Elaine is waiting for them in the alchemy lab! She looks like she might be trying not to vibrate out of her skin, by way of... having all of the measuring instruments, even the ones unlikely to be used, very definitely properly calibrated. And cleaned. This is the cleanest this lab has been in at least a decade.

"Welcome back," she says to Neil, before launching into an overview of all of the properly calibrated instruments. She makes a really good assistant, actually.

"And hi to you too, James," she eventually adds, after her report is finished.

"Hello, Ms. Moretti. An eventful while you've been having, huh?"

"Not compared to the week before," she points out, wryly. "At least if we go by Sunday starting a new week instead of just... Counting the days..."

Since it hasn't, actually, been a full week since that whole. Incident. With the notebook.

"Mmhm. An eventful little while."

James is just flirting now.

Literally shut up.

Neil looks between them, amused. Ah, to be young again...

"Well, then. Shall we begin?"

"Please!" Elaine is bouncing a little. She's trying to have some level of class but soon she will be magic aaaaa

"Go ahead and don't mind me, I'll just be a spectator," he says, leaning against a wall.

Old Neil deposits the wooden box on the table and then does something under it that reveals a secret compartment out of which he pulls a smaller, silver box, which he places next to the wooden box that came from Backlund. He opens it and pulls out a yellowish-brown goatskin parchment with writing on it.

Even at a glance, Elaine can recognise the writing in ancient Hermes. The ink reflects the light like fresh blood, even though the potion formula must have been written centuries ago.

Yeah, James is here in case she drinks her potion and snaps immediately, isn't he. Reasonable, and she's thankful to him for it. She gives him a little smile that expresses her gratitude for the horrible thing he might have to do soon.

This communicated, she gets to looking at what Neil is doing! ...
She's really going to need to work on her Ancient Hermes, isn't she. Oops, wait, maybe she's not supposed to know anything about the formula herself...

"... Is it rude to peek over your shoulder to read it with potion recipes?" Because she absolutely wants very badly to look at it!! But she's bravely holding herself back.

"Not at all," he says, offering her the parchment and then going to one of the vials he prepared earlier today. "100 milliliters of pure water, repeatedly distilled," he says, though she was there when he distilled it. He pours its contents into the cauldron she apparently polished to a mirror shine while he was out. "And next is..."

Well, she's the one that this affects, so of course she'd make sure everything is done right!!! (That's not true. She'd also make sure it was done right if it was for someone else. Possibly with more vigor and repeated water distillation.)

"Thirteen drops of night vanilla extract," she says, taking the parchment carefully.

"... which is a terrible metric of measurement, where are the noble milliliters??"

Apparently she is incapable of assisting without commentary.

James sporfles.

Old Neil just smiles mysteriously. "Ah, indeed, indeed, where indeed," he says, going back to the silver box. "Night vanilla can be extracted and stored as an essential oil ahead of time," he says, taking out a tiny brown bottle from the box and using a pipette to drip 13 drops into the cauldron without paying much attention. "And next are the gold mint leaves, yes? How many?" he asks, reaching for a small can in the box and opening it.

"Seven. Again, terrible unit of measurement, leaves can grow to be vastly different sizes!"

"Not vastly different," Neil says, counting seven leaves and dropping them into the cauldron. "And now it should be the poison hemlock, yes? Three drops?"

(James is still laughing in the background.)

"Three, yes. Still a downright criminal measurement to be measuring in, I hate even having to acknowledge it. And the leaves can be vastly different, not even just in size, but because they grew in different conditions, so they might contain slightly different amounts of the active ingredient! Really, they should be ground up and synthesized to get the dosing precise instead of just leaving them as leaves..."

Active ingredient? That's... an interesting phrase.

Yes. Yes it is.