PART 34
One evening when James and Remus went down to the lab to work on the Antiwyrm, they happened upon a Yule miracle in late April.
The potion was finished.
Not only that, it had been tapped into precisely seven little flasks and neatly labelled. The washing up still remained to be done. James looked at the bare scraped cauldron and found a sticky note.
"2."
James shook his head.
"That potion looks like a 10++ but I'm no expert!"
"Shame Padfoot is away at some Death Eater thing," said Remus.
"We can storm in there and kidnap him," said James. "I'm not busy."
"Yeah that won't just get us killed."
"Right, well, let's go then!"
"You run to your death if you feel like. I think I will think some more about the tattoo."
"You could have just said no."
"We can't just anaesthetise Padfoot first chance we get just because we have the potion now. Applying it is a very challenging procedure in its own right. We need to practice first."
"How do we do that?"
"I was thinking: you know the tree that grows women as fruit? We can practice on their bodies."
"We don't have time for that now Moo! How do we practice applying the Antiwyrm?"
"If we could somehow give them earwyrms first..."
"Or, we practice on somebody else that has earwyrms. I don't think we should waste any potion on anything that doesn't need it."
"But we can seriously damage the brain if we screw up. Applying Antiwyrm is difficult stuff even for experienced healers."
"Well you're going to healer school, aren't you? You need all practice you can get. Not just about walking around thinking sentimental internal monologues you know!"
"The problem is, if the infested brain isn't treated with antiwyrm, it will become seriously damaged anyway. Eventually the earwyrms will start… eating-"
"HOKAY Moo I'mma stop you RIGHT there." James felt faint. He needed to lean against something. "Poodle puppies poodle puppies poodle puppies chasing a ball… Ok I'm better now."
Remus made a kind of wet squishy sound with his mouth.
"What are you doing?" James asked. "I hope you're not practising something!"
"Just imagining those earwyrms at it."
"I think we should test the Antiwyrm on you first!"
They needed to decide what to do, now they had the Antiwyrm.
"How about we think about who acquired earwyrms at the camp?" James suggested. "Now Beau Marceau was there, Padfoot's brother was there, who else? Scheherazade O'Deary, Fatima Ali, Toady, Simon, Roy..."
"Perhaps if the earwyrms were close to entering the feeding stage in one of them," Remus thought. "If somebody was acting weird enough, somebody who has already been so affected that no matter what we do, even the worst case scenario would have been inevitable without our intervention."
"Somebody who is acting weird you say?"
Roy came in at that moment, completely naked, looking like he hadn't had a bath for a day, acting panicky and saying the zombie windmills were after him. James thought his head looked a little swollen, threw up, and fainted in his own sick. Roy thought he was a row boat, sat on him and began singing row row row the pony can sneeze a door whilst miming rowing. Remus whacked him over the head with a skillet pan.