Lucien closed the textbook gently and pressed his fingers against his temples, trying to massage away the dull ache building there.
When he actually stopped to think about it, the past few days had been strange.
Atlanta. The department store. Rescuing Merle from the rooftop while walkers clawed at the door. The thunderstorm. Passing out from magical exhaustion. Then the return to camp, just in time for Jim's prophetic rambling and a full-scale walker attack that lasted most of the night.
If someone had written it as a novel, it would have taken at least 40 chapters. In reality, it had all happened in three, maybe four days. It had been less than a week since he met Rick on the road into the city.
"I've been reckless," he said aloud to the empty tent. His voice sounded tired even to his own ears. "I need to think things through better."
The Merle rescue had been improvisation stacked on improvisation. He'd misjudged his stamina, pushed his magic too hard, and ended up unconscious for his trouble. Brilliant strategic planning, that.
And last night, yes, they'd had warning, but he'd still ended up performing in front of the entire camp because Jim's "prophecy" had forced his hand. It made him too visible to people who shouldn't be looking at him that closely.
Some of it had been bad luck and circumstances beyond his control. But mostly? Mostly it was him being careless.
The longer he stayed in this world, the more he changed things, and the harder it would be to predict what came next. The show's timeline was already shot to hell. He'd saved people who were supposed to die, and altered events that were supposed to unfold differently. Butterfly effect in full force.
Now everyone in the camp liked him and looked at him as if he were some kind of miracle child.
That was a problem.
Attention came with expectations. It meant people watching him closely, waiting to see what he would do next, and relying on him to perform more miracles. Every miracle brought more questions, scrutiny, and chances for someone to notice the things that did not quite add up about a kid with uncanny survival instincts and strange medical knowledge.
He had integrated into the group, which was good. He had established value and earned a voice in camp decisions, which was also good. But now he needed to pull back. He needed to lower his profile and return to the original plan. He needed to keep his head down, study magic, and get stronger.
Survival came first. Saving the world could wait. If it ever happened at all.
"Still," he muttered, "before I properly go to ground, there's one thing I need to do."
The CDC.
The decision seemed to contradict everything he'd just told himself about staying low-key. Going to the Center for Disease Control meant travel, risk, and almost certainly more visibility. But he had reasons. Good ones.
He wasn't going to save the world or follow the plot. He was going to answer a question that had been eating at him since he'd first noticed the inconsistencies with Episkey.
Did he have the walker virus in his body?
The question was like a splinter lodged under his skin. Small, but impossible to ignore.
From a magical perspective, the difference in how Episkey behaved was too obvious to dismiss. Casting it on others drained him severely and produced only mediocre results. Casting it on himself was smooth.
If that disparity really came from the spell having to fight or suppress the virus in other people's systems, then Episkey wasn't just a healing charm. It had potential far beyond mending cuts and bruises.
It might be able to slow the transformation from human to walker, or even prevent it entirely.
That possibility was too important to ignore. Even a delay of a few hours could mean the difference between life and death at a critical moment. It could give someone time to say goodbye. Time to make arrangements. Time to choose how they died, instead of becoming a mindless corpse that tried to eat the people they loved.
Of course, it was also possible that he was completely wrong. The magical efficiency might have nothing to do with the virus. It could be something else entirely, such as soul mechanics, differences in world physics, or his own unusual biology.
But testing it would produce data. And data led to answers.
Even without magic in the equation, knowing whether he was infected mattered.
If the CDC's equipment confirmed he didn't have the virus, that was huge. It could mean natural antibodies. Or it could mean his soul, foreign to this world, had fundamentally different properties than the people born here.
Either way, knowing would help him build cover stories for when he eventually encountered larger survivor groups with better medical facilities and more invasive screening procedures.
Better to understand his own biology now, while he had control over the testing environment, than be caught off guard later when someone with a microscope and military backup started asking uncomfortable questions.
As for whether the examination might expose his magic, he wasn't too worried about that.
From what he remembered of the Harry Potter books, magic didn't show up on Muggle technology. If it did, the wizarding world would've been discovered ages ago. Young witches and wizards went to regular hospitals for mundane illnesses all the time. Nobody got carted off for vivisection.
And even in the worst case, he'd rather deal with it now. One suicidal doctor with limited resources was far less dangerous than a fortified military base with proper scientists and heavy weapons.
Face your problems when they're small and manageable, not when they've grown teeth.
He went through his mental checklist one more time, reviewing the unresolved questions and preliminary plans. Only when he was satisfied did he let out a long breath and push himself upright.
His body still felt weak. The aftereffects of sustained spellcasting hadn't fully faded. But the mental fog had mostly cleared, which was improvement enough.
He reached for the tent's zipper, intending to step outside and get some fresh air, when his gaze happened to drift toward the corner.
The basket of "potion ingredients" sat there, exactly where he'd left it.
He paused.
The kids had been so excited when they gave him the basket. His original plan had been to take the whole thing down to the river, wash it, and cook it for dinner. He would turn their gift into a meal and thank them for the thought.
Because, obviously, you could not make real potions from ordinary mushrooms and wild vegetables. That would be like trying to bake a cake using dirt and grass. The ingredients mattered.
But his mind had been turning over magical theory for the past hour. Spells, limitations, magical interactions, and transfiguration principles all blurred together. Now, as he looked at the basket, a truly absurd idea began to take shape.
What if he used Transfiguration to turn the ordinary ingredients into magical ones, at least in appearance? Then he could throw them into a pot and see what happened.
The thought was so ridiculous that he actually laughed out loud.
"Because that's a perfectly reasonable thing to try."
Using Transfiguration to create real magical ingredients? Even thinking it felt stupid.
He had never studied the theoretical limits of Transfiguration, but he understood the basics. If you could just conjure up genuine magical materials, then what was the point of Potions as a subject? Why would anyone bother with harvesting and preparation if you could just point your wand and make whatever you needed?
And if Transfiguration were really that powerful, why learn any other spells? Just transfigure solutions to all your problems. Need food? Transfigure it. Need weapons? Transfigure them. Need a way out of the apocalypse? Just transfigure a bloody spaceship and fly to the moon.
It was magic, not a genie in a bottle.
Besides, even if, hypothetically, in some impossible scenario, there existed a transfiguration technique for creating matter with magical properties, it definitely wasn't something a half-trained, self-taught wizard could pull off.
He was a kid with two months of practice, not Dumbledore.
"Still..." He found himself staring at the basket. "I've already thought of it. And I've got time to kill. Might as well try it just for practice."
At the very least, he could attempt to transfigure the mushrooms into something that resembled magical ingredients and then change them back. It would be a way to test his current skill level with transformation magic and see how far his control had progressed.
Practice never hurt, and it was not as though he had anything better to do while recovering.
The more Lucien thought about it, the more curious he became.
He pulled out his copy of Magical Drafts and Potions. He flipped directly to the first-year potions section and scanned the recipes.
Most were either too complicated or required ingredients he'd never heard of. But one caught his eye, partly because the description sounded useful and partly because he vaguely recognized the name from somewhere.
Wiggenweld Potion.
"'A potent healing draught capable of treating minor injuries and awakening the drinker from magically-induced sleep,'" he read aloud, tracing the quill-written notation in the margin. "Where the hell did I hear about this one?"
He didn't remember it from the books or the films. Maybe one of the games? His flatmate had been obsessed with those old Harry Potter PC games. Regardless, a healing potion sounded exactly like the sort of thing that would be useful in an apocalypse. Even if he couldn't make it.
He examined the recipe more carefully.
Primary magical components: dittany leaves, horklump juice.
Dittany he knew. Magical plant with powerful healing properties. Hermione had used dittany essence on Ron in Deathly Hallows after he'd been splinched. Good stuff.
Horklumps were... creatures? He had a vague image of fleshy pink mushroom-things that secreted fluid. Disgusting, but apparently useful for potions.
He set the book down and looked at the basket.
Several very ordinary, very grey, completely non-magical mushrooms stared back at him.
He took a deep breath and pulled out his wand.
This was stupid. He knew it was stupid. But his curiosity had been activated, and now he needed to see what would happen.
Even if nothing came of it, which was the most likely outcome, he would at least get some transfiguration practice. And if something strange did happen, that would be useful data to have.
He focused his attention on the mushrooms and visualized the transformation. What did horklumps look like exactly? They were pink and fleshy, vaguely mushroom-shaped, but more biological in appearance.
Close enough.
Lucien pointed his wand at the largest mushroom, concentrated on the mental image, and carefully pronounced the opening syllables of the transfiguration incantation.