Hello again! And nope, not canon this time. Another oneshot of their life on the TARDIS. Lighthearted, if you will.

Ingredients Shopping For Volatile Things

Harry eyed the potions cabinet in trepidation. The clabbert pustules were gone. She'd used them in the last batch of peace draught. That… was a problem. Actually, the whole potions cabinet was the problem. She only had so many ingredients. And had no way to get most of them. That meant… research.

Usually she didn't mind. At all. Research was fun.

But usually she didn't have to research potions. It was volatile at best. At worst, well… She didn't even want to know. The hazardous accidents with magic were harder to sort out without St. Mungo's anywhere. And she'd have to do so many experiments. With new ingredients no one had ever tried before.

The girl didn't know how much help the Doctor would be with this since he still had some trouble trying to understand the logic behind potions. She herself had never quite understood it either. Harry didn't think anyone did. She just knew that she had a knack for altering them if left on her own with a cauldron.

Problem was, where could she get ingredients?

Wait. Time machine. Duh.

"Doctor?", she called out as she took out her old school trunk with magical compartments. Specifically for buying potions ingredients in her later years.

The Time Lord was doing something while hanging with ropes from the lab ceiling. She didn't ask. Thought she did raise an eyebrow. Politely, she didn't interrupt even as she sensed he was concentrating hard. He only just acknowledged she was there with a flare of greeting. He'd just about learned to communicate with the new bond like she did.

After about six minutes he let out a whoop, delight radiating from him as magical lights flashed into existence. Harry gasped and stared at the suddenly magical lighting. There were different colors and sizes floating around, looking exactly like localized Lumos spells. Only they were generated without a wand from another energy cube they'd created. This one was much smaller than the one at Ark Molube though.

"Ha!", the Doctor said triumphantly, "Watch"

He pointed his sonic screwdriver at the ceiling and the lights rearranged and recolored themselves, making a vortex of light for a few seconds as the scenery changed into… stars. It was a map. Of a piece of space. In their workshop. That would come in so useful for her when she tried to do arithmetic calculations and ritual works with dates they weren't at yet. Doctor might be able to do that in his mind but she needed an actual reference.

This was for her. She smiled slowly, happiness pooling in her stomach.

"Whoa. You never cease to amaze me, Doc"

Her friend huffed at the nickname but grinned down at her brightly, "Amazing, that's me. What did you want?"

Harry snapped her trunk open with, well, a snap of her fingers.

"I need new potions ingredients. But there's no magical community", she explained, knowing he didn't need more explanation.

Proving her right, he nodded thoughtfully.

"I know just the time, and place"

And that was all they needed to get ready for a new adventure. With shopping. Probably. Knowing the Doctor it included a trek in the wilderness.

xXXx

Harry eyed the blue stones on display and weighed options and uses in her mind. She had a digital dictionary the Doctor had dug from somewhere which explained some object's mythology and properties. This one sounded promising. She turned to the shop owner and bought a bag. It joined an assortment of things within the enlarged compartments in her trunk.

This shopping district, if you could call it that, was chaotic and full of little trinkets and items that had significant properties that mimicked some of her own world's.

Oh how glad she was that Viper had convinced her knowing magical subjects better would be worth it. Especially potions. After Snape, she hadn't been particularly enthused. But the more she'd read the more interesting it became until she found herself experimenting new ingredients and things. If she hadn't she'd have had no idea what she was doing here.

Some items were even useful looking for runes and wards. Like the little shells belonging to some space snails. The Doctor had tried to make her stop calling them that but after seeing a picture she just couldn't. They were snails. In space. Clearly. They shouldn't be named after cats.

Yeah, that had been a funny argument.

Happened a lot with them, it seems. Even if there was absolutely no heat behind them. If there was, they'd feel it. The feelings thing had solidified a lot faster than with the bonds between her and her Elements had. She was glad for it. Sometimes figuring the Doctor out without it was way too hard.

He was a master at deflection, especially when in unfamiliar company.

She'd been here almost two years, or so he told her one day. So she kinda knew him by now. As he knew her. Harry felt delighted at the thought. She reached to sense her last living family member and found him at a cafe-like thing looking at some powders. It looked interesting and maybe useful so she rushed over in time to see him buy some with a stick he'd cheated money into. Kinda. It was still real money.

"May times treat you well", said the bored looking shopkeeper with tentacles as hair.

It was a local saying the Doctor happily replied to.

"And you", he said before shoving the bubble bags in her face, making Harry scramble to catch them without magic.

She sent him a sour look which he ignored with a flash of amusement. The witch scowled harder. Which didn't work. Because she herself was amused too.

"So what's this?", she asked instead and pointed at a suspiciously emerald colored powder. The others she had a vague idea of. She had not spent the years twiddling her thumbs and the TARDIS library was an information gold mine.

"Marma", he told her, "It tastes sweet or salty depending on the way you prepare it"

Harry made an interested noise as her mind churned over applications. She could think of quite a few and some left her feeling giddy. Funny how she was now itching to get started on the experimenting when a few hours ago she'd been wary and exhausted.

"Hmm. You know, it's been said that inventing new potions is one of the hardest and most time consuming paths there are. That it takes years. And that no potion can be made without even a single magical item", she mused, lip twitching, "Want to prove them wrong?"

If the sharp grin she got was anything to go by the Doctor was eager to do so.

The sooner they got to the TARDIS the better. So they concluded the shopping and headed towards their lab with the trunk and bubble bags full of new ingredients, minds churning with ideas.

xXXx

Harry was blasted to a wall with bright pink flashing in her vision. She blinked rapidly to clear the distortion and noted blearily that bubblegum didn't work well with ice shards. The girl narrowed her eyes at her crystal cauldron and its volatile and self-warring icy pink mixture.

"Grr… Again!"

xXXx

"This shouldn't work", the Doctor muttered with a scowl, "The only thing connecting dragon scales and what is essentially a leaf is their shape and size and it's not even that precise!"

Harry just hummed absently, "I dunno, it made sense to me"

"You said made"

"Yeah, well, doesn't mean I understand it. Just be glad it works"

"This feels like a repeated conversation"

The witch didn't reply with anything other than amusement. He huffed but left it at that. She could still feel he was happy.

xXXx

They stared. The pillowcase had had a pillow. Now, it did not. It was writhing on the floor with indignant mewls and meows coming out. Soon enough a vanilla white kitten with milky eyes poked its head out with a hiss. The cauldron was emitting cat-head shaped smoke.

"Well. I understand what Mr. Flitwick was on about when he said someone accidentally conjured a bull on their chest", Harry offered weakly.

"I admit I was sceptical at first…", the Doctor said slowly.

"And now?"

"And now…", he gave a meaningful glance at the walls that had somehow turned tiger striped, "Now I think your stories may have been understated"

xXXx

"It's gone!"

"Yeah, here. Let me-"

"It's gone"

"Doc! Stop it!"

"My index finger is gone!"

"I know and I know how to fix it if you'd just-"

"Fascinating!"

"Ugh. I give up. Say when you want it back"

xXXx

Harriet hit another wall with a smack but this time a volatile potion hadn't thrown her. She'd walked right into it. Because she couldn't see anything the right way. Only sideways. It was weird.

"You said the door was here!", she snapped, annoyed.

"No, I said it was to the right, not left!"

"My right is to my left to right right now!"

"That makes no sense!"

"I know! Does magic ever make sense?"

"Arithmancy"

"Point. Where's the door?"

The Doctor sighed and she felt dizzy as he spun her around to another direction and shoved her through a sideways doorway. It looked like it was twisting and that she'd smack into a wall again but no. She got into her room to get a cleaniser potion which they'd somehow forgotten about before their bout of experimenting. A bad idea if any before potions testing.

xXXx

It took hours. Upon hours. But they made two new potions and found a sorta replacement and a works-almost-everytime replacement for clabbert pustules. And some other ones. They just needed to rework some stirring and adding orders. One of the things the Doctor didn't like since it only sometimes made even some sort of sense to him. Or to Harry for that matter.

As for the two new potions… One of them was basically a liquid Tempus-spell that let the user see time as golden smoke or tendrils for a quarter per drop. The more drops you added the more time you got. Harry named it Time Sight. The Doctor didn't protest overly much at the simplification.

The other was basically a stabilizer agent. After one too many magical messes they tried to create a way to manage them easier than the oh so many Finite's (a spell terminating spell or magic effects) and other cleaning charms. Many of which didn't work at all. So they made the potion and while it did counter many more destructive effects a drop of it in a cauldron at a start of a brewing also made a potion less liable to explode. Granted, the potions or ingredients that were supposed to be sensitive to things made them either less effective or not work at all.

Harry could imagine the uproar for their invention at the magical markets, as well as Snape's face when he heard that an alien had helped make it.

Take that magical community!

xXXx

Hehe. I liked writing this. So much fun! Potions experiments gone wrong are interesting with these two. Thanks for reading and I hope you liked it as much as I did. This was also an experiment with comedy. Did you laugh? I hope you laughed. Or at least found it funny? (hopeful pillow!kitten eyes)