"It'd let you cast fast if you needed to, but it's probably a better plan to frontload the work on having scrolls ready rather than on the graph paper thing."

"Oh, yes. I have no intention to waste away with a ruler and protractor and sheafs and sheafs of paper."

"Even if we become immortal?"

"If we become immortal I can put in my lifetime of graph labor over the course of several lifetimes interspersed with sufficient other activities to prevent wasting."

"Oh, that sounds like a better idea, I suppose," sighs May, grinning.

"The opportunities potentially afforded by immortality are extremely convenient."

"I know, right? We were born a little too late to have any realistic hope of spending any amount of time having read all the books ever written even if we keep going till the heat death of the universe, and some people still don't seem to want to live forever, it's crazy."

"I could understand turning down immortality if literally only one person could become immortal, on the grounds that outliving one's loved ones would be too painful, especially if by deferring immortality someone more inclined could take it up instead, but there are an alarmingly large number of books where the immortality itself is considered a negative in its own right."

"There are! It's very frustrating. I'd probably take it even if I did have to do it alone, although I'd probably make different use of my social life. Anyway, there doesn't seem to be a single principle of runecasting implying such a thing."

"Oh, yes. This is far preferable."

"Immortality for all, and we'll outlive those frustrating people who write those frustrating books."

"At least the ones for whom it isn't simply sour grapes."

"Those people we will try not to call hypocrites."

"Of course. If we call them on it, they might conceivably change their minds, and it would be a terrible shame to lose J.K. Rowling, for example, to her own philosophy."

"Yes. Oh, I love those books, but then they go and do that. I mean, they do have ghosts, but it doesn't even treat the ghosts as a respectable option!"

"I usually choose to interpret the moral as 'sacrificing others and damaging your own mind because you were too paralyzed by your fear of death to refrain from going with the first option presented rather than doing research into more palatable options is a really terrible plan.'"

"Yes. This is a world with the philosopher's stone in it and supposedly Voldemort's really academically talented and the last guy who pulled it off is still alive to be asked nicely for tutoring, and he doesn't, say, research alchemy and make his own, he runs off and uses some strictly inferior option and kills a bunch of people."

"So the moral is to not let fear of something prevent you from taking the correct rather than immediate solution. It even fits with Harry's dementor experiences in the third book." Pause. "I remain firmly convinced, for the record, that the Flamels faked breaking the stone, got plastic surgery or some wizarding equivalent, and moved abroad rather than actually allowing themselves to die. Really, there's no reason not to."

"I don't even know why they were friends with Dumbledore. I suppose he must have other good qualities or something. It doesn't say that they die, it says that they will, so there's that."

"Well, he was remarkably intelligent and very powerful, and he defeated the last Dark Lord before Voldemort. He's probably a useful person to know if, say, you have something extremely valuable that you periodically need to hide." beat "And then of course instead of storing it somewhere no one but the Hogwarts Headmaster could get to he put it behind an easily-bypassed series of traps with 'MacGuffin within' written on it in metaphorical neon signage, they got fed up with his bullshit and faked their eventual deaths."

"Well, it's not clear if Voldemort could have gotten it out of the mirror if Harry didn't go and do it for him," May says. "The traps leading up to it were not particularly well-thought-out, but the object wasn't 'have difficult traps', it was 'conceal stone'. ...Though it seems like a jerk move to store an object for your friends which they regularly use in a way that prevents them from going and getting it; what if Dumbledore had died? And I'm not about to defend Dumbledore in general, he's complicit in child abuse and educational sabotage."

"The problem with the way the Stone was stored is that 'to keep it away from the villain' is not the only reason to want it besides using it. If Voldemort had sent a loyal minion with whom he was not physically attached, they wouldn't have wanted it to use it, they would have wanted it to deliver it to their dread master."

"It's been a while since I read the first book; did Quirrell try that before or only after Harry got it?"

"Quirrel tried it before Harry got there, but since Voldemort was co-occupying his body Quirrel would have had to use the stone for Voldemort to benefit. If he had sent a different minion--which he didn't have contact with at the time, I will admit, but I'm dubious that Dumbledore was sufficiently sure of that to justify the loophole. More to the point, I'm dubious whether the Flamels would be satisfied with the setup, which is an entirely different question."

"Probably if they knew any details about how Dumbledore proposed to hide their most important rock they would have said 'no, we would rather just rely on Voldemort's inability to remember that there is a world outside of Europe and usually just Britain, we will be in Chile if you need us'."