Private Eye of Newt, Toe of Frog

While she wasn’t huge on social gatherings, Tilly absolutely adored coming to these meetings. She had so much fun discussing magic and even learning some new things, not to mention just getting to hang out with others who were like her. It was very unusual for her, and she enjoyed it quite a bit.

Today was a practical day, but because it was a friday in July, sometimes people opted to head out to the beach instead of coming to club, and it wasn’t like attendance was mandatory. Still, hell would have to freeze over before Tilly missed a day of practicals to go swimming. Today she had brought, as per usual, her folding suitcase full of tomes and alchemical ingredients, and she’d just finished putting out the remains of a small fire she’d created while demonstrating the proper way to conjure a fireball. She may have been a little overzealous. Still, no one could argue that she hadn’t conjured it properly.

Sitting down at the desk beside her suitcase, she pulled out a tome. Because it was practical day, it wasn;t uncommon for her to take breaks to read in between rounds of spellcasting, as she needed to recharge her magical batteries, so to speak. These days, she didn’t really need the book, but it gave her something to focus her eyes on as she entered her memory palace and began to gather up the energy to cast another fireball from her rote memory. For the time being, there she sat, sipping a now-warm can of coke and staring blankly to her book, occasionally licking her pinkie and flicking aside a page just so she didn’t look weird.

Within the confines of her memory palace, her awareness of the outside world was different. Her senses weren’t necessarily dulled, just far away from her. But by now, she’d gotten very good at selectively tuning out particular senses, and it would take her a moment or two to actually register outside stimuli in these situations.

The walls of her great library had an odd habit of reflecting sound, even within her mental construction. It was perplexing, that such a thing should be. Words from outside reverberated along the walls, quiet whispers in the distance, so persistent that eventually she was helpless but to be pulled from her meditative trance. In her mind’s eye, she finished her page, stuck a mark in the book, and set it aside.

Her physical body mirrored this response with the book she held in her hands, and her green eyes slid into focus.
”Oh, hey Katie.” She blinked, glancing up from her work, an eyebrow raising just a hair in intrigue at her request. She liked feeling smart, so answering questions was a wonderful passtime. ”Yeah, of course. What’s up?”

Tilly sared, straight-faced, through the entirety of Katie’s babbling, making no attempt to decipher what she was saying until she’d finished speaking. Sometimes she got like that too, you kinda just needed to let them work through it before you had any hope of communication.

”I haven’t actually taken Gobbledygook II yet, so I’m not really conversational yet. I think I heard “Magic,” though?” She drawled, smiling contentedly. She was having a bit of fun at Katie’s expense, but there was no ill intent in her expression.

When Katie took a minute to take a breath and explain, her expression lit up. ”Bejabbers, why didn’t you just say so?” She grinned, sitting up a bit in her chair. ”Do you know anything about alchemy? I was gonna put together a few healing potions for a rainy day, I could show you how that’s done?” She offered, reaching for her suitcase. ”Do you have any experience with alchemy? Or healing magic, actually?”

Oh, cool, she had healing powers natively. She seemed a little self conscious about them, but any magic was better than none. The hardest part was manifesting any power at all, and the rest was just discipline and dedication. At least, from Tilly’s perspective.
”Oh, that’s great! This might actually benefit you more than it would me, then.” She smiled. Katie’s excitement was, in turn, making Tilly eager to show her the ropes.

She pulled open her suitcase, and pulled out a few essential bits of equipment, explaining what everything was as she went. ”Alright, so we have the usual paraphernalia, a few Griffin beakers, your Erlenmeyer flask, and the piece de resistance, your round-bottom boiling flask, 5,000 milliliters.” She said, clinking each bit of glassware gently onto the table. She had a special little apparatus that she set up under the boiling flask, which would hold an enchanted flame that she placed there.

”Okay, this potion is pretty easy. I’m gonna walk you through it, but you’re going to be doing the actual brewing. Okay?” She said, producing a pair of goggles and gloves for the both of them. ”You’ll want these, just in case.” She added cheerfully, donning her own equipment and moving out of her chair so that Katie could have a better spot at the table.

”Now, first thing, this isn’t technically a healing potion. It doesn’t actually treat your injuries, it just alters your relative timestream, allowing your body to heal way faster than it should. For normies, this won’t do much for more lethal injuries, but I have a wizardly immune system that keeps on chugging, and you have your healing magic. Any healing spell you use on the drinker of this potion will pack some serious oomph.” She explained, digging inside the suitcase, and retrieving a vial of something milky and opaque, as well as a small case and a set of tweezers. ”Any questions so far?”

Tilly’s gaze followed Katie’s hand, and she smiled, took her gently by the wrist, and adjusted her hand so it was pointing at the erlenmeyer flask.
”The Erlenmeyer is the cone-shaped one with the flat bottom, we’ll use that for mixing” She explained, then taking one of the beakers and passing it to Katie.

”Normally, we’d fill all of these at once, because it saves time, but I wanna show you in detail what every step of the process is doing, so we’ll do each beaker individually.” She said, reaching into the suitcase and talking over her shoulder.

”Okay, so-” She said, setting down a large brown bottle labeled “Prednisolone” on the table. There was tons of medical jargon printed on it that she had never read. ”-every potion uses a base that is tangentially related to your desired function. you can kinda be creative with it, but since we wanna speed up the processes of the body, I like to use an oral steroid.” She explained, grabbing a little dropper and handing both to Katie. ”Go ahead and fill all of the beakers now, up to the little sharpie mark.”

Next, she produced a small, sealed case, and gently set it on the table. ”The first ingredient is the one that informs our desired effect. You need something either literally or figuratively associated with the magic you’re trying to work.” Delicately, she worked the tiny latch with a bit of magic, and the box drew itself open. Inside, several butterfly wings were neatly stacked atop each other, so light that the draft of the room threatened to blow them away. She passed a pair of tweezers to Katie, and nodded towards the case. ”Go ahead and put one in a beaker, and be very careful.” She instructed.

”Butterflies are associated with the passage of time, but there’s a few more recurring themes that envelop them. Resurrection, transformation, spring and summer. We have to cook it down till we can coax the right effect out of it.” She said. Once Katie had finished her work, she’d gesture towards one of the heating apparatus, and, with a snap of her fingers, a flame began to burn beneath it.

”When it starts to cook, the solution should change colors a few times. We want it to be gray and opaque. Once that’s done, we’ll remove it from the heat and add it to our Erlenmeyer flask”