[Well,] Bella said. [If I were older, I hope you'd expect me to have made commensurate progress in the shadowy conspiracy department? I'd be very skeptical of someone who was thirty, had ambitions to take over the world, and hadn't made any noticeable progress yet. I can at least claim to have gotten out of high school early, discovered a magical network, begun to poach it, and made inroads into various circles full of people with various forms of power who could be helpful or inconvenient depending. At age eighteen.]