Mary Brooding-Hawthorne
June 05, 2020 11:28 AM
Drink up, my pretties. [Beginners] by Mary Brooding-Hawthorne
"Hello, class," Professor Brooding-Hawthorne said, greeting her students as they arrived. Mary was a short woman, just over five foot tall, but her tall pointed hat more than made up for it. Today's choice was a wide-brimmed hat of green velvet to compliment her green gown, with ivory buttons on her wrists and up the bodice, to a high neck of purple crepe fabric. The dress was floor length, as most of her clothing was, and Mary looked a bit like a doll. The effect had been stronger when her hair had also been floor length, but she'd cut it to her shoulders shortly before the adoption of Zeus, and now that she had him she was very glad she had gone short. Finding time to sleep was hard enough (albeit getting easier), as was evidenced by the fading black circles under Mary's eyes, but finding time to wash several feet of hair would've been impossible.She grinned as the students paused, taking in the scene around them. The classroom had been transformed into a maze of sorts, or an obstacle course, with several starting points placed along the side of the room nearest the students, enough for all of them to work in only pairs or triads to get through it. At each one, a table with six bottles of potion was set up and at the opposite end of the room, past a set of doors closed with spring power, a heavy wooden block the size of a bookcase, and a very tiny doorway, was another table with two bottles of potion: the antidote.
"Today's class will give you all the opportunity to try out some potions, which is important for taking notes properly. We've been studying each of these potions - Strengthening Solution, Exstimulo, and Shrinking Solution - and now it's time you get to study them firsthand. As you know, the strengthening solution will grant the drinker immense, superhuman strength, exstimulo will grant the drinker increased spell power, and the shrinking solution will shrink the drinker to just a bit larger than a mouse. I want you to pair off, we may need one group of three, and pick a starting point. You can leave your belongings in the corner, except your wand, please."
Professor Brooding-Hawthorne waited for the students to get organized before continuing. "Each obstacle will require the effects of a different potion, and you will both need to take all of them to get through. I want you to try the activity without the potion first, and then drink the potion and try again. First, use the Strengthening Solution and take turns holding open these very heavy doors for each other to get through. Then, you'll use Exstimulo to improve your levitation charms and lift the heavy block for each other. Note that you should not try lifting this because you may have increased strength but you certainly won't have increased balance and I'll not have anyone dropping a block on their classmates. Finally, you'll shrink yourself down to fit through the small door at the end. When you get there, I will pipette antidote on to each of you to clear the last of these potions and then you can drink the rest to ensure you're fully cleared. I will be checking to make sure you all do so, so don't try to go leaving the classroom under the effects of these potions."
She looked around, ready to answer questions, interested to see whether anyone would ask about safety. She had, of course, planned for the risks, and the spring loaded doors had charms to detect whether there was anyone in between them before they would close, the large block the same, and the small door was not really a risk unless Mary started flinging pipettes full of antidote on students halfway through, and that wasn't going to happen.
When she was satisfied everyone understood what was to be done, she gestured for them to begin. "Please let me know if you need anything from me. When you are all done and antidoted... antidote . . . when you have received the antidote, I want you to get together with your partner and take notes. You'll hand those in at the end of class and I'll give them back to you next time so you have them for a paper you'll be turning in in two weeks. Go ahead and get started!"
OOC - Welcome to Beginners potions! The potions described can be found here, here, and here, and you can be assured that Mary will not let anyone get terribly squished or something. She brewed them herself, so they will all work as advertised. If you need her, please tag her, and otherwise have lots of fun. Feel free to godmod Mary pipetting antidote on to your student at the end of the obstacle course. Remember that posts will be awarded points based on creativity and interactivity, not just how well students do with each task. All posts should be at least 200 words! Have lots of fun.
Subthreads: You think I'm pretty? by Bonabelle Row with Graham Osbrook
Will drink in exchange for hat feels by Theo Spurn with Mary Brooding-Hawthorne, Josephine Clyde
Somehow I don't think this is going to be my favorite class ( Tag Val) by Lavender Brockert with Valentine Duell
As long as it's not milk in the looking-glass house (question for Professor B-H). by Mara Morales with Mary Brooding-Hawthorne, Sadie-Lake Chalmers
Hat feels by Theo Spurn
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Mary Brooding-Hawthorne
Drink up, my pretties. [Beginners]
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Mary Brooding-Hawthorne
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Bonabelle Row
June 06, 2020 5:46 PM
You think I'm pretty? by Bonabelle Row
Bonny liked potions. The professor was lovely and pretty and the topic was generally practical enough that Bonny could see how it would apply to her daily life right off the bat. Also, if she read up enough on it and did the legwork, she could usually get a pretty good brew. It was more mechanical than charms or something, and that was helpful. Of course, that wasn't to say she always got it right, but still. It was exciting, then, when the opportunity to try a properly brewed potion came up. Then, very quickly, it was not exciting.As the students set their things down, Bonny looked around, more than a bit terrified. She wanted to work with Val for this if she could, but she also knew that there were lots of students in here and the odds of getting what she wanted were small, especially when what she wanted was the company of someone who was wildly more social than she was.
Finally, everyone had a spot and Val was working with a girl from their year who was not Bonny, which was fine, but it did leave Bonny to work with someone else. She hadn't really gotten to know anybody yet, except Quincy, who was in her House, and Valentine. So she was stuck with it, but that would be fine. Right? Bonny listened to the last of the instructions with a growing sense of nausea. This was going to go horribly, she was sure of it. But she would learn a lot, that much was true for sure. Not that it was strictly encouraging. She did wonder a bit about how the magic behind shrinking solutions worked, as she was pretty sure the potion would bring her clothes - including the massive purple hairbow she wore - with her. But Bonny was bright, and brave, and tried to make herself believe it as she faced her partner.
"Hi," she said, not even getting to a smile. "I'm Bonny. You're . . . definitely not going to get me smashed to bits today, right?" she confirmed hesitantly.
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Bonabelle Row
You think I'm pretty?
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Graham Osbrook
June 10, 2020 9:29 PM
Why wouldn't she? by Graham Osbrook
Graham had not, of course, ever been allowed to openly do magic at home. That was illegal, and his parents were respectable, law-abiding people. He had, however, spent a large portion of his childhood wandering around the offices of the company his family owned, and sometimes, to keep him occupied, he had been allowed to ‘assist’ the potioneer who blended their specialty inks – the inks that changed color as they dried, or would flash colors for a time on the page, or were instant-drying or easy-removed or permanent, or whatever else someone thought was marketable. He had been allowed to fetch ingredients from the shelves, hand them over as needed, and in the last year, had even been allowed to do a little chopping and slicing, sometimes, much to Claire’s jealous irritation.As a result of all of this, Potions was the class where Graham had instantly felt the most comfortable. Part of it was that Professor Brooding-Hawthorne simply seemed like a gentle, comforting person – he suspected it was a bit impossible to regard her as intimidating – but part of it was also that he felt he had a degree of extra-preparedness here, even though he had most certainly not read every word of every textbook before coming to school. He had read some of all, but all of none, and felt this a bit more acutely in some of his other classes. In Potions, though, he knew he had contributed in the past to brews that hadn’t gone horribly wrong, so why should he expect those he worked on now to go too wrong to fix?
His usual sense of assurance, however, went out the window as he walked into the Potions room one day and found the lab completely changed. His eyebrows lifted in an expression of polite puzzlement as he studied the layout, then glanced at Professor Brooding-Hawthorne, his brown eyes also politely puzzled, if not yet alarmed. Were they going to brew potions as they made their way through a maze, he wondered? That could be fun.
That was not, however, the fun they were going to have today. His eyebrows raised again at the revelation that instead, they would actually drink potions today – and not just any potions, either. Shrinking was something he could take or leave, but the other two - ! Especially the Exstimulo potion….
His eyes slipped out of focus for a moment as his mind wandered to daydreams. He had never, of course, seen any real displays of substantial magical power. He had never been anywhere where such things happened. He did, however, like to read, and he had read many books about the things wizards could really do, or had once been able to do. He had also read that much of that knowledge had been lost over the centuries, and the rest of those things were typically rather illegal. They did not live in an age where things like that happened anymore, which was a good thing on the whole. Still, though…to be able to do more than the little parlor tricks they learned in class, to think about maybe, if he drank that potion when he was an adult, being able to do things like those in his books, even if he didn’t actually do them….
He was drawn out of his fantasies by a girl – one of the Aladrens, he recognized, one who had been Sorted with him at the beginning of the year.
“Huh? Oh – no,” he said. “Definitely not. I’m Graham. Nice to meet you. I guess we’re going to work together, then?”
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Graham Osbrook
Why wouldn't she?
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Bonabelle Row
June 10, 2020 9:53 PM
I mean . . . *gestures at self* by Bonabelle Row
Bonny stifled a grimace, feeling sure she had just interrupted her classmate thinking about something more interesting than herself. "Nice to meet you, too," she murmured back. "We don't have to if you don't want to," she added, not sure how to respond to him 'guessing' they were working together. She looked around the room to see whether there were any other immediately available options for him and frowned, finding none. "I'm not sure who else . . .?"Once partnership was decided, Bonny turned back to the course, feeling foolish. She could get a levitation charm down just fine, and she was sure the other potions would work to make each of the tasks possible, but it just felt so . . . blunt. Directness and straightforwardness were not the areas where Bonny's expertise really came out and she felt like a thinly honed blade being used to try to smash potatoes or something; she just wasn't the right tool for the job.
Which was odd, because brute force rarely worked in the real world. She wondered at the subtext of a lesson like this, then. What was she meant to be learning other than that potions brewed by expert potions-masters worked? She supposed she'd be learning about the effects of each of them, what it felt like to be under the influence of various potions, etc., but that was about it. Perhaps it would be helpful in identifying whether she'd been poisoned or something at some future date? That was a horrifying idea, and one that seemed more suited to Defence Against the Dark Arts class.
"Do you want to go first?" she asked Graham. "Or do you want me to?"
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Bonabelle Row
I mean . . . *gestures at self*
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Graham Osbrook
June 18, 2020 7:48 PM
You look fine to me. by Graham Osbrook
Graham flushed as he realized he had probably just been rude, even if by accident. Mom said that it didn’t necessarily matter if he meant to do something or not, only that he did it. This made the thought of life really rather exhausting if one thought about it too long – how was he supposed to fathom what might come across in this way or that to any other random person who wasn’t him and whose thoughts he therefore had no possible way to know? – but the trick, he guessed, was to somehow think about it exactly the right amount: not too much, not too little.“No, it’s fine,” he said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. Let’s work together.”
And hopefully I can keep my foot out of my mouth for the rest of class, he thought dryly.
“I’m okay with going first,” he said when she offered him the choice. He tried to sound merely confident and agreeable, to hide that he was really quite eager to find out what these potions felt like. He wasn’t sure why he did this. It was just what felt natural to him, somehow: it was something like curiosity about who his mother worked for, or disagreement with his parents’ decisions. Clearly there was nothing wrong with wanting to know how potions felt, since their professor was feeding them the things, but….
“Six bottles,” he observed. “I guess if we each put one in each pocket, and we drink one now, then we won’t have to worry about them breaking while we’re transporting them. Well, worry less, anyway,” he qualified, because it was kind of impossible to be sure something wouldn’t break. He would feel more secure if he could wrap the bottles up very securely in a lot of cloth before he put them in his pockets. “Hopefully she enchanted them not to break, but I don’t want to knock them together anyway.” Accordingly, he put one of the Exstimulo bottles in his right hand robe pocket and a Shrinking Solution in the left. Then he picked up one of the Strengthening Solution bottles, uncorked it, hesitated for a few seconds, and then downed it.
He made a slight face once it was down. “It’s not too bad,” he reported. “It’s not great, but it’s not too bad. I’m not sure how I know if it worked, though.” What did strength feel like? He had never consciously thought about it, that he could recall. It was something he was usually aware of after he did something that made him feel strong or weak, not when he did it. He looked at Bonny. “Do you want me to try the door first, or you take the potion and see if you feel anything?” he asked.
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Graham Osbrook
You look fine to me.
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Bonabelle Row
June 21, 2020 3:02 PM
Oh. Thank you. by Bonabelle Row
Bonny relaxed some, comforted by her classmate's reassurance, however awkward it was to need. In any case, it meant he was either very nice and hadn't meant to make her feel bad by being honest, or very nice and hadn't meant it to come out the way it had in the first place. Either way was fine by Bonny, who had never been very good at being nice. She was relieved, almost enough to flutter about it, when Graham said he'd go first. The best way to get ready for anything was to see someone else do it. She'd copied down templates and formats from letters she'd seen other people write in order to write like an adult better, and that was just one example. Experience, unfortunately, wasn't something that could be learned from a book. It could only be learned hands-on. Of course, it could be a little bit learned by watching other people do something hands-on, and that was perfectly suited to Bonny's preferences. Not that Graham going first would mean he got far ahead, as every task required at least two people to do.She was surprised by his consideration of how best to transport the bottles. She was about to say that she assumed the professor charmed them not to break when Graham acknowledged exactly that fact. One dark eyebrow arched at him; Bonny was pleasantly surprised to find that she wasn't the only ones to think such things through, as even Quincy seemed likely to have broken the bottles and Valentine, lovely as she was, was bound to as well. "That's . . . really smart," she admitted, taking the two bottles she'd need next and pocketing them in separate pockets. She was glad the shrinking one was last, as she would hate to carry even a small vial if she was even smaller. "I hope we can get the corks out with super strength. Maybe best to use a charm then," she considered, almost more to herself than anything.
Graham took the first potion and Bonny watched anxiously, waiting to see . . . what? What should she be looking out for? It was safe to assume (probably) that these potions were made well, so that wasn't a concern. Shy of an allergic reaction, there wasn't much to be looking for, she thought. "I'll take it first," she suggested. "That way if you get stuck or if something goes wrong and you need help, I'll actually be able to help."
She had a fleeting thought that it would be sort of fun to see whether they could pick each other up, but even with massive strength, that would require a degree of closeness she wasn't sure she wanted to suggest to her classmate. Following suit, she took the potion and felt exactly the same. It was an odd feeling, and she nodded, both to show that she was done and ready, and that she agreed with Graham's assessment of the potion's taste.
Rolling her shoulders, Bonny took a step towards the closed door and realised she felt clumsy almost. Like she was moving weightlessly across the floor, with little real idea of where each little part of her body was. "Oof," she grunted, putting a hand out to stable herself and snapping one of the legs off the table where the potion had been by pushing too hard on the top of it. Well, guess it was working. She scowled. "I can see why people don't just do this all the time," she grimaced. "Let's open this door."
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Bonabelle Row
Oh. Thank you.
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Graham Osbrook
July 02, 2020 5:30 PM
You're welcome. by Graham Osbrook
Graham couldn’t help a brief smile, pleased, when his partner said that his thought about the bottles was smart. He wouldn’t like to admit it (he could practically hear his mother’s voice in his ear, talking about how it was perfectly natural to be pleased by external validation, but that it was important to good mental health to not develop a dependence on said external validation; Mom could never just let a horklump be a horklump, she had to make it into something, or at least give it to the potential to become something), but he couldn’t deny that it was kind of nice, being told he had said something smart.“Thank you,” he said. Mom was also very keen on good manners, and said that it was actually bad manners to make a show of modesty when complimented – the correct response, she said, was ‘thank you’, and to think of something to compliment the other person back with…. “Super strength could definitely help with corks,” he said, and made a mental note to find a better compliment later.
He jumped back instinctively, eyes widening in surprise, when Bonny put out a hand and the forces involved in catching her balance proved enough to snap the table. His movement was fairly minimal, but he felt as though the floor shook more than it should from this, something that made him wince even though it didn’t damage anything.
“Definitely,” he said fervently when Bonny noted that she could tell why everyone didn’t use this potion all the time. “You’d destroy your own house before you ever got used to it.” Plus, well, how many things did one need that much physical strength for? Wandwork didn’t take that kind of effort, and…well, he supposed it could be good for Quidditch? Except that performance-enhancing potions were banned in all sports and it would be pretty obvious that something was up, if just missing a shot involved the Quaffle moving so fast it knocked over one of the goal posts and fractured the skull of the opposing Keeper….
“Let’s do it,” he agreed again about the door. He walked forward and pushed against the door, which…seemed decidedly normal-door-like to him. He could feel some resistance – the spring was presumably to make the door close itself after him, and thus automatically seek out the closed position – but it was not impossible to overcome it. However, not having the door spring back on him as he went through it as he moved off-center…would that happen? Or were they both currently powerful enough to simply push it open like an ordinary door and walk through? Or were they supposed to each take the door separately? He hadn’t thought of it at the time, but wasn’t sure what Professor Brooding-Hawthorne had meant now that he had the problem in front of him. “What do you think?” he asked Bonny, forgetting to fill in that he meant about what the best strategy would be.
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Graham Osbrook
You're welcome.
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