Professor X
November 30, 2017 10:48 AM
Beginners: Junior Groundskeepers by Professor X
The labyrinth hedges were beginning to bud. Tips of grass were beginning to poke through the dirt alongside the well travelled paths of the gardens. Flowers were beginning to sprout amid the tiny spears of grass. The days were getting longer and warmer.Spring had sprung and winter was done.
It was Nathan’s favorite- and busiest- time of year.
“Hello, beginners,” he greeted cheerfully as the flow of first and second year students into Greenhouse One slowed to a stop as everyone who was coming to class today arrived. “You’re going to have to wait until next week to get back Tuesday’s quiz,” he apologized. “Yesterday I was busy doing spring groundskeeping.” Until the school hired a new groundskeeper, he had his hands full keeping up with both his old job and a full load of core classes.
“Which brings us to today’s activity. Everybody follow me. You should bring your wands and a pair of gloves, but leave everything else. We’ll come back before the end of the class period.” And with no more explanation than that, he walked out of the greenhouse and into the labyrinth.
He looked behind him periodically to count the students and make sure he hadn’t lost anybody, but mostly he just trundled along - he wasn’t a very fast individual, but he was an adult and he had longer legs than the students - at a steady clip until he came to a part of the gardens where the hedges were in pretty sad shape.
“Some of you may have found the sledding hill we made this midterm. I’m sure it was good fun for us, but the hedges underneath all that snow had a rough winter. Who here knows anything about the hedges Sonora uses to make our labyrinth?”
“Yes,” he confirmed after one student spoke up, “they are a magical species called, appropriately, a labyrinth hedge. These are the moonbeam labyrinth hedge subspecies. What’s their most notable magic property?”
He looked around for any student with the knowledge or at least a good guess. “When moonlight falls on them, they emit a faint aura of confusion,” he told them after taking a few suggestions from the class. “So don’t stay out too late in the Gardens or you may have more trouble than you might expect finding your way back.”
“More relevant to today’s lesson though, they are very good at regeneration, and clippings of labyrinth hedges can be used in some potions of healing. What we are going to do today, is help these damaged hedges get back into shape.”
He spread his arms to indicate the whole area around them that have been buried in great mounds of snow. “Everyone pick a section to work on. You’ll need to clear out the dead branches. Just put them in this bin here,” he tapped the side of a collection bin he had brought out for this purpose earlier in the day. “We’ll use that for kindling at the bonfire this summer.”
“Once your area is clear of dead branches, use a lumos charm near the roots. Their natural regeneration works best when exposed to light, since their branches and leaves normally cause their roots to be covered in shadows. So when they get direct light, it usually means something happened to their branches and they need to grow them back. Once your area looks healthy again, raise your hand and I’ll check it over, give you your grade, and if you finish quickly enough, you can restore another area for bonus house points and extra credit. Any questions? Good, go tend to these hedges.”
Subthreads: Let's work together. by Tatiana Vorontsova, Pecari
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Professor X
Beginners: Junior Groundskeepers
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Professor X
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Tatiana Vorontsova, Pecari
November 30, 2017 9:30 PM
Let's work together. by Tatiana Vorontsova, Pecari
There were many things Tatiana liked about herbology, but she supposed the strangest was probably that it was a time when people other than her wore gloves outside. She was still generally the only one or one of very few who wore a hat, but at least her hands didn’t stand out unless someone took notice of her removing her bracelets and changing her walk-in-the-garden gloves for her gardening gloves after entering the greenhouse. By this point, however, they were probably sufficiently used to it to overlook it, especially when – as he did today – Professor Xavier actually told them to wear gloves.He also instructed them to leave behind everything but their gloves and wands, but Tatiana drew the line at leaving her hat. She had started going outside bare-handed more and more often since the weather began to warm up, half-pleased and half-unnerved by the thought that she was deliberately not doing something How Mama Said It Ought To Be Done, but it just seemed unnatural and imprudent to go out to do gardening work without something to shield her face from the sun. Mama said that people who let themselves take sun on their faces ended up with skin that looked like old, broken-down leather that ought to be thrown away when they were still relatively young, and Tatiana could not imagine that the sun here was actually less damaging than that at their dacha. All the facts Tatiana knew suggested that if anything, it would be worse, and so her hat came along with her, her gardening gloves, and her wand despite the instructions.
Tatiana knew that hedges could be magical, of course – there were some which were part of the house defenses – but she did not know about the specific kind at Sonora and so let someone else answer Professor Xavier’s question and tried to remember all he said. The hedges were confusing at night? That was inconvenient for her, really, as she lived out here, though she could see how it might be useful from a defensive standpoint – it was difficult to approach the school without going into the Gardens, which were confusing even before an intruder became magically confused as well. They probably would not be good at all at home, though, because of the long dark stretch that was winter, and because of the white nights in summer – moonlight was not a thing they would see much of in a few months.
Some of the finer points of Professor Xavier’s speech – kindling, for instance – passed her by, but she got the majority of the point, including what she was supposed to do, without difficulty. She went to a battered hedge and knelt down on the ground to look for any clear divides between healthy and unhealthy branches. It wasn’t as easy as she might have hoped; Professor Xavier had not been exaggerating when he had said that the roots were often in shadow, and the bottom part of the hedges suffered from some of the same problem. The leaves were a bit sparser, probably as a result, but the tangle was difficult to work with.
An idea occurred to her and she looked up at her nearest neighbor. “I need help,” she said, very clearly; she had been taught this phrase specifically and so had practiced it until it was clearer and more confidently used than the English sentences she tried to put together for herself in novel situations. “We may help each other, yes? One hold back the – edge – “ she pulled back part of a branch to demonstrate more clearly what she meant – “and other use the Sever Charm on – dead part.” Her brain still tried to insist she had just said ‘use the North Spell’, but that wasn’t what the word meant in English and that was that. “Okay?”
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Tatiana Vorontsova, Pecari
Let's work together.
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Tatiana Vorontsova, Pecari
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Parker Fitzgerald - Pecari
December 07, 2017 12:56 PM
Two heads and Four Hands by Parker Fitzgerald - Pecari
Smell of dirt and green things filled Parker’s nose as he made his way into Greenhouse One. As he raced into the Greenhouse he dumped is backpack on the ground near the door. Herbology was one of his favorite classes, and through it, he had taken better to a few of the other classes, since he needed those skills in this one. It wasn’t just that he got to play in the dirt and be outside, but he also got to learn about plants and how to take care of them.The air was getting nicer outside, and the cold was going away, which was nice since Parker had to walk outside every day to get to and from food and classes. He also hoped this meant more time outside during Herbology class.
As Professor X said to leave things behind and bring gloves and a wand, Parker got excited. Running back to his backpack he pulled out the items and raced out the door to walk behind the Professor. Parker could feel the sun on his face and hear the wind. It was like a tonic to his body and he loved it so much.
Parker had raised his hand at the first question. He knew the answer to this question! It didn’t happen often, so Parker hoped this would help earn him points for talking in class.
“Labyrinth Hedges,” he said.
He’d been trying to figure out things for the eventual map he hoped to create and the first thing he had looked up were the hedges. Though he did not know the next part of the questioning. Aura of Confusion was actually a little worrying, as Parker did enjoy going out walking in the evening and mornings. More reason to have a map made that he could keep on him in case he or anyone else got lost.
Parker filed away the information about regeneration and healing potions in his head, just in case potions had a healing class sometime soon.
After Professor X finished talking, Parker clapped his gloved hands together.
“Ok, lets get to work,” he said out loud to himself, looking at the really battered hedge. It looked almost sad, like a larger version of a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Parker laughed to himself, realizing few if any of the other students in the class would understand the image in his head. He was excited though.
Even at home he had liked doing yard work. It was the chore that he most readily signed up for since it meant he got to be outside. Now he was basically doing yard work and getting a grade for it, which was nice.
Getting close to the tree Parker noticed that some of the dead branches were sturdier than one would expect for being, well dead. He tugged on them, but nothing happened. He pulled one really far back and it eventually broke, but not near the trunk of the tree. He was thinking about the best way to go forward when he heard Tatiana next to him.
He liked the other first year Pecari, but since the wagon ride they hadn’t really talked much. Parker spending a lot of his time outside or near to outside. They were both on the Quidditch team, but Parker didn’t do a lot of talking as he was always trying to practice, knowing he was at a disadvantage from the beginning. The first thing he realized was that her English was already better.
As she spoke Parker nodded in agreement. OF COURSE! The Sever Charm.
“Oh, great idea Tatiana. We can start with your tree, and I’ll hold back the branch. Just please, don’t sever my arm by accident.” Parker laughed a bit hoping that Tatiana would take it as a joke, but realizing there was a bit of truth in the joke as well. He also wanted to see the Sever charm, just to make sure he didn't do it wrong and cut down a hedge by accident.
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Parker Fitzgerald - Pecari
Two heads and Four Hands
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Tatiana
December 21, 2017 10:39 PM
And a vocabulary and a half. by Tatiana
Sometimes, Tatiana thought the center of the thing was not so much the number of words she had learned this year, but that she had simply gotten better at quickly figuring out what people meant from the words she did hear and know well. “No akzaden,” she assured Parker with a small smile, her accent thickening heavily on the word she was not used to saying. “Professor angry if I sever arms.”She suspected that would be a mild way of putting it, but she didn’t think she was too likely to actually cut his arms off. She could aim pretty well and it would be better to aim as carefully as possible here - if she messed up, at best it would smack someone in the face, and Tatiana did not even wish to hit other people in the face, much less herself. To her eternal dismay, she was not a big, strong person - she was not fragile, as such, not like her sister Anya, but she still suspected a large branch could still send her tumbling to the ground if it snapped back at her, plus her face. Parker was probably going to be better at pulling the branch back, and she at trying to cut it so it fell down instead of snapping at either of them.
“Hold - soft,” she warned him. “Not hard, or it will - “ Tatiana used her hand to mime something smacking her in the face. “That not good.”
Def-fenn-doe. Def-fenn-doe. She ran through the pronunciation in her head. She thought she would have thought to be careful anyway, but since she had been reminded that the spell was dangerous and then had thought about being knocked down, she wanted to be extra-careful. Working with others was sometimes slightly awkward when she worried about them maybe not wanting to work with her because of the potential for problems when she occasionally mangled a vowel. Or a consonant. Or a strange combination of the two.
“You have it? Good - here I go. Defendo.” It sounded to her like the word for Defense class - the name of the class - but a gash appeared in the branch and nothing caught fire, so she would take it. She did it again, and this time, the first branch came away.
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Tatiana
And a vocabulary and a half.
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Tatiana
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