LUNAR (A Harry Potter Universe Fanfiction)

Five. Peer Review.

The first couple of weeks back had not been great. They had not been horrible, but they had not been great. Caiti chatted with Bill whenever the Ravenclaws had class with the Gryffindors. Sometimes she sat with Theo and his friends in the Great Hall. Elliot waved an enthusiastic hello to her every time they bumped into each other. Amelia and Miriam still drove her crazy in their dormitory at night, gossiping, and blasting their new obsession on the phonograph: a muggle band called NSYNC. But overall Hogwarts was Hogwarts. It was just sans all the people who had made it what she loved.

Instead of spending her evenings in the common room, Caiti had taken to frequenting the potions classroom in the dungeons. Professor Pym had set her up tutoring a couple of fifth years already who she thought might struggle heading into their O.W.L.s so she had made plans with each of them to meet once a week after classes.

One of those students, a Hufflepuff boy named Lewis who was very timid and turned red every time she spoke to him, had just left for the evening, leaving Caiti alone. She had an hour and a half before she was supposed to be back in the dungeons anyway to meet Professor Pym so Caiti decided to stay. She had an essay for charms that she really needed to work on, but all she wanted to do was get back to her research on the wolfsbane potion.

It had become something of an obsession in just a matter of days. She had read through the initial book on its ingredients and properties twice now and then moved on to re-reading the book Marlowe had given her for Christmas the previous year about the process of inventing new potions. Every day, she'd tried following along with one of the activities suggested in the book for composition practice.

It was fascinating. All these ideas about how to test various ingredients to see how they reacted to one another, and about messing with the ratios of one to the other to see how more or less of one or both changed the results.

For the time being, she'd decided to stick to the basic ingredients kept in the student store cupboards that she could use without worrying about waste, but she was itching to try some more rare and complex ingredients, especially the ones used in the wolfsbane potion. Already, she had a list in the back of her notebook of substances she wanted to investigate. Her birthday was next month, and she planned to ask her parents for a supply of some of the more expensive wolfsbane ingredients that she could work with on her own time.

Feeling slightly guilty about the work she was neglecting, Caiti left her school bag untouched and pulled out the book from Marlowe. Her mind was on potions anyway after her tutoring session and with her private lesson with Professor Pym to look forward to. She was onto the exercise in chapter seven, which discussed how to go about choosing ingredients with a specific purpose in mind.

Caiti was particularly interested in ingredients that were used in a little-used potion intended to return transfigured objects to their usual state (there was a spell for this, which was a lot less work), as well as those in the animagus potion. While she had only taken a brief look at each of these recipes and had never tried to make either herself, it had struck her as odd that there were no shared ingredients between either of these and the wolfsbane potion. The animagus potion was completely composed of expensive and difficult to find ingredients, but the other had a few she could find in the student store cupboard so she went and selected some spine of lionfish and a jar of small spiders to experiment with.

She wasn't exactly trying to replicate the effects of either of these potions — she neither wanted to turn something back into its original state nor transfigure it into something else — but she was interested in the transfigurative properties of these ingredients. What she really wanted to do was figure out how to stop something from transforming. She had not yet found any potions that attempted to do that.