After a lively late-night snack, it was already two in the morning.
Hermione Granger's name was still on the map, right outside the boys' dormitory door.
"Merlin's Underpants!
Did she fall asleep?"
Vincent's distinctive exclamation nearly made the twins fall out of their chairs.
"My good friend, Merlin would be very angry."
"He wasn't angry when he was slandered as a Slytherin student, was he~"
Vincent said rather nonchalantly, "There was a full five centuries between those events."
"About that..." George seemed hesitant to speak.
But Fred said it outright. "You know about the Time-Turner, right?"
"I do.
But if Merlin used it to travel back in time, that would completely violate the Novikov self-consistency principle."
"Maybe he was incredibly powerful, or perhaps the one studying magic at Hogwarts just happened to share his name."
George also strongly suspected that Slytherin had been bragging, but throughout the history of the Wizarding World, very few wizards had deeply studied time magic.
After all, one careless mistake could send them to meet the real old Merlin.
"Let's not talk about this." Vincent lowered his head to look at the Marauder's Map.
That name was still there, without the slightest sign of movement.
The twins both pulled long faces.
"This is bad. We aren't going to have to sleep in the kitchen tonight, are we..."
Rather than sleep here, he might as well take a risk and gamble that she had fallen asleep.
"Come on, she's little McGonagall!"
"Buddy, the Fat Lady not tattling doesn't mean she won't!"
Vincent stood up. "I believe she won't."
In the first movie, hadn't Miss Granger gone out at night plenty of times?
By the time she graduated, she had probably broken thousands upon thousands of school rules.
But his argument about trust was not very convincing