Selina Skies

June 19, 2020 9:45 PM
“Good afternoon,” Professor Skies greeted the advanced class. She was standing next to a tailor’s mannequin in a set of fairly plain robes. “As you can see, we’re going to be briefly revisiting the idea of Transfguration in the fashion industry today, although for the seventh years, the practical element of this class will be about something else.”

This was one of the lessons Charlie had helped her out with when he’d visited, although no one in the current advanced class would have been an advanced student at the time. It didn’t feel like it had been that long ago, but she remembered Dorian and Tatiana enthusiastically dressing up mannequins in the intermediate class and here they were, about to graduate. It had worked well - it was fun and practical (which the students would be pleased about), tied transfiguration to real life (which Mr. Row would be pleased about) and opened the door to some nice theory discussions (which the RATS examiners would be pleased about). Selina herself liked ticking all those boxes.

“This kind of catalogue and mannequin is used by some tailors who offer custom made outfits. When items from the catalogue are tapped, they appear on the mannequin,” she demonstrated, and the robe transformed, changing to a light blue fabric patterned with clouds and with large drooping bell sleeves. “If I decide I don’t like those sleeves, I can see how it would look with something else,” she stated, swapping them out for some which fitted more tightly at the wrist. “Now, the spells used to make the catalogue responsive to this type of input are charms. However, the basis of how the catalogue works and interacts with the mannequin is a modification on switching spells. As you are ‘switching’ a picture for a real thing, it’s the point where switching spells meets conjuration, and that’s what we will be working on today.

“You will each receive a drawing and a plain prototype. Your job is to use a switching spell to ‘switch’ the drawing onto the prototype. As I mentioned, making that happen automatically at the flick of someone else’s wand is an entirely different process. You will be looking more into how those work and how they work together for your homework. And perhaps looking at even more if you take Advanced Charms.

“Sixth years, you will be working on t-shirts,” she stated, a plain cotton t-shirt making its way to each of the sixth years as she did so. “As this is about working to someone else’ brief, please come and take a design provided by one of your ‘clients,’” she smiled. The t-shirts that made their way around had been distinctly child-sized, and the stack of brightly crayoned pictures at the front matched this. She had had Zeus and Dora drawing and colouring their own t-shirt designs in preparation for this class. Whilst design was typically part of where credit came from, she didn’t want them to get too hung up on that today. Plus the practical side of this usally involved being able to customise for a demanding client, or perhaps to amuse their own children - after all, you could get your own ideas out of your own head in other ways. For some people with weaker Transfiguration skills, sketching out to help with the visualisation was a useful too but most often they would be using this kind of spell to work with someone else’s ideas.. “Seventh years, you have somethng a little more complex and three dimensional. You’ll be taking one of these plain bears and turning it into something that is bright, colourful and not a bear. The pictures may represent real animals or may not. Your job is to make something that looks like the design in question even if you don’t know what it is,” she gestured to a second pile of pictures. She had encouraged the two tots to let their imaginations run wild, encouraging them to make up their own ideas for animals, which had let to all kinds of weird and wonderful looking pictures. And so, so many bright colours. “If you need help understanding what that should look like, I have a product catalogue here from a company which specialises in transforming drawings into real toys,” she gestured.

“You can use the standard switching spell,” she stated, trusting that by now they all knew that was suppono with an open infinity symbol as the wand movement. “You may begin.”

OOC - posts will be graded based on length, creativity, relevance and realism. I wouls assume you are free to make up the contents of the children’s drawings though if you have any questions about their favourite colours etc then ask their authors in chatzy. The toys thing exists and can be viewed here
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13 Selina Skies Advanced - Make it a Reality 26 1 5

Gary Harper

June 20, 2020 5:57 AM
Gary wandered into class on time. It still felt a bit odd to not rush to class so that he could cram in some adventure planning before the lesson started. Even though It was kinda nice to just relax a bit and focus on classes, he did miss making plans to do terrible things to his friends when they got together. It had been an.... odd term so far, and not really going at all like he had originally planned. Which, in light of things, was probably a good thing. Well, he was here to learn stuff, and not worry about other stuff for the moment.

He listened to Professor Skies' introduction to the topic and grinned. This had all sorts of potential for gaming. Also he could see applications for the simple wand gesture trigger to activated a preset change being very useful in designing magical structures. One of the applications that popped into his head was from the old Myst computer game. There was a library with pictures hanging on the walls. Clicking on them opened the secret bookcase passageway. The magical version, according to the professor, could use the charm on the pictures to activate a transfiguration on the bookcase. That was something he'd definitely need to figure out.

Accepting his bear and picture, he looked at what had been drawn for him. Then he turned the paper upside down. Nope, he was pretty sure he had it right the first time so he flipped it back. It had obviously been drawn by a very young child. It was a primarily a brightly covered oval with a bunch of lines coming down from it's bottom, legs? There were more than four of them. There were also a few going up to some googly eyes. Plus there was a big smile across the oval body. It looked... familiar somehow.. Then it struck him! It was a Flumph! Or at least something that kinda looked like one.

Gary chuckled and looked at his bear. "Alright Mr. Bear, are you ready to become one of the few benevolent creatures of the Underdark?" This would be an interesting transformation. The 'client' was obviously a small child, so he'd probably want to keep the creature just a little fuzzy, maybe some sort of softer felt type material. Flumphs didn't really have fur, but there was always some artistic license expected. He wondered what some other people had gotten, he looked over at his neighbor and showed his drawing. "Looks like I got a flumph to make. What did you get?"
2 Gary Harper Fantasy to reality? Interesting concept. 1404 Gary Harper 0 5