Professor Skies
September 19, 2015 12:57 AM
Advanced class - we make our own fun by Professor Skies
“Good afternoon,” Professor Skies greeted the advanced class. She tried not to yawn but she’d had a sleepless night. The latest secret was much, much more serious than the rest. The others had been petty gossip, about who liked who, or who liked which gender, about jealousy, fall outs and being fake… Certainly, it wasn’t nice, and must have felt pretty damaging to the individuals concerned, but it was all typical teenage gossip. It was all the things they were probably saying behind each other’s backs anyway. The latest piece of news, however, implied that one of their students had broken wizarding law. They were still assessing how to deal with that situation.
“Today, we will be continuing our practical work with ‘elicio’,” unlike vanishing, conjuring used a variety of incantations but there was a group which the advanced class had been studying, all using the common form ‘elicio,’ meaning to call up or draw forth, along with something to represent the object. It worked best for basic but living structures, such as plants and simple invertebrates. Whilst the class was expected to proceed through various mammals in their vanishing skills, conjuring was only taught up to this level in school.
“You may revise any of the spells in this category that we’ve covered so far or continue your theory work on the different families of conjuring spells.” As they approached the exams, it was often easiest to give the advanced students a bit more free reign to practise the areas they felt needed most development.
“If you have any particular questions, try discussing them with your peers, or come and find me.”
OOC - feel free to make up spells and wand movements within the parameters of the task given. Credit for the ‘Elicio’ part of the spell goes to Alicia Bauer’s author.
Subthreads: I've had better times. by Julian Umland, Teppenpaw
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Advanced class - we make our own fun
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September 30, 2015 9:55 PM
I've had better times. by Julian Umland, Teppenpaw
”Latin is a language,” Julian’s oldest brother had said the first time she complained to him about her lessons in it, ”dead as dead can be. First it killed the Romans, now it’s killing Julie.”Her seven-year-old self had laughed after she threw a cushion at him for calling her ‘Julie’ in the name of preserving a rhyme scheme. Whenever she sat in Advanced Transfiguration, though, she wondered if Steve had stated nothing more or less than a simple fact, because there were days when she thought conjuration might actually kill her. It wasn’t entirely Latin’s fault that she was not sure how long she was for this world, but she had never liked languages and had latched onto that aspect of it, even though she knew it was irrational. It was all just words; the Romans had even understood what they were saying. Why couldn’t those of them who didn’t have the magical power or willpower to conjure nonverbally just say “come forth daisy” or whatever in English, even sometimes (according to her mom, anyway) grammatically bizarre English, and be done with it? And why couldn’t she be like John and Mom and love doing this kind of thing the way it was done?
She was relieved when Professor Skies gave them leave to review as they pleased for class today. She needed all the practice she could get, not to mention time to review theory.
Julian had spent most of her last year at school just as though it were any other year. She had participated in school activities, worried about her best friend and her brother, studied diligently at times and slacked off at others. Following the latest vandal gossip and planning for the dance club party had seemed far more important than RATS until suddenly, one day, she had looked up and they had been hacking at her like the Mouse King in the Nutcracker. She remembered dutifully applying to university when her parents brought it up and put papers in front of her, but it seemed dreamlike and unimportant, maybe just because of how little clue she had about what she was going to do with her life and how she saw university more as a continuation of this phase of her life, the one where she didn’t have to make those decisions, than as a new one. She kept talking to John as though they were both going to look after Joey next year instead of him being the only one who’d be around to do it, but the fact was that she was going to be somewhere else and had to pass her RATS if she wanted it to be a place where she wouldn’t disappoint her family. Because while her parents might say they knew university wasn’t for everyone and so forth, she knew, deep down, that they would be disappointed if she didn’t go, probably even more than they would be for one of her brothers. The status of witches in society was something that deeply bothered her mother, and for her only daughter to be the only one of her children who wasn’t as educated as possible would hurt her.
Elicio. To call or draw forth. According to the dictionary, it implied something about coaxing, or maybe enticing. It was part of the magical school (she had nearly memorized a few lines from her book, hoping they would help her in the written portion) which held that Transfiguration was drawing something into being, inviting it to change. Another school held that it was the imposition of the will upon the object that was being Transfigured, but that was another thing. The thing they were being tested over was elicio noun, and she needed to have at least three nouns down perfectly before she walked into that examination room.
“Elicio bellis,” she incanted, performing the complex wand movement and willing a daisy to come into existence. The air shimmered, twisted, but didn’t coalesce into something solid. She groaned quietly and raised her wand to try again when her neighbor spoke to her.
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I've had better times.
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