"I imagine she'd notice that, as much as I'm sure she hasn't opened it in the last - while.  And Lily definitely needs one, too."

(Lily has for the duration of this conversation been people-watching with immense delight. So many bright colors, and cool magic effects she is itching to learn how to replicate, and people talking about the most interesting-sounding daily problems in the world, and creatures, and, and - )

"What? Oh, yeah, probably, good idea."

Another politely neutral nod.

(If anyone should unwisely ask why she knew a small child was stealing from her mother and did nothing about it, she will tell them with perfect seriousness that, technically, it's only against the Hogwarts rules to steal from your classmates, there's nothing in there about your parents. It's certainly not her job to meddle in family affairs, now is it?) 

As far as Ophelia's concerned, what she's doing is borrowing, anyway!

Well.  Her mother's textbooks, at least.  And somewhat the way she's been practicing with her mother's wand - though, she might take that with her to Hogwarts at which point the issue would become much more clear.  She's definitely stolen some things from her sperm donor, though, who does not need the money he's using on being an angry alcoholic.

Minerva might have some less friendly opinions about the wand, but fortunately she doesn't know about that.

To the luggage shop!

There they will find a variety of options, ranging from inexpensive secondhand trunks with variably functional minor quality-of-life enchantments to fantastical space-folding nonsense wildly outside of either of their budgets.

The wand was borrowed, replaced where it was found, and did not bite her face off; this is entirely legal, right?  Only if it comes to be in her sole possession (e.g. "at Hogwarts while her mother is not") in the future would there be any potential theft to object to!  She thinks!

...She is going to carefully inspect the trunks, running fingers - not her new wand, interestingly enough; she tried that but her hands seem to be a bit more sensitive the way she's been approaching this - over them, hovering gently, to get an idea of the enchantments' functionality and function.  Eventually, she'll probably settle on a scuffed but in very-good magical condition Featherweight trunk, and point Lily to a slightly more expensive trunk that can also follow her - or rather, her wand - automatically, unless someone has further opinions at her that she feels she should take into account.

Lily will cheerfully accept this recommendation and then spend at least five consecutive minutes running in circles watching the trunk trundle along. It is adorable and she loves it immediately.

While she is doing this she notices the coolest thing, which is a little box that unfolds into a normal-looking canvas tent that has a whole little cottage in it, complete with plumbing. It is wildly outside their collective budget, of course, even if they'd spent zero money yet, but she is absolutely putting a pin in her brain and coming back here in a couple years when she's saved up for it. They could go CAMPING in a MAGIC TENT in their FAVORITE MEADOW. It would be THE BEST.

The inevitable expression of that desire prompts Ophelia to fondly wrap an arm around Lily's shoulders.  "That sounds fun, Lily; I'd gladly join you."

She is so looking forward to it. 

In the meantime, for real this time: books!

Books!  ...Right, she needs the History book by Bagshott, and...Standard Book of Spells 1970 edition.

And she wants a few more, since she's read her mom's textbooks, to extend her potential knowledgebase.

She just hasn't quite figured out which ones, yet.

Flourish & Blotts has a truly staggering number of options to offer her! Most of them haphazardly stacked on tables or filed on towering rickety two-story bookshelves using a system which, while one hopes it exists, is certainly not transparent to the new customer!

Is she interested in any of these six hundred different language primers? The mathematics that underpin upper-level courses? Reference charts of elemental transfiguration properties? 1,001 Magical Flavor Charms For Spicing Up Your Home Cooking? The entire known history of a single creature called, apparently, the Hogwarts Giant Squid?

Lily is just staring stock-still and starry-eyed, which causes McGonagall to helpfully notify her that it is generally considered good practice to visit the Hogwarts library before you buy much more than textbooks. Flourish & Blotts, after all, will still be here next summer vacation and by then you'll have a dramatically better sense of what sort of thing you'd prefer to buy over borrow.

...Yeah, even Ophelia fronting maximal composure finds this appropriately awe-full to just stand there a moment and take it in.  She'll give Lily a nudge in a minute or so.

Regardless.

It's time to go book-hunting.

She doesn't suppose that the inconveniently un-apparent organizational system has produced a "Hogwarts textbooks" shelf, with or without some sort of "School Supplies" label?  (They absolutely could have done so much better than this, come on.  Are people supposed to just wave their wands and summon books that they might not even know exist?)

They indeed have shelves clearly labeled FIRST YEARS and SECOND YEARS and so on which contain precisely the assigned textbooks and nothing else. It's the rest of the store that's like that. Some of the other customers do seem to be finding what they're looking for by waving their wands about it; others are just browsing in a meandering fashion.

(In the arguable defense of the proprietors, wizarding society has such a small population that the concierge model, where if you don't know what you're looking for you ask the expert who runs the store and they give you an actually useful tailored recommendation, actually more or less works.)

...Surely even then the staff must find the -

Well, she's not actually having this conversation with anyone, so her continued objections to wizards' general inelegance can stay un-ranted-about.

"Are there supplemental materials you might recommend, Professor?  For, for example, self-study of things you wish you'd learned when you were a student here but were not taught?"

Hm. Usually when students ask Minerva McGonagall for recommended supplementary reading materials they are.... NEWT Transfiguration students. She cannot give the same things to this tiny determined child who has never been in a single introductory class. Accordingly, normally, under this circumstance, she'd just say, nothing in particular, the curriculum is very good and self-study is a matter of personal preference. But, well.

A war started last year, see. And she did, in fact, notice a particular glaring hole in the capabilities of the average Hogwarts graduate.

"Bearing in mind that this is a personal opinion and not a formal recommendation or advisory in my capacity as Deputy Headmistress," she says instead, carefully, "I would suggest that you might consider obtaining an introductory text on Healing. It is not at all an easy subject, I warn you, and many of your other subjects will be prerequisites to understanding even its basics, but you do not seem the type to be dissuaded by that." 

She'll recommend one. She won't mention she has a copy of it sitting, recently uncomfortably well-worn, on her desk.

"I see.  Thank you, Professor."  If there is one within findability range...she'll get it.

McGonagall was too...serious about that, too careful like the times someone's tried to broach a tough subject or hide a harsh truth, to not have very relevant reasons to recommend studying this.

"...I...hope I won't need to know as much of this as - the way you said it - has me thinking I might.  But you're right.  It won't stop me."

"...And I'll - do my best to - make sure you don't regret that, ma'am."

She doesn't know if that's going to help with whatever has Minerva McGonagall this worried.  But she has to try.

McGonagall has no further comment at this time, but she'll nod again, seriously, and very slightly misty-eyed.

If the war lasts long enough that these kids have to fight it too -

(pleaseno)

- well. She'll make sure they'll be ready. She owes them no less.

Any other books catch Ophelia's eye while she's picking that and the textbooks she needs off the shelves?

...She'll grab a Practical Self-Defense For Beginners book, as well.

...What is this...Muggle Studies...thing?  She's kind of curious what the wizarding perspective of Muggles is.

She'll...flip it open semirandomly.  Read a couple pages.  Blink.  Flip it to some new pages.  Squint at it.  Flip it to the back, read the index.  Close it.  Think.

Shove it back onto the shelf with a look of disgust evident upon her face.  "Someone really ought to update these in particular more than once every fifty years.  Dunno how fast wizards move, but - Muggles put men on the Moon in '69 and there's not even a mention of the US & Soviet rocketry programs in the index of Hogwarts' official Muggle Studies textbook?  Or computers?  Computers are amazing little calculation machines, these days - used to be that they were room-sized, but I've seen ads for a pocket calculator in the papers lately."

Is this eleven-year-old going to be responsible with the knowledge that it's like that partly on purpose to stop irresponsible wizard children from manifesting ambitions like "transfigure a rocket ship" and blowing up a city?

... Ophelia seems very clever but maybe not sufficiently lawful good.

Minerva makes a noncommittal shrugging motion. "Wizards do not, as a rule, move quickly."

"...but why not?  Pencils and pens write better than quills; even if wizards have plenty of ways of ensuring their own quality of life the traditional way there's still stuff that would be useful.  Quicker, more effective, less dangerous, more thorough.  Electrify the library's card catalogue, or maybe implement some sort of magical system on the same principle - actually, do wizards have any organization scheme for their books like muggles have the Dewey Decimal system?  Anti-theft devices probably have more ways to get around them magically but still deter the trivial shoplifter.  Computers could probably help with this Arithmancy thing, and then there's probably also the printing press - well, I imagine you have that already, actually; do you have to have someone go in and magic the pictures after, though?  And I'm looking at brooms and wondering if there's something you could do with the lessons of aerodynamics muggles have learned from planes.  ...Oh, and the safety equipment for not-falling-off-of-things Muggles invented for rock-climbers might be very helpful as far as preventing falling off a broom and going splat.  And I bet you could get a lot out of having a camera record of potions research.  It doesn't invent things that didn't actually happen, so - if and when the experimental product inevitably explodes, you can run the tape back and see what actually occurred.

"Which magical pictures, well, don't.

"...But I'm guessing that's not really it, because - you looked a bit too uncomfortable when you said that.  Is it because rockets are...well, barely-controlled explosions on their best days?  Because - yeah, I can get why you wouldn't mention that to people who can't understand clothing.  And I'm certainly not going to make anything like that without a much better understanding of rockets than I have.  But - you could have wizard spaceships so easily.  All for the presumably low, low price of having textbooks that aren't so...weirdly dismissive of Muggle achievements in making magicless things.  ...I don't know, maybe there's more than that - there often is, really.  But it feels like there's potential just - going to waste, a little bit."

McGonagall rattles off flatly, "Pencils and pens are much harder to enchant than quills, the Hogwarts library has a magical card catalogue, computers don't work around magic, copying charms predate the mechanical printing press by about five centuries, brooms operate on fundamentally different principles than planes and come standard with a variety of safety spells, a video camera would likely begin behaving like magical photographs if you made it magical enough to function at all in an experimental potions lab, and yes, Miss Prince, there is indeed a reason that introductory Muggle Studies textbooks deliberately omit mention of nonmagical things that explode, a fact which I'll ask you to spend a little bit more time at Hogwarts before you form determined opinions about."

It's probably a good thing Flitwick didn't draw muggleborn tour duty for Evans. He might have caught fire. 

"...Hmm.  Good to know; thank you.  Do mechanical typewriters work in magical environments?  And does anyone have any idea why electronics seem to not?  ...And, I just want to explicitly acknowledge, since I brought it up, that not having explosives as a readily available concept does make sense; there's a reason no-one publishes 'How To Make Bombs', and especially doesn't tell - well, me.  Or kids in general.  Somebody would probably get hurt."

Acknowledging nod for the last. "Quite so," and then back to the questions. (Lily is currently contentedly collecting textbooks into a shopping basket balanced on top of her new trunk and flipping interestedly through a book about bowtruckles.) "I'd expect a typewriter, as any mechanical device typically does, to work initially as you expected it to and then eventually develop unpredictable magical behavior. I am not a Charms master but my understanding is that all objects do this in the presence of sustained high magical field strength and mechanical devices have a wider array of physically possible behaviors; you will cover the phenomenon in detail in NEWT Charms."

"Huh.  That's really interesting; it also suggests that if you can create a magic-free zone, or even just a low-magic zone, within high-magic zones that you could have some interesting combinations of muggle and magic technology - which is to say, anything that involves manipulating devices with understood behavior.  But obviously I'm not a Charms Master yet, so who knows?  -- Lily, do be careful, I think these ones bite if you're not planning on buying them."