–– Clara POV ––
The holiday finally over, potion mastery classes resumed. At first, it seemed like nothing changed, until I noticed that it did. Through detailed knowledge of plants in my head, which I did not even know the name of. I investigated, after four hours in which I could not concentrate in any way.
The culprit? The ritual on new year's eve, my mind having saved the millions of years of survival training, knowledge about growth cycles, effects, appearance, scents, taste, their tactile sensation, likes and dislikes of plants and so much more mundane knowledge about plants I did not even know the name off, hammered into my very instincts. So I did the next best thing, looking for the biggest book about common herbs I found and devouring it in mere minutes, only needing to pair my knowledge with names, adding a few sparse missing details and only a rare few herbs being completely unknown to me.
I took all that and stuffed it into an empty compartment of my mind, adding sorting algorithms after alphabet, effects, common cases of use and anything else I found interesting, before automating the progress in the end and applying the new sorting system to my whole mindscape, though it took thirty-two compartments to render it possible. A spark of ingenuity, culminating in an automatic sorting creator depending on content of a compartment, just a small part of me bugging me about the last „spark of ingenuity", which backfired horrifically.
My potions did not magically get better, but the brewing process became even easier. Easier to learn, internalize and also change, though it still ended in explosions most of the time. My mind was just having more different ideas, my familiarity to most herbs going from survival to brewing and gardening applications, after I had interrogated Neville Longbottom about a few of them, afterwards spending hours with him, discussing specific herbs. He was naturally annoyed, that I did not tell them were the intimate but still mostly lacking knowledge came from, but I could appease him, I think.
Like I already mentioned, my skills improved massively through that, the rasant development still taking multiple weeks, until I had my very first breakthrough, changing a potion with mundane herbs, taking an hour less to brew due to an added bell pepper seed. Slughorn helped with the testing and trademarking process, though it needed more time than his own publications, as he did not have an unlimited amounts of favors to call in for such things. He had already done so five times for Harry Potter, whose potential was blooming even more, no longer lacking most uncommon or rare ingredients. Slughorn also said, that he would help anyone with such things if they were in his mastery class.
Recent changes in the class were, that Slughorn was brewing himself, while explaining and preventing the worst of mistakes from happening. It felt like he was dancing, a form of extraordinary art, making all others in the room feel like underdeveloped monkeys. At the start it was massively distracting, the rate of mistakes spiking to an all time high, Slughorn brushing it off: „If you are so easily distracted, you should just throw the towel.", though no one did. Even the previously rebellious group of less studious pupils were shaping up, getting better in both practical and theoretical aspects, though even I was slowly getting annoyed by the ridiculous quantity and quality of expected essays, but their effectiveness was undeniable.
Anything else did not go as good sadly, students, primarily first years, leaving Hogwarts after the winter holiday, the parents outraged over our expected standards, which had not really changed for first to third years, except they themself and their parents agreed to skip classes or start another subject sooner. The amount of first year students was still staggeringly higher than the other years though, the result of the baby boom after the end of the war.
The rest of the school year passed slowly, my proficiency in potions spiking massively, until Slughorn sprang an end of the year test on us: „Good morning! Today we will freebrew, you will only use the materials specified on the blackboard", he said, pointing behind his back: „For now I will not care about the result, as long as it has any function and as little side effects as possible. You have 4 hours and fifty-five minutes to finish it".
What followed was mass panic, followed by frantic preparation of workspace and getting the right ingredients. Then, most started thinking about what to do and how to do it, Slughorn having used a combination of ingredients, which neither made sense nor had rhyme or reason.
The ingredients were non-magical honey, magical honey, frog eyes, gills and scales of salmon and tree sap of a tropical tree. There were no requirements for amount, as long as the ingredients were used at least somewhat.
My first attempt started with added non-magical honey to the simmering water, letting it completely dissolve. Then I added the scales, the content of my cauldron vaporizing. I did not test it with frog eyes and gills, as that would probably end in the same reaction.
The next try was nearly the same, just with additional magical honey added and dissolved, before I added another ingredient. This time it ended it black goo, which I promptly vanished. Another twenty tries later, I had found a method which at least allowed the third ingredient to be added. Simultaneous insertion of both types of honey and the tree sap, all frozen solid at the same temperature, the cauldron being removed from the flames with boiling water, before I added them, stirring clockwise.
The forth ingredient would explode, so I let it cool down, before reheating it and realizing, that any heat would turn into explosions in the end. So I let it cool again, before adding finely pulverized salmon scales, which did not dissolve, as the heat for that was missing. I then stirred the soup, until the powder was properly distributed, before flash freezing the whole mixture. The next step was slowly uniformly heating up the ice through a spell, the ice encased powder reacting in mini explosions. After the whole mixture was liquid again, it was now a silvery instead of golden shade.
And it exploded, as I added the frog eyes. I needed only three tries how to add them, as it was an imbalance between the salmon scale powder and the frog eyes. The right ratio was one hundred grams of powder to one pair of frog eyes. Afterwards I could put the gills in without any explosion, letting the potion simmer a bit, before removing it.
The preliminary result was an effect similar to gillyweed, granting gills and scales to the consumer, while those had a layer of a honey like liquid over them, which was the only current side effect I could infer from all the tests, as the liquid layer caused the test rat to suffocate. So I worked on that through adjusting the ratios of all ingredients. Less honey, more sap, two pairs of additional frog eyes and the corresponding powder and finally three gills at the end.
The next problem was, that the potion could not be split into doses and was was too much to drink, currently approaching a volume of two liters. Letting it boils away excess moisture was my first idea, resulting in my first explosion of today. I tried a few different things.
Scaling down the ratios to only one frog eye, which resulted in gills so weak, that the rat suffocated. A few other techniques to remove liquid failed as it was still too much to drink comfortably as without additional ingredients their effects were limited. My last two tries were an upscaled ratio of the potion with the same amount of water, ending in black sludge and compressing the potion into a pill, using a technique mainly used in other countries and taught by Slughorn only in our theory classes.
No one except Harry Potter had succeeded, his idea being an adhesive, which works underwater. My pill also failed, the pill killing the rat upon consumption due to a magical energy shock from the unhandled medical effectiveness. In the end, the time was just too short. I already had brewed up to five potions simultaneous, my time per potion averaging about five to ten minutes. I could potentially fix the problem of the pill with another ratio or longer brewing times, which just were not possible in the timeframe.
The next day we all got a report from Slughorn, detailing all steps anyone had done in the class and their respective results. Our homework over the summer holiday was to summarize and analyze it, which would prove hard for most, as my part alone was seven hundred, Harry's totaling nine hundred, most others hovering around three hundred pages long.
And I want to know how he wrote thousands of pages in the span of a night.
He also gave us a stern warning, more like straight up ban on freebrewing for this time, which most seemed to accept.