"Eyyyy there's my favorite bastard to murder," singsongs the black King as she places him neatly into place first thing, waving at his counterpart. "You ready to get flattened into marble paste, bro?" 

The king-side knight elbows him. "There's kids here, be nice." 

"Oh come on these guys don't suck though, can't I be normal for once. I have to be nice ALL THE TIME when we're playing the Malfoy set, the prissy fu--"

"GOOD MORNING HELLO," interrupts the white King brightly. "I see you continue to never change, my dear." 

"Not ever once!" 

"It makes you easier to beat, you know." 

"... I know, but hey!" 

 "Oh, what a lovely autumnal tea," Augusta says when she sips it. 

(Usually the interstudent drama starts with the Quidditch season; shouldn't you be gleefully explaining transfig efficiency step ordering algorithms to sixteen-year-olds or whatever?) 

"Yes, Professor Weasley recommended it." (He is who I want to talk about, and also this is literally true.) 

Long pause. 

"....he is. Getting along well with the young Slytherins." (Which might be a problem, no offense.)

"Really! And here I thought you'd all lost the skill." (Are these ones less evil or something?) 

"Well, Merlin knows the rest of us have," (no, not really), "but-- ah. Hm." 

(help she wants to say something rude about her colleague and metaphors are stupid and the worst.) 

She looks down at the chessboard, which is now well into swing driven only by the occasional gentle nudge from either of them. Surely the chessboard will contain a metaphor. Something about knights? 

"...queen-side bishop, my friend, I think you've taken rather the wrong lesson from that last capture." (When you make a reckless mistake and someone dies, the appropriate response to it is not, generally, to get closer to the people who killed them. And also this is literally true.) 

"YEAH HE DID," crows the black king, prodding his knight to go stomp on the bishop. The bishop sulks off to go sit next to his rook on the edge of the tea tray.  

Snort. "Oh, I don't know, this looks like a very recoverable position to me," hums Augusta, tapping her king with her teaspoon admonishingly. "Bit less hubris, dear, you are a chess piece and not a phoenix-wielding hero of ages."  

(You could just kill him if he seems likely to be a strategic hazard. Well, I mean, probably you can't actually but Dumbledore can, right.)

The black King makes a tiny face. "Yeah okay but he isn't either!" 

"I'm secretly Herpo the Foul actually," deadpans the white King. 

"Betrayal! Treason!" opines the white Queen from across the board where she's looming threateningly over a very nervous black king-side rook. 

"I think he just did regular crimes and not treason actually," says the other black rook. "Might depend on what the Greeks considered political though, wasn't he Greek." 

The recently-captured bishop says, "Didn't the Greeks think everything was political?" 

"...wait so technically if I was a greek king maybe it would be treason for you to win this chess game," proposes the white King, thoughtfully. 

His counterpart frowns at him. "Don't they kind of famously not have kings though." 

"Really? How do they play chess?" 

Nelya Vector likes to use her next-youngest sibling as a rubber duck. 

Pancha Vector loves being a rubber duck. It's incredible for her grades.

"--and it really wants to self-correct towards a preferred state, right, spells are like bowling balls falling down cliffs except weirdly way more opinionated than that? So a lot of spell design is actually about making it perceive the, like, metaphorical bottom of the cliff, as the state you want it to have. Because to be clear if you don't do that on purpose it will pick something really really really stupid. And this sounds like it should be easy, right, you just have to define your coordinate system with the right zero point--" 

"--decays into this stabler state and you get a bunch of energy out, right, so you just have to make sure the spell knows what to do with all that energy, and Ted is using like three quarters of it for his pet theory about dispel resistance but this is fine because shields are actually really energy-efficient if you do them right--"

"--augh, what the hell, I forget which operator this symbol means, can you run over to slash-Diophantine--"

"That's a stupid shelf label, it doesn't mean anything." 

"Hm? Oh, no, it's not a description, it's the name of some guy, blame the people at Delphi." 

"...I guess. Nel, have you eaten recently?" It's not like Nelya to forget weird symbols. She loves those. She wins every time they play rune crosswords at home, even against Ena and Tri who went to a whole postNEWT runes seminar at Beauxbatons last year. (Deuxième refused to attend that one on grounds that the French laugh when she introduces herself, which is fair.)  

Blink blink. "Erm-- I'm not, like, hungry, but I don't... remember... eating breakfast... so maybe not..." 

"Right okay I will fetch you books from the Named After Greek Math Guys shelf later, right now we are going to lunch." 

"Okay so I swear this isn't just gossip, I keep accidentally stepping on his feelings and I would really like to stop, what on Earth happened to Brutus's uncle?" 

"Why do you think I know this." 

... yeah, fair cop. 

"Okay so you know how Aurors have that thing where there's always two of them?" 

"Ye--es." 

"The official story is she was randomly murdered by mysterious unidentified terrorists while they were on vacation." 

... 

... 

"...and this wasn't investigated? For an Auror?"