A Saturday Late Morning

*Click*

That snap locked the last lens into the apparatus. The frame was conical, owing the the descending sizes of the rescued lens. That had been the trickiest part after getting the lenses out of the broken devices. Either the lens was cracked or too large for the frame Philo had built so that required sanding them down to trim. And that required a letter off to Theta Pepper, who had graduated last year, on how to trim a lense without breaking it. The letter had taken a while to come back because of her secret work as a Department of Mysteries Unspeakable intern.

But for now, Philo had done it for the most part. The magical lenses were framed in the best possible order and could be housed in the camera's hull. The box-like old muggle film camera, laid on its side, had a series of mirrors and the other parts inside. The magical lenses were set perpendicular to the shutter but the mirrors corrected the path from the frame to the viewfinder.

Philo placed it in then rest the screws and finally the side of the camera, fixed with a Reparo.

He had done it, recycled some old observation devices into a new camera. And it only took three extra parts from dad, two letters to Theta and only one question about photography from one of Ravenclaw's prefects, Ligeia Canterbury. Her knowledge on the earliest photography, the Daguerreotype, had been helpful but she was so creepy! Philo was never going to usurp her authority as a Prefect because she was so creepy even when she was being nice.

So, all in all, Philo had completed the first build of his invention. Because the parts used in it's construction we're so irregular, he was going to call it an Irregularity Camera.

All he needed now, to test, was something to photograph.

For the past half hour, Asher had watched with the unblinking curiosity of a cat as Philo fiddled with his device.  Unusually for Asher, he also hadn't moved in this time, not even to fidget.  This particular bout of concentration was dedicated to discovering the purpose of Philo's curious camera.  Of course, his friend had spent weeks putting it together, but Asher couldn't be expected to investigate everything going on in Hogwarts, and so far nothing had exploded.  Now that it was all put together however, he was resisting the all-too-familiar urge to take it apart again. 

He watched Philo fix the last screw into the box. 

"What's that about then?" he asked, now that the truly fiddly part was done with for now.   "All those lenses--to get photos of invisible folk or somethin'?"

"Criv--!"

Arlaug was a bad influence on Philo. Sure, his father could toss a steaming magicless curse if he dropped something on his foot and Foster and Felicia simply picked up words from their respective careers, but Philo's knowledge of 'Crivins' and 'D'Arvit' had been sourced from a frog.

So long as he didn't let the F-word drop.

Asher had just shown up out of nowhere from Philo's blindered perspective. "Oh, it's just you Asher. Invisible folk?" Conspiricies formulated in the young Ravenclaw's mind, expecting that there were dozens of invisible things about them at this very moment. "Maybe. I didn't have anything that could 'see' invisible things." The only things said to bypass an Invisibility Cloak were Dementors and a very rare electric blue eye. Well, maybe an Izanaki Spyglass. Actually, Philo had recycled one but those had been the most damaged lenses of the lot.

"Though how would we even know where to look for something invisible to test that?" Maybe if they found an older student that knew Disillusionment.

Asher frowned speculatively, pushing his glasses back up his nose. 

"We could try Peeves," he suggested, "He's always showing up out of nowhere.  Of course, maybe he can apparate . . . might be worth a try?  Or, hey, maybe it'll work on invisible ink!" 

Of course Asher had invisible ink--not just a variety of paltry muggle versions, but several different types of magical ink, including a Weasley Brother's variety which actually just plain couldn't be seen at all, ever.  Asher was part way convinced the wells  didn't have any ink in them to begin with, but he kept them around just in case.  He was that kind of kid.

"Here, wait up a sec--I'll be right back."  he assured his friend, taking the stairs up to their dorms two at a time.  It was a habit that had cost him a split chin more than once, but there was always someone in Ravenclaw just itching to try out a new healing spell, so the threat of injury rarely deterred Asher from doing as he wished.  Digging around in his trunk, he soon found his special stationary kit.  It was actually an old cigar box he'd discovered in the shed and it had a rather jolly picture of a plump, wasp-waisted witch enjoying a lime-green cigar.  According to the box, the original contents had included peppermint, cherry and plimpy flavored cigars--you could still smell the plimpy. 

In his excitement, Asher half-fell, half-jumped down the staircase, waving the box in the air. 

"Is it ready?  Can we test it?"[1]

1.	Sorry it took me so long to reply!  I thought I hit notify for this thread, but apparently not.  XP  I'll reply more frequently now.

Normally, the suggestion for apparating at the school would be met with the common rebuttle of 'you can't apparate at Hogwarts!' with the notable exceptions of being Headmaster and/or owning a phoenix and house elves. Philo, however, pondered deeper. "I don't know if Peeves can apparate or if he even needs to. He's a gh--spirit," there was a distinction, "and Spirits aren't really bound by physical laws. So they can pass through matter."

A speculation soon lost as Asher ran off for invisible ink. It was a really short wait. Philo wasn't sure he would have found something of his so quickly.

"Sure, we can test..." Everything was ready but Philo was distracted by the site of the box for multifaceted reasons. Not only did he recognize the brand for the female mascot (both alluring and freaky to behold given the state of her corset) but also by the smell. His father Frederick used to smoke these until the scent of burnt Plimpy in the house displeased his wife enough. By that time not only was Foster keeping the odd box hidden under the bed for an occasional smoke, he also kept 'other substances' in there.

So Philo hoped that Asher realy truly just kept invisible ink in his cigar box and not anything that would make their Head Professor Trishna go around performing drug tests by making them sneeze into a reactive potion.

Asher opened the cigar box with a flourish, unaware of his friend's misgivings.  He himself had never seen the cigars the case must have once contained and had never asked his mother who in his family used to smoke them.  Containers in general roused his curiosity and he had a vast collection of old boxes and bottles in his room back home, though after discovering a cursed basket his mother had forbid him from furthering his collection.  Out of respect for his mother (and because he couldn't stop hiccuping up flowers) he'd steered clear from heirloom storage units for almost an entire week, which was more than she'd hoped for, really.

Of his collection, the cigar box was one of his favorites, mostly because most of the cigar boxes had been trashed or had decayed or were full of tiny grey spiders (for some reason this happened a lot).  Inside the case, he'd neatly arranged two rows of quite inconspicuous ink wells, two of which sported the infamous Weasley logo.  Three of the ink wells had been filled with inks of his own recipe, one had what remained of a muggle spy-kit-for-kids sample, one didn't look like ink at all and one contained quite ordinary ink with the addition of a charm that could be activated once the ink had dried with the tap of a wand.  There was also a sheaf of parchment, folded and tucked in the side, for convenience and to prevent the bottles from rattling.

"I don't know which one we should try first--these are nonmagical over here, but if the Weasley inks actually exist, then they're pretty well invisible--this here is charmed, something I found in a book.  And this one is something I made up during potions class when we were supposed to be working on preservative solutions," he said, lowering his voice but raising his head.  He held up a faintly vial of faintly violet liquid.  "It goes invisible once it dries, but I haven't been able to make it show back up," he explained, shrugging bashfully.  "Uh, I'm not sure if this counts as stealing potion materials, so don't tell anyone?"

"It shouldn't be too hard to test, what we could do is..." Philo paused to realize what Asher was saying. Ravenclaw often had inventive people, like Theta Pepper or Philo's gizmo here but he was surprised to here that Asher had apparently created a new invisible ink in the middle of a potions class when they were working on a completely different potion.

"How did you not get noticed?" Philo didn't ever mean to get into trouble although his curiosity got him close to the line. The Irregularity Camera had started from fiddling with old omnioculars when Professor Trishna was running a by eyesight only star charting.

"But anyways, the, uh, test." Philo spread out some parchment. "For each kind of invisible ink you have, write a message and wait for it to dry. But I can't see the messages and you should write a different one for each kind of ink so I can't guess. Let me know when you're finished." Philo looked away and covered his eyes.

Asher grinned gleefully and proceeded to crack his knuckles before picking up the quill.  He decided he'd start with the Weasley inks, because those were the ones he was most interested in.  Cracking open one of the bottles, he dipped and quickly began to scratch out a message, or try to scratch out a message.  Since he couldn't actually see what he was writing, he could only suppose he'd spelled out I am Asher.  Cleaning the quill as best he could, he tried the next bottle of W-ink: Asher I am.  All ready boring of these innocuous messages, he scribbled Philo stinks using the charmed ink, then felt bad about it and wrote I'm only kidding. with his experimental ink.  Grabbing his wand, he managed to tap the charmed ink before it dried (it was supposed to work after it was dry too, but he thought his pronunciation might have been off). 

"Finished!" he announced, as the last of the violet-colored sentence faded to nothing.  "And I cleaned the quill properly between inks.  Ready to test?"

After a few moments of thoughts trailing various subjects but never investing time to the details...the camera, homework, summer vacation and certain girl(s)...Asher announced that the test was ready.

"Ok." He took the camera and angled the protruding lens to look at the paper. He squinted, looking into the eyepiece. At first pass there was something blurry to the paper, presumably the parts that had been inked and dried, but there was no fine focus nor contrast to make out the words.

"Part of this has to due with adjustments," Philo explained as he twisted the outer lens. "I couldn't get everything to work at once so the magic kind of switches to a more dominant lens, changing it up." He looked again and there was purple writing present in the viewfinder, carried over from the operations of the omnioculars.

Asher I am.

I'm only kidding.

"I've got two. What are you kidding about--?" There was a flash and a whirling clicking noise and out from the bottom of the camera came a polaroid. "Oops, didn't mean to do that." Make that two polaroids, as when Philo picked up the picture slowly appearing on the sheet it came apart, revealing two exposures stuck together face-to-face.

Asher crowded his friend, peeking over Philo's shoulder to try to catch a glimpse of the camera's good work.  But his friend took a step to the side, inadvertently blacking his view.

"Oh, ar," Asher mumbled, trying, not very successfully, to dodge the subject.  "Well--what's that?" he asked suddenly, distracted by the polaroids.  He'd never actually seen a camera at work, so far as he could remember, and though he'd recognized the machine from pictures and diagrams, up until now he'd been uncharacteristically incurious about its workings. "Is that how you get the photos?  How do you get the photos?  Can I see?"

He stepped to one side and turned his head to inspect the paper.  Because looking was synonymous with touching to Asher, he reached out automatically to turn up one corner, searching for the picture.

"Why's it blank?"

"It's a muggle method to get photos," Philo explained. "Kinda." Magic was supposedly powering it now, he had needed a few parts from his dad's old polaroid to get everything connected.

"These kinds of pictures, they can develop instantly without a need for a solution. It just takes a bit to show up." Taking the polaroid split from the one Asher had grabbed, Philo began shaking it. From the grey square of the photo an image slowly came through. The parchment on the table, at the angle Philo had viewed the image.

"Like I thought, it's not going to be a real picture like our kind. You know, moving." Part of Asher's elbow was in the shot and it didn't budge. "I wonder why it prints two at once?" He looked to Asher's copy, the image coming into focus too. Then looked back to his, then back and forth a few more times.

"That's funny. I only got two of your messages in the viewfinder. But my version shows blank parchment, yours has the messages. Albeit blurry." Philo tried to read the one in the middle, the one he hadn't seen before. "Phlb Stmnkz?"