Guitar Strings and Flower Petals

Blood Meal

"Alright - And what did you learn?"

"...To not throw glyphs into Abomination goo until I know what it does."

"...And not to encourage her to do that."

Clearing up huge piles of Abomination goo wasn't something that Willow was unused to doing. She had spent quite a long time in the Abomination Track before being moved to the Plant Track, and a lot of the lessons and experiments she had taken part in ended up in failure, leaving her with a huge mess to clean. Honestly, it was probably one of the worst parts of being on the Track.

After switching Tracks, a part of her had honestly expected those days to be behind her. If she could help it, she didn't even want to so much as touch another Abomination again for as long as she lived.

And yet, here she was, trying to scrub the remains of a particularly sticky, viscous, and obstinate Abomination from every corner of the Abomination Track's homeroom, using water, cleaning solvents, mops, whatever was to hand to try to coax the sludge to give in and allow itself to be cleaned up.

And while she tried to do that, the Track Professor berated Luz and Amity, not even ten feet from her.

"I'm glad to see that your common sense survived this fiasco." The Professor flatly stated, clearly not satisfied. "I wish you would think to use it more, though." He faced Luz. "Principle Bump informed me of your unique ways of doing Magic before you attended any of my classes. That is the only reason I've permitted you to get away with not actually creating any Abominations for my classes for so long. I had hoped that when you discovered a way to control them, that you would have had the foresight to figure out precisely what you were working with."

Luz chewed on her lip, and looked away.

The professor turned to Amity. "And I would have hoped that you, Ms. Blight, of all people, at least would have had the sense to not indulge her in this."

"I'm sorry, sir." Amity looked at the ground as she apologized. It was more a whisper than anything else.

Willow sighed. This had all seemed like a much, much better idea twenty minutes ago.

Everything about this situation had started while everyone was eating lunch - Luz and Amity had just had Abomination classes, and were talking about the projects that they had to complete for the Track. While Luz kept notes about the class, and the technical side of creating the Abominations, she didn't have any idea how to actually cast... Any sort of spell to let her control an Abomination. Without Magic, she had to rely purely on the mixture being perfect, but even then , she couldn't get the thing to form, or to rise at her command. And if she couldn't raise an Abomination, well, that was pretty much a dead-end for the Abomination Track.

When Amity asked to see what notes that Luz had made - suggesting that maybe there was an error in the amounts of material that she had used, or that she was using the wrong technique, or some other small mistake that could explain why she was having so much trouble - she discovered that there had been a glyph, made out of Abomination goo, that covered one of the pages, that had formed without Luz noticing.

In all their heads, that had to be the glyph that would allow Luz to control the husks, and with encouragement from Willow and Gus, and Amity's assistance in getting into the room and finding a vat of goo, Luz tried out her new spell.

Unfortunately, it had actually had the opposite effect of controlling Abominations - It just caused the things to go ballistic and attack people.

Luckily, everyone was able to use their Magic to destroy the rampaging thing, splatting it into a useless mess of sludge. The noise however, attracted the Track professor; and all he saw were four students, and his classroom absolutely coated in Abomination goo.