Advanced Charms - Episkey on Charms

Grayson Wright

April 08, 2022 7:50 PM

Advanced Charms - Episkey by Grayson Wright

Professor Wright was sitting behind his desk when the Advanced class started to trail in, and he remained seated as the distant bells that tolled the beginnings and ends of classes sounded and the students settled in. This was somewhat unusual - normally he spent most of class time on his feet - and the Advanced students had definitely been around enough to know it, so he suspected it was in vain that he hoped he had adequately concealed any other signs that he felt distinctly unwell, but he couldn't muster much interest in the matter in any case. He'd have to put in more effort with the younger ones, where they weren't necessarily much more confident of their own abilities than he was confident of their abilities, so the Advanced class would have to suffer the loss of decorum.

He was not ill, not anymore, but he had been ill for almost the whole of the winter break. It had been odd, too; the usual remedies for severe colds had usually seemed to work, at first, but instead of curing him, they'd seemed to simply wear off after about a day, putting him right back where he'd been to begin. It had been a wretched way to spend the time away from school, anyway, and just the opposite of what he'd needed after spending much of the autumn more and more aware of the strain of his many responsibilities on top of the stress over his mother's health. It was not really a surprise to find himself still over-tired and easily exasperated and possessed of frequent bouts of muscle aches now that he was back, but it was certainly not something he found it easy to resign himself to, either. It was the first day of classes and he felt already like he was weeks behind on everything. If it got worse from here, well....

Well, hopefully it just wouldn't. Because that would be unpleasant.

"Welcome back, everyone," he said to the students. "I hope your essays weren't too time-consuming, and that you had ample time for rest and recreation while we were out of class. Now we're back, though, so if you'll remember to put those on my desk at the end of class, if you haven't already...right. So. I'm sure you've all noticed there's a box on your desk. If you open it, you'll each find two pieces of a broken bone - don't ask me what they all are, I don't know exactly," he added wearily. "We're starting the basic healing charms now, and since I doubt any of you want to create the situations we'd need to practice on live subjects today anyway, you'll make your first attempts on these, with the spell episkey - it's one of the minor healing charms, and the most it can do is usually correct small injuries to small bones - broken noses and fingers, split lips, that sort of thing. For larger or more serious fractures, you'd need other spells, some of which we'll look at later in the term. For now, though - wand movement's circular, you all know better than to point your wands at each other. Your homework's going to be to compare this charm to reparo and write an essay on why the two cannot be used interchangeably." For reasons unknown, the mending charm would produce hideous scarring when used on living beings, and the healing charm wouldn't work particularly well on objects at all. "You have until Monday to finish that - you can start working on the research in this class if you finish early. You know the rules, let me know if you have any questions."

Subthreads:

This could be useful by Mab with Ellie Alperton

16 Grayson Wright Advanced Charms - Episkey 113 1 5

Mab

April 16, 2022 8:47 PM

This could be useful by Mab

Mab turned in her homework and sat down at her usual seat in Advanced Charms, feeling particularly grown-up. Apparently, seventeen was a legal adult in the fey lands, and Bel had made a big deal of her birthday over midterm. Sadly, there had only been a day to take advantage of her new legal status, specifically the part where she was finally permitted to do magic at home, as she'd then needed to take a wagon ride back to Sonora the day after her birthday, but she supposed she'd have all summer - and she supposed the rest of her life, but the summer was longest stretch remaining before her graduation which was the milestone when she'd consider herself qualified to be an adult - to do magic legally in Boston. At least the one day had been enough to get to show Mom and Reilly some of the things she could do now and what she was learning at Sonora. And dueling Bel might have been the highlight of the whole break.

Now back at Sonora, nothing much had changed since doing magic was part of learning magic, so the prohibition had only nominally applied when they weren't under direct supervision. Even as a prefect, she only had to stop malicious magic when she ran across minors practicing it without a teacher present. Despite that, she was now seventeen, and she had her special engraved pocket watch ("For Mab, on the occasion of her majority, with love, from Bel" - not exactly the most flowery of inscriptions, but it had the word love in it, which was one Bel did not often say, and now Mab had it it writing), and so she felt older and more in command of herself and her life. She was an adult, after all.

She did note that Professor Wright was not acting his normal self, but attributed it to an exhausting midterm. Her own had hardly been what she'd call calm and quiet between all the various parties for Christmas, New Years, and her birthday.

She opened the box in front of her when invited to do so (or at least, she took the mention of it as an invitation) and saw what she would probably guess was a small bird's broken bone (it was visibly hollow, so it was either a bird's bone, or it had a very weird injury). She closed the box back up to focus on the rest of the lecture. For Professor Wright, it was short and to the point, and she wondered: was he was seriously ill? He didn't look particularly well, but he didn't look to be on death's door either. She hoped it was just midterm exhaustion.

She hadn't particularly wondered about any similarities to the mending charm until he assigned a comparison essay for homework. They did have similar effects in the grand scheme of things, she supposed, but bodies and inanimate things were just so very different in her mind that it made absolute sense to her that they could not be used interchangeably and it baffled her that this had to be specified. She would not use scotch tape to in place of a bandaid on a bleeding cut (well, she had, once, and it hadn't worked), or a bandaid to refasten a ripped piece of paper, and the two spells were obviously for equally as different situations.

She opened her box again and took out the two pieces of bird bone, glad that they were working on something already dead, so the repercussions of not getting this right were negligible.

Her wand dropped easily into her hand from its arm holster, and she circled it over the bone pieces. "Episkey!" she tried, doing her best to let the magic flow through her body, focus within her wand, and then spark into the bone.

Unfortunately, nothing much happened. She pushed the two bits closer together, lining them up at the fracture. "Episkey!" she tried again, and this time they knit together a little bit, but the line where they split apart was still very notable. It would not take much to rebreak it at the same spot.

She grimaced slightly. She changed her grip on her wand slightly, repeated the wand motion a third time, imagined the fairies casting their magic on the bird bone, and said again, "Episkey!" and was annoyed when it worked.

It was a work-around for her magic that she'd figured out last semester, and there was no reason why it should work, why attributing the magic to fairies instead of herself let the magic flow more readily than trying to make it go through the wand, but it did, and she kind of hated it because she knew the fairies who had done her bidding as a child weren't even real but she still couldn't competently cast most spells without invoking them.

1 Mab This could be useful 1473 0 5

Ellie Alperton

April 29, 2022 7:02 PM

But weird by Ellie Alperton

Ellie was returning from a magical-in-multiple-senses winter break. Firstly, there was the Disney level of sparkle, and the warm feelings produced by family and nostalgia—Christmas was one of those times where something close to magic descended on the non-magical world, and it would have been possible to believe in it even if she hadn’t known it was real. Her studies of actual magic had taught her that love was a deeply powerful kind of magic, so maybe that was why. The abundance of love, and memory, and possibility… She was also legally allowed to do actual magic at home. That one was harder. She couldn’t quite shake the memories of the over-zealous response to her school-age accidental magic, and it felt like breaking a rule—however old she was, it was something that she kept very separate from her home life. There was also a tiny part of her that was worried that Seth would be jealous, and it would set off all those ill feelings again. Except Seth had Lego robotics championships to prep for, and seemed to be glued to his phone in a way that suggested he would rather part with his kidney than live without it. Whenever Ellie asked who he was messaging, he either said a particular girl’s name or ‘no one’ in a way that came with a blush and a shifty look that said it was still the same person as before.

She had done a few simple spells at home. Mostly when no one was looking, just to check the universe wouldn’t explode, and that no one would come swooping down on her. But mostly, she enjoyed the magic of Disney Plus at the touch of a button, and the old ornaments that she’d had since she was a child. Most of them didn’t need a touch of magic, they were magical just as they were, in all their plastic glory. There was one exception to that, and one tiny bit of magic she had used in front of her family. She knew her mom had never thrown out the ‘[NAME]’s first Christmas’ ornament she’d got for Ellie, and Ellie understood that. There was a box of her baby stuff, in the attic. Her mom had memories of buying those things, of Ellie’s hands and feet being tiny enough to make those little hand and footprints in clay, of celebrating all those tiny milestones… Mom loved her existence, and wanted to hang onto every piece of it. It was just unfortunate that they all the wrong name on. Every year, it was only Seth’s first Christmas that went on the tree.

She had been a little nervous, asking her mom if she could change it, unsure whether her mom would want things messed with in that way. But she shouldn’t have been worried. Her mom had let her change her own name, her pronouns, everything about herself, always with the utmost support. Mom had been amazed at the magic of it, rather than upset by the change. It had been strange, seeing her deadname again. But it had been so long since she’d been called it. It felt like evidence of a past mistake. It wasn’t right or comfortable, but it didn’t grate or burn like it once had. It was something alien, not something she was having to endure, and then with a wave of her wand, it was gone, replaced with sparkling pink letters spelling ‘ELLIE.’ She hung it on the tree, just above Seth’s (she was older, after all!).

Now, it was back to school. Back to a slightly warn down looking Professor Wright, telling them they had a box with bones in it—and no, he didn’t know exactly what bones, so don’t ask. Really, not the cosiest or most comforting start to a lesson. Still, at least the class content itself was relatively positive.

Ellie made a couple of attempts on the spell, finding that the bones either joined, but poorly, or joined but messily. It was going to be a very long time before she dared attempt this on a human. It was already deeply weird to think that she could.

“Magical first aid is… something else,” she commented to her neighbour. Her neighbour was Mab, who wasn’t exactly known for being chatty, but Ellie was pretty sure that if Mab gouged people’s eyeballs out just for speaking to her, she would have heard about it by now. They were prefects together, and in the same small classes in the same small school, so Ellie sort of felt like they had enough small-group common ground to feel friendly towards each other. At least, she felt that way towards Mab. It was hard to tell whether it was mutual. “Even after this long, it’s sometimes hard to accept that I can do things like this,” she gestured at the bones.

13 Ellie Alperton But weird 1456 0 5

Mab

May 11, 2022 6:24 PM

A bit, yes. by Mab

Mab glanced over at her neighbor as she spoke. Ellie was one of the people Mab was fairly neutral toward, which, from Mab, was reasonably high praise. Ellie had gone five and half years in the same school without irritating Mab, which a lot of other people could not say.

Mab nodded in agreement that it was hard to accept that they could just wave a wand and fix somebody's broken bone, a feat that took muggle doctors an immobilizing cast and months for the bone to knit itself back together. "I'd think it was like some of the other things we've done that just speed up natural processes, but these bones are dead. If we put them in a cast, they'd still be broken years from now. I guess that's why he compared it to the reparo charm. The spell is actually doing the work of fixing the bone."

She picked up her bird leg (or whatever) and examined the job 'the fairies' had done on it. There was still a barely visible line where the break had been, possibly still a very minor fracture, possibly just some kind of bone scarring (could bones get scars?) but it was far and away better than she had managed with her first two tries. "Though I wonder if reparo would work on these since they are dead already and basically inanimate? Or does the fact that they're organic mean reparo can't work correctly on them?"

Mab would normally keep such questions to herself, but Ellie was both older and an Aladren, so she thought the other girl might actually be interested in discussing the topic, and Mab didn't mind having intelligent conversations about class subjects.

1 Mab A bit, yes. 1473 0 5

Ellie Alperton

May 13, 2022 7:30 PM

I guess that's most of our lives by Ellie Alperton

Mab, generally, didn’t say much. That usually meant that when she did speak, it was something worth saying, and very much worth listening to. Today was no exception, as Mab posed some interesting theoretical questions on the spell they were working on.

“Hm,” Ellie said, to show she was pondering that before giving it a reply. “It feels like it should make a difference… Magic seems to care so much about those intangible forces like life and energy.” But maybe this was one of those things where it was just more mechanical somehow—bone was bone, and that was the important factor, whether alive or dead. Magic did have a habit of being surprising in that way. In the ‘oh, no, we care very much about THAT’ way, whilst something else that seemed logical got chucked out the window.

“I think in non-magical healing, bones knit back together by some kind of new cell growth. If we were mimicking that, it would surely fall under Transfiguration. Unless it’s just… so small that magical folk don’t know that’s what’s happening. But if it works on dead bones, it can’t be that. Probably,” she added, because there was no saying that with magic you couldn’t make a dead bone grow new cells. “Perhaps when we’ve mastered this one, we can see if there are any spares to test reparo on?” she suggested. It was definitely an interesting thought, and a little extra credit experimentation was never a bad thing—so long as no one lost their eyebrows.

13 Ellie Alperton I guess that's most of our lives 1456 0 5