Wiggen' out! [Years III, IV, and V] on Potions

Prof. Isis Carter

December 06, 2015 9:51 PM

Wiggen' out! [Years III, IV, and V] by Prof. Isis Carter

All of her personal items were packed, leaving the Potions room temporarily somewhat bare. Isis was a bit sad to vacate the position, having grown rather comfortable with daily teaching and having her own classroom. But as a substitute, she supposed this was really the nature of the job, and this relative melancholy was her own making since she had gotten too cozy in this particular room. At least she wasn’t leaving Sonora altogether; her whole life was here now.

“Alright, everyone,” she began as the Intermediates filed in for their lesson. “Before we begin, I’d like to make a small announcement. This is my last day as your Potions professor. A permanent professor has been found and will be taking over. No, that does not mean that your essays for next week are cancelled. They will still count toward your grade, but they will be scored by someone other than myself. Thank you for your good behavior”--she had not really had any discipline issues in her time teaching Potions--“which I trust will continue with this new professor.”

Isis cleared her throat, her shifting body language leading the transition back to a learning environment. “Today, we’ll be working on the Wiggenweld potion” she explained. From thereafter, all relevant information appeared on the board behind her as she spoke. “Can anyone tell me what it does?” Isis called upon the closest raised hand and continued to recognize students until the correct answer was given. “That’s right. It’s a healing potion that will awaken someone from a magically-induced sleep.”

“It is said that this potion was once used by a prince to wake a princess who had been giving the Draught of the Living Dead by putting some of it on his lips and kissing her,” Isis continued, providing the sort of background information that had always been fair game on quizzes. She supposed things might be different now, when the new professor arrived. “This has influence in the Muggle world with the story of Sleeping Beauty, although in that edition, it’s love, not magic, that helps the kiss wake up the princess.”

“Brewing instructions are on page 413 of your textbook. Please turn to it and begin preparing your potion.” As always, Isis would be at ~~her~~ the desk up front, keeping a vigilant eye out for any students who may need help. Unlike the Advanced level, these students were not permitted to Vanish away their failed attempts, so she generally anticipated a greater need for her attention on brewing days. Teaching Potions sure had been fun.

OOC: The following instructions are provided by the HP-wiki:

Add salamander blood until the potion turns red.
Stir until the potion turns orange.
Add more salamander blood, this time until it turns yellow.
Stir until the potion turns green.
Add more salamander blood, until the potion turns turquoise.
Heat until it turns indigo.
Add more salamander blood until the potion turns pink.
Heat until the potion turns red.
Add five lionfish spines.
Heat until the potion turns yellow.
Add five more lionfish spines.
Add flobberworm mucus, until the potion turns purple.
Stir until it turns red.
Add more flobberworm mucus, this time until it turns orange.
Stir till it turns yellow.
Shake and add until it turns orange again.
Add honeywater until it turns turquoise.
Heat until it turns pink.
Add salamander blood until it turns green.

Be sure to follow all site rules and provide me with some creative, lengthy posts to read and score, and feel free to tag Isis if she is needed. Happy posting!

12 Prof. Isis Carter Wiggen' out! [Years III, IV, and V] 31 Prof. Isis Carter 1 5

John Umland, Aladren

December 16, 2015 12:31 AM

I'd really rather not. by John Umland, Aladren

The trappings of a room were not usually among the things John consciously noticed unless they were stunningly beautiful, overwhelmingly hideous, or made of books (a condition that could easily put it into the ‘stunningly beautiful’ category), but he did usually automatically notice changes in environments he was used to. The changes in the Potions classroom caught his attention far more than most of the missing objects ever had when they’d been in their proper places and their absence made him a little uneasy. In his experience, people who changed things up in a room were people who were about to change how things worked, and in classes, that usually meant interacting with others in ways that he found annoying.

This time, however, it did not mean that. Instead, it meant something even less to his liking: a new teacher. He had no particular relationship with Professor Carter, but she was familiar, competent, and rarely presented an obstacle to him doing what he wanted to do, which was about as much as John typically asked of adults outside of his own neighborhood and made her presence more desirable than that of an unknown quantity. An unknown quantity might be the strict, by-the-book type who’d get in his way, or the spacey, touchy-feely type who’d want him to sit around in a circle playing bizarre review games that involved lots of clapping with the third years, or…or anything, and while there was a chance an unknown quantity would be awesome and let him do interesting work on his own or with Clark instead of even nominally operating on the same level as the people who were just floating along to get through their CATS, John strongly suspected this chance was a slim one. The versions of the story that prominently featured obstructive idiots were all much more likely to come to pass.

Since there was nothing he could really do about it, though – one of the things about life that frustrated him more all the time – he focused instead on being pleased that they got straight to work instead of lingering over the issue. John wrinkled his nose at the allusion to Sleeping Beauty, a little disgusted by the idea of kissing someone who was in many versions a total stranger and in all versions was someone who happened to be in a coma. Kissing random people was a bad idea in and of itself even from a strictly practical point of view, exchanging bodily fluids with people one had just met being a wonderful way to contract and then spread disease, but kissing unconscious strangers removed any ambiguity about whether the unsanitary behavior was also morally wrong. Kissing was, he was sure he’d read somewhere, a bonding behavior – a bizarre bonding behavior, considering that it was unsanitary and put a soft bit like the tongue in close proximity to someone else’s teeth and yet was also an act which was in no way actually necessary to a successful attempt at reproduction, but it was supposed to be a bonding behavior, at least for people who didn’t think. It was morally wrong for sapient species to make such gestures toward potential mates who were unable to indicate whether they wished to bond with the initiating party or not, that was just a fact. If whatever medieval prince had done that had been a proper hero, he’d have just dripped the stuff onto her mouth from the bottle, but the delivery method he had chosen in the version of the story John was most familiar with pretty firmly established him as both a creep and a complete moron, considering that he’d put a potion meant to break something called living death on his own lips while already awake….

His mind drifted away from the creepiness and to the science and magical theory. If he'd been a betting man, he would have put his money on the potion doing some pretty fascinating things to Prince Creepy’s nervous system, too, unfortunately for the princess - he had sudden, vivid mental images of some poor girl waking up to find a freshly-created corpse collapsed on top of her, or else marrying her savior only to find that he got less sleep than Macbeth and thus was also doomed to insanity and death in relatively short order. It was possible, though, that the compounds in the potion might...bind themselves, he guessed, specifically to compounds in the Draught of Living Death, like the immune system attacking a virus, and would pass harmlessly out of someone without the Draught in him. He’d need to know more about the Draught of Living Death, and specifically whether it worked on lab mice once he had access to a proper lab, he guessed, to really work anything out, so he scribbled a few notes to himself with one hand while turning pages in his book with the other.

Limitations! Limitations!

Still, he guessed this was a useful potion for a lot of his classmates to know. Aladren, at least, seemed to have a tendency toward second sons of pureblood families, and he suspected those were the people who ended up running the American government and economy, activities that could end in making enemies and other such dramatic things. John doubted he’d ever have much use for it – if he ever made enemies, he didn’t think putting him or his loved ones into enchanted sleeps would be the kind of thing they’d go in for. His crimes and associates just weren’t of the right characters for that kind of thing – but nobody was going to use everything, and it would be interesting if he ever had the time and resources to run those experiments. He found the directions, filled his cauldron, and took out the bottle of salamander blood. Fascinating stuff, that. He made a mental note to look through the library's journals to see if there was any good research being done with it these days.

“Lovely subject, this,” he remarked to his neighbor, adding drops one at a time so he didn’t waste any. Money did not, sadly, grow on trees where he came from, and for some reason his parents had neglected to ask if the house was on top of a gold mine before they bought it. Careless of them, really. "I'm never sure whether I should be reassured or terrified when we study antidotes in here."

Each drop hissed a little as it made contact with the water. Fire and water with no intermediary. As they diffused through the water, John frowned at them, wondering if he was supposed to go all the way to opaque red or just recognizably red. Salamander blood was a powerful restorative, so a little might go a surprisingly long way. He had read stories where people were revived by a few drops, though he took those with a good half-shaker of salt, especially since others gave larger amounts. A novel he’d read over the summer had made a plot point of a healing requiring a tablespoonful, leading to some drama when the protagonist lost a good deal of her bottle while escaping from the Inferi in the abbey, leaving her uncertain if she had enough blood on hand to heal her dying brother when, a few chapters later, he got himself badly hurt trying to save her life (she had, unsurprisingly, had enough blood to do the trick, but the author had been bored and her editor sloppy, so before the protagonist could administer the dose, they’d been attacked again and saved by her boring love interest in a move so detrimental to BLI’s health that it had forced her to choose between saving the brother and the BLI – only to then find out the bottle was self-refilling. John had not been amused). His water was already recognizably red from the amount of blood he'd put in it, but he could still see the bottom of his cauldron without difficulty. He added a few more drops and reached for his stirring spoon.

16 John Umland, Aladren I'd really rather not. 285 John Umland, Aladren 0 5