Partners don’t seem optional this time on Potions

Mary Brooding-Hawthorne

January 04, 2020 1:00 AM

Aurors, Auras, and Healers, oh my! [Intermediates, III-V] by Mary Brooding-Hawthorne

As a group, intermediate students were probably the most messy. Their lives were messy, their hormones were messy, often their potions were messy because their lives and hormones were messy, and their futures were messy. They hadn't yet taken standardized tests and didn't yet know where they were going in life. Advanced students were usually just stressed out or focused really hard, and beginning students hadn't yet figured out which way was up, so there was were growing pains for every group, but intermediate was where Mary noticed it the most. It was also the biggest class, with three years of students all in the room together. She was pretty sure some of them probably liked each other, and some of them hated each other, and she was perfectly happy to sit down for hot chocolate and talk about that with any of them, but also she was perfectly happy to hide in her office and drink hot chocolate by herself. She supposed there were growing pains to being a newly married, newly hired, newly thirty-year-old too.

It was the career part of the whole thing that Mary chose to focus on for today's lesson, because it was one of the easiest things she could introduce to students without making them feel like they were going to blow up. Most of them weren't close enough to graduation to really be thinking about careers yet and those that were in their fifth year usually had only just begun thinking along those lines. It was a good way to ease them into it, especially as they started considering what classes to take in advanced years. Easing into it was made all the easier by the fact that she didn't actually have to say that was what she was doing. Today we're going to talk about YOUR FUTURES FIGURE IT OUT RIGHT NOW, wouldn't help anybody.

"Hello. Hi. Hi, how are you?" Mary stood by her desk, a large book chained shut beside her, greeting students who came close enough to engage with her as they came in. When everyone had found a seat, Mary stepped away from her desk to reveal several baskets, their contents hidden by black cloths. There were enough for everyone to work in pairs, something Mary made sure to do in most of her lessons.

Addressing the class, Mary smiled. "Does anyone know what an aurologist does?" she asked, calling on a few students who raised their hand. The answer was basically in the word itself, but she knew that wasn't always a helpful clue for her students so she gestured to the board where a piece of chalk wrote out the root meanings of "aura" and "-ologist" while she spoke. "You've probably touched on this topic in your readings, or in other classes, especially Defense Against the Dark Arts and Charms, and maybe Herbology," she began. She always sort of wondered how many of them had put two and two together about the fact that there were two Professor Brooding-Hawthornes at school these days. "But today we're going to be looking at the ways in which potions can assist us with detecting magical auras. I've brewed the potion for this myself and there is plenty if you drop some or run out," Mary assured her students, gesturing to a cauldron on a stand near her desk, its contents rolling with translucent silver curls of steam.

"Magical auras can be detected on people as well, but since we are obviously all magical, there won't be anything very interesting to notice if we were to apply this potion to ourselves. Also, who wants potions all over them? I know I don't. Instead, you'll be testing the potion on the items in these baskets. Each one has some of the same things and some different things, and the magical aura may not be the same as the one in other baskets, so you won't be able to cheat off your neighbors. The recipe for this potion and a guide to the auras can be found in your English textbook on page 72, and you'll be writing an essay about this experience for next week."

Mary took a moment to consider her students' faces, looking for any sign of questions and leaving time to answer any that arose. Then, she dipped a ladle into the potion and poured a few drops of it onto the book on her desk. The air nearby went frigid, enough so to be uncomfortable, and a high-pitched humming sound emitted faintly from the book. "There are a variety of signs you can see. Sometimes things glow, sometimes they change color or smell funny." She shrugged. "Ironically, this book has been charmed to catch fire when opened. None of the items in your baskets will be that dangerous. There is room for interpretation, especially since none of you are expert aurologists. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me, but I also will be grading the effort, not the accuracy, so you can work with your partner to figure them out as best you can. Go ahead and begin working, and let me know if you need any help getting started!"

OOC - Have some fun and feel free to play around with this. Big thank you to Nathan's Herbology lesson last term for inspiring this after I was reading about aurologists in the Harry Potter world, so there's a little taken from a lot of places.

Subthreads:

Das ist nicht real by Hilda Hexenmeister with Johana Leonie Zauberhexen

Partners don’t seem optional this time by Heinrich Hexenmeister with Evelyn Stones

I sense strong magical talent by Sylvia Mordue with Katerina Vorontsov

22 Mary Brooding-Hawthorne Aurors, Auras, and Healers, oh my! [Intermediates, III-V] 1424 1 5

Hilda Hexenmeister

January 07, 2020 1:37 PM

Das ist nicht real by Hilda Hexenmeister

Hilda stared flatly up at Professor Brooding as she made up new English words and asked who knew what they meant. English had plenty of words already. There was zero need to go and mash up ‘aura’ and ‘ologist’ like that and expect people to know what you’re talking about. Just call it an Aurareadingperson like a normal language.

Pfft. Ologist. What kind of word was that? Nobody said Ologist. Hilda had been trying to learn English for years now and she’d never heard of an Ologist before. Professor Brooding made that up.

Fortunately, she stopped inventing new words after that and just used a pile of hard ones Hilda didn’t know, but at least they were ones other people seemed to accept existed as real English words. Even better, she had taken the seat next to Heinrich (as she expected she would do for this entire first year of Intermediates until he got sock of her and told her to find her own side of the room - except Heinrich was too nice to do that and she was totally planning on taking advantage of that) so she just looked at him like a lost puppy and he started whispering translations to her. It was amazing. She was going to do so much better in classes this year, she could already tell.

And maybe she’d even start picking up English faster with a real time explanation for the words she didn’t know. She turned to page 72 in the German text, then flipped back and forth a few pages until she found the place where her book talked about auras.

Once they were told to begin work in pairs, Hilda went up front to get one of the baskets, feeling on top of the world because she actually knew what was going on today. She then turned to the student sitting on her other side that didn’t have Heinrich. Sitting on next to her brother for every class in order to get lecture translations was one thing, but she had no desire to spend every minute with him. Not only was he an Aladren killjoy when it came to work, but he was a fifth year perfectionist as well and she didn’t need to be compared to that.

“Hallo,” she greeted her other neighbor and showed them the basket she had collected. “We together work? I have basket. You have potion?”

1 Hilda Hexenmeister Das ist nicht real 1433 0 5

Heinrich Hexenmeister

January 08, 2020 8:25 AM

Partners don’t seem optional this time by Heinrich Hexenmeister

Heinrich entered the potions classroom and swung by Professor Brooding’s desk to say hallo and confirm that he was still interested in being her fifth year potions assistant. He liked the brewing parts, but he almost enjoyed the parts where he helped refill the classroom ingredient supplies more. There was just something immensely fulfilling in, well, filling small jars and vials and making sure everything was accounted for and in its proper place.

He took a seat and was swiftly joined by his younger sister. This was going to get old, he could already tell, but it was just one year that they’d share classes and she clearly needed the help. He had already noticed she was much happier about classes in just the last couple weeks than she had been during the entirety of the last two years, so he wasn’t going to rock that boat by demanding space away from her.

Professor Brooding began talking, and he dutifully repeated what she was saying in whispered German, hoping he wasn’t disturbing and distracting his other neighbors too much. He was a prefect now, so the last thing he wanted to do was make it harder for people to pay attention to the teacher, or look like he wasn’t paying attention himself. Yet, helping younger students was absolutely the biggest part of his new job description so translating for Hilda was possibly the most prefectly thing he could be doing right now, and he couldn’t shirk that.

So he whispered in quiet German, trying hard not to miss anything because it was hard to listen and translate and whisper at the same time, but he managed, mostly, and he was lucky it was a relatively short lesson today, though potions in particular was rarely very long, if only so there was time to brew the day’s potion.

Today there was no brewing though, which was why he was grateful it was a short lecture. There was potion application though, and he wondered if he should have let Professor Brooding know sooner that he’d be her assistant so she wouldn’t have needed to make it all by herself. Well, next time, he guessed, and anyway she was a potions master and totally and completely capable of brewing on her own.

Though even Heinrich who was perfectly happy to not group up during most classes did prefer to at least have other people nearby when brewing, if only to have something to watch during the inevitable waiting periods, and Professor Brooding struck him as a much more social being than he was. Hopefully, her cat had kept her company.

Or maybe the other Professor Brooding-Hawthorne did. Or was that one Professor Hawthorne-Brooding? Either way, that was far too much a coincidence for that not to mean anything. So if they were keeping each other company while Professor Brooding brewed, they definitely didn’t need Heinrich around. He’d just make things awkward for them.

Anyway, the potion got made, and now it was time to apply it to the items in the basket and try to read their auras. They were supposed to work in pairs, as there weren’t enough baskets for everyone to have their own. So step one was to find a partner, preferably one who wasn’t Hilda.

He turned to the person sitting on his other side. “Do you have a partner?” he asked in perfectly passible if heavily accented English. He’d been working hard on improving his grammar over the summer and thought he’d made pretty good progress.

1 Heinrich Hexenmeister Partners don’t seem optional this time 1414 0 5

Evelyn Stones

January 12, 2020 11:50 AM

Just a nice chill thread then? by Evelyn Stones

Evelyn spent way too much time thinking way too hard about where she sat in classes these days. If things were simpler, everyone would always sit in the same seats for all of their time at Sonora, but she thought that would probably get old and the professors really liked when they worked with different people. Mix it up. Which meant Evelyn sat with Ness often because Ness was great and would work with whomever was on the non-Evelyn side just as often, if not more, than with Evelyn herself, and others when she could. Sometimes Julius. Sometimes Malikhi. Sometimes Katerina. Sometimes someone else. She wasn't particularly picky, so long as it wasn't someone who was rude about her blood status, background, or makeup. The last of these was pretty well resolved these days, but she remembered well who had solidified themselves as thinking she was a weirdo. It was interesting to see that some people thought her blood status was pretty good, even though her mother was a squib, just due to two long lines of magic ancestry converging into the mess that was Evelyn Stones. Others seemed to think she was every bit as "defective" as her mother. For entirely different reasons, Evelyn hoped that wasn't true.

Blood status was not on her mind when she took a seat next to Heinrich for class. She tried her best not to overdo it on that front, in part for the same reasons as with Ness - she suspected Heinrich didn't want to work with his sister all the time, which left him to whomever was on his other side, and the Aladren undoubtedly preferred variety there. Plus, Evelyn wasn't about to blow an Aladren out of the water with her abilities in any class, although she was pretty good at Potions. That was probably why she didn't mind sitting next to him in Potions maybe a little more often than other classes. It was something they both enjoyed and she felt a little bit less like she was relying on him to get her though the lesson, or otherwise completely embarrassing herself for lack of ability.

Today's lesson was interesting in a way that potions lessons usually were not, as it touched on Evelyn's growing interest in magic theory. It also reminded her of an Herbology lesson where she'd worked with Dorian, who had been very nice about Evelyn struggling her way through, and today didn't seem to have the pitfalls she'd experienced there. Which was exactly why she had grown up loving potions, of course. Her mother couldn't do the wand work, but she could do some of the rest, and they had spent a lot of time gathering ingredients from around town, cutting them up, preparing them, and sometimes even brewing potions with Evelyn's father's help. Looking back, Evelyn was well aware that many of the "potions" they had made were actually things like soup and it had largely been a ploy to get Evelyn to eat her vegetables.
In other cases, spells were just lullabies and Evelyn was pretty sure Go To Bed Potion was just warm chai and milk. It made her happy nonetheless. At first, when her mother had left, Evelyn had hated potions class for all the memories it brought back. Now, it was about the only positive connection to home she had left, and that made it worth the bitterness of bittersweet.

Sometimes Evelyn wondered what she would do as a parent. Of course, she'd be able to do wand work better than a squib, a fact which had not been totally guaranteed just a few years previously, and she wasn't sure yet whether she'd ever have children. But whether she had her own, adopted, or maybe just worked with children someplace like the McLeod Foundation - a dream job she was pretty sure she was entirely not suited for - she couldn't help wondering what that would be like. Would she make chai tea and milk for future children? Would she teach them how to make real potions before they went to school? Or if they didn't have any magic, would she love them just the same? Her parents hadn't seemed to love her the same as they would've otherwise. In fact, her father had loved her much less before they were sure she had passable magic, and her mother had loved her a lot more before then. Evelyn never wanted to be like that, another reason she hoped she wasn't like her mother. She was pretty sure she was not anything like her father, which was good, but she sometimes thought of CJ and wondered what his childhood would be like. She thought it was safe to believe that he would have a better childhood than she did, but that was - as Heinrich had once put it - a very low bar.

When Heinrich turned towards her, Evelyn smiled up at him - even sitting, he had a height advantage on her to some extent - and shook her head. Sitting next to each other for lecture did not always, and had not always, meant they worked together for any practical part of the lesson, and it was nice when the opportunity to do so arose. Plus, potions were fun and this should be great. It seemed like a more social activity than 'you cut up the spleens and I'll stir this seventy-five thousand more times,' which made the whole thing a bit more fun in her opinion. The methodical parts of potion-making were things she could do just as well on her own; if she was going to work with a partner, she wanted to actually get to work with them.

"No, not yet," she said, turning towards him. Her textbook and notebook were on the desk in front of her, and she hadn't gone to get a basket yet. "Do you want to work together? I can grab one of those," she offered, pointing to the covered baskets and hopping down to the floor. She waited for his response before making her way to the front of the classroom.

22 Evelyn Stones Just a nice chill thread then? 1422 0 5

Johana Leonie Zauberhexen

January 12, 2020 12:07 PM

Danke für deinen Bruder. by Johana Leonie Zauberhexen

Johana Leonie felt a little bit like she was probably cheating to sit where she could sort almost hear some of Heinrich's interpretations for his sister. She also sort of felt like she was probably cheating to sit with someone she knew she could switch languages with, even if she was making a concerted effort to use English even with Hilda. But school was hard and she had noticed her mind wandering more in classes recently, so she wanted to make sure she at least had a fighting chance of getting through when she was paying attention. She wasn't sure exactly why she was having such a hard time, except that she'd been thinking more and more about things that were prettier than potion-making. She even liked potion-making! She wanted to be a Healer after all, didn't she? Didn't she?

She was pretty sure that's what she wanted to be because that's what she'd always been, but she couldn't help acknowledging that Healers didn't get to wear pretty things very often, and she really did like that. With Jessica, Katerina, sapphire, and any other number of beautiful girls in her class, Johana Leonie felt particularly sub-par. Maybe that meant she was well-suited to becoming a healer. Maybe it meant she just had to try harder. Even Friederike Albert got to enjoy pretty things, and he had a date to the Ball because he'd cut out some not-so-pretty flowers for a girl who always wore pretty things. She wasn't even sure whether he liked the girl he'd asked, or whether he was really capable of liking anyone yet. Heck, she wasn't even sure whether she was capable of liking anyone yet. She'd noticed a little bit more often that some of the boys in her class were actually pretty cute - including Heinrich who had likely only come to her notice because he was her best friend's brother, and had quickly been dismissed as a prospect - but no one had stood out to her. Maybe she was doomed to be alone forever. At least then she could get a lot of pets and wear pretty things for them. At least a niffler would appreciate her penchant for shiny things.

When Hilda got up and left their shared sitting area and made her way to the baskets, Johana Leonie copied her and retrieved a vial of potion. She wasn't sure how much they'd need, but she didn't want to be wasteful and Professor Brooding hadn't really used very much of the potion in her example. There was another woman who always wore pretty things, and Professor Brooding had a gross job. Maybe not as gross as healing, but if the potions professor could wear fancy dresses and pretty things for her work, maybe there was hope yet for Johana Leonie's career goals and fashion choices to work out together.

She returned to her seat as Hilda did and her friend turned to her, speaking English. Johana Leonie smiled, glad that Hilda seemed to be doing better in that area than she'd been before. "I have potion," Johana Leonie confirmed, holding up the vial. "Want you to together work here? Oder..? This should be enough space. In the basket is . . ?" The nice thing about questions was that, in both languages to some extent, just going up at the end of a sentence sort of made it a question. It took less brain work to go up at the end than it did to rearrange the words. Noticing that Hilda had her German textbook open, Johana Leonie opened her English one so they could compare.

22 Johana Leonie Zauberhexen Danke für deinen Bruder. 1432 0 5

Sylvia Mordue

January 17, 2020 6:49 AM

I sense strong magical talent by Sylvia Mordue

CW Xenophobia

Potions was not Sylvia’s favourite class. She could handle all the eye of newt and mucus of flobberworm - she naturally preferred activities where these weren’t prerequisites to success but she could handle it - it was more the constant overly saccharine cheer of their teacher that set her teeth on edge.

Sylvia took a seat away from Nathaniel though making sure she was still near someone respectable. She noticed that the Germans were being as clannish as ever and did not want anyone to suggest the same about her. She also didn’t really want to sit with Jeremy in any classes.

The Professor began by asking a question and Sylvia raised her hand, quite sure that people without a magical background would be clueless here, and glad for the rare chance that the teacher seemed to be willing to offer for those of magical pedigree to actually demonstrate it.

“An aurologist reads the signals which emanate from a magical object upon subjecting it to certain tests. Although this may, on the surface of it, sound similar to certain divination practises, aurology differs as the signals it gives are consistent and relate to concrete, extant states, though it still requires skilled and specialist knowledge to interpret the results,” she stated.

The professor made some notes and then went on to detail their experiment for the day. Sylvia thought it might actually be interesting to use the potion on themselves, as then they’d be able to compare those of them with proper pedigree to the others. People were always going on about how they were all equal and what not. Well then, let it be proven. Except of course the bleeding heart liberal professor was not going to risk that, on the flimsy excuses that the results would not say much, and that no one wanted potion all over them. She suspected it would not be necessary to pour it all over oneself. Well, perhaps in the cases of some of her lesser classmates it would - they might need a full immersion for whatever glimmer of magic they had to show up, but Sylvia’s little finger probably had more than enough magical energy to show the potion’s effects.

Oh well, object analysis it was. Sylvia collected a basket and a vial of potion, returning to her desk and opening the textbook to the appointed page. The professor had not warned them against touching any of the objects, so presumably they were not cursed - at least not to the extent that they could not be handled. Judging by what she had said regarding the book, some nastier effects could not be ruled out. She turned her attention to ‘Detecting Dark Magic’ first.

’Dark magic, on the whole, tends to produce an aura in keeping with its own characteristics. After all, on many cursed objects, the spells are intended as a protection. As with the aposematism we find in the natural world, whereby poisonous animals give off signals to dissuade predators, dark magic often looks dark. This can manifest in denser saturations of colour, or in more obvious shapes that do not take an aurologist to decipher them such as the formation of skulls in the vapor.

Curses which are intended to lure a victim in present differently, and the absence of obvious mal intent should not be taken as an indicator that an object is safe.

Well, that was cheerful. Still, obviously dark portents were a solid starting point, and it seemed important to rule those out before getting better acquainted with the objects in her basket.

“Did you want to work together?” she asked her neighbour pleasantly. The advantage of taking care with one’s seating choice was that she was rarely stuck next to someone she didn’t want to work with, and today was no exception, “I thought this might make a logical starting point,” she offered amicably, pointing to the explanation she had just read.

13 Sylvia Mordue I sense strong magical talent 1413 0 5

Katerina Vorontsov

January 19, 2020 5:08 PM

That could be a handy ability to have. by Katerina Vorontsov

Katya smiled automatically at Professor Brooding when Professor Brooding smiled at her. She bowed her head respectfully upon hearing the teacher’s greeting and said, “Very well, thank you,” just as she was supposed to. She did not allow herself to stare at the book next to Professor Brooding, nor did she allow herself to ask why, exactly, the professor had it, or what it was, or anything else about it. The odds that pretending it didn’t exist would do any good were slim to none, but this was still the socially acceptable thing to do and so Katya did it.

Privately, however, she was wary. Books were powerful, as everyone with sense knew – why, books with no magic cast directly on them at all had started revolutions before, and the ones with magic woven into them could have even more dramatic effects. There were books which could change people’s lives in a single reading, and usually for the worst at that. A book which had to be chained shut certainly seemed like one with the potential to do damage. Why, exactly, did they have such a book here, in Potions class?

‘Aurologist’ did not immediately fall on her ears as a word, but as it was wriitten on the board, it began to click. Aura was the same word in both languages; in Russian, this would be an auralog, rather than an Aurologist. Katya tried not to judge such things, but in this case, she thought the Russian word really was superior, as it flowed more smoothly and didn’t involve so much wrestling with vowels pushed too close together. Not that she planned to mention this to Professor Brooding or, indeed, anyone else.

Sylvia had an answer for the question, which Katya was careful to look attentive to, even though she was only mostly following it. Sylvia was doing the thing that Katya herself did quite often when talking to someone older, she realized – picking words to sound smarter. Showing off, essentially. Katya found this sort of thing oddly humanizing, because she only did that when she was privately concerned that someone might be looking down on her.

The lesson went on. So, they were...not putting potions on themselves. That was good. Katya also couldn’t see how it could be really practical to use a potion to detect if someone was magical or not, because having potions where the Magly could see them was against the law. Splashing someone with something that would make an aura visible was...not a good idea, though it was possible that Magly couldn’t see them at all, which would just leave them confused about why someone had just thrown a vial of liquid at them, she imagined. Better to stick to objects.

Not, of course, that doing that was without its risks. Katya put her dragonhide gloves on before she even went to get an object, not wishing to come into contact with anything like Professor Brooding’s chained-up book (even as she continued to wonder what the purpose of a book which was charmed to catch fire when opened – she supposed that one could do it purely to burn the opener, but since it would have to be quite a fire to be life-threatening, that brought her back to what the point was). Dragonhide gloves couldn’t block everything, of course, but they repelled magic well enough to block at least a mild hex, and Professor Brooding had said the objects they had been given to work with were not especially dangerous. Accidentally brushing an object with her pinkie was probably not something she would feel through the gloves, which was just fine by her.

“I am happy to do so,” she said when Sylvia offered to work together. She looked over the passage the other girl had her book open to. Her eyes skipped a word here and there, disregarding it as something she could probably divine the meaning of from context; on the whole, she was successful, and emerged with a solid idea of what the passage said. Dark magic looked dark. Well, wasn’t that shaped like itself, and made the name make sense, at least....

“I agree, this is helpful,” she said. “Though perhaps we have no Dark spells.” She looked at the object in her basket – a figurine of a cat in white porcelain. “At least he has not chains on,” she observed with a hint of humor. “That is maybe a good sign.”

16 Katerina Vorontsov That could be a handy ability to have. 1418 0 5