The jellyfish (dis)continues. Should I raise the rating? There's another chapter in the works, about (predictably) Luna's dad.
Blackadder: I did mean Antinoamian with an a, for a variety of reasons -- the most banal of which concerns Noam Chomsky. What I forgot to mention, and which has since been fixed, is that the endless gorilla song is in French. Oops. Thanks for drawing my attention to that-- I often fall prey to my pantryful of pepperjack cheese...
When one gave Luna Lovegood a detention it was best to make sure she served it alone.
This increased the amount of time one was required to supervise one's detainees, but prior attempts to put her in a batch had failed spectacularly. Once she had stared at Alicia Spinnet for upwards of an hour. Another time she had chattered at Ginevra Weasley: the only time Snape had ever felt sorry for a member of that despicable clan.
On this occasion her transgression had been to transfigure her Potions ingredients into an approximation of the potion she was supposed to be making (a rose-and-wine topical poultice for fractures). Under questioning she submitted that she often did this to her ingredients, changing them into their chopped, diced, ground, or otherwise treated form for his benefit as he walked around so as to give herself more time to actually prepare them.
"Did you think you could fool the tester?" he'd hissed.
She did not.
"But I wasn't going to submit it as my final potion, Sir!"
"I see. You were just lying for lying's sake. For practice."
She had continued to gaze at him.
"I suppose I couldn't expect anything more from a Lovegood," Snape had muttered before waving the mixture away: "Evanesco, and a detention. And I will have a word with your Head of House about this."
"I don't lie, Sir."
He'd turned around with an expression that could snap bones.
"And what do you call this sorry attempt at dissembly-- the Holy Communion?"
"No," she had replied calmly. "I just wanted to see what the potion would look like so I could know if I was doing it right."
"Perhaps listening to the instructions might have served you better, you imbecilic little know-it-all."
Luna had been unperturbed. "I have trouble with your handwriting, Sir," she'd said, leaving him mystified at the connection between his handwriting and his spoken instructions. Perhaps the Lovegoods lived in a silent comic-book universe with thought-bubbles floating over everyone's heads. It would explain a lot.
She appeared at the scheduled hour, looking vague and humming a rhyme. He closed his eyes against the flood of exasperation that washed over him at every sight of her glassy fishbowl eyes, then ordered her to the sink in the workroom where a number of jars-- their innards coated with residues of varied toxicity-- awaited her ministrations. It was still unclear to him how she had managed to transfigure her ingredients so consistently as to fool him all year. A more devout Seventh-Year could typically accomplish it to some pasty degree, but he set alarm spells over his NEWT classes to prevent that sort of thing. And Minerva's reports on her progress in class were uninspiring: Luna Lovegood never really did anything-- she always did something else. That should have warned him, of course, but even he could be a bloody fool.
He cursed himself for being such a bloody fool.
The tower of jars shifted a bit in the sink, prompting her to raise her invisible eyebrows in apprehension. Encouraged, Snape pocketed her wand and omitted to tell her where the gloves were located. It was nothing Madam Pomfrey wouldn't be able to fix.
"Ah-- Miss Lovegood, if I find you have broken anything--"
She stared at the jars for a time, then stepped out of her slippers and slipped her hands into them. Her toes were uncommonly long and curved, the toenails painted with Ugaritic astrological signs-- doubtless on a tip from her father's unbottomed supply of useless misinformation. Snape's nerves tightened again and he turned back to his store cupboards. She'd be unable to wash the jars silently, he reasoned; and he'd set a specific amplification charm to ensure that the shattering of glass could not be covered up by a cough.
Presently a chanson about a gorilla could be heard over the clumsy sounds of the sink. The gorilla's cage had been poorly shut, he learned. The gorilla then lost its hair. Snape's teeth creaked together and he considered casting the Antinoamian Curse on himself in order to unlearn French for the duration of this ordeal. The song, predictably, had about fifty verses, which Luna sometimes felt compelled to repeat. Other than that, however, she acquitted herself tolerably well with the jars, failing only to remove the colony of fungus that had taken over the habitual residence of his stock of prosimian hairballs.
But as luck would have it, she completed her task exactlynineteen seconds after he'd left his desk to check on his latest work in progress.
This placed him, visibly, just inside the doorway of the vivisection laboratory and with his back to her. By the time he had stepped far enough from the door to be able to close it she had crossed the intervening space and was smiling a blithe smile at him.
"My slippers got blistered," she announced, proud. "May I have my wand back, Professor Sn--"
At which point the Tengu started to screech.
Luna's wide eyes widened and Snape interposed the door between her and himself. Fine work, Severus. You're fit for the dissection bench yourself, miserable fool
He hurried to the creature's extracted thorax and dripped several drops of tobacco juice to soften and silence it. The rest of the organs seemed to be working all right, though the bird's beady eye-- the one closer to him-- was bloodshot and murderous. He reached for the sugar water and a syringe: even though dismembered, the creature had to be fed, else it died. It was the lamentable disadvantage of life. He preferred his materials cut and dried, the drier the better; like children, living things were soft and inconstant and altogether too fond of screeching.
"Alohomora?" he heard Luna suggest to the door, and realised with a shudder that he'd left her wand in his outer cloak, which he had shed in his office on account of its cumbersome sleeves, which had no place in the vivisection room where precision was a three-dimensional thing. He also realised that he had forgotten to reset the wards on account of the Tengu. On account of which--
Very good, Snape. Very good. Keep repeating yourself; maybe that will fix everything.
His gaze paused on the pans under the excretory tubes before turning to Luna. They were empty, which was not a good sign.
"Is that a Tengu?" squealed Luna helpfully. "I knew it; I knew they existed! Oh, Dad will be so pleased when I tell him!"
She seemed unruffled by the fact that her Potions master was elbow-deep in such a rare creature, or that it had been effectively turned inside-out, with each of its organs stretched to the full possible length of its connective tissue and suspended, pulsating, in the air.
"You will tell nobody, Miss Lovegood," he assured her.
Page ninety-four of the third volume of Grubitz' Magical Bestiary, Unchangeable Edition, has this to say on the subject:
Tengu-- playful bird-goblin and changeling, rumoured to live in the East. Reports of actual sightings are rare although Marco the Magnificent swears that one of his travel companions had been personally robbed by a Tengu on the steppes of Mongolia, and a twelfth-century account of a delegation to Prester John mentions a similar animal. Usually taking the form of a crow or a kite, their favourite prey is monks who are unstrong in the faith. They can, however, also take the form of--
The copy in the Hogwarts library sports an inerascible inkblot over the rest of the entry.