Marsha was nervous.

She always was when it came to potions… because she WANTED to be good at it. She loved cooking and baking at home with her Mam, so she thought that that meant that she SHOULD be good at it now… but generally it didn’t work out that way. Magic made it different, new, unreliable and … well majorly unknown. However, so was every recipe she had tried making for the first time over the last few years. So, she tried to stay positive and decided that it simply meant that if she ever failed an exercise, she would ask the professor for time to retry it.

However, she wasn’t going to fail.

Okay. First things first, organise her ingredients and sort out her equipment just like she would do if she was cooking with Mam at home. She made sure that her ingredients were in a neat row and then she moved over to the washbasin at the back of the room to quickly clean all of her utensils and equipment. She knew that Cutty had helped her to scourgify her cauldron at the end of her last lesson but it never hurt to be careful. The twelve year old also really wished she could get some of their “simple” but often used spells down, it would make everything so much easier.

After she had washed everything, she filled her cauldron with water from the sink, and then returned to her desk. Aguamenti was another charm, along with scourgify that she was trying to perfect outside of class… She had managed a trickle of water, and one layer of dirt so far - and neither seemed helpful right now in class… However she would keep trying… she would get there.

Okay, now for the spell specific for this potion. Apto pressura. ”Apto pressura. Apto pressura. Apto pressura!” As she listened to the sounds around her, she smiled a little when she noted that she was saying it the same as everyone else which either meant that they were all right, or they were all wrong. Saying it again, for a fourth time she lowered her wand in a straight, vertical line over the cauldron as she did so.

Marsha was happy that one spell that she had managed to get going since she had started here, was incendio which she used to light a fire underneath her cauldron. As she dipped the end of her thermometer in her potion, she watched the water slowly heat to 100 degrees. A few weeks ago, the Professor had shown her how to control the temperature and it was slowly becoming more and more natural to use and perform. Hopefully everything else would follow suit.

98… 99… 100!