Professor Wright
October 22, 2017 11:54 AM
Fly away, Beginners (Beginners Charms). by Professor Wright
The Advanced classes were, in theory, the most challenging for everyone involved, but it was the Beginners who Gray used as his personal yardsticks for determining whether or not this teaching thing was actually something he was doing with a reasonable degree of competence. Last year, that had worked out okay for him, he guessed, but he’d only had any of his students for half a year. This would be his first full year, and as midterm drew closer, he was getting a tad nervous about the exams he himself had made up for them. What if last year, all everyone had learned, they had learned in the first part of the year, and now he was about to find out he was an abysmal failure?He tried not to think too much about this as he gathered the beginner classes for their last new unit before they got to those exams. “Hello, everyone,” he said. “I hope you’re all feeling healthy and awake today – “ he normally would have used more interesting ways to say that, but he had tried to purge his speeches for the Beginners of as much metaphor, simile, and colloquialism as possible for the benefit of the couple of students in the class who were learning English as they went along, not to mention any with other difficulties he wasn’t even aware of; grading student papers had given him all sorts of insight into how different other people’s understandings of the world could be, and he sort of regretted that it was unprofessional to regard students as humans and talk to them as such – “because today, we’re going to make objects fly.”
He waited for any murmurs over that to die down – it could be exciting, this, especially for the first years. “First years, you’re going to start small – levitating feathers. Your incantation is wingardium leviosa and your wand movement is a swish and flick.”
Gray demonstrated this, causing a feather to rise about five feet in the air in front of him. “Don’t worry if it takes you a few tries to get it to rise,” he encouraged them. “Remember that charming doesn’t change what an object is – you’re making it do something it’s not naturally supposed to do. A feather helps a bird fly, but it isn’t supposed to fly on its own, and you want it to hover – to be still in the air. You don’t want it to blow around on a current of air. That would be easier. I want everyone to practice the wand movement and incantation separately a few times before you start on the feather, too, so you don’t have any accidents.”
With the first years thus engaged, he turned to the second years. “Second years, you’re going to go a bit further into charms of motion,” he said. “Today, we’re going to start you on levitating multiple objects at one time. You’ll each have two rubber balls, and levitate them with a circular wand movement followed by a flick and spherae leviosa.
“Homework for everyone will just be to keep practicing these for today,” he added generously to the class. “You may begin.”
OOC: Welcome to Charms! All site rules (minimum word count 200 words, or about eight sentences, good spelling and grammar, no writing for each other’s characters without permission, keep it PG, and keep it realistic) need to be followed for points. Tag Gray in your post title if you need to ask him something in character and ask on the OOC board or in Chatzy (I’ll often be found there as Tatiana or Amelia) if you have any questions out of character. Have fun!
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Professor Wright
Fly away, Beginners (Beginners Charms).
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Jennifer White, Aladren
October 23, 2017 6:29 AM
Rogue Rubber Ball by Jennifer White, Aladren
While she could confess to being healthy and awake - and yup that ranked near the top of weirdest professor-to-student greetings she had encountered - Jen couldn’t admit to be interested. Some spells were obviously more useful than others (some transfigurations were just plain nonsense but Jen was assuming they helped develop useful skills or something, and that they weren’t being taught how to transfigure useful objects into far less useful objects just to entertain the professors and whatever board governed the school and its curriculum) and levitating was potentially useful, she guessed, but Jen could already do that. Now she needed to spend a whole class learning a new spell to levitate more than one thing at a time. That was kind of annoying. Why not just teach them that spell in the first place?She stared at the set of rubber balls on her desk. One was dark red, the other a sort of ugly, aquamarine. Both were well scuffed, and the second year could easily imagine they had existed longer than she had. They could be new and poorly looked after, she neither knew nor cared. She sighed, and ran a hand distractedly through her short, choppy, mousy-brown hair. Her thumbs were poking through the holes she had made for them in the sleeves of her lightweight black hoodie, plain except for the neon orange stitching around the hem and hood. Right, she was sitting in the class anyway, she might as well do the work. At least she wasn’t forced to work with a first year on this occasion. Jen didn’t think much of Professor Wright, but at least he let her work alone sometimes.
Jen picked up her wand and, with enormous effort, forced herself to sit up straight in her seat rather than slouching over her desk. She muttered the incantation to herself and practised the wand movement a couple of times, and was common practise for most students when they were learning a new spell. Then a rogue rubber ball bounced on the floor beside her, then up into the air, before arching again and falling into Jen’s lap. She looked down at the ball, then looked up to ascertain its owner. Picking the ball up with her left hand (her wand was still in her right), Jen held it up to the student looking in her direction. “This yours?”
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Jennifer White, Aladren
Rogue Rubber Ball
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Ivy Brockert, Teppenpaw
October 23, 2017 5:44 PM
A rouge rouge at that. by Ivy Brockert, Teppenpaw
Ivy was really excited to have Vlad and Peyton here at school with her though was a bit disappointed that the latter had been sorted into Crotalus. How nice it would have been for them to all be together. Plus, she was worried about Peyton feeling left out. Still, she was glad her cousin had made friends with her roommate.So overall things were going good. Last year, even though Ivy had initially been excited to go to Sonora, once she'd gotten here, she'd become homesick. Now that she had her brother and cousin with her, it was so much better. She no longer had to ever worry about loneliness and even though Ivy still missed her parents and Lavender, she felt more like she had some of home with her because of her two closest friends. True, she'd had a bunch of cousins with her last year, but most of them were much older and she'd never been as close to Natalie as she was to Peyton even though she'd never excluded the Pecari from anything.
And it wasn't as if school itself had been bad though Ivy wished she had more friends. She liked her classes especially Herbology and Transfiguration and really enjoyed orchestra.
Professor Wright began the lesson and at first, Ivy felt a bit disappointed. She had already mastered this last year. The Teppenpaw knew that the first years needed to learn it but she couldn't help but want very much to learn something new. Perhaps she was meant to help a first year. That would be nice.
Then Professor Wright went on to give the second years their task and Ivy began to feel excited. Learning to float multiple objects was quite useful like if one had a lot of stuff to carry. In fact, Ivy thought that might be the point of learning this spell to begin with. People didn't usually need to float a single feather. If they needed to transport a feather, they probably would just carry it, but it was a step towards having to carry something heavy. The second year loved this, how seemingly useless steps led to being able to do bigger and better things. Just the process of learning delighted her.
She received her balls, one of which was a neon orange and the other was a reddish purplish color. " Spherae leviosa." They both rose a little in the air, before the reddish purplish fell, rolled off her desk and started to bounce away. Ivy secured the orange ball with a quick charm so it didn't do the same and said "Stay" like one would a pet or a broom. Then the Teppenpaw gazed around for other ball spotting over on Jen's lap. She was about to go and get it when the other second year addressed her. Ivy nodded sheepishly and blushed. "Yes, sorry."
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Ivy Brockert, Teppenpaw
A rouge rouge at that.
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Jen White
October 31, 2017 4:42 PM
A rouge rogue or a rogue rouge? by Jen White
Ivy nodded, and blushed, and apologized, and Jen thought it was lucky the ball had only landed in her lap and not broken her nose or smashed her specs (neither likely, considering the balls were apparently quite bouncy but they didn't seem to be Bludger-hard or any other sort of dangerous), because her yearmate might have imploded from being flustered. If that was a thing. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, and threw the ball the short distance back to the other girl.Jen didn’t know Ivy well, but then she didn’t know anyone especially well, prone as she was to keeping to herself and preferring solitary pastimes. The other girl seemed quite nice for the most part: accommodating, without being that sort of pushy helpful that got in your face and made you feel awkward. She was also a Brockert, and there seemed to be a lot of them, and they were definitely part of this whole pureblood culture thing that Jen really just didn’t understand. Her Mom was a witch and who knew who her Dad was? So the whole patriarchy, heirs, betrothals deal didn’t make much sense to her. Not that she’d ever judge Ivy based on her name - unless it was something lame like Ryder Knight or weird like Strawberry Sunshine, which it wasn’t - but Jen was just mentally summing up all she knew about her. Maybe she played some sort of musical instrument or other? Jen liked music, just not playing it. She’d never bothered to learn.
“I guess there’s gonna be a lot more of that happening, with failed levitations and stuff,” she nodded, making one of the world’s worst efforts at awkward conversation. Jen didn't make a habit of starting conversations. Partly because she sucked at at, as she was clearly demonstrating right now. Partly because mostly she just didn’t want to talk to other people. Still, it was only second year, and Jen was stuck with all the people currently in the classroom for a while longer yet. Not all of them could be as evil as Cleo. It was probably safe getting to know Ivy a bit better.
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Jen White
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