notes: happy halloween, all! or should i say... shallura-ween... wait that didn't work. forgive me.
Allura doesn't usually get antsy about exams — but she admits the upcoming potions practical is starting to steal the peace of her sleep.
It isn't that Allura hasn't been paying attention in lectures. She's a good student. Not the best of the entire Academy, but a quick learner, a sharp thinker, and one of the professors' favorites.
But potions... potions is the one subject that she doesn't think she will ever really get. She was never able to really get a grasp of it when she was younger — and while she hoped that the chemistry would eventually click and that the formulas would eventually stick - it never quite did.
Tell her to do anything but make a potion. She can conjour up a fireball, heal a Balmaran, learn three new languages, recite the most important centuries of Altean history — anything, anything but make a potion.
The instructions are written right there in the book, informing her approximately how much of this or that she needs, and for how long she needs to stir or to whisk, but for some reason, even when she follows the recipes down to the detail, her potions are never fruitful. She's absolutely terrible at figuring out the precise proportions of whatever she needs — lizard tails, owl feet, fish eyes — you name it, she could probably couldn't use it right, and she could never understand what it meant to have a "gut" feeling for what's to come into the cauldron.
Sometimes her classmates would tell her to look closely at the consistency or to wait until steam rises from the surface of the brew, but in all honesty, Allura can't tell the difference between one slimy stinky green liquid and another.
It's too bad that her father is well-known and one of the Academy's potions professor emeritus. She has plenty of legacy to shoot for, and too much pride to admit that perhaps she just couldn't do it.
Allura huffs, taking a deep breath, before slurping the last bit from her juice cartoon noisily. She then sighs just as loudly and checks her phone for the time.
Fourteen hours until her potion practical. Fourteen hours for her to at least be able to master at least one of the potions taught in class. Fourteen hours for her to clean up her act so that she doesn't embarrass herself.
After all, this isn't grade school anymore, where simply reciting the ingredients and the instructions was sufficient to pass the potions class. This is the Altean Academy of Sorcery, and she has to make potions in a limited amount of time in front of her professors for her potions practical.
With a great roll of her eyes, she finally stands with great effort. It's time to try again, she reminds herself.
She holds up her notes to read the annotated instructions for the medicinal potion — probably her umpteenth time doing so.
Attempt number 47, she counts to herself, which will probably be another bad batch.
But she doesn't lose faith, and she isn't going to give up so soon. She cracks her knuckles, and then snaps her fingers to start a fire underneath her cauldron. She checks around to make sure that nothing in her surrounding is going to interrupt her potion-making session, and moreover, that nothing in her vicinity is going to explode for being too close to the heat.
"Oops, I'm sorry, Rufus," she remarks, swiftly scooping up the fat brown mouse. "I'll have to ban you and the rest of the mice from my room for now. Don't want to accidentally turn you into something."
She sets Rufus down in the hallway, shooing her pet to the living room to join her father, before waving a quick goodbye and closing the door.
Practicing for potions at home is something that Professor Coran warned the class from doing: Last academic year, a few students who were using their own cauldrons at home accidentally melted their houses down and another set of students turned their pets into roaches (an infestation they still haven't cleared), which led the Academy's board of trustees to quickly siphon money into building a proper potions lab — complete with thermo-resistant floors, an automatic air filtration system, and curse-negating crystals for in case anything explosive, noxious, or demonic arose from failed experiments — on campus for students to use.
Allura doesn't care. She's created a make-shift work space in the middle of her bedroom to practice potions, and she's snuck home plenty of plastic bags of ingredients from the Academy. She doesn't want to make studying for her practical any more discouraging for her, and needing to travel by broomstick for 30 minutes just to make it to campus is an inconvenience she can't afford when her grades and reputation depend on it.
And besides, she assures herself, technically her father is just downstairs watching the Alteans vs. Galrans final soccer championship match, and she's sure that he would be able to quickly handle anything that goes awry.
Her attention is drawn back to her work when she hears bubbling from the cauldron. Foam starts to surface at the edges of the pale pink broth within.
"And when the mixture starts to bubble," she reads, off her paper, "add two dried lemon peelings and a gram of LWP, which should immediately turn the mixture a bright green."
She immediately sets aside her notes, then dropping both lemon peelings in simultaneously. She waits for the peelings to completely dissolve as she tries to figure out exactly what LWP stands for.
LWP could be either lilywort petals or lupus willow powder, she reasons, holding both ingredients in either hand. Unfortunately both the petals and the powder are an off-white shade, so she couldn't really guess which should go in by color.
Allura sucks on her teeth for a moment, immediately regretting not completely paying attention to lecture that day, but at the same time growing frustrated that LWP is abbreviated in the first place. Shorthand is half the reason why she hates potions — simply knowing all the references in the wretched subject is a two-year course in and of itself.
She weighs both ingredients in her hands for another tick before deciding to go with a gram of the lupus willow powder. The powder is heavier and denser per spoonful anyhow, and the amount that the recipe is asking for doesn't make sense for how many petals she would need for a gram.
It's risky, but there's only way to find out if LWP is what she thinks it is.
She holds her breath while she sprinkles a gram of the powder into her cauldron, praying to the seven stars that the mixture turns a bright green...
...and within seconds, the liquid in the cauldron does just that.
She sighs a deep breath of relief, stirring the broth around with a ladle as she picks up the recipe again to see her next step — adding a gallon of distilled water.
"Damn," she curses to herself.
Of course, water is the one thing that she forgot to bring upstairs with her.
Allura sets aside the ladle to the side, not wasting time to fetch the missing ingredient. She swings open the door and —
"Rufus?!" she yelps, when she sees the mouse zipping between her legs, followed by a black cat. "Where did this cat come from - ?"
Swiveling around, she tries to catch the intruders, but before she can stop them, Rufus has ducked behind her cauldron, within the pile of bagged potion ingredients and the cat has leaped high into the air to catch the mouse.
"Wait, no!" she shouts.
But with a splash and a yowl, the cat ends up diving straight into a bubbling green mess.
"Oh, shit," she wheezes, stepping up to the cauldron to see what became of the cat. She looks hard into the thick liquid for any sign of movement, but she can't even see a single strand of fur.
That cat is gone, she thinks, completely dissolved away in the —
And then something emerges from the cauldron.
Something alive takes a deep breath and gasps for air.
She silently shrieks, falling over backwards, covering her mouth.
She catches a glimpse of short black hair, tan smooth skin, the edges of a sturdy collarbone, and the ripples of a well-muscled back.
Well then, she thinks. Perhaps attempt number 47 didn't turn out to be a bad batch after all.
notes: ah this was a pleasant little something to write before heading into the work week! i feel like this is due for a continuation, especially because there is so much potential! (but let me know if that's something you'd actually want to see or not, ahaha. don't want to extend a plot further than i need to!)
still lacking halloween costume ideas,
thir13enth