AU: An Inner-City School (part 1)

(A Worm / Harry Potter / Key and Peele crossover)

Author's Note: Anyone who doesn't already know what in the world Harry Potter and Key and Peele have to do with each other, go watch 'If Hogwarts Were an Inner-City School' over on Youtube. Worm is being thrown into the mix because someone on reddit suggested this crossover a while back and it tickled my funny bone. That said, while I do try, I can't match the tempo of Key and Peele outright, so this won't be quite as ridiculous.

Taylor's first day back from Winter break got off to a discouraging start. She overslept, slogged through getting ready for school, and trekked out to the bus stop two blocks from her house, all so she could stand in the wind by the side of the road, alone, waiting for the bus that might or might not have already come and gone. She was the only one who used this bus stop, being at the very edge of Winslow's district.

Missing the first day of the semester wouldn't be the worst thing in the world; she was still worried that the unusual lack of torment leading up to the break would come to a terrible end now that school was back in session. If the bus had already come and gone, that was it. She could walk back to the house, go inside, and call her dad, who was already at work and unlikely to be able to come back home just to drive her to Winslow.

The bus could just be late, though, so she couldn't throw in the towel and go home yet. It could pull around the corner any moment now. She didn't have a watch or a phone, so there was no way to say what time it was, exactly. Five minutes late was reasonable.

She stood at the curb of a weed-filled gravel driveway, waiting. The wind buffeted her back and forth, throwing her hair around. Some got in her face, and she closed her eyes as she brushed it away.

Somewhere nearby an engine backfired, a loud bang that made her jolt. She instinctively stepped back from the curb, as another, contrary source of wind whipped her around, spinning her like a top. Her shoes dug into the gravel, and she blinked hard, stumbling back around to look at the road.

A school bus screeched to a stop ten feet past her, leaving tire tracks on the road. The yellow paint was bright, fresh and new, but that was the only thing about the bus that looked well-maintained. The tires were bald, half the windows were broken or missing, and the little board next to the door that was supposed to show a route number was blank.

She was loath to call this a new bus, but it was new to her. Winslow buying used vehicles wouldn't exactly be a surprise.

The doors folded inward as she tentatively approached, revealing a spindly black man with an eyepatch in the driver's seat. "Hey!" he yelled out. "You Taylor Hebert?"

"Yes." She didn't think there was anyone else in the bus. Just the driver. "Are you–"

"New route," the driver told her, waving her inside. "Gonna have you at school faster than a broom on sweeps day, come on, I've got ten other stops to hit before eight!"

Taylor shrugged off her unfounded reluctance and boarded the bus. At least she hadn't missed it! Maybe her new year was getting off to a good start after all. A lucky start.

"Is my stop always going to be first?" she asked the driver as she passed him. That would be nice, if so. It meant she would get the pick of seats every morning instead of sitting wherever was still open.

"Prob'ly," He tapped at one of the gauges on his dashboard. There were a lot of them, but half of them were broken, blacked out, or… in different languages? That was weird. "As long as I'm driving. Engine's still got a kick to it, buckle up!"

She took a seat across the aisle, close to the front. This bus did have seat belts. They were in good condition, too, even though the seats themselves were all defaced with the usual graffiti. The artist responsible for the back of the seat in front of her had a thing for unicorns, in graphic positions.

She obligingly clicked the seat belt after putting her backpack in her lap, and then looked up at the driver. He was fiddling with the clutch, flicking up several little knobs that lined the side of the stick. His unhappy, mostly inaudible muttering dissuaded her from asking what they were for.

"Good enough." He straightened up, kicked something under the dashboard, and put both hands on the wheel. "Hold on tight!"

The bus peeled away from the curb, into the middle of the empty street, and then into a suddenly-appearing cloud of smoke directly in front of it. A terrible banging sound rattled from the engine, and something struck it from the side, sending the entire vehicle rolling!

Taylor screamed – who wouldn't? – as the vehicle rattled, still encased in dense smoke, upside-down, hurtling forward and to the side at such tremendous speeds that she was pressed into the back of the seat, into the window, and into the seatbelt miraculously keeping her in place, all at once.

"Hell no," the driver could be heard yelling as he banged on the dashboard, "I fixed you! Get your act together or I'll scrap you and sell you for spare parts! Don't test me, mother-"

The bus flipped back around, though it was still driving forward in the endless smoke at tremendous speed.

"Ha!" The driver spun the wheel, and Taylor was yanked towards the aisle, testing her seatbelt to the utmost. The smoke cleared on her right, and they fishtailed to a stop alongside a sketchy storefront.

Taylor wheezed out, the blood rushing from her head as all of the crazy movement stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

Teenagers filed onto the bus, yelling and talking loudly. Somebody flopped down next to her, a large girl with headphones and a weirdly rectangular phone. She took great care to properly put on her seat belt, as did everyone else within Taylor's now greatly limited line of sight.

The doors closed again, and Taylor held her backpack in a death grip as the bus jolted off into the smoke again, though this time the trip was much shorter and didn't involve any flipping, driving upside-down, or cursing from the driver. Everyone else treated this as if it was a completely normal occurrence, though the ruckus of a group of teenagers in a confined space was thoroughly interrupted every time the bus… popped? Exploded? Teleported?

Taylor had no words for the experience, and she couldn't ask about it. She definitely wasn't supposed to be here. This wasn't a bus to Winslow.

The bus kicked off, blasted through smoke, and stopped to let more people on twice more as Taylor tried, with some success, to hide her growing anxiety.

She wasn't supposed to be here.

But nobody else seemed to know that yet. She was blending in, just another teenager waiting to get to wherever it was they were all going. She didn't think this was a kidnapping. Thinking back, she didn't actually say she was going to Winslow, and the bus driver hadn't said he would be taking her… wherever they were going. They both just assumed the other knew what they intended.

Maybe he was a crazy Tinker rogue who just drove around the country randomly picking up kids for their schools on his special school bus? There was so much going on in the world that she might have missed the news stories about this. That would explain why everyone was so calm; she might just be out of the loop.

She decided to wait and see. Not that she could do anything else; she would have to clamber over the girl blocking her into her seat to go anywhere, and then figure out how to open the bus door, and then figure out where the hell she currently was in the world after more than five random smoke-highway teleportations…

The bus jerked to a stop once more, testing the strength of her seat belt yet again. Someone was smoking in the back. The girl next to Taylor nodded her head in time with the tinny beat of whatever music she was listening to. Something with a lot of snare drums…

"Everybody off!" the bus driver yelled. Outside the window, Taylor saw a squat one-story brick building with no windows. She couldn't actually see much of it, but it extended at least far enough to the front and back of the bus that brick was all she saw.

The students hurried off the bus, elbowing their way into a mockery of a line. Taylor got up, following along at the very back of the crowd. The bus driver watched them all with his one good eye squinting suspiciously, arms held protectively over his little semi-cockpit by the door.

She made it out of the bus without being stopped, but she had no choice but to continue following the crowd. They were in a sort of enclosed parking lot, one large enough for multiple buses and entirely surrounded by a chain link fence with barbs on top. There was, of course, the potential comparison to a prison yard, but after sitting on a teleporting bus the uninterrupted fence didn't strike her as nefarious. If a school bus teleported everywhere, why would there need to be a way to drive out normally?

Taylor could either linger outside the brick building – which some of the other teens were doing, leaning up against the wall to smoke – or follow the main group inside, via a very small, normal doorway in the wall. Only one of those options led anywhere.

Inside… it was a school. Not a very nice one, either. Tiled floors, the smell of bleach and smoke, metal detectors lined up at the start of the hallway, posters and defaced sign-up sheets tacked onto the walls. The posters were what held her attention, because they were… weird. Some of them had moving illustrations. As she lingered in the middle of the crowd being forced to go through the metal detectors, she stared, dumbfounded, at the posters.

'Join the Quidditch team!' one visually shouted in eye-watering red letters. Underneath, a silhouette of a girl in what looked like football gear flew around on a broom, circling from one side of the poster and back. Literally circling, moving like an animation, but on paper. Underneath that, in small print, the poster added 'Bring your own broom. Mops, other substitutes allowed but not encouraged.'

Another poster, much more subdued but no less strange, featured the phrase; 'Be like Smecker, say no to Wizard Pepper!' Red 'X' symbols dotted the edges of the poster, each one covering a cartoonish bunch of peppers with sparks coming off them. Standing on top of the slogan's blocky text, a stick-figure with two long pigtails repeatedly threw little cartoon jars down, where they disappeared beyond the bottom of the poster.

'Remember, Apparition is the art of one wizard and one wand!' a third poster warned. This one didn't have any movement, just a static photorealistic image of a smiling man in black robes, brandishing a cylindrical wooden stick.

The line continued to move forward, and Taylor, from her closer vantage point, could see the man on the other side, operating the metal detector. He had a big staff, an eyepatch with a giant comedy fake eyeball built into it, and…

Was that the same guy who drove the bus, just with a different eyepatch?

"Brandon," the suspiciously similar-sounding man said, waving a tall bald teen through, "you ain't gonna get this through a god-damn metal detector!" He waved something Taylor wasn't in a position to see in front of the teen, before setting it in the bin for confiscated items. "Clear. Git!" The teenagers in line behind him laughed as the man grumbled and let the next student through. It all had the feel of something that happened every day, not remarkable in the least.

She shuffled along with the line, seeing no way out. The guard greeted every student by name, confiscated something from each and every one of them, and sent them on their way. Suspicious baggies, sticks, bottles… The occasional knife was the most familiar contraband Taylor saw taken. It was like Winslow, but only enough that the contrasts were all the more striking.

"Eh.?" The man's false eye wobbled from side to side as he watched her go through the metal detector. "Nothing? Well, I'll be. Go on…"

Taylor moved out of the way of the line.

"Wait!" The guard's eye fixed on her. The good one, that was. The bad one rolled all the way back to show its badly-painted back. "You're Taylor Hebert, aren't you? Stick around, the principal needs to see you."

So…

She was supposed to be here?

Looking at the grimy halls and multiple boxes of contraband, and then at the mysterious posters and sticks and moving eyeball eyepatches, Taylor had no clue whether that would turn out to be a good or bad thing. Hopefully this principal could explain everything. She would settle for someone more helpful than Blackwell.

That was a thought. At least she was getting out of going to Winslow today.

"Parnassus Jackson, at your–" the man in the suit stopped mid-sentence to slap something away from the air to the left of his head, something invisible but solid enough that Taylor heard his hand smack it. "Service," he continued seamlessly. "We've got a little Southern Sugar Glider infestation, an exterminator is coming by this weekend. You know how it is."

Taylor did not know how it was, and at this point she was afraid to admit it, so she just nodded. Principal Jackson's mustache quivered as he smiled and offered a hand, which she shook. "Nice to meet you," she said, studiously avoiding staring too long at his well-worn suit, or the jar of unidentifiable fleshy bits on his desk next to a '#1 Principal' mug. Or any of the other insane things that decorated his office.

"And you!" He reached down under his desk. "I'm terribly sorry about the mishap with enrollment, first we didn't get your acceptance letter and then when our usual driver tried to lock on to your location for the bus ride at the start of the school year, the engine exploded! We still don't know where your letter ended up, but Lester finally got old man Willy to let him soup up the engine over the break, and here you are! Half a year's better than nothing, right?" He leaned forward and winked. "Between you and me, I'm sure you'll catch up in no time. Did your last school forward your records, do you know?"

"I… don't think so," Taylor answered. At this point, she had no idea what was or was not plausible.

"Well, you'll have to take placement tests anyway, so no harm in them being a little slow on the draw!" Principal Jackson assured her. He handed her a sheet of printer paper from under his desk, along with a fancy ornate stick. "Here's your schedule, each of your teachers will give you the test for their subject to see where you should start. No pressure, Clortho has a curriculum for you no matter where you are academically. First test, go ahead and give that a wave."

Taylor put the stick down on the desk and, feeling very out of her depth, waved the schedule around in the air in front of her.

"Ha!" Principal Jackson laughed. "Oh, I like you. You'll fit right in. Bunch of jokers, the kids around here."

Taylor felt her cheeks heating up as she put the schedule down and picked up the stick. "I… wave it?" She drew a little imaginary line in the air with her stick. "Like this?"

"Hmm…" He eyed her hand as she continued to move the stick about. "Yes, just like that. Feel anything?"

A deep and constant sense of dread that she was doing, saying, or implying something that would turn this from a confusing dream to a terrifying nightmare… but that probably wasn't what he meant. "No?" She gave the stick a more forceful wave, but aside from the initial pang of a confusion-induced headache, nothing changed.

"Right." He coughed, looking abashed, and took the stick back. "I'm sorry for that. Still, Clortho can teach anyone what they need to know to pass the standardized tests, and between you and me…" He tucked the stick away under the desk. "The wand subjects are overrated. The future is in Astronomy, mark my words!"

With that, the door to his office swung open behind her. "Mary," he called out, "is Tyrone here yet?"

"No, he's absent," the receptionist Taylor had passed on the way in said. "Also, you have four missed calls and the lunch ladies are threatening another strike if you don't negotiate on their behalf next week."

"Well, d-" He cut himself off by smacking the back of his head, and then backhanding something heavy enough to rock him in his chair. "Darn invisible Sugar Gliders. Mary, can you take our new student to her first class and grab one of the other students to show her around for her first day?"

"Sure," the receptionist sighed. "Not like my job is important… Where to, kid?"

Taylor looked down at her schedule, which up until now she hadn't read.

American Wizarding History. Potions and Poultices. Physical Education. Wandwork. Astronomy. Magical Theory. Statute Studies. All of them on Mondays in short blocks, four longer classes on Tuesday and Thursdays, four more on Wednesdays and Fridays, with Astronomy being her 'central' class that she would attend before lunch every day of the week…

Her brain hung a sharp left turn and dragged metaphorical skidmarks in the nonexistent road as it swerved back around to that first thing.

American Wizarding History?

Taylor had never in her life failed a history test so badly, or so rabidly jumped on the ratty graffiti-ridden history text she was provided afterward. The overly enthusiastic, Mr. Gladly-esque lecture the old, obese teacher launched into was filled with jargon she didn't understand, just like the test, but the textbook was very accessible.

And a good thing, too, because she needed simple, small words to make sense of what it was telling her. Wizards were everywhere, according to the textbook, and had been since before the Middle Ages. They could do… basically anything she had ever heard of a fantasy witch or wizard doing, from casting spells to performing rituals to predicting the future. They lived in secret among normal people, and had their own governments too. There was little to no crossover between the two societies; an international agreement called the Statute of Secrecy had determined that the two be forever separate before America even came into existence.

All of that world-defining information was contained in the first page of the introduction. Flipping back to the table of contents, she saw that the Statute of Secrecy merited its own small chapter next, and then the establishment and independence of wizarding colonies, and the war for independence…

She got as far as the middle of the Statute chapter by the time the sound of a bell ringing played over the intercom. The teacher had never said whether she was allowed to keep the book – she rather thought she wasn't, from how ratty and used it was, it had to be a spare copy kept in the classroom for whoever forgot to bring theirs – but she had seen a section on 'Magical Economy' and had no idea if she could buy one for herself with normal, Earth Bet money. He was busy talking to a group of students near the front of the classroom when the bell rang, so she shoved the textbook into her backpack and got out before he noticed.

An apology along the lines of 'I'm sorry, I forgot to give it back yesterday' was a small price to pay to keep the book for today. He'd get it back when she was done with it.

"Bitch." A big, well-tanned hand landed on her shoulder, and she looked up to see a truly massive girl with braces and a crew cut leaning down to stare at her. "Potions is the other way."

"Uh…" she said slowly.

"Come on." The girl turned and walked the other way, without ever removing her hand. Taylor stumbled along before she could be jerked off her feet. It felt like she was being pulled by a truck! "How far away are you from?" her maybe-guide asked.

"Really far…" Taylor said vaguely.

"So you know nothing," the girl growled.

"Kinda." she admitted.

"I'm not cut out for this," the big girl grumbled as she dragged Taylor along. "This here's Clortho. Don't mouth off at the gangs, don't go into the bathrooms that smell like anything other than piss and scouring charms, and if you see a knife pulled–"

"Get out of there," Taylor finished. This, she knew. Winslow was the same.

"Uh huh," the girl grunted. "If you're a Squib, don't say and don't ask. Asking gets you shanked or hexed on the crapper."

A Squib… hopefully her history textbook could tell her what that was. "Okay."

"Creature heritage, though, no big deal." The girl looked back at her. "Were, Vamp, just steer clear of whichever gang doesn't try to recruit you. Anything else, jinx or punch the first one to mouth off and they'll leave you alone. You from Europe?"

"No," she said.

"Good. Stuck-up weirdos. 'Specially Hogwarts." She grunted again. Taylor got the impression that she was a woman of few words and many grunts. "Here's Potions. Don't fuck with Ms. Dingleberry. Some of us actually want to learn."

"I want to learn too," Taylor assured her. Aside from appeasing the girl who had yanked her along for a good four minutes straight without stopping once, it had the benefit of being whole-heartedly true. Learning to make actual magic potions? Who wouldn't take full advantage of that?

The Potions classroom was bright and sunny, with windows lining all… four… walls. Taylor turned in a full circle, or tried to before the big hand on her shoulder stopped her. She was sure the hallway was too tall for the window over the door to actually be a window. But it was open, with sunlight streaming in, and she could feel the breeze coming from it. At that… the sun was coming in from different directions depending on the window, always beaming towards the center of the room.

Her guide didn't care about her confusion. She forcibly steered Taylor to a seat at one of the empty desks arranged in a semicircle around the single big cauldron taking up the center of the bright, airy room. Only once Taylor was sitting did she release her vice-like grip. Taylor winced and rolled her shoulder. She was going to have bruises for sure.

The big girl looked around furtively, having taken the desk next to hers, and pulled out… a stick. She then pointed it Taylor's direction, mouthed something, and put it away. The ache from her grip disappeared.

… Or maybe she wouldn't have bruises after all. "Thank you."

"Don't mention it," the big girl growled.

Okay then. Taylor quit while she was, if not ahead, then at least no worse off than she had started. She looked around, but nobody else in the classroom seemed to care about their little interaction. A few girls were pinning their hair back, and one tiny kid who looked like he should still be in elementary school was putting on goggles, but most of the other students were sitting around, waiting for the teacher to arrive.

Two minutes after the bell rang, a spindly young woman with red hair tottered through the doorway with a big brown grocery bag that looked like it weighed more than she did. "Sorry everyone, we'll get right to it today. Gather 'round!"

Taylor joined the general surge of students abandoning their desks to stand around the big cauldron as the teacher put her bag down next to it and took out an ornate stick – wand? – and began waving it about, muttering under her breath. The bag emptied itself in a supernatural flurry of plants and jars, the ingredients arranging themselves around the cauldron, while a long rolled-up piece of paper unrolled and floated up a good five feet above the cauldron.

Actual magic. With a wand and everything. A more suspicious person might say this was all the product of some combination of parahuman powers, but Taylor found it easier to call it what they called it, because this was like no power she had ever heard of.

"Today we'll be brewing a Cats-Eye Solution," the teacher announced. "Can anyone tell me what it does?"

Magic the subject might be, but the near-silent shuffle of two dozen teenagers all waiting for someone else to answer the question was all too mundane.

"Helps you see in the dark," the big girl eventually volunteered.

"Yes!" the teacher smiled at her. "But that's only one of its properties. Can anyone else tell me what other effects it has? Or what ingredients cause these effects? Come on now, we haven't got all day!"

Again, silence, but this time without a volunteer to break it before it got awkward.

"Oh, very well, we'll see if any of you can answer the question after we've brewed it." A fire lit itself under the cauldron, startling Taylor. She was going to have to get used to things spontaneously happening around her. "The first step is to bring pure, distilled water to a boil…"

Taylor looked around, but she didn't see a textbook… or an assessment test. So she contented herself with trying to learn what she could from the actual witch cooking something up with an actual cauldron.

By the end of the school day, Taylor had four 'borrowed' textbooks, two take-home assessments, and one tiny glass vial of Cats-Eye Solution carefully packed into her heavy, straining at the seams backpack. Her mind was whirling with weird, strange, inexplicable, or downright odd things that she had seen, and the half-assumed explanations she had gotten for them. Seven classes, seven teachers, hundreds of fellow students, dozens of words she could only guess at, foreign gang colors and foreign people…

The bus dropped her off at the edge of her street, long after it had disgorged every other passenger it held. First on in the morning meant last off in the afternoon. Taylor stepped out into the afternoon sun.

"Kid!" the driver yelled. She turned back to see him staring one-eyed at the street sign, and then at the many dials on his dashboard. "You got any Muggle misdirection charms up on this street?"

"No?" She didn't know what those were. "It's… probably fine?"

"Eh, here." He stamped down the steps and abandoned the bus. Then he pointed a gnarled staff – where did he get that from? – at her. "Non Problema Minima!" He made a half-hearted little squiggle with the tip of his staff.

Nothing happened.

"Hmph." He got back onto the bus. "That ought'a hold until Easter," he muttered as the doors closed.

The bus leaped away from the sidewalk, blowing a solid streamer of black smoke from its tailpipe, and flattened into nothingness right before the empty intersection.

Taylor looked around… but the street was empty.

Was it all a hallucination? Some sort of anxiety-induced fever dream?

The weight of her overloaded backpack implied otherwise.

"Dad, did you know magic is real?"

"That's nice."

"No, seriously."

"How was your day?"

"I learned to make a magic potion, rode a teleporting school bus, got dragged around by a girl who I think might actually be half-giant based on some descriptions in my history textbook's chapter on inter-species relations, and ate a disappointingly normal school lunch. Magic is real. Did you know?"

"That's nice."

"What the fuck?"

"Want to order take-out? I forgot to set the beef out to thaw."

"But…"

"Chinese or Italian?"

"I… Italian?"

Taylor chose to believe that the magical spell cast by the bus driver was causing her father's total lack of interest. The alternative was too depressing.

If there was a record for 'most times caught completely off-guard', Taylor broke it that first week at Clortho, possibly by several orders of magnitude, or several magically significant multipliers, which were apparently crucial to most workings of ritual or predictive magic. Every time she turned around, something she would never have expected came up and smacked her across the face, sometimes literally.

"Today we'll be watching the signing of the Declaration of Independence," Mr. Chadham announced, to a mostly disinterested American Wizarding History class on Tuesday. He punctuated his announcement by waving his wand to dim the lights, and summoning a big stone bowl. "Gather round, pay attention, I spent a whole pint of my own blood borrowing this memory for you all! Extra credit to the first student to correctly identify which of the Founding Fathers was a wizard, and which of the Founding Fathers was not human."

Seeing George Washington with vampire fangs was a surprise, though it made sense once Mr. Chadham explained things. Wooden teeth? No, that was a myth, but the former president's dental 'troubles' were a real cover for old-fashioned dentures that disguised his fangs. Learning how he avoided running water despite being famous for crossing the Delaware was a homework assignment.

Wednesday, in Wandwork, Taylor was given an unsharpened pencil, a diagram of a figure-eight, and paired up with the tiny kid from Potions class to practice the movements that their teacher, an unassuming older woman with tinted glasses, promised would produce a 'Stunner'. Half the class ignored the assignment, while the other half covertly pulled out ornate wooden sticks – wands – and stunned each other while the teacher's back was turned, before quickly reviving each other again.

The rougher kids were the ones using the stunners, and Taylor got the feeling they considered them routine. Certainly not new. Taylor, for her part, paid very close attention to the entire affair while staying well out of the way. Wands, as far as she understood things, were contraband when on school property… but they were being taught to use them, and a good portion of the students owned them. Sort of like if Winslow had a mandatory gun safety class.

The thought made her shudder. At least these spells were nonlethal.

Thursday afternoon, in Physical Education, Taylor rode a decrepit mop three feet off the basketball court floor, and didn't fall off. Her hands didn't stop shaking for a full hour. The rules of the game the class was theoretically playing went as far over her head as everything else, but only because she was very preoccupied. Nobody tried to knock her off her mop, which was more than she could have said about Winslow students if they were ever in such a situation.

Friday, in Magical Theory, she learned absolutely nothing. Magic did not make substitute teachers experts in the subject they substituted for, so it was a study period. It was the calmest class she had all week, even taking into account the substitute stunning two rough-looking teens who wouldn't stop shouting. Nobody else seemed to care. About the shouting or the stunning.

The only class that went more or less how Taylor expected it to was Astronomy, which could have fit into Winslow without a single alteration. Looking at star charts, discussing telescope anatomy, ignoring the idiots goofing off in the back…

By the end of the week Taylor expected that her shell-shocked expression had worn its way so deeply into her face that she would never be rid of it. In forty-eight hours she would have to go do it all again.

That wasn't true, though. She wouldn't have to go back. She could look for the Winslow bus. Confess to Principal Jackson that she didn't think she was supposed to be there. Go back to Winslow. Go back to hell.

That Saturday, she used her potion sample at midnight, in her bedroom. It gave her perfect night vision and a craving for tuna for a good three hours.

The following Monday, Taylor boarded the magical bus with a huge grin that no amount of turbulence could wipe off her face.

Author's Note: There'll be three equally-long parts of this little story, in total. I could have done it all in one chapter, but that felt rather crammed-together and would have involved two time skips at approximately the one-third and two-thirds marks, so splitting seemed like an obvious solution.

I'm trying not to do what other snippet threads do with posting the first chapters to cool stories that will never be continued. Trying is not necessarily succeeding, as a certain Subnautica crossover will attest to. Next week… something!