The bell rang and the practical Advanced Potions class began.

“I hope you all paid attention on what you wrote down, because you need to keep these rules and procedures in your mind as we brew your very first advanced potion.” Mage Marks said. “Open your books to page twenty six and have a look.”

“The cleaning potion?” Jinelle asked and sounded a bit incredulous. “Even mom can make that!”

Mage Marks sighed. “Jinelle, please stop questioning everything I do in class. This is the first day. I need time to adjust the curriculum for each of your individual progress, now that I know what you can and can't handle.”

“I thought I asked you to not disappoint me.” Jinelle said with a huff. “This is a waste of time.”

“I'm so sorry that you think that my observation of your practical skills is a waste of time.” Mage Marks said sternly. “If you want to, you can sit there and do nothing for the next three hours and I'll make sure your future classes are at the appropriate laziness level for you.”

Jinelle frowned and looked like she was thinking about doing just that, then she huffed again and opened her book.

“That's the first smart decision you've made today.” Mage Marks commented and looked right at me. “Mr. Drake, I believe you might want to sit this one out until...”

“So, not only don't you want to teach me, you don't want to gauge my skills?” I asked. “What kind of teacher are you?”

Mage Marks looked angry. “The ingredients are dangerous to handle and...”

“Have you forgotten where I grew up?” I asked and interrupted her. “I boil and grill three foot tall death spider legs as snacks and make the best water beast and diamond snake stew.”

“GUGH!” The young man I didn't know covered his mouth and his face went green. Surprisingly, Lorna, Jinelle, and Nick didn't react.

“He left lunch early the last two days and didn't see what you did.” Lorna said as an explanation.

I nodded and looked back at Mage Marks as I waited for her response. She looked very reluctant to allow me to proceed, then she sighed. I took that as permission to proceed and checked the recipe. It did look quite complicated and as I read it through completely, a few of the ingredients looked familiar. I stopped reading and closed my eyes to go over in my head why I recognized some, then smiled.

There was a potion in the potions book I had brought with me that I had always intended to try, because it would have been useful to clean some of the things I had back at the marsh. It wasn't the same recipe. In fact, it only bore a slight resemblance; but, I had studied everything in that book as I replaced the ingredients I knew about with the ones I had access to.

The cleaning potion was the next one I would have done, just so I could get clean water from the marsh instead of having to skim off the scum every time I wanted to make a potion. At least, that was how I did it until I replaced the water I used with rain I caught in barrels from my roof. I didn't even have to lug around the large square barrels I had made, because they filled themselves constantly.

I opened my eyes and realized the problem I had now. Some of the ingredients I didn't recognize and I also didn't know the properties of them. If my prep work was off because I wasn't handling the ingredient the way it should be handled, it could ruin the potion before I even started it. I took out my writing pad and started copying out the recipe, word for word, and marked the things I didn't know and then wrote on a separate page the ingredients I needed to check the preparation for.

The recipe didn't say how to do the initial prep work and only said to add the ingredient at specific times. That was the downside of advanced potions. If you didn't have the knowledge to do your work, you were going to fail... probably spectacularly.

I'm glad I went to the library. I thought and slipped out the pages that the librarian and I had gathered and written out. I tucked them half under my written recipe and the ingredients to check list, then quickly referenced both to look through the list. The other students already had their potion pots on the fire and the initial water added, then they started to gather their own ingredients and started their prep work.

Jinelle kept glancing over at me with a smirk occasionally, probably because she thought I was struggling. I technically was; but, only because I wasn't stupid enough to just jump right into creating a new potion without any research beforehand. I was going to make sure that I knew what I was doing before putting the pot on to boil.

It took me half an hour to find all of the ingredients, two of which were lower variants of the ones on my library list, so I substituted them and adjusted the recipe slightly. Thankfully, they only needed to be diluted to three quarter strength and could be added normally. Other than that, I had to ask Mage Marks to clarify two of the sentences in the recipe. It seemed to use terminology that I didn't know, even though I could read a lot of the mage language.

Mage Marks confirmed that it was a specific reference to something that a non-mage, or a person from a non-mage family, wouldn't know. She explained what it was until I understood what it meant. She had been quite patient with me and I appreciated that.

“Thank you.” I said and she looked slightly surprised.

“You are half an hour behind the others.” Mage Marks said.

“It doesn't matter. I'll be done long before them.” I said and her slight surprise changed to full surprise. There were two soft feminine laughs and Mage Marks gave me a shrug and walked back to her desk.

I picked up my potion pot and went to the sink and only quarter filled it, then went back to my workbench and lit the fire. No one was looking, so no one reacted to me doing it wordlessly. I picked up the pot from the next workbench and did the same thing. This time, Mage Marks stared at me intently and I assumed it was because she was wondering what I was doing. She would see soon enough.

I had been prepping multiple potions for nearly the entire time I had access to multiple potion setups, and that's what I did here, only with part of the ingredients in each pot. They didn't need to be combined until the potion was nearly done, since the brewing wasn't necessarily dependent on having all of the other ingredients added first.

Plus, I could cut down on the various simmering times by having only half the water in each pot and then combining the short simmering ingredients together and the longer simmering ones in the other. It was an old trick I had used a bunch of times when I had to rush making number ten potion. I could make a batch of it in under ten minutes with this trick and it sure came in handy in the army.

I did the ingredients I had to dilute first, since they needed the most water added, then kept working. I switched between workbenches as I prepped each ingredient and added them to the appropriate pot. I had gained the attention of the others as I worked and they kept looking over at me.

“Eyes on your own work.” Mage Marks said with a stern voice.

I ignored them all and continued to brew dual potions. When the time came to add them together, I did it properly and carefully. Any mistake, like the heat reducing by adding too much potion at once without increasing the heat, would ruin everything I had done up to that point. I slowly ladled the short simmering potion into the long simmering one, which worked out perfectly, because it took a while to get all of the contents of one pot into the other.

When I had them successfully combined and they had simmered to perfection, I added my catalyst. I used the full vial this time, because the potion was so complicated and I wasn't going to skimp on it. I stirred it for ten minutes and then infused it with my magic. The pot glowed a bit more brightly, because I added a lot more magic to the infusion this time.

I needed it to work and I wasn't going to only add the minimum amount of magic that it required, just like I hadn't added the minimum catalyst. Mage Marks stood up and came right over to me with a vial and held it out to me. I couldn't object, because the ingredients were on the expensive side. There were only a couple of the common ingredients in the recipe and the rest were uncommon.

I filled the vial for her with the dark blue potion and she went back to her desk. The magic wood panels expanded and blocked her off from being seen as soon as she sat down. I used my Sense Magic ability and felt a lot of spells being cast.

“How did you do that?” Lorna asked in a whisper and I looked over at her.

“Practical knowledge of techniques.” I said back without whispering.

Lorna gave me an odd look, then she went back to work. There was just under an hour left for the class and if she was lucky, she could get her own potion to the right stage for infusion.

It took ten minutes before Mage Marks reappeared and the wood panels folded away. She stared down at the vial of liquid and her face looked like it was full of something. I couldn't tell if it was disbelief, surprise, resignation, or some combination of them mixed together.

After another five minutes of her staring at both the vial and the paper beside it that she had filled out, Mage Marks stood and added a much smaller rack next to the large rack of Basic Potions. She put my vial into it and we all saw that it had my name and a very distinct Grade A++ written on it in red ink.

“NO WAY!” Lorna and Jinelle gasped at the same time.

“How? How is that possible?” Nick asked. “He doesn't even know the proper rules and procedures!”

Mage Marks turned back to look at me. “Mr. Drake, I'd like to buy several vials of your potion.”

“WHAT?!?” Jinelle, Lorna, Nick, and the last guy exclaimed.

“I can only offer the normal going rate for an advanced cleaning potion, since this can't really be graded officially by the guild until next week.” Mage Marks said and ignored their outburst.

“Is that why you want to buy them?” I asked and she nodded. “Is it your own personal money or the academy?”

Mage Marks smiled, as if she knew what I wanted to hear. “The academy.”

I went to the side of the room and grabbed a crate of empty vials, checked to see that they were clean, then I quickly filled them all up. “How many do you need?”

“Six.” Mage Marks said as she walked over to me and moved her robes aside to show me she had a section on her belt with padded potion bottle pouches.

I gave her six of them and she wrote out a note on an official piece of paper with the six potions, their current grade and quality, their tentative price each, and authorization to hand over the money to me.

“Present that at the faculty administration building, ground floor, first door on the right. The woman there will settle the bill.” Mage Marks said.

I read the bill and she had authorized the payment of ten gold crowns per potion. “This is going to go up, isn't it?”

Mage Marks hesitated briefly and then nodded. “Maybe 50% more, perhaps 75%. It all depends on what they decide it's actually worth.”

“Aren't you going to test it yourself first?” I asked.

“No, I know it'll work. This thing...” Mage Marks pet the six vials in her belt. “I doubt there's anything that it won't clean.”

I had to think about that for a moment. “I'm going to keep 20 for myself. Do you want to buy the rest?”

Mage Marks didn't hesitate this time and wrote out another slip for the other ten potions and she had to go and get a half crate to carry them. “Thank you, Mr. Drake.”

I nodded and she went back to her desk to wait for the other students to finish. The others finished their potions just in time to start their infusions when the bell rang.

“You can stay for several minutes and finish up.” Mage Marks said. “You came in just on the bell, so I won't dock points for going over the allotted time.”

“Thank you, Mage Marks!” Lorna said happily and she added several drops of her blood and then used her magic to infuse the potion. The others did the same and the small rack with just my potion in it, now had four more potions beside it. All of them were a much lighter blue than mine.

Mage Marks looked at Jinelle while we all packed up our class things. “I've changed my mind about telling your mother about what happened today.”

Jinelle caught her breath. “Th-thank you, Auntie Greta.”

“You can tell them your uniform was damaged when you laid it down near your workbench.” Mage Marks said and Jinelle's face filled with relief. “They will still be a little angry over that.”

“It's okay.” Jinelle said and smiled briefly. “You know I've damaged things with magic before.”

Mage Marks smiled back. “Class dismissed.”

Jinelle, Lorna, Nick, and the last guy left with their things and Mage Marks looked at me.

“I'm sorry that I can't rescind my punishment.” Mage Marks said. “However, I will lift the restriction of not doing anything and I'll allow you to study instead of just sitting there.”

I raised my eyebrows at her.

“I hate it when I have to waste time doing nothing, too.” Mage Marks said and sat down at her desk. “I have lesson plans to prepare until suppertime.” She pulled out several sets of papers and blank sheets, then she started to work.

I stared at her for several minutes to see if she was going to change her mind again, then I took out the things I had gotten in the library and started studying. In the back of my mind, I was almost appreciative of getting to do it now and wouldn't have to worry about going home and trying to do it later.

I glanced up after ten minutes when I felt her looking and saw that she was looking at what I was doing. A small smile appeared on her face and she dropped her head down to continue working. I did the same and kept reading. I also compared the list I had with the ingredients Mage Marks had behind her in the bins, because the more I knew about what I had access to, the more I could do.