"Oooh, you're psychic. Predict me a thing."

"Hmmmmm..." says Darren, closing his eyes and putting two fingers to his temple theatrically. "I so predict that... At some time in the future, you will be given chocolates."

"I like this prediction! It is in plenty of time for Valentine's Day next week."

Darren snickers. "Yeees. Almost like I knew that, or something."

"Predict me more things. I wish to flagrantly abuse your knowledge of the future for both personal gain and altruistic purposes."

"The future is cloudy today. Ask again later."

"Awwwwwwww, man." Pause. "Is it later yet?"

"Nope!" says Darren brightly.

"Rats. You're not a very good magic eight ball, are you."

"You've caught me! You're better off with a normal magic eight ball, really."

"They're not even really magic. You are." Pause. "Can you do useful divination spells?"

"Eeeh. Maybe? Haven't tried to, I've been focusing on obsessively learning all of the runes I can before I specialize."

"Is the number of runes known to be finite?" wonders Bella.

"No idea! I want to find out, though!"

Bella laughs. "Well, if it isn't, you're going to have one heck of a life project."

"Yeah - I figure I'll end up specializing soonish, but I still have the sneaking suspicion that there are other options for specializations available and I just honestly don't know about them yet."

"I'm not sure I follow?"

"Things to - do and focus on. I know I want to try and make more medallions, but there might be a rune that lets me cure all diseases ever, and if I focus on medallions I would never know. I don't want to throw myself into one thing without full knowledge of as many options as possible."

"Oh, that's like eighty percent of why I jumped straight on 'found Hogwarts', can you say multiplier effect?"

Darren giggles. "Yeah, I can, and I know what it is, too! Why do you think I'm teaching you, aside from you being awesome and magic being awesome and there being an obvious option of combining them? I'm mostly just cautious, honestly."

"I do approve caution, I plan to be somewhat careful about what kind of students I take - although not about advertising the place."

"Good, good. Very reasonable of you!"

"I'm super reasonable, I will be much better at Dumbledoring than Dumbledore."

"You'll be really good at putting innocent babies in terrible, abusive homes?"

"No, see, that was a way in which he was bad at Dumbledoring. I'm using 'Dumbledoring' to refer to his actual job description and not his extremely dubious methodology."