Penwick

Rejoice! Rejoice this glorious day, this day most cherished! For today was the day June Selwyn well and truly realized that she would never have to take a Potions class ever again.

Now, Alchemy was basically potions, but it was not literally potions, and that was reason enough to constitute a joyous moment.

That joyous moment was quickly dashed when the professor assigned pairs for a practical potions assignment due the following Monday.

It seemed like neither June nor her assigned partner, Raizel, particularly wanted to do a practical assignment over the weekend, so Friday night it was.

"Doesn't seem too difficult," June mused while reading the parchment in front of them. The alchemy classroom was empty for now, June had hurried her supper to be able to start sooner, but time would tell if other classmates trickled in.

"Don't know why the professor wants us to show up to class with a Hiccoughing Solution, though. Think they'll make us drink it and brew an antidote while we suffer the side effects?" It was conversational lubricant more than anything, but June truly was curious. What were the professors at Penwick like? One of each class was hardly enough to get a proper read on the academic atmosphere of a school, maybe her partner could help her out a bit.

She turned toward the wall of ingredients, suddenly feeling very, very lost. Some of the labels had faded over time, and while a first-year class may have received instruction on how the professor organized their supplies, a fifth-year class certainly would not. They'd practically be able to get ingredients with their eyes closed.

Which June used to be able to do. But now everything was wrong. There was dittany where the bubotuber puss was supposed to be, rose oil seemingly with the dried plants instead of the liquids, potato peelings nowhere to be found (!!!). Wrong, all wrong.

But she'd have to grin and bear it unless she suddenly had a desire to become a potions professor. Which she very much did not. June sheepishly turned back to her partner, a meek smile on her face. "You, uh, wouldn't mind showing me around, would you?"

June tilted her head, blinking owlishly at her partner’s reply. Oh. Right. That hadn’t come out the way she’d meant it. She laughed, a little too quickly, brushing stray hair behind her ear.

“No, not… Of the classroom. I mean,” She gestured vaguely toward the jumble of shelves. “The ingredients. Not sure my guesswork would take us very far.”

She smiled awkwardly while silence fell on the pair. Silence was dangerous. Silence was where June started to remember she was going to face things like this over and over while getting used to Penwick, looking potentially daft while simple things confused her, things she thought were strange practices that made perfect sense to others..

So she filled the air again. Maybe an analogy would help. “This,” she said, waving her hand at the shelves, “this feels exactly like... Have you ever been at someone else's home, and they say, 'Help yourself to some tea'? So you go into their kitchen, and you’re just trying to make a cup of tea, but you can’t for the life of you figure out where the mugs are. You open a cupboard and it’s spices. Next one, plates. Next one, seventeen oddly-shaped jars of honey. You know the mugs exist, you know they’re somewhere obvious, but apparently your host lives in a parallel universe where nothing makes sense.”

Her voice warmed a little.
“Well, that’s me right now. Except instead of tea, it’s..." She glanced at the first ingredient, "Fluxweed. Which is green and leafy. That narrows it down to, oh, half the room.” She tapped the parchment recipe with her wand, then looked at Raizel expectantly. “Care to rescue me before I start taste-testing?”

Herbs​‍​‌‍​‍‌ and liquids, well, at least they were separated. Didn't help much though, as most of the labels had been faded by years, maybe decades of use. At least the fluxweed was easy to find. She took the jar, putting it down and pulling over a chopping board.

Her chopping was… adequate. Not good, not terrible. Her slices were a little uneven, but nothing catastrophic.

"It’s not that personal a question, don't worry. Well, at least in my case. It wasn’t anything dramatic that made me leave Hogwarts,” she replied, pushing the chopped pieces into the mortar with the side of the blade. They landed with a quiet rustling, and she started to grind them with her practiced yet slightly stiff movements, like a musician who had memorized the notes of a piece but wasn't playing it with any feeling.

“Hogwarts is a good school,” she said, neutral, factual. “But it is also very… narrow. Not literally, of course. There is only one way to learn, one way to behave, one way to progress. I got tired of feeling like I had to make myself smaller to fit the structure.”

She stopped for a moment, picking up some leaves from the rim and putting them back into the bowl of the morter.

“I love self-study, I love following my topics outside of the syllabus. You know, beyond the basics that professors teach. Instead of encouraging that,” she said, picking her words with more precision than force, “they treated it like a problem that needed to be solved. As if curiosity was a discipline issue.”

June took two pinches of the ground herbs and put them into the cauldron, then lit the fire beneath it.

“I wasn’t trying to be a rebel. I just like… to understand things.” She gave a little shrug. “Apparently, that was a problem.”

She looked around the classroom once more, her shoulders relaxing.

“There was also that time when an attack was made on a broom race I was in, and it was never looked into. We all got pretty injured. I tried investigating it myself and got detention for it.” A very slight, almost bitter, but not quite, kind of exhale came from her. "I’m pretty sure that won’t happen here. At least, the detention part. It looks like any place with a lot of wix is also a place where danger is likely to be found.”

June moved to the liquids shelf, and with a bit more confidence, she was examining the labels. The salamander oil was quite simple to recognize, its signature gloss gave it away, and she checked the number of drops on the parchment, muttering under her breath:

“One, two, three.”

The cauldron responded with a soft swirl of colour that assured her she had done it correctly.

More confident, she went for the vial beside the salamander oil that she thought was horklump juice. Similar size, similar bottle type same shelf. She didn’t check the label as she uncorked it. June raised the vial over the cauldron, poised to add a neat drop of what she believed was horklump juice.

The label, if Raizel had glanced at it, read in clean looping script:


June tilted her wrist, completely unaware.

June did not have time to process the warning, only the urgency in Raizel's voice and the flicker of motion out of the corner of her eye. Reflexes kicked in where thoughts had failed her. Her fingers clenched.

The drop fell.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then the cauldron screamed.

The surface of the potion buckled inward, folding as if punched from below, before erupting in a violent plume of light and heat. June let out a scream, stumbling backward onto the ground as a shockwave of force slammed into her chest, stealing the breath from her lungs. The cauldron tilted, rattling ominously against the stone as greenish mist billowed outward, metal screeching and cracking as if alive.

June threw her arms up in instinct, her hair flying as the blast sent sparks, fumes, and bits of half-vaporized potion flying across the workbench. Something splashed against her sleeve and began to smoke where it hit. The air was thick with the smell of burned resin and copper, and a bitter, choking reek that made June's eyes water instantly.

When the noise finally died down, the cauldron rested warped and partly blackened, its contents churning in a disturbing, hiccough-like pattern all its own.

June stood frozen, her chest heaving, her heart pounding so loudly that she was sure Raizel could hear it. Her fingers trembled as she slowly lowered her arms. Smoke curled lazily through the air, catching the enchanted classroom lights in sickly green ribbons.

"…That was," she said huskily, her eyes blinking away the fog, "that was not the next step."

She turned to Raizel, her face pale but her eyes wide with horrified awe, a thin trace of green residue smearing her cheek.

"I am so sorry," she continued in a rush, her words spilling over one another. "I honestly believed, I mean, I didn't even think to check because it looked right, and I just, I didn't think it would-" She waved weakly at the smoking cauldron. "-do that."

Another hiccough erupted from the potion, punctuating the silence.

June winced.

"…On the bright side," she continued, still gasping for air, "I'm fairly certain we've conclusively proven why they didn't want us doing this alone."

She glanced at Raizel, a pang of guilt now that the shock was wearing off. "Are you alright?" she asked, standing up, holding out a hand to Raizel if she too had been pushed to the floor. "Because if I've injured you and destroyed the classroom, I might actually have to transfer again."

Maybe she shouldn't have celebrated her freedom from potions just yet.