Beta: Cloudy

(≖‿‿≖)ノ⌒●~*

The first weekend of my summer I snuck out to Lunar's Orchid to meet with the vampire.

Fenrir set it up for me. I had introduced myself to Fenrir in person first specifically so he could be with me when I met the vampire. I had no way of knowing how the vampire would treat me and I wanted someone I could trust beside me. Fenrir was dear to me and I had faith in him.

In Lunar's Orchid I owned a decently sized building. It had a privacy fence and a lot more security wards than the other homes, but that was because I intended it to be used as my laboratory. I needed it to be secure for the kind of tests I had planned out. Only Fenrir, Kreacher, and Sil could access it after the security was put into place.

I didn't have a good mind for decorating so I hired a witch who took care of it for me. She seemed to go with a night/plant themed witchy aesthetic that I oddly liked very much.

At eleven o'clock at night Fenrir guided the vampire into the backyard of that home, where I waited.

Under the waning moon, I sat on a stone bench in my black rose, black iris, and black hellebore garden. I had a fair few stone fountains around the area so it was calming to listen to the sound of running water. I wanted it to be relaxing—a place for me to step out and catch my breath in between research times.

Iris was at her full length—thirty feet long, and three feet in diameter—as she stretched out in the garden. She still had more growing left to do, but it was nice to see how big she was already getting. She lifted her head and flicked her tongue in the air when Fenrir and the vampire Anyo approached.

Anyo was maybe five foot seven inches. At a glance, he—she?—did not appear to be something as dangerous as a vampire. They were lithe, light on their feet as they moved closer to me. He—she??—wore a loose white blouse and tight black leather pants with knee-high black boots to go with. They had a pristine white porcelain mask over their face so I couldn't see anything apart from silvery eyes gleaming underneath. Their white hair was feathery soft hair and gleamed under the moonlight.

As soon as Anyo reached me I couldn't help but blurt out, "Do I call you they, he, or she? I'm sorry, if that offended you."

"Any," Anyo said, which did not help me decide. Everything about them was androgynous. Their figure could have been that of a pretty boy, or a boyish girl. Even their voice was too velvety soft to make me figure it out.

Anyo seemed amused by my mental struggle because they laughed and said, "Due to the patriarchal society of the European Wizarding world, perhaps he would be best."

"Okay, thank you," I sighed with relief. Fenrir's face screwed up at that. He shuffled closer to me so he could stand behind me while Anyo took a seat on the stone bench next to me.

Anyo cocked his head at me. "You're not quite what I imagined."

"You're so much prettier than I imagined," I sighed.

"You can't see my face?"

"In my head you're even prettier."

He laughed, the sound sweet and melodic.

Anyo shifted his weight to turn to me. "Fenrir mentioned you want to... perfect the lycanthrope curse?"

"Mm-hmm. I don't suppose you've already studied it?"

"Vampire magic is very different from what a witch can do," he answered. My eyes widened as he said that. The books I had read had very little information on what vampires could do. He must have noticed my interest because I felt him smile at me behind the mask. "Vampire magic is more illusionary. We do not affect the world around us like witches."

"That's still really neat," I sincerely praised. "Could you make an illusion feel so real to a person it affects them? Like if they die in the illusion they believe it so much they die in real life?"

"What a morbid question!" Anyo laughed again, this time louder and warmer. "Truly powerful elder vampires could, but it is not a common thing. Our magic is used more to keep our society safe as we hunt for our food."

I nodded, accepting his answer. A thought occurred to me. "Anyo... can vampires make potions?"

"Under certain circumstances," Anyo said. "When a potion requires a spell we usually have to substitute it for an enchanted rune."

"Enchanted rune?"

"A rune that a witch or wizard will load a spell into. Vampires rarely need potions so there isn't a high market for them."

I frowned, a little disappointed. "That's a shame. I was hoping to have someone else with more experience assist me."

Anyo placed a hand over his chest. "While I do not brew potions on the regular, I am an elder and perhaps my experience could still be of use to you."

"Would you like to join me in my experiments, then?"

"It would be quite fascinating if you would care to invite me."

"Consider yourself invited. Every insane potioneer should have a pretty assistant," I joked. Anyo did not laugh, but I felt like he was amused by that statement. "Come on, I'll show you the lab I've got set up. Ah, Fenrir, I already gave you a tour, right?"

Fenrir mutely shook his head.

I grinned and offered out my hand to him. "Then you better come along, too, my friend."

The grizzled werewolf's smile as he accepted my hand was as adorable as a puppy wagging its tail.

(≖‿‿≖)ノ⌒●~*

Under the sweltering sun, I laid flat on my back. The grass beneath me was cool, and when the wind blew the sun didn't feel quite so horrible. Harry was sprawled out next to me, blearily glaring up at the clear blue sky.

Together we laid in our backyard, sweaty and uncomfortable.

"Can we go inside yet?" Harry croaked. "I'm dying."

"Depends, you gonna throw up again?"

"Hopefully not."

Remus had a horrible time of the month. The morning after he stumbled home and proceeded to lose whatever dinner his werewolf form had scarfed down all over the living room. That made Harry throw up when he got downstairs. Sirius proceeded to slip in Harry's mess, then get sick himself which just set Remus off again.

I, a reincarnated medical student, dragged Harry outside to get fresh air. I laid him in the grass, then I dragged Sirius out the front and laid him under the shade. Finally, with my lovely Wingardium Leviosa I got the unconscious Remus bathed, in new clothes, and tucked into bed.

I would have started cleaning up the mess, but when Kreacher returned from grocery shopping and saw—

"EVERYONE OUT! EVERYONE OUT! KREACHER MUST CLEAN THE STUPID MUTT'S MESS!"

So now I laid in the grass next to Harry, envious of the unconscious Remus who got to sleep in the cool house.

"It'll probably be awhile before it's ready," I admitted to Harry. "What do you want to do?"

"It's too hot to want to do anything other than die," he muttered.

"Wanna sneak out?"

"And go where?"

"I dunno. You got money on you?"

Harry dug around in his pockets. "Little bit."

"Wanna go window shopping?"

"In this heat?"

"I'm sure Florean Fortescue's Ice-Cream Parlour will be cool," I reasoned.

Harry sat up abruptly, his eyebrows raised. "They'll kill us if we're gone too long."

"Sirius won't be able to resist napping under this sun, and Remus is out cold. If we bring back ice cream for them both they won't complain," I said cheerfully. "C'mon, I'll even let you drive the broom."

"Nah. Better idea. I'll race you there, and whoever is last gets to pay."

"You little shit. I'm in."

(≖‿‿≖)ノ⌒●~*

We were still grounded. But only for a day because ice-cream was a great bribe to reduce our sentencing.

(≖‿‿≖)ノ⌒●~*

My main home in Lunar's Orchid was primarily a laboratory. There were three levels—a main floor, a second floor, and a big-ass basement. The top floor was one room with a skylight ceiling—very similar to greenhouses—and had a bunch of standard potion-ingredient plants that grew all around the sides. I had purchased a House Elf specifically to tend to the plants in this home and monitor it.

Her name was Sil. She was young by House Elf standards—only twenty-four—but I (as my alias through Fenrir) was repeatedly assured that she could take care of any gardening desire.

I would have loved to have had only Kreacher, but he was too busy tending to our family as a whole. It would put too much of a burden on him to take care of our home in addition to my second home. A second House Elf was an ideal solution.

In honor of Dobby I did offer Sil the choice to work for me with wages instead of a contract, but she wailed and started sobbing so I reassured her that a standard contract was fine.

I wasn't comfortable with slavery, but I had to acknowledge my limitations. I was not all powerful. My free time was devoured by my preparation of obtaining wealth and power, and helping the werewolves. I simply did not have the time or energy to devote that level of dedication to freeing House Elves yet.

I was not ignoring them. House Elf abuse was not something to be taken lightly. Worst of all, for all intents and purposes it looks like they had literally been bred to be subservient through a contract. A House Elf with no master would die off within a decade if not sooner. Some House Elves died of grief within minutes of their master's death.

Hermione had worked hard in the canonical story to try and give them freedom, but none wanted it. I could only conclude that they physically could not handle freedom yet either due to psychosomatic symptoms, a magical issue, or a physical limitation on their bodies. Dobby could have been a mutation.

Something I couldn't just blindly rush into and forcibly free them. Winky had nearly killed herself after being given "freedom."

It would be irresponsible, reckless, and arrogant to rush through their freedom. For their own sake I needed to be able to dedicate the time and energy to properly research the safest way to free them.

At the moment, I simply could not devote that level of dedication. I was only one human and I was already being stretched pretty thin.

Sil was given—as a uniform, not a gift, so it didn't free her—a cute flowery apron and dress to wear with matching boots. She had an option of clothes made available to her—as a uniform, I had to repeatedly stress to her, not as a gift. I didn't want her to get cold in the winter, or too hot in the summer, after all. And if something got torn up beyond repair, she had other options.

She was instructed to take care of the House, and to come to me when I called her name. She couldn't teleport to Hogwarts like Kreacher—Kreacher was registered as Black&Potter's House Elf and as long as a Black or Potter went to Hogwarts he could apparate inside—but she could come to my actual home. The wards did nothing to prevent House Elf entry, apparently.

It would be easy to sneak back and forth to my lab in Lunar's Orchid and my bedroom back home with her.

My laboratory was on the top floor, and in the basement. It was pretty much just lots of potion workbenches, each filled with different cauldrons. Where there wasn't a potion there was a bookshelf crammed full of ingredients and books.

I had dozens upon dozens of cauldrons up for testing. After all, some potions required different lengths of brewing time. To experiment, I would have to make the same potion over and over and over again and adjust the time in between stirs or ingredients added. Luckily for me there wasn't a potion that took longer than a lunar cycle to make, so I was willing to bet a pretty penny what I had in mind wouldn't exceed that.

Speaking of potions... they were odd.

If someone was good at chemistry in a past life, they'd be ass at making potions in the Potterverse.

If someone was a great poet in a past life, they'd be a genius at making potions in the Potterverse.

The art of potion-making was delightfully ridiculous and yet completely understandable. For example, when you tossed oh say strawberries into a pot over heat they'd eventually melt. But if you tossed those same strawberries into a potion they'd flippity flappity explode in a puff of cloud of super fine grains—almost dust—before settling into the potion.

All sweets turned to "dust" when tossed into a potion. Why? Because sweet like sugar and sugar was a fine grain like "dust". Sugar in potions did make them taste sweet, but it also meant you had to start stirring the potion clockwise. Clockwise was for good and anti-clockwise was for bad. Good potions were healing potions. Bad potions were destructive potions. Everything in between utilized clockwise and anti-clockwise.

Sweet and spicy were good. Salt and bitter were bad. Dry was neutral.

Sweet-tasting stuff exploded into dust, spicy erupted into flame, salty condensed into a rock, bitter turned to sludge, and dry lamely dissolved.

In terms of science none of it sounded sane, but in terms of what a toddler or poet might think of, it made perfect sense.

Then you got to the magical ingredients, and oh my God what a trip.

Unicorn hair had thirteen different results depending on what was already added to the potion. Twelve of those results would only happen if the potion was considered good and if it was any other type—bad or neutral—then the unicorn hair would turn the whole thing into the magical equivalent of a block of dry ice.

Fascinating.

Now here was the tricky thing.

I wanted to start with a painless transition potion for werewolves.

Did the potion count as good since my intention was to take away pain, or bad because werewolves were considered dark creatures? I had to pick one of those paths since they would take me down drastically different ways to experiment. They would require opposite ingredients, and if I chose wrongly the first time it would turn into a huge waste of time.

How could I possibly choose?

With a coin flip.

C'mon magical luck, kick in and give me a good answer.

The coin landed right in between the crack of the floorboard of my top floor laboratory.

Fuck you magical luck.

(≖‿‿≖)ノ⌒●~*

The first full moon of the summer was a special one. I had discussed previously with Anyo on theories of which direction we could take the potion, but all of that had merely been theories.

I had studied the blood samples Fenrir had kindly collected for me.

Blood was essential in magical rituals. Blood was the strongest medium to use for curses. I felt very certain that the lycanthrope curse relied on blood, or could be found in the blood. While the lycanthrope curse most often spread through bite infections, there had been cases where healers become infected due to mishandling the cursed blood.

The blood Fenrir procured was at a glance, perfectly normal.

I didn't have access to advance medical equipment, so the exams I conducted weren't more advance than testing for reactions and monitoring under a microscope. The blood behaved and looked like standard human blood, nothing out of the ordinary.

The only way, I concluded, to see a physical difference would be to examine the blood under a full moon.

That came with another issue, because I had no idea if the blood would react accordingly after being out of the body for so long.

Ideally...

Ideally I needed a werewolf who was willing to let me draw blood from them under the full moon.

I explained as much to Fenrir, broaching the subject with complete honesty. He listened patiently. When his brow furrowed as some of my words, I took the time to further explain them. He had never had a science class, let alone a biology lesson, so it took longer than anticipated but he eventually understood what I needed and why I needed it.

"Go' be me," Fenrir said firmly. "On'y one yeh can trust."

"Yes," I agreed. "But only if you're comfortable with it. I'll... I'll have to chain you."

Fenrir shifted on the couch, clear discomfort flickering over his face.

Even with wolfsbane there was no guarantee he wouldn't try to bite me. I had nothing against become a werewolf on principle, but it would certainly make things infinitely more difficult. He knew that, but he detested the idea of being chained during a transformation. It was already a painful, horrible, process. Fenrir was as used to it as any werewolf could be, but being bound during it could make it so much worse.

He didn't speak for several minutes, his hands clasped tightly together as he thought it over. I didn't pressure him at all.

It would be a terrible night for him. He would be bound, gagged, and helpless as I forcibly withdrew blood from him for testing. He wouldn't understand it in his wolf form, which would make it all the more terrifying.

I wasn't going to force that upon him. Whatever he decided, I would respect his wish and move on from there.

"Okay," said Fenrir. "Okay."

"You can change your mind—"

"No." Fenrir looked out the window at Lunar's Orchid so I could not see his face. "I cannot. I trust yeh."

I placed a hand over top his own.

He was more than twice my size, but at that moment he just seemed like a scared, small boy.

(≖‿‿≖)ノ⌒●~*

Anyo and Fenrir rigged up the testing area. Fenrir had taken his wolfsbane potion and nervously allowed us to chain him in the laboratory. A healer at Lunar's Orchid had kindly set up a few monitoring wards in the laboratory—no questions asked—that would alert me if Fenrir lost too much blood, if his heart rate elevated to a dangerous level for a werewolf on the full moon, or if the chains were under too much distress.

Anyo had been reviewing some blood biology books I had brought over. He was already well versed in human biology—which was a pleasant surprise—but he had not studied up on canine biology. I hadn't either until a few years ago, I couldn't claim to be an expert. I felt like I understood enough that I could spot differences between lycanthrope blood and canine blood at the very least.

All that was left to do was wait.

Fenrir shivered in the laboratory as the full moon began to climb into the sky. He—

The transformation—

It—

The movie did not do the horrors correctly.

It was not quick. It didn't happen within minutes. It happened within hours. Hours of skin ripping, blood pooling and gushing then sizzling away into a dark mist after an hour of being outside the body, bones snapping and crunching, screams and whimpers of absolute agony, and just—

Wrong. It was wrong. Looking at it hurt. From a medical perspective watching it felt like I was witnessing some absurd Hollywood grotesque film. As if it were disturbing for the sake of being disturbing. It was hard to accept what I was witnessing as a reality because of how utterly horrific it was.

Disgust swelled in the pit of my stomach, but it did not stop me from working.

I wrote down what I saw, taking notes at how some bones were repeatedly broken—specifically the spine chord snapped and reconfigured the most, despite the fact that it was the skull that underwent the most significant transformation—and that I had not anticipated that werewolf blood would literally disappear after an hour of being outside the body.

I even checked the previous vials of werewolf blood I had collected, and they also disappeared an hour after the full moon went up.

So werewolf blood could not be collected in mass. It would vanish upon the first full moon, one hour after being outside the body.

That was... good news, and it made sense. It would prevent werewolf blood from becoming a biological weapon. It explained why no Dark Lord had thought to use it as a grenade, or a way to poison a water system previously. The blood was only contagious on the full moon, and if it could only survive one hour outside the body that didn't give enough time to properly utilize it as a weapon. Or at least not enough to bother when one could simply use actual grenades and poison.

Anyo did the first withdrawal from Fenrir, causing the partially-transformed werewolf to howl in rage. Anyo was professional, though, and did not hesitate or falter in his movements. He placed a few drops on some slides under each microscope and we examined what we saw.

Obviously it was terribly weird.

I had expected all the blood cells to undergo a transformation, but that was inaccurate. There were some human cells, some cells that looked remarkably similar to—

No... surely, not?

"Anyo, hand me Everything Canis Lepophagus," I quickly asked Anyo, who was examining his own sample under the microscope.

"You saw it, too?" Any asked, pulling out the thick textbook and placing it between us.

Canis lepophagus lived in the early Pliocene in North America. It was considered—thus far—to be the original father of the modern day wolf and coyote. Scientists had tracked the canine history as best they could, with many proposing their own visions or ideas to what the evolution appeared as.

The author of Everything Canis Lepophagus had created several simulations to what those extinct species would look like if dissected and examined thoroughly today. They had produced several iterations using different beginning information in the simulation, and one of those iterations looked remarkably like what I saw under a microscope.

I flipped through the page, only vaguely remembering the odd cellular pattern.

Ah.

"Oh my," I said out loud, already reeling from that projection. "Anyo, do you happen to know when exactly the first werewolf was spotted?"

"Not off the top of my head, but I'm quite certain it was much later than that," said Anyo, perplexed as he compared the picture and what he saw under the microscope.

"How," I wondered, "exactly does a curse barely a few centuries old looks like it has DNA from a species that died out sixteen thousand years ago?"

"I confess I am at a loss."

For reasons I could not currently fathom, the lycanthrope curse transformed some cells into what looked like canis dirus cells—the dire wolf.

How? How is that possible? What kind of magic is this?

"Were dire wolves magical creatures?" I whispered in awe.

"Not as far as I am aware," Anyo said, tapping on the table in thought. "Oh. I do wonder, though... some rituals use bones, don't they?"

"That's—OH MY GOSH! FOSSILS!" I shrieked, causing Fenrir to howl. I quickly put my hands over my mouth as the pieces rapidly fell into place.

Dark rituals required blood, or bones, to be used. The older the bone the stronger the ritual. How friggin' powerful would a sixteen thousand-year-old fossil make a ritual?

"It must have been incomplete," I went on. "Not all the cells are transforming."

"Which would cause a half state—half man and half wolf," Anyo concluded.

"Yes. They likely didn't have access to a complete skeleton," I said, thinking quickly. "So... what..."

If I could reverse engineer that ritual and get a hold of a complete dire wolf skeleton—or at least more than what they had—could I complete it?

The thought sent chills down my spine.

One thing at a time, Rosie. You don't know enough about rituals to even consider going down that road. But now—

"I feel confident saying that we can treat lycanthrope as a botched ritual," I said. "There's already a set up guideline healers use to treat that. Let's review, test some individual ingredients on the blood we collect tonight, and re-evaluate in the morning."

"I will follow your lead, my lady."

(≖‿‿≖)ノ⌒●~*

After having robbed almost every museum / absurdly rich Muggle in Great Britain that didn't have absurd security that would require very obvious magic to beat, it was time to move on to another country. In honor of Monty Python and the Holy Grail I chose France. Thankfully France was one of the countries connected via the floo network to Britain so I didn't have to worry about setting up an international portkey.

The real downside to having robbed so many Muggle places was that the aurors were so definitely on to me and I was starting to have a few close shaves.

If I didn't have a Deathly Hallow-grade invisibility cloak my ass woulda been caught years ago.

But that's what makes being a thief so fun! There's nothing like the thrill of the chase.

To be an extra dick about it, I started leaving a rose as my calling card a couple of years ago.

(≖‿‿≖)ノ⌒●~*

Bucket List Completed:

27. Begin courting vampires through alias

ƪ(˘⌣˘)ʃ

Hope y'all like my take on how the werewolf curse came to be.

See you next week!

Answer: The basilisk would terrify me during it, but losing to a dementor would be so much worse. Basilisk it's over instant, dementor? Good chance to get stuck with eternal torment.

Question: If you were an international thief, what would be your calling card & media name?

Reviews are love!