Professor Skies
May 07, 2016 12:56 AM
Beginners - feeling bouncy by Professor Skies
“Good morning,” Selina greeted the beginners class, “As you already know, I’m Deputy Headmistress Skies, however you can all address me as ‘professor,’ and I will be teaching you Transfiguration. Transfiguration is complex magic, and you will find that you do best in this class if you can approach your projects with a degree of patience. Please try not to be disheartened if you don’t achieve much straight away. A lot of what we practise may seem to have little practical use at first - why change one object to another, if the other is close at hand? But can you imagine being able to conjure up what you need out of thin air, or change your appearance at will? These are some of the more complex forms of Transfiguration, but you can’t learn to run before you’ve learnt to walk. The skills you will learn in your early classes will strengthen your magical ability as a whole, and your ability to control your powers. And you never know when you might not have exactly what you need readily to hand, so you may find these types of spell coming in useful more often than you imagine.“Your first task today will be to fill out a Transfiguration table, which is coming round now - there are detailed copies for first years, and blank ones for second years. The table lists all the features of an object, such as function, size, etcetera. When we are Transfiguring, the most important element is to visualise in detail the change that will take place, as well as finding common links between the items. As you become more practised in the process, this is something you will be able to do in your head, but to start with, it helps to think it through on paper.
“Today, you will be making bouncy balls. You have a few different options to choose from. First years, you may take either a smooth, round pebble or an eraser. Second years, you can choose either of these materials, or a more lumpy and uneven pebble,” as she spoke, a box floated from her desk around the room, pausing in front of each student so they could make a selection (although if they took too long, it jiggled somewhat impatiently). “Whilst you work, I would like you to keep notes about your different attempts, including what changes you visualised and what results you saw. For homework, pair up with someone in your year who chose a different starting object to you and compare notes. It’s not a puzzle, and neither of the first year objects is more or less difficult - they each have plus points and minus points.
“The spell for everyone is hevea,” she had considered making them look up the derivation of this for homework as well, as the other task was fairly easy, but she didn’t want to overload them in their first week. “We’ll be looking at different spell origins throughout the term, and anyone who wants to get ahead on this subject should read chapter four of their books,” behind her, the chalk scribbled details of the lesson and the homework in an elegant, sloping hand.
“You may talk quietly amongst yourselves whilst you work, and if you have any difficulties, you can discuss the problem with your neighbours or raise your hand to get my attention. You may begin.”
OOC - Welcome to Transfiguration! Remember, in her first lesson, Hermione Granger was only able to make a matchstick go silvery and a bit pointy. The lesson you’ve got is slightly easier to give you more chance to have a range of different outcomes, but it will still not be a fast or easy process for your character. You are marked on the quality of your writing, not how well your character does, and high marks are given for realism, creativity, length and relevance. Feel free to make up details about the worksheet that has been handed out, and tag me in the subject line if your character is calling my attention, or doing anything risky that a teacher would likely put a stop to. Remember, you are being supervised, and whilst explosions are fun, Selina would step in before a situation became truly dangerous, so please give her the chance to do so if you’re up to anything.
Subthreads: Play ball (tag: Gabe) by Ben "Hippo" Pierce, Pecari with Gabe Valenti [Teppenpaw]
Hope everyone's put away their china. by Joseph Umland, Teppenpaw with Killian Everett - Pecari
Where there's smoke... there's a Spark? by Jozua Sparks, Teppenpaw with Farrah Welsh (Aladren)
Not so bouncy. by Lily Spencer, Pecari with Arianna Valenti [Aladren]
Bounce, little pebble, bounce! [Tag: Juniper] by Finn Scott with Juniper Brockert,Teppenpaw
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Professor Skies
Beginners - feeling bouncy
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Professor Skies
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Joseph Umland, Teppenpaw
May 16, 2016 8:46 PM
Hope everyone's put away their china. by Joseph Umland, Teppenpaw
It ranked pretty high on the list of things he never wanted to admit to anyone in his family except maybe Julian or his dad, but Joe had discovered over the course of his first year that he didn’t really like Transfiguration all that much. It was difficult, often (as, to Joe’s mixed guilt and amusement, Professor Skies basically admitted in her speech to the new first years) tedious, at least at this level, and Joe felt constantly as though he was not living up to expectations in it. His sister Julian’s performance had been more respectable than brilliant, too, but the age differences made Joe think the teachers were more likely to compare him to his brother John, and John had honestly thought Julian was joking when she’d asked him if he was at all worried about the CATS. How was Joe supposed to compete with someone who'd effortlessly thwarted the efforts of the fleet of psychologists whose entire job was to make sure the mysterious cabal of sociopaths who wrote standardized tests composed each item in a way guaranteed to give one last Judgment Day boost to the gut-wrenching, near-debilitating fear of failure the cabal’s agents had spent a lifetime instilling in poor innocent schoolchildren in preparation for that day? It wasn’t possible.He still smiled cheerfully at Professor Skies as he walked past her, though, and kept on as she started class. She was a nice lady and it never hurt to be nice back. Besides, it was a new year. Maybe, now that he had the basics firmly in his head (and he did; Mom had gone over the high points with him again over the summer to make sure he at least didn’t lose much theory of anything while he was out of school), Transfiguration would go a little more smoothly this year. There was no reason not to hope until they got started, anyway.
They got started with bouncy balls. Joe hesitated just long enough over the box of options when it came to him that it jiggled impatiently at him. Professor Skies had said it wasn’t a puzzle, but really, it kind of was – a flipped spot-the-difference game where crossing his eyes wouldn’t work. Spot the similarity, and...yeah, pebbles were somewhat roundish and could bounce on water, so he could see that. When the box expressed its irritation with the length of Joe’s reasoning process, he grabbed, on impulse, one of the rougher stones meant for second years, only to then realize why the erasers were there: a lot of erasers could bounce on solids, which were really a lot more likely to be used to test their creations than a body of water was…..
Now he had a pebble, though. Here was hoping his attempts to be clever did not turn around and bite him in the rear when it came time to drop the bouncy balls from a height and see what happened. He thought, based on stuff he remembered hearing Mom and John talk about, that he might be better off trying to make a larger bouncy ball instead of indulging in a little loophole abuse to make one of the little ones that came out of machines at the supermarket…Except that on second thought, he wasn’t sure if that sounded easier or not. Those little ones were heavier naturally, closer to the density of rock, he thought his brother would put it, and could undeniably do some bouncing – Joe had once taken out a lamp and the door to his mother’s curio cabinet with one of those things, the latter going out so violently that a couple of the contents had fallen and broken, too. Magic made it an easy fix, but Joe was still glad that the other two people in the house had been John and their oldest brother Steve instead of Mom and Dad. The three of them had, once Steve finished repairing the damage and John finished laughing hysterically, agreed to take it to their graves, and as far as Joe knew that was still the plan.
He added deliberately asking John to ramble on about physics at him to his to-do list. In the meantime, Joe ran a hand through his blond hair. He thought for a moment about the incantation, but he didn’t have a clue what it meant and unlike John, he didn’t just carry around a dictionary. Maybe he should start. Today, though, he was on his own.
He saw his neighbor had also selected a pebble. “Great minds think alike,” he observed, hoping he wasn’t tempting fate there. “Are you thinking of going for a big light ball or a small heavy one?” It couldn’t hurt to see what other people were thinking, he thought.
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Joseph Umland, Teppenpaw
Hope everyone's put away their china.
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Joseph Umland, Teppenpaw
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Killian Everett - Pecari
May 18, 2016 10:50 PM
Not to mention family pets by Killian Everett - Pecari
Killian eyeballed his wand after taking it out in preparation for Transfiguration. The wood was a light color, willow, which wasn’t too bad. The core, unicorn. He fought back a frown. Unicorns were for girls. Why couldn’t he have had a dragon heart string? Now that sounded cool. Way cooler than some prancing white horse with a giant toothpick glued to its forehead. That’s it if anyone asks, my wand is Oak and Dragon Heart string, Killian decided, those sounded far more manly to the eleven-year-old, much better than wispy willows or glitter belching unicorns.Envy itched at Killian while he watched the box of objects float around the room with perfect ease. While he knew it would take time to learn to control his magic, he still couldn’t wait to be able to do stuff like that instead of stare cross-eyed at random things on his desk as they failed to change. Hopefully, he wouldn’t catch anything on fire by accident.
That thought inspired him to snatch up one of the smooth, round rocks when the box hovered in front of him before it could even think of giving an annoyed rattle. Only after the box moved on to the next student did Killian realize he should have thought a little bit more about what they were doing instead of worrying about what might happen. Rocks didn’t have a lot in common with bouncy balls, except shape. At least the eraser was made out of a type of rubber. Getting a rock to bounce would probably be more than a little tricky.
The boy next to him spoke up, adding yet another curveball to the mix. “How does that even work?” Killian couldn’t help but ask. His major stumbling block when it came to magic had to be the ungodly amount of scientific rules it broke. “I mean, where would the extra mass come from?” While he’d never been a big fan of English class, he’d adored science, making magic all the harder to swallow. “It might be easier to keep it small, so we only have to worry about changing what it’s made out of.”
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Killian Everett - Pecari
Not to mention family pets
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Killian Everett - Pecari
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Joe Umland
May 23, 2016 2:39 PM
And any small children. by Joe Umland
The person beside him was a Pecari first year, but evidently, that was not an impediment to speaking at least conversational Nerd. Joe saw no reason this should not be so, as he and his sister were both Teppenpaws who understood probably up to intermediate Nerd, though Joe knew he, at least, didn’t speak it very well.“Sometimes, with Transfiguration, you can…stretch out…what you have,” he said. “Rubber – I guess that’s what we’re going for?” Joe thought most bouncy balls he’d seen were made more of some kind of bendy plastic than they were of rubber, but John could use lots of words to say that simpler substances were easier to Transfigure and Joe remembered from his social studies lessons that rubber was derived from rubber trees. He was sure it got processed to death before it became bouncy balls, but it was still probably simpler than plastics. “That’s usually lighter – less dense, I think – than stone, so something a little larger but lighter could work.” Joe knew there were a lot of equations about that kind of thing they would learn when they were older, but he already thought he knew that size and weight were important because the input and the final product didn’t necessarily have to have identical ones and was content to lump it all into the general category of things that could be summed up as ‘probably because of quantum thingummies’ until the details became things he needed to know to get his work done. His rule of thumb for now was that he should not try to Transfigure anything larger than his own head, be it something larger than his head into something smaller, something smaller into something larger, or something larger into something else also larger. Within those parameters, he thought he should be pretty safe until he was old enough to learn all the equations. “But so could one of those really small, really hard bouncy balls from the supermarket, if you know those.”
That was always a question. Joe had been raised on a Muggle street, but by magical parents. As a result, he knew just enough about both worlds, he thought, to be pretty much incomprehensible to anyone firmly anchored in one any time he didn’t pay attention to what he said. Still, he guessed the basic idea was pretty easy to figure out even if the younger boy was pureblood and so possibly unfamiliar with supermarkets and their cheap toy machines. It occurred to him that he should ask his sister how purebloods got their things, as she ought to know by now, or at least be able to find out pretty easily, somewhere between her biological relatives and her boyfriend….
“I’m Joe, by the way,” he said. “Second year. Welcome to Transfiguration.”
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Joe Umland
And any small children.
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Joe Umland
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Killian
May 31, 2016 12:59 PM
If all the breakables are put away, let’s give this a try. by Killian
Killian listened to the older boy’s logic and gave a reluctant nod of understanding. Transfiguration boggled his mind more than any other class they’d had so far. He could get potions, after all, it was little more than a hybrid of chemistry, cooking, and medication making. Although, from what he’d read, there were a lot of uses for potions that had nothing to do with overall health. He could wrap his mind around it. Then there were charms, which while strange, felt more like magic in a way that was more expectable to his mind. Care of magical creatures made the most sense, seems it was learning about animals. Magical animals, but still animals.Transfiguration, however, made his skin itch with irritation as he tried to force logic onto the branch of magic and failed. Shouldn’t they have to know what each item was made up of before they could even begin to try and change it into something else? How could they change stone to rubber? How could they fundamentally alter the very nature of an object, transforming it from one thing to another? The whole thing felt wrong, but he had to take the class and learn, so there was no point in fretting over the logic (or painful lack of logic) of it now.
“Yeah, well if we tried turning them into a kick ball that might work since the inside would be full of air. Then again, would it be harder to get air into it instead of keeping it one solid thing?” He glared down at the rock before pulling his worksheet closer. Maybe if he filled it out he’d have a better idea of what should be happening here.
“I think I’m going to go with one of the small bouncy balls,” he offered a smile, “yeah, the ones that come out of the quarter machines. That way, I just have to change the material it’s made out of instead of worrying about how I’m going to inflate it. I’m Killian,” he tacked on as an after thought.
Looking the rock over, he noticed that it looked like a river rock and was fairly round, though it had a bit of an egg shaped tip at one end. “Shouldn’t we have to know what it’s made out of before we try to make it be something else?” There were lots of kinds of rocks out there, and he had no idea if it mattered what type it was before he changed it.
Pulling out a ragged looking quill that looked like it might have been gnawed on by a puppy, he began scrawling out a description of his rock:
Smallish, dark grey, smooth surface, not quite round A frown teased the corner of his lips down while he tried to think of what else to write before giving up and moving to the other side to describe the type of ball he wanted.
“I’m going to have it be one color, maybe that’ll make it work better,” he thought out loud.
Small rubber bouncy ball, yellow, same size as the rock. “Do you think that’s all right?” He asked, pushing the sheet over a little so Joe could see.
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Killian
If all the breakables are put away, let’s give this a try.
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Killian
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Joe
May 31, 2016 3:25 PM
I think they've all been secured. by Joe
The mechanics of getting air inside a Transfigured object were not something Joe had thought a lot about in his life, but the younger boy’s point made sense now that he did. If they made a kickball…shell, he guessed, from the rocks, it would obviously have some air inside (his scientific knowledge was fairly limited, a composite of province of Alberta educational standards for students around grade six and stuff he’d picked up just from living in the same house as John, but he didn’t think they were likely to create a vacuum – he distinctly remembered something about even space having a few hydrogen atoms floating around in it, or something close to that anyway), but ‘has air in’ was not the same thing as ‘has enough air in to fill it up.’ Air had to…he fumbled for nerd words…was it pressure it had to have behind it to inflate something? That made sense when he thought about blowing up balloons, so he decided he was going to go with that.To conclude, he said, “I have no idea.”
Thankfully, Killian’s next question was a bit less baffling. “Only…like, in general,” he said. “It’s easier the more similar two things are, or the more similar you think they are – a lot of it’s all in your head – but you probably don’t need to know exactly what kind of rock it is.” He considered the little he knew about the kinds of rocks there were and concluded that this was one of those things John and Clark would probably have spent whole hours of free time experimenting with had they been in his shoes. “Unless you’re someone who knows a lot about rocks, maybe,” he allowed. “My brother has trouble sometimes because he knows too much.” Knowing too much didn’t, in Joe’s opinion, necessarily make one smart.
He started filling in his own Transfiguration chart. The first image of a small bouncy ball that popped into his head was half-red and half-blue, so when Killian said he was going to go for a monochrome one, he decided to go with the mental image he’d had. He did have second year pride to think about, after all. “Colors and things can get you more points,” he said. “You know, if it’s not grey. Just…getting something that’s not rock – and not, you know, oozing or on fire or anything like that – “ he qualified on second thought – “will probably mean full points anyway today, though.”
Joe looked over Killian’s Transfiguration chart, which looked pretty good to him. “Yeah,” he said. “You might want to put something on about making the ball round to, you know, match the other part, but other than that, that looks good. Just get that picture in your head and you’re ready to give it a try.” He paused writing on his own chart to see if Killian would give it a try so he could see how the Pecari did and maybe – he didn’t think it was likely he’d be of any help, but it was possible – offer pointers for the near-inevitable second go.
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Joe
I think they've all been secured.
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Joe
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Killian
June 03, 2016 9:30 AM
All right. On Three, 1 . . . 2 . . . by Killian
Even though Joe didn’t have the answers to all his random questions, Killian found himself glad that they were seated together. At least Joe had some experience. Killian could have ended up next to another baffled first year, leaving the pair to wander around like a pair of helpless pups left alone in a park.Joe knew enough to guide Killian, and the smaller boy paid strict attention when the other spoke. A small laugh escaped him when the other boy admitted his brother got into trouble for knowing too much. One of Killian’s favorite channels on TV was the Discovery channel, and he thought in a few years, maybe he’d know enough to get into trouble with it. Add magic to the mix, and there was no end to the amount of experiments he could perform.
He mulled over the point that more colors would earn a higher grade, but chose to stick with his single color theory for the time being. When he got the hang of changing one thing to another, then he’d think about the decorative aspect.
After Joe looked his page over, Killian nodded and added round to the bouncy ball side of the equation. A sigh threated to escape him as he set the paper aside and took out his wand. There were no more little tasks to keep him from giving it a go.
He gave the rock a long hard look. You are going to be a day glow yellow bouncy ball, perfectly round, and made of rubber. I will be able to throw you and you will bounce. It felt silly to be mentally willing a rock to turn into something else, but whatever helped, he’d go with it.
Taking a deep breath, he pointed his wand at the helpless rock and cried “HEVA!” To his dismay, nothing happened. Not one single thing. Heat filled his cheeks as he poked the rock with the tip of his wand. It remained a rock, just like in his heart he knew it would. Killian’s eyes darted towards Joe, and he gave a weak smile.
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Killian
All right. On Three, 1 . . . 2 . . .
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Killian
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Joe
June 07, 2016 3:58 PM
Think you've got a couple of things out of place there. by Joe
Joe was not terribly surprised that Killian’s first stab at the project availed him nothing, but he felt bad for the first year anyway. “Don’t worry about it too much,” he advised the younger boy. “You’re doing well for a first try in here as long as you don’t set anyone else on fire.”A mediocre performance was, of course, setting oneself on fire, at least a little bit. Joe decided not to mention that to Killian. “I think you had the pronunciation a little off, though,” he did add. “It sounded more like hee-vee-ah when Professor Skies said it. Saying it right is…really important, ‘specially when you’re older. Now we can just – backfire our wands, or nothing happens, but when you’re older, you might accidentally Summon a buffalo when you did not want to Summon a buffalo, and I think that would, uh, kind of ruin your whole day,” said Joe authoritatively. He had only the most passing acquaintance with buffalo studies, but understood they were very large relative to people and, indeed, most rooms people were likely to be in when they inadverently Summoned them.
The difficulties of start-of-the-year Transfiguration were something he knew more about, though. Being a second year meant it had to be easier than it had been when he was a first year, but..."My turn,” observed Joe, hoping he didn’t sound too gloomy about the prospect. “Hevea!”
The rock…shuddered, part of an irregular edge drawing inward toward the rest and forcing the bottom down, but it only took on the faintest suggestion of unnatural smoothness and didn’t change color at all. Lifting it and dropping it about three centimeters also proved that it wasn’t made of rubber yet. Joe caught it quickly before it could roll off his desk. “Like I said, it takes a while,” he said. “How’re you doing?”
OOC: Pronunciation borrowed from oxforddictionaries.com, that being the first online dictionary with a pronunciation guide my cursor landed on when I Googled it.
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Joe
Think you've got a couple of things out of place there.
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Joe
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5
