Testing, one, two, three...

Mika did give it some thought, all night in fact; and the following week. Nothing more was said about it for everyone thought it best to keep it quiet for now. Mika didn’t know if Dumbledore had been consulted yet or not. If he had, nothing had been said to her about it. She was hoping that it would be forgotten. The last thing she wanted was to cause more trouble or be accused by the Timelords once again for ‘interfering’. She didn’t have Qui Gon’s eloquence to defend her this time.

Instead Mika decided to submerge herself into her ‘research’. The next few days, aside from her lecture on Saturday afternoon, she spent in the TARDIS experimenting with the various substances that had been on the list of potion ingredients that Snape had sent to her. In spite of Hermione’s fears, Snape had given her an accurate list. She spent hours in her laboratory analyzing the various ingredients that Hermione and Lupin had managed to help her acquire. Hermione was not very happy that Mika had excluded her from this stage of the research, but she did have class work to think about!

Poor Lupin wasn’t any more enlightened as to what she was doing in her secret lab either. He hadn’t even been permitted in her TARDIS yet. Even Hermione had only seen it out of necessity when Mika went to retrieve the errant students who had accidentally on purpose transported themselves back in time [for which they received a right good rollicking too!]. The timelord just wanted to have something substantial to test before getting Lupin’s hopes up too much. Though that didn’t mean that he wasn’t an active part of her research. The poor professor must have given Mika a sample of every element of his person possible – blood, hair, skin, etc. [with maybe one exception!] – so that she could test the various compounds as she came up with them.

Alas, nothing seemed to work; not on the samples at any rate. The only other alternative was to test them on a fully transformed DADA teacher, but Mika didn’t have the heart to put him through that. She still had not witnessed his terrible monthly affliction in person; only heard about them and seen the gradual weakening that Lupin suffered every month after the full moon. But he said he didn’t mind if it meant the possibility of a cure; he even stopped taking his potion just in case. Mika had decided to hold out on that facet of her investigations until she was sure she had something concrete to test. But it wasn’t looking good.

Mika sighed and put aside the latest test tube full of green goo. She brushed aside the few strands of hair that had fallen into her eyes and sat down on a nearby stool. Head in her hands she pondered in her mind over what she had learned; which was basically that there was no cure. She had managed to produce a sort of compound that had the possibility of minimising the transformation. She only had to test it on Lupin himself. That meant waiting for the next full moon. And putting herself and everyone else at risk. Mika didn’t know if she could do that.