Chapter - 30 : Exploration
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Harry was gazing fondly at line of slender new potion bottles, filled with an array of differently colored contents, secure in their unbreakable bottles, and glistening from the wash he'd just put them through.
The fixatives he'd added should make those batches stable for years, and the wash meant that no trace of the contents ought to remain on the outside of the bottles, which made them safe to carry.
Harry had a potion bandoleer as part of his safari kit. Somehow the British wizards had worked out what a nice idea it was to have a collection of useful potions right on hand for when you might need one. Of course, they applied this knowledge only to a specialty niche market, but he was glad they had, as now he didn't have to devise his own equipment for doing the same. He could use the gear they'd already produced and presumably tested.
And Polyjuice, healing potions, Veritaserum... every potion you could carry expanded your options of what you were capable of during an emergency.
Of course, that wasn't the only use they could be put to, as he'd spotted Fred and George getting far more use out of the knowledge in that 'Basics of Brewing' book than Ron could even imagine. And, thinking ahead, Harry had gifted those two pranking prodigies with a new potion setup identical to his own: a Portable Lab, advanced self-stirring rods and measuring tools, silver cauldrons and copies of a few potions books Hogwarts kept in the Restricted Section, the whole nine yards.
The duo had been flabbergasted, floored by their gratitude.
In return for this, relatively minor (for him) investment, he got to sign on as a junior partner in their future prank-shop business. Not a big deal on the face of it, as his skills suited him to much better paying work. However, the real payout came not in money later, but in priceless knowledge in the here and now, where he got to be enlisted in the mixing and brewing department.
Those twins were geniuses. They really were. They'd already broken half a dozen standard and accepted rules of magic, and were on their way toward breaking many more.
That was the sort of knowledge you couldn't buy! It was his privilege now, as their assistant, to be learning all that they'd discovered - and that was no small deal!
Just about everything those two brilliant redheads came up with was stuff Voldemort didn't know. Stuff nobody else knew! And he wasn't going to learn it in any book, as they'd never written any of it down (except in private notes only they knew how to read).
This was new magic, not the old stuff done over in a different guise. It was a privilege to learn it in any capacity, and the price of the equipment meant nothing contrasted with the value of what that tuition was worth!
Already, Harry'd revealed far more of his store of stolen knowledge to them than he had to anyone else, just to serve as a sounding board to the twins, so they could bounce ideas off of him and get answers swiftly instead of using their valuable time looking up obscure topics in dusty corners of the library. And, having made it available to them thusly, the duo were already improving on Voldemort's knowledge, expanding it in new directions!
He'd left the Weasley twins contemplating possibilities granted by a handful of kneazel hairs Harry had combed out of his pet's coat that morning, and the kind of things they were suggesting as potential uses were so exciting that Harry was contemplating buying his own magical menagerie, just to see what they'd do with the ingredients they could harvest.
Actually, Harry was considering negotiation a deal with the twins where Harry could get both Hermione and Luna added on as junior brewers, both for the knowledge and experience it would yield to the duo of young girls, but also to free up those pair of pranking minds from ordinary drudgery so they could be devoting those remarkable intellects of theirs to devising more stuff!
The abused child was already contemplating a bid, starting with an offer of Occlumency books and training, then moving on to a second set of potions brewing equipment identical to the first, and, if it came to that, going on to buying a storefront in Diagon Alley for them, when a white form fluttered into his face, and settled on his shoulder.
"Hey, Hedwig. How are you girl?" Harry accepted his owl's attentions and removed the letter from her leg without hardly thinking. The owl paused, as if unsure she should let him, but in the end gave no fuss and let him go ahead and remove it.
On opening the letter, his brain kicked into gear and reminded him why his owl ought to have been reluctant to part with it. The letter wasn't for him! He'd been so busy thinking of other things (namely all the stuff Voldemort didn't know that he was learning from the twins) that he'd momentarily forgotten that he'd left Hedwig with the Grangers for the school year, and this was a letter from them to her. Private family correspondence.
However, by the time he'd remembered that, he'd already read the first line and was shocked enough to abandon good manners and continue reading.
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