Professor Yu
October 26, 2014 6:48 PM
<i>Furnunculus</i> reverso (Years 1 & 2) by Professor Yu
They had already been back at school for two weeks but the occurrences over the break were still bothering Diana. Her family had been denying the sexuality of her brother Stephen for the past decade but this year Stephen had brought his friend Henry home for the holidays and all hell had figuratively almost broken loose. Diana supposed that the blow-out could have been much worse but for her family it was as bad as it could have gotten. She and her two brothers had been raised to respect their parents and growing up there had never been many fights. However, this year she couldn't help but feel they were all in a silent fight and that, Diana felt, was much worse than yelling and getting it all out in the open. She just couldn't handle the way their parents liked to cover things up and act like everything was fine. She knew that they knew that Stephen knew that everyone knew that Stephen was gay and Diana just didn't understand why they couldn't come out (she laughed derisively at herself for the pun) and say it.These thoughts were weighing heavily on her mind as she opened the Beginner's Potions class that afternoon because of a heated Floo call she'd had with her other brother's girlfriend, Sara, who was of the same opinion as Diana and the stress came into her voice as she introduced the potion for the day. "Although we all know to respect each other," she said, frowning. "Sometimes we can't help but get angry with those we love. Sometimes we even hurt them. One thing that we should never do is curse or jinx those we are arguing with. That is stooping to a new level that is wrong." Diana wished her family would just jinx each other and get it over with so they could apologize for that and get down to the real discussion like Sara had explained her family did. "Anyway," Diana cleared her throat, realizing that her lecture had gotten somewhat off topic. "There are certain spells that are painful and have no counter-curse. One such spell is Furnunculus, which produces unsightly, painful boils to break out across the victim's body. In order to clear these boils, we use the Cure for Boils potion which has two equally successful recipes. You can find them side by side in your books on pages 246 and 247. The reasoning behind this is in case the potion needs to be brewed in an emergency and certain ingredients are unavailable."
Diana thought the whole thing was ridiculous and her family had always kept a well-stocked medical cabinet with such potions inside in the case of an emergency. Besides, if one didn't have an ingredient there were stores all across the wizarding world that could be easily reached with a simple apparition or floo. "The recipe on page 246 is somewhat easier and so I would like the first years to try that potion and for the second years to try the slightly more difficult potion on page 247." She reached over and flipped the chalkboard to reveal the side she had written out the potions on. "I realize that not all of you have the same editions of the book and so I have taken the liberty to write the two recipes up on the board for each potion in case your book does not have your potion in it." She gestured to the left side of the board. "The recipe with snake fangs, horned slugs, and porcupine quills is for the first years and the recipe with pungous onions, flobberworm mucus, ginger root, and shrake spines is for the second-years."
OOC: The reasoning behind the two different potions is the wiki page has two different recipes. If you wish to use the page as a reference you can find it here. First years should pay attention to the potion from Magical Drafts & Potions, and second years to the potion from Book of Potions. If a first year believes themselves to be excellent at potions or wishes to try a challenge assume that if they had asked Diana for permission she would have given it to them if they truly were capable of doing so. As usual have fun, follow general posting rules and creativity will be awarded with extra points and tag Diana if she is needed.
Subthreads: Once more unto the breach. by Joella Curtis, Pecari with Aiden O'Neil, Teppenpaw
Bad is an Understatement by Theo Dashland, Crotalus with Professor Yu, Clark Dill, Aladren
Right, Wrong, and Hypothetical. by John Umland, Aladren
Off to work I go. by Lionel Layne, Pecari with Uzume Shinohara, Crotalus
*Cue Mission Impossible Music* [Tag: Lena Westley] by Liac Reinhardt, Teppenpaw with Lena Westley, Aladren
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Professor Yu
<i>Furnunculus</i> reverso (Years 1 & 2)
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Professor Yu
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John Umland, Aladren
November 03, 2014 10:49 AM
Right, Wrong, and Hypothetical. by John Umland, Aladren
There was, John thought as he put down the books which hadn't fit into his bag, a chance that he had finally figured out how many topics were truly too many to read about at one time. Between the book on Quidditch strategy, the two plays Mom wanted him to compare and contrast, the books on Greek and Roman mythology and magical history he had ended up taking out of the library because of the plays and hadn’t gotten around to returning yet even though he was sure he wasn’t going to finish them and they were really just extra weight in his bag, the books on magiornithology he had stumbled across at a sale over the holidays and was working his way through with support from Sonora's library, the dully-but-accurately named copy of Physical Science he had talked Joanie into loaning him until Easter, and the stuff he had to read for classes and the day-long sojourns into still more books that those books caused, he sometimes felt like his head was going to explode even when he wasn’t facing the hardest of his daily decisions: what to read in the few minutes before class.Because of where he was, he removed Physical Science from the pile at once and put it into his bag. Since Joanie was an only child and he thought Mr. Murphy kind of made a lot of money anyway, his colleague got almost everything new, including her books, and she would nag him for ages if he even forgot himself and wrote on the pages of Physical Science; if he spilled a potion on the glossy hardcover volume, she’d probably kill him, and while he was busy being dead, she’d be locked up wherever they sent twelve-year-old girls whose reaction to desecrated books was to hit the offender sixty-seven times with an axe, and both their situations would result in great losses to science. Putting one more book away didn’t really make him feel any better, though, because it just reminded him of the unread ones already in his bag and that Physical Science was really the book he needed to concentrate on the most. He needed to read it at least three times and perform some experiments before he gave it back to Joanie, and it was a thick book he wasn't even halfway through taking notes over yet.
He couldn’t work on that project right now, though. Joanie would kill him if he spilled something with dung in it on her book, and he didn’t really feel like being axe-murdered this Easter. Instead, he grabbed the play of magical origin from his bag and read that until Professor Yu began the class.
Paying attention became easier once, still trying to now stack his extra books on top of the bag propped against the leg of the lab table, he realized she was giving them a lecture on Right and Wrong – not something he expected in Potions, somehow, though it began to make more sense when he realized this was a Defense lesson that just happened to involve brewing something. He could see how the subjects went together pretty well - poisoning people was, after all, usually Wrong, and using a deadly potion would probably make it Dark magic as well. Professor Yu didn’t answer the question of why they learned to jinx people and a lot of them were legal, if unkind, if it that bad to do so, but he didn’t dwell on it. He had other things to think about, like the existence of two versions of the potion.
He flipped the book open to pages 246-7. The version his year was supposed to do was the one which looked longer and a little more complicated to keep up with to him, so he guessed it was theirs because its measurements were more precise than the second year one. He frowned, though, when he detected the presence of the potions procedure which, of all the potions steps he’d seen in half a year, annoyed him most: wave your wand.
It meant nothing. There was no spell. No aim, other than, the second time, ‘finishing.’ Obviously it was directing magic…somehow, but…normally, to channel the form of energy known as ‘magic’, he not only needed a conductor (specifically, a strip of wand-quality sycamore wood magically combined with at least part of a dragon’s heartstring), but he had to move that conductor a very specific way, and he had to say something – he wasn’t sure if the answer to why magic was usually a lot easier that way had something to do with the stuff Mom and the introductions to some of his books said about magic as a spiritual discipline or if it was just that sound waves either bounced off something or had something bounce off them, somehow, but either way, he couldn’t usually use non-verbal spells yet. Except this. Which wasn’t even really a spell at all.
“Hey, what do you - I don't know - think of, what do you do, during the ‘wave your wand’ part?” asked John of one of his neighbors, still frowning at his book, which continued to fail to offer him the information he wanted. He mentally added at least three more things to his list of things to try to look up, wondering for a moment if he was really going to fall over and die of being crushed by his own books someday before his thoughts went back to task. His best educated guess, from what he had put together about how different spells worked, was that experimenting would probably lead to a massive explosion, with Transfiguring or charming his cauldron's contents as less likely alternatives, but since this didn't work the way their other spells did, he didn't feel comfortable fitting any of his ideas into his probably-painfully-inadequate understandings. He looked around for a moment, trying to remember where he had put his writing case.
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John Umland, Aladren
Right, Wrong, and Hypothetical.
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John Umland, Aladren
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