Severus Snape's patience had been ground down to dust during that silent clash of minds in the corridor. His footsteps on the dungeon flagstones rang out in a measured, oppressive rhythm; each tap of his heel carried the cool, metallic certainty of someone who keeps careful accounts. The bat-like black robes trailed a cold breath in his wake.
Since the hallway encounter, since the moment Alan Scott had, on the level of pure thought, outmaneuvered him with a logic he could not penetrate, something foul had been simmering in Snape's chest. It was not a passing irritation. It was a slow-burning, humiliating fire. Snape did not forget slights easily. Nor did he forgive them lightly. He had been waiting for an opening: a proper, sanctioned chance to return the insult and do so according to rule and craft.
Today, the chance had come.
Potions class.
His domain.
"Today we shall brew a Draught of Forgetfulness," Snape announced, his voice sliding along the dungeon walls like oil. Each syllable was soaked in impatience and disdain.
The students fell silent, bent over their texts, hands moving with the careful, clipped motions the recipe demanded. The cauldrons fanged at the cold copper, sending up a faint, bitter perfume of dried herbs and mineral dust. Everything proceeded, step by deliberate step, dull and unromantic.
Yet Snape's gaze traveled like a raptor, gliding over every bowed head until it found Alan. The boy worked with infuriating calm and absolute precision, as though he were executing a flawless program rather than mixing a complex potion.
A thin, cruel smile tugged the corner of Snape's mouth. He strode to Alan's bench and halted beside it.
"Scott," he said, in that deliberately slow, threatening tone. The room seemed to drop a degree in temperature.
Alan paused in his work, laid down the silver knife, and met Snape's black, contemptuous eyes without flinching.
"You consider yourself a 'logician,'" Snape emphasized the word with a disdain that cut air, "so I think a standard Forgetfulness Draught would be far too trivial for you."
His words drilled into the room; activity slowed as if everyone's motions had been put on ice.
"Therefore," Snape continued, the smile widening into a venomous curl, "your assignment is to brew a special Forgetfulness Draught. I require that, upon ingestion, the drinker precisely and only forget the knowledge of the Forgetfulness Draught itself, its recipe and all procedural associations. And yet, they must unmistakably remember, with absolute clarity, that they have just drunk a potion."
When the sentence landed, the dungeon dropped into a silence complete enough to be felt. Only the soft gurgle of simmering liquid broke the stillness.
Every student understood the implication. This was not a difficult brewing task. It was a maliciously conceived logical paradox: a closed circle with no resolution.
The basic mechanism of a Forgetfulness Draught is to erase from the drinker's memory all newly formed traces within a specified time window. To forget the recipe is to forget everything learned and done while brewing the potion, the steps, the ingredients, the very knowledge one used. But the memory that "I drank a potion to cause this forgetting" sits on the same chain. If you erase the recipe-memory, you will also have erased the memory of drinking the potion; but if you remember that you drank a potion, then the potion's standard effect has not fully taken hold, and thus the recipe-memory cannot have been entirely removed. It is the classic chicken-or-egg paradox dressed up in potions class.
Snape had created an impossible assignment, an unsolvable riddle wrapped in official instruction. He did not intend to test Alan's potion-making skill. He meant to watch this so-called "logician" crumble when faced with a paradox that could not be solved by logic alone.
But the panic Snape expected, the flustered confusion, the enraged helplessness, did not appear on Alan's face. The boy's expression remained an infuriating mask of calm. Behind his eyes, countless invisible data streams moved at a speed beyond ordinary comprehension, analyzing, breaking down, reconstructing.
In less than a second, Alan's Thinking Palace had generated a simple, direct, and devastatingly effective solution, one Snape could not have anticipated. He did not try to alter the potion itself. He did not attempt to hack memory formation through tweaks in ingredients or stirring patterns; Alan clearly judged that the problem was not in the "software" of the potion. Snape's assignment was a software-level paradox, and any attempt to solve it by altering the potion's internal logic was doomed.
The answer, therefore, had to come from outside the software.
Calmly, Alan resumed his precise motions: cut, grind, add, stir. Clockwise three times, counterclockwise once. Heat regulated without deviation. He brewed a textbook-perfect Forgetfulness Draught, clear, immaculate, unblemished, exactly by the book. To Snape, that composed diligence looked like defeat, like submission. His smirk grew.
When the class bell was about to ring, Alan siphoned the finished potion into a transparent crystal phial. The liquid shone pure and flawless in the dungeon light. By any practical standard, it was the perfect solution, exactly what the professor had requested.
He set the phial on the lectern with a small, clean sound, glass on wood, and Snape's victorious expression tightened. He was ready to announce Alan's failure and dock points with relish.
"No, Professor," Alan said, quietly and steadily. "I have completed the task."
Snape's brow arched in a line of sharp, dangerous curiosity.
Alan pointed, calm as a teacher indicating a theorem, to the cork of the phial. It was an ordinary stopper, until Snape squinted and moved closer to see the details. On the very top of the cork, adhered as small as a fingernail, was a folded scrap of parchment. Under normal light it was almost invisible; at certain angles the ink would gleam faintly.
Snape leaned in. His eyes narrowed; he could just make out a pattern on the tiny paper: a micro-rune packed with exquisite structural complexity, drawn in a silver ink that reflected only when seen at a precise tilt. The design possessed a cold, nontraditional aesthetic, more like an integrated circuit schematic than any rune he knew.
Alan spoke, explaining the "plug-in" he had written for the potion.
"The draught executes the standard 'forget newly formed memories' routine," he said. "But this rune, this tiny script on the cork, prepares the memory-stream before the potion takes effect. It extracts and locks the single concept 'I drank a Forgetfulness Draught' out of the set of memories about that time and sequesters it as an independent, immutable unit."
He used two words that snapped in Snape's mind: isolate and lock.
Alan continued with quiet precision: "Thus, when the potion erases the memories it is designed to remove, everything except that isolated and locked concept is swept away. Including, of course, the recipe for the draught itself."
A sudden constriction gripped Snape's pupils. The realization arrived like a cold, fast blade: Alan had not tried to defeat the system from within. He had created an external safeguard, an out-of-band solution: a preemptive operation performed on the memory stream before the potion's effect executed.
Where Snape set traps inside the potion's code, Alan had reached around the code altogether and placed a hardware-level lock on one specific thought. It was, in effect, a form of logical bypass; elegant, surgical, and utterly unforgiving.
Snape said nothing. He was left with a tightness in his gut and a sudden taste of uncertainty. The triumph he had anticipated curdled into a different, less satisfying sensation. The class, meanwhile, sat stunned; the carefully engineered prank of a professor had been met with a countermeasure so conceptually pure that it felt like witnessing a new species of magic.
Alan had solved the unsolvable by stepping outside the prescribed domain and writing a tiny "program plug-in" for reality itself.
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