Worrying. As usual. on Care of Magical Creatures

Professor Dakin

July 16, 2010 2:40 PM

Intermediate Lesson by Professor Dakin

Rowan was ecstatic for today’s lesson with her Intermediate Students. She had procured a bird that had been on the brink of extinction. Of course to get it for the lesson she had to go through a hundred different government channels. Though she felt it was well worth it to even see one was amazing. For the lesson though she was forced to do it indoors in case the small bird slipped away. She stood near the door ushering the students in quickly.

Once it seemed as if everyone was there she quickly shut the door and said. “Take your seats quickly; we have a lot to get through in a short amount of time.” Usually she would have greeted them in a friendly manner but today Rowan was just too excited about the lesson. Once everyone was settled she smiled at them.

“Today we are lucky enough to see a creature so rare there are severe penalties attached to capturing or owning one. It took me all year to get through all the paperwork, and there are two people here to observe this class. One is a government official Mr. Jullien Meadon, and the other is from the reservation this creature lives on, Miss. Lillian Melon. Please treat them with respect as you would any other adult.” She smiled and then tapped the board. The word Snidget appeared in big bold lettering.

“A Snidget is a small spherical bird that can fly with amazing agility. It can change it’s speed and direction without a moments notice.” She began and the students began to take notes. “They have golden feathers, and ruby eyes. Their eyes are one of the reasons the Snidget was hunted to almost extinction. The second reason is because during the early years of Quidditch the Snidget was used as the Golden Snitch. Sadly when they were caught they almost always died.” She paused and took a deep breath.

“Now they are a protected creature, and harming or even capturing one to keep as a pet will result in severe penalties. Snidgets now have about three reserves around the world, and of course the Golden Snitch was invented to replace the Snidget in Quidditch.” She paused and swallowed again. “Now before I let the two birds out, I must ask you to please to very careful if they land on you. They are fragile birds, and Jullien, Lillian, and I will be keeping a close eye on each and every one of you.” With that she nodded and waved her wand causing two birds to burst out of the cage.

OCC: You can have the birds land on you, just be very gentle with them! If you need me or one of the two adults please tag them!

Subthreads:

Worrying. As usual. by Edmond Carey with Marissa Stephenson

Playing princesses. by Alison Sinclair

0 Professor Dakin Intermediate Lesson 0 Professor Dakin 1 5

Edmond Carey

July 19, 2010 9:11 PM

Worrying. As usual. by Edmond Carey

Edmond had been mildly surprised to hear that Care of Magical Creatures class was going to be held indoors when the weather was not clearly too inclement to go outdoors, but he couldn’t say he was exactly sorry. He enjoyed spending time outside at home, and in the Gardens or on the Quidditch Pitch here, but it was not an appropriate setting for a regular class. Even the tutor who had taught him landscapes had only taken him and Jane outside a very little, confining most of their lessons to their schoolroom and having them do any sketching of the surrounding land on their own time and bring it in during his next visit. Being inside just promoted a more naturally academic frame of mind for him, while being outside was an invitation to let his attention wander to focus on what lovely foliage they were having this time of year.

Well, in a manner of speaking. They didn’t exactly have foliage here. The term ‘Gardens’ was a little misleading, when so much of it was pathways and clearings with fountains and benches that were created by neat patterns of evergreen shrubbery. It made looking for new things to write his herbology summaries on an interesting experience, and frequently a lengthy one; a few times, he had cheated and merely looked something up in the library, though he usually didn’t because it was dishonest and it was always good to get the air and exercise. Since leaving his living space meant walking straight into a library, he had developed an unfortunate tendency to spend far too much time seated behind a desk nearest to whatever subject caught his fancy on a given day.

The first thought he had upon noticing strangers was that they were there because of him for some reason, especially given how harried Professor Dakin had sounded, and his shoulders tensed defensively. Morgaine had muttered a little about how she was sure the school would not provide him with adequate security, citing that incident with the Spindlers a few years back as her evidence, but he hadn’t thought she would actually hire security guards. It was like taunting anyone who might want to kill or kidnap him, and worse, if anyone figured it out, then they would all start treating him differently, and most likely not in a positive way. It would be terrible.

Once the lecture began, though, it turned out that the new people were not there to protect him. They were there to protect the object of the lesson. Edmond blinked slightly, but otherwise kept from betraying his alarm as Professor Dakin opened up the cage.

He would not, of course, intentionally hurt the Snidgets, but….Well, the truth was that he was rather taller and stronger than had really dawned on him before he’d spent most of the holiday with his much older sister and noticed how tiny and, even more disturbingly, since one did not normally think of Morgaine Carey that way, physically fragile she was. While she could still turn him inside out with magic any time she chose without thinking about it too hard – the benefits of being an adult, with skills he only had a theoretical knowledge of developed practically to the point where she could make them look as easy as breathing – all he would have to do to beat her silly would be to act before she pulled a wand on him. If he acted quickly enough, he might even be able to take the wand away from her after she did, though he doubted it; she had been the one to point out to him, after all, that no one ever expected a physical assault or would know what to do with it once it happened if their wand was compromised. If he could do that to her on purpose, what could he do to the little bird by complete accident?

He was really beginning to agree with some of the less flattering opinions of Professor Dakin’s intellect. Hearing what had been done to Janey at the beginning of the year had made him most upset with his teacher, but at least the professor had been the only one in a position to face legal trouble if something went wrong that time. This time, he could get in trouble with the law. He could just imagine how the family would react to that….

Edmond was watching the birds closely, determined not to let it come to that, and so not paying as much attention to his surroundings as he should have done. It took him a moment to realize he’d been spoken to. “I beg your pardon?” he asked, only briefly removing his eyes from a Snidget that was getting relatively close.

0 Edmond Carey Worrying. As usual. 143 Edmond Carey 0 5

Marissa Stephenson

July 25, 2010 8:22 PM

I'm sure it's not so bad as all that. by Marissa Stephenson

Though she preferred it inside, for the simple reason that she was from Georgia and, for a lot of the year, Georgia was very hot, Marissa had been brought up doing enough outdoor activities around the year because of her parents’ focus on being well-rounded that she had never really found Care of Magical Creatures lessons to be all that much of a burden. Sometimes, when her other lessons were literally as well as idiomatically making her head ache, as they had taken to doing this year, she even enjoyed getting to spend an hour out in the air and move around and generally not think very much.

That didn’t seem to be on the agenda for today, though, because they were being taken into the building they used when either the weather went against them or when the creature in question was not something they wanted to get loose on the grounds. Since the sky was fine, Marissa was assuming it was for the latter reason that Professor Dakin was taking the lesson out of the great outdoors – or what passed for them, here. Most of the grounds, except for a corner she’d read about but had yet to reach, were carefully landscaped and maintained, and beyond them, there was nothing but desert, the most effective system she had yet seen to keep kids from trying to leave without permission or duck their exams.

She had spent her whole life wanting to go to school in New England, but over the past three years, Marissa had begun to develop an affection for Sonora – a bittersweet one, considering how much less successful her life here was than her life there almost certainly would have been, but an affection just the same. She had friends here, of a sort, and she thought that her professors liked her despite the frustrations her poor practical work perhaps caused them. She had learned a great deal about the culture of the magical world, too, though she imagined there was still a great deal she would need to know before she made any attempt to live as an adult in it.

Whether or not she would ever make that attempt was, of course, still very much something she was unsure about. Right now, she was studying magic during the day and Advanced Placement exam-prep books at night and leaving the decision up to Future Marissa. Current Marissa didn’t have the time or energy or even ability to deal with it yet.

Marissa took careful notes over Snidgets, glancing occasionally at the government people present for the lesson and nodding at points she remembered from Quidditch Through the Ages. She had read it to try to get some idea of what she was getting herself into when she joined the Quidditch team, and while she’d found the volume, overall, to be a disappointment, she had enjoyed getting to add a title she read so quickly to her list of read books for the year. Her parents never had to know that she’d been able to read it and another book in the same afternoon, since the lists weren’t dated, and they had been concerned with how few she’d finished last year. They didn’t understand that the amount of work she had to put into classes here was a major drain on time that would have otherwise been spent on enrichment, since their entire concept of her hinged on her being a good student and daughter as compared to Paige, who was also a very good student but who was often much more difficult and less willing to accept what she was handed without complaint.

She flinched slightly when the cages burst open, but then leaned back on her hands to watch the little birds fly around. The freedom the creatures for study were allowed had unnerved her in first year – in the Muggle world, anything involving animals also usually involved fences – but she had gotten used to it since then. Beside her, though, Edmond Carey seemed much less at ease.

“I don’t think they’re going to bite you,” she said lightly. Her days of seeing him and Cassie as real rivals had more or less ended with History of Magic, since that had definitely thrown the balance of classes in favor of ones where they could stomp her without even trying, but she had retained a certain good-natured respect that went with the former condition. When he asked her to repeat herself, she said, “I don’t think they’re dangerous or anything. The birds. You look really tense.”

16 Marissa Stephenson I'm sure it's not so bad as all that. 147 Marissa Stephenson 0 5

Alison Sinclair

July 25, 2010 8:30 PM

Playing princesses. by Alison Sinclair

She didn’t hurry – it was a private rule of hers never to hurry unless she or others appeared to be in immediate danger, which really didn’t seem to be the case here – but she did pick up her usually leisurely stroll a little at the urgency in Dakin’s voice as she ushered them all into what Alison had dubbed the bad-day building back in her first week at Sonora. Once inside, she began to reconsider her rationale for the name. It had originally been a reference to the way classes were only held there when the charms on the place gave them bad weather, but any lesson that involved extra adults on guard duty was bound to involve something unpleasant.

Alison had no philosophical objection to adults; she had been born to them, raised by them, and educated by one, and in little more than two years, she would be one because of the way her birthday fell relative to magical law. She did, however, consider their presence a nuisance in most cases and, more than ever since the one she’d always classed as a cool adult went AWOL on her, she usually didn’t trust them to be as into her best interests as they liked to say that they were. In her experience, everybody was usually in it for their own best interests, usually to the detriment of everyone else’s, and she couldn’t really see thirty-odd months doing a lot to change her opinion. She decided to find a seat well away from the newcomers.

Quidditch had never been a passion of hers, since she didn’t find sports to be very interesting in general, but Alison had read Quidditch Through the Ages for a society report and could remember the passages on the Golden Snidget well enough if she concentrated. It was fairly memorable stuff, though she had always been more interested in the fact that it was a woman running the government at that time than in the animal rights angle. It wasn’t that she didn’t care for the plight of the birds, because she’d found that as reprehensible as anyone else raised with standard values, but considering how far back most of magical America seemed to be, it was weird to think that there had essentially been a lady president in England in, if she remembered right, the Middle Ages.

It wasn’t quite as surprising as the professor letting out super-protected endangered birds in a room full of thirteen to fifteen year olds, though. Sonorans seemed to her to be an unusually well-behaved, sedate sort of people, but they did have some kids who would fit in okay in the Muggle school she vaguely remembered, and turning loose a parakeet there would have been a bad idea. One kid would have screamed and fainted and got their parents to sue, another would have done unpleasant things with excrement, and then there would always be the one who tried to kill the little thing for giggles. Something super-fragile and super-restricted seemed like a little disaster just waiting to happen.

Still, they were pretty, what little she could see of them. Dakin hadn’t been lying about them moving fast.

She held out a finger, more as a joke than anything else, and, to her surprise, one of the little birds landed on it. Great. Now she was a Disney Princess. Belle, maybe, though her hair and eyes were darker than Belle’s Technicolor dots, and her skin fairer by contrast than Belle’s was. Neither the peasant dress nor the Big Yellow Gown were happening, though, and no way was she doing a musical number about how misunderstood she felt and then developing Stockholm Syndrome because her kidnapper had a nice library.

“Nice birdie,” she said under her breath. “Good birdie. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Whether Birdie believed her or not, she didn’t know, but he quickly chose to fly away anyway. End the montage; she could get back to reality now. Though, to the people who’d made Beauty and the Beast, her reality would seem little more realistic. The Beast did have a certain resemblance to some of the weirder werewolf legends, though what she’d read about the real things suggested they bore no resemblance to either. “That was cool enough,” she remarked to the person sitting beside her.

16 Alison Sinclair Playing princesses. 140 Alison Sinclair 0 5