top hat I've ever seen. Wealth, at least six hundred thousand Galleons... so around thirty million pounds, not enough to make a Muggle famous, but good enough for the smaller wizard population, I guess. Rumored to be a modern alias of the six-century-old Nicholas Flamel, the only known wizard to succeed at the incredibly difficult alchemical procedure for creating the Philosopher's Stone, which enables the transmutation of base metals into gold or silver as well as... the Elixir of Life which indefinitely prolongs the youth and health of the user... Um, Hermione, this seems obviously false."
"I've read more references to Nicholas Flamel," Hermione said. "The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts says he secretly trained Dumbledore to stand up to Grindelwald. There's a lot of books that take the story seriously, not just this one... you think it's too good to be true?"
"No, of course not," said Harry. Harry pulled out the chair next to her own, at the small table, and sat down beside her in his accustomed place on her right, just like he'd never left; she had to choke back a catch in her throat. "The idea of 'too good to be true' isn't causal reasoning, the universe doesn't check if the output of the equations is 'too good' or 'too bad' before allowing it. People used to think that airplanes and smallpox vaccines were too good to be true. Muggles have figured out ways to travel to other stars without even using magic, and you and I can use our wands to do things that Muggle physicists think are literally impossible. I can't even imagine what we could rule out the real laws of magic being able to do."
"So what's the problem, then?" Hermione said. Her voice sounded more normal now, in her own ears.
"Well..." Harry said. The boy reached over her own outstretched arm, his robes brushing hers, and tapped the artist's illustration of an ominously glowing red stone dripping scarlet liquid. "Problem one is that there's no logical reason why the same artifact would be able to transmute lead to gold and produce an elixir that kept someone young. I wonder if there's an official name for that in the literature? Like the 'turned up to eleven effect', maybe? If everyone can see a flower, you can't get away with saying flowers are the size of houses. But if you're in a flying saucer cult, since nobody can see the alien mothership anyway, you can say it's the size of a city, or the size of the Moon. Observable things have to be constrained by evidence, but when somebody makes up a story, they can make the story as extreme as they want. So the Philosopher's Stone gives you unlimited gold and eternal life, not because there's a single magical discovery that would produce both of those effects, but because someone made up a story about a super happy thingy."
"Harry, there's a lot of things in magic that aren't sensible," she said.
"Granted," said Harry. "But Hermione, problem two is that not even wizards are crazy enough to casually overlook the implications of this. Everyone would be trying to rediscover the formula for the Philosopher's Stone, whole countries would be trying to capture the immortal wizard and get the secret out of him -"
"It's not a secret." Hermione flipped the page, showing Harry the diagrams. "The instructions are right on the next page. It's just so difficult that only Nicholas Flamel's done it."
"So entire countries would be trying to kidnap Flamel and force him to make more Stones. Come on, Hermione, even wizards wouldn't hear about immortality and, and," Harry Potter paused, his eloquence apparently failing him, "and just keep going. Humans are crazy, but they're not that crazy!"
"Not everyone thinks the same way you do, Harry." He did have a point, but... how many different references had she come across to Nicholas Flamel? Besides World's Wealthiest Wizards and Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts, there'd also been Stories of Moderately Ancient Times and Biographies of the Justly Famous...
"All right then, Professor Quirrell would've kidnapped this Flamel guy. It's what an evil person or a good person or just a selfish person would do if they had any sense. The Defense Professor knows a lot of secrets and he wouldn't miss that one." Harry sighed and looked up; she followed his gaze, but he was apparently just looking at the larger library, the rows and rows and rows of bookcases. "I don't mean to mess with your project," said Harry, "and I certainly don't mean to discourage you, but... Honestly, Hermione, I'm not sure you're going to find any good ideas for making money in a book like this. Like the old joke about how if an economist sees a twenty-pound note lying in the street, they won't bother picking it up, because if it were real, someone else would've picked it up already. Any way of making lots of money that everyone knows about to the point where it's in books like this... you see what I'm saying? It can't be possible for everyone to make a thousand Galleons a month in three easy steps, or everyone would be doing it."
"So? That wouldn't stop you," Hermione said, her voice now roughening again. "You do impossible things all the time, I bet you've done something impossible in the last week and you didn't bother telling anyone."
(There was a slight pause, which, if Miss Granger had known, was exactly the length of pause you'd make if you'd fought Mad-Eye Moody and won exactly eight days earlier.)
"Not in the last seven days, no," Harry said. "Look... part of the trick of doing the impossible is being selective about which impossibilities you challenge, and only trying when you have a special advantage. If there's a money-making method in this book that sounds difficult for a wizard, but it's easy if we can use Dad's old Mac Plus, then we'd have a plan."
"I know that, Harry," Hermione said, her voice wavering only slightly. "I was looking to see if there was anything here I could figure out how to do. I thought, maybe the difficult part about making a Philosopher's Stone was that the alchemical circle had to be super precise, and I could get it right by using a Muggle microscope -"
"That's brilliant, Hermione!" The boy rapidly drew his wand, said "Quietus," and then continued after the small noises of the rowdier books had died down. "Even if the Philosopher's Stone is just a myth, the same trick might work for other difficult alchemies -"
"Well, it can't work," Hermione said. She'd flown across the library to look up the only book on alchemy that wasn't in the Restricted Section. And then - she remembered the crushing letdown, all the sudden hope dissipating like mist. "Because all alchemical circles have to be drawn 'to the fineness of a child's hair', it isn't any finer for some alchemies than others. And wizards have Omnioculars, and I haven't heard of any spells where you use Omnioculars to magnify things and do them exactly. I should've realized that!"
"Hermione," Harry said seriously, as he started to dig down into the red-velvet pouch again, "don't punish yourself when a bright idea doesn't work out. You've got to go through a lot of flawed ideas to find one that might work. And if you send your brain negative feedback by frowning when you think of a
