight."
"Ohh that's a good idea! You think I could do that? I wonder if the Headmistress would allow that."
"I probably should come up with some actually operational ideas before just going to the Hat and saying 'hi I wanna fix Slytherin.'"
"A priori I'm not even sure Professor McGonagall would even want to let me talk to it at all, talking to it multiple times would be awesome!"
"But if she lets you once why wouldn't she let you more often, as long as it wasn't enough to bother her?"
"If she was like 'well let's see how it works this once' and then nothing came out of it she might decide I was just trying to, I dunno, mess with her."
"Yeah, I guess that's a risk. If only you had a reputation for never trying to mess with people."
He looks at Karen, then cups his hands around the sides of his head a bit so his eyes aren't easily visible. He turns them into chameleon eyes and moves them in different directions a bit.
He laughs, his eyes and tongue no longer particularly lizard-y. "Yeah, I'm not gonna start behaving just 'cause of that. I think I ought to come up with at least one operational idea before talking to McGonagall about it."
"Meaning it's something I could actually implement, or someone could, or, like, with more tangible immediate results than 'Slytherin doesn't have a bad rep anymore.'"