Amber’s Chaotic Crucible

You never know what a genius witch’s next potion will brew up, including herself.

Amber is both an unlucky and lucky soul, born into a Western fantasy world. Her mother is a legendary witch, and her father a master of potions. She inherited their supreme talents perfectly, then put them to use in all the wrong ways.

At three, she used her father’s herbs to brew a “pet communication potion” that made every dog in the family speak human for three minutes. The dogs spent the whole afternoon cursing out the neighbors.

At four, she practiced with her mother’s book of curses and made a cousin who had tried to mock her hiccup for three days straight, each hiccup producing an elvish swear word.

At five, her parents reached a consensus: this child had to go.

So they dumped her at a witches’ academy.

There’s the painfully diligent top student and roommate, Ellie, who’s always trying to format Amber’s life with a planner; the timid, shy mermaid songstress, Xi, who cowers in a corner and trembles whenever she watches Amber experiment; and the haughty summoner prodigy, Silas, who firmly believes Amber’s existence is an insult to the magical world, until one day her “love potion” backfires and he starts passionately confessing his love to his own summoned beast.

There are proper classes in potions, curses, divination, languages, and more, but every one of Amber’s assignments is a blind box containing either disaster or surprise.

Her potions always brew perfectly. Their effects, however, never appear on the recipe.

Want to make a cleaning solution? Congratulations, you’ve filled the classroom with rainbow bubbles and treated the teachers and students to a group costume change.

Want to make an energy potion? The unlucky student next door sprouts a whole flower field on their head, and bees chase them for three streets.

Want to make a love potion? Everyone starts playing Truth or Dare, and the headmistress’s secret first love is exposed on the spot.