Giselle Duell
June 14, 2024 10:12 PM
Divinations for all by Giselle Duell
Giselle really had no idea how to go about this lesson, but for some reason it had sounded like a good idea at the time. Once she got down to planning though, she wasn't so sure. The idea had been to have an 'open class' for more than just the intermediates, something that might give the beginners some idea of what they might be getting into should they decide to pursue Divinations once they got older. The problem was, there was a reason that Divination lesson started in a witch or wizard's third year of schooling. It was difficult and required a measure of discipline, but the main reason was because it was a very sensitive field of study. The magics were faint and very subtle at this level, and the chaotic magical 'noise' that still hadn't settled down on the new, young magic users played havoc with those delicate sensings. This was also why the Divinations class rooms of most magical schools were up in towers, or otherwise separated from the main schooling areas.So now she got to figure out how to show potentially any beginners that dropped in how Divinations worked while their mere presence made that impossible. Also while keeping everyone entertained or at least interested in the subject so that some of them would take the course and she wouldn't be out of a job. Not that she really thought Professor Skies would do that, but... well it didn't take a master at Divinations to know that the Headmaster didn't think much of her area of expertise. Still, everything would be fine. Hopefully.
There had been a few lessons she had debated between, but finally settled upon one that she thought should work, unless it turned into an unmitigated disaster. Giselle once again lamented the fact that divinations about the results of your own choices rarely came out useful. When the students began to arrive, she was ready to meet them at the door and direct them where to sit on the mats on the floor. The room was devoid of the standard tables and chairs, one long table was set out of the way against the wall. It was draped with the standard odd mix of cloth, and various bowls sat upon it. In the middle of the room, around which all of the mats were arrange was a good sized camp fire.
"Welcome everyone to Divinations class, I am Professor Duell and today we will be taking a very cursory look into Fire Omens." She had decided this was a good option as the chaos of the fire might not mind the chaos of the beginners as much as other options. Plus campfires were fun, right? "Fire Omens are one of the oldest known methods of divinations, it was born out of story-telling around the fire as the day shifted through the mystical twilight from day into night. You each have paper and a quill by your mat, we will begin first by watching the flames dance about and you will write down the shapes, patterns or sensations that you receive. After a few minutes you can then partner with someone beside you to try and connect your sensations into a tale of some sort, watch the fire as you do so and see if it gives you any more inspiration as you go. The stories may not mean anything to you or to your partner, and that is okay. It may gain meaning later if you keep it in mind."
Professor Duell then moved to the table, "I have a few simple herbs and other components that can be sprinkled into the fire which may have some varying effects on your senses during the process. Then she smiled at her students. "Once we are done with that, we can break out the marshmallows for anyone who wants them."
OOC: Welcome to Divinations! All posting rules apply. If you need the professor for anything, just tag her in the post title and I'll be along soon. Be creative, use good spelling and grammar, and, above all else, have fun! (disclaimer totally stolen from Professor Wright)
Subthreads: Somehow, I don't think this is going to sort my life out for me. by Eben Sosna
Oh, an elective for me! by Dora Xavier with Cecily Welles
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Giselle Duell
Divinations for all
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Eben Sosna
June 18, 2024 1:05 PM
Somehow, I don't think this is going to sort my life out for me. by Eben Sosna
In retrospect, it made a lot of sense that an open-to-all Divinations class would actually mean ‘open-to-all-the-Beginners.’ There was, after all, no way an Advanced student of anything less than downright unnatural ability could pick up a completely new subject even in sixth year, never mind seventh. The problem was, the way Eben happened to have read the announcement, he hadn’t understood it as an invitation to consider taking the class. What, exactly, he’d thought it was, he wasn’t, in retrospect, entirely sure, but it definitely hadn’t been that...and now, as a result, he suspected he looked really, really stupid to anyone who happened to notice him.There were ways, though, in which it was convenient to have been a weird kid all his life. One of these was that he was reasonably good at disappearing into the woodwork without actually leaving a room, limiting the extent to which people noticed him sticking out like a sore thumb. Another was that he was even better at keeping his face blank and indifferent, as though he wasn’t really doing anything very unusual at all and other people were the weird ones for questioning his behavior. He might have lost the skill at Sonora except for his habit of chatting with the portraits too much in his early years at the school; these days, he mostly conversed with a couple of reasonably friendly ones in the MARS area, but as a first year he’d tried interrogating every painting in the castle that had a subject capable of speech in it. While people at Sonora were bizarrely nice for the most part, they’d definitely been capable of giving him Looks, and between having learned to look blandly back at them and having only just gotten back from two months at home, he thought he might just have enough of a lock on the expression to carry himself through a class composed of mostly altogether the wrong people.
Well, it wasn’t as if he really needed anyone to think especially well of him at this point in his academic career, not when he was so close to being out of here for the last time. At the very least, he didn’t need people’s good opinions nearly as much as he needed advice, and this seemed like as reasonable a place as any other to get some. At home, fortune-telling was ridiculously stupid, but this was Magicland. The stuff they learned in all the other classes worked, so why shouldn’t this work? So he sat down and tried to think seriously about fire omens.
It was not, unfortunately, a very successful effort, unless it was altogether too successful and therefore too serious to achieve the goal. Either way, though, staring at the flames as intently as he would did nothing to make them look like anything other than...flames. He glanced at Professor Duell’s table, then adjusted his glasses as a thought occurred to him. He then took the glasses off, but....
“Well, that didn’t work,” he said to nobody, mainly himself, when all removing his glasses did was wash out what details he had been able to see with them on. When he put the glasses back on, though, he found that someone appeared to have overheard the remark, so he added, “unless there’s something meaningful about all these, uh, spots of color you get when you blink after looking at that too long.”
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Eben Sosna
Somehow, I don't think this is going to sort my life out for me.
1538
0
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Dora Xavier
June 18, 2024 9:33 PM
Oh, an elective for me! by Dora Xavier
Dora had not really given much thought to what electives she would be taking next year. She still had the entirety of her second year to go yet, and Zeus and Edu needed more than a couple lessons under their belts before they could make strong recommendations for or against the ones they signed up for (if they even had signed up for any; she hadn't thought to ask yet). But when the offer to attend an introductory class open to anyone who wanted to see what Divinations was like, she jumped on it. Libby seemed keen to try it out, too, and the professor was blind like Summer was, so her Aladren friend might check it out, too, and Dora wouldn't miss anything her friends were going to even if she hadn't been interested in it herself.But she was interested, and not just because electives were something she was currently not allowed to attend (though that certainly added to the appeal). Of the three main electives Sonora offered, Astronomy sounded boring and Muggle Studies was something she kinda already knew some things about, but Divination was brand new and mystical and sounded awesome. Who didn't want to know the future, right?
So here she was, a second year in an elective class (if only for this one, boo), and the room was totally awesome! There were mats on the floor instead of desks and chairs, and it had a campfire!
And wow, they weren't just getting an introductory overview, they were even getting an actual lesson on Fire Omens which just sounded like the coolest thing ever. The practice had its roots in story telling, and Dora loved story telling!
She picked up her paper and quill, and wondered if it not being the mystical twilight when day turns into night would affect their results, but decided it probably didn't matter for an introductory lesson where a fair number of the people had no idea what they were even doing. Okay, so shapes, patterns and sensations, and work those together into a story. And when they were done there were going to be marshmallows! Best. Class. Ever!
But first, the lesson. Dora watched the fire intently, writing down whatever crossed her mind like heat and snap and dancing and yellow when someone tossed in a handful of salt and the flames briefly changed colors. A notion of dragon occurred to her as well and she wrote that down, too. Pasta was added to the list when someone added a root herb that she didn't get a good look at, but was probably garlic if her momentary glance and the smell were any indication.
After she had a dozen or so words written out in her messy handwriting, she glanced over at her nearest neighbor. "Are you ready to try to put together a story, or are you still collecting signs and portents?" 'Signs and portents' sounded like very Divination heavy vocabulary and she was pretty excited about being able to use them in ordinary conversation today.
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Dora Xavier
Oh, an elective for me!
1507
0
5
Cecily Welles
July 11, 2024 2:31 PM
For me, too! by Cecily Welles
The fire in the middle of the Divinations classroom was perhaps not the largest in the world - it was nothing at all, really, compared to the fires at the midsummer and midwinter celebrations they held every year back at Mom's estate, back in Alberta - but it still bloomed impressively in the semi-darkness of the room, a great orange flower with a touch of blue at the base of each petal. As she stepped over the threshold of her newest class and paused to let her eyes adjust, Cecily couldn't help but admire it. It wasn't exactly the kind of thing she had really been expecting, to the extent she'd had expectations - her only real exposure to the subject before had come from watching society ladies get tipsy and make wine-blurred attempts to read tarot cards and each other's tea leaves at brunches with her mother - but no matter what else was going on, she had to admit: Professor Duell had style.Once her eyes resigned themselves to their current conditions, she settled onto a mat, almost surprised to find it on the floor inside a room after viewing the fire, and made sure to arrange her robes properly over her legs once she was in a comfortable cross-legged position, smoothing them so that even her feet were concealed. Hopefully, they wouldn't need to move around too much for this lesson, or at least would stand up first if they did, but at the very least, she could try to keep her underpants out of view. With her robes tucked under her feet like this, every move she made would need to either be deliberate or else find itself moderately impeded, which would give her a moment to think about it and make it more deliberate and careful, or at least, that was her theory. It hadn't failed her yet, but in the interest of fairness, she supposed she did have to admit to what John would call a scarcity of data or something like that when it came to putting it into practice - when she was little, of course, she'd played on the floor as much as anyone else, but it had been a while since she had been little enough to do that very often. Sometimes, rarely, with Kenneth, it might be all right, but at school and without Kenneth - well, it had never really occurred to her to do that at school, and she suspected this was not entirely attributable to the absence of her youngest brother. She was comfortably settled either way, though, by the time Professor Duell started the class and told them about fire omens.
The name fire omens alone seemed to reinforce her first impression that she wasn't dealing with something that much like going to brunch, but it did sound impressive and furthered her opinion that Professor Duell had style. Professor Duell's decision to end her serious speech on the note about marshmallows was not precisely in line with that style, but Cecily didn't mind that, either, when it came to it. Seriousness was, after all, not something she had experienced in large doses before, and from what she'd seen of it, she thought she could live with keeping her portions modest for a while longer, and preferably forever. Serious was Grandmother weeping at the Stations of the Cross, or the moods Mom was in when she suddenly, without warning, told Marylaud that she was taking Cecily and the boys back west and then she bundled them out of their house the same day, without even waiting for Dad to come home for supper first: neither of those ev ents was unprecedented, they'd both happened more than once before, but they were still unusual, and a little disturbing, and more than a little frightening if Cecily thought about it for too long. Seriousness was a condition which could only be improved by interruptions for marshmallows.
First, though, there was the lesson. Looking into the flames, trying to relax her mind, and looking for...something, if the Fates were inclined to show her anything, at least. Whether or not they were...well, they would have made her take an entrance test or something before signing up for the class if it hadn't been possible for someone without the Sight to pass the CATS, and maybe being a Seer was like magic, something that could occur spontaneously in a family that otherwise showed no signs of it, but....
Other people had started throwing things in the fire. She made a firm effort to turn her thoughts away from both speculation about theory and marshmallows, but wasn't sure, after a moment of fire-gazing, that she had really succeeded. Had that flame really looked sort of like a heron, or was that just her mind running down a line of associations from the word 'marsh'?
The girl beside her - Dora; Cecily had learned the names of all the now-second years last year, when they had been first years and she had been a second year - asked if she was ready to make a story from her signs and portents, and Cecily smiled. "I was just thinking about whether a piece of the fire really looked like a water bird or not," she said. "Or if it's a griffin or a sea serpent instead. I can't make up my mind. Did you have any better luck?"
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Cecily Welles
For me, too!
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5