"I guess, but if it's a stone why wouldn't the pieces work?"

"...really really hard?" He shrugs. "I dunno, the guy's dead. Why would anyone do that though..."

"I don't know!"

"Seriously, did they get bored or something? Is that even possible? There's so much to do!"

"If they were going to get bored I'd think they'd take less than six hundred years to do it!"

He shrugs. "Yeah I dunno." He shakes his head. "Anyway. Any more concepts related to production of things? Or, maybe, to transformation, since the Elixir might be transformed and gold definitely is. Butterflies? Or maybe just their cocoon? Actually I think lots of insects do stuff like that, and tadpoles as well..."

"We don't want to metamorphose. Well, I don't, anyway. Gold is transformed once you actually have the stone but it's not transformable - not in chemical composition and not easily, anyway."

"Yeah but this would just be the metaphor for the transformation of other metals to gold itself, not for the end product. I mean, I think our metaphor will have to either be pretty detailed or pretty unusual or something; just using something vaguely related to immortality and gold probably won't cut it."

"Fusion," suggests Miranda. "For turning things to gold. Can't be how it was done originally but it might work."

"Oooh, yes, good! How would we metaphor that, though—wait, nevermind, brainstorming time, we'll worry about the 'how' later. What other muggle science things could be related? I mentioned penicillin, but I wonder if there's anything else we could use that's similar. Syringes? For something related to disease?"

"An actual vaccine maybe. Or if you want a symbol of the disease itself to ritually destroy, a petri dish or somebody's removed appendix?"

"I'm not so sure a removed appendix would represent disease, exactly...? But well, let's not discard it. What are muggles' major advances with respect to wixen? Electronics, non-magical medicine, various vehicles, physics..."

"What's this have to do with things?"

"It's our comparative advantage! If there's any way we can create more elaborate or specific metaphors using that stuff I bet that'd help. Wixen are a tiny minority of people, apparently completely isolated from the outside, and alchemists are a tiny minority of wixen, I wouldn't be surprised if very few people ever thought of using muggle stuff there, especially given that muggles only really got noticeably ahead this century."

"Oh. Data, communication, mass production, nonmagical biology, you said medicine, ummmm... weapons, kind of."

"...yeah I think if weapons are used at all it'll be as something to symbolically sacrifice. Do any of those have obvious instances related to all this? Other than weapons and death. Nonmagical biology in general and diseases, I guess, but we've already mentioned that."

"I don't want to know what happens if we symbolically sacrifice physics."

"Well now I totally do. We could create a worm hole!"

"The worst case scenario is very bad!"

"And the best case scenario is only pretty cool, I'm not actually going to try to sacrifice physics. What would that even look like? Burning CERN down? Willow's dad would be out of a job!"

"Well, you were talking about ankhs, you could do one of those little plastic models of an atom."

"But those little plastic models are really really wrong! ...does alchemy depend on our personal subjective position on the metaphor? Like, if I tried something that depended on a metaphor for an atom and was really really sure that that particular metaphor was bad, would it not work for me when it might work for someone else?"

"No idea, we should ask Slughorn."

Good thing Sadde has his notepad with him and has been writing these things down on it! Scribble scribble.

They are notetaking buddies.