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The next alchemy class of their second year, they arrive to the lab to discover that each of them has an ordinary chicken's egg (brown) and another box of miscellanea.
Slughorn explains, when everyone is assembled, that alchemy with an egg is actually where phoenixes are speculated to originate; but no one has the recipe any more and there haven't been new phoenixes for centuries. They will not be making living things today. But the eggshell is a good base from which to appear lots of possible objects; alchemy doesn't like to conjure things into existence in plain sight but is quite willing that new things appear inside eggshells, cocoons, geodes, and similar. Their eggs have been pre-drained of their interiors for this purpose, although some recipes use full eggs.
As last week, they are invited to come up with recipes on paper for review by the professor before trying anything. Known possible results available with this set of ingredients include wooden, decorated eggs nested inside the shell; a shellful of small sharp teeth (the commonest source of hens' teeth, as they have encountered once or twice in potions); successively smaller eggshells the smallest of which holds a blob of mercury; and a perfectly hardboiled egg which can be arbitrarily flavored by exact details of the process. But they are welcome to aim at another result as long as their procedure looks safe.
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chanuphis
always_and_forever
"Okay... so try to focus on that in specific, maybe? Visualise getting a legendary alchemic rock."
always_and_forever
"Okay, yes, that looks like we're on the right track. Visualise... getting the Elixir of Life? Scaling it up? Everyone immortal and immune to disease?"
chanuphis
"I haven't actually done these things, we may be pushing the 'happy memory' paradigm," says Miranda, but she waves her wand and incants.
Slightly defined mist.
Slightly defined mist.
always_and_forever
"Yeah, but we're on the right track, I think. Except, we're looking at lots of yesses, how do we falsify this hypothesis?"
always_and_forever
"Yeah, but it's something to do with legendary alchemical things, and making everyone immortal and stuff, which points to a general 'getting what you want,' but it also could be a specific 'making people immortal' thing."
chanuphis
"Okay, so, as long as I'm imagining things..." Incantation. Mist. "It is not just a getting what I want thing."
always_and_forever
"Yeah, okay, similar scale. So it's something about making people immortal? Is there a difference between a panacea-mist and a philosopher's stone-mist?"
always_and_forever
"So something about making people live longer in specific...? What other kinds of things are related to this? "
always_and_forever
"Well, phoenixes are immortal, but they don't make people immortal. There must be something about that."
chanuphis
"Just outright inventing a spell so I could tap people on the head and make them immortal," she shrugs.
always_and_forever
"Yeah, I think that's a bit too far-fetched." Pause. "Says the girl who thought magic was imaginary just a year and a month ago."