Right. With a nod, and a muttered, "Thanks, Sir." Dalton finally made his way back to his desk, adding the correct amount of red wine and the bat tongue to his perfectly measured out ingredients. Then, after another short stretch and a flexing of his fingers, he set about using his mortar and pestle to mash up the hairy fungus, before moving that into another bowl, casting "Scourgify" to make sure the equipment was clean before moving onto powdering the tortoise shell. Neither tasks of which took too much time due to the summer he'd spend at the gym, but he wasn't bragging about that, especially not how it helped his potion skills. Heh. The dicing and slicing took longer, however, as he was determined to get the pieces to as near perfect uniform as possible, and paused once to perform a sharpening charm on his knife.

A spell that he wasn't sure even helped that much. At least his potioneering skills were better than his charms ones, though.

"Scourgify," Dalton muttered again under his breath, this time with his wand aimed at his cauldron. After a quick inspection leaving him satisfied that it was clean, he pointed his wand at the base, lighting a low fire there, before slowly adding the wine and prune juice. Keeping his wand pointed at the flame in order to control the heat and not have the liquid warm too quickly or accidentally boil, he swapped the now empty bottles for his glass stirrer. As bubbles started to form, Dalton slowed his clockwise stirring and peered down at his textbook for the next instruction.

The hairy fungus was added in, with a short "Crap," under his breath as he read the word immediately. The slight pause could form cause for concern with the potion, and he grimaced slightly before continuing the clockwise stirring, timing ten minutes on his watch. Tongue stuck between his teeth in concentration, of course.

As the potion started to pale, his gaze on the clockface became more intense, in order that he should add the tortoise shell as accurately at ten minutes as possible, given that he'd already messed up timing slightly. Maybe if he'd been good at any other subject it wouldn't bother him so much, but seeing as he didn't count Muggle Studies, Potions was his only option at doing well. Doing well at anything, seemingly. After dropping the shell into the cauldron, Dalton switched hands with his stirrer, and timed another eight minutes, observing the colour change to cream. A creamy colour that he wasn't sure was completely accurate, but would have to do. He didn't have time to start over.

Eight minutes later, he extinguished the flame with a short wave of his wand and added the last of the ingredients. He always wondered what would happen if one used a spell to speed up the cooling of a potion, but wasn't going to try without guidance, and so made a note to look it up later. Instead, he just waited the next twenty minutes out with an increasingly bored expression on his face, before siphoning off some of the now-emerald liquid into a vial and stoppering it.