Advanced DADA: Make-Your-Own-Sneakoscope on Defense Against the Dark Arts

Professor Daniel Nash II

May 30, 2017 8:39 PM

Advanced DADA: Make-Your-Own-Sneakoscope by Professor Daniel Nash II

It was his first class. Well, not the first one he had ever taught - he'd had the requisite student teaching hours to get his degree, of course - but this was his first class. Well, he was still technically a substitute, so it was technically probably still Pye's class, but Pye had resigned. The students here would have Daniel as their professor for the rest of the year. It was close enough. So he was sticking to his initial statement: it was his first class.

He wouldn't say he was nervous. He'd never had performance anxiety before and he was quite sure that was not what this was. There were only half a dozen students on the DADA roster, no more than some of his college project groups, so he had no problem with the class size. In fact, the number of students present was just about perfect for the kinds of discussion and demonstrations he thought would be most effective for covering the material planned for the remainder of the year in Pye's syllabus. Daniel was fully confident in his understanding of that material and his ability to present it, so that wasn't the problem either.

The problem, Daniel concluded as the students took their seats for their first lesson with him and he got his first look at them, was that these kids would be his students at least until the seventh years graduated. It wasn't temporary (well, it was, but as far as the seventh years were concerned, he would be their teacher until the end). Also, for the majority, it wasn't just DADA. It was Charms, as well. The same kids. Stuck with each other for either one or three hours a day every weekday for half a school year.

What if they didn't like him? Worse, what if he didn't like them?

No, that was unprofessional. Like them or not, it was his job to teach them. And he would. He'd do everything he could to see that they passed their RATS. Though, obviously, he just had them for five months. Their previous teacher hopefully already laid down the bulk of what they'd need to know.

"Welcome back to Advanced DADA," he said. "I'm Professor Nash, taking over for Professor Pye for your last semester this year. You already know each other, but I don't know any of you, so we're going to start with a fairly simple, yet deceptively difficult exercise. This is about deception, and about lies." He pointed his wand toward the front board and the words, "Veritatem revelare," wrote themselves out in chalk. "This spell will let you create an on-the-fly sneakoscope. Cast it on any object that has parts that can move independently of one another. Say, for example, your inkwell. An inkwell thus enchanted may begin spinning or wiggling its lid if someone close by begins lying. I'd like everyone to make yourself a sneakoscope, then once everyone is done, we'll go around telling two truths and a lie about yourselves."

"The pronunciation is Veritatem Revelare," he spoke the words aloud, slowly, then repeated them at a more normal casting speed. "The wand motion is a slow circular motion, though the faster you make your circle, the more obvious your lie detection motion will be on your object. An even slower circular motion will result in a very subtle indicator. All together," he demonstrated the spell on a hanging ceiling decoration depicting the solar system that he'd put up earlier for precisely this purpose. He gave his wand motion a reasonably swift circle so the demonstration sneakoscope would be clearly visible for those sitting farther away.

"So my truths and a lie," he continued, feeling this was the sort of thing that even professors ought to take part in if they were subjecting students to it, "First, I've been on muggle television at least once," he stated first, getting that one out of the way. The planets stayed rock solid in their orbital positions as the statement was completely true, but the moons did begin to revolve slowly around their planets in response to Daniel's less-than-accurate implication that this was maybe because he'd gotten a few minutes on a local news show or something and not because he'd been a Hollywood child actor and played the same character for five seasons.

"Second, I attended Sonora as an Aladren and my half-sister was a Pecari." The moons stopped moving. The entire diorama was perfectly still. That was complete and unvarnished truth with no equivocation.

"Third, I'll stick around Sonora long enough to see the sixth years graduate." The moons began rotating around their planets again. The planets moved slowly along their orbits, perceptible, but not as fast or as obvious as might have been expected for a solid lie given the speed of his wand motion when creating this scope. It was an outright lie, though. The truthful statement would have been 'I'll stick around Sonora long enough for them to find a permanent teacher or for me to find a college professorship, which ever comes first.' However, there was a distinct possibility he would stick around Sonora long enough to see the sixth years graduate, even if there was no direct causality between that graduation and him staying on, so the motion of the solar system was only a bit more pronounced than after his first truth.

"And fourth, just for demonstration purposes: a ridiculously blatant lie. I'm ugly, I hate books, and I'm a natural blonde." After this statement by the brown-haired former Aladren with an appearance like that of a Hollywood leading man (as that was exactly what Daniel Nash Senior had been at Daniel's age), the planets and moons and even the sun began a lively demonstration of how orbits and rotations work.

"Okay, now everyone write down your observations about those results, and make your conclusions. We'll do the same for each of your lies and truths as well. Feel free to be evasive in your truths, and honest in your lies, to make things interesting. Also, please remember to tell me your names. That's a large part of the reason we're doing this, so I can get to know you a little bit. Also, I'm not going to ask anyone to reveal which of your statements is a falsehood, but I do want analysis on the sneakoscope responses to all statements made. The academic point of this lesson is about drawing conclusions, not getting your answers handed to you. Go ahead and make your own sneakoscopes now, and then we'll go around making statements after that. I'll tell mine again first, so you can calibrate how well yours work."

OOC: You may go ahead an assume Daniel calls everyone's attention and repeats his statements pretty exactly after all the sneakoscopes are made. It's a pretty small class, so everyone should just reply to the previous post and add your two truths and a lie to the discussion.

Subthreads:

This seems like it has the potential to get philosophical. by John Umland, Aladren

1 Professor Daniel Nash II Advanced DADA: Make-Your-Own-Sneakoscope 130 Professor Daniel Nash II 1 5

John Umland, Aladren

May 31, 2017 4:12 PM

This seems like it has the potential to get philosophical. by John Umland, Aladren

John’s first thought about New Pye, formed before he had even started to think that the man’s real name sounded vaguely familiar, had been that he was too good-looking to possibly be of any use. Old Pye had had a reasonably well-proportioned face, but New Pye looked not entirely unlike Michelangelo’s David, just with straighter hair and clothes on. The addition of clothes was one for which John was grateful, he disapproved of nakedness in people who were not inside a bathtub and he disapproved of it even among those who were in a bathtub if other people also happened to be in the room at the time, but it didn’t change the fact that the new professor was easily as handsome as his sister’s fiancé and therefore was Not To Be Trusted.

Rationally, however, John knew that this was ridiculous. Joe and Joanie were pretty people, and John literally trusted them with his life. Maybe not with his well-being, at least at the moment – they were both rather angry with him, so the next time they and he were together, if there ever was a next time, he rather expected Joe to disarm him magically so Joanie could get on with hitting him a lot without any distractions – but that didn’t change the fact that they were both Trustworthy in his book. Mom and Julian, too, were beautiful, and they were both Good. Maybe not so Trustworthy as Joe and Joanie, but Good, and that was even more important. There was no reason, given these facts, that New Pye should prove more of a Billy Boy than a Joe, and John in fact had good reason to hope Nash was a sterling character, as John was going to spend a lot of time with him for the rest of the year. With this in mind, he forced his reservations onto a shelf before his first class with the man, reminding himself that he disliked it when people assumed he’d prove a villain just because of his looks.

He didn’t like it when people assumed he was stupid because of his sporadically rocky relationship with the English language, either, but he still found himself docking a couple of points from the beginning neutral fifty he was determined to start with for the man when Nash used the phrase ”fairly simple, yet deceptively difficult”. This was an oxymoron. John did not appreciate all the classic oxymorons – jumbo shrimp, for instance; a jumbo shrimp was clearly a shrimp which was larger than others of its species, and anyway, he was reasonably sure shrimp as a term meaning ‘small thing’ was a colloquialism derived from a species of aquatic animals which happened to be small, not a word which inherently, of itself, implied smallness – but he was comfortable enough with the concept to feel sure of this. A thing could look simple and yet deceive by actually being difficult, but that wasn’t what Nash had said at all…and he was off-task, perhaps dangerously so, as the professor had just also, he realized belatedly, used the expression deception and lies.

Deception and lies were things John knew a lot about. They were the reason kneazles and hippogriffs sometimes looked sideways at him, though the latter had at least had the decency not to try scratching him. Perhaps they knew John knew about these topics for what he’d believed at the time to be good reasons. In Defense class, though, this was…not really a distinction he felt would be appreciated. This might be important. He tried to focus and was glad he did, both because the spell Professor Nash demonstrated looked extremely useful (he mentally gave the man back the points he’d docked, plus a considerable quantity of change) and because he quickly realized the demonstration was going to involve receiving more information about the person now in charge of two of his classes.

The first statement Nash made almost took him off-task again – was television the reason the name sounded vaguely familiar? John rarely, if ever, watched television himself, but Joanie and his other old friends had often referred to it in his presence. It was possible Joanie and Lindsay had at some point been fangirls. He didn’t think that was it, though, and so filed it down as a possible lie – there was a hint of movement in the mobile, from the moons. Maybe the man was an exceptional liar.

The second statement, however, provoked no movement from the mobile whatsoever, and – perhaps more importantly – finally let John figure out where he’d heard the name Nash before. Nash – Aladren – there had been a dude named that who’d been Quidditch captain and Head Boy once – or, technically, Head Boy twice. It was this ‘twice’ on the Head Boy which John supposed had made the name stick in his head when he’d glanced through the trophies about the school before. He gave Nash a few more points and decided he could be referred to by his real name more often than he was called New Pye in John’s head. They were, after all, part of the same club if this Nash and that Nash were the same person, and Nash didn’t seem to be a surname that popped up anywhere else on the lists John had seen. This, combined with the remark about television, suggested he was Muggleborn, which put them probably into the same sub-club of non-purebloods who’d done well in Aladren. Their kind had to give each other some credit even if Nash was someone most people would agree was attractive.

The third statement got little reaction from John, as whether or not Nash was going to stay around for another year was of little interest to him. He was rather more concerned with what, precisely, he was going to be doing and where he was going to be doing it in a year. He had managed to figure out some of the university application process on his own before midterm, but really did not know how that whole venture was going to work out for him. He had flirted with the idea of going to a university that wasn’t the University of Calgary before, but never with the idea of not even applying there or not having Mom and Dad and his older siblings all helping out with the paperwork and decision-making process. He could only hope he’d done it more or less right….

…Which was less than likely if he’d been as off-task while writing his essays as he was right now. Nash was now going to tell them a blatant lie. John propped his chin on his hand to hear this and frowned at the content of the lie, docking Nash a couple of points. He could not in good conscience approve of anyone who was that comfortable with regarding his own attractiveness as a given. Billy Boy did that and it was one of the reasons John desperately wished to cave the other wizard’s face in. That their self-concepts were both accurate was not relevant data. John still disapproved.

He had a ballpoint pen in his pocket as always and decided that would do for an improvised sneakoscope, especially as it was a small, unobtrusive object one might actually use for that purpose at need. That it was less likely to make movements his classmates could readily detect was just a bonus. Its small size – small objects were, he thought, usually easier to enchant than large ones when all other factors were more or less equal – didn’t hurt, either. John cast the spell, his wand moving quickly, and he began contemplating what in the world he could possibly tell them.

His first inclination was to say something like I’m an Aladren, I’m an American, and I’m awful at telling people stuff about myself off the top of my head. The first and third statements were true and the second was a blatant lie. This, however, was not the assignment. He was pretty sure they were supposed to be a little more subtle than that. He barely noticed as Nash calibrated his pen, still busy thinking of what he was supposed to say….

“All right, then,” he said finally, once it was determined the pen was in sufficiently working order to allow them to proceed. “I’m John Umland – that’s for you – “ he added to Nash – “and…first statement. I know what my first choice of university is going to be.”

The end of the pen, the part he would remove to put a new tube of ink in, twisted slightly, but the other moving parts remained in place. This was half-true; sometimes he felt relatively confident on this point, but other times he didn’t, and today was a day where he was ambivalent on the subject.

“Second statement…Potions is my favorite class.”

This earned him a depression of the clicky bit at the top of the pen. Many of his classmates probably thought Potions was a favorite with him because he and Clark had always had a lot of fun in that class, but this year he was bored because he didn’t have anyone to try to cause explosions with. Bouncing ideas off Clark and doing stuff just to see what happened with an audience was fun. Just making potions and memorizing concepts discovered before he was born was boring.

“Third statement – I drink coffee.”

He was probably well-known, too, as ‘that guy with the teabags’, but this statement barely made the cap twitch. John had, a few times in his life, consumed that Other Beverage. When he was nine, it had made the whole world seem like a blur. These days, it made him sick in the long run but could boost his concentration in the short run when he didn’t have time to sleep as much as he needed to, which was a tradeoff his current schedule sometimes demanded that he make. He did not, however, know that anyone else knew this, and it meant the spotlight could now move away from him. Wishing desperately that he had a cup of proper tea, tea from home, right now, John found an unenchanted pen and some paper to note down what sorts of results happened as the next person in line started trying to fool them all.

16 John Umland, Aladren This seems like it has the potential to get philosophical. 285 John Umland, Aladren 0 5

Araceli Arbon, Crotalus

June 15, 2017 10:53 AM

Or messy by Araceli Arbon, Crotalus

Araceli had taken advanced Defence Against the Dark Arts on grounds which other people might have described as paranoid - that she really believed in the need to be well-versed in the more unpleasant things in life, in order to be prepared should they happen. However, it wasn’t paranoia if they really were out to get you, and she had already experienced more than enough manipulation at the hands of magic to know what it was capable of. And, whilst she could trust in her own ability to avoid certain things (for example, not visiting a part of the world inhabited by Lethifolds), she knew she could find herself easily enough at the mercy of other people, unless she was careful.

The class was a near constant mental broom crash for her. Pretty much everything they covered was either just plain terrifying or found insidious little ways to link itself back to what had been done to her. The lighter seeming classes, on disguise or deception, were the worst, in that they hit just a little too near the knuckle, especially as she had seriously limited options in terms of debriefing after the session. Today was one such class. Time to lie their socks off. At least this time, they were supposed to. At least there was some element of control, unlike when Delphine had been here, and had to fake sick rather than risk walking through a class Kneazles.

She noted the varying degrees of movement, alongside the statements, although she had difficulty inferring what it might mean that the statement I have been on Muggle television at least once received a small degree of movement. It was, presumably, a lie, but not as severe as the assertion that he would stay to see the sixth years graduating. Araceli was fairly sure there was no such thing as non-Muggle television (unless, perhaps halfbloods and Muggleborns made their own content - she supposed that was possible without her knowing) or whether one could partially be on television (again, she didn’t think so). She noted ’Implied lie/half truth. Do not know enough about television to conclude anything further, before turning her attention to her own statements.

Feel free to be evasive in your truths, and honest in your lies. The instruction echoed in her brain. Well, if that wasn’t quite the philosophical summation of her whole existence. How could you be honest in a lie, anyway? A lie was a lie, whatever else you put around it. You could contain it between two truths, but it was still there, the dirty little worm in the heart of the otherwise unblemished apple.

The main trouble was, that her mind tended to run wildly over all the things she least wanted people to know about her when any exercise like this was presented. She knew no one was trying to catch her out, but it was difficult not to feel like it. And, whilst she could attest such bland things as ‘I hate chocolate,’ it was actually hard to think of anything remotely normal when images danced through her head of an inkwell lid spinning wildly as she declared things that should not be unusual or controversial - I have never taken polyjuice outside of class, I have been here the whole time. Or, conversely, it staying stock still whilst she told the world ‘my sister replaced me for two and a half years.’ Or the meta-lie… I am a bad liar. I believe lying is wrong. One outright lie, one that was true but which didn’t mean that she didn’t do it…

There was also the object to think about, which she realised, as her classmates started their spells, she had almost forgotten about. Moving parts… moving parts… What did she have with moving parts? There was her necklace, the catch of which moved, but she thought that might be a little too subtle. She settled for her inkwell - unoriginal, given that it had been the example, but she had very little else with her that qualified. She noted its responses as Professor Nash repeated his statements.

“My name is Araceli Arbon,” she said, trying not to imagine how her own lie detector would have gone off on Delphine at this point, had she still been here continuing their charade, “although some people call me Amy,” she hoped that adding it to her name, almost casually, would help her disguise the half-truth. The present tense did not really belong in that sentence. Amy had only been a cover name, whilst she had been at CASMA, and so no one called her that any more. She reasoned that, if they ever talked about her, that was what they called her. So perhaps, somewhere in the world, that was true, it just wasn’t really a part of her reality any more. The lid wobbled slightly. “I have two older sisters and a younger brother,” the lid stopped, although again she couldn’t help but think of Delphine in this position. That would have been a fact for her to avoid. She also wondered whether some of her classmates might try picking that out as a lie, as only two of the Arbon children had officially attended Sonora. “And I love public speaking.” This was the closest Araceli was ever likely to come to sassing a professor, as the lid of her inkwell pointedly and definitely began unscrewing itself.

13 Araceli Arbon, Crotalus Or messy 290 Araceli Arbon, Crotalus 0 5

Scarlett Brockert,Pecari

July 02, 2017 9:15 PM

Not quite by Scarlett Brockert,Pecari

Scarlett walked into Defense with less enthusiasm than she had previously. After all, her main reason for choosing this class to keep was so she could try to catch a glimpse. If she really thought about it more, she probably would have kept up with Defense anyway, based on Potions not really being her thing. She might have taken Care of Magical Creatures instead though. As it was, the Pecari was not all that sure she was going to stick with Dueling Club.

She took a look at Professor Nash. He was, Scarlett supposed, good looking but honestly, she didn't think he was her type. Too much of a pretty boy compared with their previous professor's rugged handsomeness.

Perhaps this was a sign though. She was engaged now, she'd be married before she knew it. She probably should not be ogling other men, even unattainable ones. Still, it was like saying goodbye to a part of her. Professor Pye had been the first man Scarlett found attractive, even though before she'd...noticed, she hadn't really liked him that much. But now he was gone and she had Marco.

It didn't make her want to go to class more though. The Pecari had never been especially studious, but prior to now, this had been a class she'd obviously looked forward to.

Maybe now she'd pay attention to the lesson instead. As far as subjects went, Defense was actually less boring than most. Scarlett had grown to enjoy it a bit for it's own sake and not just the previous view. She'd even learned stuff and that was with the distraction. Maybe she could learn even more now. Never been a particular priority of hers but it could happen.

Either that or Scarlett would end up daydreaming. Probably that.

She'd give listening a try for now though. Professor Nash began to speak about Sneakoscopes, which she could see were something useful.How often she would personally need one was up for debate but making one sounded fun. She couldn't help but roll her eyes at the professor's lie though. Since he was blatantly basically saying he knew he was good looking, Scarlett couldn't help but find him less appealing overall.

Now what could she make her Sneakoscope out of? She did not want to use her inkwell, because that seemed unoriginal. She began to dig through her bag, which always seemed to have such random things in it.

Unfortunately, nothing Scarlett could find would work. Her bag was such a mess and she was sick of looking for something different. Inkwell, it would have to be. She quickly placed a spell on it.

Now she had to think about her truths and a lie. First she had to introduce herself though. "I am Scarlett Brockert of the New York Brockerts" The top rocked subtly. She was Scarlett Brockert and would be living in New York once she married but there was no such thing as a New York Brockert. "My favorite food is eggs." The top stayed completely still. "And I am an only child." The top rocked wildly, flying off and landing on the floor. She bent down to pick it up. Thankfully, she didn't have enough ink left in there to splatter.

11 Scarlett Brockert,Pecari Not quite 293 Scarlett Brockert,Pecari 0 5