Black Fire- Harry Potter AU

3. Geminio

Mia Grindelwald was quickly discovering that an empty castle was very lonely. Slowly the teachers were returning from their summer homes and the elves were populating the kitchen, but with such small staff one could walk around the castle the whole without seeing another living being. Minerva was often leaving the castle to attend Order meetings, and while she invited Mia to a few she hardly agreed to join.  Frequently though, Mia saw the ghosts of Hogwarts. While the most common form of company being a dead wizard was indeed eerie, the witch was able to enjoy her time without children populating the halls, finding it quite easy to continue her research. 

As of late the witch was studying effects of potion components. The witch had found a venomous snake in the dungeon. Choosing to ignore the fact that there was in fact a venomous snake in the building, the witch harvested its fangs. Snake fangs are a common ingredient in potions, but they were always brewed with non-venomous fangs.

To study the disruption of a single controlled ingredient, Mia crushed a single venomous fang along with the other fangs when creating a wideye potion. While the potion was brewing Mia used the bird summoning spell to create a flock of birds for testing, and caged each separately. While the practice would easily be considered cruel, the witch was unalarmed. A witch could only practice so much dark magic without some corruption after all. Comparatively to other dark witches and wizards Mia's corruption was minuscule, but very much existent.

Maintaining another petal and mortar as well as another cauldron, Mia brewed a normal wideye potion for control purposes. In a much larger book than her journal Mia wrote a detail by detail overview of the experiment. By the time the potion was brewed the witch had filled three pages with bubble pattern explanations and diagrams, color swatches and time lines of color changes, detailed clarifications of opacity, and even descriptions of scent.

Taking up a white tray the witch laid a ladle of the tampered potion as well as the control potion side by side. She filled another page describing how the tampered potion was slightly more royal blue and a little less opaque and viscous than the control potion. Of course, these were small changes that most wouldn't notice unless looking. She noted that the potion did in fact retain the same scent as the wideye potion. 

The black ink of her quill graceful scrawled out her notes in the book she reserved for potion experiments. The book itself was a deep red and about nine inches tall, seven inches wide, and bordering five inches thick. She had another book similar to the potion experimentation book designated for experiments based around spells, of which was a dark blue. Several smaller books of ranging lighter colors were designated to the studies of dark animals, objects, plants, and potion ingredients. After this experiment was completed venomous snake fangs would fill a page of the small, light green potion ingredient book, a fang affixed to the page opposite.  Her white notebook contained the basics of spells, mainly ones she had learned in Hogwarts. The light book however was not as fleshed out as many of the others. In deep contrast of the notebook was the witch's prized black journal of which contained almost all of her knowledge on dark spells, or charms. As it contained the most harmful magic the witch put protections on it such that only she could open the book. Eventually the witch planned on publishing a proper book from the contents of the journal, but wanted to have perfected the spells within the book and found counter curses, or at leasts reasons for the spell to have stopped before the information was available to the public.

After filling out the physical properties of the potion, Mia gathered her flock of birds, the majority of which had fallen asleep in their respective cages. Unlatching the first cage Mia administered the control potion to the sleeping bird. It stirred awake as expected. Mia closed the cage once again, pleased with her potion brewing skills. 

Opening a second cage the witch administered an equal dose of the test potion. The bird startled awake and flew from its cage. Mia watched in fascination as the bird circled the room endlessly without showing signs of exhaustion.  Mia continued to watch the bird into the late hours of the night. It was still flying, perhaps even faster, by the time she returned the next morning. The witch was in wonder, studying the endlessly flying bird for the next few days. Right up until the bird dropped dead from exhaustion. She deduced that the bird had died due to exhaustion the potion kept it from feeling and had instead replaced with the need to exert more energy. Normally the wideye potion would have worn off before this happened, but more importantly given the recipient energy. After careful examination of the bird, Mia was able to understand that the tampered potion made it feel like the recipient had exponentially more energy than they did.