Not one for the tom-foolery, sorry. on Care of Magical Creatures

Professor Tallec

January 16, 2015 10:17 PM

Riddle me this... [Advanced Class] by Professor Tallec

It was Friday, and Richard was looking forward to the weekend. He would be turning 27 on Saturday. A birthday he was both dreading and looking forward to. He was at that age where going out to the bar was fun, but somewhat awkward due to being on the older end of the spectrum. Although he did enjoy the pub talk with strangers, he sometimes caught himself wishing he were closer to the other faculty at the school. When he heard a new professor was arriving this year to teach beginning DADA, Richard was secretly very excited. With so many similarities between their respective subjects, he hoped the new professor might share some similar interests with him. Unfortunately, Pye wasn't exactly the type of person Richard imagined him to be. From what Richard had heard about him over the past few weeks, they were completely different in both personality and teaching styles. It was one thing to be tough on the Advanced students, they were the ones that would be taking the CATs and RATs, but quizzes every class for the first and second year students? The idea didn’t settle well into Richards stomach. He made a mental note to make his first year lessons extra fun to compensate, but right now it was his Advanced students he needed to worry about.

“Good afternoon everyone,” he stated in a cheery tone as the class entered. In the front of the class was a levitating sheet hiding a large object. Richard smiled to himself as he was rather excited for today’s lesson. Once the class had arrived he waved his wand, shutting the door in an attempt to keep the cool air in the room. “Now I know it’s Friday and the last class of the day but if you could all stay focused for one more hour then you will be free to enjoy your weekends,” he said feeling slightly hypocritical when he had just been making mental plans only a moment before.

“Since we have been studying Sphinxes I think its time to put your knowledge to the test. So today we will be having a quiz. However,” he said pausing for effect, “I will not be the one quizzing you.” With a wave of his wand the sheet fell, revealing a 6-foot limestone Sphinx. It was seated on a small stone pedestal, moving its head from side to side as it eyed the class with her beautiful almond eyes. The statue had been given to him by a relative, and although he thought it was a little oversized for his home, it was a brilliant example of the power of charmwork, as well as the perfect 'person' to test his class' skills.

“She will give you 3 riddles. And in partners you must work together to solve them. Whichever team solves all the riddles first, or the most riddles by the end of class, will receive these,” he said pulling out two small Sneakoscopes from his pocket. “These little devices will light up, spin, and whistle if someone is doing something untrustworthy nearby,” very handy items for teenagers he suspected. “Now as you know, real Sphinxes will attack you if you answer the riddle wrong, and this statue is no different. However, since she’s attached to the pedestal her attacks should only have a range of a few feet or so,” he added nonchalantly. He trusted his Advanced students should be able to handle a statue, and in any case Medic Eir could probably patch them up if they didn’t get out of the way quick enough.

“All the more incentive to do your best at solving the puzzles,” he said as he headed to the board; chalk in hand, ready to scribe for the Sphinx. “You have the floor,” he said to the feline-like beast.

The Sphinx, whom had been brushing her face with her paw for the last several minutes, now peaked her head up. She looked to the classroom, her expression as cold as the stone she was made from. After a moment, she spoke in a clear elegant voice, “The first riddle will be:

Often talked of, never seen,
Ever coming, never been.
Daily looked for, never here,
Still approaching, coming near.
Thousands for my visit wait,
But alas, for their fate,
Though they expect me to appear,
They will never find me here.
What am I?

The second:

I sizzle like bacon,
I am made with an egg.
I have a good backbone,
but I lack a good leg.
I shed like onion,
but still remain whole.
I am long as a flagpole,
and fit in a hole.

And last:

I go up and I go down,
towards the sky and the ground.
I'm present and past tense too,
Let's go for a ride, me and you.”

After Richard finished writing the last riddle on the board, he released his class to begin their 'quiz'. The Sphinx, who looked rather pleased with herself, watched the students as they worked on her riddles, waiting patiently for the first pair to approach her.

OOC:

Creative, realistic posts are worth more points. If Richard is needed, please tag Professor Tallec in the subject line. Posting rules apply. Please add house after name.

Answers:
TBA

Permission from Pye's Author to address him.

Subthreads:

Not one for the tom-foolery, sorry. by Neeka Campbell with Charlie B-F-R, Teppenpaw, Neeka

OOC: Riddle Answers by Professor Tallec

0 Professor Tallec Riddle me this... [Advanced Class] 0 Professor Tallec 1 5

Neeka Campbell

January 18, 2015 4:39 PM

Not one for the tom-foolery, sorry. by Neeka Campbell

Neeka liked animals and whatever, but Care of Magical Creatures for her tended to be a bit of a drag. Sure it was fun on the occasions where species were actually brought in, but the rest of the time was kinda boring. She didn’t really care about the reproductive cycle of dragons or the flocking patterns of hippogriffs. And even worse than lecture-style learning were tests and quizzes, an inevitability in essentially any class but nonetheless atrocious in this setting.

The sphinx thing might have been cool if it had been an actual animal; the statue stand-in was, the Pecari thought, a lot less exciting. Maybe it was unsafe, but she kinda liked the danger involved in that kind of situation. She assumed the other Muggleborns and Halfbloods probably felt the same way, and if the poor little Pureblood kids couldn’t handle it, they were more than welcome to drop the class. A lot of them, she imagined, had by now anyway. Sometimes it got a bit dirty around here.

Apparently the statue would attack as a result of the wrong answer, a fact toward which Neeka felt rather apathetic. It had a short range, plus, what kind of real damage could a temporarily-animated inanimate object even do? It’d be like getting knocked over by some rocks: unpleasant but resulting in minimal damage, maybe a few scratches and bruises that would stand out on her paler classmates but essentially camouflage into her dark brown skin. And even present bruises would be boring. “I got hit by a living rock” wasn’t a very good story to tell.

It was in these thoughts Neeka was somewhat lost as the rock-cat-lady rattled off her riddles. Welp, that’s too bad, she thought with less emotion than the words implied. Professor Tallec had said to work in pairs, so she figured she could just rely on somebody else to have hopefully listened more intently.

Unlike the nervous Beginner’s tactic of “Do you want to work together?” being sputtered to a nearby individual, the seventeen year old glanced around, found somebody who looked like an Aladren (although she had no proof; they just seemed kinda smart-looking) and approached them. “Still looking for a partner?” she asked with moderate indifference.

12 Neeka Campbell Not one for the tom-foolery, sorry. 244 Neeka Campbell 0 5

Charlie B-F-R, Teppenpaw

February 08, 2015 4:21 AM

How about fooling around with Tom? by Charlie B-F-R, Teppenpaw

Charlie wasn’t totally sure what he wanted to do in the future… Fashion designer, fashion photographer, creator of a range of fabulous accessories… It was going to be something along those lines and, depending on which of them he pursued, the curriculum of Soora was going to be more or less useful. He had kept Charms on, because he could see the benefit of it in most lines of work that interested him, even though he would have to learn far more precise tailoring spells - still, he needed to keep his skills up to have the basework to build a specialisation on. Transfiguation was probably less useful but it might have its moments. Care of Magical Creatures he had kept on purely for the fun of it, and because three was a good number of classes to take.

The class today was one of those ones that was in a fuzzy area…. The stone sphinx was…. Charmed-or-Transfigured (he thought probably the latter as the thing she reminded him of most was chess pieces which counted as Transfigured for reasons that he still didn’t fully understand, in spite of the baffling homework they had been set on the matter - his best answer to the issue was still ‘because someone said so, that’s why’) and that was probably a whole interesting theory class just waiting to happen somewhere else along his way, and she was also kind of dangerous. He wasn’t sure he would want to care for one, so much as defend himself against it. However, he could get riddles and write enough about what Sphinxes were like to get him through these classes, so that was all that really mattered.

He quickly wrote the riddles down as she spoke, though it was hard to keep up and get the exact wording, which mattered very much for riddles, so he was glad that Professor Tallec was writing them up too. The first one was very familiar… Henny and Father loved riddles, and he was sure he had come across this one before…. Yes! He remembered, it was ‘tomorrow.’ He jotted this down in the margin. That was just memory though… He wasn’t sure he was good at actually working them out. He frowned over the second.

He was still doing this when someone approached him. Ordinarily, Charlie would not have been the kind to go to for academic help. Whilst he worked hard, he usually did in a cheery and carefree way, and he looked too well groomed to be taken overly seriously - the embellishments on the cuffs of his school robes were a clear sign of his frivolity. However, the riddles having captured his attention, perhaps his intent look of concentration gave him the appearance of someone who knew what he was doing.

“Sure,” he nodded, looking up and feeling a slight tightening of his stomach at the idea of partnering a girl. Neeka wasn’t a girl whom he’d paid much attention to thus far - she was older than him, so faded in and out of his classes, and was a different house. But now… The thought of talking to girls in general was tricky because he felt like they could automatically tell he might be thinking dirty things, if not about them specifically then about their sex. He turned his attention back to his work because looking her in the eye was difficult. He comforted himself with the fact that Neeka didn’t really know him. She probably had preconceptions of what he was like because everyone did about everyone else but she might be more easily convinced that she had been wrong than figuring that something was wrong with him, like the girls he knew were bound to do.

“I’ve got the first one already. I mean, I remember it from being told it before,” he added, not wanting to create a false impression of himself. Well, more of one that he had to… “But I haven’t got very far with the others yet,” he explained.

He pondered the second one, noting ‘bacon’ next to the first line. He had never forgotten the riddle that Dad had told him… ‘What walks like a cat, is soft like a cat, chases mice like a cat, mews like a cat but isn’t a cat?’ After letting him frustratedly search through every possibility, Dad had revealed the answer to be ‘a kitten.’ That was the trouble when Dad said riddles instead of Father - they were always something silly. He suspected the Sphinx was above such nonsense but you couldn’t be sure and he had never under-estimated the potential stupidity of riddles since. The first thing he thought of that sizzled like bacon was bacon. It didn’t really fit with the rest though.

“Any ideas?” he asked Neeka.

13 Charlie B-F-R, Teppenpaw How about fooling around with Tom? 252 Charlie B-F-R, Teppenpaw 0 5

Neeka

February 16, 2015 3:52 PM

Was that meant to sound suggestive? by Neeka

Generally, Neeka rather sucked at names. She felt pretty bad about it, actually, since these were all people she had been around for literal years now, but self-loathing aside, facts were facts. Aside from her roommates and most people named Brockert, whom she paid slight attention to partially because they were all somehow related to the Headmaster and partially because she envied them for having Lilac, Neeka only was ever initially able to piece together parts of someone’s named during an interaction. This boy, for example, she was pretty sure had a lot of last names. Charlie something-something-something. Warber-Jegger-Manjansin. Something.

Fortunately, Charlie already knew the first riddle. He didn’t favor her with the answer, but she didn’t really care. It wouldn’t matter who answered in the end, anyway. When he said he hadn’t gotten far on the others, however, she vaguely wished she had either picked a different partner or maybe at least, y’know, listened to the riddles when they were told. One or both of those options might have been helpful. Mostly the latter, since Charlie had done at least a third of the work already. She supposed having someone do all of it was asking a little much.

“Any ideas?”

The Pecari paused, feigning contemplation. “I’m not sure. The last one’s really tripping me up.” A lie, of course, since she had no more information about the second one than the third, but she assumed they would only get harder as the sphinx went on. Plus, being specific made it sound like she was trying.

It was only then that Neeka noticed that Professor Tallec had literally written the riddles on the board. Wow. Nice going there, Einstein, she accosted herself. All of this just-barely-above-indifference over not hearing the riddles--for nothing! She read them quickly to herself, skipping the first one since Charlie claimed to have the answer. And surprisingly, the second one kind of made sense to her. “Do you think the second one might be a snake or something? I mean, it might be a stretch to compare hissing to sizzling, but the rest seems to fit.”

0 Neeka Was that meant to sound suggestive? 0 Neeka 0 5

Professor Tallec

March 02, 2015 8:26 PM

OOC: Riddle Answers by Professor Tallec

First Riddle: Tomorrow

Second Riddle: A Snake

Third Riddle: A Seesaw

0 Professor Tallec OOC: Riddle Answers 0 Professor Tallec 0 5