A Different Use For Alcohol. [Advanced, VI-VII] on Potions

Professor Mary Brooding

September 21, 2019 9:02 PM

A Different Use For Alcohol. [Advanced, VI-VII] by Professor Mary Brooding

The first week of classes after midterm were always interesting for Mary, as she got to see the gamut of student performance. Some students kept up on their reading and curiosities over winter break, while others either didn't or couldn't. Mary was understanding of the fact that life continued to happen whilst students were still responsible for being students, but that wasn't to say the curriculum had room to go anymore slowly. As such, the advanced students had begun the second half of the year with theory in mind.

Aware that this was often a dull subject for students, and that she would not be doing much to get messy today, Mary had selected a rich purple gown for the occasion, with long sleeves buttoned to her wrists and her signature pointed hat perched on her head. Her functional braid was even playing its part, and loose strands coiled to the floor, altogether suggesting that today was a more casual, albeit more intensive lesson.

"This is a favorite topic of mine," Mary began class once students had taken their seats. There was no homework to pass back yet, so she had the advantage of one less distraction. "And one that undoubtedly impacts every aspect of potion making. Today, we will be looking more closely at the theories and practices of spagyric. Based on ancient practices of alchemy as applied to plant-based substances, spagyric is the very base of most strong healing potions, cleaning solutions, and even more recreational brews.

You yourselves have been practicing spagyric by virtue of practicing potion-making but today we will be more intentional. Part of the work requires the extraction of plant essences in oils, ashes, and other parts. These are added back into potions that used other parts of a plant in order to strengthen the potion. Can anyone tell me why that may work?"

Once she had received the correct answer - that the process of potion-making and the application of heat and magic could break down certain ingredients, thus reducing their potency, and that adding the essence in again later could help mitigate that effect - Mary continued.

"Today, you will be practicing these techniques in order to better understand the theory you will need to describe in the essay I have assigned for two weeks from now." Mary waved a wand to send an essay prompt to each student, written on tiny scrolls with unalterable ink. She'd learned her lesson the hard way. "There are fluxweeds at the front of the room. These weren't picked at the full moon, so you wouldn't be able to use them in polyjuice potion. That means they're less valuable and you don't need to worry too much if your work goes awry.

Sixth year students, I want you to focus on separating the essences of the plant. Seventh year students, I want you to collect the essences of the plant and also attempt to recombine them into a tincture. All in all, you should collect oil, seeds, fibers, ash, and salts. You all know how to use the tools around the classroom for this, but if you need any help, feel free to ask me or refer to page 54 of the English edition of your textbook."

OOC - Welcome back! This lesson is based on these three articles, and you can safely assume that any necessary science or potions sort of tools to do these tasks are available.

Subthreads:

Bad break up? by Cleo James, Crotalus

Bad people by Kir McLeod, Teppenpaw with Amelia Layne, Aladren

Depressed by Isaac Song

I'm more interested in the usual use, honestly. by Simon Mordue, Crotalus

22 Professor Mary Brooding A Different Use For Alcohol. [Advanced, VI-VII] 1424 Professor Mary Brooding 1 5

Cleo James, Crotalus

October 03, 2019 10:08 AM

Bad break up? by Cleo James, Crotalus

(CW mental health struggles)

Cleo just wanted to let go. She wanted to let go, and move on. But how could she when she kept seeing his face everywhere she went? Why wasn’t she allowed to just draw a line and stop thinking about him? She supposed the external world was only partially to blame. Yes, it kept forcing the point, forcing her to look at him. But even when she was alone, when she shut herself up in Crotalus (which she did at almost every opportunity) she couldn’t stop thinking about him. It didn’t feel fair. She didn’t want him inside her head.

Her eyes landed on the back of Isaac’s head as she took her seat in Potions. He had walked away. He had yelled at her too. After he’d gone, she had let herself cry. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him, or turn him into a monster. But she’d done both. Isaac was kind and calm and she’d made him angry. Thinking of it thusly fitted it neatly into her little self-fulfilling prophecy that she could not do normal, and should not have tried. Bad things happened. She made bad things happen. And yet… With Isaac, it was different. She had said go, and he had gone. He had listened. He had listened to her telling him to run away and that almost made him worth keeping around. Was that how her life was going to be? Caught in the paradox that the only people she could trust enough to keep close were the ones who left her alone. There was a feeling almost like loneliness at the edge of the misery. Like having someone nice to hold her hand wouldn’t be the worst. But she didn’t know how to have that right now. And anyway, she’d sent him away.

She wiped her eyes self-consciously, hoping no one would notice. Or, if they did, that they wouldn’t comment. She suspected her classmates were used to it, even after only a couple of days back. She hadn’t got through a whole class period without some form of tears yet, though in some cases she’d been able to blink them back. Other times, she’d had to ask to be excused, or had simply left rather than let other people see her get to the point that required that.

She was not sure what was happening in class. Information came in small bursts. Her attention wandered. Sometimes, she would know what she was thinking about; she would have vivid pictures inside her head. Sometimes it was like there was just noise, just white noise inside her ears. Snatches of Professor Brooding’s speech came through. A sentence here or there. But it was like she was listening to a foregin language. She wasn’t getting enough to follow what they were meant to be doing. She wasn’t concentrating. She should try harder… How did you try harder to listen when you couldn’t hear over the noise of your own thoughts though?

The words page fifty-four were written on the board. She turned to it. Eventually. She found she kept having to confirm the page number as she flicked. Right. Fifty four. Yes. Fifty four was not complicated information. Why wouldn’t it stay in her head? She stared at the page in front of her. She would just start at the top of the page and read. But tears were blurring her vision. She wiped them away impatiently, and forced her way through the first sentence. It was like her brain was wading through treacle. She wiped away more tears and pressed on. But sentence after sentence, hard fought though each one was, slithered away, refusing to stay in her brain. And meanwhile, the tears were becoming heavier and heavier so that she couldn’t get through more than two words before she was having to wipe her eyes. And then she was just crying. Silently, still praying to escape everyone’s attention, but her shoulders were noticeably shaking and her hands were pressed to her eyes.

(OOC - Advanced Potions is first thing Mon/Weds/Fri. As the into post stated ‘first week’ not specifically ‘first day’ I am assuming it to be Wednesday first thing - i.e. two days since Cleo broke up with Isaac, and there have been two days of her behaviour for classmates to observe)

13 Cleo James, Crotalus Bad break up? 389 Cleo James, Crotalus 0 5

Kir McLeod, Teppenpaw

October 03, 2019 10:09 AM

Bad people by Kir McLeod, Teppenpaw

CW: sexual assault

Kir dropped down at the end of the front row. He chose his seats to be out of the way of blocking people’s eyeline - if he could help it, he also avoided sitting next to any Purebloods, or took a seat next to empty ones and trusted the feeling was mutual enough that they would avoid him. Today was the latter kind of day. He picked up his paper whilst he waited for class to start. He’d had a letter from Zevalyn to read over breakfast, which had been a much more pleasant piece of reading. Blake Brize-Norton was staring at him out of the front page yet again, under the headline ‘Assault Suspect’s Sister Stokes Fire’. He knew he was reading into his appearance what he already knew of his character, but there was something about the cold dead eyes of someone’s mugshot that made you feel uneasy.

Anna Brize-Norton spoke out yesterday, in defence of her brother. Blake Brize-Norton’s name has dominated headlines for almost a week, following his attempted assault of a sixteen year old girl, visiting their family home.

Ms. Brize-Norton’s statement seemed to be designed in equal measures to defend her brother and to stoke and stir the particular brand of white, entitled nationalism that characterises her father’s general stance in politics. For any decently minded people who thought that having a son accused of attempted sexual assault would damage Counselor Norton’s standings, they did not bank on the ability of sentiments such as ‘innocent until proven guilty’ to stir up a particular section of the populace - one which previously Counselor Norton seemed like he would lose out on to more hardline Pureblood rivals.

Ms. Brize-Norton went further, stating she had felt compelled to defend her brother as his and her father’s own pleas about his good character seemed to be falling on deaf ears due to them being white, heterosexual males. Can we please, once and for all, shut down the tiresome narrative that it is possible for such a person to be a victim in this country? It is beyond belief-

Kir folded the paper, placing it down on the table as class began, the serious face of Anna Brize-Norton staring up at them as she read her statement. Happily, it was time to move on and leave that behind for now.

Spagyric. That was cool. It was fun to say, and also sounded pretty sciency. Kir skimmed his book. It seemed like seeds would be the easiest to collect, that was just a basic herbology slice-and-dice skill. After that, oil was the next easiest, as it was also naturally present in the plant and just needed getting out. Same with fibres. Other things were going to involve sciencing the plant, largely with fire, after which it would be harder to get anything more out of that. So, leaving ash and salts until last made most sense. Although he might need separate pieces of fluxweed for those anyway, because if it was deseeded and de-oiled and de-fibred it would pretty much be mush by that point, and there was probably a lot less point processing the pulpy remains into concentrates for tinctures.

“This seems interesting,” he greeted his neighbour cheerfully.

13 Kir McLeod, Teppenpaw Bad people 366 Kir McLeod, Teppenpaw 0 5

Amelia Layne, Aladren

October 04, 2019 11:58 PM

When people show you who they are, believe them. by Amelia Layne, Aladren

CW: same as Kir's.

Amelia wasn't sure how she felt about returning to the Potions lab. She had always felt reasonably comfortable here, and had enjoyed her time, but with the end of the year now firmly in sight, she couldn't help but also think about how much time she was about to spend in a different lab, which made the rest of the semester here seem a bit...beside the point.

This, of course, was good evidence that one shouldn't pay too much attention to one's feelings. If she let her grades slip now, then her direct path to a minimally difficult life would get turned into a bridge with playing card bricks. So she listened closely as Professor Brooding talked, nodding comprehension here and there.

She glanced at Kir as he remarked that the material seemed interesting. "It's never a boring day when you play with fire," she said, and then spotted the newspaper on his side of the table. Awkward, she thought, though it was perfectly reasonable to assume he hadn't been reading about that story.

Amelia didn't really read the papers much, but she had heard the story over midterm. It had provoked sharp debate at Aunt Emily's annual family get-together, when Uncle Jeremy had for some reason decided it was a good idea to counter a point about there being very few reasonable explanations for it by pointing out that his youngest stepdaughter had two sons....

"Who will have worse problems than the law to think about if they're ever arrested like that," said Alicia. "I expect better from them, and they're going to know it and deliver it."

"Now, Alicky," Granddad had said uneasily. "You can't blame all of people's decisions on their parents."

"I can blame myself if Nicholas and Alexander grow up in my house and have no respect for me than to think that a witch can't defend herself as well as a wizard. That's the stupidest idea I think I've ever heard," said one of the least dangerous-looking people, with her diamond earrings and purple nail polish, that Amelia had ever seen, "and Norton's kid got what he had coming if he believed it."

"If?" asked her sister Rachel.

"I suppose there is always a tiny chance someone spiked his drink or hit him with some spell, to make him go nuts over this girl," said Alicia, disturbingly casually considering the subject matter. "Not likely, but it's always a risk in politics."

The discussion had turned then to other scandals - specifically, one of the Mordue women apparently doing that thing Purebloods sometimes did where they just died without dying. Alicia had been the one to remember that Amelia went to school with 'some of them,' though she had quickly informed them that she barely knew the Crotalus boys. This had not, however, spared her; somehow, she seemed to have been walked into saying a lot of everything she ever knew about Emerald, and for some reason everyone laughing at anecdotes about Headmaster Brockert, limited as those were....

She kind of wondered if she should tell Emerald about that, now that Emerald was engaged to Winston. Emerald would probably be less than thrilled to be reminded of it, since Alicia was related to Amelia, but she and Alicia were going to be family, so it seemed fair to put everyone on the same page - more or less, since she was fairly sure she could say less about Alicia than about Emerald. Alicia and Rachel were the members of the family she had always admired most when she was little - they were easily the most glamorous people she had ever met, totally different from Mama, on the rare occasions Amelia saw her, and from her perpetually rather tired-looking Grandmother - but part of the reason for that was that they had been rarities when she was growing up. Besides, she reasoned, even if Alicia was plotting something nefarious - and she had seemed kindly interested, as much in Amelia herself as in Emerald - it wasn't as if Amelia even knew anything that anyone could use in a nefarious plot. She took some pride in being detached enough to be able to say that.

"Though at least there's the calciner to help regulate the environment a little - even if that means you need more charms to keep it hot and rotating," she acknowledged.

16 Amelia Layne, Aladren When people show you who they are, believe them. 360 Amelia Layne, Aladren 0 5

Isaac Song

October 07, 2019 2:56 AM

Depressed by Isaac Song

Isaac slumped into his seat in his favorite class looking weary. There were dark circles forming under his eyes and he had barely looked at his textbooks and notes since returning to Sonora. It had been two days since Cleo broke up with him, and those past two days had felt like torture. It wasn't like he could just run away and never see Cleo again. She was in his classes and he couldn't very well avoid her. Not completely, at least. He tried not to look at her, but she seemed to look just as miserable as he felt. A big part of him wanted to point that out and tell her why they should just stick together--they were miserable without the other--but the other half of him still held onto his pride. He still had some dignity left, and he wasn't going to grovel for a girl that didn't even want him.

It felt unfair that this was happening to him right now. He was supposed to be working on college applications, figuring out what to do with his life, and studying for his RATS. It was crazy to think that just three days ago he had everything he'd ever wanted: a beautiful girlfriend, high marks, and a really supportive network. Now, it felt like he had nothing. That wasn't true, of course, he was only missing the girlfriend, but he doubted he'd ever find someone as great as her ever again.

It just sucked. Breaking up sucked so much. And the worst part was that he didn't even understand why it had happened.

After his anger had dissipated, though, he regretted how they'd left things. Isaac didn't want their last conversation to be so angry, but he didn't know how to approach her now and fix it. Cleo didn't want him to bother her--she'd made that pretty clear. It hurt thinking of how she'd yelled at him, and at night it replayed over and over in his head. He kind of felt like he was going crazy, so yesterday he had written a long and detailed letter to Lauren telling her all about their break-up and not to tell mom yet because he didn't want her to worry about him. Lauren was really the only one he could write to since his friends back home were muggle-born and he didn't want any of his friends here to think badly of Cleo. He had sent his letter in the morning and then skipped breakfast to sit and stare at a book in the library in a poor attempt to study for his RATS before classes started.

Sitting in Potions wasn't doing anything for him either. Isaac kept drifting in and out of the lecture while trying very hard not to glance at Cleo. By the time it came for them to do work, he had no idea what they were doing. Isaac glanced around at his peers and before turning to his neighbor.

"Sorry, what are we supposed to be doing now?" he asked quietly so the professor wouldn't hear.

19 Isaac Song Depressed 375 Isaac Song 0 5

Simon Mordue, Crotalus

October 19, 2019 5:53 PM

I'm more interested in the usual use, honestly. by Simon Mordue, Crotalus

Sometimes, just sometimes, the shallowness of most people's lives turned out to be a good thing. So did other people's misfortunes. Song's half-human girlfriend had dumped him, and as a result, everyone's attention in Advanced classes was helpfully on the ex-pair, and therefore not on Simon Mordue and his imploding family life.

Some, he knew, were aware. All those in his social class, no doubt. But between Song's breakup and Winston and Emerald's unexpected engagement, they were at least not bored enough to mention it to his face.

Yet.

He had begun to develop a nervous twitch in his right eye, and it was annoying. Not visible, thanks unto anything that was still good in the world, but annoying. It twitched whenever he was around people, whenever he was not around people and thought about the fact that he didn't know if people elsewhere were talking about him, whenever he saw something annoying...and therefore, near constantly in Potions, because there was a lot here that was annoying. The professor put his teeth on edge sometimes when his nerves were not overwrought, but at present, he just wanted to yell at her to stop smiling, stop being so smug about the damn assignment scrolls, stop making such a spectacle of herself, put her stupid hair up, get married, and act like a proper woman.

All that, however, would just make a spectacle of him, which was exactly what he currently did not want. So he ground his teeth as he caught his scroll, shoved it in his bag without looking, and tried to concentrate on the lesson.

Separating essences was easy enough, he supposed - more about waiting than anything. The technicalities of recombining them for the tincture would be more difficult. He would rather just try drinking the alcohol needed to separate essences. It was a very Uncle Nicholas thing to do, which was inherently bad, and it might loosen his tongue, which would be very bad, and it might actually, given what it was, kill him, which was also bad, but he had always heard that getting drunk made you feel artificially happy and temporarily forget your problems, and he would really like for his eye to stop twitching for a bit.

Instead, however, he sighed slightly to himself and started preparing materials. He was a gentleman, after all. It did not matter what he wanted. He had responsibilities, unlike some people and those people's half-insane children. Perhaps he could work with willowbark, something to relieve a headache...

16 Simon Mordue, Crotalus I'm more interested in the usual use, honestly. 369 Simon Mordue, Crotalus 0 5