|
Post by Heidi on Jul 26, 2014 23:18:44 GMT -6
Michael Dubois taught for a living, and he loved his job. He felt a spectacular sense of pride each and every time a student's eyes shone with clarity and new understanding of the world as a result of his lessons. For this reason, Michael always took painstaking effort in preparing his lesson plans. The first week of classes at Hogwarts was no different. And as he trudged through the dense and noisy swarm of human beings much shorter than himself, Michael considered the variety of charmed books on introductory history of magic in his briefcase with pride. Yes, today, minds would be broadened and lives would be changed.
This thought was punctuated by a thud and a small shatter, noticeable enough above the commotion caused by the throng of students to turn Michael's head. As if on instinct, he veered in that direction. In his experience, thuds and shattering sounds were never a good sign. Suffice it to say what Professor Dubois enjoyed about his job was the teaching.
Not the babysitting.
And it wasn't that he disliked children when they weren't quietly attending to his lectures.
"Professor, professor! That Pees kid's gone and hurt himself again!"
It was just that -- "Hurry! He's bleedin' out!" -- children, and people in general -- "Lookit him, he's about to cry!" -- were very, very -- "Whole summer gone by and he's still a bleedin' pansy!" -- loud.
Michael arrived at the corner of the third floor hall, where an age-old scene played itself. Several third and fourth year students, a mix of houses, gathered round as young Anthony Pees, a Hufflepuff second year with a delicate frame and an even more delicate temperament, lay on the ground, clearly employing all his emotional faculties to prevent himself from bursting into tears on the spot. His already wrinkled robes, too large for his frame, were tangled about him, revealing a twisted arm. Where shards of glass embedded into his pale skin, pockets of red budded.
On the ground next to his elbow lay the pendant responsible for the damage. The hourglass now exposed and the rotating mechanisms most likely damaged, it nonetheless gleamed cheerfully up at him against the dreary stone of the castle hall.
"What's this?" asked Michael. Despite his tone he did not mean it rhetorically. He already knew about time turners. What he did not know about was how this one ended up here - and more importantly, to whom it belonged.
Several of the students looked about and shrugged, as though waiting for some brave soul to confess ownership. By now the ruckus in the hall had died down, signalling the start of morning classes.
"Pees had it with him, was how I saw it!" piped a thin-lipped Gryffindor girl in the back.
This apparently struck a chord with the boy on the floor, for he very pointedly forgot to shed tears in the moment it took him to turn and scream, "DID NOT! IT'S NOT MINE, ELIZABETH!" as loudly as he could. As a result of this, a chorus of screaming and finger pointing erupted amongst the others, a display which Michael had very little patience for in general but especially not at 8:30 in the morning.
"All right, that's enough," he decided, pulling the child to his feet and gesturing the others away with a sweep of his arm. "Off to class. You don't want to be late on your first day." He snatched up the broken time turner by the chain and with a sigh of disappointment turned a swift 180 degrees toward the hospital wing, guiding the child as he did.
"I swear that isn't mine," Pees insisted, pudgy cheeks red from exertion as he craned his head up at the much taller head of house.
"We'll discuss it further after Nurse Moss checks you over. An armful of class is the most pressing matter right now."
Like that, Michael Dubois' first day of the term began in a way which he had not expected. Thus, another aspect of teaching which he found less than appealing - the unpredictability.
|
|
|
Post by Tori on Jul 26, 2014 23:54:19 GMT -6
When Katharine Moss accepted the position of nurse at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, her expectations included children inflicted with colds, maybe a scrape or two, but no one had prepared her for what it was actually like. The first week of term was, in a word, chaos. The majority of students sent to her were first-years who hadn't quite mastered the art of casting a spell without setting themselves on fire or worse.
At midnight on the second day of classes, a seventh year Slytherin girl was rushed into the hospital wing wearing absolutely nothing, completely covered in boils the color of acid pops. Her boyfriend, wearing only underpants, explained that they'd been swimming in the black lake, and she'd been bitten by something. Katharine was going to ask why they were swimming naked at midnight, but was overtaken by a flashback of herself doing that very thing during her 7th year. How foolish, she thought, knowing what she knew now about what lives in that lake.
Two days later, and the girl was still incapacitated. It was a quiet morning at Hogwarts, and Katharine enjoyed breakfast in her office, still in her pajamas and propped up in bed with a number of colorful pillows. A mug of coffee hovered in the air a few feet to her left, and today's issue of the Daily Prophet turned its pages for her as she shoveled some scrambled eggs into her mouth. The news wasn't what interested Katharine, though. It was the comics. Cute little drawings that frolicked in their panels, shooting hexes at one another, and sometimes invading other comics. Katharine laughed aloud at them, slopping some hot sauce onto the paper.
A soft chiming filled the room, and little magic bird in her cuckoo clock appeared, fluttering around Katharine's head.
Sighing, she set down her plate and took one last gulp of coffee before standing up and locating her slippers. She didn't bother fixing her hair yet--her patients were likely still sleeping, and she just needed to check on them and give that poor Slytherin girl some more medicine.
Her prediction was correct; the four students occupying beds in the hospital wing were sound asleep. Apart from a faintly snoring second-year, the wing was silent, the only light streaming in through the cracks in the curtained windows. With a swish of her wand, the torches lit and Katharine set to work, a little crazy-haired witch in flannel pajamas and bubblegum-pink cat slippers that purred.
As Katharine rummaged in her cabinet for the correct potion, she heard the door swing open. In strode Michael Dubois, the History of Magic professor, with a student who looked to be in a great deal of distress. Looking more closely, Katharine noticed the boy's arm. Blood and glass. Katharine had seen more blood in the past week than in her whole life, and she thanked the stars that she wasn't as squeamish as when she was a girl.
"What's happened?" Katharine asked, walking briskly toward the pair, having grabbed some bandages from her cabinet. She hoped he'd simply broken a set of phials and not something more dangerous. As if on cue, sunlight glinted off of something in the teacher's hand, and her stomach lurched.
"What's that?" She asked, knowing full well what it was.
This was not going to be easy.
|
|
|
Post by Heidi on Jul 27, 2014 0:41:54 GMT -6
In all of Michael's eight years at Hogwarts, never was the hospital wing a place he enjoyed traveling. First of all, it smelled sterile and lifeless. Michael supposed this was a sign that the nurses had a decent operation established, for a hospital wing smelling of days-old bandages or retch would surely be a cause for concern. Nonetheless, the lack of smell itself indicated to Michael the obviously blatant effort to keep the reality of injury and illness at bay - too clean. Eerily so.
Secondly, Michael hated blood. And because his journey to the hospital wing had been so single-minded, aside from the creaking of the soles of his leather shoes and the Pees boy's unsteady footsteps as Michael hauled them both up several flights of steps, he had not taken notice of how extensive the child's injuries actually were. Looking now, however, his stomach rose several inches toward his chest and his knees lost composure.
Michael relinquished his grip on the child as Nurse Moss asked him what had happened and what the object in his hand was - in the same tone he himself had used in his ineffective interrogation of the students. He caught her gaze just quickly enough to pass a meaningful look of confirmation. Frightening the already rattled boy with horror stories of broken time turners past was not particularly high on his priority list at the moment. So Michael simply recited what had been conveyed to him by Pees on the way to the hospital wing. "Anthony fell. It seems he was pushed by one of his classmates."
"That w-whatever-it-is isn't mine," said Anthony, a tremble in his lower lip. "I've never seen it before! Someone else put it in my pocket!"
Michael couldn't help but feel a stab of remorse for the boy. His arm clearly broken, he had nevertheless managed to remain relatively calm despite the pain he must be suffering. Currently he was struggling to keep the baggy sleeve of his cloak pushed upward toward his shoulder, away from his injuries. By now, there was so much blood that it had formed an elaborate network of rivers and streams down the limb in question. Michael could have sworn he spotted one which took a striking resemblance to the Chad-Congo Basin - that is, before he legs gave way and he collapsed into a chair against the wall, shielding his eyes from the carnage with a distressed hand-to-the-brow maneuver and a sigh.
When Brigitta heard of this, she would likely wring his neck for not identifying the guilty party.
|
|
|
Post by Tori on Jul 27, 2014 1:16:10 GMT -6
Katharine had been alive for 31 years, and in all that time, she'd never seen a time-turner, only pictures. It was especially difficult to receive one, and as far as she knew, there were only a handful in existence since Harry Potter's day. According to history, every time-turner that was in the Department of Mysteries had been smashed. Only a few wizards were licensed to make them, so how in the world did one fall into the hands of a second-year student?
As the boy sputtered his denial of ownership, a few of the other students in the ward stirred.
Taking a deep breath, Katharine smiled gently.
"Alright," she said. "No need to panic. I'll get you fixed up. Have a seat on this bed here."
She led the shaky boy to one of the cots and sat him down, lifting his arm gingerly to get a closer look at his injuries. Sharp bits of glass were deeply embedded into the boy's clearly broken arm, and rivers of blood flowed across his skin, mixing with some of the glittering sand from the time-turner.
Using her wand, Katharine siphoned off the sand and blood from the boy's arm, which remained clean only for a moment. Fresh blood crept out almost instantly, forming a new map of red rivers. But at least the sand was gone.
"This is going to sting," she told the boy calmly. She slipped on a medical glove and began carefully picking pieces of broken glass from the boy's skin. Each empty wound added more blood to the mess, but the glass needed to come out. The boy winced each time.
Five minutes later, the glass was gone, and Katharine cleaned his arm thoroughly before bandaging it.
"This will hurt, too. Your arm's been broken."
Slowly and carefully, Katharine mended the boy's arm, but it wasn't without pain for the boy. It wasn't until Katharine was checking the boy for other injuries that she remembered her fellow staff member.
"Professor Dubois," she said, turning to face him. "Would you mind going to the cabinet and fetching some blood-replenishing potion? He hasn't lost a lot, but he does look a bit pale."
She glanced over at the bedside table. She'd placed the broken glass on a tray there, and blood and sand glistened from the jagged edges. She was shocked and relieved that they boy didn't seem to have any more serious injuries.
But why didn't he? Time-turners can be deadly.
Katharine had a sour feeling in the pit of her stomach, like something really bad was going on.
Or maybe that was the hot sauce.
|
|
|
Post by Heidi on Jul 28, 2014 17:06:42 GMT -6
Given her current state of dress, Nurse Moss's exceptional medical care skills might have seemed surprising to anyone. But for Michael, to whom the sight of blood was all too appalling, the speed and adeptness at which she dealt with the boy's injuries were both impressive and a great relief. The moment he had sat down, he had averted his gaze, and by the time he was asked to retrieve the blood-replenishing potion from the medical cabinet, the child was all patched up.
Since the coast was clear, Michael stood and made his way to the shelves of vials. He realized very quickly that only a small number of them were labeled, and gingerly plucked a crystalline bottle containing bright red liquid from the middle shelf. Potions had never been his best subject, but Michael was certain that blood-replenishing potion was red. He had almost stepped away when he spotted a second vial in the back holding a serum of a deeper red, and on second thought, decided to take them both.
"Which of these is correct, Nurse Moss?" he asked, placing both vials in her hand.
He realized that he had been clutching the time turner's chain so tightly in his hand that the tiny interlocking links had created a stark red indentation on his palm. He carefully placed the object on the white linens, next to Pees.
"Where did you get this?" Michael asked.
"It was in the pocket of my cloak when someone pushed me. I swear I didn't put it there. I don't even know what it is!"
Michael's lips tightened and Pees, seeming to get a sense that his answer had not met a certain standard, swallowed with discomfort. "What is it?" the boy asked.
|
|
|
Post by Tori on Jul 28, 2014 17:46:28 GMT -6
While Michael Dubois rummaged through her cabinet, Katharine's mind wandered to the presence of the time turner once more. How had it gotten here? Surely it wasn't from the ministry. Something about it looked odd, as if the sand inside wasn't gold but gray, and the glass broke too easily. Something really didn't seem right, but Katharine willed herself to keep quiet about it, so as to not upset the student more. He seemed to be panicking quite a bit.
When Professor Dubois returned to her side, he held out two bottles, one with a slightly darker liquid. Blood-replenishing potion was deep purple, so Katharine grabbed the darker bottle. "Thank you," she said, uncorking the little bottle and pouring some into a glass.
"It's a time turner, Anthony," Katharine explained. "They're not very common, and they're incredibly dangerous. It's not good for one to be circulating the school. I'm afraid even if it was yours, we'd have to confiscate it."
She handed the glass of potion to the student and walked away, re-corking the bottle. The floor in the wing was slick with blood, and Katharine's pink slipper jetted forward, causing her to lose her balance. She wobbled in place for a moment before her weight pulled her to the side and down she went. Before she fell, she managed to grab her colleague's shirtsleeve, but a small tinkling noise told Katharine that she'd broken the bottle of potion.
"Oh no," she said, her heart racing still as she glanced down to where her hand had landed. The bottle of liquid had smashed Katharine's hand lay in a large mess of glass and red liquid.
That's odd, she thought, lifting up her hand. There was glass sticking to her palm, and also a trace of the gray sand. This potion is supposed to be purple.
"Prof-ss-r Do-wah," Katharine slurred, the room beginning to swirl and grow darker. "I don' think we used th' righ' poti--..."
|
|
|
Post by Heidi on Jul 28, 2014 18:59:48 GMT -6
Before Michael knew what was happening, a weight on his sleeve had dragged him to the ground and he felt the intense force of impact as he tumbled backwards, hiting the wet, glass-covered floor with a crack. Looking around him, he saw blood that had already smeared the stone - Pees' blood no doubt - but then he felt a sharp pain his palm and lifted his hand to find small shards embedded where his own blood bubbled up from his own skin.
Michael felt faint. But the room, too, seemed to be changing, morphing, contorting. He heard Nurse Moss saying something to him but her voice warped low and deep until it was practically unintelligible to him.
It wasn't until Michael Dubois fell flat on his back and the room went dark that he finally was able to make out the garbled speech.
"Michael!" it insisted. "Michael!"
Long moments passed.
He opened his eyes, and the room came into focus.
"Wake up, mate!" A boy with roundish features and dark eyes was shaking him by the shoulders. "Do you want to be late?"
"Nurse Moss?" Michael muttered back at him.
"No," was the flat response. "Sounds sexy though. I'll give you a chocolate frog later if you tell me how it was."
"Huh?"
"Your dream." A sly eyebrow wiggle accompanied these words.
It was then that the wheels in Michael's brain finally started turning. They turned, and spluttered, and came to a grinding halt, seemingly all in one long moment. He blinked several times, and his fingers blindly grasped at the bed linens.
Of course dreams would be a reasonable topic to discuss with someone who was lying in bed. Yet currently Michael sought relentlessly to find an explanation for why he was in bed, how he had gotten there, and more importantly - attempted fruitlessly to grasp at the elusive thread of the world he had just exited. He uttered a sound of inexplicable panic as it clattered off the edges of his mind.
The next moment Michael was avoiding a pillow to the face.
Apparently he was very late to class.
|
|
|
Post by Tori on Jul 28, 2014 20:04:13 GMT -6
Some large bird called in the distance, and Katharine Moss had the faintest feeling of being awoken from a vivid but elusive dream as she stirred in her bed.
I don't even remember going to sleep, she thought, burrowing deeper into her blankets. What day is it? Do I have to work today?
Katharine thought about work, but the details wouldn't come to her.
"Katharine," someone called.
"Michael?" Her voice replied. She wasn't sure if she'd only imagined it.
"Who's Michael?" the other voice asked. "Michael Gibbons? Didn't you just break up with him? Why are you dreaming about him?"
Helen, Katharine's brain whispered. "Helen?" She repeated.
"Yeah, it's Helen," the voice answered. "Wake up! You missed breakfast. What did you do last night? Find more firewhiskey in the caretaker's office?"
"Probably," Katharine said, her head aching. "What day is it?"
"Bloody hell, Kath. It's Tuesday. Get up, we're going to be late!"
"Late?"
"For potions, you dim wit! Jesus, no more drinking on school nights. You look like hell."
Blinking her eyes open, Katharine took in her surroundings. She was in the Hufflepuff girls' dormitory, and morning light was streaming in the windows.
"I feel like hell, too," Katharine said, forcing herself to sit up. Her head felt as though someone had cast an enlarging charm on it. "I can't remember anything."
"Probably for the best," the blonde girl agreed, throwing a set of Hufflepuff robes on top of Katharine. "Get dressed, we've only got five minutes."
Feeling like time was spinning around her, not really knowing what that meant, Katharine quickly threw on her school robes and two shoes, not looking at whether or not they matched.
On her way out of the dormitory, Katharine caught a glance of herself in a long mirror. Her dark hair was wilder than she'd ever seen it, flyaway strands extending past her shoulders and making her appear several inches taller.
"Helen," Katharine panted as the two girls ran down the corridor, "I look like Medusa."
"You always do, Kath," Helen shouted behind her shoulder. "Terrifying."
"Brilliant."
The two fifth-year girls came to a breathless halt in front of the potions classroom door. They even had one minute to spare.
"I'm awful at potions," Katharine said, sighing as she settled down into a chair and dug up her textbook.
"Me, too," sighed Helen.
"We all are, mate," said a boy to her right, also out of breath. "O.W.L.s are going to be fun."
Katharine groaned and sunk down in her seat. She'd forgotten about O.W.L.s.
|
|
|
Post by Heidi on Jul 29, 2014 13:38:38 GMT -6
From the moment Michael Dubois had met Kirk Carlisle at the endless dining hall table during the first year sorting ceremony, their differences had been so painfully obvious that few failed to notice. In fact, their first meeting had left Michael wondering at the sorting hat's validity, for certainly there was no way that this boy was anything like himself.
Five years later, this thought still occasionally wandered through Michael's mind. Currently it was having lunch somewhere around his visual cortex while Kirk folded a waffle in half and aggressively began shoving it into his mouth.
Michael pretended not to stare. "Where did you get that?" he asked through clenched teeth, eyes glued to the chalk board on which Professor Crispe was currently scrawling the ingredients list for today's lesson. Eating in potions class was strictly prohibited - for very obvious reasons. Unfortunately rules seemed to exist simply so that Kirk would have something besides his own dignity to desecrate.
"K'ss'n," said Kirk through a mouthful of waffle, a little too loudly.
"What?" whispered one of the girls at the table next to them, and as she did so, Professor Crispe paused ever so slightly such that Michael was certain she had overheard them. A moment more and it became clear that she had simply forgotten the spelling of croakoa.
"Right, then," Crispe said, finishing the 'a' with a small flourish and finally turning to address the class. "Today we will be recreating Baruffio's Brain Elixir, the instructions for which are listed on page 149 of your text. I imagine with your impending O.W.L.s, this potion might be quite appealing for some of you. However it is important to note that while effective at increasing concentration and reasoning capabilities, this potion can have dangerous side-effects if mixed incorrectly, including severe amnesia."
Michael reached into bag, expecting to feel the ragged leather spine of Advanced Potion-Making. His chest seized when he felt no such thing.
He had forgotten his book.
|
|
|
Post by Tori on Jul 29, 2014 14:01:09 GMT -6
Katharine tapped her foot on the floor, noting that her shoes felt a little worn. Wasn't there a trip to Hogsmeade coming up? Her attention was pulled from the rhythm of her foot to the table at her right. The two boys--what were there names?--were engaged in an awful attempt at whispering.
Something smelled like breakfast. Katharine was hungry.
"What?" She asked them, but they didn't answer. Professor Crispe finished writing on the board, and everyone began turning their pages.
"Are you serious?" The boy to her right was saying to his table mate. "You ALWAYS bring your book. Now we don't have one! She didn't write any instructions on the board."
Without hesitating, Katharine placed her textbook on the boys' table. "You can use mine," she said. "I remember how to make this one."
"Cool, thanks!"
Helen choked. "Kath, you're hilarious," she said, placing her own book in the center of their table. "But I can share with you."
"No, really," Katharine assured her friend, sliding the book away. "I know how."
"This should be good," Helen said, shaking her head. "You do know you're rubbish at potions, right?"
"No," Katharine said. "Watch me. I swear to you I can make this potion."
Before anyone had finished reading their ingredients list, Katharine was up at Professor Crispe's ingredient station with a tray. She counted out 16 billywig stings, 2 Jobberknoll feathers, a sprig of peppermint, 8 salamander eyes, and a jar of dew water.
Helen watched her, incredulous. Katharine waggled her eyebrows at her friend and set to work, lighting a flame quickly under her cauldron and adding the salamander eyes first, just like she remembered.
They must've done this potion before.
|
|
|
Post by Heidi on Jul 29, 2014 14:26:29 GMT -6
By some great miracle, the girl at the table next to them passed over her potions book, and Michael's "thank you" was drowned out by Kirk's overly enthusiastic one. The words seemed to be lost the girl anyway, as she was already on her way up to the ingredients table, gathering things onto her tray as though she had made this particular brew dozens of times before.
"All right, mate, let's get to it," Kirk said.
Hands on the newly acquired book, Michael felt his blood pressure lower then consequently rise again as he opened to the correct page and stared at the instructions.
Salamander eyes?
Billywig stings?
"These ingredients can combust if heated too quickly," Michael said worriedly.
"Great," said Kirk, with a tone Michael didn't care for and so decided to ignore. "Let's get started." With that, he shuffled off to collect ingredients while Michael reread the instructions several times over.
He glanced over to see the girl with the wild hair leisurely popping ingredients into her cauldron, as if doing so couldn't cause a fire. Unlike Michael, she seemed entirely confident with the task at hand, even cheerful about it. Was that humming he heard?
He couldn't remember her name, but he did know for certain that she hadn't been this good at potions last week, and his memory was nothing to scoff at.
"Okay, here we are." Kirk sat the tray of ingredients between them. "What now?"
"Heat the water to just boiling, then add salamander eyes two at a time, stirring a minute between," Michael recited nervously.
"Remember," Professor Crispe said from the front of the room, "if your potion turns red, turn off the heat immediately."
Michael gulped and, with a flick of his wand, lit the cauldron.
|
|
|
Post by Tori on Jul 29, 2014 14:44:46 GMT -6
"How are you doing that?" Helen demanded, dropping a salamander eye into her own potion.
"We must have made this potion last year," Katharine said, stirring the yellowish concoction in her cauldron clockwise six times.
"Doubt it," the girl said, staring intensely at her instructions. "Besides, we've made sleeping draughts about six times and I don't think you've memorized it."
"Oh, shut up, you're distracting me."
After Katharine added one of the feathers, she extinguished her flame and sat down. She needed to give the potion a bit of time to settle before continuing. Her attention was drawn back to the boys at the table next to her. The one closest to her was Kirk. She was pretty certain of that. Why didn't she know the other one's name? He was Hufflepuff too, surely. She'd seen him before. Why couldn't she think of it?
And why was she suddenly so bothered by that?
"Seriously, Kath, you can't be this far ahead of everyone. What's gotten into you?"
Katharine checked the clock. It was time to add the dew water. "Just let it go, Helen. I must be a genius now."
While Helen fretted over her sickly looking brown goop, Katharine grinned as she whisked her potion lightly. It was such a bright blue that she wished it were the sky. When she relit the flame, the potion began to simmer, letting off a purple steam.
"This is so pretty," Katharine said, almost breathlessly.
"You are so strange. Come help me with mine."
"I can't," Katharine said, swirling the peppermint sprig around in her cauldron. "I've got one more step."
Add 16 billywig stings one at a time, stirring two times counter-clockwise between each addition.
Katharine had added nine stings and stirred properly between them when a shadow behind her told her that Professor Crispe was watching.
"Wonderful work, Miss Moss," the professor said. "
"Moss, huh?" Katharine heard Kirk say. "Hey Michael, Moss."
"What?" Katharine asked Kirk, just as Helen tapped her on the shoulder.
"Katharine, mine's turned red!"
"What?" Katharine asked, whirling around. As she did so, she slipped on something Helen had spilled, and after a moment of regaining her balance, Katharine noticed the jar of billywig stings just as it sank below the surface of her almost-finished potion.
"Oh, no!" Katharine cried out as her cauldron began emitting a low moaning sound, the lovely blue shade transitioning to a sickly purple, then a deep, deep red. "Oh, no..."
|
|
|
Post by Heidi on Jul 29, 2014 15:08:49 GMT -6
As the professor complimented the wild-haired girl on a job well done, Michael realized just how slowly he was moving. He had barely even finished adding the salamander eyes and she already had a practically perfect result. But, he reminded himself that doing it correctly was the most important thing, even if it meant he had to go slow.
"Wait, what did you just do?" Kirk asked, blatantly copying everything Michael did on his own potion.
"Don't do what I do, read the book. I don't know how to make this."
"I did, and mine's a different color than yours," replied Kirk.
Michael glanced over at his friend's cauldron only to find it a flat, murky brown. "You must have gone too fast," he muttered, his brain too focused on counting out counter-clockwise stirs to care at the moment.
One, two, billywig sting. One, two, billywig sting.
"Oh, no! Oh, no..."
One, two, three, four, five....
By the time Michael realized what he was doing, he had already made the fatal error, thoughtlessly stirring his brew as the Moss girl stumbled and regarded her once-perfect potion with despair.
"Michael? Uh, Michael... Michael!"
"Huh?" Michael asked, watching as Professor Crispe cast flicked her wand in the direction of the girl's potion. "What, Kirk?"
"Your arm's on fire."
|
|
|
Post by Tori on Jul 29, 2014 15:22:31 GMT -6
Chaos.
The room soon filled with thick smoke from the four students' cauldrons, and Katharine was pretty sure someone was on fire.
"Professor Crispe!" Someone shouted. Some people screamed. Many people coughed.
"Calm down," the professor yelled, and everyone silenced themselves, apart from those who continued to choke. In a flash, the fires under their cauldrons were extinguised and the smoke lightened. "What in blazes happened back here?" The older woman demanded.
"I got distracted--" Katharine began.
"We all did!" Helen added.
Kirk opened his mouth to say something.
"Enough!" Professor Crispe said, rubbing her temples. "Just clean up the mess. Five points from Hufflepuff."
"Way to go, Katharine," Helen hissed once their teacher had walked away.
"How is this my fault?"
"You had to be all cocky! You made me nervous!"
"It's not my fault!" She snapped back at her friend. "At least my potion looked right before you made me spill my stings."
"Shove it," Helen said, storming off and slamming her ingredients tray back at the front of the classroom.
"Anyone who failed to complete their potion will write ten inches on parchment for tomorrow explaining why the dew water is so important in this recipe."
"Great," Helen spat. "Now we have homework."
Katharine rolled her eyes and continued wiping up everything that had spilled.
|
|
|
Post by Heidi on Jul 29, 2014 17:11:47 GMT -6
Michael's cheeks became as hot as his now-extinguished arm as Professor Crispe reprimanded them. Luckily, the fire had been put out before it was able to do any real damage to his robe. His hand stung, and would probably blister later, but he was sure he wouldn't die from that.
"Who has that much to say about a dumb potion?" Kirk muttered, haphazardly shoveling all the ingredients he hadn't used back onto the try and casting "Scourgio!" to clean the smelly muck out of his cauldron.
The potions textbook on the table had caught an ember or two from the blaze, and now sported a few black stains, like cigar burns. Michael picked it up and made his way over to the girls' table, whose occupants were willfully refusing to look at each other as they cleaned the brewing area.
"Here," Michael said, handing the book to the Moss girl. "Thanks for letting us borrow it. I usually don't forget my textbooks. Today has been... odd." As an afterthought he added, "Sorry for the damage," and returned to his own table.
|
|