Professor Sophie O'Malley
December 23, 2016 4:36 PM
Comm-on, everybody! [Years I and II] by Professor Sophie O'Malley
Getting back to school was always a bit rough. Sophie herself remembered dreading the return to classes, even the ones she liked, after a holiday at home. Even with friends and extracurriculars to get back to, it could be difficult to leave one’s family behind. Most years for her, returning to Sonora meant leaving her father alone again, isolated in a giant, empty house. Serapes had to return to his workplace, and while Ileum would be around, it was not the same.She couldn’t help but look around the classroom and wonder how many of her students experienced something similar, how many of them went home and had to fight to leave because of who or what they left behind? However, the former Pecari quickly rationalized that this was a productive line of thought for neither her mood nor her teaching, so she pushed it away for now, put on a smile, and cheerfully greeted her beginners. “Welcome back!”
“Hopefully everyone had a pleasant break,” she said. “But now it’s time to get back to work, yeah? So let me take a quick attendance and then we’ll get started.” The small blonde didn’t bother to call out names anymore, as she was easily familiarized with everyone by now, but she did scan over the room and quickly dash checkmarks into the appropriate boxes on her clipboard.
“Right, now then,” began Sophie, sitting the attendance sheet down on her desk and moving forward around it. “I thought we’d get right back into things with a good brew. Sound good?” She paused, glancing around the room for obvious dissent. Of course, she wasn’t going to change her lesson plan to please a sourpuss, but she liked to keep tabs on where the kids stood as far as favorability on the subject. Kids did a lot better in classes they liked. “We’re going to work on the Antidote for Common Poisons.” She waved a hand, and the title of the potion appeared on the blackboard. “Now, can anyone tell me what a poison is?” Sophie didn’t expect a word-for-word dictionary definition, but the glossary in the back of their textbooks would define it as “a substance that is capable of causing the illness or death of a living organism when introduced or absorbed.” Anything close to that was granted five House points.
“Great answers, everybody. So as you’ve gathered, a poison is basically anything that can hurt or kill you when it gets inside you. There’s an unpleasantly vast variety of poisons in both the magical and Muggle worlds, but one potion was developed to cure - hence the title - some of the more common ones.”
“You will find instructions on page 230 of your textbook. Accompanying that, you’ll find a couple pages on different poisons and the origin of this potion, which I’d like you to read up on as your homework or whenever you finish brewing. As always, feel free to work in pairs and talk quietly among yourselves as long as the work still gets done and the noise stays manageable.”
OOC: Welcome back, everybody. Instead of lengthening this post with the instructions, I’ll just direct you to the HP wiki from whence it came, which can be found here. Obviously mind the rules, and keep in mind that I will award an OOC point boost to account for IC correct answers to in class questions. As a reminder, your student would be using a pewter cauldron. Have fun, and happy holidays!
Subthreads: I'm here, I'm here. by Farrah Welsh, Aladren with Jozua Sparks
Comm-unication by Winston Pierce, Crotalus with Arianna Tate, Crotalus
Tagging Finn by Juniper Brockert, Teppenpaw with Finn Scott, Teppenpaw
I foresee this coming in handy... by Madeleine Dautin, Aladren with Natalie Atwater, Pecari
Focused. by Kit Reid, Aladren with Gwen Fintoc, Teppenpaw
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Professor Sophie O'Malley
Comm-on, everybody! [Years I and II]
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Professor Sophie O'Malley
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Madeleine Dautin, Aladren
January 10, 2017 2:44 AM
I foresee this coming in handy... by Madeleine Dautin, Aladren
Even if Madeleine didn't spend the majority of her days running around as Flora Deschamps, international super-spy bringing down the hammer of justice on evil, she still would have been happy to learn the antidote to common poisons because as any good French witch or wizard knew, crimes of passion were not meant to be taken lightly. The French wizarding culture turned a blind eye to cheating and being from a family where neither of her parents were sleeping with the other, Madeleine lived in fear of someone or other becoming jealous and Doing Something About It.So, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, Madeleine brought out her potions kit and began to prepare for the day's lesson. Arguments over love were not just something that ran in the adult circles. No, her sister was bitter towards the former Pecari prefect and Quidditch Captain over a long-old tryst Liliana Bannister had shared with Myrtille's betrothed, and just that past winter break Louis Valois had been shamed by Sébastien Évreux over Ingrid Wolseithcrafte (something which had caused Madeleine to laugh for a good while at Bastien when they returned because of the way it had all blown up in his face).
"You know," she commented to the other student at her desk. "This is really going to come in handy later on. It's definitely one I'm going to have to make carefully and memorize because one never knows when they'll need to use a poison antidote!"
She went back to setting up her workstation, placing the bezoar in the mortar and setting out her standard ingredient and measuring spoon so that she could quickly put the correct amount in her cauldron after crushing her bezoar as finely as possible. Madeleine knew that she took her time when crushing things if asked to make a fine powder because she liked to brew as thorough as possible--after all, Dautins made beyond passing marks!, and she didn't want to have to wait too long after everyone else's forty minutes were up to continue on with her potion.
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Madeleine Dautin, Aladren
I foresee this coming in handy...
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Madeleine Dautin, Aladren
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Natalie Atwater, Pecari
January 12, 2017 1:31 AM
Well that's a bit disturbing... by Natalie Atwater, Pecari
As usual, Natalie was running late. She didn't know why this happened nearly everyday but it did. It was always one thing or another, today she had forgotten her potions kit and didn't realize it until she was halfway there and had to go back and get it. Maybe it was some subconscious desire not to go to class. She wished she could blame an active social life and while she still had a chance for one, she didn't have one yet. She supposed it might have to do with her liking to sit on the beach in the water room after she ate. And that was hard to pull herself away from that.Especially to goto a class like potions. No disrespect towards Sophie, whom she loved very much for being so good to Ryan and just being all around cool even if they didn't have the bond Sophie and Kira did. In fact, Natalie felt terribly guilty about not liking this class better because her cousin's wife was teaching it but she really didn't have much patience for the brewing process. . She honestly wished she could have the Intermediates' silencing charm lesson instead. That sounded useful and fun.
Still she got there on time, even if she was one of the last ones there and when she heard the lesson, at the very least it sounded like it could be useful. Though Natalie was going to be a grand society lady like all Atwater and Brockert girls were groomed to be. Not only that, but she couldn't imagine anyone disliking her enough to want to kill or seriously harm her. Even with her basic black sheep status, her family didn't want her to die , just be more like Kelsey.
Of course, in a way, that would be kind of a death. A death of whom she, Natalie Cornelia Atwater, truly was inside. While being the perfect pureblood lady was who her sister was, it wasn't her. And truth be told, her paternal family was being quite unfair. While Natalie was going to talk to whomever she pleased-after all, it would be rude to just ignore her roommate for example-it wasn't like she wanted to marry a non-pureblood or denounce magic and live a Muggle life-she couldn't imagine why anyone with a choice would-or even play Quidditch. She just wasn't some perfect lady who barely seemed human like her sister was.
Still, a literal death from poisoning was unlikely to befall her. So she sort of blinked when Madeleine Dautin whom she was sitting next to said.
"This is really going to come in handy later on. It's definitely one I'm going to have to make carefully and memorize because one never knows when they'll need to use a poison antidote!"
Natalie was not sure how to exactly reply to that. What kind of family did Madeleine come from? She'd heard of "dark families" out there but she didn't realize the Dautins were such. Or that poisoning regularly occurred amongst the French. "Do you expect to be poisoned?"The Pecari asked incredulously. If someone was so sure they were going to be poisoned it either meant they were an awful person and knew it or that they knew a bunch of awful people. If it was the former, maybe Natalie should stay far away from Miss Dautin after this lesson. If it was the latter, than Natalie felt very sorry for her.
And the other girl was only a year older than Natalie, how could she have accrued so many enemies already that she was expecting to be poisoned.
Another thought occurred to her though " I mean, for me I suppose like, when I have kids and they might accidentally ingest something, a remedy would be useful." Hopefully Madeleine meant something along those lines. Not that having kids was everything, but considering the alternatives Natalie had been imagining, this seemed far more sensible and something most pureblood women would likely have happen to them. The having kids part that was, not the kids being accidentally poisoned
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Natalie Atwater, Pecari
Well that's a bit disturbing...
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Madeleine
January 18, 2017 1:23 PM
Is it? I just want to stay alive... by Madeleine
This was an instance in which Myrtille’s advice for Madeleine to think a bit before she spoke would have really come in handy, the Aladren thought as she saw the look on her classmate’s face. It was a reasonable question, she supposed, for someone who didn’t have quite the imagination as she herself did—or who hadn’t grown up knowing all kinds of loose love. Yet loose love while accepted as a universal truth was also not discussed in polite company with those outside of la noblesse although the adult witches did titter behind cups of punch about the latest gossip at parties and balls.Did she expect to be poisoned? Madeleine couldn’t really say. Louis Valois had not opted to get back at Sébastien Évreux in a violent way, and both her parents were turning blind eyes to the other’s extramarital affairs even though Papa was indulging a parade of burgeoisie witches and Maman was in an six year long affair with Papa’s brother, Oncle Thierry. However, her parents did still love each other on some level, Madeleine knew that—they had to or else they wouldn’t be so lovey dovey at parties or when talking to their friends. Madeleine was rather observant but even she could tell that the way their eyes sparkled when talking about each other was real.
“It’s to be prepared,” Madeleine settled on, hoping that her word choice made sense. She didn’t want to marry because she didn’t want to end up like her parents in a loving-loveless marriage and so therefore she logically couldn’t have any children. She wasn’t about to have kids out of wedlock! She wasn’t some burgoise witch, after all! “Besides, you never know who might be jealous with whom and if you might be the person to accidentally stumble in the middle of someone doing something about it!”
She had been careful to use general terms so as not to implicate any of her French brethren in her statement, and she was also rather proud of her use of ‘whom,’ since the French ‘qui’ and ‘que’ oftentimes muddled in her head as they could also be used as question words and also stand-ins for people-nouns and thing-nouns respectively.
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Madeleine
Is it? I just want to stay alive...
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Madeleine
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