Barnaby was having a wonderful day, as if he had taken a sip of Felix Felicis with his breakfast cereal.
Tonks' staff was successfully completed; perhaps it wasn't as perfect as his own, but it was more than enough for the occasional use the young witch intended, as she still preferred using her wand most of the time like the rest.
But the important thing was the time they spent together.
Later, he received a message from one of the creatures in the castle about how Mr. Flamel had come looking for Dumbledore with an unfriendly expression, demanding an explanation for where his beloved Philosopher's Stone had gone.
The scene of Dumbledore running through various hallways with his hands extended forward trying to explain himself, his beard swaying with his pace, while being chased by a red-faced Flamel riding an alchemical scooter and waving an alchemical flyswatter wildly was simply comical.
Oh, he made sure to stay far enough away to prevent Nicolas from sensing anything; after all, he was a quite distinguished alchemist. It was easy to have a small creature follow them secretly and later share the memory thread with him.
Not only that, upon his return, his father surprised him by bringing nothing less than a whole chicken coop.
He said he was nearby when a "huge muggle cart" (probably a truck from some farm, Barnaby deduced) overturned, and several poultry birds ran off at the first opportunity.
Although the muggle was unharmed and recovered most of them, it seems he couldn't find some of them and left with a resigned expression. Hagrid couldn't leave those birds alone, so he recovered them with the intention of taking care of them and having fresh eggs every morning.
Calcifer was equally enthusiastic about the idea.
Barnaby personally checked that all the hens and roosters were healthy, without injuries, diseases, or parasites.
Three of them had to be sacrificed and turned into stew due to having a broken leg and non-symmetrical feathers.
Once the rest received his seal of approval, he fixed the coop to keep the roosters separate from the hens.
After thinking it over, he also added a couple of predator-repelling enchantments like foxes or raptors, to prevent them from trying to eat the coop's inhabitants.
"Now that I think about it, we don't have bird feed," Barnaby realized while petting Fang. "No matter, I can ask for some cereal and vegetable scraps from the kitchens. There are also some wild edible medicinal herbs in the Forbidden Forest that I can collect to keep them healthy."
While bird feed was convenient, Barnaby believed the chickens preferred real food to be happy. And the happier and plumper they were, the better they would taste later.
His experience in handling chocobos came into play.
"I suppose we'll have to wait around two months to increase the population if I let the roosters 'dance' with the hens," he calculated carefully. "A chick weighs about fifty grams and after forty days, it will weigh around two and a half kilos, which is fifty times its weight."
Barnaby stretched that time to two months because his feeding, exercise, and selective growth would make the meat of better quality than average.
By the time he was done with them, the famous Bresse chicken would seem scrawny, dry, and tasteless in comparison!
Although if he wanted to have enough for all the Hogwarts students...
Just remembering Ron Weasley's table manners, Barnaby felt chills.
"Better settle for having some for ourselves..." he concluded, thinking about how voracious some growing students could be.
Sanshi raised an eyebrow in silence, was he referring to himself?
"Barnaby!" Hagrid pulled him out of his stupor by calling from the other side of the path. "Professor Sprout is looking for you, go to greenhouse number three!"
"Aunt Pomona? Understood, I'll go right away."
Barnaby gave one last look at the improvised coop and walked towards the castle.
"Why do you think she's looking for you?" Sanshi asked through their link.
"Maybe it's related to Pyocomon, no, now it would be Palmon," Barnaby guessed, not entirely sure. "Or maybe it has to do with the new batch of mandrakes."
The answer didn't take long to arrive.
"Barnaby!" a huge cactus with red boxing gloves greeted Barnaby from outside greenhouse number three.
"Looks like Palmon is now Togemon," Barnaby returned the wave while reminding himself to avoid hugs from her.
"Oh, thank Merlin's beard!" Professor Sprout sighed in relief upon seeing Barnaby arrive through the greenhouse door. "Sorry to bother you, but with the unexpected growth of Palm-"
"Now it's Togemon," the cactus politely corrected.
"Sorry," Sprout apologized with a smile. "With the recent growth of Togemon, she now has some..." she looked at the huge boxing gloves, "...difficulties helping me with the more delicate manual tasks."
Barnaby saw the prepared soil containers behind the herbology professor and some green, tender leaves that occasionally shook.
"So it's the new batch of mandrakes," Barnaby said more in affirmation than in question.
"Yes, I need to do the first transplant of the younger ones so they'll be ready for this year's lessons, but as you can see, there are too many for me to handle alone, and the best time to do it is today," Sprout explained with a worried expression.
"No problem," Barnaby nodded while with a wave of his staff, the gems in it momentarily lit up. "Silentium Protego."
Although with his bloodline an adult mandrake would only leave him or Sanshi slightly stunned, the sharp cries of the younger ones were still very irritating.
"This is definitely more comfortable than earmuffs," Sprout said to herself as she marveled at Barnaby's magic and they began to work without delay.
Due to the poor magical control of first-year students, she found herself needing to use large earmuffs to muffle the cries of the mandrakes during their lessons.
It wasn't that none of her students had the ability to cast simple magic like this; the problem was maintaining it consciously until her signal.