It occurs to him, after breakfast once he’s walked all the way back down to his dungeon office, that he’s going to need more wormgrass for the lesson on stoneskin potions he’ll be conducting later. One of the perks of working in an academic environment (and the reason he applied for this job in the first place) is the vast array of resources available to him. One of the inconveniences is that he often needs to walk across the sprawling campus to obtain said resources. They really ought to institute a system, Droog thinks, wherein he can just place an order and have things delivered to his office without all the hassle and pained interactions. It’s not that he has anything specific against the Herbology professor, it’s more of a reluctance to waste both time and energy. And it does take a lot of energy, not the walking, but the interactions, putting the effort in to mimic typical conversational patterns and the array of facial expressions that accompany them, it’s tedious and in his last line of work he rarely had to bother with it. Of course in his last line of work he had been working nonstop to keep records clean and evidence buried, so in a way it’s probably a fair trade off. Probably, because there are certain aspects of it that he distinctly misses.



The air is not yet cold enough to produce that telltale puff of frosted breath as he sighs upon exiting the main building to make his way over to the greenhouses. It occurs to him, about a minute and a half too late, that his departure was poorly timed. It’s nothing quite as severe as having left a vital blind spot unguarded, but it is a mild inconvenience. In short, as he’s walking across the not yet ice streaked grounds of Hogwarts a bell chimes, signaling the end of first period.