FicWad

The Harry Potter universe is the creation of J.K. Rowling. This is fanfiction. The standard disclaimers apply.


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Chapter 23: A Visit to the Greenhouses


Saturday, October 27, 1990


Sybill Trelawney was sitting on a bench in Regent's Park, watching an informal muggle football game. She had spent the morning at the London Zoo, and had told Acamar that she'd come meet him in the library before they went to lunch. For now she was wearing her street appearance, glasses tucked away and hair under control.

When she sat down, there was a young man lying on a blanket behind her, staring up into the trees. Ten minutes later she glanced back there again, and he had not moved. He had shoulder length hair, hadn't shaved in a few days, wore a flannel shirt and jeans with holes at the knees. There was a dirty, beat-up looking bookbag lying next to him. Sybill knew she couldn't tell post-punk from grunge or whatever, but was pretty sure he was a typical college student.

She generally did not introduce herself to strangers while sober. Since her night with that guy—Dave—who she had never gone back to see, Sybill had spent nearly every weekend in London. Every few months she would go into bars or clubs and drink, and when that happened she would invariably wake up in the bed of some attractive young man, feeling much better about the world. So far she hadn't had the courage to try anything with them while she was sober enough to remember it, and she seemed to only be picking younger guys who had similar problems, and who lacked the confidence to try anything the morning after. She had become very good at embarrassing them, though, and had enjoyed some nice breakfasts and walks in the park before her good mood wore off and she felt the need to run away.

The knowledge that she had to go meet up with Acamar soon meant any conversation with the guy on the blanket would be limited to a few minutes. She decided to force herself to talk to him.

"What're you looking at?" It sounded dumb as soon as she said it, but after walking up to him, it was all she could think of to get his attention.

He took a moment to respond, slowly turning his head to look at her. "The trees . . . the colors in the trees. The red leaves . . . are they always this red?"

"I think so. Sometimes we don't appreciate the familiar until we can look at it with the eyes we reserve for the strange."

"Yeahhh." She noticed something was wrong with his eyes, and leaned in for a closer look. His pupils were dilated. "Yeah, you can tell 'cause my pupils are big. Kinda creepy sometimes when my friends do it. Have to be careful looking up—sun's so bright. But the leaves . . ."

"Mushrooms, right?"

"Yeah." He smiled, turning his gaze back to the trees.

"Do you see patterns in the leaves that you wouldn't have noticed before?"

"Yeah. It's hard to describe . . ."

"If it's the mushroom I think it is, it should let you see things you couldn't before. It makes your mind stop censoring things that you've learned to treat as irrelevant. If you pay attention to them now, you can learn how to see them later, when it wears off. Just don't overdose on it or take it too often."

"Have you done them before?"

"My grandmother made me try a lot of things."

"Cool grannie."

"She was."

Sybill decided that was as good a time as any to get going, said goodbye, and headed off to the library.


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Monday, October 29, 1990


The Hogwarts greenhouses were a mazelike complex of long, traditionally-shaped greenhouses connected by glass-covered hallways and grand atria, mixed in with various specialty rooms, and somewhere in the middle, Professor Sprout's office. The greenhouses were more or less static, having been built after the magic of the founders had been lost, but that hadn't stopped centuries of Hogwarts staff from adding new buildings as they ran out of space in, or maybe just got bored with, the old ones. Sometimes the new buildings were simply added between the old ones, crammed into impossible spaces using magic. Everything stayed where it was put, at least in theory, but that didn't stop the occasional room from getting lost for decades at a time, reappearing only when everyone had forgotten about it.

Sybill was nervously making her way down the Hall of Ferns. So far as she knew, there were no magical ferns that attacked people, but it wasn't her specialty. She could see Pomona's office through the glass, up ahead and to the left. The office, as best as she remembered, had a few stone walls that were taller than a regular greenhouse, and that you could navigate towards, if there wasn't oo much blocking your view. Her memories, though, were pretty hazy, since she hadn't been back here since the late 70s when she had been a student.

Professor Sprout's office did, indeed, turn out to be around the corner at the end of the ferns, but the door was shut and locked. Eventually Sybill found the herbology professor by following the sound of Pomona humming to herself in a storage room, where she was loading empty pots onto a cart.

"Oh! Sybill! I don't think I've seen you in here since you were a student! Welcome back! Did you come for a particular reason, or are you just poking around?"

"I was hoping you could help me with something."

"Of course!" Teasingly, she asked "You aren't planning to teach some sort of augury using the entrails of plants, are you?"

"No, but there are some ways to do things like that. I don't think they've ever been taught at Hogwarts, or at least not in Divination classes. But I was hoping you could help me try some teaching techniques we haven't used here in a few generations."

"Ohhh." Sybill could see Pomona's mind churning briefly, running through possibilities, before giving up. "How intriguing! I can't say I know much about what you do in your classes, let alone what they did a hundred years ago. So what did you have in mind?"

"Sometimes seers need help getting into the proper state of mind to do their work. When I was a little girl, my grandmother must have had me try oh, maybe fifty different fungi and hundreds of plants." She added, quickly, "in safe amounts, of course," as a look of understanding appeared on Sprout's face.

"Is that so. Well, I guess that only makes sense. I wouldn't be foolhardy enough to try that—most of the plants in here are dangerous enough without me eating them! But you say this used to be done at Hogwarts?"

"Yes—I was looking through some old textbooks, and the further back you go, the more of it you find. Of course, I'm not sure what I can obtain nowadays, which is what I'm hoping you can help with."

"Oh, certainly! We have an awful lot of species in the greenhouses, and there's also the forest to consider. Did you have anything in particular in mind?"

"Well, for plants, one of the common ones was mandrake, which can have a bunch of different effects, depending on how it's used."

"You can make a pretty good aphrodisiac with it! Or, so I hear."

"I was hoping to take advantage of its other properties—it can also alter perceptions and induce visions. How hard would it be to get?"

"Well, I don't have any at the moment, although there could always be a few hiding out somewhere—I'll keep an eye out for those. Depending on how soon you need it, I could probably order some seedlings, and we might have some seeds in the storeroom. If not, we can order those too, of course . . . But the adults don't travel well, and most extracts of them need to be used soon after preparation. Hm. When were you hoping to use it?"

"Oh, any time before the end of the year. I wanted to try it on my seventh years first, as a sort of treat for sticking with me all the way, so, I guess, any time, as long as they have a few days to finish their essays about it before the N.E.W.T.s start."

"Oh, in that case, we'll do it from seed! Unless you're trying to make the restorative draught, you can use the roots of the younger plants for most purposes. Oh, this will be nice, I know exactly how I'll work it into my lesson plans, too. Children always love the mandrake lessons—all the screaming and writhing when they repot them!"

Sybill smiled. "That would be great. Do you still keep mushrooms in the greenhouses?"

"What! Hogwarts, stop growing mushrooms altogether? We have hundreds of species of fungi. Some of them are even growing places they were planted on purpose!" Sybill remembered from her days as a student that plants and mushrooms would turn up growing in all sorts of improbable places, the main difference being that the mushrooms didn't need light for it. "Do you know which you want?"

"Well, mushroom names are sort of problem . . ."

"Oh, yes, that's true, isn't it . . ." Sprout scrunched up her face thoughtfully. "The textbooks today would be different from the ones you were looking at, and your grandmother probably used different names, too. This can be tricky."

"Well, the last Divination textbook to use them listed 'blue-frilled crow agaric' and 'spotted vaporbell'. I think the muggles mostly use some Psilocybe species from the Americas. And based on what my grandmother worked with, I'd be happy to get any of the ones she called 'dusty reindeer agaric', 'Circe's toes', 'Jenny-go-dreaming', or 'those damn little purple ones'."

Pomona laughed at that last, and clapped her hands. "Now that is a bit of a mess, isn't it. Well, come on! Let's start be narrowing it down visually. We'll start in the mushroom house."

The Hogwarts mushroom house was a long, greenhouse-shaped building with no windows, lined on the inside with tiers of growing beds. These contained wide, movable trays of dragon-dung compost in which all manner of fungi could be found. The trays were organized according to some scheme comprehensible only to Professor Sprout; most were unlabeled. Some were behind glass walls, others behind chicken wire.

Upon entering the dark room, Pomona waited a moment in the dark, "so you can see all the luminescent ones—we have a whole bunch this year—the red glow in the back is from Kashmiri firespores. Don't get too close to them. Let's have some light now . . . there." A series of dim lanterns lit up along the ceiling.

After about half an hour of peering, pointing, backing away rapidly, and getting hissed at, Sybill had pointed to a few candidates that Pomona would do further research on. "Excellent! Of course, that's just the mushroom house. We've got more under some of the flower beds, since it's dark down there and the space is free. That's all Hogwarts had, in fact, before one of my predecessors had the mushroom house built." Sprout led the way down several halls, and opened a door to a greenhouse Sybill didn't remember seeing before. "This seems like a good place to start. Do be ready to duck, though, just in case. Eeek!"

A large fruit came flying past them, splattering against the wall. "Tsk, tsk. One of these days they're going to break the glass doing that. I've told them, but they don't listen! It's just some grapefruit cultivars, nothing fancy, but they do get violent sometimes. I think they're out of ripe fruit for now, so we should be safe." Sybill spent a nerve-wracking five minutes kneeling next to the beds, keeping a watchful eye on the trees growing at the far end. They really did look like normal citrus trees, except for the threatening branch-waving.

This sort of thing went on for almost another hour until a chime came from within Pomona's robes. "Ah, that's my watch. I need to get to greenhouse three for my next class. Feel free to keep looking! It was so nice to see you again, Sybill—I'll get back to you about the mandrakes and those mushrooms you were wondering about. Bye!"

Sybill had been too embarrassed to ask Sprout for directions to the nearest exit, and so was forced to wander aimlessly for some time. She eventually found the door out, five buildings away.



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Author's note:

I kind of like the greenhouses. You can probably tell.

You might also notice I'm methodically trying to write with a lot of different characters. That's part the "writing exercise" aspect of this . . .