Oh goodie on Care of Magical Creatures

Professor Rory Taransay

August 27, 2018 3:08 PM

Presentation preparation [Advanced class] by Professor Rory Taransay

Rory looked up as the students filed in. He’d always enjoyed being the Care of Magical Creatures professor, based on the subject matter, but now he was glad of it for another reason: it meant that he wasn’t Tabitha, and so hadn’t had to teach the students about veela. He felt very sorry for Cleo, and hoped that the lack of Aladren students coming to him with questions or problems meant that there weren’t any, at least in the quarter of the student body for which he was responsible. However, one never knew what was around the corner.

Rory had found a somewhat renewed enthusiasm for being at Sonora after his conversation with Tabitha. He had to admit that he had been stagnating a bit recently, but the arrival of someone from his childhood had reminded him that he wasn’t that old, really, as well as bring back memories of being young and full of possibilities. It had given him cause to think about his future, about what he really wanted for life. This wasn't to say that he was planning on leaving Sonora, but his sister-in-law did perhaps have a point when she said that he needed to get out there more, meet somebody, and realise there was more to living than just teaching and his summer expeditions.

Some of the students in his advanced class would be sent out into the world in the not too distant future, with the opportunity to properly start living, and he was excited for them all to have the opportunity. He hoped that some of them would continue an interest in magical creatures - not that he was biased or anything! He also hoped that their lessons at Sonora provided them with more than just facts. Some would be going on to further study, and they would hopefully benefit from learning the analytical skills that would help them in that, and they would all hopefully find the knowledge useful for everyday life (or hopefully not, depending on the creature).

He liked to stretch his advanced classes more than the younger students, aiming to build on and use the knowledge they had of the creatures they’d studied.

After greeting his students, he outlined the task at hand.

“Today, I’d like you to work in pairs or threes. Your task is to pick a creature that we have studied over the years, and to outline a plan for how best to conserve the species. Think about things such as habitat - should it be kept in the wild, contained on a reserve, or kept on a much smaller scale -, where to source its food, the number of creatures to conserve, and the biggest threats to its continued existence.

“As ever, I have useful books up here at the front, and you can ask me questions if you are struggling. Your homework is to finish this task, as each pair or three will be presenting their plan next lesson.”

With that, he let them get on with it, wandering round the groups to listen to parts of their discussion and be on hand if needed.

OOC: Usual class rules apply, in that posts should be 200 words minimum and factors such as creativity, length, and realism will be taken into consideration when marking. Tag Professor Taransay in the subject if you wish to ask him a question. By advanced level they should have studied most, ifnot all, creatures, so go wild in your choices (although some may be more suited to the task than others)

Subthreads:

I can contribute colourful pens by Georgia Kirkly, Teppenpaw with Ben Pierce

Oh goodie by Angelique Brockert,Crotalus

9 Professor Rory Taransay Presentation preparation [Advanced class] 33 Professor Rory Taransay 1 5

Georgia Kirkly, Teppenpaw

September 15, 2018 8:58 AM

I can contribute colourful pens by Georgia Kirkly, Teppenpaw

Georgia had got through her CATS, somehow. Well, actually she knew exactly how. Zevalyn. Georgia was under no illusions that she herself was academically gifted, and even in basic skills like working out a revision plan for the exams and sticking to it, she had found herself woefully underprepared. The only thing she had really brought to the party was a love of stationery, including various coloured pens and sticky-notes with cute motifs, and regular chocolate breaks. She definitely reckoned the latter was a vital ingredient to success, and liked to feel that, in some small way, she had contributed to Zevalyn’s sanity, whilst her best friend had contributed in spade loads to her understanding of the course material. Somehow, Zevalyn had managed to stuff enough knowledge into her head that she had passed her exams, and she had managed to stuff enough chocolate into them that they’d both done it without going crazy (as far as she knew/could tell) and she had actually had something approaching choices, with a mixture of As and Es.

Care of Magical Creatures had always been one of her better subjects. She wasn’t sure she was naturally an animal person, not having grown up with any pets, but it is was usually pretty practical. Even the theory was more along the lines of ‘Here is how you would look after this thing if you had to keep it for more than one lesson/if it wasn’t so dangerous or rare that I can’t bring it to class’ compared to Transfiguration and its mind-bending theories of ‘Here is how reality is made of wibble.’ Writing basic, common sense usually got you credit in Professor Taransay’s class, in a way that it really didn’t with other subjects. Herbology was kind of good like that, only with fancier names for everything that made it hard to remember the details, and (usually) less responsive test subjects - if your care did not meet the needs of a particular creature, they tended to let you know about it, sharpish (sometimes with that being painfully literal), whereas plants just sort of started… drooping. And that either meant you had given them far too much water or nowhere near enough, and you just sort of had to guess which and try to make it better. Admittedly, it was the magical world, so some of the plants could get a bit sassy or pinchy if they didn’t like how you were handling them, but on the whole they were trickier to read than the animals.

Still, it seemed that even friendly and fluffy Care of Magical Creatures was making good on the threats that RATS were hard work, as their task this lesson was ‘work out how to conserve a species.’ That sounded hard. Wasn’t the whole point of why these things were dying out that they were… well, difficult to keep alive? She was pretty sure that actual professional grown ups spent years of their lives attempting and failing to address this question, and that it was not something that a room full of teenage witches and wizards were about to solve. Given that, she suspected the question was more ‘regurgitate some information you can find on other people’s efforts to conserve a species, and make it look pretty.’ That, she was more down with. There was the chance to do bubble writing and use her range of cool pens which, as noted, was pretty much what she had to offer in terms of contributions to anything academic. She just hoped that the ‘useful books’ Professor Taransay had mentioned were really, really useful, and not the kind that you had to do a lot of ploughing through to get the tiny grains of relevant info. As it was a RATS class, she kind of doubted her luck on that one. But trying to retain her sense of optimism… well, it was COMC theory. COMC theory was way less head hurty than most others, and it was pretty easy on the eyes too, in that when she couldn’t think what to write, she got to look at Professor Taransay. He was really hot, and the way he said ‘conservation’ made it sound kinda sexy, even if she suspected it was going to be really difficult.

She glanced around for potential partners, trying to think about whether she had any particular animals she would like to work on. When anyone said ‘think of a magical animal’ her brain still went straight to dragons and unicorns, in spite of the many things they had studied over the years that were a far cry from those. Those were two things she had grown up knowing about. A bit, kind of. She hadn't believed (past age… whatever) that they were real, and she suspected a lot of what she thought she knew about them was very wrong, but they had been part of her world. That was kind of interesting, wasn’t it? Maybe? In terms of like… conservation and having a place for magical animals, there was a need to make sure that place stayed secret. With dragons and unicorns, there had presumably been some degree of failure on that front. With dragons, it was kind of easy to see why. They weren’t subtle. Unicorns were meant to be shy though, and she wasn’t quite sure why, as someone growing up in the Muggle world, that knowledge was there. She thought she could fill up a decent sized space on a poster with rambling about how Muggles knew about unicorns or dragons, and outline it jauntily with a nice colourful border, and that made at least one section of a poster seem somewhat manageable. She glanced around for a suitable partner. Someone who was not going to recoil at the idea of talking about the Muggle world. Basically, it was the people who were willing, on a daily basis, to at least acknowledge her existence. By now, she had a good-ish idea of people who didn’t want to speak to her on account of being a chubby halfblood.

“Hi,” she said, approaching a classmate, “I was thinking of doing unicorns, or maybe dragons,” she was pretty sure that some of the boys would think that writing about unicorns was lame, “Like… a species that wizard kind has failed to keep secret, totally, from Muggles, cos that’s maybe relevant to like… how practical it is to keep these things?” it came out as a question because she wasn’t really sure, now that she was saying it out loud, that it was totally relevant. Secrecy and conservation were two different things. Maybe. “Are you interested at all?”

OOC - assuming that your character doesn’t routinely look at Georgia like she’s trash, you can probably reply to this post. If you are a PB who she has never had any real interactions with, maybe check with me in chatzy.

13 Georgia Kirkly, Teppenpaw I can contribute colourful pens 346 Georgia Kirkly, Teppenpaw 0 5

Angelique Brockert,Crotalus

September 23, 2018 7:29 PM

Oh goodie by Angelique Brockert,Crotalus

It was her last year at Sonora and Angelique couldn't wait to get out of here. Her entire childhood she'd thought that she was going to make wonderful friends, meet some terrific pureblood man, and be very popular. That didn't happen. Instead she got a year with a disproportionate number of jocks and just people that the Crotalus had zero in common with. The years below and above hers didn't really have the kind of people she was looking for either. She had wanted friends she could talk about fashion and do makeovers with, not people who wanted to toss a Quaffle around as that was something Angelique was not doing period. She'd have rather jumped into a pit of live snakes than played Quidditch. Besides, the other girls in her year had never seemed to want to include her or Tasha in their little clique anyway.

True, she all that she wanted outside of school. Outside there were people that were more interesting and more interested in her. The seventh year was friends with respectable pureblood girls who had feminine interests-in all honesty, Angelique would have taken a girly halfblood or muggleborn girl here at school, but apparently such things didn't exist-threw and attended fabulous lavish parties where she wore beautiful gowns and, more importantly, got to hobnob with people who made her feel like she belonged, and best of all, had the attention of one Devin Highmore, heir to the Highmore family. In addition to be fabulous looking, fabulously wealthy and of fabuously good breeding, he actually appreciated her. Which was the most fabulous thing of all.

Oh, Angelique had begged several times to change schools so she wouldn't be alone the vast majority of the year, but Father-who usually gave her whatever she wanted-had refused. Brockerts went to Sonora, period.

And now she was in Care of Magical Creatures, a class she wasn't that interested in, but had taken because it was recommended that she took three classes after CATS. Angelique hadn't wanted to take Defense because of the athletic components and Herbology, while perfectly respectable as there was nothing wrong with a young lady gardening, was too....dirty. Potions was just merely dull and besides, who wanted to handle things like bubotuber pus or bat spleens? That left Care of Magical Creatures for her final option.

So despite that fact that she wasn't interested in the slightest, and would rather give in to daydreams of Devin and freedom from schoolwork and just plain being around people she could relate to, an end to her lonliness and a culmination of all she'd ever wanted in her life, Angelique listened to Professor Taransay's assignment.

She tried not to wrinkle her nose as he mentioned partners or groups. The Crotalus was very social person but she very much doubted anyone was amenable to working with her or that she could work amenably with them. They'd surely want to do something very different than she would. Angelique wasn't on the same wavelength as her classmates and never had been.

11 Angelique Brockert,Crotalus Oh goodie 332 Angelique Brockert,Crotalus 0 5

Ben Pierce

October 04, 2018 12:42 PM

Yeah, Dragons! . . . and, uh, unicorns, too. by Ben Pierce

If Ben had to name a favorite class, it would be Care of Magical Creatures. It was interesting, it didn’t break his brain, and, by RATS level, dragons were on the curriculum. What wasn’t to like?

In all truth, there were really only two things stopping him from going to college to study dragon wrangling. The first was that he’d have to leave Boston, which he really didn’t want to do. His family and Tess’s were both there. The second was that his current Future Career Plan involved getting picked up by a professional Quidditch team, or maybe going into coaching. He honestly would have preferred baseball to Quidditch, but there were Dumb Rules against wizards playing muggle sports professionally. The International Statute of Secrecy sucked.

One thing he never considered doing was trying to conserve an entire species, but that seemed to be Professor Taransay’s plan for the Advanced class’s next presentation.

It seemed like a tall order to him, and he was trying to decide if any if Gramelia’s and Aunt Bel’s DISCUSS tactics would be valid for this, when Georgia approached and made her pitch. “I’m all over the dragons,” he agreed, thinking that their notoriety among muggles surely wasn’t doing dragons any favors. Of course, she had led with unicorns, and while those generally were not one of Ben’s favorite animals, he didn’t want to dismiss them entirely. “Or unicorns, I guess,” he offered gallantly, but the enthusiasm he’d shown over dragons clearly wasn’t there.

“But yeah, if a muggle sees one of those, they know what it is, they report it, obliviators come in, the dragon has to be relocated. . . and muggles are everywhere, and they all have cell phones to take pictures of anything unusual they see, and it’s just getting harder and harder to hide the big magical creatures. Though, at least, nobody’s hunting them with swords anymore, so that’s good.”

OOC: I’m assuming Ben doesn’t give Georgia a pureblood-to-be-avoided vibe given his ever present Boston Red Sox hats and the Boston Pierces being widely known as disowned muggle-loving liberal blood traitors.

1 Ben Pierce Yeah, Dragons! . . . and, uh, unicorns, too. 339 Ben Pierce 0 5