It was Sunday afternoon. Ron and Harry were sitting in the Gryffindor common room, peering intently into a glass of boiling water in which Ron had just broken an egg.
"Trelawney will be pleased," grinned Harry. "Look at that bit of white. It clearly indicates that you will take a heavy fall."
"Yeah, well, I am pretty sure that this little swirly bit here means that I will take my best friend down with me."
"I think that we've got enough for now. We should get Potions done," Harry said with a heavy sigh.
Ron grunted.
"You're right. I can't think of more horrible accidents anyway. They're getting tamer."
They had spent half an hour staring into the glowing embers of the fireplace and when they had been been satisfied with the list of misfortune that was going to befall them in the coming week according to the ashes, they had moved on to divination using eggs. It was better then hanging above the smoky ashes, but it meant that their homework was smeared with raw egg. Harry was going to walk off a cliff, be eaten and then spit out again by the giant squid, and be dumped in the garbage by a house elf mistaking him for a rotten onion. Ron's misfortune would cause him to be run over by an escaped streeler, captured by red caps and shrunk to the size of a garden gnome due to the unfortunate ingestion of shrinking solution.
"Better not show that one to George and Fred," mumbled Ron."It might give them ideas."
They looked up when they heard the portrait open. Hermione entered.
"I can't believe some people," she grumbled. "Madam Pinch has the flu and the library was watched over by two prefects. Everyone was talking. I couldn't concentrate on my charts at all."
"We've just finished our Divination homework, Hermione," Ron said. "Why don't you sit here with us to finish Arithmancy? We're going to start our Potions essay and we could use some help."
Hermione frowned at this, but said nothing as she settled herself across the boys.
"I don't understand that Snape wants us to write two feet on a potion that just changes the drinker's eye colour," sighed Harry. "What does he expect us to write about?"
Hermione looked at him incredulously. "You can't be serious, Harry. The Solavis potion is amazing. I would have thought that its effects would interest you of all people quite a bit."
"Why would it interest me? I like the colour of my eyes."
"Yes, but you don't like these a whole lot, do you?" She reached over and tapped the frame of Harry's glasses. " There are hardly any witches or wizards who are missing an arm or a leg, because in most cases the regrowth of limbs is fairly easy. Only two parts of the human body can almost never be healed by a potion or spell: the brain and the eye. The Solavis potion does more then alter the colour of the drinker's eye. It also enhances sight slightly. The effect is very subtle, but it is thought that the Solavis potion may be the basis of a cure to poor eyesight or damage done to the eye. St Mungo's has even contacted a few Muggle ophthalmologists to help with the research."
"The names of the ingredients are bloody weird," said Ron, ignoring the word ophthalmologist and eyeing the text in his Potions book as if he expected it to apologise for the difficult words written in it. "I mean, how are we supposed to know what a mouldwarp is?"
He jumped when Hermione slammed her book shut and stood up abruptly.
"Oh really, Ronald!" she exclaimed. "I'm sure that professor Sprout won't hold it against you that you have no idea what phytosophy is. It's a difficult word after all and Neville was quite happy to be given the chance to explain it to you. I'm also positive that Hagrid will, in time, forgive you for asking why we were studying pebbles, when he said that the next lesson would be about the roc, although I think that he was a bit hurt about it, Ron. It sounded like you were making fun of one of his beloved monsters. In fact, you sounded a lot like Malfoy."
"As for that," Hermione continued, pointing at their Divination homework, a sorry-looking mass of lines and scribbles, "I won't pretend that I am not amused by your way of dealing with a subject that raises more questions then it answers, but you will at least have to get the terminology right. Even Trelawney is not dense enough not to notice that you seem to think that tiromancy uses eggs to divine the future. You're mixing it up with oomancy. Tiromancy uses cheese."
"Cheese?" asked Ron bewildered. "Why would anyone use cheese to predict the future?"
"You're wondering about that? Wait until I tell you what is used in ichthyomancy," said Hermione with a smirk.
"We used ash. That's right, isn't it? Please tell me we didn't stare into the fireplace for half an hour for nothing?" begged Harry. Hermione's smirk became pronounced.
"Oh no," groaned Ron. "We did, didn't we?"
"As a matter of fact, yes, you did. Ash is used in tephromancy. Ichthyomancy predicts the future using the entrails of fish."
She took an obvious pleasure at the looks of horror and disbelief on both boys' faces. She calmly collected her books and prepared to leave, probably to finish her homework in the library without interruptions.
"Oh, and by the way," Hermione said just before she left through the portrait hole, "mouldwarp is just another word for mole. Mould and warp are two old words, which respectively mean 'soil' and 'to throw'. Moles may be blind, but their eyes are the key ingredient to many eye specific potions. It's all in your notes, if you cared to take any."
"Bloody hell," said Ron, grabbing his Divination homework and glancing it over. "Reckon we can change it without rewriting everything, Harry?"
"Sure, Ron," said Harry, slumping in his chair. "We'll just say that we dropped runny cheese into a glass of water and looked at red-hot, dusty fish guts."