Potions Championship I Now you see me... PV

Aly Salinger did not really love potions - sure, she'd brew them when necessary or when a particular quirk of nature piqued her curiosity, but her true loves lay elsewhere, in Quidditch and astronomy and books and the like. However, she did love her best friend. Dee Prince held a very special place in Aly's heart that no one else could ever hope to even approach, let alone take, and so the curly-haired pureblood was here, in the Great Hall, out of love. To support her best friend, and hopefully not accidentally sabotage her along the way with her own (admittedly very subpar) potioneering skills.

The professors on the dais finished their speeches, and Dee turned to her with her teal eyes full of a thousand stars more shimmery than those of the night sky themselves. Aly shot a knowing look at their third teammate, arguably her other best friend - white-haired, one-eyed, and absolutely brilliant, Peri Dralt was the only other person who could have possibly convinced Aly to brew potions together. Now, Dee and Peri together on her team? How could Aly possibly have said no? Even if she royally messed up (which was, let's be honest, far more plausible than either of the other two being responsible for failure later in the competition), combining the absolute geniuses of Prince and Dralt would surely make up for it. "Any ideas?" their resident potions prodigy asked, and Aly twisted her lips into a pursed frown. If Dee didn't have ideas, well, that wasn't the best sign to start off.

"Well, I don't take Care of Magical Creatures, so I doubt I'll be much help with knowing... literally anything about these Swooping Evil buggers," she offered up, rather unhelpfully, "but sneaking past might be the best idea, just so we don't have to deal with them." Aly shrugged, remembering the many times she'd snuck places: the Astronomy Tower, various corridors and empty classrooms, the Forbidden Forest... she muttered under her breath, "If only we had an Invisibility Cloak or something. That'd make this a hell of a lot easier."

This offhanded comment led to the decision, amongst the Ravenclaw trio, that Invisibility Potion would be an excellent first choice for when it came to sneaking past these evils. (Duh. Why hadn't she thought of that?) Dee provided the other two with mostly-illegible scribbles, decipherable to Aly's eyes only because of years of experience with reading scrawled notes passed under desks in classes, and green eyes scanned the parchment with practiced ease. Wrinkling her nose at the idea of dealing with raw chicken, and breathing a sigh of relief that Dee offered to take over that particular step, Aly jumped at the opportunity to work with cherries instead, throwing a two-fingered salute to her mates as she headed off to find them amongst the ingredients table. Not quite as good with Professor Regan's sorting system as her dormmate of the past few years, it took Aly a moment (or five...) longer to locate the necessary fruits, and the chicken was already cookin' by the time she made it back to their workstation. Now, knifework - that was something she'd gotten decent at as of late, even taking to carrying her own blade for safety perhaps more often than was supposed to be done in the Hogwarts corridors, and so she took that freshly cleaned and polished silver knife to the cherries, pitting them before starting to coarsely chop them.

"It works better if you cut them diagonally."

Aly jumped, the knife slipping in her hand, having not expected Dee to pop up behind her like that - luckily, the flat part of the blade hit her finger rather than its sharp edge. "Bloody hell! Don't sneak up on me when I'm holding a knife," she muttered, turning back to the cherries and angling the blade so that it went at the cherries in diagonal lines instead of the up and down she'd been doing before. "Like this, you mean?"

"No, like, in a sort of cross pattern?"

"Ah." She started to score the cherries like one would a scallop, except her knife cut deeply enough to slice instead of just score. Before she could even turn back to Dee to get her best mate's advice, she heard a "Yeah, I mean like that," and the ghost of a proud smile darted across her face faster than a Firebolt. Maybe she wasn't so bad at this potions stuff after all.

The half-dozen cherries were chopped long before the chicken had fully boiled, and Aly moved to work on their second potion in the meantime; when Dee had collected chicken water and removed the remains, Aly used the flat of her knife to push the chopped pieces into the cauldron and begrudgingly picking up the sponges that her roomie had used to get the water. Casting a dark (and only sort of playful) look at Dee, she grumbled, "If we win, you owe me for making me touch chicken water," before wringing them over the cauldron to return the water from whence it came. It smelled faintly salty, and though Aly was no vegetarian, she wrinkled her nose - her bouts in the kitchen preparing for her food articles for the Headliner had in no way prepared her for this.

When the sponges were bone dry, Aly took a spoon and stirred the mixture three times, clockwise. She checked the heat, turned it to low - not quite as precise as Dee's fussing over it earlier, but a decent enough low - and watched it like a hawk until a distinctly purple hue had taken over the liquid, and it wasn't just from the cherry juice. There - that was her last bit until the wandwork at the end, something Aly felt more confident in than ingredient-adding and stirring and watching and heating and such, and she sat back in her chair, satisfied but also with a question on her mind. As Peri and Dee fussed over the potion, completing their final steps, she asked it aloud to no one in particular: "Hey, did you lot notice the other bits in the instructions? A specific item, additional complications, that stuff? Is anyone else worried about the fact that they're being intentionally vague, or is it just me?"

| @Dealla Prince | @Aly Salinger |

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	Potioneering was as much a wonder as it was a science. The Saltgrave side of Pericles' family may have taken the craft to extremes (and he may have been tempted to do the same), but his mother had a healthy respect for it, a trait inevitably passed down. The smell of the Great Hall- brimming with bubbling cauldrons and components- brought him back to her brewing wing in their estate. He wouldn't bat an eye at the acrid stench of something burning, nor stir at the sight of grisly ingredients. This was an atmosphere reminiscent of home. Peri had swapped out his drifting persona for one of trademark hyperfocus, a composed face doing nothing to hide the gleam of excitement. Challenges weren't interpreted as a means of besting others. They were a chance to challenge one's self, and the tournament was a test of prowess, skill, and knowledge. He rose to it with underlying eagerness. Their group came together effortlessly. While there were one or two others he would have liked to team with were it not for the three-person limit, Pericles was proud of their assembly. For him, brewing was a satisfying and systematic procedure, a hobby both practical and relaxing. For Dee, it was a passion. The instant he heard "potions" and "championship" in the same sentence, he knew she would be participating, and was not surprised that Aly- mutual best friend and the glue of any group she joined- had reached out as well. Planning between them was a testament to their synergy. It took little time for the trio to determine a defensive approach to swooping evils would be wisest, Peri's contributing suggestion being that they craft "Something to avoid them, and for the next round, a contingency in case the first fails." It would not be his first time brewing the Invisibility Potion outside of class. He even brought a vial of his personal batch along as an example of what the final result should represent, as well as a set of protective equipment. The ingredients were innocuous enough, though he reasoned the use of proper gear may be a part of the grading. Pericles donned pliable gloves, a soft leather apron, and a pair of protective goggles. Looking ready to reprise his role as a mad scientist, he met Dee's order with a playful "Yes, chef." Of course. Spider legs for the spider guy. Time was passed discussing the tasks to come, though their quiet counterpart listened for the majority of it. Dee and Aly had a chemistry that was satisfying to spectate for a people watcher like him. By the time the potion turned purple, the spider legs were long since ground into a fine powder. With painstaking precision, he counted out two measures, scooping it from the pestle and using a blade to scrape the mound smooth. After a clockwise stir, he watched as Dee counted in three measures of beetle eyes, then waited for the mixture to begin bubbling. Once the surface started to teem, he ever so carefully extracted a dropper of demiguise tincture, holding his breath as he gingerly squeezed a single drop into the brew. "And now," he muttered, drawing a pocketwatch from his apron and squinting at the seconds hand, "we wait." Peri pulled off his gloves, pushed the goggles to the top of his head, and cleaned their area to pass the time. "Hey, did you lot notice the other bits in the instructions?" He paused in the midst of collecting component jars into his arms, glancing over at Aly. "A specific item, additional complications, that stuff? Is anyone else worried about the fact that they're being intentionally vague, or is it just me?" Her fellow bird mulled the matter for a moment, frowning in thought, only to shrug and extend a reassuring smile. "Not particularly. They mean to keep us on our feet, but I have confidence in our ability to improvise. We three can handle whatever comes our way."After twelve minutes, the concoction had taken on a shimmering silver hue. A curl at the corner of his mouth created a contended half-smirk. "Care to do the honors?" With a wave of Aly's wand, the potion was complete, and Peri fetched three vials to bottle it up. Despite the pressure of perfection, making the potion alongside them was far more pleasant than making it on his own. The hours required of it seemed to fly by in comparison.
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WC: 743/400

Aly felt distinctly more comforted by Peri's confidence in the vague instructions. Well, she supposed that the moon's trust was not placed in the potions professors running the tasks but rather in the trio of Eagles themselves, who had already brewed one potion and were now on the verge of finishing another. She threw a relieved smile his way. "Well, I suppose you're right," the curly-haired brunette allowed, only shaking her head very slightly in disbelief that she was the least self-assured person here. In fairness, she should have assumed that that would happen when she signed up for a competition in one of her worst subjects. No better way to push herself academically, right? "We've been through much worse before than a fun little battle-of-the-brews. At least this isn't Transfiguration. Not all of us can have that natural talent." The final playful jibe was absolutely directed more at Peri than at Dee, since he was, in fact, their resident Animagus. Who still owed her a flight, by the way.

Still, there was one more step to take, and having not done the first wand-wave for the Mopsus Potion, Aly definitely felt much more pressure as she stepped forward at Peri's bidding to complete this elixir. "I'm certainly honoured," she muttered, the word honoured sounding more like scared, even as she once again pulled the white wand of aspen from her pocket. Waving it over the potion to complete the final step that they would need before the last task would begin, she sent a silent prayer to whatever Legilimens may have been listening in: Please don't let us fail. Please don't let me fail either of these. I don't want to let them down.

Peri bottled up the potion, which was now a lovely shimmering silver that only semi-rivaled some of the jewelry tucked away in Aly's trunk up in Ravenclaw Tower, and Aly once again breathed a sigh of relief that at least it hadn't exploded. That was a good sign. She turned her attention to the dais, waiting for instructions from Professors Regan and Lennox, but found herself reaching out to take Peri's and Dee's hands without looking in the meantime, giving them a reassuring squeeze. Or perhaps the squeeze was meant to reassure Aly herself. Either way, she waited, connected to her teammates and friends, knowing that even if she let them down, they would be there to pick her back up again.