Chapter 39: How to Properly Feed Mrs. Norris
Kyle didn't know what Cedric and Cho had talked about in the hall earlier, but he returned to the Hufflepuff common room with a smile on his face. As he sat down to read, a bulging bag suddenly dropped onto the open pages of his book.
"What the—," Kyle exclaimed, startled, before turning to see Cedric grinning widely. "What's gotten into you? Why are you smiling like that?"
"This is way faster than picking up money," Cedric said, squeezing onto the sofa beside Kyle. "Guess how much we made from selling the maps in Ravenclaw... Fifty-two sickles, each!"
Although Cedric phrased it as a question, he didn't wait for an answer and continued excitedly, "A few sheets of parchment, five knuts worth of materials, and a couple of simple incantations, and we made so much money..."
"Wait a minute." Kyle, confused by Cedric's enthusiasm, interrupted. "Shouldn't there only be forty sickles? And what's this about parchment?"
"Well, here's what happened," Cedric explained, settling in. "I went to the Ravenclaw Tower at noon and adjusted the routes to better suit their needs. Cho saw the revised map and suggested raising the price a bit, so that's how we ended up with fifty-two sickles instead of forty.
As for the parchment—it's a little trick with the Doubling Charm. For stuff like notes or maps, you can skip duplicating the complex parts of the parchment itself and just copy the content. It makes the spell easier to cast, and the replicas last longer."
After hearing this, Kyle understood why they'd earned twelve more sickles than expected. The quality of the map had been improved, so naturally, the price had gone up. However, he thought using parchment was a bit excessive. In his view, those maps would probably become obsolete in about a month, so Cedric had really gone the extra mile.
Fortunately, parchment wasn't expensive, costing less than two sickles overall, which was nothing compared to the profit. Plus, Cedric had paid for it himself, which Kyle appreciated the most.