Chapter 20 — Hermione Improves My Bad Ideas

Harry and Ron were waiting when I reached Gryffindor Tower. They had kept their promise to bring food, although the grey-brown object Harry handed me seemed better suited to repairing damage in the castle. I tried a bite, stopped when my teeth objected and looked at the two of them across the remains of my confidence in friendship.

‘Hagrid’s rock cakes,’ Harry explained. ‘He wanted us to bring you some. We stayed too long and missed dinner ourselves.’

I asked why they weren’t eating the rest. Ron looked at the cake in my hand before admitting that they had already tried. Apparently surviving the first attempt had satisfied them. Neville had kept biscuits upstairs, but Ron had discovered those earlier, and the supply had not survived the discovery.

I drank water, put the notebook safely away and went to bed hungry. Saturday breakfast therefore received considerably more attention than anything happening around it. When Seamus Finnigan passed me a cup, I took a grateful mouthful before noticing how closely he watched me drink.

‘Weak tea,’ I said when he asked how it tasted. His disappointment was immediate, so I asked what he had expected it to be.

He admitted he had been trying to make something stronger. I set the cup down and asked whether he usually checked a Transfiguration by offering it to somebody else. Seamus insisted it had only been a small experiment. Ron laughed into his breakfast while I explained that my appreciation of research did not extend to discovering I had joined a trial after swallowing it.

After we ate, Ron produced a battered chess set borrowed from Percy. Harry wanted to play, particularly once the pieces began commenting on how they ought to be arranged. I would have liked to hear whether their advice improved after the game started, but Hermione arrived with a notebook against her chest. We had arranged to continue investigating the talismans.

Ron called after us that he had made a valuable contribution on Thursday. Hermione said being hit twice did not qualify him to direct the next experiment. He insisted that someone had needed to do it, which was true enough that I left them to disagree about the value of his service while we went out.

She had found an unused classroom and arranged a desk with parchment, scales and small containers. The notebook lay ready beside them. I set down my own records and the pouch, pleased to have somewhere to work without people arriving to ask whether a few more Galleons would change my mind about selling the results.

We began with preparation itself. Hermione used my brush, a blank strip of treated Runebark and a mixture I already knew worked. She copied the inscription while I watched the angle and sequence. Nothing settled into the paper. A second attempt with my guidance produced the same lack of response.

Then I took the brush and prepared a fresh strip from the same supply, using the same mixture and inscription. The familiar change came almost at once. I kept the successful piece separate from Hermione’s failed sample, making certain neither could be confused with unused paper when we put them away.

‘It isn’t just the handwriting,’ she said. She compared the two pieces, looking particularly annoyed by how similar they appeared when they had behaved so differently.

‘Or simply having the brush in your hand,’ I added. ‘But it might respond differently to you. We haven’t separated the wand from whoever’s using it.’

Hermione wrote down the possibilities and underlined the fact that we hadn’t proved a cause. She drew columns for the material, preparation, carrier spell and observed result, then asked me to expand some of my shorter failure notes. According to her, ‘didn’t work’ left rather too much interpretation to whoever came back to the page later.

I described what had actually failed and found myself admitting that the extra words helped. We numbered the trials and kept unused control strips apart from the working supply. I counted out a small allocation from the treated paper I had brought, then returned the rest to the pouch. When that allocation was spent, we would stop and examine what it had told us.

The black liquid came next. Hermione noticed its colour and bitter smell, then asked to see the notes which belonged with it. She suspected aconite extract. Comparing the recorded preparation with what she had read made her more confident, though the damaged bottle label couldn’t tell us everything Ken had put into it.

‘Not a finished potion,’ she said. ‘An extract used in preparations. The concentration and anything added to it will matter.’

That fitted the pages I had copied the previous evening, but she had supplied a better identification than my private description of the bottle. I showed her the force tests in my notes. Calling an effect stronger had hidden the distinction between how hard it struck, how long it lasted and what happened to the target afterwards.

We began separating those observations. Hermione added more columns while I marked which earlier results could actually support a comparison. It was slower than choosing an interesting liquid and hoping for a spectacular outcome. It also made it much easier to see which question the next piece of paper was supposed to answer.

One useful result came from a small sample of dried hallucinogenic herb Hermione had obtained from the Potions stores. I used the preparation with a basic Force Pulse inscription, then threw the piece towards one of the ordinary mice in our enclosure with a spoken ‘Impello!’ The paper was consumed in a slight pulse. The mouse’s reaction was much larger: it bolted from an empty corner and kept avoiding a space where neither of us could see anything to frighten it.

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Hermione stopped the trial. The simple countermeasures she tried calmed its movement before the strange avoidance fully faded, leaving us watching rather than pretending we had immediately undone everything. We recorded what the mouse did. We couldn’t ask it what it had seen, however well the behaviour fitted the herb’s known effect.

‘The ink may be carrying something beyond the pulse,’ I said. Hermione wrote that as a possibility beside the observations. We had changed the preparation without learning a different carrier spell, and the result gave us a reason to investigate that distinction.

Her Hiccoughing Solution produced a much less alarming surprise. She had brewed a small batch of the student prank potion, and we used a diluted preparation with another Impello inscription. I threw it with the same formula, spending the piece in barely enough force to nudge the mouse before it began hiccupping. Hermione stared at it, then at the entry she had just made, as if neither was behaving with the dignity proper to research.

‘That might count as a new spell,’ she said. She had already started a heading when I objected that we were still using the same carrier.

The changed preparation had added a result. If we named every mixture as a completely separate spell, I told her, we would lose the connection we were trying to understand. She considered that, crossed out the heading and replaced it with a note about the secondary effect. I was pleased enough with the argument to forgive the growing number of columns.

The next sample was a tiny sealed vial labelled Amortentia. Hermione had obtained it from an older student in exchange for Muggle cosmetics, which raised several questions about supplies at Hogwarts. Before we opened it, scratching came from behind a broken cupboard. A grey rat emerged, stopped at the sight of us and tried to withdraw.

I recognised Scabbers and caught him before he reached the gap. Ron had been complaining that he couldn’t find him, so at least returning him would produce one useful result unconnected with the notebook. Hermione held out a hand for the rat. I looked from him to the smaller mice and made the mistake of explaining why his size might help us observe an effect.

‘He’s Ron’s pet,’ she said. Scabbers shifted in my hands as though that ought to settle the discussion.

I argued for using only effects we had already observed, with less of the preparation and an immediate stop if anything looked wrong. Hermione objected that this was hardly permission from Ron. We still ended up setting limits instead of returning the rat, which was a convenient way of answering a different question from the one she had asked.

The ordinary mice would come first. We agreed against unknown combinations on Scabbers and waited for each effect to clear before considering another. Those arrangements made the session easier to control. They did not turn Ron’s missing pet into something he had offered us, a distinction I preferred not to examine while we returned to the vial.

Amortentia created artificial infatuation, not love. We discussed that before preparing the trial, because delivering such an effect through a talisman would mean more than finding another use for a prank. It might make an influence normally associated with drinking a potion possible through a stored spell. I wanted to know whether the medium could carry it, even as the answer began to seem less comfortable than hiccups.

I prepared the effect with the same small Force Pulse carrier, threw the piece and spoke ‘Impello!’ as it released. The ordinary mouse then ignored food and followed another around the enclosure with a persistence it hadn’t shown before. We kept the spent remains and observed until the behaviour faded, recording the change without treating it as affection. Hermione’s excitement had gone, while mine had become an uneasy satisfaction with the answer.

‘Keep the result, but mark it restricted,’ she said. She watched while I wrote that the effect was coercive and that we would not test it on people.

I used a reduced preparation for the confirmation with Scabbers, consuming another piece with a short throw and the same spoken formula. He began following one of the mice with the same kind of fixation, though less insistently, and Hermione ended the trial. We waited until he stopped. The result belonged in the notebook, but knowing that the compulsion could reach him through paper didn’t make it less disturbing to watch.

We agreed it would stay a research finding, not become a casual trick. Then I prepared the last diluted Hiccoughing piece, keeping the force low as in the earlier mouse trial. I set Scabbers down, stepped back and released it with a short throw and a spoken ‘Impello!’ The paper spent itself, and the rat gave a startled jerk.

The hiccups followed. Hermione turned away with a hand over her mouth while I tried to observe Scabbers without encouraging her. After the previous trial, the absurd little sounds were a relief, which probably explained why behaving seriously became more difficult than it deserved to be. We ended the session there and began putting the materials away.

I wrapped the unused successful control separately, labelled the failed preparation and kept the trial records with the spent remains. The untouched treated supply went back into the pouch. We had learned enough to ask better questions about preparation, and we had evidence that our results depended on more than copying an inscription. We had not discovered why my magic worked this way, or how to reproduce everything Ken had attempted.

‘We need more Potions knowledge,’ Hermione said as she closed the notebook. I thought of the much thicker volume upstairs and told her Snape’s punishment might help with that.

She wanted to see it immediately. I promised to show her the relevant pages, but she was already considering a visit to the library and I needed to return Scabbers. His last experiment had left him hiccupping intermittently in my hands. I carried him back while thinking about how little of the morning Ron was likely to appreciate.

Harry and Ron were still at the chessboard when I entered the common room. Ron had the satisfied expression of someone whose position had improved considerably while his opponent considered it. He forgot the game when I placed Scabbers beside the board and told him where I had found him.

‘I’ve been looking for him,’ Ron said, gathering the rat against his jumper. ‘Poor thing. He must have gone looking for food.’

I advised him to keep Scabbers away from unused classrooms and Filch’s cat. Both were sensible recommendations, although they omitted the hazard currently standing beside the chessboard. The rat hiccupped, and Ron looked down at him with renewed concern.

‘Why’s he doing that?’ he asked. I took the chair opposite Harry and studied the pieces, none of which offered useful advice about my position.

‘Stress?’ I suggested. Scabbers hiccupped again while Ron stroked his back. I had spent the morning insisting on better records, then come home and left the most relevant part out of my report to the person who should have heard it.