Mary Brooding-Hawthorne

June 26, 2020 3:01 PM

Mary Brooding-Hawthorne

Staff
Subject: Potions
Written by: Turtle

Age in Post: 32
Birthday: August 19

Medicate yourselves. [Advanced] by Mary Brooding-Hawthorne

Mary tried not to terrify her students. She really did. They'd been working on a medical unit this term and she was sure that it had served almost the opposite effect on half the students as the other. While some of them were undoubtedly committed to becoming healers now, others would probably be satisfied to never get within arm's reach of a bezoar unless their life depended on it. However, there life would depend on it. Most of the people Mary was closely acquainted with had had need of a bezoar at some point in their lives. Of course, she was primarily acquainted with fellow potions masters, Tabitha, Darius, and their ilk. Perhaps that said more about her than it did about the safety of the world. Today was going to be the wrap up of this unit and she was a bit anxious for it. Again, some students would hate it, and others would love it. Dorian, she suspected, would have mixed emotions.

"Hello, everyone," Mary smiled, greeting her class with the same warm expression she almost always wore. "As you know, today is the conclusion to the medical unit we've been working through, and we'll be beginning lessons on environmental care, including ecological, herbal, and creature care, next week. Today, however, we're going to have an adventure. Please, pair up and face each other across your desks."

Waving her wand, Mary muttered a few incantations and sent various vials around the room. They were separated into two groups - poisons and cures - and each student got some of each. Among them, unbeknownst to the students at this point, of course, were potions to cause and cure a cough, hiccups, hair-raising, a chill, befuddlement, and more. There was nothing more deadly than a mild cough, as it would be unethical to require students to break bones or remove them to test out some of the more advanced cures.

"We have been practicing identifying potions we don't know and you'll find that each desk has a selection of tools available to do just that. You will take turns for this activity and it is meant to add a little more real-world pressure to your work without outright causing any harm. Whoever wants to go first, you will select a potion from the group on your right. It will cause symptoms that the student on the other side of the table must appropriately assess using the symptomology we've been working with and then identify the cure for using the tools on hand. This shouldn't take terribly long and if you get stuck, I can help. When you believe you have identified the correct cure, wave me down and I'll come make sure before you give it to them. Once cured, you'll switch. Like I said, there's no real harm in here, but it is a bit more true to life treating patients. When you are under the influence of a potion, you are free to sit or lay down as you please. Any questions? Go ahead and get started."

OOC - Welcome! Throughout this lesson, feel free to godmod Mary approving or not your potion selection and you are free to come up with other ailments that might be caused and cured here, so log as none are severe. You should assume that everyone has the skills necessary to do this task, and the knowledge, and that they have all imbibed most of these potions before.
Subthreads:
This sounds.... fun? by Gary Harper with Tatiana Vorontsova, Dorian Montoir, Mary Brooding-Hawthorne
Sylvia? I don't like this. by Nathaniel Mordue
22 Mary Brooding-Hawthorne Medicate yourselves. [Advanced] 1424 1 5

Nathaniel Mordue

July 09, 2020 9:06 AM

Nathaniel Mordue

Alumnus
House: Teppenpaw
Written by: Grayson Wright

Age in Post: 16

Sylvia? I don't like this. by Nathaniel Mordue

He usually kept it to himself – there was too much which could be read into such a declaration, with the teacher among the truly alarming number of staff members engaged in improper behavior – but Potions was easily Nathaniel’s favorite class. When he found himself seized by the notion that something bad was going to happen despite the lack of evidence for such an idea, or had the morbs to a particularly severe degree, or even, most of the times it happened, fell into an unreasonable rage, there was often a remedy for it in the precise measurement of ingredients, the intense concentration of chopping and slicing, the satisfaction of seeing exactly what he was looking for beneath the veils of shimmering vapors. He saw, touched, smelled – he could lose himself in sensory input, shutting out the snarl of abstractions that usually occupied the inside of his head. In Potions, he could hold his own beside Sylvia without a particularly backbreaking effort, a rarity in their other classes. Potions just made sense to him, enough that he even sometimes had the confidence to experiment a bit with the potions he knew best – that was to say, those used in magical photography.

Nathaniel liked Potions. Nathaniel valued potions. He did not, however, have any particular liking for consuming potions, and he had no liking at all for consuming unknown potions. When he heard that he was going to be expected to do the latter, he did the only thing that made sense, which was to signal to Sylvia that they were working together today and public opinion be damned.

There was, of course, no real way that this made it better, except that he trusted himself to feed Sylvia antidotes and Sylvia to do the reverse more than he trusted anyone else in the class to perform such a function. In times of trouble, it was always best to look to one’s own people for help, and he thought times where they were poisoned ought to count, by almost any definition, as troubled times.

“I think we should at least try to make some educated guesses about what these might be before we start drinking any of them,” he told his cousin when they were dismissed to begin the work. “There’s a list of common healing potions in the book – we might look up what they’re commonly used for, and then check the book’s index for any potions that sound like they might cause that effect. What do you think?”

He thought this was a very good plan himself, and only framed it as a suggestion out of politeness and habit. Other people, however, seemed not to be so cautious as he was, as a little way over, he saw Tatiana Vorontsova just down a bottle without the slightest hint of hesitation and then –

Nathaniel supposed he was shocked enough by her beginning to apparently dance on her own in the middle of class, but he outright stared when she started…doing something that looked more deliberate than the earlier steps, and specifically involved hip-swinging and sort of…gyrating, he thought the word was. Very much drawing as much attention to the fact she had a body as was really possible in their uniforms, anyway. Had she drunk something that induced madness, or was that just what they did in Russia? It was not something he thought a lady would do in American society, anyway. And practically commanding Harper, of all people, to dance with her, dear Merlin –

“So,” he said briskly, if quietly, to his cousin. “Think we can work specialis revelio on all these without her noticing, too?” he asked, with a slight incline of his head toward the professor. “I do not want either of us to have time to make a scene like that if we can possibly avoid it.”

OOC: Nathaniel saying he and Sylvia were working together was pre-approved by her author.
16 Nathaniel Mordue Sylvia? I don't like this. 1412 0 5