Professor Skies
January 24, 2014 5:05 PM
Intermediates - cogs, gears and curios by Professor Skies
Professor Skies was always interested in teaching beyond the standard exam subjects. For one thing, any exercise of her students' magic was good for their development – so long as the challenge she set them stretched them, it was worthwhile. Secondly, it highlighted the wide range of things Transfiguration had to offer. To the third years, making decisions about the future probably seemed a long way off but some of the more conscientious fifth years would already be making plans. If you stuck to the exam topics, Transfiguration could seem like a narrow bunch of cheap tricks. She wanted them to understand the range of areas the subject covered, how it could broaden out and change if they pursued its study further.“Good day,” she greeted the class, “Today we will be looking into mechanical transfiguration. Broadly, this is a branch of the subject that aims to make simple items into more complex ones. Your homework will be to look into the history of the field and its current applications. Today, you will be making a simple toy into a piece of automata. The handout coming around explains a little bit about these for those who aren't familiar,” they were slightly old-fashioned and not necessarily things she would expect her students to know about. The handout explained briefly what automata were, as well as giving details of the movement patterns that could be created with one, two or three cogs. A box followed round, containing a number of small toys mounted on frames.
“It's important to understand what you expect the mechanical element – in this case, a simple cog – to do. Its shape and function should inform your wand movement. The spell for this is Kuggera. If you are adding multiple cogs, you need to cast once with a continuing flowing motion that delineates the outlines of all of them,” she pulled a little rowing boat out of a draw in her desk, casting the spell on it. Below the rower, three little cogs appeared, and when the handle was turned the man sat forward and back in the boat, the oars flicked to and fro and the boat bobbed up and down.
“If you need any help, please consult me, your classmates or the reading materials.”
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