Sugar And Spice: An Inquiry

Keith frowned, sinking into the large chair in front of the window. In his hand was a small vial of dull silvery liquid, which seemed to contain tiny threads of a much brighter silver if you looked at it right.

He had made it last year, quite by accident, and yet he couldn't figure out what it did. Nothing he could find in the library at Diagon Alley seemed to fit, and while he hadn't yet checked the Hogwarts library, he didn't think he would fare any better there. Keith wasn't about to test an unknown potion himself - he was young, not suicidal - and so earlier this summer he had fed some to a rat he had found in his basement. The rat had began to run wildly in circles before finally tipping over on it's side, breathing heavily. It had survived, but Keith had not wanted to subject it to another dose, as he was afraid it might be fatal. He felt he was onto something here, something big, and yet he couldn't find anything that might tell him exactly what he was onto.

It was maddening - much like trying to assemble a particularly complicated puzzle. Except he was blindfolded, and he didn't even know if all the pieces were there, and there were lots of pieces from different puzzles. He was growing more and more frustrated, but he couldn't figure out what to do. The thing was worthless!

Keith's ears perked up as he heard a pair of feet descending down the steps into the common room, and he hurriedly stuffed the vial into his pocket. No point in letting some stupid 1st year stumble in and ruin everything by telling a teacher. This would be his discovery, or nobody'.

The footfalls Keith had heard coming down the steps did not belong to a first year, as he had suspected, but rather to a very disgruntled seventh year girl. Amelia’s feel fell heavily on the stairs as she descended from her dormitory, still trying to put the thoughts of her mother’s letter out of her mind, but quite obviously failing if her sour mood was any indication.

Her mother’s letters were usually a point of frustration for Amelia, for they were typically filled with instructions on how she could be doing better or more of the things Antoinette found ‘appropriate’ and less of the things she deemed ‘unseemly’. There seemed to be very few things on the first list, but a whole host of them on the latter one, and although Amelia dedicated a large amount of her attention to fulfilling her parents’ wishes, it was beginning to wear on her. Perfection was logically unattainable, Amelia knew, but her mother seemed to have other feelings toward that utopian state and spared no feelings in informing Amelia of just what she was doing wrong in achieving flawlessness.

This most recent letter had focused, as the last few had, on Amelia’s plans for her future outside of Hogwarts. Although Amelia had an idea in mind of what she would like to do after her graduation from Hogwarts, she had not shared this idea with her parents, who she knew would disapprove. Instead, she had been rather non-committal about the entire situation, avoiding the topic which only made her mother believe that she had no plans. If Antoinette had her way, Amelia would become a concert pianist and a trophy wife, a socialite extraordinaire in contact with all the right people and influence in all the right arenas.

Fat chance of that… Amelia thought bitterly as she descended the last step into the common room. Her mother was delusional if she thought Amelia would ever make a good socialite; if there was one word that did not belong anywhere near Amelia’s name it was ‘social’. Barely able to string together more than a few coherent sentences that could hardly pass as small talk, Antoinette must have been either oblivious – which wasn’t the case, because she chastised Amelia on a weekly basis about her lack of social skills – or entirely too hopeful about Amelia’s chances of improving socially.

Annoyed already, Amelia’s eyes darted around the common room for someone to tell off for wrongdoing. Enforcing the rules always made Amelia feel a little bit like she had some semblance of control, unlike the way she felt whenever her parents came down on her the way Antoinette had done via quill and ink, but the only person in the common room at the moment was Keith Nicholas, sitting in an armchair next to the window.

Although the boy was a troublemaker, and despite her interest in taking out her frustration on someone else, Amelia immediately dismissed the idea of criticizing him for some mostly-unknown and never-enforced bit of Hogwarts policy, as had been her original plan for whoever was lounging in the common room. She did not know Keith overly well, but from what she had seen of him, she liked his direct personality and sharp wit. The boy said what was on his mind without filter and often without serious repercussion, a trait about him that made Amelia slightly jealous. Although she often shared Keith’s thoughts on a situation, she rarely said them aloud unless directly asked, preferring to keep her observations to herself for the sake of anonymity. There had been many a situation, though, that she wished she had a bit of Keith’s gall when it came to speaking her mind, for it would have been slightly gratifying to put some people in their place.

With a sigh, Amelia walked over to the side of the common room where Keith was sitting and took an armchair one away from him. She did this so it might seem that she was here only to look out the window, or he could take it as an invitation to approach her. Amelia could use a distraction right now, and Keith had always made a good one, but she was not quite strong enough in her conviction of their quasi-friendship to approach him first. If nothing else, she could stare blindly out the window and hurl imaginary insults at her mother that she would never, ever dare to say out loud.

Keith glanced over at whoever was coming down the stairs, feeling a bit surprised as he recognized Amelia. He had met her last year, and she had surprised him - at first glance, she seemed to be your typical stick in the mud. She was older, quiet, studious, and had a habit of...well...hm.

Being a stick in the mud.

But Keith occasionally caught glances past that. She could've defended Christy when Keith was taunting her last year, but hadn't. In fact, she could've made herself a lot more annoying last year, but she had been relatively easy to deal with. Someone as smart as Amelia was never easy to deal with, so she was involved somehow.

She was a bit of an ice queen, Keith knew. Nobody was really her close friend, but the snatches of gossip he had caught all had her pegged as a rich heiress - not that she mentioned it much. Keith was appreciative of that. Hogwarts seemed to have to many spoiled princesses willing to blow thousands of galleons at the drop of a hat as it was.

she took the seat next to him, saying nothing, and Keith was happy to keep the silence. All the better to concentrate on this little problem of his. Still, he felt like his head was about to explode. If only he could find a book...

Keith's head tilted slightly. His eyes widened.

Amelia.

Gifted honors student. Top marks. Liked him. Or at least, tolerated him. She was like a walking, talking encyclopedia. Or whatever. She was perfect! Except for one small problem.

How was he going to get around her stick-in-the-mud-yness?

He would have to phrase it differently. Maybe if he passed it off as potions homework...yeah, that would work. He'd run with that. If she ever started to suspect, he could always just bail. She needed solid proof if she was going to nail him with anything.

"Hey...Amelia? You any good at potions?"

It was raining outside the window, so Amelia was immediately distracted by the raindrop races down the panes. This was something she had done since she was a child, though she knew that there was almost no logic involved. The goal of the game was to pick two raindrops which were currently at the same height on the window and pick which one you thought would make it to the bottom of the window first. Of course, it was impossible to predict infinitely numbered systems – such as raindrops – but it was a pastime she still held dear, mostly because of the person who had taught it to her.

Raoul had always been infinitely more competitive with their raindrop races than she had been, but then, Raoul was probably the person who had taught her to be competitive in the first place; older brothers had a tendency to do that. Whether it was running, swimming, card games, or raindrop races, Raoul had always pushed Amelia’s buttons until she came to care about the outcome as much as he did. In fact, the only game they had never been competitive about was quidditch, and that was because Raoul had that one easily in the bag. He was a brilliant flyer, while Amelia did even dare to leave the ground. She liked her feet on solid soil, thank you very much.

The two raindrops she had picked were both making slow progress as they slid down the window, a little faster each time the pane vibrated slightly with the arrival of another drop. But then, the drop on the left had a stroke of good luck and was hit directly by an incoming drip, and with this added weight easily crossed the finish line at the end of the windowpane, just as the blond boy beside her spoke up.

“Hmm?” Amelia asked ineloquently, pulled from her private reverie of watching the raindrops. A moment later, though, she managed to process what Keith had asked and immediately tried to recover from her inarticulate answer.

“Oh potions,” she said, recovering somewhat as she sat up a bit straighter turned in her chair to face Keith more directly, “I suppose I am proficient in the subject.”

He may want something more than that… Amelia’s mind commented after a few awkward seconds had passed after her words. Keith hadn’t filled the emptiness her words had left, and it was only after an inordinate amount of time that Amelia realized why. People did not ask questions like that just for the knowledge – they asked for a purpose. Obviously.

“Did you, um, need help with an assignment?” Amelia asked somewhat sheepishly, knowing Keith to be perceptive enough to have noticed her social stumblings. He was already aware of them, though, and had still struck up a conversation with her now, so Amelia defended herself in the situation by asserting that Keith knew what he was getting into before he spoke in the first place. This should come as no surprise to him by now.

"Yeah!" Keith said eagerly. He winced. Perhaps that was a bit too eager.

"Uh, what I mean is," he said, doing his best to keep his tone normal, "what I mean is that I've been having trouble finding out what I need to know." He looked up for a moment, thinking how best to phrase this, and wishing desperately he could just start the conversation over. But there was no going back now.

"See...in class the other day, we were trying to make uh..the draught of joy. You know? The one with the peppermint leaves and fir roots?" He paused, struggling with a way to tell Amelia what she needed to know without giving himself away. "Well, mine came out...weird. I think I mixed the order of things, put the pixie blood in at the wrong time, and now my potion came out all funky...do you know why?"

(OoC: Sorry about the short post, I have a ton of schoolwork. Keith's potion, btw, should basically speed someone up...like, everything. A lot. It makes them giddy, flighty, etc. I'll leave it up to you to decide how much Amelia would know)

((I’m mostly just going to make it up as I go along, if that is okay with you. I don’t know how attached you are to the exact ingredients you stated, or if you had any others in mind, but if you have specifics, don’t hesitate to share them and I will include them in Amelia’s supposed “knowledge”.))

Keith’s reaction to her question seemed far too enthusiastic for someone talking to her, much less someone talking about homework. Most people did not talk to her at all, which Amelia actually preferred, and when they did, the conversation was as short as functionally possible. Having this as her precedent, Amelia could not help but raise an eyebrow at Keith’s sudden interest in his studies, which to be honest, had never seemed all that important to him in the past.

Despite her suspicions, though, Amelia let her eyebrows return to their normal height as Keith made to correct himself by continuing on in a more normal tone. He spoke in bursts, a few words at a time, as though he was having trouble phrasing his question. Amelia thought this might have something to do with the fact that her own inability to carry on normal conversation sometimes put others ill at ease as well. Although she had never seen this from Keith himself, she had to guess that conversing with the social equivalent of a five-year-old had to have its downsides.

Keith’s phrasing aside, he seemed to be getting to the point after a few awkward sentences, and Amelia tried to analyze just what he was getting at. He was talking about a potion Amelia had never heard of – the Draught of Joy? – and her eyebrows knitted themselves tightly together at the thought that Keith, in his second year, would have encountered something so foreign to her. After a few seconds of contemplation, though, an expression of realization appeared on Amelia’s face, and she focused her energy on not sounding patronizing as she made her response to Keith.

“Do you mean the Elixir to Induce Euphoria?” Amelia asked, though she was quite certain already that she was right. Keith had probably not paid much attention to the actual name of the potion, but rather to its effects. The potion was a complicated one, as Keith had obviously found out, and if it was done incorrectly, it could produce odd side-effects.

“Did you add the pixie blood before or after the peppermint?” Amelia asked, her first question more of a rhetorical one, though Keith’s answer would confirm her suspicions. Without actually knowing the nature of what exactly had gone wrong with Keith’s potion – ‘came out all funky’ was not exactly specific – Amelia would have a difficult time knowing just what he might have done to mess it up, but she could make some guesses from what she knew about common potion-making mistakes.

((Making things up as you go along is how to rp stuff like this, at least in my opinion. We can freestyle it. It'll be fun.))

Keith frowned, chewing on his upper lip as he did so. Elixir to induce Euphoria? He could've sworn...hadn't draught been in there somewhere? No, he was certain. It had been the draught something. The draught something. Because when he had turned the page to continue, it had said Draught something at the top, kinda like it did when...

When you were starting a new potion.

Keith's eyes snapped open as he realized what had happened, and he stared out the window for a moment, his jaw slack. His textbook was missing a page. That was why his potion had come out silver, and everyone else's a deep purple. He tried to hide his sudden revelation from Amelia, but he had the sneaking suspicion that he had alerted the older girl that something more serious was going on.

Well not like he could stop now. He wasn't going to get another chance like this. If Amelia could just tell him what might happen if he gave it to a human....

"A...After the peppermint," Keith said slowly, going over what he had done in his head. It had been such a long time ago - how was he supposed to remember exactly what he done the entire summer? Of course, Amelia though he had done this just last week, so he couldn't afford to hesitate.

"After the peppermint," Keith said firmly. "I thought that it offset the cramping caused by the leaves...and then I uh...might've added crushed snake scales afterward..." he said, ducking his head. "I know, I know, it wasn't part of the recipe, but it's supposed to slow you down right, and I thought you might need that after the pixie blood."

Amelia thought it odd to see such concentration on Keith’s face when he scrunched up his features and bit down on his lip; usually, the look on his face was far more mischievous – and therefore worrisome – but Amelia wasn’t going to put a stop to something she thought probably ought to have happened a long time ago. From what she saw, Keith never really paid much attention to his studies, and although this didn’t seem to faze him much, she was certain that his lack of ambition when it came to academia was bound to come around to bite him sooner or later.

After a few seconds of what looked like painful thought, Amelia noticed a significant change in Keith’s expression, one of realization coupled with what looked a little bit like… disbelief? With his eyes as wide as dinner plates and his mouth hanging open like a codfish, Amelia could not have missed this break from normalcy.

Keith, on the other hand, seemed to think he could get away with sweeping it under the rug by answering her previous question quickly and without reference to what he had just mentally stumbled upon. His first response seemed questionable, and although he later repeated himself with more certainty, Amelia was still not convinced. Her eyebrow once again found its way inching up her forehead as Keith averted her gaze and started mumbling things about snake scales and lack of attention to instruction details.

Something was going on, but Amelia didn’t know just what. She hated this feeling, this inkling that something was awry, but the inability to tell just what it was. Amelia was a girl that liked to have all the information displayed neatly in front of her before she made a carefully calculated decision. It was likely that Keith knew this about her, but it seemed he was intentionally keeping her from certain details of his current predicament. This was at odds with the fact that Keith had told her this was for class, in which case he should have nothing to hide. That being the case, though, Amelia was beginning to doubt Keith’s honesty up to this point in the conversation.


“Crushed snake scales are not a counter-additive to pixie blood,” Amelia said matter-of-factly, though a hint of her suspicion was beginning to show in her words. Keith’s story wasn’t adding up, but she didn’t want to outright tell him that she was on to that until she had enough information to know, or at least have a guess, at what he was up to. The longer she kept him talking, the more she would have to go on.

“Which is probably why you didn’t get the desired effect that would mimic the parasympathetic nervous system,” she continued, still stuck on just what Keith could have done and why he was so curious about it now.

“On the other hand, if you had added belladonna leaves, that would have only increased the euphoric effects of the potion, which would have just been downright irresponsible on your part because I know for a fact those are not on the ingredient list and would have had highly negative – at least from any sane person’s standpoint – effects,” Amelia finished, now just spouting any information her mind came across in the hopes that it would get Keith to give her some kind of hint as to what was really going on. This was sounding less and less like potions homework as the conversation continued, and Amelia was not oblivious to that fact.

Keith's eyebrows inched up his face as Amelia continued rambling, finally reaching their full height when she mentioned the parasympa-something nervo-whatsit. Keith filed this under his mental folder labeled "smart people talk" and promptly forgot about it. Things went a lot smoother that way.

He did, however, have to pause when she mentioned belladonna leaves. Keith tilted his head slightly, trying to remember exactly what had happened several months ago...

I was in potions. I remember that. We were brewing the Elixir to Induce Euphoria.

Alright, he had that. What had happened next?

A page was missing. I skipped over to the Draught...something. Mixed up the ingredients. Failed the class too. That sucked.

A little focus please?

It had been only a few days before exams. The professor wanted me to take a sample and improve it in my spare time for extra credit. Oh, and I had to write a paper on what I did wrong. That sucked too.

And then, things got...difficult.

Stopped by the abandon classroom a few days later. I think I was trying to tweak a shrinking solution to only affect cotton. Pulled the vial out of my bag by accident and dumped it in the empty cauldron...did I have Belladonna leaves? You know what, I think I did. Cause I got that detention at the end of the year for sneaking into the greenhouse after hours...they thought I was planting dungbombs in the dirt.

Oh. Right. I was. Heh. But I also got some Belladonna leaves. Why in hell did I do that? Is it because that hufflepuff girl is allergic to them? Yeah...yeah that was it.

Well, she was still in St. Mungos from my last prank. Thank God nobody traced that back to me. A genius piece of work, if I do say so myself...

Agh! Focus!

Right. So I might've dumped the leaves in the potion, yeah. The fumes smelled great. Not that I was like, intentionally smelling them. Just an observation. Really energizing too. Like coffee.

Keith loved coffee. His dad had introduced him to it, but had soon stopped buying it altogether when he realized the effect it had on his son. The house elves had wizened up after a few days too. He couldn't order coffee at breakfast, and if someone else ordered it for him, it disappeared as soon as he touched it. Keith did enjoy making the older student's coffee disappear right from under their nose however, so it wasn't all bad.

Wait. That stuff smelled like, awesome. Why would that be bad? Was Amelia implying he wasn't sane?

"Sane person? Why? What would happen to you if you drank something like that?"

It seemed that Amelia’s eyebrows were not the only ones rising to new heights during this conversation, because as she spoke, Amelia watched both of Keith’s disappear behind the shaggy blond hair on his forehead. It was not the same kind of eyebrow raise that had been elicited in the redhead earlier, but rather one of being intellectually overwhelmed. Quickly, Amelia went back over all of what she had said, and didn’t find anything that would have been too confusing… until she reintroduced herself to the person she was talking to.

Note to self: less big words, and much less science… Amelia thought to herself as Keith once again took on the look of a dog that had just heard a noise it couldn’t quite identify. The fact that he was tilting his head that way suggested that he was thinking, but Amelia tended to think that intellectual thought was not exactly one of Keith’s usual pastimes.

“Yes, sane person,” Amelia repeated herself, as though this were obvious, “Any sane person would not want to be acting as though they had just been injected by a shot of pure adrenaline.”

No science words, remember?

“To put it more simply,” Amelia corrected herself, trying to find a more vernacular way of stating the effects of such a potion, “Drinking a potion that contained both Belladona leaves and pixie blood without any counter ingredients would almost certainly make a person behave as if they had just consumed the sugar content of approximately 286 chocolate frogs,” Amelia said, using a reference Keith would certainly identify with.

“Their energy would be greatly increased, but their inhibition and ability to focus would suffer just the opposite reaction,” Amelia added by way of clarification, shuddering at the thought of ingesting such a potion herself. She could not imagine how ill-behaved she would become under such influences, and she was rather stoic to begin with. What would happen if it were given to someone more naturally energetic, like Jack or Keith?

Let’s hope we never find out… Amelia’s subconscious commented solemnly.