Tiger walked over to the drinks table, ignoring his fellow teenage party-goers who were socialising and desperately trying to get each other to eat or drink things which probably contained sleeping potions.

He was at the annual Spring Party, or at least the students’ version of it. Of course, this place being what it was, it wasn’t just a party; rather, it had been turned into a furious competition to see who could “poison” the most people with sleeping potions.

That, naturally, meant that Tiger was extremely cautious about what he ate or drank. He moved over to the nearest jug, containing some kind of pale reddish-pink juice, and carefully cast a basic potion-detecting charm over it.

He couldn’t sense any potions, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any: there were plenty of spells which could confuse a detection spell. So he closed his eyes and held one hand over the top of the jug, trying to sense the tiny disturbances in the air which were, to the trained senses, the unmistakable signs of magic.

He sensed nothing. There were, of course, still possible explanations for this, but at this stage the most likely was that the juice was actually just juice, so Tiger poured himself a glass of it.

The next stage in his plan was to cast a sensory charm which effectively let him see behind himself without turning around (glancing around to see if you were being watched automatically made you look suspicious).

He was relieved to find that he wasn’t, and so he took a vial of sleeping potion out of his pocket and dropped the contents into the juice. Finally, he cast a spell to prevent the potion from showing up under a basic detection spell.

That done, he wandered casually away and took a sip from his own glass, which he was about seventy-five percent certain didn’t contain potions.

He heard a slight commotion behind him and turned around to see what was going on: from what he could make out amongst the flail of limbs, Scarlet was trying to force-feed Robin a croissant.

“Um, Scarlet,” said Tiger, “you know you’re meant to be subtle about this, right?”

Scarlet disentangled herself from Robin and came up to Tiger. “Hey, Tiger,” she said, “would you like a croissant.”

“That depends on whether it’s poisoned or not.”

“It isn’t.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I can prove it,” she said, and cast a poison-detection charm on the croissant. “See? Not poisoned.”

“I still don’t believe you.” This conversation was rotting his brain. He turned and walked away, looking for a corner to skulk in or anywhere where he wouldn’t actually have to engage with anyone.