Lab Coats and Wizard Robes

Chapter Four : In the Chemistry Lab.

It was a good thing that Apparition led you straight to the place you wanted to be. It made it a lot easier to find the Analytical Chemistry Department. He was now in a dark corridor with many doors. He was successful at the first one he tried to open (not that it mattered, but he was always lazy when it came to taking his wand out of his pocket).

As he stood in the doorway, he scanned the room. It was one of the strangest rooms he had ever seen. There was a bright light coming from something rectangular in the ceiling. There were what looked like tiled counters against nearly all the walls, and a big table in the middle, leaving hardly enough space to move around it. On his right hand side, above one of the counters, there was a sort of glass chimney that was making a zooming noise. There was no fire underneath it, but a collection of bottles. He stepped closer to examine them. They were all closed with stoppers in a material that Snape couldn't bring home, and carefully labeled. All the counters were similarly scattered with bottles and other glass recipients in odd shapes and sizes.

Excellent, thought Snape, the only thing I need to do is read the labels and find the one that says 'hydrochloric acid'.

He had gone to the corner opposite the door to start his search methodically when his attention was caught with what was on the table. There were three big beige boxes made in the material Snape now recognized as pastick. Dumbledore had once shown him something that looked ans felt the same, and had told him it was a Muggle invention. Well, they sure use it a lot, thought Snape, looking around and noticing it everywhere now.

Next to each pastick box was another pastick box, smaller, and with one side made of glass. It looked like a sort of window, but instead of showing another place, there was light coming from it, but in various colours which were forming a picture: dots and lines which must have made sense to Muggles, as there was written on it (still in ligth on the glass window) : 'OD at 1700 cm^-1 vs added volume of hydrochloric acid (mL)'. Snape got his wand out and tapped the box with it: 'Reveal your secret'. The picture abruptly changed: instead of white, the window was now completely black, except for a text written in red letters, which was moving from left to right like a wizard advertisement : 'Manchester United rules !!!'. Snape was looking at it, completely nonplussed, vaguely wondering if that were some kind of incantation, when the door opened and a woman came in. Snape froze, but she wasn't paying attention to him. She was singing on top of her voice:

Sometimes I feel I've got to run away

I've got to get away from the hurt you try...

Her voice trailed of, as if she had something more important to think of, as she bowed towards one of the boxes with the windows, and took to staring at it. You could now hear a rattling noise from behind the pastick box. Snape looked at the box in front of him, and noticed a rectangle he hadn't seen before. On it were glued pastick cubes with the letters of the alphabet on them. Obviously that was the way to communicate with the box.

He was distracted from his musings by a rather loud yell.

"What do you think you're doing here?!"

The Muggle was now looking at him with an angry look on her face. Feeling rather offended at being addressed that way by a mere Muggle, Snape lost his patience:

"Be silent!" he hissed.

"What do you mean, be silent? As far as I know, it says Dr. Emma Woodhouse on the door, as last time I checked, that was my name. So you have no business telling me to be silent in my own lab. So I repeat my question: what are you doing here?"

But Snape was so angry at himself for getting caught, and at her for daring yell at him

in such a fashion that he hardly knew what he was saying.

"Be silent, Muggle!" he spat.

But he soon wished he had never said it, or that he had never learnt Occlumency. He could almost hear her think "Oh, God, it's the mad mathematician next door! And he thinks he's a Harry Potter character too!". It was the second time today that he was compared to that hateful bloke! His hands were itching to hex the woman into smithereens, and he had to think very hard of the Statute of Secrecy to refrain from doing it. Meanwhile, the woman had gone on ranting:

"Muggle? Really? And I guess you are a great wizard, and you're here to brew a nice little potion, because you desperately need to poison yourself or blow up the lab? You know what happened, last month? A crazy woman, just like you, fancied she was a Harry Potter character, and set her house on fire making a potion with toothpaste. Now you want to do the something here? Help yourself: methanol, gets you drunk, gives you a bad headhache, and leaves you blind if you drink enough of it. Or chloroform, makes you lose conscience, and is a strong neurotoxic. You need more? Here, fluoridric acid, which will start eating your bones in a week or so with horrible pains. And why don't you try the good old trick of mixing chlorodric acid and sodium hydroxyde, and see if you get salt water or some horrible acidic or basic mixture?"

She was showing the bottles corresponding to the ingredients.

If truth be said, Snape was impressed by what all those ludicrously named Muggle potions could do, and would love to forcefeed them all to Potter, but he'd see to that later. First, the hydrochloric acid. He didn't really know what to do, except that he wanted her to leave to take the bottle and Disapparate freely. He tried the first thing that came to his mind:

"Go away before I hex you."

He could have predicted that she wouldn't be impressed, but he hadn't expected her to start laughing.

"Really, hex me? Want to try the good old Avada Kedavra on me?"

She saw his shocked face and adopted a stern look.

"Listen, the Harry Potter series are great books, but they are just that, books. Harry Potter is a fictional character, and Severus Snape, who you obviously think you are, is fictional. Wizards don't exist. Now will you please leave? You're not allowed in here, and as I just pointed out, there are some quite dangerous substances here. So go home and pretend to be brewing a potion when you're cooking your meal, or something."

Snape stood rooted to the spot, as would anyone who had just been told that they were fictional. The Muggle was very annoyed that he would not go.

"Look, I have a report to finish for Monday, and I really don't have time for this. So if you don't leave now, I'm getting security."

Snape awoke from his stupor. Now he knew what he had to do: refuse to move, have her leave, take the potion, Disapparate to Hogsmeade and go straight to Dumbledore. The Muggle left with a sigh and slammed the door behind her. Within a second, he had grabbed the right bottle and was gone.