Sustitute Professor Jera Valson

August 31, 2014 3:38 PM
Having spent the vast majority of her summer working with dragons, Jera had returned to the Opening Feast quite well singed, with neither of her eyebrows wholly intact. This far into term, however, she was once again resembling a professional educator, albeit one who valued comfort and necessity over aesthetics; her plum-coloured robes had once been new and good quality, but were now a little worn around the sleeves and hem. Her dark hair was pulled into a simple ponytail and her bottle-green dragonhide boots were in need of polishing. Nevertheless, she greeted the first and second year students with a smile as she once again stepped up to take the Beginner’s Defense Against the Dark Arts class in the absence of their full-time professor.

“Good day, everyone,” Professor Valson greeted cheerfully, and she closed the classroom door only after she had taken attendance. “Okay, so today we’re going to continue with your current topic of fear,” she resumed their syllabus; they had been touching on the many ways in which fear could be used as a weapon when an opponent was using the Dark Arts. “As a quick recap, a boggart will transform itself into your greatest fear, and a Dementor will force you to relieve your most feared experiences.” Naturally, the first and second year students before her were not sufficiently advanced – magically nor emotionally - to study either of these Dark creatures in significant detail, but the curriculum evidently enabled a level of awareness.

“It is important, then, that you are able to acknowledge and control your fears in order to reduce the severity of any personal attacks, however unlikely they may be.” True, it could never be predicted when the next witch or wizard would become too big for his or her boots and start causing a ruckus, but the substitute professor didn’t want to instil unnecessary fear in her young pupils. “Our practical class for today is an excellent first step in that direction.”

Here the professor paused her speech to retrieve her wand from inside her sleeve, and to rip a strip of parchment – about one inch wide by three inches long – from the sheet on her desk. “First you need some parchment or paper,” she held up the strip. “I would like you to consider for a few moments, and write down what you think your worst fear might be. Then, you are to cast the first of two spells.” Professor Valson waved her wand and drew the stduents’ attention to two incantations written on the board. “Obscuro should make your writing invisible to onlookers,” Jera continued. “Finally, you are to pick a partner, and cast the second spell, Revelio, to try and read what was written on the paper.” Depending on the relative skill levels of both students involved, this second spell might work, or it might not, if the initial spell was sufficiently well cast. It was not Jera’s plan to share this information, however; she would rather permit the boys and girls to make this discovery unaided.

“Your homework, which you may begin in class, is to write an essay detailing the history and current uses of each of these two spells. If anyone has any queries, please attract my attention,” said professor Valson. “Otherwise, you may begin.”

(OOC: Please stick to site rules when posting here. Housepoints will be awarded based on quality of your response, including writing ability, creativity, relevance to the class and interaction with other authors. If you have any OOC questions please ask them on the OOC board. If you need the professor IC, please Tag Jera in the subject line. Thank you, and have fun!)
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0 Sustitute Professor Jera Valson Beginners (1&2) DADA - No Fear 0 Sustitute Professor Jera Valson 1 5

John Umland, Aladren

September 04, 2014 4:39 PM
“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here – “ muttered John under his breath as he hurried into the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom just ahead of the bell. Falling into the first available desk he found, he began pulling things out of his bag before he even got his legs under the writing table and winced when he turned the top of his ink bottle too quickly and some of the ink within sloshed out onto his thumb and index finger. Hurriedly, he shook back his sleeve and, for lack of a better solution, stuck the affected fingers into the bottle of pen cleaner he pulled out next. It would probably be a while before all the traces came out from under and around his nails (the makers of his brand of ink were not kidding when they said the stuff was permanent), but he thought the alcohol would get rid of the worst of the evidence.

It also burned, a reminder of the layer of skin he’d taken off the end of the index finger in the Gardens the day before. He shook his hand as he pulled his fingers back out of the pen cleaner, scattering drops of ink-laced solution over the surface of the desk; giving it up, he blotted those with his other sleeve, figuring he’d let whoever did the laundry deal with the robe later. Grabbing his second-favorite pen in one hand, he opened his notebook with the other and got to the right place in his notes a breath before Professor Valson called his name for attendance.

“I’m here!” he exclaimed, a little more triumphantly than was probably necessary. He was not having a very good day, so at the moment, it did almost feel like an accomplishment.

He read over his notes as Professor Valson recapped the unit so far. The previous classes had not been very interesting themselves, but they had led to interesting reading. Boggarts and dementors weren’t classed as magical creatures, but pogrebins, which also induced bad feelings in people near them, were, which he hadn’t been able to find an explanation for yet. Boggarts were apparently even harder to study than he would have imagined (no one up to the level of his sister Julian’s fifth year books, anyway, seemed to know anything about them except that they looked like what the nearest person or people most feared and that they were somehow banished or destroyed, they weren’t even sure about that, by laughter), which could account for them, but there was more data on dementors. Fifth years, at least, didn’t know how they did what they did, but they had a form, and the four pages of book on the subject had also said they multiplied like fungi (unfortunately failing to specify if they did so literally or if that was a bad metaphor) and were sometimes, basically, employed as guards and torturers – all of which pointed toward them being alive and fairly intelligent. Horrible, but alive and fairly intelligent. How, then, they were apparently classed as neither beast nor being intrigued him, enough so that he was considering just asking his Defense and Care of Magical Creatures teachers to see if they could explain it, since he hadn’t found it written down anywhere yet.

It had also gotten them a place on his list of things to somehow get tissue samples from someday, though at the rate his experiments were going, he would be so old he’d forget what he was doing between one side of the lab and the other before he got to that level of study. He had figured out how to collaborate with someone with access to at least basic scientific equipment back home, but he kept running into problems when it came to actually doing that. First the slides he had prepared for his partner to look at had all kept breaking between Arizona and Calgary, and then all the Transfiguration samples had reverted to their original forms during the same journey, and then some of the surviving samples had kind of started to decompose in the mail. His partner had been...particularly unamused by that last problem. Finally, desperate to get some results so that the whole project wouldn't be a complete waste of a risk, he had found a dry stick in the Gardens, broken it in two, Transfigured half, waited for that to go back to normal, and taken samples from both halves so they could at least maybe see if Transfigured materials truly returned to their beginning states. He had given up on preparing the slides himself; clearly, microscope slides were just not sturdy enough to send a bit over 2,250 kilometers by owl unaltered, and his attempt at reinforcing them magically had just made entirely unrelated glass items in his room begin to explode at random for a few minutes. Uric the Oddball only knew what the second year guys thought was going on next door sometimes....

He rubbed his head, trying to put his independent project woes out of his mind for now. The spells Professor Valson taught them didn't sound like they had much to do with fear resistance to him, but did seem like okay things to know. It took him only a few seconds to realize a problem with the main use he would want to put them to – people saw him writing in his pocket notebook all the time, so it would be obvious he was hiding something if someone ever grabbed it away from him and found that it looked blank, and since they all knew the revealing charm, too, that would make the whole exercise kind of pointless – but still, maybe useful. Definitely useful in the Muggle world, anyway, and maybe there was a way to write the real stuff, Obscure it, then write something else on top, obscure the top part, reveal the real stuff when he wanted to read his notes, then hide his notes again and bring the top stuff back once he was done reading. He decided to see if he could get it to work once he mastered the one-layer version of the spells.

First, though, there was figuring out what to write down. Last year, he’d had a worst fear, but nothing bad had happened and the chances of someone else he liked getting caught up in a freak magical accident were so slim that he didn’t really worry about it. The last time he’d seen a boggart, it had been something huge, he thought with tentacles, but he had only gotten a glimpse of it before he’d slammed the trunk lid shut again and then started running very fast in the opposite direction, so he didn’t know what he’d call that….

Volcanoes, he wrote finally. Reasonable enough, he guessed – Pompeii and Herculaneum weren’t fun things to think about being caught up in. Admittedly, they had been hugely helpful to historians, once they were able to dig them up, but it wouldn’t have been fun to be there. Pliny the Elder had died there, though that might have just been a heart attack or something – a loss to scholarship, anyway, and he had to write something, so that would do for now.

Now he had to make it disappear. Or become impossible to see with the naked eye, anyway; technically, the writing was still there….

He frowned, his attention wandering away to how the spell worked. Obscuring something meant hiding it, so it wasn’t that the ink became invisible. That meant it had to either become the same color as the paper or that the paper sort of – grew over it? That sounded crazy, but it was magic, and that would help with impressions, too – the impressions of the letters wouldn’t still be there for anyone with a sheet of thin paper and a stick of graphite to copy and work out. Or the texture and color of the ink might change to get the same effect….

“Yeah, I think that makes – “ he started to say, then realized this was probably not the correct response to whatever had just been said to him by another student. "Er - sorry, I have no idea what you just said," he said instead. "Sorry. My fault. If you want to say it again, I'll listen this time," he added contritely. Then he'd ask them what they had imagined was happening while casting the spell, if they had already succeeded (he wasn't sure how long he had been woolgathering; he didn't think it had really been that long, but if his neighbor was skilled at this sort of charm, they might have finished it already), and experiment with that, too, to see if maybe different visualizations yielded different results, sort of like Transfiguration. He twisted his pen between his fingers, hoping he could remember both of the things he wanted to try long enough to hopefully patch things up with his neighbor before he wrote them down.
16 John Umland, Aladren Fear is the mind-killer. 285 John Umland, Aladren 0 5


Lena Westley, Aladren

September 07, 2014 3:44 AM
Lena had more than a distinct impression she'd interrupted her fellow Aladren, she knew she had when he answered her with a completely irrelevant start to a sentence. "I was wondering if you wanted to be partners." Very unlike Lena to take initiative, she had been so frustrated over having her accent flub the obscuro spell (she had a hard time fitting that 'y' sound between the 'k' and 'oo') that she wanted to see if it had worked well enough or not.She couldn't tell what exactly was wrong with the parchment, but she felt as if someone could tell there was something written, that somehow it was not properly hidden. Not a perfectionist, but not having had enough sleep, she became frustrated and wanted it to be revealed as soon as possible so she could move on to her essay.

Sure enough, when the boy said Revelio the words "Olivier's unhappiness" showed up dark and blotchy, a little distorted and not quite in her usual hand. It looked as if the words had tried to disappear in a whirlpool and had only had the slightest of tugs before being inched back and forth in a rocky wave of invisible motion. It had been invisible at least, but now seeing the actual ink the product of her labor definitely reminded her of a badly photo-shopped picture.

Exhaling a final frustrated sigh she got out another piece of parchment and started writing all she knew about the two spells (not very much aside for their outcome) and did her house shame. "When you're done with the first spell let me know if you want me to try uncovering it."

The writing was harder than she expected; not being to pronounce them properly gave her little confidence but their uses seemed apparent. She didn't know where they were elsewhere applied other than in school or possibly diaries but thought maybe if it were extremely well cast, some important documents. Maybe the Ministry of Magic's legal papers or magical bank statements. She didn't know how practical Obscuro was if it could be undone with Revelio but opted for a longer paragraph about the first. Her second paragraph would have to be about girl's diaries since she couldn't think of any uses for Revelio other than military spying (or receiving end of bank statements, etc.), and she thought it unlikely that she could write anything new.

OOC: Lena is from Wales, so her long vowel pronunciation messed the spell up considerably. It wouldn't work at all before the 'y' sound, but now it's just not well cast.
7 Lena Westley, Aladren Oh, Boggart-Boggart 279 Lena Westley, Aladren 0 5

John Umland

September 09, 2014 11:09 PM
Oh, right. He had to complete the assigned spells before he could start experimenting with them. Mom said he always tried to run before he walked and he couldn’t say she was wrong about that. He had fallen flat on his face too many times to make anything like a strong argument in his own defense.

“Ah – yeah, sure…right,” he said, forcing a fake, awkward smile in his embarrassment over his distraction. “I haven’t, you know, gotten anything hidden yet, but…yeah, I’ll try out yours.”

Now Lena probably thought he was an idiot who couldn’t cast spells properly, but he couldn’t see anything to do about it but prove he could perform the revealing spell and find out…whatever she thought her worst fear was. Which was really kind of an uncomfortable thing, now that he thought about it, to consider admitting to someone who, though they worked the same shifts in the library on Tuesdays and Sundays, she didn’t really know. He didn’t care, but he had noticed that the stuff which bothered most people…really didn’t bother him a lot of the time, and he had figured out last year that fears were something people were Not Supposed To Talk About. His brother Paul said it was wrong to do it because it increased everyone else’s burden – not really a factor here, admittedly, but maybe it being something it was wrong to talk about was why this girl had picked a first year who still had visible writing on his scrap of parchment for a partner – she assumed he wouldn’t be able to do it? That would make pretending he couldn’t the nice thing to do, except that would be – inaccurate, wrong….

John blinked, shook his head, and tried the spell. “Revelio.

Still flustered over his early inattention and possible bad impression, he was more focused than usual and so the words began to reveal themselves on the page. Squinting, he muttered the word under his breath again and – there it was. Olivier’s unhappiness. Odd thing to list as one’s worst fear, but since the best he’d been able to come up with had been inspired by the death of a long-dead Roman lawyer-naturalist, he guessed he had no room to judge. He just hoped it was because she really liked Olivier instead of because Olivier took it out on her when he was unhappy or something, in which case Olivier needed to go get Transfigured into something embarrassing for a while….

“Er – there you go,” he said, handing it back to her. He nodded when she made her offer. “Yeah, sure,” he repeated. Fascinating conversationalist he was today; sometimes that happened.

Now he just had to quickly finish the first version of the first spell and let Lena have a try at revealing it before he started trying to figure out how it worked. He squinted at the word volcanoes and tried picturing it disappearing the first way he had imagined, where the ink changed to the color of the page. Lena’s had looked funny when he revealed it, so maybe she had done it wrong – not so it hadn’t worked, maybe, just so it wasn’t as good as it could possibly be. He’d have to see if his would do the same thing, one way or another….

He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to cut off the flow of ideas and images in his head – paper types, print, inks, books, pens, pencils, hidden things, concealment, camouflage. He was not going to get this done if he let the image of a tiger linger in his head for more than the split second it took him to realize he was getting wildly off track. No tigers. He was not allowed to think about tigers, the spells on the school, what qualified as a magical creature, or anything else right now except how to get the word volcanoes to disappear.

He opened his eyes. Tried the spell. The word turned orange. He closed his eyes again, this time in frustration. Stupid tigers. He opened his eyes again, tried again. This time, the words began to fade on the page, and he regarded where they had been with a small smile as he ran his fingers over the page, feeling where they were but not seeing them now.

“Here you go – “ he said to Lena, then saw she was writing something – probably her essay, Mom said it was best to go ahead and start homework in extra class time if there was any, so he wouldn’t have it to do later on, when he had more homework and things to do than he did when he was given the assignment. “Sorry. Good thinking, getting started,” he said. “I’m going to play around with the spell a little – see if how I picture it disappearing affects how it works,” he said conversationally as he handed a seemingly-blank scrap to her. "Then start working on the essay. What uses have you come up with?" History was more straightforward, but when thinking of 'uses,' collaboration might help them both.
16 John Umland Not sure they're in the habit of coming when called. 285 John Umland 0 5


Lena Westley

September 15, 2014 1:25 AM
Despite their shifts together Lena hadn't really talked with John 'til now. Not that they were making particular headway, but it was progress. After putting the essay writing on halt she accepted her house mate's parchment and replied "I was on a paragraph about possible military usage, like an alternative for enigma machines. I'm not sure how practical the first spell is in the 'wizarding' world if it can be undone so easily, though."

Her voice leveling off, Lena put down her pen and readied her wand. Concentrating on the pristine piece of paper in front of her, she tried the spell and came up short. Nothing was on the parchment, blotchy, misshapen or otherwise. It was barren, no indication of it having been used at all. This class had been nothing but disheartening. Maybe I'm not cut out to be a witch. A glum thought, but not altogether misguided, she thought. She'd never been a particularly ambitious individual; maybe simple spells were all she'd ever be able to accomplish. Then it occurred to her, this was supposed to be a simple spell. Although what she'd envisioned her magic being put to use with were things like enchanting cleaning supplies and letting them have at it, but really how much different could those be in terms of level of proficiency needed from this spell?

Giving up and turning back to something she could do, she engaged John in conversation again. "I'm also a bit stumped as to uses for Revelio. If you're experimenting, maybe you could try to see if it can undo other encryptions or if being the counter spell for Obscuro is the extent of it."

Not having had enough sleep and now her doubt about her magical potential had had the unexpected result of companionate discussion with her fellow Aladren. John had already done several new things with the spells- he would be better able to test new versions than Lena, who couldn’t do the plain versions well. Had Olivier been in her class she would have been made to practice before giving up. Her twin was a better wizard than she was a witch and so it would have resulted in a similar situation that she was in now. As it was she could let John take the reins in spellcasting and she could support him with further ideas. Olivier had been the only person Lena spoke to openly but even they didn’t have very long conversations. Most times he knew what she wanted, what she liked and although he encouraged her to step outside her comfort zone, usually conceded to her preference.

It was different, and difficult, talking this much. It wasn't a bad thing, and she wasn't exactly frustrated but she felt a bit awkward hearing her voice so often. The right words escaped her many times when she was trying to describe ways John might be able to make the words disappear, having found that just as interesting as the assignment. She wanted to see if they –he- could make them levitate off the paper and then disappear but that may have required a different spell since even he couldn't get it to work. They played around with various “special effect” styles, her favorite being when each letter burst like a bubble, one at a time as it went down the line. They did eventually get back to their homework assignment, and she looked up from the paper they'd been playing with when he started to get back to it.
7 Lena Westley It was a censored, mild cussing 279 Lena Westley 0 5