Author's Notes: This is my first HP fanfiction in over a year, and kind of a strange one at that. Done one for the Potions Homework Mini-Contest on Deviantart's Harry-Potter-Club, wherein contestants are assigned a random potion and have to describe it's effects in a first-person story. I took a slightly different tactic with mine. ;-) I'm not sure if this will even qualify, but meh, everyone else did it the "right" way and I wanted mine to stand out. Hope you enjoy!
For this week's homework assignment our esteemed educator, Professor Severus Snape, has assigned each student a random potion to drink, with the task of identifying said potion by its effects and writing about our experiences under its influence. This is a quest which I admit to approaching with initial dread, alleviated only with the knowledge that our wise and benevolent professor, being the great potions master that he is, would surely avoid giving us any concoction too volatile, dangerous or potentially mortifying to cause any need to fear.
My assigned mixture, Potion No. 2, appeared at first glance to be a thick, dark-brown vial of goop most favorably comparable to mud or, less favorably, raw sewage. With only the knowledge of Professor Snape's brilliance to spur me on I imbibed the elixir, and quickly decided that the latter answer was probably the most accurate. I downed it as quickly as possible and tried not to throw up, afterward washing the horrible taste out with half a cask of butterbeer that I swear the house-elves don't give out to students at the drop of a hat.
After my stomach settled I paused, waiting for the potion to take its effect; however I was surprised to find nothing obvious occur, with both my physical and mental facilities apparently intact from the experience (again barring my intense urge to throw up). I waited another few moments and began to get worried, wondering if perhaps I had somehow managed to drink the potion wrong. I checked my mirror continually in the next several minute, each time expecting to find my hair purple or my nose ten inches longer, but still I appeared fine. I even ventured down into the Ravenclaw common room to ask for help, wondering if perhaps the potion's effects were just lost to me—maybe it was a Confusing Concoction, and I was merely too confused myself to notice that I was stumbling around like a moron? Alas, this was not so. (I even asked the next morning when such a potion would have had to wear off, just to be sure.)
At this point I was stumped! The potion had had no effect on me, unless it was indeed supposed to make me to vomit? (No, I looked up Puking Potions, apparently they were supposed to be a sickly green color.) Most of my fellow Ravenclaws had already done this assignment with little problem; could it be that our great potions master had somehow made some sort of mistake regarding my potion? No! I could not accept such madness! And yet the potion he had given me did nothing. So what...
And then it hit me. Of course! Professor Snape, in his brilliant sagacity, had come up with a way to test the true cleverness of the class by giving some of us fake potions! Ah-ha! My "magic potion" clearly wasn't real at all; it was most likely water with a few random but pointless ingredients thrown in (or possibly actual sewage, though I tried to avoid lingering on that particular theory). The test was to see whether any of us would detect his little plan, and understand the lesson: that any minor error in potion-making can nullify the proper results, and that even a great master can sometimes make mistakes (though of course I realize this was intentional, given how brilliant this particular concoctor was). Oh, very clever Professor, very clever indeed! It's that utter brilliance for teaching, combined with your devilish good looks and amazing sense of style, that explains why so many of the female students and teachers of this school are secretly so enamored with you. (Names of whom I am of course willing to divulge at five House points a pop.)
Laughing at this amazing joke, I took a moment to bask in Professor Snape's unbelievable intelligence before preparing this assignment, eager to tell him how much I hoped to one day match him in both talent and wit.
"A T? !" I exclaimed, staring first down at my paper and then up at Snape's disgusting, monkeylike face. "How could I get a T? !"
"You didn't do the assignment," the idiot said coldly, his beady black eyes glaring, the nostrils of his Pinocchio-esque nose flaring with annoyance. "This paper doesn't say a thing about the effects of Polyjuice Potion."
"Poly-whosa-what?"
"Polyjuice Potion," the moron-whose-parents-were-probably-brother-and-sister sneered, rolling his eyes. "It is a potion that can transform you into the form of any other pure-blood human for one hour. Provided, of course, that you add an element from the person you desire to turn into."
"An element?"
The thinly-disguised troll looked even more exasperated. "Yes, an element. Usually something like a hair or a few flakes of skin."
"But—" I stared at him, back at my paper, then him again. "How was I supposed to know that? You said just to drink the potion and record the results, you never said we had to add anything to it, let alone somebody's skin!"
"Well, if you had done enough reading to recognize a Polyjuice Potion, you would have known—"
"You yourself told us that tampering with a potion's composition can be very dangerous, that there are sleeping potions only one ingredient different than deadly poisons!" I said, pointing accusingly. "A random brown potion could have been anything! For all I knew, adding a human hair would have killed me as easily as distilled nightshade! You're basically telling me I should have defied your own instructions and risked killing myself for a test you didn't even tell us about! How is that fair? !"
Professor Snape stared at me for a moment, apparently trying to come up with some kind of a comeback. "Well, you fail anyway," he said simply, sweeping past me to return the next student's paper.
I growled, crumpling up my paper as I glared at Professor Snape's back.
"Git."