antebellum [t. riddle]

xx.

november 1944
tw: brief mentions of sexual assault

it was only a few hours later that she received the owl saying her message had been evaluated and approved. no "thank you" or "good work", not that she was expecting one. originally, she'd planned to wait for a response, or fall asleep doing so, but now she was wide awake. she wanted to take a break, and she wanted to celebrate, but she couldn't take that risk right now.

instead, she sat down on the floor of her dorm room at one a.m. and opened all her potions, transfigurations, and healing magic books and got started researching.

none of them held a recipe for a stimulant potion. not that she was expecting it to.

instead, she found descriptions and explanations behind the theories of how potions like that were supposed to work. she learned how they channeled her magic and redirected it into her body's central nervous system and neurons. she read about the healing magic of them, and how the magic of the potion attached to the white blood cells in her body's immune system, and gave them strength and power to heal quicker and more effectively.

her eyes glazed over an analgesic potion, but she immediately dismissed that idea. with the analgesic, there would be no repercussions, and she didn't know if she had the restraint not to get addicted to that. plus, that was the easy way out. she needed to punish herself; she had to make this a challenge.

she thought back to what the healer had said about muggle sedatives. it would be foolish to even try to get ahold of alprazolam, or any other muggle prescriptive drugs without physically walking into london and buying them herself, and that was entirely too risky. it would also be more difficult, because she would then have to bind all the chemicals in alprazolam to the magical potion. instead, she settled on using alcohol as the sedative, because there would only be three different elements she'd have to bind.

she needed to go to a bar. or pub as the british called it. what a silly word.

she scribbled and scribbled through the night, only noticing that the sun had started to rise, trying to write down every idea or theory she had in her head. it was hard, with no one to bounce ideas off of, but in the morning she'd look back upon her notes and easily sort through anything actually useful and the meaningless drivel that her half-asleep brain had come up with.

she tucked herself into bed as she made the decision. originally, she had not planned at all to go to hogsmeade, but now, she needed to. she would go down and visit the pub, and then the bookstore to pick up the muggle chemistry book and then sprint back to the castle to sort through library texts for anything useful while everyone was gone.

it was a mistake to forgo sleep in order to write.

she awakened after her two full hours of sleep until it was time to get up. she wondered how different the effects of the energy potion would be on her body when she was not on the verge of death. she got dressed for class quickly, deciding against taking the potion, and instead went through her inventory. the previous night, she made a list of the many potential ingredients she might need and found she was lacking several.

re'em blood

bitter root

valerian

boomslang skin

essence of daisyroot (65% dilution)

okay, so she would need to go to the bookstore, a pub, and the potion supply store.

she was unnaturally distracted in her classes today, only being able to focus on her newest puzzle of putting together this potion. she realized that she was not recreating healer miranda's potion, but now completely trying to create her own.