Pretty Dope PV Maggy Mags Closed

Ami had originally signed up for Quidditch because of Alexx. Her infatuation with the blonde Slytherin had led her to sign up for all sorts of extracurricular activities in hopes of impressing her. Alas, her efforts had been for naught, and in the end, Alexx still rejected her. It stung, knowing that she would never like her like that, but there wasn't much she could do. But, on the other hand, Ami had discovered a community where she finally felt like herself, and she felt like people appreciated her for the things she had previously hated. After all, there was generally very little use for brawn in a school of magic, but on the Quidditch pitch? With a bat in her hand whilst she was astride a broom, her teammates worshipped her like a god and her opponents feared the wrath of her strength. Her love for the sport had grown exponentially over the past few years, faster than she ever could have expected. Quidditch pushed her, physically and mentally, more than anything else in her life. Even in her life before Hogwarts, martial arts and piano had not tested her limits as Quidditch did. That, coupled with her recent rise to captaincy of broom racing, meant that Ami spent nearly every minute and every second of her free time on flying, whether it be out on the pitch, training with her teammates, or in her dorm room, furiously planning future practices and coming up with new plays for Quidditch.

And yet, despite all of this time and effort dedicated to her sports, the results weren't showing that she was an asset to the team. Aside from a single win against Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff hadn't won a single match since Ami had joined the team. She was supposed to be a big asset to the team, a replacement for Kovacs, but she felt like she was some sort of curse. No matter how hard she tried, how long she trained, or how many plays she came up with, Hufflepuff just couldn't seem to catch a break. The match against Gryffindor right before Aaron resigned from the team had been one of the bloodiest affairs Ami had ever been involved in, with the minor exception of getting set on fire during her first year. She had watched her teammates, her friends, plummet from the sky, their bodies hitting the ground and crumpling with sickening thumps, one after another. Aaron falling had been particularly difficult for her: she had been entrusted to fill in the massive shoes he'd left behind as co-captain, and now she had failed him. His body lay unnaturally on the ground a hundred feet below them, and she couldn't help but feel like it was her fault.

When he resigned, the feeling of failure only deepened. She had hoped that the next year would be different, that she would be able to prove to Professor Browne and her teammates that she was the right choice as their co-captain, but the matches against both Gryffindor and Slytherin had been bloodbaths as well. Many nights following the two matches had been spent wide awake, the combination of the upcoming OWLs with the pressure she faced from the Headliner, Quidditch, and now Broom Racing being too much to allow her mind to quiet enough to surrender itself to sleep. On the nights she did manage to drift off, she was greeted with visions of bodies on top of bodies, broken and bloodied on the ground. Aaron, Quinn, Ethen, Howard, Atlas, and all of her other teammates, all of them unconscious or even sometimes dead, and Ami was tasked with bringing all of them to the Hospital Wing. When she tried, their bodies were impossibly heavy. No matter how hard she strained, no matter how tight her grip around their chests and arms, their bodies would barely move, and she was left screaming on the Quidditch pitch until she woke up.

Was she good enough? Did she deserve to be co-captain? Did she even deserve to be on the team? Every neuron in her brain right now was telling her that she was a worthless piece of shit. Now, a week before their match against Ravenclaw, Ami was frantically trying to find a way to ensure their victory. Not by cheating, necessarily, but more of an insurance policy. A guarantee that they would not come out of this season winless. Spells were a no-go on the pitch, as they were too easily seen by the referee and Ami was simply too terrible at magic to even bother attempting it. But potions... maybe potions would be more practical. She wasn't exactly good at brewing potions, but she was certainly better than she was at duelling. A few hours of research in the library yielded a somewhat challenging but intriguing solution, so Ami found herself spending her Saturday afternoon in the Potions classroom, hunched over a workbench.

Her solution was to brew a few doses of the Vitamix Potion and slip it into her teammates' breakfasts the morning of the match. Professor Wickham-Deacon had mentioned during their lesson on the potion that Quidditch players had attempted to use such a potion in matches before, but it was akin to doping or taking steroids in the No-Maj world. Luckily for the Hufflepuff Quidditch team, however, Ami wasn't some do-good, Harry-Potter type Gryffindor. If her teammates being more aware, no matter how illegal the method, led to fewer of them in the Hospital Wing at the end of the day, then she wasn't going to get her head caught up in the rights and wrongs of cheating. Every other team did it too, what with all the blatching Ravenclaw was notorious for doing on the pitch, and Ami couldn't bear the thought of having to carry her friends to the Hospital Wing again.

Now, seated at her usual seat in the very back of the classroom (she tended to get a lot of complaints of classmates being unable to see the board or the professor when she sat in front), Ami began to brew her potion. Considering that the fifth years had learned about this potion fairly recently, she was confident that she would be able to brew it without much trouble at all. However, when she flipped her textbook open to the Vitamix recipe, her lips pursed together as she realized that maybe it wouldn't be as straightforward as she had originally hoped.

It wasn't outlandishly complicated, by any means, but Ami also had never been very good at following directions. She didn't have a copper cauldron, so she placed her own tin cauldron on the burner and lit the burner. As the cauldron heated up, she began crushing the standard ingredient and essence of wormwood into the required paste. She added it to the cauldron, and while she waited for the potion to turn gray, she took out her Quidditch notebook and reviewed her notes for their next practice, as well as her notes from their last practice. However, as she was prone to do, Ami got lost in the world of Quidditch and didn't notice when the potion finally turned a dull gray color. Only when it began smoking in the cauldron did she notice, and her instant panic was accompanied by a slew of colorfully descriptive curse words. This wasn't supposed to happen, was it? She immediately removed the cauldron from the burner and extinguished the flame, but the contents continued smoking. "Oh my god..." she groaned, scrambling to find her wand. Gripping it with a violently shaking hand, she muttered "Aguamenti!" as firmly as she could, but no water came out of the tip of her wand. Several more fervently shouted "Aguamenti!"s later, the cauldron was now filled to the brim with sloshing gray liquid, and it was still smoking.

Unfortunately for the fifth year Hufflepuff, it was at this moment that she could hear footsteps approaching the Potions classroom. Footsteps that she had no doubt were Magdalena's. "Oh, for fuck's sake," she swore, glancing around the classroom for a place to hide. Under her desk? No, she was too tall... The professor's desk? No, it was basically just one of those fold-out tables you set out at picnics. What about the storeroom? Ami darted to the storeroom, her hand frantically wrapping around the handle and twisting it with all her might. To her dismay, it appeared that Magdalena had locked the storeroom specifically to send any snooping fifth year Hufflepuffs into even more of a panic spiral. Glancing around the classroom wildly as the sound of footsteps drew closer, Ami's brain immediately went to her arsenal of Transfiguration spells, which was her preferred branch of magic. What could she do? What spell would fix this mess? Think, think, think!

Maybe she could scare Magdalena away. That would totally work, right? With a crack of her neck, red-headed, freckled, 6'1" Ami Procoppio would grow a meager five inches, but suddenly gain an extra 100 pounds and a whole lot more hair. A hulking Marsican brown bear now stood in the Potions classroom, looking at the door to the classroom with as terrified of an expression a bear could have.