"Miss Hebert... where would you find a bezoar?" Snape asked.

"One of these?" I asked, pulling it out and holding it up. "In my pocket. If you are asking where they come from, it's the stomach of a goat."

I'd been given one by Dumbledore, supposedly because they warded off poisons. Asking me this question was most likely intended to tell my classmates that I was warded against poisons, which might make them less likely to try.

It might also simply make them try poisons that bezoars couldn't handle. Still, sending them a message that I was ready for whatever they brought might be worth the danger.

"And what is it used for?"

"Poisons," I said. "And keeping you alive."

Snape stared at me for a second. He glanced around the room at my classmates, who were all watching the both of us intently. The Ravenclaws and Slytherins were all very interested in what had happened.

"What's the difference between Monkshood and Wolfsbane?"

"They're the same plant, and they are almost as poisonous to the rest of us as they are to werewolves."

"And what would you use it for?" Snape asked.

"Some sort of stimulant potion," I said. "And the Wolfsbane potion."

"It is called the Wideye potion, Miss Hebert," He said. He turned to the rest of the class and nodded as he saw that everyone was taking notes.

"I am glad to see that not every student at this school is as foolish as a Gryffindor," he said. "However, you will find that my expectations are correspondingly higher in this class."

The entire class stared at him, with no one saying a word. He had a certain elegance of speech that made him mesmerizing when he wanted to be, and this particular group of kids were eating it up.

"Today we will be working on a boil curing potion. Recent events will make it clear why this is a necessary first step."

He turned and began writing the ingredients on the board.

I raised my hand.

"Yes Miss Hebert."

"Are there any steps that we need to watch out for so that the potion won't explode on us?"

Hermione had said that Neville had been forced to go to the infirmary with boils, which seemed... interesting. Presumably he'd made some sort of elementary mistake that had changed the entire nature of the potion, from one that cured boils, to one that caused them.

That might mean that every potion was like that. It might not, but it was an intriguing avenue to explore.

"Do not put the nettles in until after you take it off from the fire," he said. "Or you will regret it. A fool of a Gryffindor made that mistake yesterday."

I'd heard vague rumors that Neville had been injured in class.

I made a quick note. I looked up and saw him looking at me suspiciously. Did he think I was planning to make boil making potion? Possibly as a way to get back at the people who had attacked me?

Boils wouldn't be enough. Attacking in kind wasn't enough to be a deterrent. Although... dropping several boil making potions in their bath might be doable.

How diluted would that potion have to be before it didn't cause boils any more? I wrote this down in the margins of my notes. It might be something I would have to experiment with, not in my own bathtub, of course. I'd also have to find out about how to clean the solutions effectively.

Snape was watching me again.

He set us to measuring out nettles and crushing snake fangs.

As he came around to me and Hermione, I asked, "Is there any residual poison in these fangs?"

"There is only one species of venomous snakes in the British Isles," Snape said. "And we do not use their fangs for first year potions. Undoubtedly, half the class would nick themselves and end up in the infirmary. Crush the fangs more finely; you wish it to be the consistency of granulated sugar... something you should be familiar with as an American."

"At least we don't boil everything," I muttered under my breath.

He pretended not to hear me, and Hermione stared at me with wide eyes. I had a suspicion that she would consider talking back to a professor tantamount to throwing dynamite into the middle of class.

I was being unfair, of course. The food at Hogwarts was actually quite good, although I still couldn't understand how the students weren't all the size of actual whales. There wasn't any sort of physical education requirement, and every meal was a feast.

The students around me ate heartily too. It wasn't that they had some sort of supernatural restraint. Did magic require calories? Who would I ask?

Of maybe Hogwarts food was magicked to be non-fattening.

It seemed to work, whatever they were doing.

Snape seemed to have criticisms for everyone except Draco Malfoy, who seemed to preen. He looked at me triumphantly as his potion turned perfectly clear. My potion with Hermione was the second best out of the bunch, but it was still a little cloudy.

I suspected that there were some steps in the process that hadn't been adequately explained, and I could see that Hermione was frustrated, especially by the looks Draco was giving her. She was going to insist on getting every potion right.

I, on the other hand would be interested in getting them wrong. Unconventional potions, created through mistakes in the process would be devastating. This potion alone would be interesting, and it took almost no time to make.

The most difficult thing would be testing out the resulting potions. I might have been better off having class with the Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs if they were as stupid as Snape seemed to think; they'd probably have a lot of creative mistakes.

Of course, Snape seemed as prejudiced against the Gryffindors as the rest of the school was against the Slytherins.

I already knew who'd sent the letter. Bugs had senses of smell that were fairly acute; they used it to track down food. Different insects had different senses of smell, but bubotuber pus had a distinctive smell that all of them could identify.

Although the culprit had been careful not to touch any with his bare hands, he'd been around it enough that the scent had lingered on his robes. That was something my bugs could smell, although it wasn't something that I could take to Dumbledore.

I'd doubled my number of bugs I could control again; I could now control somewhere around two hundred and fifty. That would be enough to carry potion vials, although I wasn't sure that I wanted to risk revealing them to the world for something like this.

On the other hand, I might be able to get away with it if I was clever. Working on a distribution system might not be that difficult. I'd have to make sure that I was somewhere in public when it happened; if the people attacking me thought that I had co-conspirators, it would drive them crazy looking for them. They might tear themselves apart trying, which would keep them from focusing on me.

Was it worth the risk of my being discovered?

I suspected that Wizards probably had easy ways to deal with bugs if they knew about them. Once they knew that bugs were a large part of my arsenal, they'd get rid of them, probably using some kind of charm or shield I'd never heard about.

Still, hitting people with a sock full of galleons wasn't going to be enough to drive the people who wanted to hurt me off for long. I needed to send a message and I had to do it in a way that even the slowest of the Slytherins could understand.

Finally, I decided.

I needed the kind of uncertainty that this was going to create. I needed people to assume that I had someone protecting me, so that they'd spend more time trying to figure out who that was than attacking me.

"We should go talk to Neville," I said to Hermione.

Her eyes lit up. "He's probably still in the hospital wing."

I nodded. It was the right thing to do; it was the human thing to do. Also, I needed a better explanation of what had happened during his accident.

We went straight to the infirmary, where Neville was lying in bed. His face was still covered in boils, although they already were looking better than Pansy's hands had looked.

He looked up at us, and he smiled. "Hey."

Neville grimaced as the skin of his cheek pulled tight. Hermione patted his unblemished hand.

Parts of him were covered in boils, and other parts were clear. I tried to imagine what sort of splatter pattern had done this; how far did it extend, and how far I needed to be when I replicated his mistake.

He thanked me for saving him from a broken arm; I waved it off.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Professor Snape..." Neville said. "He's so scary. I guess I wasn't paying attention."

"The potion exploded?" I asked.

"It melted my Cauldron," Neville said. "Boiled out over everything. Professor Snape says I'm going to have to pay for a new one."

"I'm sorry that happened to you," I said. "Maybe Hermione can help tutor you in potions."

Hermione glanced at me quickly, but Neville grabbed her hand. "Would you?"

"I'm sure both of us would be happy to," Hermione said quickly, glaring at me.

At her angry look, I shrugged. Tutoring Neville would have kept her busy and out of my hair. Helping to tutor him might not be a bad idea. While it was possible that he was simply unlucky this first day, he seemed like the kind of person who might be clumsy in a class like potions, where small mistakes could cause big disasters.

Helping tutor him might actually give me special insights into exactly what mistakes he was making, and if there were useful ones, I'd be able to turn those to my advantage in ways that people might not expect.

The fact that his variation on the potion destroyed cauldrons was unfortunate. It meant that I needed to get multiple cauldrons, and I'd need to be careful about cleaning up as well.

I could steal some of the school's cauldrons, but I'd have to replace them eventually. It was possible that Wizards had magical versions of muggle forensics, so I'd have to be particularly careful. I'd use my spare wand for everything too. If it needed to be attuned anyway, I probably needed to practice with it.

We sat and talked with Neville until lunch. I did not receive any mail.

For the next two days, I went about my normal routine. I used my bugs to find out where the school cauldrons were, and I slipped in when no one was looking, and I clumsily picked the locks guarding them. Why anyone bothered I wasn't sure; there were magical ways to open locks available to anyone who wasn't me.

Stealing several cauldrons wasn't hard; levitating them through the hallways to an unused bathroom was considerably harder task given that the walls were covered in paintings. I had to give up a night's worth of sleep to pull that one off, which left me unreasonably cranky the next morning.

Apparently paintings slept when no one was around; whether that was an energy conservation method, or they simply slept because they thought they should, it didn't matter. What mattered was that I was able to levitate several pots within pots to the unused bathroom and hide them in the stalls.

I managed to brew the potions that very night, and if I hadn't been using bugs and levitation spells for the last part of it, I would have been in serious trouble. The explosion the first one made covered half the bathroom. It was a wonder that more of the students hadn't been injured.

In the end I managed to make six vials of my boil causing potion, and I spent the rest of the night trying to clean the bathroom. While it was unused in the middle of the night, getting rid of the smell and the burn marks on the floor was a lot harder than I'd thought it would be.

The cauldrons melted, and I managed to levitate them into buckets. Pouring them down a toilet proved to be a poor idea, and when I was done, the toilet was no longer working. However, I was able to keep the cause of the problem from being apparent.

I barely made it back in time not to get caught, and the entirety of the next day I was so exhausted that I could barely keep my eyes open. Having a teenager's body and stamina would have been much more convenient.

When I'd been a super hero, and then a super villain, I'd pulled all sorts of all-nighters. Now I found my self going to bed early, ignoring the whispers of my roommates.

Because I'd gone to bed so early, I was able to wake up early as well.

The boy who'd sent the pus had been one of the boys egging my attackers the first night. Geoffrey Avery was a pureblood, and he hadn't said anything about what he was going to do to any of his friends, at least not when I was close enough to listen.

It was simplicity itself for me to coat the insides of his bathtub with the potion. Experimentation with a less than friendly rat had showed that Neville's concoction was dangerous even when dry, and that if reconstituted it took time to work, but eventually would.

I went back to bed, and decided to sleep in. I was awakened to the sounds of screams.

Jerking awake, I saw that Millicent and Tracey were already up. They were staring at each other, wide eyes, and grabbing robes, they ran downstairs.

I took a little longer to get dressed. By the time I was done, Snape was already levitating a boy covered in a sheet down the boys stairs.

His hand and arm slipped out from under the sheet, and I saw that it was so covered in boils that it looked almost unrecognizable. Apparently six doses had been much too strong, even when dilute through an entire bathtub of water. Using three might have been enough, but I'd wanted to avoid underkill.

Snape looked at all of us.

"This stops now," he said. He sounded genuinely angry. "I am taking Mr. Avery to the infirmary, and when I am done, I expect the entire House to be in the common room."

With that, he was gone.

I saw several people openly staring at me, and I carefully kept my face neutral. Now that I thought about it, using an untested potion on a human being hadn't been the smartest thing I could have done. Why had I done it?

Was there something wrong with my brain? I hadn't been this impulsive since the last time I was eleven.

I fought to keep myself from scowling.

How could I make plans if I couldn't trust my own decision making? If my own brain was working against me, I wasn't sure what I could do.

Snape was back less than thirty minutes later.

"I thought we were done with this after last year," he said. "Fighting with the Gryffindors was bad enough. Fighting among ourselves?"

He shook his head.

"The other houses think that we are the villains, that every Dark Lord comes from among our ranks, and that because of that we cannot be trusted."

"Mr. Avery almost died tonight," he said. "He has boils inside his mouth and down his throat that crippled his ability to breathe, and it was only through my quick intervention that he survived at all."

Snape stared at me, but I kept my eyes straight ahead, my face expressionless. I kept my mind blank too, just in case.

"I would like to hear where everyone was when this all happened," he said.

The next thirty minutes was composed of questioning. Snape kept looking at me, and I kept my mind as blank as possible.

Finally he shook his head.

"Should Mr. Avery die, the aurors will become involved. At that point, my ability to intervene will be null and void."

The room was quiet. I saw some of the others looking at me, and it was clear that some of them wanted to throw out an accusation, but no one said anything.

"And Miss Hebert?" Snape said.

"Yes?"

"Detention," he said.

"What? Why?" I asked. My acting must not have been very good, because I heard a muttering coming up from the crowd.

"We will discuss that during your detention, which will begin on Monday."

I sighed and nodded.

In a way, he'd as much as outed me to the entire class, but given the way that Slytherins worked, it would only help my reputation. Maybe he wanted to quiz me on who my ally was, or maybe he didn't believe I had done it at all and simply wanted to throw whoever he thought the true culprit was off the scent.

I considered going back to bed for my first Saturday off, but my stomach told me that it was time to eat. For some reason, this iteration of me was much more concerned with food. If I wasn't careful I would get fat, especially because I hadn't worked out a way to keep running without becoming too visible.

The last thing I needed was for my enemies to be able to predict where I was going to be at any given time. Even my bugs couldn't watch everywhere, and I'd die just as quickly from a rock pushed off from one of the towers as anybody else.

Breakfast was my first priority, and then I was going to have to try more magic.