Breaking my own glass ceiling. on Charms

Grayson Wright

January 04, 2021 8:34 PM

The Sky's the Limit (Advanced) by Grayson Wright

"So," said Gray, looking affably around at his Advanced class. "Let's talk about the weather."

He leaned on his desk as he spoke, as close as he generally got to the picture of ease and comfort. Outside of class, he had numerous things on his mind - some relevant to people in this very room - and a now-constant feeling that one of the things which was not on his mind was in some way important, something he was forgetting that he should remember which would help solve a larger problem, but right now, he put all that firmly to one side, as much as he could. When he was teaching, now that he had gotten enough used to it that any appearance of serenity had a chance of being more than a tissue-thin mask overlying panic and invested enough in his students to care as much for their success as for his continued possession of gainful employment, there was no room for distractions. He had to, if at all possible, keep his mind entirely on what he was doing.

"By now, you should all be able to produce drinkable water using aguamenti," he continued, "which is fortunate, since that's a prerequisite to this unit. Working with the weather is one of the abilities wizards have which I'm told the Muggles remember well about us - it's unclear if it has anything to do with the ancient Greek notion that a witch could 'draw down the moon', which would have devastating affects on the weather around coastal areas, but it probably also doesn't help that the royal family of England at one point seems to have had three, maybe four witches marry into it within five generations in the medieval period - " admittedly, Eleanor Cobham was fiercely debated, over whether she had been a witch and whether any of her alleged accomplices had been or if she had simply fallen afoul of charlatans and politics, and Jacquetta of Luxembourg was hard to pin down, but Elizabeth Woodville was a very likely case, and there was at least one wizard portrait documented which referred to itself as Anne Boleyn, meaning either she had been one of them or that someone had had a very strange sense of humor - "and one of them supposedly used her abilities to affect some military operations by providing her husband's forces with cover by creating fog banks. One of the first things you'll learn to do in this unit is replicate, to some degree, that feat - there's times when some mild adjustments to the weather like that can be very useful for upholding the Statute of Secrecy, if you need to hide something quickly, though I don't condone interfering with international leaders with it. "

He said this lightly, and did not mind if it got any chuckles, though he did hope they didn't try such things. He knew that at least some of them would, to one degree or another, be involved in politics - indeed, depending on how one counted the tendency that pureblood sixth and seventh year girls had toward ending up in arranged betrothals, some of them might already be - but there were...limits. Besides, that kind of thing was thoroughly illegal in the vast majority of circumstances these days anyway. He continued on.

"But before all of that, you'll need to learn a few things to help you not destroy half the school, or fatally compromise the charms that make the area immediately around Sonora fit for human habitation. As usual, you'll have some reading and writing of chapter summaries to do for homework, but the first thing we're going to learn is how to stop a weather charm."

He pointed his wand at a sturdy crate, which began floating around to the students, prompting them to each remove one of the objects inside. At first glance, they might have been confused, as they looked like crystal balls; closer examination, however, showed they were somewhat lighter-weight than the ones they could find in Professor Duell's room, and their contents also looked somewhat different. Where crystal balls used for divination were often full of swirling mist, these were mostly hollow, except for a knot of miniature, very dark clouds at the tops of the domes.

"Just enough time left for me to explain what you'll do with these," he observed, checking his watch. "In about a minute and a half, the clouds inside these orbs will start producing rain. Your task is to make the rain stop before the orb fills with water. The charm is meteolojinx recanto, and you perform it with a series of sideways figure eight movements - " he demonstrated, drawing an 8 somehow tilted on its side in the air with his wand - "which start pointed at the bottom of your globe and move upward toward the apex. If or when you succeed, you can start reading about the theory for this one in chapter seventeen," he added. "In the meantime, wands out, and yes, you are allowed to exchange tips or complaints as you go along. And - begin."

OOC: The historical figures referred to are:

Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester - second wife of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester and son of Henry IV. Humphrey was lord protector for his nephew, King Henry VI, while Henry VI was a child. Eleanor started out as a lady in waiting to his wife Jacqueline, then became Humphrey's mistress, whom he married after he and Jacqueline got an annulment. However, things fell apart when Eleanor was convicted of witchcraft for buying fertility potions and of consulting astrologers about when Henry VI would die, something which at the time was treasonous, implying as it did that Eleanor would proceed to make plans around the projected date which would end with her husband as the new king. (Since Henry VI had not yet made the disastrously bad decision to marry Marguerite d'Anjou, Edward of Westminster had not yet been born, and Humphrey was therefore next in line to the throne). Her potions dealer and her astrologer friends were executed and Eleanor herself was forced to do public penance, had her marriage annulled, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in castles away from her husband, and they all lived unhappily ever after.

Elizabeth Woodville - queen/pro-bab-ly wife? (long story) of Edward IV, the dude who later kicked Humphrey and Eleanor's nephew Henry VI off the throne. This was, of course, not easily done, and after Edward's marriage to Elizabeth it was in fact briefly un-done, before he regrouped in Calais and then promptly came back to kick Henry out again, this time making it permanent by almost definitely having Henry killed in the Tower. Apart from being suspected of entrancing the king to marry her through witchcraft (as she was a low-ranking Lancastrian widow and her mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg was the widow of a Lancastrian duke before she married Elizabeth's father, Elizabeth was of little obvious interest to a Yorkist king except for her apparently, by contemporary standards, astonishing beauty), it was also alleged that Elizabeth once saved Edward from disaster in battle through calling up dense fogs to shield his movements. Jacquetta was accused of witchcraft once but cleared; Elizabeth was not formally tried, but may have been formally accused of witchcraft in the documents used to legalize the removal of her son Edward from the succession. Not sure if anyone ever accused Elizabeth of using magic to affect events after Edward's death, but it wouldn't surprise me much, given that in rather rapid succession, comparatively speaking, her least-favorite brother-in-law's son died, then his wife got TB and died, and then he himself died during this mild disturbance of the peace at a little place called 'Bosworth...'

and Anne Boleyn - is Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII (for those keeping track at home - Eleanor Cobham was only related by marriage, she was the wife of a paternal uncle of Henry VI, whose maternal half-brother Edmund was Henry VIII's grandfather, but Jacquetta was his great-grandmother and Elizabeth Woodville was his grandmother. One of Elizabeth Woodville's ten children with Edward IV was Princess Elizabeth of York, who married the guy who became Henry VII after Bosworth; Henry VIII was Henry VII and Elizabeth of York's son). I'd honestly not include this one just because the woman got such a bad rap from propagandists after her execution, but in the first HP movie, there's a shot in which one can see a portrait which is generally held to be Anne Boleyn. I'll leave it to the reader to debate whether she'd have been a Gryffindor ('daring' and 'nerve' were qualities she seems to have possessed in the extreme, and the practice of 'chivalry', if we stretch the meaning to include courtly love, was one of the things that ended up being used against her when Henry tired of her) or a Slytherin (her name is the next thing to a byword for extreme ambition, though her exact opinion on means and ends is hard to decipher through history; I've never seen a version as amusing as the infamous "Satan is not a [redacted] pogo stick!" fight some Milton scholars allegedly once had, but people can get Kinda Heated over whether she genuinely was too pious to countenance becoming Henry's mistress or whether their entire relationship was purely Anne pushing things as far as they could go in service to her ambition until they got entirely out of her control). Or heck, maybe even Ravenclaw ('wit' and 'learning' also quite strongly associated with her, even if 'wisdom,' perhaps, not so much)

16 Grayson Wright The Sky's the Limit (Advanced) 113 1 5

Evelyn Stones

January 10, 2021 12:12 AM

Breaking my own glass ceiling. by Evelyn Stones

Advanced charms was hard as heck but it was also interesting as heck and today was one of those lessons that proved both of those things true. Evelyn had been a good notetaker for a long time but especially since her classes had ramped up, she'd been taking more detailed notes than before. It also made her feel like she had something to contribute when it came time to study with her classmates, or with Ness and Heinrich. Sometimes, she supposed she might eventually get tired of being the least smart person she knew, but she figured she had other things to bring. For example, neither Ness or Heinrich were quite as skilled at fingerguns.

Ugh.

Today's lesson struck a particularly bittersweet chord for Evelyn, who was trying pretty hard not to think about scary questionable mists, and who was now sort of going to have to. Of course, this was a different sort of thing altogether, but still. Instead of letting her mind wander down that rabbit hole, she made some marks on her page of notes to remind herself of some of the practical and theoretical elements she'd want to review most carefully later, and of which historical references Professor Wright was making that she'd want to read about later, and then set to work.

She was enough of an extrovert on the whole that she'd rather do work in pairs but she also knew that her best magic work came from inside and she had to tap into that first. She took a moment to practice the pronunciation and movement separately and then, giving it her best go, she screwed up her face and did it altogether. Not much happened although she thought she saw a stutter in the way the drops fell into the orb. Realizing the time crunch on this task, she turned to her neighbor, feeling a little panicky.

"How's yours?" she asked, surveying their work so far. "I think my figure-8s are just swishes, I'm having a hard time keeping any good shape to them and moving and doing the incantation all at the same time."

22 Evelyn Stones Breaking my own glass ceiling. 1422 0 5

Ness McLeod

January 22, 2021 9:49 PM

That's one way to stop things overflowing by Ness McLeod

Anyone who thought that Charms was easier than Transfiguration had never been taught by Professor Wright. And that was, coming from Ness, most definitely a compliment. Charms was fun and weird and quirky and absolutely jam packed full of facts and science when he taught it. As such, Ness probably liked it at least as much if not more, especially as Professor Wright was Aladren Head of House. Ness also knew he’d done a lot to help Evelyn which made him a good human and whatever, but that was still - ridiculous and petty and wrong as Ness knew it was - a slight point of jealousy, so the sixth year tried to focus on his pure nerdiness instead.

The subject of weather charms was for sure interesting, in that it was both super powerful magic but also lent itself to interesting ethics discussions around the ‘Just because you can doesn’t mean you should…’ type, but also the ‘Given that we can, ought we to…’ kind. To what extent could magical influence assist with issues like drought which affected vast numbers of people? Or was there only so much help you could give without throwing the world off balance, and how would it be apportioned? Ness sort of hoped they’d have an ethics essay for this module because it seemed like it would be super fun.

For now, they had to stop tiny rain. Ness took a crystal ball, imagining it like a little snow globe and wondering what tiny people would live there. Which was a mistake when it began raining and, being held within a particularly small field which tapered at the bottom and had no top soil, the rain simply began to flood the world.

“Metro- no - - um, meteolojinx recanto?” Ness tried, double checking the spell and giving an… eight-thingy-ish swish. The tiny rain kept pouring, and it was probably a good job that there weren’t tiny buildings or tiny people or Ness would have felt even worse about the imaginary civilisation that was rapidly disappearing underwater. It wasn’t failure until it got to the top of the globe. But ugh, Ness did not like time pressure.

“Can’t talk. Saving tiny world from drowning,” Ness gabbled when Evelyn tried to interrupt. “Meteolojinx recanto!”

13 Ness McLeod That's one way to stop things overflowing 1419 0 5

Evelyn Stones

January 23, 2021 7:35 PM

Usually I'm the one that's overflowing. by Evelyn Stones

Evelyn bit her lip and retreated some, not sure what to do. She really would have preferred to work together on this but Ness didn't want to. The person on her other side was equally invested in their work and Evelyn looked back at her own orb with a growing sense of despair. This wasn't going to work out. Charms theory? Evelyn had it in the bag. Wandwork? It was a lot less likely to get her anywhere. Of course, she was well aware that her track history seemed to suggest that she couldn't perform well under stress. She didn't pull her wand when it mattered and she certainly couldn't do spells when it mattered. Ness was saving a tiny world from drowning and Evelyn was watching it fill up, convinced she couldn't save it.

Well that was some crap.

She adjusted her grip on her wand and locked her jaw, determined to make this work. She thought of the misty image of her father that Heinrich had described and that Professor Wright had assured her wasn't her fault and wasn't going to hurt her. She didn't have to be stressed anymore and she'd basked in that for a long time.

Taking a deep breath, Evelyn started the figure-eight motion again. Precision was hard, so she experimented with making slightly larger figures than she'd been doing before. She scooted away from the table a little so she could make the motion without whacking into the desk and when she was confident she'd gotten it down - as quickly as she could get confident since the orb was getting horrifyingly close to full - she said the incantation.

To her surprise, the rain spluttered a bit and then stopped. She blinked at it and then turned to Ness, her mouth open in a surprised circle. "Bigger, firmer movements helped," she told her friend, not entirely sure whether it was actually that that had done it but figuring it was worth the shot.

22 Evelyn Stones Usually I'm the one that's overflowing. 1422 0 5