Eventually though it had to end. Percy informed the students that dinner was over in the Great Hall, and it was time to head back to the dorms before curfew. With that, the mortal party-goers exited en mass together, bidding farewell to the ghosts and marking an end to a lovely Halloween.
Yet as they ascended the stairs out of the dungeons on their way back to the Gryffindor Common Room, Harry blinked and began to look around in confusion.
~"Kill… time to kill… blood… smell blood!~
"Everything alright, Harry?" Ron asked.
"Does anyone else hear that?" Harry asked instead, frowning.
"Hear what?" Hannah asked. The corridor was rather noisy thanks to all the students making their way up.
"I dunno… but there's somebody talking about blood," Harry revealed.
"Mayhaps it's one of the girls," George (or maybe Fred) suggested with a waggle of his eyebrows.
"Aye, perhaps its that time of the month," Fred (or maybe George) offered with a smirk, only for both to let out an "Oof!" as the Quidditch Chasers socked them both in the stomach for that off-color joke.
"Sorry, Harry, I don't hear anything," Neville apologized.
"Me neither," Susan replied.
"Yeah. Anyways, this is our floor, we gotta go," Hannah said, and the two Hufflepuffs left, going off back to their dorm.
Shrugging to himself, Harry bid them farewell, and put the odd voice out of his head. If it was import, it'd come up again later.
However, when they reached the second floor, things took a dark turn as one of the students up ahead let out a groan. "Ugh! The floor is all wet!"
"Myrtle's flooded the bathroom again," an older girl complained.
"No she didn't," Luna said, the young Ravenclaw Firstie still with them. "She was at the party."
"She was," Harry confirmed. "Unless she can flood the place from down there, she's been with us all night."
Murmurs began to echoed up and down the hallways, only for a scream to pierce the air. Like a herd of lemmings, the Gryffindors rushed towards the source of the noise, and found some of the Third Years staring up in horror at something on the wall.
As they crowded around and were joined by students from the other Houses who were leaving the Halloween feast, Harry gulped as he saw Mrs. Norris hanging from a wall sconce, unnaturally stiff.
"D-did somebody kill her?" Hermione wondered in horror.
"That's not all they did!" Angelina exclaimed, pointing up at some words written in a disturbingly red liquid beneath the cat.
"The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemy's of the heir, beware!" somebody read aloud, and a shiver ran down Harry's spine for some reason.
'Is that what Ed was warning me about?' he wondered as more and more people from other houses began to gather, drawn by the commotion. 'It must be!'
He heard Draco shout something about "You'll be next, Mudbloods!" only for a furious McGonagall, Sprout, and Flitwick to each deduct fifteen points for that sort of language, but Harry wasn't really paying attention.
Instead, he couldn't help but feel that something was about to happen, and this was only the beginning of a greater mystery
...
"Alright, everyone! Places!" I called out, and all around the room the workers in the potion brewing workshop moved away and took up position nearby to watch and record my work. It was early on a chilly Monday morning in November, and I was excited to see if the latest experiment would work.
Slowly, I brought out Duncan's cage from its spot, and removed my loyal pet toad from within, placing him onto a wooden desk. I then took out an eyedropper full of a egg yolk yellow potion and placed a single drop of the liquid onto his head. In an instant, brown hair sprang forth, giving him a shaggy mullet.
"Note that the Hair Growth potion from Batch 12 works exactly as predicted!" I announced, and a wave of relieved murmurs rang out. As that was happening, I delicately snipped off the hair, leaving only a tiny buzzcut on Duncan.
Then, I took a Q-tip and dipped it into a jar of a thick brownish-yellow cream. Next, I rubbed it all over Duncan, and watched intently. It would take an hour or two to see any changes, but I was confident it would work. After all, it was the exact same Hair Growth potion from earlier, simply turned into a cream.
The Hair Growth potion I was experimenting with was the latest version, made entirely from purely mundane and easily sources ingredients. It consisted of beeswax, sea salt, diced bamboo shoot, and quail egg yolk, and when mixed into a cream was by far the most effective hair growth formula on the market.
Diluted and weakened as it was in cream form, the potion would take around twenty-four hours to regrow about an inch's worth of hair on the applied spot. But that was already miraculous for mundane hair growth, and now that I'd found a recipe that was much cheaper and easier to produce, I could begin mass production of it.
Since I didn't have time to waste staring at a toad - as marvelous a specimen as Duncan was I had other things to do today - I placed Duncan back inside his habitat, where I'd check on him later to see if the shaved hair had grown back at all.
"Seems like Batch 12 is ready to go into full production as soon as the final tests and observations are done!" I announced to the room, and the people there cheered and applauded. They all wore white coats, rubber gloves, face masks, and eye covers, as they were the ones who worked with the potion brewing process, handling the ingredients, checking the vats, and so forth. Safety practices were important, after all.
"Oh, and don't forget that there's cupcakes in the break room and the tea has been restocked," I said. "And yes, folks, it's proper bags, not powder, so nothing like that near riot last week should happen again."
...
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