Professor Skies

April 21, 2019 8:25 AM
“Good morning,” Professor Skies greeted the beginners’ class. The weather outside was shifting - both in the sense of that particular morning, which had begun with overcast skies and a spot of rain but which looked like it might clear into a nice day by lunchtime - and in the broader sense, with the general pattern of the weather across days. Yes, there were abrupt and unexpected cold days, contrasted with startlingly warm ones, but overall it was shifting into being milder and warmer, if also somewhat wetter, and unmistakably, spring was in the air.

“Today, we are going to be having a fun little challenge in class, in celebration of the season and of Easter. You are going to be working to make foil-wrapped eggs. Now, you will not be creating chocolate today - can anyone tell me why?” she asked. Gamp’s Law was covered in more depth later on in their studies, but those who had grown up in a magical household or who had gone ahead in their reading might well have been able to tell her the answer.

“Instead, you are going to be using a hard-boiled egg, and your aim is to turn the shell into pretty, colourful foil. You will be exercising two skills by doing this. The first is, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, design-work,” the fact that making their projects prettier or more intricate would always earn extra credit had been a mainstay of class since their first day. During the first half of the year, this had mainly been asked of the second years, as a way to up the challenge for themselves whilst first years still got to grips with the basics, but since Midterm, the first years had received encouragement to start making their mark.

“The second skill you’re working on is your degree of control. You are to transfigure only the shell of the egg - whilst it may seem easier to transfigure only a smaller amount of an item, it does require a greater degree of precision that you’ve been using up until now. I will be unwrapping each of your eggs at the end to determine how well you’ve done with this.

“To give you some added incentive, and to celebrate the holiday season, the two prettiest eggs - one from each year group - will win a large chocolate egg,” she indicated the brightly wrapped prizes on her desk, “Everyone else will receive a small egg for their efforts,” she added.

“The spell for this is aluminus, and you will need to make a smooth sweeping wand motion around your egg,” she demonstrated, producing a pretty wrapper in graded shades of blue with differing swirls or circles on each band.

“Before beginning, you should make notes on the similarities and differences between what you’re starting with and what you’re aiming for to help you with the visualisation process. You may also want to sketch out your design - for some people that helps with their visualisations.

“You may talk quietly to your neighbours. Raise your hand if you need my help. You may begin.”

OOC OOC - welcome to Transfiguration. Posting here can earn you house points! Posts should be a minimum of 200 words and will be graded on length, realism, relevance (how well you deal with the class content) and creativity.

Posts are marked out of character, based on the quality of the writing, so a character who says they are doing badly but does so in a well-written and detailed way can still score full points. You are now part way through this term, so first years should consistently get some results on their first try unless something is very wrong, but no one is likely to get it perfect on the first go.

You are being supervised, so if things are going wrong, Selina would step in before anything got terribly out of hand. Please tag me in the subject line if there’s something that needs my attention.

Have fun, have a go, if you’re unsure about anything, ask on the OOC or in chatzy.
Subthreads:
13 Professor Skies Beginners - Easter Eggs 26 Professor Skies 1 5

Johana Leonie Zauberhexen, Teppenpaw

May 07, 2019 1:05 AM
Johana Leonie wasn't entirely sure what they were doing in class, but she was pretty sure she could do it. The thought was a bit intimidating, as she was well aware that she wasn't really supposed to be able to do much of anything, but this was something she'd seen done and even practiced a little at home when her parents weren't looking. There was nothing so formal as this then, and of course, they didn't use the Latin incantation, but it was a spell she was vaguely familiar with. Beyond that, she liked it.

The Easter Tree, full of decorated eggs, was a yearly tradition at the Zauberhexen home, and Johana Leonie and Friederike Albert had spent a lot of time together decorating eggs for their patients to enjoy whilst bedridden. Of course, their parents could do fun things like make the eggs change every so often, and somehow the patients always thought they'd just blinked and missed a new detail or something. Still, Johana Leonie and Friederike Albert had made a contest of painting and clearing the prettiest eggs, and sometimes their designs even managed to include a little magic. Accidentally having experienced this before was good enough, right?

She wasn't sure why the professor's was so shiny, and thought it was perhaps just a design choice, but she wrote it down just in case. She was almost definitely missing something, which made everything that much harder. She took a few more minutes to write some notes, trying to fill herself with homemade memories as she thought of her own design.

At first, she tried the spell with no results. Frustrated, she put her wand down and thought about what she and Friederike Albert had always done at home: surprised each other. She was pretty sure she couldn't do anything fancy without her wand now that she'd started to control her magic that way, but maybe she could still use her hands a little too. That was, after all, the way of German hedgemagic, and the Zauberhexens were nothing if not a little unorthodox.

Picking up her egg and clutching it in one hand, covering as much of it as possible and closing her eyes, Johana Leonie waved her wand and murmured as close to the incantation as she could manage. She thought of the last egg she'd seen Friederike Albert make: a pretty yellow flower with pink roses. Of course, he'd actually only managed to drop the egg and it had picked up the print from the table cloth, but still. It was magic, and that's what counted.

When she was done, the egg felt much much heavier than she thought it was probably supposed to. While her design had appeared on the surface as she'd intended, it was more embossed than painted, as the egg had become solidly metal. Or at least . . . she was pretty sure that's what happened. She set it down on the desk in front of her and stared at it, her mouth open in surprise.

"Das ist nicht richtig... " Johana Leonie turned to the nearest student and pointed at her egg. She realized that she didn't have most of the right words for what she wanted to ask, and found herself frustrated by that. At least she'd be learning more than one thing today. "The spell, that is for the making . . . the mirror rock? Das Metall?"

She flicked her egg with her nail, resulting in a solid plink plink! which helped her make her point. She was pretty sure the German and English words for metal were similar anyway. "Is not correct what I did."
22 Johana Leonie Zauberhexen, Teppenpaw I could do this wrong in my sleep! 1432 Johana Leonie Zauberhexen, Teppenpaw 0 5

Jessica Hayles, Crotalus

May 08, 2019 8:29 PM
"There's nothing like an early sky
Lit up before the dew is dry
It casts a gentle spell on me
In its pastel majesty

None of sunset's orange is there
Peach and rose fill the bright cool air
And stretch up, up, up, into silver and blue
As clouds thin, and the firmament breaks through

The moon hovers on, a silver round,
Even as the horizon becomes sun-crowned
Apollo and Artemis are joined for an hour
And fraternal joy gives them a brief common power

Happy is the house where siblings live in harmony!
Perhaps this is why the dawn always ensnares me.
Heavy is my head, grainy is my eye,
But at these lustrous sights, I forget to sigh

The spell must break all too directly
The sun must surge above the pine tree
Warm amber must turn to molten gold
The moon must leave the family fold -

But for a single narrow hour
The sky alone has the power
To wake up happiness in me
And inspire poetry.
.

Jessica was not happy with the poem. Its images were all tired, overused. Its rhymes were simple. Its lines were too uneven. It seemed to move at random between the high-flung and old-fashioned and the pedestrian - it bordered on bathos, but wasn't amusing enough to make the leap. There were lines in the second stanza which she liked, but overall, it was trash.

It was, however, a complete poem - the first she had written in almost two months. She also thought of it more as a diary entry more than a true poem, though it had gone through two drafts - the first had been scrawled while watching the sun come up outside her window, the second over breakfast, improving on a few of its flaws with better words. She also had several other pages clipped into her binder - two were covered, front and back, with neat copies of the fragments and false starts she had made since her abilities had briefly failed her, and on one, she had started trying to organize these and fill in gaps between them - she had half a thought about trying to compose them all together into a sort of stream-of-consciousness narrative poem about losing one's mind. There were good lines among them, after all, and she thought the result might form something like modern verse - something she had never really understood or gotten the hang of. Perhaps, she thought in her present good humor, she had simply needed to go mad first; perhaps that was the key to it all.

It was amazing, she thought as she looked over her manuscripts, what having a purpose in life could do for one's outlook on said life.

As she looked at Professor Skies, she had to struggle not to smile. Skies had probably noticed that Jessica was finally making a focused, determined effort to be a good witch, but she was sure the woman didn't expect smiles from her, not yet. Jessica would have to progress further before the hag was likely to believe her truly brainwashed, a good little cultist who could be trusted.

Easter. The word brought up associations which made it easier not to smile, memories of home and her family - this was the first year since she was born that she supposed she wouldn't have an Easter dress. While she had never, at least since she was about seven or eight, been sure about whether or not she believed in God, she had also always enjoyed the ceremonies and services surrounding Easter in the Methodist church she had also attended every Easter (plus most general Sundays, before All This) since she was born. Plus egg hunts, and chocolate, and the teas and luncheons and dinner parties and china, and the flowers -

Perhaps she could write about that later. Perhaps. She had thought late last year that writing about her feelings helped, but now she thought that perhaps it had helped drag her down to that point where she hadn't been able to write anything for a while. It wasn't something she could do now, though, anyway. A problem for another time.

For now, her mind was engrossed with another problem - specifically, whether or not this task might actually have a point, specifically, whether it made sense to think that this task meant it was theoretically possible to turn Skies' skin into metal someday, trapping her in a conscious, frozen living hell with no possibility of anyone paying any attention to her distaste for the position.

It would be appropriately, horrifically gruesome if it could be done, but Jessica wasn't sure. When they peeled boiled eggs at home, they seemed to have a membrane between the egg and the shell; would that correspond to the lower levels of the skin? If so, could the transformation be accomplished on a living subject, in such a way it didn't kill the patient outright? She remembered the delicate, layered models of human insides - the organs and veins and vessels - they had made in school. The skin had to have blood to live, and the layers were joined up, so would turning even some epidermis to metal lead to the whole system collapsing over a short period of time, or to metal poisoning or something?

So much to learn before she could know. Perhaps she would write some lines about an iron woman to make sure she didn't forget - she had so much to take into consideration, after all. Now that she paid attention to it, she could see that this world was just brimming with things that could be used to Make It Pay.

However, she was a long way from being able to do that. She was still struggling with these small tasks. Sighing, she picked up her magic stick and began another round of practice.

Unintelligible sound caught her ear, and she looked up at her neighbor - one of the German girls. Her eyes widened as they took in what her classmate had produced, even as her brain filed away the phrase 'mirror rock' and something more creative than anything she could have produced.

"It's like a Faberge egg," she said in her soft accent, saying the first thing that came to mind, before she realized what German Girl (Jessica had not bothered learning one from the other before Christmas) was saying. "Yes, it's metal - it looks like metal." Jessica suppressed a flash of jealousy at the girl's obviously superior skills. "We were supposed to..."

She couldn't say what they were supposed to have done exactly - if German Girl could understand, she would have understood it when Skies had said it.

"The outside of the egg should be...thin metal," she said, hoping thin made sense. "Like a metal blanket around the egg. Does that make sense?"
16 Jessica Hayles, Crotalus Do wrong, right. 1442 Jessica Hayles, Crotalus 0 5

Johana Leonie Zauberhexen, Teppenpaw

May 09, 2019 1:39 AM
Johana Leonie beamed at the girl and her luck. Seriously, was everyone at Sonora just the nicest person ever? Well . . . she knew that wasn't true. Still, this girl was nice!

Johana Leonie chuckled softly and waved a hand at the comment about Faberge eggs. That would've been wonderful, but she'd already given up on wanting it to look like that. "You have much nice," she told the girl, blushing a little. "But mein egg is not right. Thin." She emphasized the last with her fingers up close to each other to show that she understood, and then shook her head sadly.

She glanced at the girl's binder on the desk in front of her and raised her eyebrows. "You have thinking? About egg? The spell . . ." She waved her finger around mimicking the wand movement they were using. "That made metal egg? Oder that made pretty egg? Do spell always make metal?" She couldn't figure out any better way to say what she wanted, and looked around the room for a moment to see if she could find Hilda. Not immediately spotting her friend, and worrying it was rude to be looking around when she had such a lovely conversation partner right here, Johana Leonie smiled sheepishly. "My English is not good, but I have learning."
22 Johana Leonie Zauberhexen, Teppenpaw But then who does right, wrong? 1432 Johana Leonie Zauberhexen, Teppenpaw 0 5

Jessica

May 09, 2019 6:59 PM
Jessica blushed, too, when she was told she had 'much nice.' That was not one of the compliments she was accustomed to, at least not from someone her own age, and it made her feel guilty about not even knowing the other girl's name properly.

"I understand you," she said when the girl uttered the disclaimer about her English. "The spell is supposed to make some pretty metal - " knowing the girl knew the word pretty made this conversation so much easier than she suspected it might have been otherwise - "which is wrapped around the egg."

Wrapped might, she realized, be a problem word. She opened her binder, flipped past her poems, and took out a sheet of blue-lined paper. "Like this," she said, trying to wrap the paper around her egg with only moderate success. "Only better," she added judiciously. Since she had noticed the other girl looking at her binder before asking if she had thoughts on the egg, she also added, "these aren't about the egg, they're just what I was thinking while the sun was rising this morning. I write poetry."

She said this without any embarrassment over the topic itself, but did think, a moment later, that she wasn't sure how much of what she'd said which her new acquaintance would understand. In Spanish, 'poetry' was poesía, but Spanish was a romance language and German was something entirely different. Of course, English was more closely related to German than to Latin or Spanish, but that didn't tell her anything about where English had picked it up from. It could be something entirely different in German.

"I don't know how to describe that...something like this," she said, turning a page back and pointing to the stanzas she had written before class. Surely most people would at least recognize the shape of a poem even if they couldn't read the words.
16 Jessica Probably more people than you'd expect. 1442 Jessica 0 5

Johana Leonie Zauberhexen

May 10, 2019 3:42 PM
Johana Leonie couldn't help appreciating that Jessica didn't say the same thing everyone said: Oh, your English is fine! You're go great! She was actually not doing great and her English was severely subpar. Saying otherwise wasn't helpful to anyone and Johana Leonie found it difficult to know whether she was actually ever doing okay when no one told her whether she was or not.

"Thank you," Johana Leonie said gratefully. "Much people not understanding."

She thought she was halfway following Jessica's explanation, but the demonstration helped tremendously and Johana Leonie's face lit up with excitement as she understood. "Spell not wrong? Metal right? Only not all metal?"

It was very frustrating that she couldn't get anything out the way she wanted to, but it wasn't all bad either. At least she wasn't doing terribly, and there was very little need to express deep personal concepts in transfiguration, so her academic vocabulary would do for now.

Johana Leonie had heard of poetry but never actually seen much of it before. It wasn't a focus of her education and the only poetry she'd seen was the French poetry she'd read from some of their international patients. As a result, she wasn't actually sure how it all even worked. This was the first time she'd seen any in English, too.

"The sun rising this morning," Johana Leonie repeated. "I think that it would be funny that a poetry would be about a egg," she giggled. "Do you put magic in the poetry? Make the rising sun have a metal?"
22 Johana Leonie Zauberhexen Oh, good. 1432 Johana Leonie Zauberhexen 0 5

Jessica

May 30, 2019 4:00 PM
“That’s right,” said Jessica, assuming she understood what Johana Leonie was saying about how the spell was supposed to work. “Only the surface should be metal. Thin metal.”

She had to smile at the idea of eggs in poetry. “I know at least one famous poem about an egg,” she said. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. And all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The poem itself didn’t say anything about what Humpty was made of, but the illustrations Jessica had seen had always included an egg with a face, and usually a pair of trousers. “But I’ve never written one. Or put...magic in one of my poems.”

She hated to admit it, but she had to wonder about what that could mean. How could spells be worked into poetry? Could one create illusions that brought the poem to life, at least in cases like her sunrise poem? What would happen with more abstract poems? Or highly structured ones that took a shape on the page? She knew moving pictures in books were a thing, so clearly, there was a place where magic and images crossed over….

Would that actually be a thing she’d want to do, though? Poetry was different to everyone who read it. Doing anything else would reduce a reader’s ability to interpret it. That would be wrong. Poems meant what the author wanted them to, but also meant what was read into it.

“Do a lot of poems...here have magic in them?” she asked. “I don’t know anything about wizard poetry.”
16 Jessica Now let's talk literature. 1442 Jessica 0 5