1
"I have been instructed by the headmistress to make an introductory announcement of how my class is going to be run.", Perenelle Flamel informed.
"I am not Headmaster Snape. I do not have his record nor reputation for never losing a student. In fact, I have lost count of the hundreds that have died attempting my instruction and disregarding it. Whether that is by not abiding by my directions by laziness or arrogance, not understanding the principles I've explained by ignorance or stupidity, or not discovering the magical world's rules due to a lack of ambition or volition - I cannot care. Across more than six centuries the result has been the same: dead students. Alchemy is deadlier than Potions and if you make certain of it, Potions can be deadlier than Transfiguration, Care of Magical Creatures, and the Dark Arts combined because at least in those classes you have to try to get yourself killed. I will not care if you die. I am not trying to be callous - I was born before syphillis came to these shores. Your parent's marriages strike me as childhood infatuations and puppy love, your life goals are my day dreams, and my concern for your well being is as your concern for the starving children of name a place."
"Then why did you even transfer here to teach?", Neville asked.
"Why, you, Mr. Longbottom.", Flamel replied. "I am presented with the first interesting problem in what has been way too long. Learning languages without the accent bored me after the thirty-fifth. The research team I worked on defeated aging ages ago. You people pride yourselves on obtaining a single Mastery and I no longer bother to fill out the paper work after a world changing discovery. But humanity is going to die. And unless I crack your case I will be its biographer. And I don't know how I am going to do that. I'm finally concerned about something after all these years.
"That is why you and you alone have special rules in my classroom. You will be wearing the Bubble Head charm whenever you are within Potions' wards. That does include right now, Mr. Longbottom. You will wear both my dragonhide gloves, dragonhide overboots, and basilisk hide apron."
"Basalisk!", Daphne exclaimed.
The professor shrugged. "They take a few decades to raise to human covering size but it's usually worth the effort for the components."
"Shouldn't you be taking precautions for all of your students' safety, if you have such a poor record of survival?", Hermione asked.
"School is not for surviving, it's for learning, Ms. Granger.", Flamel replied. "You want to be safe, go back home and raise the kind of vegetables that don't bite back. Find a fat shopkeeper looking for a brat oven. Muggle it up: I'm certain some wandless routine will keep you in enough coin for you to stay out of my hair. But if you're brave enough to garner the secrets of the universe then society has been kind enough to provide you me, this school, and opportunity to turn that brain into a mind. Are you so cowardly that you would rather accept being only what you are right now rather than what you could become if you just tried? Are you going to let mere pain and death stand between your little fragile world view always under attack by the truth or are you going to pounce on knowledge in any manner you can determine is a correct path to it? Are you the town's bitch?"
"Ask Voldemort if I'm a bitch.", Hermione replied.
"And that's exactly why I'm taking you onto my project team to find out why Mr. Longbottom is not dead and/or jumpstart humanity's reproductive cycle.", Flamel stated.
"Whereas, take Ms. Parkinson for instance."
"huh?", Pansy came to attention.
"What is the cauldron in front of you made from?"
"uh...lead?", the girl ventured. "With silver mixed in?", when that didn't get an affirmative response.
"It's pewter.", Flamel corrected. "What does pewter consist of?"
"I don't know.", Parkinson admitted.
"Is the cauldron new?"
"I think so.", the girl stated.
"And what does that mean?", the professor challenged.
Pansy shrugged. "It was made recently."
"Mr. Longbottom - correct her.", Flamel instructed.
"Pewter is primarily tin but it's alloyed with antimony, and sometimes lead, copper, bismuth, and silver. Tin is rarely a potions ingredient but it has a lower melting point which allows the other materials to be extracted into the potion. Being a new cauldron, the imparted materials can be expected to enter the potion solution faster due to their higher concentration and at lower temperatures. Also, the interior surface of the cauldron hasn't reacted with any potions brewed in it so that surface is even more reactive than normal.", Neville stated.
"Mr. Longbottom, according to your late previous professors, are you adept at making potions without exposing yourself and your classmates to danger?", Flamel asked.
"No, ma'am.", he said softly.
Flamel raised an eyebrow. "Then why have you driven yourself to know about the composition of cauldrons if they are not usually listed in the instructions for common potions?"
"I'm planning on a Master of Herbology.", Neville explained. "I have to know what magical plants are used for - in this case potions - and how they react to the properties of other things they interact with as well as the results of those interactions. That's why I'm taking N.E.W.T. level Potions."
"Ms. Parkinson.", Flamel called out. "According to your late professors' notes, you are a middling student that puts in enough effort not be labeled a failure. My patience, time, and classroom resources are being expended - why?"
Pansy huffed. "Fine, I'll study harder."
"That is not what I asked, Ms. Parkinson. Some amount of points off of Slytherin unless you immediately drop my class so I don't have to be put in this spot of bother. No? Then tell me, someone who has been sorted into the house of Slytherin - the house of the ambitious and cunning enough to accomplish those ambitions, why are you taking my class after you know it can kill you when it doesn't look like you have the spark for it that a man I've wrapped like a child on a winter's day does?"
The other girls in the class considered her.
"Fine, if you want to put the unsaid all out in the open.", Pansy begrudged.
Flamel scoffed. "Schools are for gifting normally unsaid knowledge."
The girl sighed. "When seeking to continue a pureblood house, the most valuable spouse is the most accomplished one. I'm not going to leave a gaping hole in my knowledge set only to be outcompeted by someone who bothered.
"And now that we're all down to Neville and adding in the people who seem to be closing in on controlling access to him, I can't be - even though I never have been - someone who's just assuming her name is enough, just and only reveling in it. In order to have it continue and have it be worth continuing, I have to step up to the dragon all the time."
"Where was that stepping up when you wanted Harry sacrificed to you-know-who?", Ginny objected.
Pansy glared at her. "That was stepping up. How am I supposed to bear an heir if Deatheaters intentionally kill me for being a blood traitor, the Order decides that everyone not with them is against them, or two sets of wizarding forces backed by magical creatures catch me up in a cross fire? Snape hadn't fired Macgonnogal or Flitwick or even Slughorn - so there was evidence that the surrender would save the most lives possible."
She closed her eyes.
"Mr. Longbottom. I don't know how you see me. But I know how you must see me. You have become my personal genie, as I can only ask three things from you. Please forgive me for whatever you think of me, whatever wrongs I may have done to you or yours or even just because they were wrongs and you're enough of a Griffindor hero to care. While I can't promise you anything, I can promise you everything within my power. And the third is that in repopulating the world, please, please, consider the Parkinsons. Grant me at least that."
The girl had found herself standing before her peers. After a quick glance around, she abruptly sat down.
Flamel walked toward Pansy's lab bench. "You feel like crying. Everyone can see it. Your intentions and desires laid bare in front of all your school chums.
"Why aren't you?"
Pansy breathed in. "Because a tear might make it into a cauldron. I don't know what reaction that would have on whatever potion we're going to be studying, but it might have an adverse one. So I can't until I learn that."
The professor smiled. "Good girl. Some points to Slytherin."
2
Hermione and Neville sat after class. All the other girls were dismissed, some more adamantly than others, from Potions. Professor LeStrange sauntered into the room. "Let's get to shagging!"
"Lumos Maxima!", Hermione cast as she jumped from her seat. Professor Flamel and Neville instinctively clenched their eyes shut and were forced to cover their faces. Bellatrix merely caught Hermione's left fist in her right hand, tapped the girl's side and neck with her knife's flat edge, turned into her and bodied her to the floor.
"Essay.", the Dark Arts...Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher commanded.
Hermione stood up with such an expression of disgust that some of it had to be directed inward. "You cursed your vitreous fluid in your eyes to darken in case of overwhelming light. So when I punched you...well, at you, you saw it coming."
The woman pointed her knife at clicked her tongue. "Got it in one, mudblood. I certainly wasn't going to curse the lens in my eye, but I did need to keep vision considering that the magical spells that weren't just spellfire but actually bright didn't blind me."
Hermione sat down and held her head in her hands. "And you only cursed one eye because of the off chance someone might figure out a way to exploit it before you could counter-counter curse yourself in combat."
"I'm not saying which, dirt/"
"Alright, that's enough of that inaccuracy.", Perenelle commanded. "Magic is phenotypical not genotypical."
Bellatrix folded her arms akimbo despite still holding the daggar. Sulkily she admitted, "I know that. I'm not stupid."
Hermione looked like she might lose her mind from it falling right out of her nose. "You know that? Yet you carved into my flesh? And you know that?"
The woman dismissed what she considered whining. "Oh, the term is still accurate. Due to the circumstances of your birth you can never actually be as magical as those of us born into pureblood houses and trained from birth in family magics. Mudbloods simply can't have the pre-natal let alone childhood environment to adapt to magic correctly. You can only attempt to steal ourmagic."
"I'm not biologically different due to...", Hermione trailed off. She turned to Professor Flamel. "Wait, am I?", she asked as the concept re-ran throug her head.
"Hah!", Bellatrix scoffed.
Flamel absently nodded. "You could be. But not because of LeStrange's misconceptions." She sighed. The woman waved a hand at a chalk board and an Arithmantic creature type analysis appeared on it. "There's the Arithmancy on what actually causes the magical core to form. You can consider on your own time."
"What?", Bellatrix exclaimed.
The two younger women raced each other to the board to memorize the theorem. LeStrange casually parried Hermione's wand away from her ribcage. "Oh, give it a rest for a moment, will you?"
"Yes, Mr. Longbottom?", Flamel acknowledge the boy's raised hand.
He looked quite uncertain. "Um...what does that mean?"
Hermione didn't take her eyes off the board. "It means that there's a whole host of environmental factors that effect the epigenetics that can be mundanely pressured from conceptual probability all the way through/"
"No.", Neville stopped her. "I meant...what does feno-typical mean?"
The women all looked at him. "Okay, you're going to have to shut up and concentrate on being as male as you can be. That's your new job, alright dearie?", Bellatrix admonished.
Neville settled into being quiet. Then it dawned on Hermione. "Don't insult Neville.", she scolded Bellatrix. The woman regarded her. She shrugged, "Maybe some of this material is a little advanced, Neville?"
"Yes, it is.", Flamel stated. She floated over a stack of tomes and parchments that weren't even organized into tomes yet. "And you're going to have to get up to speed. Without time turners because someone blew up the/"
"That was her fault!", Hermione and Bellatrix yelled while pointing at each other.
"Don't care, you don't have time time to waste.", she informed the two. "I have to explain all this so I'm not just better off using the wall as a sounding board."
Hermione assessed the stack of material Flamel had presented. "Okay. I can do that."
Both of the other women started laughing. "No, no, no.", Bellatrix informed. "This is her getting me up to speed. I've only had two years to catch up on the research that has been done since I was imprisoned in Azkaban. And I've spent most of that time being a full time professional Death Eater."
Flamel nodded. "You are going to take this pass and catch up to this material by abusing the ever loving shite out of the restricted section of the library. And don't let Pince or Pomfrey or your own mortality slow you down."
Hermione nodded. "Because they'll just try to help by explaining things that I can make the leaps in logic on my own.
"Wait, my own mortality?
"Oh, because you want me hopped up on Pepper-Up Potion to outperform what I normally can do.
"But long term Pepper-Up abuse can lead to/"
"Oh, you want me to casually invent a better substitute so that I can outperform every expert around me in order to catch up to where you two are operating at."
Flamel and LeStrante afforded her a glance. "Right."
"Fine!", Hermione declared. "There's a concoction I've been meaning to try brewing anyway. Might as well try it now. Not like the Wicked Witch of the West over there couldn't re-implement her original research that created time turners in the first place by transfiguring their base with alchemically aligned materials explained by the world's leading alchemist.", she said while walking out the door.
Bellatrix looked up. "Yeah."
Flamel stalled, considered, and restarted. "Okay, she got us there. What do you need?"
"Well, you know how electrons jump orbitals without traversing the intervening spacetime when they're excited by photons?", Bellatrix started. Flamel gave her a dirty look. "Well, when you magically induce a distropic big word, big word, really big word"
Neville had stopped even listening at that point. He slapped his legs, stood up, and walked out of the room. Completely forgetting that he was doing so without a guard.
