Prof. Isis Carter
June 13, 2015 5:14 PM
Fortify! [Years III-V] by Prof. Isis Carter
Such a shame, really. She had rather liked Diana Yu. While the woman had always seemed a bit edgy, Isis had never really expected her to actually snap. It had been a few days since the woman packed up and left, so she imagined the students had taken notice by now, although Isis intended to refrain from spelling out the apparent reasons. Still, such a shame.She tried to shake off the lingering knot in her stomach from the whole thing as she began setting up for today’s lesson. Admittedly, she was going to miss covering Defense Against the Dark Arts, but Potions had always agreed with her, at least. She just hoped Professor Pye, now a permanent staff member, would be less harsh on the young kids than he had been as a substitute. After all, they were just kids.
The class currently pouring into the Potions classroom were a bit older than that; Intermediates were, Isis found, always a decent bunch to have around. They were too old for childhood’s naivety but too young to worry too terribly about the future, an excellent balance, she felt. At least, they could be relatively worry free here at Sonora, unlike the pressure many of them may have faced at home, either from wealthy society or impoverished circumstance, the latter of which more reminiscent of her own childhood.
“Welcome,” the woman smiled once everyone was seated and her typical five-minute grace period had passed. “Today, we’ll be making the Girding Potion, which is designed to boost the endurance of the drinker. You’ll need dragonfly thoraxes, fairy wings, flying seahorses, and doxy eggs. Anything you lack will be available on the shelf.” The ingredients she listed appeared on the chalkboard behind her, along with the thirteen-step* instructional process. “Feel free to work in pairs, and be sure to note the color changes--if it isn’t hitting those particular markers, you haven’t heated it enough. It should be a greenish gold when you’re done. Unless anyone has any questions, go ahead and get to it. You’ve got the class period.”
OOC: Mentions of Diana Yu approved by her author. I’d like to see 250 or more words, if possible, although 200 is the technical minimum. Please follow all guidelines for godmodding, but if your character needs Isis for any reason, feel free to call her over and assume she came to them fairly promptly. Be creative, and have fun!
Your instructions are:
Add one set of fairy wings.
Heat until the potion turns turquoise.
Add one measure of doxy eggs.
Heat until the potion turns pink.
Add the toasted dragonfly thoraxes until the potion turns red.
Heat until the potion turns blue.
Add toasted dragonfly thoraxes until the potion turns silver.
Heat the potion until it turns red.
Add three measures of doxy eggs.
Add some dragonfly thoraxes.
Heat the potion until it turns blue.
Add three flying seahorses.
Heat until the potion turns green.
Subthreads: Trying to be a good intermediate student by Araceli Arbon with Tobi Reinhardt, Teppenpaw
Looking for personal supervision. by Joella Curtis, Pecari with Liliana Bannister, Pecari
An offer you can't refuse. by John Umland, Aladren with Clark Dill, Aladren
I wish I could. by Isaac Douglas, Crotalus
Just what I need (Tag Liac) by Chaslyn Brockert,Crotalus
Measure twice, brew once by Theodore Wolseithcrafte, Aladren
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Prof. Isis Carter
Fortify! [Years III-V]
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Prof. Isis Carter
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John Umland, Aladren
June 16, 2015 2:37 PM
An offer you can't refuse. by John Umland, Aladren
Professor Carter, John had decided, was his kind of person: clearly both intelligent and magically skilled, not limited to one field of knowledge and skill, and someone who could adjust to circumstances without looking too fazed by them. Whenever other teachers disappeared, she showed up and kept things moving. He thought that might be harder than really teaching on one specialty and so really did respect Professor Carter for that.Her views on punctuality were less agreeable to him. In second year, John had been bored often enough that he’d had no objection to wasted class time, seeing that as time he could use to peruse his notes and make new ones, but this year, he was excited by the prospect of more interesting assignments and wanted to get on with them. He had read his sister’s old textbooks and seen her homework assignments when they studied together in the library, and intermediates got to play with more complex theories and perform more complex magic. John didn’t agree with the teachers who locked the tardy out, but nor did he consider said classmates’ inability to get their acts together the rest of the class’ fault.
When they finally did get started, though, he wasn’t disappointed with the assignment. This was definitely not something they would let the Beginners make. He couldn’t, off the top of his head, think of a really obvious way to kill someone with it, which he often had been able to do with Beginner potions, but he could imagine some equally-disreputable uses for it and some of them were even relevant to the lives of average students. It sounded like a good way to cheat at Quidditch and might also have some applications in the field of last-minute binge study sessions.
Endurance could be mental, but emotions are all chemistry and electricity, too, or whatever it is with us - but whatever does it, mental and physical condition go together - I can do so much more when I’m awake and – but sometimes, admittedly, when you’re tired but keep going, you’re proud of yourself for making yourself go more, so….
He shook his head, clearing it of generalized thoughts and looking at the evidence in front of him, the details of this specific potion. All the ingredients were animal-derived, and he didn't recognize any of them as mood-affecting, though he knew he really shouldn't include that when he knew he had never really made an effort to memorize everything that was. Then there was the potion name - girding. The first thing that came to mind was armor and the second was the magic girdle from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. John was reasonably sure that this potion would not give the drinker the power to endure decapitation with no ill effects, but an increase in physical endurance was still the most likely answer to the question of what the potion did.
Lots of flying things, he noticed as he looked over the ingredients. He wasn’t going to be the only one who thought of Quidditch, though he wasn't particularly tempted - he had heard Sir Gawain and the other stories often enough to know that honesty (and not being the guy who walked into what had to either be a trap or the designs of a crazy person) usually really was the best policy, and he did well enough on his own now to make it a matter of pride anyway. Flying seahorses he didn't know much about, but doxy eggs were toxic. He guessed the heat’s effect on them and their combination with other compounds could address that, but maybe the potion was also at least mildly toxic, at least in large quantities - that could be the 'deal with the devil' aspect of it. His best guess was that it affected proteins, either fiddling with metabolism or doing something with the ones that influenced cell structure or musculature to make them temporarily stronger. The affected polypeptides would eventually degrade, and without more of the potion, the body would just be left with its original resources, assuming the original dose was properly removed from the body and didn’t…accumulate or something, mess with the balance of protein turnover....
He took out a fresh sheet of paper and wrote down first the name of the potion and two short notes of things he wanted to research further when he had a chance. Then, content, he put that aside and opened up his potions kit before turning to a neighbor. Another thought, one he could actually do something with right now if he could find a partner in crime, had just occurred to him.
“Hey,” he said. “Er – we can work together or we can not, I don’t care, but do you mind if I look at your supplies? The seahorses and dragonflies and stuff.” He started talking faster in the hopes of finishing before he was interrupted. “Entomology’s not really my thing, but I know there’s a lot of species under most common names – like dragonfly – and I bought mine in Canada, so we might have different types and it’ll be interesting to see if that makes the potion better or worse in the end. If we do, anyway. Have different - " he waved toward his kit -"these, I mean.” Some products were basically the same on both sides of the border, but others weren’t, and he had no idea if there were any business connections between the Edmonton potions shop he’d visited this summer and any suppliers in the States.
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John Umland, Aladren
An offer you can't refuse.
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John Umland, Aladren
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Clark Dill, Aladren
July 04, 2015 10:43 AM
I could, but I'd miss an amazing opportunity by Clark Dill, Aladren
One of the things Clark liked best about Professor Carter was that she didn't bog down her classes by tediously going over things that were spelled out perfectly well in the book. Everyone could read, and intermediates didn’t need their hands held to follow a straightforward potions recipe anymore. Plus, it felt pretty good to be trusted to get through the process on his own.He was checking his potions kits against the ingredient list to see if he needed to get anything from the school stock when John addressed him. At first, Clark was a bit confused by the request - had it been Oliver he might have suspected him of wanting to mock the inferiority of Clark’s kit, but John, he’d gathered, was from a similar economic class to Clark’s. Then John explained and Clark shared his ingredients with genuine interest. He wasn’t exactly sure of the exact species his vials contained, but they were from the East Coast of the US, so it did sound reasonable that they might differ from what was available in Canada. “I got mine on the east coast, in Maryland,” he offered to give John an idea of where he came from in case he didn’t know already. “So I’ve almost certainly got seahorses native to the Atlantic. I’ve probably just got whatever the most common kind of dragonfly in my area is; I got one of the cheaper kits,” he admitted. Not the cheapest because he figured that was just asking for poor quality ingredients and therefore poor quality potions, but he certainly hadn’t shelled out the big galleons for the best stuff out there.
He normally liked working in pairs, mostly for the social aspect, but he could work alone, too, and occasionally did just to get practice for his exams which wouldn’t be cooperative, and if John was working in parallel to him so they could compare the species’ effect on the outcome, that would surely satisfy Clark’s need for social interaction. “If they are different, I’d be up for seeing whether or not it affects the outcome. What do yours look like?” he asked, opening his up and taking out a few samples for comparison.
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Clark Dill, Aladren
I could, but I'd miss an amazing opportunity
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Clark Dill, Aladren
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John Umland
July 08, 2015 12:35 AM
Okay, I can work with that. by John Umland
If there was anyone at Sonora who was likely to prove a willing and able accomplice to one of John’s class experiments, it was Clark, but John still smiled in momentary relief when his proposition got a positive response. His expression only became gleeful, though, when Clark told him Maryland was on the east coast. John was sure he had committed this information to memory at some point during his education, but American political geography was not a subject he had a lot of regular use for and so he was not sure if he could have recalled much about its location without the prompt, especially since he thought he remembered it as one of the tiny little middle ones he’d found difficult to place when Mom made him do all those tedious North American maps.“Me, too, so yours should be different from mine,” he said cheerily. “I’m pretty sure I don’t have much that’s Atlantic – I mean, the mountains and B.C. are between us – in Alberta – and the Pacific, but there’s four big provinces between us and the nearest bit of the Atlantic.” Newfoundland was sort of in there, too, as was New Brunswick, but the Gulf of St. Lawrence allowed him to feel comfortable ignoring them and the islands for purposes of talking to Clark. There was a time and place for stuff like making a show of Canadian knowledge or claiming that he supported his family by hunting moose with a hockey stick while wearing nothing but flannel underwear and consuming nothing but maple syrup as he hiked through the endless year-round snow and went slowly insane in the face of the vast emptiness of the plains, but now wasn’t one of them. Not least because he liked Clark well enough not to subject him to the no doubt painful mental image that would go along with a description of John traipsing around anywhere in any kind of underwear not, along with the rest of him, safely concealed by the rest of a proper set of clothes. “And like I said, I haven’t made a big study of dragonflies, but I’d expect our climates to be kind of different, since even my east coast is further south than where I live and Maryland’s not particularly close to the border, is it? That might make a difference. Do you have any mountains?"
He also took out some representative samples and put a blank piece of paper down so they could compare everything side-by-side. All the dried insects they had looked the worse for being dried and disassembled, but even looking at what they had, there were some visual differences that supported his theory. Some of the thoraxes, the larger ones in the samples, looked about the same, but some of the other Maryland ones were more colorful than almost all of his even in their dried-up forms.
“It looks like they might be mixed species,” he said, disappointment coloring his tone. “Still, some of them are different, so I guess we can roughly compare east versus west for now, maybe try to get some better samples another time if there isn’t any good information in the library.” He could write home for detailed information on dragonflies if he couldn’t find an appropriate book in the library; someone must have studied this before, but the book or paper might not be in a high school library or be about North American insects, so he might have to cobble the information together on his own. “Hypothesis, if there is a difference - if these aren't like blended tea - then yours will work a little better than mine – coastal means more water, dragonflies like water….Huh,” he said, a thought occurring to him. “I saw that everything had wings, but it’s – the component list is half-aquatic, too, flying seahorses and dragonflies. Hydration's a big factor in endurance, but I don’t know if that’s related.” He started taking out more things for the potion as he speculated, speaking and moving more smoothly and confidently than he usually did outside the classroom. “I don't know that much about the mechanics of water animals, either....It could influence how the drinker’s body processes water, depending on the interactions with the fairy wings and the doxy eggs. I'll have to get my brothers to look for stuff about how fish breathe and all, probably. The library's great, but it's not that great with biology, honestly.” The Care of Magical Creatures textbook made him want to bang his head against a table, or better yet, bang the author's head against the heaviest taxonomy textbook he could find. He beamed at the delicate set of fairy wings in his hand. “We should probably compare these, too,” he added, putting the wings above the thorax samples. “I’ll take some notes on what these look like, then do that with the other samples while they heat up.”
OOC: Dragonfly descriptions courtesy of Google searches for “dragonflies Maryland” and “dragonflies Alberta.” Apparently, as Google never lies, they’re more common in Maryland than Alberta generally, and while the two political units do share some species of darner, they don’t seem to have much other overlap within the broader dragon- and damselfly category.
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John Umland
Okay, I can work with that.
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John Umland
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Clark Dill
July 22, 2015 10:35 PM
Great! by Clark Dill
Clark nodded in agreement as John theorized their ingredients would have some differences, making a mental note along the way that John was from Alberta. He wasn't sure he'd be able to place Alberta on a map, but even before John explained its relative position to the oceans, he would have figured it for a Western Province simply because he was moderately more familiar with the Eastern Provinces and it wasn't one of those."Maryland is kind of in the middle," Clark explained when asked for clarification on its latitudinal location. "We're the northmost of the Southern states," he added, "with our North border being the Mason Dixon Line." He wasn't sure John, being Canadian, knew the significance of that, so he added, "which was the political divide in our civil war. And I think western Maryland has mountains, but I'm only about half an hour from the coast, er, the Chesapeake Bay coast that is. The ocean's a little further off. But either way, we're relatively flat and close to sea level. Is your area high altitude?"
Clark looked between his dragon flies and John's and returned the ones which looked like they might have some species overlap in his own pile to their jar. Clark's selection seemed to have more variety so it made sense for him to take his matching samples out rather than have John do so. This left them with distinctly different sets of dragonfly thoraxes, at least as well as he could tell by visual inspection and knowing very little about the differences between dragonfly species. "Ideally, we should probably brew a bunch of potions using single species for a more thorough comparison and eliminate a greater number of variables," he remarked off-handedly, "but this will do for a base test to see if there's any difference at all. Though if the instructions aren't specific, and the overall effects are minimal in the finished potion regardless of the species of the ingredients, it may be that some of the variations cancel each other out so it doesn't matter so much."
"That's a good point," Clark remarked, impressed, as John made the connection between aquatic ingredients and hydration for endurance. He made a note of it on the sidebar of his text book. "And flying creatures are generally lighter than land creatures and especially sea creatures which have the water to help support their weight, so that may help with the endurance as well since less mass means less energy is needed to reach the desired goal so, magically speaking, they would contribute to a lower energy consumption and therefore what energy you do have lasts longer."
At John's request to compare fairy wings, Clark took out some of his as well. As fairies were magical creatures, Clark's ability to differentiate them was even poorer than it was with the dragonflies, which he had at least seen a lot of growing up, but there did seem to be some differences there as well. "Looks like my area generally likes colors more than your area," he observed, then expounded it into a hypothesis he'd have to check later. "I bet tropical fairy wings are even more vibrant than mine."
Then a more immediately applicable idea occurred to him, and he said, "Hypothesis: Maryland fairy wings will turn the potion turquoise faster than Alberta fairy wings."
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Clark Dill
Great!
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Clark Dill
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John
July 31, 2015 8:55 AM
We'll have fun, fun, fun 'til they take our cauldrons away. by John
John nodded as Clark filled him in on a few details of American geography, including historical politics. Who Mason Dixon had been escaped him at the moment, but he remembered that their civil war was one of the few things the Americans had ever done that Mom (the descendant of U.E.L.s on her mother’s side, though she didn’t make a big deal of it) seemed to find genuinely interesting. She used that war as a major example in the advanced nineteenth century history curriculum, the one Paul and Steve referred to as “Why To Never Become A World Leader 101” because of the Socratic ethics lessons. Julian, asked to pick first one side and then another from contemporary arguments and then defend it as Mom pointed out every possible objection, had been driven to frustrated tears at one point when it was her turn because there was no safe position, not when each position was taken to its logical extreme. Paul’s attempt to claim each situation had to be viewed individually and without reference to general principles had gone over just as badly as Steve's more rule-abiding answers and Julian's several attempts to change her story had. John suspected this was the point, and also that he was going to fail to find the ‘right’ answer just as spectacularly as his siblings had when it was his turn, though he had carefully taken notes over Julian’s lessons so he at least wouldn’t make the same mistakes his sister had.“We’re...not at a low elevation,” he said of his home altitude. “I don’t remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but we’re a good bit higher than Edmonton, a lot closer to the mountains.”
John tried to estimate the number of tests that could be performed to find the combination that produced maximum efficiency, provided they didn’t already have it. It was possible that some combinations, using single varietals and such, could do their jobs too well or something like that, making the melange of dragonfly and fairy wings the best solution – he didn’t know enough to know. “Yeah, you could probably use this as the basis for an Advanced research project,” he said. “The example potion, use that to illustrate a principle of component selection. I look at what my sister’s doing sometimes,” he added to explain why he was thinking about Advanced class research projects. “Though we could probably do most of the work now if we had the time and resources,” he added matter-of-factly.
He tried not to feel too ridiculously pleased with himself when Clark said he had a good point. “Also a good point,” he said when Clark extrapolated about the magical effects of flying creatures. “Hold on a moment – “ he wrote down lighter mass – less ener. expnd. “That one might be relatively easy to test,” he said. “More or less, anyway, for the magic side. Eat identical meals before performing identical tasks for a few days, then try the same routine with the potion...except for how hard it is to do the same thing even two days in a row." One day he got along fine with his sister, the next they were arguing and he didn't even know why. Different clubs met on different days. The kitchens didn't serve the same things consistently. Plus all the other things that made science really hard when it was off the books, without financial backers and a budget that allowed for ignoring the rest of the world for a while.
“Noted,” he said when Clark proposed a second hypothesis. “Yeah, Alberta’s not really your place for bright colors – landlocked, prairie provinces, that picture.” John added his fairy wings and began to heat the potion. “I read somewhere that your Texas is similar. Oil, steel, cattle...musical traditions of arguable quality. My mom thinks it's a shame that we've got one of the best universities in the world - " he said this, he noticed with mild irritation, with pride in his tone; he never believed people who sounded like that really had the data to back up their affection for their homes, so he wished he could have been more matter-of-fact about it - "in our city but we're better-known for a rodeo." His dad didn't mind so much, but he was from Saskatchewan and didn't only move west because of the universities in the first place. "I think this is starting to look faintly bluish," he added of the beginnings of his potion. He peered at his cauldron, looking for pieces of wing to see if they disintegrated or if they just infused something into the water. "The wizard who invents decent wizard lighting and gets us out of the candle age will never want for gold again," he joked.
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John
We'll have fun, fun, fun 'til they take our cauldrons away.
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John
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