Imari was sitting in a deserted classroom with her cauldron and potion ingredients strewn about on one table.  As a Slytherin she did quite well in the class, but she was getting bored with the regular curriculum and was interested in trying to develop her own potion.  The only problem was, she didn't know where to start.  She had all the regular potion ingredients, all her notes she'd taken since her first year laid out, and full of ideas, but she was stuck.

It was like as soon as she sat her stuff down on the work-table, every single idea she had left her mind.  She hated it when stuff like this happened to her, which was quite often.  She'd be all set to sit down and write a lengthy essay and as soon as she was poised with her quill over the parchment, every word she'd planned on writing was gone.  Almost like they were hiding and laughing at her from the corners of her mind.

She was glad it was the weekend, no more dreadful skirts.  She had dug through her trunk that morning to find her favorite pair of jeans, the ones she did her best thinking in as she had dubbed them her "lucky jeans".  They were faded to the point of almost not being blue anymore, a tear across her left knee from a biking accident last summer, and a bright pink paint splotch from where she painted her room that same summer. Paired with a comfortable, tight-sleeved, long-sleeve shirt and her hair in a ponytail, she was ready to work.

She pulled out a chair from under the table and stepped up on it.  Sitting down on the top of the table with her feet in the chair, she balanced her potions notes on her lap as she began to read through each detailed page, hoping one of them would trigger the idea for her experimentation.  Imari was so focused on reading through her notes that even if a firecracker went off right in front of her, she wouldn't hear it.

FWOOM!

From the professor's entrance to the storerooms there came vivid orange smoke as if the air itself had rusted. The door creaked open and a cloud of orange smoke burst forth. And from that came the albino Ravenclaw prefect, backwards, wand-equipped parasol blowing the smoke back into the corridor.

"Mustn't let the sandalwood get smoked before it goes in next time." Ligeia turned. "Oh hello Imari! Don't breathe in yet, I was coughing up blood before I made an antidote." In her other hand was a sprayer. She pumped the contents towards her Slytherin peer, wafting her head in purple mist. "Breathe deeply before it evaporates. With any luck you'll be immune to airborne poxes for two weeks. That's better."

Crisis averted, Ligeia set down the sprayer and latched parasol. Ligeia was in her lurid stained potion apron and dress, having been working on her long running brews. With a glance she took in Imari's array of notes and ingredients. "Oooh, what are you brewing?"

Imari did as the girl told her and then breathed in when she sprayed the mist towards her.  She certainly didn't want to be coughing up blood.  When asked the question about what she was brewing, Imari looked up, excitement showing in her eyes.  "I'm not sure.  I've got all my notes from first year, plus some from books in the Restricted Section, and some books as well."  she took a breath, "I was going to try and come up with my own potion, or perhaps improve one that already exists." she said quietly, going back to her reading.

She looked up after finishing the paragraph, "Except, now that I'm here and ready, I have no clue where to even begin.  I thought I was good at brewing potions, but now I'm just stuck." She hopped down off the table, "You can help if you want." Imari told her.

"You're very own potion!" The ghoulish glee was in full effect behind her lavender eyes. "How exciting. I've invented my own too, have a look."

Ligeia placed a photograph (her pet vulture chasing after a pygmy puff) on an empty corner of the table. From a small bottle she poured out a few drops that spread over the picture and splashed some of the wood as well. The photo became monochromatic and the affect parts of the wood a colorless grey.

"I was originally after a bleaching solution that for all purposes turns everything white although I never got that to work. This color-removing solution is entertaining but I'm not sure what to do with it."

"But what are you intrigued in making? There's so many ways to make a variation of poisons, you could create your own signature, or a more fast acting antidote, or a hag brew..." She trailed off with further suggestions.

Imari looked at Ligeia and answered, "I'm leaning towards improving  a healing potion, or creating a new one.  I just don't know where to start." she told the other girl seriously.

"Your potion is amazing, how'd you come up with that?" Imari asked her, usure if the other girl would actually tell her the process by which she made her potion or not.

((So sorry that it's short, I couldn't think of anything))

"This was inspired by someone else's folly." Ligeia began her tale. "It was when I was interning at St. Mungo's over the summer, Potion and Plant Poisonings floor. We had one chap come in, Mr. Flint, saws he was working on a Strengthening Solution but he had bleached himself white. Well, parts of himself, even down to hair and fingernails and half of other parts. That was when there was the attack on the hospital."[1]

She lifted the corner of her colorless photograph. "I tired the reminder of the summer to create what Mr. Flint had done by mistake, though I could never get it to react in liquid form. And then this is the closest result; it temporarily removes color as opposed to doing away with it completely. And then not completely white, but greyscale."

Ligeia smiled. "But that doesn't compare to what I'm doing for practice, but it's nowhere near ready yet."

1.	When Trouble Comes Knocking - July 29

"That sounds interesting." Imari said and then was silent for a moment.  "I have an idea, but I don't know if it would work out well.  You see the Weasley Wizarding Wheezes have this daydream charm, but I kind of wanted to try and put it in a potion that could last longer, maybe half an hour, or a whole class."  She didn't look at the other girl in case she thought Imari's idea was completely bonkers.

"What they have is good, but what if it could be put to a better use than something in a joke store." Imari shrugged her shoulders as she said this, thinking about a dying person getting their dream vacation while their body slowly shut down, or a really bad guy being distracted by his dream and then getting taken down.  She shook the images out of her head, best work on the potion first.  "If I were to do that, where would I start?"

"Oh, those." Ligeia had tried a Daydream or two but never found them to her liking. They were so sappy, placing you and a fictitious significant other in blase´ romances. If it was a proper romance why were the kissing in full daylight on a ship surrounded by dolphins and siren mermaids?

"Hmm..." Ligeia mused over the challenge presented by improving a Patented Daydream Charm. "You may want the basis of a sleeping draught, such as Draught of the Living Death to trigger the subconscious use of the potion...maybe ingredients from Felix Felicius, the positive ones...but the Daydream is a multilayered charm that follows a script, how to translate that into the potion?"

After purposefully silent contemplation a flash of brilliant inspiration creeped across her face. "Have you ever seen an extracted memory? When it's all wispy and ethereal?"

[1]

Imari nodded as she listened to Ligeia explain the backgrounds of the Daydream Charms and think of how to turn it into a potion, but when she asked if Imari had ever seen an extracted memory she forced herself to say, "No, I can't say that I have, I mean, my parents both have their personal pensieves, but they've never used them in front of me or my sister." she told her honestly.

1.	I would just like to say that I'm sorry it's taken me awhile to reply, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted Imari to say/do.  Thank you for being patient with me.

"A harvested memory can be a pretty thing. It's a silvery wisp, almost ectoplasmic like the substance of a ghost. Maybe that's significant, ghosts are mainly the memories and personalities of the departed." Ligeia briefly paused in her musings to savor that new inference.

"But there is a trick difference, removing all traces of a memory from copying most of the contents over to a pensieve to free up your mind. Copied memories can even be modified into a fake memory, although that's complicated." Her hands came together, white fingers arched into a pyramid. "There's some theoretical thought, but since a tendril of memory can be treated like a liquid when using a pensieve, why couldn't it then be used in a potion, in impart the feel if not the full image of the memory?"

This was the sort of concept that had Ligeia's mind turning the way minds turned in Ravenclaw house.