Selina Skies
December 20, 2019 5:27 AM
Intermediates - Make It Snow by Selina Skies
“Good morning,” Selina greeted the intermediate students. “Coming around is an outline of the things we will be studying this semester,” she informed them, waving her wand to disseminate a stack of parchments. This listed module outlines including animate transfiguration (theory/practical), mechanical transfiguration (theory/practical), and limits of transfiguration (theory). “For those of you who have just moved up to intermediates, you should all know that you have the chance to take electives or extended studies. These can include subjects outside the core classes. Some are taught here and there are correspondence course options. You may take these up now or at any point during your course of study, though the later you do that, the more limits you will face in what you can take at exam level before graduation. If you have any questions about this process, please talk to a staff member, particularly Mr. Row,” strictly speaking, this information was not Transfiguration related, and had hopefully been discussed at multiple intervals with the students. However, it didn’t seem like it would hurt to mention it.“Today, we are going to begin our mechanical transfiguration unit, which is one of my favourites,” she added with a smile. The animate things came with a lot of worrying about the animals involved and a lot of competing theories and ethics. Interesting fodder for theory, but a headache when it interfered with practicals. This element of transfiguration had been somewhat niche when she started out but it had gradually been gaining momentum and she had been adding more and more of it in with no complaints so far. “In essence, this is a branch of transfiguration that looks at making moving things with complex working parts. We will look into the theory of that too, discussing how your knowledge of how something is put together affects your ability in this branch of magic.
“Today, we’ll be starting out with something a little simpler. Something that you should all understand the fundamental workings of, but which nonetheless presents a challenging problem for you all.” She placed a rubber ball on top of a small box on her desk so that it was easily visible from around the room, and with a muttered incantation and light, flourishing wand movement turned it into a little snow globe, complete with a castle in it. She picked it up to demonstrate that a little flurry of glittery snow did indeed appear when she shook it.
“Now, who can tell me why that might be more complicated than some of the things you’ve already made?” she asked. It didn’t seem like a very challenging question, and so it didn’t take much calling on people to get a clear answer.
“The incantation you will need for this is Globus Nivalus,” she instructed, “And you should use a swirling wand motion with a light fluttering gesture at the end. In version A of the task, you can just work on creating the ball filled with water and ‘snow.’ In version B, you can add a miniature scene. You may choose which to work on, or work through one and then the other. The goal of the class is for you to be comfortable creating something involving multiple materials and parts which must work in harmony but also independently. This will be a useful foundation for creating more complex systems, both in terms of pseudo-living things and more complex mechanical transfigurations.
“You may talk quietly with your neighbours, or ask me if you need any assistance. Please begin.”
OOC - welcome to Intermediate Transfiguration. Posts will be graded based on length, realism, relevance and creativity.
Subthreads: I suck less now! by Evelyn Stones with Jessica Hayles
Beautiful things. by Katerina Vorontsov with Felipe De Matteo
How I hate going out in the storm. by Nathaniel Mordue with Allegra Brockert
Do I have to? by Jeremy Mordue with Johana Leonie Zauberhexen
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Selina Skies
Intermediates - Make It Snow
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Jeremy Mordue
January 01, 2020 4:50 AM
Do I have to? by Jeremy Mordue
Jeremy took a seat as far away from his brother as physically possible. On the one hand, it was sort of gratifying to be put in the same class as Nathaniel and Sylvia. They had always liked lording it over him - how they were so grown up and so much more mature than he was. They used it as an excuse to treat him like a baby or leave him out. Well now, they were all in the same class, so they could suck on that, couldn’t they? Sure, the material would be differentiated, but that wasn’t the point. They couldn’t call him a baby when they were all in the same grade.That was the one tiny silver lining to what he otherwise thought was going to be a nightmare situation. It wasn’t as if Nathaniel didn’t already always poke his nose in and try to find out what Jeremy was up to, and then pull it all to pieces all the time. This was going to make it so much easier for Nathaniel to look over his shoulder and nag at him, and it wasn’t like his brother wasn’t super skilled at that already. Or at least, he always had been. Summer had been… weird. Not that Jeremy wanted Nathaniel around or wanted him to nag, but it’d felt like he’d been on his case less than he expected. Nathaniel appeared when he was expected to, and occasionally when he wanted to stick his nose in, but he’d often not say much and then sort of drift off into his room. It applied even when Jeremy was doing the right thing, like when he had won at Quidditch, and Nathaniel had basically barely cared. Maybe Nathaniel just figured Uncle Alexander was handling it, and that he could finally stop trying to be the man of the family, and the frigging boss of Jeremy. Jeremy expected that to return full force now they were at school, and especially with Simon graduated. Nathaniel would feel the need to ‘keep an eye on him.’
The other downside was the potential comparisons to his brother, both academic and physical. It was sort of hard to escape being compared to Nathaniel when he looked like just a slightly smaller version of him, and putting them in the same room was really not likely to help that fact. Jeremy hated it. It was like his own nose and mouth and eyes weren’t his just because Nathaniel had gone in and got them first. And it wasn’t like he’d copied on purpose. It was irritating how much people made a big deal out of it. Though, he supposed on that front, thank goodness they were still officially related. It would have been very strange and very awkward to have been in the same room, being clear copies of each other, and having to pretend his brother did not exist and was nothing to do with him. At least he only had to do that on the personal level. He answered his name in roll call, taking some satisfaction that alphabetical order put him ahead of his older cousin and brother.
The assignment itself was lame. Snow globes were girly, and Jeremy didn’t want to make one. Still, he didn’t want to fail and get a lecture. He wasn’t sure if he was already going to be in trouble if his relatives had noticed the Mudblood stalking off at dinner the previous evening. He thought it was rather a point of pride to be so clearly not associated with such a person, but he wasn’t sure if Nathaniel was going to make a fuss about ‘causing scenes.’ Whatever. Jeremy was still proud of it. He clearly knew how to push Jessica’s buttons, and that wasn’t something he was going to let go to waste. If pushing Mudblood’s buttons pushed Nathaniel’s too, for whatever reason, then double win.
He turned to his notes, deciding he’d just make a globe. After all, he was a third year. That was what was expected, and was why there was an easier task, plus making cutesy little castle scenes or whatever made this activity even lamer.
”Globus Nivalus,” he cast, trying to swirl his wand. Jeremy was better at Defence than this – at decisive, abrupt motions. None of this fluttery and twirly nonsense. The ball on his desk changed, becoming transparent, and filled with little bubbles. He poked it experimentally. It seemed to be halfway between rubber and glass, and was definitely a far cry from a snow globe.
“This is such a girly spell,” he muttered irritably.
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Jeremy Mordue
Do I have to?
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Johana Leonie Zauberhexen
January 01, 2020 10:56 PM
No. by Johana Leonie Zauberhexen
Johana Leonie hadn't been sleeping well and it was only the beginning of the term. She was already tired, already a nervous wreck, and already sure that she was going to struggle. Still, there were things that made it all a little better, like making snowglobes in Transfiguration. Transfiguration was a difficult class - by far one of the hardest at Sonora - but it was made a little easier by the fact that so much of it was visual. Johana Leonie could see what the wandwork should look like, and what the results should be. Other courses did that too, but it wasn't the same as seeing exactly what was meant to be done and, in a way, how. How did a ball become a snowglobe? Well it needed to go from rubber to glass, and it needed to get filled up with water instead of air. Making it happen was the difficult part, but it was a whole lot easier if she knew what she was supposed to make happen.She also had the advantage of knowing Professor Skies from the extra help classes and language instruction classes. Professor Skies wasn't the only friendly, helping face at Sonora, but she was certainly one of the most consistent. It was nice to be a little less scared of the scary class.
The presence of snowglobes set Johana Leonie's mind spinning as she thought about other such pretty baubles. They made her think of the holidays and her snowy village in winter. They also made her think of fancy balls that were coming up and that she didn't want to think about because this was just the beginning of term and she had like ten months to worry about that. Or, if she was lucky, not to worry.
The student next to her - a boy - seemed about as frustrated on the outside as Johana Leonie was on the inside, but she recognized it as a common look on his face. She'd been in classes with Jeremy for the past two years, going on three years, and had become well used to the faces he made. She supposed it was the benefit of not being fluent in the language people spoke: she learned to read their faces instead.
In this case, however, Jeremy didn't seem frustrated for the same reasons. Johana Leonie reviewed what she thought she'd heard Jeremy say in her head, making sure she understood it before she built up the nerve to say something to him. "Snowglobes were made by boy first," she said quietly, searching his face as she spoke. "Muggle; he make. In Germany." There weren't many times where Johana Leonie got to use her heritage to her advantage, so it was exciting to do so now. "You can make, also."
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Johana Leonie Zauberhexen
No.
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Jeremy Mordue
January 17, 2020 5:49 AM
Thank goodness for that by Jeremy Mordue
CW - xenophobiaOh great. In his eagerness to avoid his brother, Jeremy hadn’t taken nearly as much care as usual in choosing who he sat next to. And now he was stuck with one of the miscellaneous dumb foreigners who Professor Brooding felt the constant need to give special treatment to. This girl was the reason why, here in America, his potions bottles were labelled with French and Gibberish and Bull. It wasn’t fair. There was no reason for people like her to come in and squeeze him out of a space that had been rightfully his. And now she even thought he was talking to her.
He was sort of surprised by her level of understanding, given how she spent all her time with the other foreigner and needed constant pandering to by the staff. He wanted to say that he had not been talking to her but then he would look like he’d just been muttering angrily at a bouncy ball and, whilst that was true, it was probably slightly lower down the list of acceptable behaviours than talking to this girl.
“Of course I can,” he replied, with a roll of his eyes, when she stated that he too could make a snowglobe. Of course he could. He was a Mordue, not some genetic mishap who thought wands were weapons, probably because of their own ineptitude in handling one. “Who says I want to?” he challenged, “And no one just… knows the history of the snowglobe,” he added, pretty sure she had to be just making that up because it was such a mindlessly pointless thing to know.
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Jeremy Mordue
Thank goodness for that
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Johana Leonie Zauberhexen
January 18, 2020 10:09 PM
Warum sind sie nicht glücklich? by Johana Leonie Zauberhexen
On the bright side, Jeremy spoke clearly. It was mostly because he was just sneering a bunch and also probably because he thought she was a moron. The latter was really annoying because she actually did benefit from him talking slowly and enunciating more clearly. His eye roll really got to her though because even rude people didn't just go around being terrible most of the time. Usually, they were thinking rude things in their head and just kept them there, or they would be sort of subtle about it. Sometimes they'd say rude stuff, but not just because it was fun. What was Jeremy being rude about?"Natürlich," she frowned. She didn't have the English words to say 'I didn't mean you're capable of it, I meant that you can get over yourself' so she just settled in a hard frown. "So what is your Problem? You need help?" She tried really hard to be sincere about it, because if he actually did need help, she wanted to offer it. At the same time, she was pretty sure he wouldn't take her help even if he did need it.
The fact that he doubted her was more insulting though because she was proud of that bit of knowledge. She shook her head, her red curls bouncing. "I know history," she said, frowning. "He was Deutsch-- German. Snowglobes are pretty things. I like know about them."
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Johana Leonie Zauberhexen
Warum sind sie nicht glücklich?
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