Imposter

October 17th, 1994

Sixth Year

After a month and a half of watching the new Professor closely Jo and Leilani had picked up on some oddities in his behavior. They were predisposed to distrust after his first lesson, but Leili tried to look at it objectively, or as objectively as she could, considering the disastrous first lesson. Her arm still hurt and she saw Madame Pomfrey once a week to work on range-of-motion exercises

"He's drinking out of his flask once every hour. If it were a normal drink it wouldn't be so exact, it'd be more sporadic, and he wouldn't be turning his back to us. There's something in it that he doesn't want us to see," Leili said as they sat in the great hall for lunch.

"You know what we gotta do?" Jo asked

"Please tell me you're not thinking of stealing the flask," Leili groaned, turning to look at her friend.

"Yup. How else do we find out what's inside?"

"Alright… how do we do this?" Leilani sighed.

"We wait till he's asleep and then we steal it right out from under his nose."

Later that night the girls stood outside the Professor's quarters and summoned the flask. When it came zooming towards them Leilani quickly began to pour some into a vial she'd brought along. Seeing this Jo whispered, "What're you doing? Just take the whole flask!"

"If he wakes up and finds that this is missing I don't want to know what he'd do to get it back! Besides, I'm pretty sure we only need what's in the flask, not the flask itself," Leilani whispered back. As soon as she was done pouring, the flask was quickly banished back to Moody's room and the girls ran like the hounds of hell were on their heels. They got back to their dormitory, breathing hard. "Now what do we do with it?" Leilani asked.

"I don't suppose you can identify it, can you?"

Leili examined the liquid in the vial, she swirled it around and even gave a short sniff from a safe distance away. All it made her do was sneeze. "I haven't got a clue, it's not one I've ever made and it smells dreadful, how anybody could stand to actually drink that stuff is beyond me."

"Then, tomorrow, I'll take it to Marcus; if there's anyone who can identify this stuff, it's him. ...Or Snape, but I don't want him asking how we got it." Jo said taking the vial from Leilani. "But for now, we go to bed."

Leili laughed quietly, "Bed, oh, I like that idea."

Jo presented Marcus Flint with the vial the next day-she had some sort of homing beacon on Slytherins. She could always find Flint and Snape and Leili was pretty sure she could always find Malfoy if she just tried.

After close and careful examination in an unused classroom, Marcus asked Jo to answer a question before he told her what it was. "Where did you get this? You obviously didn't make it yourself otherwise you wouldn't have asked me what it was. So, where did you get it?"

"A teacher," Jo said simply.

"An imposter is more like it. This is polyjuice potion; it allows a human to transform into another human for one hour. It's difficult to make and I can't imagine it tastes very good, between the leeches and the lacewing flies and the boomslang skin. Plus you need a bit of the person you're transforming into, otherwise nothing will happen and you'll have drunk a foul tasting potion for no reason," Marcus explained as he walked over to the sink and dumped the potion down the drain, rinsing out the vial before handing it back to Jo. "Don't let anyone catch you with that stuff."

"We won't," Jo told him confidently.

Later that day Jo met up with Leili and told her what Marcus had said. "Polyjuice potion? Sounds dangerous. …I would say that there could be a perfectly innocent explanation but, I doubt it. Should we tell Dumbledore?"

"Probably."

"We're not going to, are we?" It was more statement than question.

"He might already know, after all, he knew about Lupin."

"What if he doesn't?"

"We'll deal with it then. We should get more information before we say anything anyway."

"As you wish," Leili quoted.