Breaking physics on Charms

Professor Wright

August 15, 2018 4:30 PM

Time to extend your minds, Advanced class. by Professor Wright

Before he had come to work at Sonora, Gray had thought of his degree as useless to his real interests in life. It had simply been a thing he had acquired to please his parents, one fragment of the set of complex, unspoken bargains which formed the outlines of their relationship of mutual affection and just as mutual lack of understanding. When he had lost his network contract (something which still baffled and annoyed him – he had been head writer of two programs in his day, had won awards, even – what more could they have wanted, him to hand in scripts where he used his own blood as ink, and never mind that he did not think blood would really make a terribly good ink with all the clotting and attracting flies and whatnot?), he had more or less come to see his degree in a different light – as a symbol of failure. He had tried to prove that life needn’t be endless drudgery at make-work, had failed, and had ended up just like his father after all – nobody in particular, plodding along, first trying to play the private tutor and now the schoolmaster. Then last year had happened, when they had been under quarantine for what had seemed like forever –

Well, something had had to give, and he just counted himself lucky that it had not done so – badly. Instead, the quarantine – at least for those of them who had already been ill – had lifted before that, and then over the summer, being forced to write instead of being forced not to, he had been able to really think about what he did now. For one thing, school life had its own rhythms, its own symbology, and its own morals – both from the point of view of the teacher and the student. For another thing, there was his actual subject, which he of necessity knew better now than he probably had when he’d sat his exams in it. There were a wealth of ways in which theory could be mined for metaphor, and he had started working on one before the school year had begun – which had allowed it to flow freely into lesson planning, with lesson planning flowing back into the work, until, for the moment, he felt fairly balanced.

“Good afternoon,” he said to the Advanced class, just after two-fifteen on a Monday. He felt some sympathy for them – thought he would of necessity be at work for several hours more, holding office hours and marking papers, after the Advanced class left, this was his last structured class of the day, and it would be over at three. After that – well, it would be quite late before he could give himself up to whatever pursuit happened to catch his mind, but he could scratch a line here and there between actual work if he was careful, along with doing some staring off into space, unless it was truly a difficult day and fifteen people required help at once. “Welcome to your second week of Advanced Charms for this year.”

They had spent the first few days in hard but fairly mentally undemanding labor, mostly focused around getting a grip on basic non-verbal spellcasting. Now that he felt sure they were back on form, the real work was going to start.

“Generally, before now,” continued Gray, “Charms is a subject where you’ve dealt with material objects. You’ve mostly directly altered the features or function of things you could see and touch – we’re talking here about colors, sizes, position in space, density and weight. In Advanced Charms, thought, more and more of our focus is going to move to abstract objects. Anyone care to offer some hypotheses – or prior knowledge – about what that means?”

Gray took a few comments before taking the floor back. “Good, everyone, thank you,” he said. “The charms I’m talking about here are those which operate in increasingly invisible ways – at the highest level, or at least the highest level we’ll cover in this class – and will cover only in theory in this class – this involves spells like the Fidelius Charm and the binding spell for an Unbreakable Vow. Spells which are entirely based around an absence. A little more practical – something you may all encounter in your adult lives – are magically binding contracts. These interact in curious ways across time and space – any guesses what the common factor between them is?” He nodded when he got an answer. “Right, relationships,” he said. “The spell, for lack of a simpler term, knows the status of the relationship between persons in these advanced examples – one of the great debates in theoretical charms is if this magic comes from within persons or is an external tie around them. One thing almost everyone – “ there always had to be a dissenter in every field; Gray suspected some of them of doing it deliberately, Socrates-like, to keep everyone else honest – “agrees on, though, is that all charms are based on relationships of some kind.”

He waved his wand toward the blackboard and diagrams began to draw themselves. “The most ancient charms worked on the understanding that it was necessary to balance classical elements – balances of earth, water, fire, air. Alchemy – the Great Science – attempts to synthesize the core magical disciplines of Charms, Potions, and Transfiguration. The simplest levitation charm involves a balance of forces between the wizard, the earth, the object, and the air – if any of you pursue Charms further than your RATS, that will be one of the first things you study, actually, if things haven’t changed too much,” he said offhandedly. He had rather liked that, as he recalled – going back to the bottom, going higher by going deeper into what one already thought one knew. “Today, however, we’re going to begin our study with physical objects, with the undetectable extension charm.

“You all know how to enlarge or shrink an object to size,” he observed, “either through Charms or with some biological cases, potions. But in this spell, you make an object – essentially – larger on the inside. Sometimes impressively so.” Gray flicked his wand and levitated a small fabric box onto his desk. It was small enough to fit into one of his pockets. He opened it and began removing odds and ends: his teacher’s edition of the textbook, a cauldron, his lapdesk, and a lamp. All were visibly larger than the box; no one should have fit inside it, never mind all. “If I really wanted, I could fit that bookcase in here,” he informed them, pointing to a bookcase to indicate. “You won’t start out doing that. Instead, you’re just going to take little boxes like these and work your way up, by the end of the week at least, to putting your textbooks inside them.”

Having issued this challenge, he supposed he really ought to offer some pointers on how to get there. “The key understanding to start out with is that space and time are not, at this level, things you treat as separate things,” he instructed them. “Nor are they things that run in straight lines. The usual model…here we are.” He flicked his wand to light the candle which provided the light source for his projector and put up the first slide.

"This represents the movement of the Earth around the Sun throughout the year," he explained. "You see from the curving line connecting the Earth-dots how the Earth is moving through space-time. Now there, they're represented as points on an axis - a second model, maybe more helpful for what you're going to be doing, is this." He put up the next picture.

"Here, space-time is the grid, and it's distorted by massive bodies - here, that's being represented by those spheres," explained Gray. "Essentially, you're doing something similar, on a very small scale, inside your box." The theory could get much more complicated, but for the purposes of RATS and a first lesson, that would do. "The tricky part is simultaneously sustaining the shape of the box - managing the way gravity works on its exterior so that its interior can hold your textbook while the box maintains all its own properties - including how easy it is for you to move it right now - while the space within it is distorted to much larger dimensions.

"To cast it, you'll have a two-step process - two broad circles around the box, first clockwise and then counterclockwise, with your wand while you begin the incantation, forasiempra, and then a sharp flick and tap to the inside with your second half, intraugeundo. If it doesn't explode right away, you're doing well," he added cheerfully. "I'll be very surprised if everyone doesn't have at least one explosion - at least in terms of the exterior blowing apart, if not actual fire - or implosion or other disaster before you get the hang of it, which is why I don't recommend trying to put your book into it without flame-retardant charms and after you've already observed the box remain changed and stable for at least five minutes.

"For homework, you're going to read the next chapter of your textbook, which goes into more detail, and do the problems at the end of it - I warn you, there is math involved. And graphing. You can take some time to begin reading now if you prefer, or come get a box and start working on the practical lesson." One of the perks of the Advanced class was that they were supposed to take less direction from him by definition - though it was hardly restful today, when he was blithely asking them to almost certainly blow stuff up.

OOC: My thanks to the European Space Agency and the University of Pittsburgh for the images. My apologies to all of you (unless you like this sort of thing) for the images. If you, too, feel like diving into science and trying to incorporate it into your post, this is an excellent way to increase the number of points you receive, but the only rule is that all posts adhere to the site rules, as always. Have fun!

Subthreads:

Breaking physics by Jozua Sparks, Teppenpaw with Joe Umland, Teppenpaw

It works because it does by Kyte Collindale, Pecari with Zevalyn Ives, Aladren

Ew, physics by Arianna Tate, Crotalus with Georgia Kirkly, Teppenpaw

16 Professor Wright Time to extend your minds, Advanced class. 113 Professor Wright 1 5

Jozua Sparks, Teppenpaw

August 16, 2018 10:50 AM

Breaking physics by Jozua Sparks, Teppenpaw

As a general rule, Jozua liked charms. It wasn’t his favorite or best class and he’d only gotten an E on his CATS, which his mom had frowned at him about, but mostly Charms was a good solid reliable class. It wasn’t even a subject where he had caused much Sparks trouble unless the charm of the day had particularly large wand motions, because it was usually just too difficult to create fire without it looking either intentional or totally incompetent.

Apparently not so this lesson.

Jozua felt and saw more than one set of eyes turning toward him as explosions and fire were mentioned as a probable side effect of trying to mess with natural physics. He sat up straighter, kept his eyes focused on the professor, and pretended not to notice. He was a model student now. He hadn’t caused a problem in class since he was cured of last year’s plague. (Unless you counted that everyone else’s plague related class trouble was indirectly his fault since he brought the illness into the school, but those incidents weren’t something he was directly or obviously responsible for.)

Though if the professor ‘would be surprised if most of you didn’t have at least one explosion’ Jozua wasn’t sure where that left him. If he didn’t have one, now that he was trying to be good, would that be a red flag that all his other explosions were less than accidental? Did that mean he had to try to explode it? But if it was as hard as Professor Wright was suggesting, he might explode it honestly and if he tried to explode what was already going to explode, it would explode even worse and that would be and that certainly wouldn’t be safe. He’d always prided himself that he’d always had complete control over his disasters. It was why he had never seen anything wrong with what he was doing until he looked at it from an outside perspective last year, when people weren’t taking him seriously when he said his magic was out of control.

So basically his only real choice - he was Teppenpaw enough that he could not imagine ever putting his classmates in any kind of real risk - was to make an honest go at the charm and hope it either blew up on its own, or nobody read too much into his success if it didn’t burst into flames.

Or maybe he could just use a simple incendio to set it ablaze afterwards if it did work out without a natural mishap. They had been refreshing theirs skills on non verbal spells lately so he could probably do it discreetly enough. He just wasn’t sure if Wright would be able to identify the difference when he looked at the damage though. Maybe save that for the worst case scenario of people giving him actual suspicious looks when everything around him was on fire and he was a quiet desk of calm. Professor Wright would be far too busy at that point to bother trying to figure out whether Jozua’s ashes were consistent with the kinds of ashes he was expecting.

He supposed he ought to get on with it then. He started by putting everything flammable on his desk into his bag and casting a fire retardant charm on that. (He was really good at those; if the CATS had asked more questions about how to create or stop fire, he totally would have gotten an O.)

Step one: Two broad circles. Had he wanted to intentionally increase his chance of fire, he would make those extra broad - his wand was prone to volatility with large motions - so he was careful not to do that. He spoke the first word clearly, then gave a sharp (but not too sharp) flick, finishing the second half of the incantation as he tapped the inside of his box.

And . . . no boom. Not even a little smoke.

He stuck his finger into the box. It wasn’t a lot bigger on the inside than it had been, certainly not large enough to put his textbook in yet, but it was a little bigger. He could probably lay his quill in there now. So it had worked. He broke physics. And it hadn’t blown up or caught fire or anything.

Jozua wasn’t sure whether he ought to be proud of himself, terrified of discovery, or just plain disappointed that there was no boom.

He kinda missed the booms.

1 Jozua Sparks, Teppenpaw Breaking physics 348 Jozua Sparks, Teppenpaw 0 5

Joe Umland, Teppenpaw

August 20, 2018 11:56 AM

Breaking physics may break my brain. by Joe Umland, Teppenpaw

I am a bad friend, thought Joe, mere seconds after Professor Wright mentioned that fire was a decidedly likely outcome of their early attempts at undetectable extension charms.

This was not a thought Joe had entertained before, at least not consciously, but as soon as it occurred to him in this context, he was forced to accept it for the unpalatable truth it clearly was. What else, after all, could one really say about hearing that fire was a likelihood and automatically glancing in the direction of probably one’s best friend at Sonora? That was not good friend behavior. Even if it was sort of justified. He looked away guiltily and back at his notes.

The lesson itself did not promise especially good things for his self-esteem, either. He was good with a wand, and even decent-ish with theory, of the sort that involved Latin grammar – there had, after all, been some practical aspects to having been given at least the first six years of a classical education at home before he had arrived at Sonora, however pointless and dry the daily lessons in Latin might have seemed at the time. He could spin out as good a paragraph as anyone about how the precise declensions involved implied this or that about the theory of how they used magic which was relevant to the spell in question. When it came to not only making things do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do but outright breaking the normal arrangement of reality, he – well, he had no objection to it, of course, but thinking about how it worked sort of made his head hurt.

Right. Gravity. Gravity was a force – the weakest of the Big Important ones, really, but it had the odd property of always being an attractive force. Space and time were…he was sure this had something to do with things which were simultaneously both a wave and a particle. The way Professor Wright had talked about bending them made him think that thinking of them as though they were matter might be helpful, though this led him to think about anti-time and anti-space and what in the heck those would be, as there was such a thing as anti-matter. From his religious and philosophical background, it made sense enough - he had been accustomed to think of time as a medium where a prayer said on a given day could be tied to the beginning of weather patterns leading to the prayed-for weather even if those beginnings were a million years prior – but there was outside of space and time and then there was the obliteration of space and time and the production of….

He didn’t even know what. He knew that matter and energy had some weird equivalence as a consequence of how matter could be neither created nor destroyed, that breaking it up somehow – setting it on fire, for instance, or he supposed the big flash of light if you shook hands with your anti-self – released energy, but he principally remembered these things in terms of Mom sitting around the living room with her more advanced pupils debating whether the matter/energy thing led to the invalidation of the idea of haecceity. Joe had not been old enough to participate in those conversations – Mom had largely stopped teaching by the time he was.

He could understand, however, that gravity was what held particles together, trying to force the box to keep its shape and internal dimensions. Magic was trying to force the inside to…bend while the outside remained the same. If space was an object, then he supposed he could think of it as a separate object from the box? That made sense. Sort of. So he was multiplying space (this consistent with the idea of an expanding universe, he guessed) but the process of multiplying by division would exert force or energy of some kind, and this would cause an explosion if it interacted too violently with the gravity exerting force on the object surrounding the space-object – specifically, the inside of the box – he was working with. Space was a thing, but a thing defined by its relation to something else, which he was pretty sure was a violation of haecceity but he wasn’t that good with abstract metaphysics and those weren’t the topic of the moment anyway.

He started to open his textbook to see if it could validate any of his thoughts before he tried this, but saw Jozua casting a spell and immediately shoved his book back inside his desk as a precautionary measure…a measure which proved unnecessary, as nothing exploded.

“Any luck?” he asked his friend.

16 Joe Umland, Teppenpaw Breaking physics may break my brain. 329 Joe Umland, Teppenpaw 0 5

Kyte Collindale, Pecari

September 01, 2018 8:34 PM

It works because it does by Kyte Collindale, Pecari

Kyte initially thought he had made a mistake when he sat down in Charms and Professor Wright started talking, and then just kept talking, and talked some more and then there were even slides. It definitely seemed like he had stumbled into a theory class by mistake, and he wasn’t supposed to take those. They had all agreed that there was no point in him taking those. The teachers may as well have been speaking a foreign language, and his attempts to write answers to the questions they posed just hurt everybody. They definitely hurt his brain, and judging by some of the angriness of the red ink captions he’d gotten on his way to fifth year, they hurt his teachers too. Professor Nash in particular looked particularly upset every time Kyte handed in any form of written work, like he was questioning the whole worth of having set it. It had almost become like a fun challenge to see how many times he could make the man write ‘No!’ on his homework. His record was twenty-seven, which included a straight three steak with exclamation marks of ‘No no NO!!!’ when he had mentioned the role of crystal healing in treating lycanthropy. He also hadn’t passed the theory part of his CATS, so there was definitely no point trying to teach him RATS level material. Given that this reduced the number of classes he had to take dramatically, he actually had paid more attention to the class syllabus than ever before, and was actually pretty attentive to his schedule, because just… the risk of being exposed to advanced theory was not one he was willing to take. He was much more likely to make the mistake in the other direction, and accidentally skip a practical lesson. He was pretty handy with a wand though, and if he scraped together enough practical classes, he would be given some sort of official piece of paper that said he had technically completed high school. Which was pretty crazy. Before him and Raine, no one in their family had sat a national exam, much less passed one (or even two, as Raine had done with her CATS) and now they might both technically graduate high school. That was like… kind of a big deal. Even though it still seemed all sort of pointless.

Case in point, when Professor Wright eventually finished talking, it turned out they were doing undetectable extension charms. That didn’t seem like such a big deal that needed like… a marathon lecture. His family travelled. They lived in tents and out of bags. They cooked meals for a crazy extended family in a single skillet over a fire. Kyte was more confused when he found any kind of object that wasn’t bigger on the inside than the outside. And his family definitely didn’t know any of the things Professor Wright had just said. He could have learnt just as fancy magic at home on the road, only without the snoresome lecture to proceed it. The only benefits to the slides had been that the second one was kind of trippy - like if you unfocussed your eyes on purpose it went kinda swirly.

He took the box that was offered. He reviewed the notes on the spell - by which he meant the wand movement and the incantation, none of that fancy stuff - and gave it a whirl.

It was quite possibly one of the strangest examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect at work. In spite of having just sat through a lecture on physics which had not understood a single word of, Kyte remained entirely ignorant of just how little he knew. He knew that Professor Wright had just said a bunch of stuff that he didn’t get, but he really did not believe it be actual worthwhile knowledge that was necessary to perform the spell, seeing as his family did it all the time. As far as he was concerned, it worked because it did, because it was magic. And this was where the psychology interacted in interested ways with magic. Because self-belief was a large proportion of what made a spell work. Knowing the minutest amount about physics would probably be someone’s undoing on this task. Any level of physics knowledge higher than zero but less than full understanding was probably going to trip up his classmates. Kyte knew precisely and perfectly nothing about the science, but did know that objects were frequently (in fact, almost always, in his experience) bigger on the inside.

He opened his box and stuck his fist inside.

“This is fun,” he grinned at his neighbour.

13 Kyte Collindale, Pecari It works because it does 335 Kyte Collindale, Pecari 0 5

Zevalyn Ives, Aladren

September 12, 2018 10:25 AM

Re: It works because it does by Zevalyn Ives, Aladren

Given that she had made it through muggle middle school and therefore actually had a solid background in science, Zevalyn felt she had a better chance of understanding Professor Wright than most of her Sonora peers did. Which, mostly, she did. There were a couple spots where her understanding went a little bit wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey, but since they were basically being tasked with recreating the inside of the TARDIS, that seemed more or less unavoidable.

She took careful notes, including some tangential questions she was going to have to consult actual physics books to answer, then pulled out her wand to attempt the charm. Now that she was seventeen, she could do magic at home, and she was really looking forward to showing off this one to her parents. *See? It’s bigger on the inside! Do you think TimeLords were wizards?*

Actually, she was really looking forward to going home for midterm this year. Not only would it be the first time she got to be home for the holiday since she started at Sonora, but there were so many things she could show Mom and Dad now that she was legally of age in the wizarding world.

But first she needed to practice it here to get it right. Professor Wright made it sound very difficult, but Kyte Collindale was sitting in the seat next to hers, and he had already done it. So it couldn’t be that hard, could it?

“It is cool,” she agreed with him when he declared it was fun. “Let me try.”

She visualized the TARDIS, specifically one of those scenes where an Earthling saw the inside for the first time and was freaked out by the disparity between its relatively small outside and its huge inside, then cast the spell at her box. (Which was just an ordinary box. Not really like the TARDIS at all.)

She moved her wand in two broad circles around the box, first clockwise and then counterclockwise, her doubts about the physics of this pushing at the edges of her consciousness as she did so. She began the incantation, “Forasiempra,” followed by a sharp flick and tap to the inside her box as she said, “intraugeundo.” Meanwhile, her brain was wondering, *If this works, won’t there be an awful lot of friction and heat generated as reality expands and pushes against the current reality?*

Then, just after the incantation finished, she shrieked and pushed her chair backwards as her box burst into flames.

1 Zevalyn Ives, Aladren Re: It works because it does 380 Zevalyn Ives, Aladren 0 5

Arianna Tate, Crotalus

September 20, 2018 7:51 PM

Ew, physics by Arianna Tate, Crotalus

It was her sixth year and Arianna was hopeful regarding Advanced classes. Even though they were more difficult and likely to be composed of a lot of boring theory-which she expected to be able to be understand if she could manage to pay attention to it and not let her mind wander to more interesting things such as clothing, make-up, parties and suitable men to marry-they would also be learning more advanced spells that were more interesting and impressive to know.

So,Arianna took a seat in Charms, sitting in the middle of the room. As much as she liked to be seen, the front was for suck-up Aladrens-the kind her mother wasn't- and the back was for idiot Pecaris-the kind her brother was.

The lecture started okay, but quickly devolved and Arianna couldn't help but sneer a little. Physics? Ugh no. Absolutely not. Learning about boring things-which was par for the course in any class she was going to take and would put up with for the sake of saying she'd finished school-or Muggle things-such as listening to Jasmine talk about Disney-was one thing, listening to a professor discuss boring Muggle things was quite another.

Why Professor Wright even bothered knowing about those things himself puzzled Arianna, as he wasn't Muggleborn anyway. Then again he was the nerdy sort of Aladren. Which was admittedly most of them. She felt a surge of sympthy for her mother having been around the sort on a regular basis-she'd alway rather thought Mother and Uncle Adam should have switched houses-and moreover, that Professor Wright had beaten Mother out for prefect.

The latter was something Arianna still had difficulty fathoming. Having had him for professor and knowing her mother, she was certain Mother had been badly slighted. She had assumed this before having met Professor Wright of course, but now knowing him, she had no idea what the staff in those days had been thinking. Mother was a billion times more impressive. She could only figure that back when they been in school, that the staff had been biased against important purebloods. Thank Merlin that had changed. Arianna was prefect, Angelique was prefect and-unsurprisingly-Emerald was prefect.

Eventually, Professor Wright got to the bloody point of it all, which was making something bigger on the inside and the incantation and movements to go with it. Why did they have to suffer through that long lecture on something so mind numbingly dull and unimportant? The homework didn't thrill her either and she wrinkled her nose in distaste.

Arianna received her box and got out her wand. The she did as instructed, feeling slightly miffed at Professor Wright's comment that disaster would strike them when they did this spell, even though the comment was likely intended to make them feel better if they weren't successful. She was not going to blow things up, she was not Jozua Sparks or some stupid Pecari. How insulting!

Not that she got the spell perfect by a long shot, but there was no implosion yet and most certainly no explosion . Her box wiggled slightly and when she placed her hand inside, one side seemed small bit bigger. Unfortunately it didn't last long before retracting again so she pulled her hand out quickly but still, no explosions.

OOC-Knowledge of Jasmine's interest in Disney double checked with her author

11 Arianna Tate, Crotalus Ew, physics 353 Arianna Tate, Crotalus 0 5

Kyte

September 30, 2018 5:57 AM

Zzzzzzeeevvvvvalyn by Kyte

OOC - Professor Wright’s part supplied by his author.

“Nice!” Kyte beamed, with genuine enthusiasm when Zevalyn’s box burst into flames. He didn’t have much time to enjoy it though, as Zevalyn’s shriek meant that, within seconds, Professor Wright had swept over and extinguished the box. Having confirmed Zevalyn was all right and provided her with a new box, he left again. Kyte gave a disappointed sigh. The teachers were no fun. Zevalyn’s firebox hadn’t been hurting anyone.

“D’you reckon you can do that again? I love when stuff catches on fire,” Kyte informed her. “Or explodes,” he added, glancing around with anticipation at Jozua, who was usually pretty good for that kind of thing. He had taken in enough of the lesson to process the fact that explosions were pretty likely, which had sounded like a plus point to him. Kyte gave a slight sigh on noticing that the other boy’s box was still whole. “Aww, no fun,” he mumbled.

He returned his attention to the person next to him. He hadn’t ever given Zevalyn a whole lot of thought before, other than the default imagining what she might look like with fewer clothes, which he gave to almost all his classmates. He guessed she ranked quite high up that list, although those positionings were apt to change based on who was in closest proximity. There were a lot of really attractive people at Sonora. Zevalyn was also a cool name.

“Zevalyn’s a cool name,” he informed her, having strayed out of nudity thoughts (which he’d learnt it was best to keep to himself) and back into things that he could say out loud to other people. “Zevalyn. It’s fun to say too,” he realised. He hadn’t really had much cause to say her name before, but it really was “Zevalyn,” he said again, “Zzevvalyn. It’s kinda buzzy. Zzzzevvvalyn. Zevalyn,” he continued repeating her name, drawing out the consonants to differing lengths and enjoying how they sounded and felt. .

13 Kyte Zzzzzzeeevvvvvalyn 335 Kyte 0 5

Georgia Kirkly, Teppenpaw

October 01, 2018 7:34 AM

Wow, we actually have something in common by Georgia Kirkly, Teppenpaw

Charms would be fun, she had told herself. Charms would be easy. Well, okay, she hadn’t honestly expected any advanced classes to be easy, but compared to some of the others, it was meant to be easier, wasn’t it? She supposed she couldn’t compare to Transfiguration because she wasn’t taking it, but she couldn’t imagine how mind bendingly awful it was if it was harder than this. It was off to a pretty bad start when Professor Wright used the phrase ‘abstract objects.’ Because unless he meant those swirly paintings that it looked like a two year old could have done, but which were apparently really deep, meaningful and valuable Art (and she had a feeling he didn’t), then she had no idea what he might mean. She wasn’t much the wiser after he talked about Fidelius Charms and Unbreakable Vows. Was she meant to know what those were? She had done the reading. Kinda. She’d sort of read through the chapters over breakfast. But it wasn’t like she memorised every detail because who could? Was that the level expected now - to come to class just knowing the entire textbook? Was nothing going to be actually explained? There had been something about making people unable to tell your secrets, which had seemed kinda cool, but she hadn’t really understood it and also there had been pancakes, and those were distracting. The main point of the lesson seemed to be… relationships? Or something. Charms was now about relationships. She had thought it was about movement and making things shiny. She had liked it when it had been about those things. Sparkly, tap dancing pineapples had, admittedly, seemed a bit pointless, but at least she’d been able to do them.

Then he started talking about elements, and it sounded like he said that after RATS, you started studying how things fly again. She wondered whether that was because RATS broke most people’s brains and turned them into quivering heaps who had to start again from scratch. Probably not. He was probably saying something else entirely and she was missing the point but it didn’t actually feel like her theory was that implausible right now.

The demonstration was about the only bit that made sense to her, as Professor Wright started pulling all manner of things out of a tiny box on his desk. Sure, that should not have been able to happen logically, but she had long ago given up assuming that logic and magic had any kind of relationship. Of course you could fit a bookcase in a box that looked like it was designed more for a piece of jewellery. Why wouldn’t you be able to? she thought, almost irritably. But the fact that he had stopped talking and was just showing what he meant made it much easier to understand. However, once Professor Wright had finished going all Mary Poppins on them, the lesson devolved back to rambling again. Only this time there were slides. Slides with graphs, and diagrams, and all Georgia was getting from it was that everything went wibbly wobbly woo. She bet Zevalyn got it. She was simultaneously really glad to have her as a best friend, because Georgia was pretty sure she would not survive this otherwise, and also really not looking forward to the point where Zev tried to explain all this to her and she had to feel stupid and refrain from saying that she thought science was stupid because she knew that would hurt Zev’s feelings, and only make Georgia feel even stupider, and the whole thing just had ‘headache’ written all over it. There was even the dire warning that the homework would contain math. The only glimmer of decency in the whole thing was that Professor Wright understood that required warning them, but that did little to redeem him or the general situation. Part of the best bit about finding out she was a witch was that it had seemed to promise no more math, only people kept finding ways to slip it in.

As the little boxes were passed around, the question at the front of her mind was Do I really have to do this? RATS were overall just seeming like a lot more trouble than they were worth at this point. Sure, magic was handy sometimes, and she really didn’t think she’d want to go back to living without it - accio was the greatest thing ever, and she couldn’t wait to be of age and be able to use it all the time, because actually getting up to get things was for chumps. But this… If it was a choice between math and just having to have all her objects a sensible size on the inside forever, Georgia knew which one she’d choose. She wasn’t even that sold on it as a good idea. There had been a bit about making extendo purses in the textbook. That bit had stuck because it had sounded kinda useful but also kinda problematic. She already had enough trouble with her schoolbag ending up full of broken quill pieces and gum wrappers and notes that she was totally going to put into a proper filing system at some point, and other assorted detritus that made finding what she actually needed kinda hard. If she had the capacity to make her schoolbag bigger on the inside, she wasn’t sure she’d ever find anything. At least with its current, finite capacity, she was at some point forced to deal with all the kibble and reclaim enough space for her textbooks to fit in. How many gum wrappers would you end up with in an infinite bag? It sounded like one of those bullcrap maths questions… Georgia chews on average two bits of gum a day, but more when Professors make her head hurt. At RATS level, they do this on average three times a week more often than they did at CATS level, where the number of headaches was the same as the amount of pustules on the average Bubotuber. At the same time, another train leaves a station on the opposite side of the country. Assuming that the capacity of her bag can be represented by the letter X before the spell is cast and by the letter Y after it, then how badly does she want to stab Professor Wright with a quill?

Actually, she thought she knew the answer to that one…

She turned to the little box in front of her, which she had basically been told she was almost guaranteed to blow up. That wasn’t a comforting thought. She was perfectly willing to accept that ‘just cos magic’ was a valid reason for this, but apparently that didn’t fly any more and there was this whole branch of magic-math-physics crap that she was going to have to understand, and that she was definitely not going to understand any time soon, probably ever, and yet here she was being expected to try doing the spell. Without much hope, and with the almost certainty of causing an explosion at the forefront of her mind, she traced her wand around the box, muttering the incantation. No sooner had her wand completed the final motion of tapping the thing in the middle, than the box gave an angry bang, each side shooting across the desk in a different direction as it fell apart, the pieces smoking slightly.

“Uh… sorry,” she apologised, reaching out to retrieve the part that had invaded her neighbour’s desk area, and realising uneasily that it was Arianna Tate. Arianna was one of Those Girls, the kind who was skinny and from an old Pureblood family and who somehow managed to even have expensive looking hair. Georgia was not sure how that was possible but she was convinced there was such a thing as Rich Girl Hair. She thought it might be something to do with how glossy it always looked. And now she, chubby halfblood with mid-brown, regular locks, had send bits of exploding box towards her. Georgia felt this was not going to end well, but felt the added sting that Arianna might assume she was incompetent because of her blood status. “He… he did say it’d probably explode,” she added defensively.

13 Georgia Kirkly, Teppenpaw Wow, we actually have something in common 346 Georgia Kirkly, Teppenpaw 0 5