Beginners - it's in the bag on Transfiguration

Professor Skies

July 11, 2015 3:16 AM

Beginners - it's in the bag by Professor Skies

The term marched on. By now, the beginners were hopefully settled, and showing a consistent ability to channel their magic into doing something, even though their results were still likely to be imperfect or inconsistent. Selina had kept an eye out for anyone who seemed to be struggling with either the practical or the written work, not just in this group but across all of them – every year saw a step up in what was expected. Any students she did feel were trailing their classmates, she invited to come and see her during her office hours, whether it was to practice spells or to go over their homework. Her office hours were also open to anyone who was concerned, though for the most part anyone that she hadn't picked up on just needed reassuring that they were doing perfectly well, or helping with one particular thing that had got them stuck.

“Good morning class,” she greeted. “Today, we will be making bags. You will all start with the same source material – a plain square of fabric. For anyone wanting a simple project, aim for a plain tote bag. Anyone wanting to stretch themselves can do so by changing the colour, adding a pattern, or making a more complex bag, with fastenings.” Broadly speaking, the first task was aimed at the first years and the second at second years but she liked to give some leeway, so that less confident second years could work on the simpler project without feeling too ashamed, and ambitious first years could stretch themselves if they so desired – though personally, she thought it a bit early in the term for any of them to be doing that.

“The incantation is saccus, and you will need to make a soft, swooping movement with your wand, like so,” she demonstated the spell, the square of linen she was holding up transforming into a small, black beaded clutch.

“You may talk quietly to your neighbours about your work, and call on me if you require any help.” By now, they should all have been confident in using 'reparifarge' to undo any botched attempts and in her subject, the greatest problem tended to be frustration as the spell failed to take, rather than explosions. Still, she would keep an eye out.

“Please begin.”

OOC - Welcome to Transfiguration. Posts here are graded on your realism not how well you claim to have performed, so keep it in line with what could be expected of someone of your character's age and experience. You are being supervised and Professor Skies would not allow anything to get out of hand, so please give me time to intervene if you are having/causing trouble, and tag me in the subject line to get my attention.

Please put your character's name and house in the author line.

Posts are marked on length, realism, creativity and relevance and must be a minimum of 200 words. Enjoy.

Subthreads:

Nope, my cat got out of his. by Ginger Pierce, Teppenpaw with Owen Brockert, Teppenpaw

Totally. by Barnaby Pye, Aladren

13 Professor Skies Beginners - it's in the bag 26 Professor Skies 1 5

Ginger Pierce, Teppenpaw

July 11, 2015 10:05 PM

Nope, my cat got out of his. by Ginger Pierce, Teppenpaw

Ginger’s visits to Professor Skies’ office hours were regular part of her schedule. She wasn’t bad, exactly, at Transfiguration - with the extra help, she was actually doing quite well in the class - but Sully had suggested she go to office hours if she had any doubts about the subject, to keep from falling too far behind, and she was following that advice. Mostly she got help on the essays and theory work. She had trouble wrapping her head around the concepts sometimes, and a few different approaches at explaining it often helped her get it at least well enough that her homeworks weren’t just parroting back the book with no real understanding of what was actually going on.

The spells themselves usually weren’t too hard for her so she could usually get something close to what was expected during the class period. Then some extra practice later and, of course, grasping the theories behind the spells helped a lot, too, so by the time the tests came around, she was doing pretty good. She wasn’t challenging any academically motivated Aladrens or anything, but she was pulling solid Es and even an occasional O (especially right now when the lessons were pretty basic for the new first years), so she figured she was on top of things.

Consequently, she felt she was also in a good position to try a bit of flair on her bag today. The material didn’t have to change much, as fabric was what bags were made out of, so she didn’t need to worry about altering structure and texture, or anything like that, which was really what she found the hardest things for her to do when casting the practical spells. Outer appearance was relatively easy.

So what kind of bag did she want? If she made a beaded one like in Skies’ example, she would need to deal with structure and texture. Even buckles would add some of that, but not as much. She nodded thoughtfully. She could handle a cute little buckle, she decided. That ought to give it enough extra difficulty that it wouldn’t look like she was doing the bare minimum.

Her Transfiguration Table was fairly simplistic, but she accompanied it with a drawing of what she wanted her new bag to look like. Finishing that, she picked up her wand. Holding a clear picture of her new bag in her mind, Ginger cast the spell on the plain piece of fabric with the appropriate swooping motion of her wand. The result was not exactly how she imagined it, but the buckle looked great. She must have been focusing on that more than the bag itself, because that was lopsided and the colorful pattern she’d added was a bit fuzzy.

“I guess I have plenty of time to try again, huh?” she asked, mostly rhetorically, but glanced over to see if her neighbor was going to answer anyway. Also, she was curious to see how their bag was turning out.

1 Ginger Pierce, Teppenpaw Nope, my cat got out of his. 302 Ginger Pierce, Teppenpaw 0 5

Barnaby Pye, Aladren

July 13, 2015 1:09 AM

Totally. by Barnaby Pye, Aladren

At first glance, Barnaby wasn’t sure how or why this spell would be particularly useful to him. He was always grading spells on their usefulness to his every day life this way. He figured so far that most of the spells he learned he would have use for one day or another—why else were they learning them? However, bags were not something that were really a part of his every day life. Besides, he very rarely had fabric lying about to be transfigured into a full bag.

After watching Professor Skies’ first example though Barnaby was feeling better about the assignment. He carried around handkerchiefs a fair amount of the time, especially after Alfie had taken him to get his glasses as the handkerchief was really great for if he ever had to wipe his glasses clean—certainly much better than the corner of a shirt. And on top of that, he loved to take little notes, storing them about his person until he was able to get to his bedroom later and put the notes into a shoe box he kept under his bed. A handkerchief turned bag that he could keep in his pocket would certainly be most useful, he decided.

When he got his square of linen he practised the wand movement a few times before considering how he wanted to do his bag. Plain was the style he liked best—overly patterned things and bright colors were not things that Barnaby particularly liked. Yet he also was not the sort of person who really liked to underachieve. He frowned. He really wasn’t sure how to pattern his bag now.

Barnaby let his eyes wander around the room looking at the different things around. Nothing he really wanted to put onto a bag. Finally he settled on some light and dark blue stripes. Blue was a safe color, he thought, as well as one of his house colors and stripes were relatively easy. Straight lines up and down, it wasn’t too difficult to imagine yet designed enough that it could be considered complicated. Especially if he chose different sized stripes across the board. Barnaby nodded to himself and carefully drew out different sized lines in his notes, taking care to point out which colors would go where—purely for record keeping and not because he enjoyed designing.

Once that was done, he laid the fabric out on the desk in front of him. “Saccus,” he said firmly, sweeping his wand in the proper motion. To his delight the quare linen folded itself up into a sort of crumpled up bag, all sewn up with a vaguely blue pattern similar to what Barnaby had wanted. It would only take a few more tries, he thought, to create what he wanted and receive a good mark for the assignment.

Barnaby was such a very careful spell maker, and even though Alfie had prodded him a couple times to try and get him to loosen up, Barnaby didn’t really want to change. So far his cautiousness worked and so far he had not yet failed to make a perfect spell in under five tries and for the most part that year he had been closer to two or three. Which was really nice and something that Alfie rolled his eyes about his older brother thought that Barnaby was still young he should be acting like a young child and not worrying about things like grades as much.

Tarquin, on the other hand, always said that being cautious was better than being reckless, and of course Barnaby felt inclined to agree. Sometimes Barnaby felt Tarquin had more of a handle on life than his own brother who had been out in the real world for nearly all of their lives. And besides that, Alfie was the sort to enjoy Quidditch and noise and running around battling dark wizards. Tarquin liked academics and quiet and, to be quite frank, was more likely to be the sort of person sitting behind a desk watching his underlings fight aurors. Barnaby, however, either couldn’t see this or simply didn’t care, perhaps even thinking this was something of no consequence to him. Tarquin was younger than him, unable to properly use magic on his own, and besides that Barnaby had always felt intellectually superior to him.

10 Barnaby Pye, Aladren Totally. 298 Barnaby Pye, Aladren 0 5

Owen Brockert, Teppenpaw

July 26, 2015 12:27 AM

I got a penguin and polar bear in mine. by Owen Brockert, Teppenpaw

Owen entered the Transfiguration room coughing and breathing hard. He didn't want to be late and get in trouble but he'd gotten rather distracted and had had to sort of rush, moving a little bit faster than he really should have . He'd been working on a new story and was feeling rather inspired today. Quite frankly, he'd rather still be writing it and not Transfiguration notes. Note taking was not creative.

His current story was about a penguin named Cookies and a polar bear named Cream who lived in a magnificent snow fort together. Cookies was smart, funny and had sort of an attitude. Cream was sweet and so quiet that he didn't talk at all and communicated solely through non-verbal cues. Cookies was the brains and Cream was the heart-and muscle because polar bears were bigger animals than penguins. Owen planned for this to be either a series of adventures or a very long book with many events. Currently, Cookies was riding Cream-he often rode on top of his larger friend and since Cream was so nice and strong, he never minded- out to look for food and had overheard a cockroach who was plotting to contaminate all the soup and hot chocolate and bacon-Cookies had a fondness for bacon, even though penguins normally ate fish-and garlic that all the animals loved to dine on-in fact, aside from Cookies' love of bacon, garlic was the preferred food of the entire village- and make it so they all had trouble breathing. Owen knew that cockroaches did not live in the same climates as polar bears and penguins but this was the super evil Lord Cockroach who could live in all climates. He was supposed to be the villain for the whole series. Lord Cockroach would plot something evil and Cookies and Cream would foil it. He hoped to show it to Jemima and see if she'd illustrate it. He'd really loved her drawings of his story over the summer.

However, now he was in Transfiguration, trying not to think of Cookies and Cream and Lord Cockroach and sitting next to Ginger Pierce. Owen felt it was necessary to get to know her a little better even though she wasn't society. She was in his year and house and friends with Jemima too and he'd really like if the five of them all got along well, though he didn't know how Andrew felt about non-purebloods.

First though, he had to listen to the Transfiguration lesson. The Teppenpaw did want to do well, and as this was his best class, he really didn't want to fail because he didn't listen. It was really hard to concentrate though. When Owen got on a story, it was nearly impossible to focus his attention elsewhere.

Yet, he looked down at the white square of cloth and turned to his transfiguration table. For similarities, Owen wrote down that they were similar in texture, given that he assumed that the bag he was to make was supposed to be of the same material. And bags were roughly square shaped. They could be the same color but did not have to be. He'd try that once he mastered the regular totebag. The obvious difference of course, was that a totebag needed more than one square of fabric.

He made the soft swooping motion that Professor Skies had demonstrated "Saccus" . Okay, it was...not perfect. It was a plain white bag but the stitching wasn't too good. However, there was the vaguest outline displayed. Owen squinted at it. Was that a....penguin riding a top a polar bear? Yeah, he sure knew where his focus was.

The second year nodded in response to Ginger. "Sure. I mean, class just started" Unfortunately, since Owen really wanted to get back to writing. "And these are only our first attempts. I'm honestly not sure mine is going to stay in one piece." He held it up for his fellow Teppenpaw to see, only for the stitching on the side of bag to come undone. "And it is not." He had to wonder if she'd noticed the pattern he'd accidentally made.

11 Owen Brockert, Teppenpaw I got a penguin and polar bear in mine. 300 Owen Brockert, Teppenpaw 0 5