Chapter 1
15 Months Later
Ingredients
17 wolfsbane leaves- Juice of 2 Mandrake leaves - Need from Neville
3 drops of dragon blood (Remember to write Ron back)1 powdered moonstone- 2 drops of Syrup of Hellebore - DO NOT MESS WITH
- 3 Murtlap tentacles - New Variety?
Juice of 7 Sopophorous Beans - New bane of existence- 1 Occamy egg
Wolfsbane Potion is my mortal enemy. I never want to lay eyes on another half melted cauldron or cloud of green smoke again. It may be my breaking point.
We are currently running into several problems, and the Board of Healers are always very happy to hear about all of them.
Wolfsbane leaves are all the same. The variants all have the same brewing properties, and the only difference amongst them being the color that the flowers bloom. Utilizing those differences is an avenue we pursued, and then very quickly abandoned as it proved fruitless.
The moonstone is just moonstone. It doesn’t have any variants or mutations or even other uses as far as we know.
Juicing Sopophorous Beans is a particular annoyance that I would be very happy to never repeat again in my lifetime.
The dragon’s blood we are using has started to dry up, and Ron’s next parcel is not supposed to be here for another week or so. Luna and I had tried for a while to use the blood of different breeds, but the only one that had an impact was the Chinese Fireball, and all it did differently was turn the potion from a smokey blue to a deep red. Cool, but not exactly helpful.
Our Murtlap Tentacles have been doing exactly what they are supposed to, but are fragile. The holding temperatures of the different brewing stages are all to maintain the integrity of the tentacles until the very end, when the heat is increased back to a boil and they disintegrate with a stir. That is all wonderful, unless of course, your goal is to change the purpose of the potion and need to alter things like the cook time and techniques used.
Neville’s latest shipment of Mandrake leaves are smaller than usual, which isn’t entirely his fault or detrimental, but it still makes stretching them between multiple batches more challenging.
Trying to add just one more drop of Hellebore Syrup is what created the mess in front of me.
“I need some air,” I announce as my eyes unfocus in the direction of swirling gray smoke.
“Of course Hermione! Take all the time that you need. I will get this cleaned up,” Luna calls, already waving her wand to clean the mess on my bench, and abandoning whatever she was noting at the other table. It looks like she was documenting the changes witnessed when Hellebore Syrup is dropped directly onto the other ingredients. Probably in pursuit of finding another method of imbuing the Syrup into the potion. That may be a great way to increase the amount that we use without getting an unstable reaction. I’ll need to ask her more about that later.
“You know, these cauldrons really are cheaply made. These messes are likely more to do with the properties of the pewter than whatever test you are running at the moment,” she adds with a small smile on her face.
I want to be grateful that she is there to be so helpful and so encouraging, but I am very close to sensory overload and the sound of her voice is grating on my ear drums. If I stay here I will end up saying something unkind that I don’t mean, and that she does not deserve. Not when she has spent the last 15 months putting up with me.
With that in mind, I take off through the lab door and high-tail it up to my office. The air in that room won’t be fresh air per-say, but the window does open. Plus the lights turn off, and I am in desperate need of a reset.
As soon as I walk through the red door though, I am met with the messy black hair that graces the back of my best friend’s head as he peruses my bookshelf. If my memory serves, and my organizational system has held up since I last redid it, he should be staring straight at my tattered copy of New Theory of Numerology .
Fine. He can be here for this if he must.
I turn off the lights and brush past him, marching directly over to the window to throw it all the way open. Once those two tasks are accomplished I kick off my shoes, sit on the floor, and press my back to the stretch of wall beneath the sill.
Brick against my back, carpet beneath my feet, wind blowing past the window. I set a 5 minute timer on my watch, and settle in to get my brain back on track. Then the day may continue to happen.
“Woah there, you okay Hermione?” Harry asks gently. I give him a tight nod in return.
“Just needed some quiet.”
“Understood,” he says, then drops himself right next to me. A few inches separate us, but I can still feel the heat that radiates from the man like he’s a space heater. He has always done this. Always known what I need without me having to verbalize it. The lack of that understanding is what caused Ron and me to drift away so soon after school ended. He never quite got these sensory resets, and without Hogwarts keeping up locationally together, he stopped making the effort to accommodate me. His brain doesn’t take in as much as mine, which must be nice, but there was always a disconnect between us because of it. Harry and I have never had a problem understanding each other. We’re not just friends, we’re the siblings that neither one of us ever had.
Brick against my back, carpet beneath my feet, wind blowing past the window, Harry’s body heat. 4 more minutes.
We sit in complete silence as Harry scrolls on his phone and I slowly feel my senses reign themselves back in. Brick against my back, carpet beneath my feet, wind blowing past the window, Harry’s body heat, the sound of his breathing. The closer we get to that 5 minute timer, the clearer my head becomes, and thankfully, Wolfsbane potion returns to being my passion project, rather than the bane of my existence.
Several high-pitched beeps pierce the silence and it’s business as usual. I hop up, straighten the legs of my trousers, slip my socked feet back into my loafers, then move to close the window. Harry unfolds himself from the floor and tucks his phone back into his pocket. Moving to flip the light back on, he says, “I’ll never quite understand how they’ve gotten phones to work in this building. They’ve never worked in close proximity to magic, but all of the sudden, totally fine. Not that I’m complaining. With Ginny out of town, this is far easier than sending owls back and forth.”
“It’s the phone’s that changed, not the building. Some witch or wizard must’ve gotten high up in the phone companies and changed a network setting. No one in research has done a thing,” I reply and tidy up my desk. Once everything is in its place, I look up.
“Really?” Harry asks with his eyebrows climbing up his forehead.
“No,” I say, with a small smile. “Once Kingsley got his hands on a cell phone he insisted that we find a way to make them work. Took the team a week.”
“Why do you do that?” he says with a shake of his head.
“Because you always believe it. You should try being more suspicious of my answers.”
A huff from Harry tells me that that won’t be happening. Since we were kids both him and Ron have taken everything I say as fact. I’ll never know why considering how often I make up an answer just for the distinct pleasure of these conversations.
“Did you need something? This is my office after all,” I ask. Harry is usually tied to his wing of the Ministry during work hours. It’s gotten rather difficult these days even to catch him after a meeting, much less get a moment alone in my office.
“Oh! Yeah, I had a spare few minutes, so I wanted to come see how your day was going, but after our moment of silence I can surmise not well?” he asks sympathetically, but I don’t want sympathy, I want answers.
“It’s not all bad honestly, just frustrating,” I explain, slouching into the plush chair behind my desk. “It feels like we’re making progress all the way until the very end, and then we add one more ingredient, or one less drop of something, and the whole thing falls apart. Just now? A pewter cauldron melted, and when the mixture cooled enough to be handled, we placed a single drop on a leaf, and the thing burst into flames. Safe to say I am not going to be handing that to Bill.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Harry asks.
I blow air out of my lungs and ask, “Can you get me unrestricted access to the three other coastal varieties of Murtlap and 6 kinds of Hellebore? Because from the reading that I’ve done, a combination of those things may be the key to this whole thing.”
Democles Belby originally brewed Wolfsbane on the coast of Northern England. The most common variety of Murtlap is native to that region, and Belby notes that changing their diet for 3 weeks prior to brewing the potion altered the properties of their tentacles. Luna and I have confirmed as much during our very first bit of formal research. We then experimented with how much we could change that prescribed diet to achieve favorable results. As it turns out…we can change very little.
Hellebore plants are native to the same region as the Murtlap, and are used to produce a syrup that, in the right amount at the right time, stabilizes the reaction between the Dragons Blood and the Mandrake leaves. Upon experimenting with the viscosity and concentration of that syrup, we deduced that it is another thing we cannot change anything about without disastrous results.
“I am your sponsor, am I not?” he says, spreading his arms wide. “See where in the world you can find those things, and I’ll get you and Luna what you need.” If only this were a problem with a simple solution.
“It’s not that easy Harry. We would need to be able to run numerous experiments with all combinations of each variant, and then compile the results into a report for Chairman Brown and the rest of the board all within the next 45 days. They are already giving me a hard time about the contents of the last report. If I write to them next and can only say, ‘ah yes, we are waiting on shipments from all over the world and have still not made any concrete discoveries since we began 15 months ago’, they are going to pull the plug on the whole project!” I try to explain.
The last report we gave to the Board resulted in Luna and myself being summoned to that cold room to explain to 10 geniuses that we’re running out of equipment due to the melting issues, and have yet to be able to test a stable sample with Bill Weasley because there have been no stable samples, and no one is willing to risk his life.
“You are Hermione Granger. Smartest witch of her age. You will find the solution to this, I can promise you that. Think about it, and figure out a clever way to solve both problems. You need to run better tests with different ingredients, and at the same time show the board that you are not only doing everything you can, but the right person to fix this problem. You’ve done more difficult things before, don’t forget that.” Harry placates, and he’s right. I am Hermione Jean Granger. I’ve hunted Horcruxes. I’ve fought Death Eaters. I’ve survived torture . This is nothing.
- - -
“Ah Hermione, are you feeling better?” Luna asks the moment I return to the lab. My bench is sparkling clean. The heat has also died down, so our little room is now at its normal swamp-like temperature.
We were lucky to get a private lab allocated for our use. Especially for so long a time. The rest of the research team was not happy about it at the start. This small lab had become the place that we would all use to get a little peace and quiet. They have since settled into a comfortable arrangement in the 3 other large labs that are located within the Ministry headquarters building, and anyone who truly needs to brew in quiet can take their work home.
“Yes, I am. Thank you for cleaning up my mess. I don’t know what I would do without you,” I offer her a smile and stride to stand beside her. She has a clear cauldron bubbling in front of her, the magically reinforced glass glistering with tiny depictions of herb bundles and flower bouquets. The design is so undeniably Luna that I can’t imagine her brewing with anything else.
“What was it you were working on before I stepped out?” I ask, pointing my chin towards the open notebook to the other end of her bench. The pictures she drew on the left side page are immaculate, depicting a Hellebore plant in full bloom. At least…I think it’s a Hellebore? She pulls the notebook closer, and upon further inspection, the leaves have an extra spike on each side, and the flower petals are smaller.
“I was working with the Hellebore Syrup. I left it room temperature and just documented how it interacts with the other ingredients upon direct contact. Not much happened to the moonstone or Sopophorous Beans, which was expected, but the wolfsbane leaves did absorb a fair bit without combustion. I didn’t want to waste what little dragon’s blood we have on a test like this, but I think the result may be favorable.” she explains, but doesn’t mention the drawing.
“Test away my friend. It's not a waste if it works, so here’s hoping it does,” I say with a smile. These moments are why Luna is such a good partner to have. Most of the other researchers are wizards who use their intellect to feel superior. There’s very little comradery to be found for us witches.
“I’ve got another shortcut batch brewing. I think we may find more fruitful answers if we focus on the components and instructions for this version. When Professor Snape was testing this recipe for Remus, it seems he identified the base ingredients and techniques that are absolutely vital. From there we can keep going,” she offers. It’s a smart strategy, especially considering that this version of the potion takes an afternoon to brew rather than the 3 days that the full potion takes.
“That sounds great. What’s that picture of?,” I ask, “It looks like Hellebore, but…not.” The drawing is triggering a deep memory. One scented with old parchment and dusty quills.
“It came to me in a dream last night. The leaves remind me of the Hellebore plant, but I don’t think that is what it is. There are six known genetic variations of the Hellebore plant, but none of them have 6 spikes on the leaves. Plus the dream had a purple hue, and none of the known variants are purple.” she explains, tracing the outer edges of a leaf. Sketching a dream plant is a very ‘Luna’ thing to do, but it has worked in the past, so I decided to just go with it a long time ago.
“Huh,” is all I can think of to respond with. I was the one that brought it up, but now an unnamed dream plant does not feel top priority. “Can we talk through our plan for the next 45 days?” I ask. If we are going to look into different varieties, we need to be on the same page, so that we can prioritize finding the ones that are the most likely to produce results.
“I’m all ears.”
I talk through the long version of what I told Harry, while she continues to stir her cauldron and occasionally drop in another ingredient. There are 3 variants of Murtlap and 6 Hellebore mutations that are not noted as experimented with or even considered in any of the literature around Wolfsbane. It makes sense, as they are scattered around the globe, and at the time Belby was developing the potion, the magnitude of the werewolf problem did not warrant searching high and low for alternatives to ingredients that he could find locally. Our solution may very well be found in those variants.
The problem, as I explained to Harry, is that with the Board tightening the reins on our project, we need results now . Not in 2 months when all of the shipments that Harry is funding would arrive.
“Well if we can’t bring the ingredients to us, why don’t we go to them?” she asks while sorting through a jar of Sopophorous Beans to find the least bruised 7.
“What?” I ask. That seems like a rhetorical question, but I need to be sure.
“Why don’t we go to them? Surely going to Bulgaria ourselves would be faster than finding and contacting breeders and growers,” she answers, still sorting through the beans. She has a small pile forming, but is still looking.
“I’m sorry, what?” She’s speaking gibberish at this point. What is she bringing up Bulgaria for? A hypothetical scenario is not helpful right now.
She finally looks up from her searching and stares into my eyes. The longer she holds the stare, the more I can feel the pale blue color of her eyes muddling with the dark brown of my own. She blinks and repeats slowly, “Bulgaria. Us going to Bulgaria would be much faster, no?”
“What’s in Bulgaria?” I ask. I don’t recall any reading that I’ve done on the area mentioning anything particular about Murtlap or Hellebore. Then again, the most extensive reading that I’ve done on the country was a series of letters from Viktor Krum, which weren’t very educational.
“There’s a coastal town there that has the most rare and diverse population of magical creatures of any other place currently known to the magical world,” she states as a matter of fact, “It’s also quite a beautiful city in general. I went with my father one summer. We went to a cafe with the most spectacular–”
“Luna?”
“–yellow Snargaluff plant. They also had a delightful array of pastries–”
“Luna?”
“–One was made using the water of a Mimbulus mimblet–”
“Luna!” I yell to break through what was sure to be a very detailed description of pastries. “I’m sure the pastries were delicious, but right now I am more interested in the name of this fascinating city that you haven’t mentioned until now.”
Why has she not brought this beautiful town with its delightful pastries up before now? If it is truly home to such an impressive array of magical flora and fauna, it may just be the solution that we desperately need.
“Oh! It’s called Тайна, which interestingly enough in Bulgarian translates to–Hey where are you going?”
As soon as she utters the name of this city filled with rare magical plants and creatures, I am out the door. I’ll send a message down to let her know she can carry on with whatever experiment she had planned without me. Images of brightly colored Murtlap tentacles swim behind my eyes. I can almost feel the Hellebore petals beneath my fingertips.
The hallways leading to my office are crowded. A glance at my watch tells me that it’s lunch time, which is both a hindrance to my journey, and a convenient delight. It may take me longer to get up to my office, but the Ministry library should be free from workers. Which means uninterrupted research time for me.
The elevators are overwhelmed with witches and wizards scrambling to leave this place for an hour, so I turn to the stairs instead. Three floors up is my office, with the comfiest chair I could find and all the water and snacks I could need for some spontaneous reading. From there, if my personal collection of books of Bulgaria proves lacking, I can take a walk just down the hall to access the largest array of magical literature in England. I can climb some steps for that kind of reward.
On the second landing, the one connected to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, I pass a group of wizards huddled together laughing about something. In the middle, a head of silvery white hair. Malfoy. I don’t often run across the man, but every time I do, he seems to be surrounded by a few other Aurors, and an admin or two. The boys club they seem to be running migrates together, which is funny, because even though we aren’t close by any means, our relationship has become far more amiable in recent years. He’s not the type to keep a club. As I pass by, icy gray eyes flash up and collide with mine.