hatchery

[chanuphis]

The next alchemy class of their second year, they arrive to the lab to discover that each of them has an ordinary chicken's egg (brown) and another box of miscellanea.

Slughorn explains, when everyone is assembled, that alchemy with an egg is actually where phoenixes are speculated to originate; but no one has the recipe any more and there haven't been new phoenixes for centuries. They will not be making living things today. But the eggshell is a good base from which to appear lots of possible objects; alchemy doesn't like to conjure things into existence in plain sight but is quite willing that new things appear inside eggshells, cocoons, geodes, and similar. Their eggs have been pre-drained of their interiors for this purpose, although some recipes use full eggs.

As last week, they are invited to come up with recipes on paper for review by the professor before trying anything. Known possible results available with this set of ingredients include wooden, decorated eggs nested inside the shell; a shellful of small sharp teeth (the commonest source of hens' teeth, as they have encountered once or twice in potions); successively smaller eggshells the smallest of which holds a blob of mercury; and a perfectly hardboiled egg which can be arbitrarily flavored by exact details of the process. But they are welcome to aim at another result as long as their procedure looks safe.

Comments

[chanuphis]

"Just outright inventing a spell so I could tap people on the head and make them immortal," she shrugs.

[mswoods]

"Yeah, I think that's a bit too far-fetched." Pause. "Says the girl who thought magic was imaginary just a year and a month ago."

[chanuphis]

"I mean, tap them with my wand."

[mswoods]

"Yes, I know, and it still sounded far-fetched. This is not a thought I should be having, I come from muggledom, I should not be stuck to old preconceived notions of what magic can or can't do!"

[chanuphis]

"I don't see any principled reason why an alchemical rock should do it and a wand spell shouldn't be able to, it'd just be beastly hard to come up with."

[mswoods]

"Well, alchemy seems to be the only known way to break otherwise inviolable laws of magic."

[chanuphis]

"Then the rules aren't very inviolable, are they."

[mswoods]

"Ergo 'otherwise'!"

[chanuphis]

"Still, wands are pretty great."

[mswoods]

"Yeah, they are." Pause. "And now my brain's thinking of experimentation with new kinds of wands."

[chanuphis]

"New like what?"

[mswoods]

"New cores, combination cores, new woods, non-woods. I wonder if a chip of the philosopher's stone could be a wand core."

[chanuphis]

"Ooh, combination cores, I never heard of those."

[mswoods]

"Yeah! And it could be that they just don't work, but it could also be that attitudes like Mr. Ollivander's are widespread enough that people haven't tried, or not enough."

[chanuphis]

"Yeah, I haven't even heard of it as a thing that doesn't work."

[mswoods]

"I mean, if the effects people ascribe to them are really true, it could even make sense that they react to each other or something, but." Shrug.

[chanuphis]

"Worth trying. Karen's interested in wandlore, maybe we can get her to do the work."

[mswoods]

"Yeah. We're gonna revolutionise magic!" she singsongs.

[chanuphis]

Giggle.

...Patronus?

Mist.

[mswoods]

"Maybe you do need to revolutionise magic before managing."

[chanuphis]

"That would be so unfair."

[mswoods]

"It would. But I mean, it's probably going to happen anyway."

[chanuphis]

"It could take ages though, and yours is already working."

[mswoods]

She shrugs. "I dunno. Maybe if there was a way to find a Dementor in a supervised, safe environment, you could try patronusing it."

[chanuphis]

"Unfortunately they let all the domestic Dementors bloody loose."