Grayson Wright

September 21, 2023 4:14 PM

Grayson Wright

Staff
House: Aladren
Subject: Charms
Written by: Grayson Wright

Age in Post: 47

Beginner Charms - Sparkly! by Grayson Wright

The Beginners had all survived anywhere from three and a half to one and a half terms of Charms lessons, and the ratio of days in the week where fires needed extinguishing to days in the week where they did not had, more or less, tipped in the more desirable direction. Between this and how he’d somehow both cleared his in-box of annoying letters and almost caught up on grading over the weekend, Professor Wright was in a good mood as he started his class.

“Welcome, everyone! I hope everyone’s ready to start a new unit.” They had taken their unit exams for the last one over the course of two days the previous week, and he’d decided to be merciful and not assign them any reading over the weekend. Hopefully, this would translate into them being slightly better-rested and more ready to learn new things than they might have been otherwise, and not to everything they’d ever learned about charms having leaked out of their heads over the course of forty-eight hours.

“Lumos, as you all know, is the light-creating spell – specifically, causing a small area of visible light to emanate from a focus point. It’s also only the first of a number of charms which involve light manipulation. We’re going to look at another one today – one which creates a small field of semi-random effects, so, more difficult. To demonstrate - “ he held up a plain sheet of paper and tapped it with his wand. “Scintillate!”

The paper began to sparkle brightly, as though it had been encrusted in sequins that threw back the light around it at angles. Examination, however, would reveal that the paper had not changed its appearance or texture; it behaved as thought it had features which should have included glittering as a property, but creating such features would have been a transfiguration. This paper retained all the qualities and properties of paper, but it nevertheless behaved as though it had additional ones, though in this case it was simply an illusion bending light waves near the paper.

“Finite incantatem,” he said after a moment, tapping the paper again to make the glittering stop. He could have performed the spell nonverbally just as easily, but liked to remind the students of that incantation before giving them new ones to attempt. It was his job to solve most of the problems that invariably arose with this age group, but it never hurt to nudge them toward doing it themselves where possible, especially with the second years. In just a few months, they would be in Intermediates and by the end of their third year, they would be casting charms on each other in class; they were, in other words, on the brink of being expected to take real responsibility for what they did with their magic. Finite incantatem was a good contender for the most useful spell taught between the first day of a student’s first year and the point in around fifth year where they started learning complex counter-charms.

“Of course, this spell...is only of limited practical value,” he admitted. “Not many applications outside of decorations. You never know when you might need something mildly decorative, though - “ he suspected there might be a brief fad among the Beginner girls for sparkly pencil cases and the like, and perhaps a few unnaturally shiny objects attached to an attendee or two at the Midsummer Ball – “and it’s a step toward more complex illusions. By the time you take your next set of tests, you should be able to make a surface into a temporary mirror without too much trouble, and by the end of the year, I hope some of you will be able to make a page full of text appear blank to anyone who doesn’t test it magically for enchantments.

“By the time you finish fifth year, you’ll be able to make it appear blank to everyone except yourself, or like it has text from a different piece of paper on it. Among other tricks. But for now – you’ll begin by doing what I just did, which is trying to make an entire sheet of paper appear to sparkle, so that I can’t really tell if there’s writing on it or not. It will probably take several tries to get more than one point of light going at once, especially for first years – experiment with it, see if tapping different areas on the paper gives you a better effect than others. Second years, if you want to challenge yourselves, you can attempt to create different-colored effects from the list of spell modifiers at the beginning of your textbook. Homework’s to read chapter eleven and write a paragraph summary in your own words. Begin.”

There was a chance this could cause fires, of course, but one of the small mercies of Beginner Charms was that students rarely had the skill to create light illusions that could act enough like mirrors for long enough to do that. Nevertheless, he wouldn’t finish grading their tests this class period, but would keep an eye on them for the most part instead. Just in case.
Subthreads:
Ooh! by Ursula Arcadius with Alma Brockert
Shiny? by Edu Alamilla with Cecily Welles
Future so bright, I gotta wear shades. by Violet Calhoun with Leo Lyons
Not feeling as such by Charlotte O'Malley with Quillan Arcadius
Twinkle twinkle piece of paper. by Mathias Melcher
16 Grayson Wright Beginner Charms - Sparkly! 113 1 5