Professor Mary Brooding
August 02, 2019 11:39 PM
A Study in Sleep [Beginners I-II] by Professor Mary Brooding
Mary arrived to class feeling well-rested, which was pleasantly ironic. She'd been sleeping better since her talk with Tabitha and she was confident that the two were going to be just fine. Communication was important and she managed it much better with Tabitha than she obviously did with . . . basically anybody else.The potions classroom was warm and light. Often, these sorts of places felt too sterile for life, but Mary thought that that simply wouldn't do for her. There were a collection of flowers - some dried and some flourishing in pots and vases - around the room, artistic diagrams of various sources of ingredients on the walls, and shelves full of interesting things around the room. Bright sunlight streamed in through a window and the room itself was well-lit, something Mary insisted on for the best brewing practices; how could they be expected to be careful with their ingredients if they could not see what they were doing?
Mary herself fit in well with the room, her black hair tumbling in a braid past her shoulders to the floor. She was wearing a more traditional Indian gown than what she normally donned, and it made her feel close to her mother. The yellows and reds of the outfit were neat embroidery patterns and buttons that went down her arms to her long sleeves and her high collar. Her dress was floor-length, as they almost always were, and her large pointed hat matched the ensemble perfectly.
She greeted her class with a smile and put her thoughts aside to focus on the task at hand. It wasn't terribly difficult; this was a fun lesson and one of her favorites to go through with her poor stressed baby students.
"Hello," she said as they took their seats. "Welcome to your potions lesson for today. You should have been keeping a sleep and dream journal over the past few weeks. Have you done that?" Acknowledging a few nods and awkward shifting expressions, Mary went on. "Today, we're going to be brewing a Sleeping Draft." The ingredients appeared on the chalkboard as she spoke.
"Second years, you should remember making this last year. For that reason, your assignment is going to be a little bit different. I want all of you to take today's lesson to brew your own Sleeping Draft. There are directions in your textbook and I have various languages available at the front if you want them. Ingredients are also labeled with various ingredients." She gestured to her shelves as she spoke.
"At the end of class, please collect a vial of your potion for me to grade. First year students, you'll do that yourselves and label them with your name before putting them in the basket at the front of the room. Then, collect one of the vials of potion that I've brewed from the other basket. Second year students, I'll be coming around to each of your stations to collect a sample of your potion and determine whether you'll be using some of mine or some of your own.
Everyone will be continuing their sleep and dream journal for one more week, taking the Sleeping Draft before bed each night. If you have any concerns about this, please let me know. I assure you that we will not be brewing anything so strong as to be dangerous, and it will not keep you asleep past the time you need to wake up unless you don't take it until two or three in the morning. Just communicate with me."
Pausing to do a mental inventory of what she had intended to cover today and giving the students a moment to think, Mary nodded. "Alright. Let me know if you have any questions! Otherwise, go ahead and begin. I'll be available if you need anything."
OOC - The Sleeping Draft (Draught, Draft, whatever), ingredients, method, and more can be found here: https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Sleeping_Draught
Subthreads: Wait, dream journal? by Freddie Zauberhexen, Teppenpaw with Anya Delachene, Pecari
But at least I did it. by Bridget Ferguson,Teppenpaw
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Professor Mary Brooding
A Study in Sleep [Beginners I-II]
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Freddie Zauberhexen, Teppenpaw
August 16, 2019 9:50 PM
Wait, dream journal? by Freddie Zauberhexen, Teppenpaw
Freddie grimaced when Professor Brooding wasn't looking. He hadn't been particularly interested in the dream journal - although Hana had been, or perhaps because Hana had been - and he wasn't excited at the prospect of making up the past two weeks after today's lesson. That aside, he did like sleep. He also liked to help people and it was good to know that this might be an option for people who couldn't sleep well, or in cases of weird time zone problems.He hadn't slept so well himself when he'd first arrived to Sonora, and now with school life picking up, he was starting to really feel it. While his routine and sleep schedule were mercifully normalised, his mind wasn't yet used to the bustling activity of so many kids in one place at a time. A restful night sleep, free from the whirring cogs of his brain, would be wonderful.
Still, not all of his classmates looked so thrilled with the idea of potion-assisted sleep. He supposed he was used to such notions simply because so many of his parents' patients needed such assistance, and he'd seen firsthand how helpful these potions could be. That meant this was an opportunity to put someone's mind at ease, and that was kind of neat.
Freddie had the English and German potion books open to the same place so he could compare notes as he worked, and he collected the ingredients he'd need with the rest of his classmates. When they returned to their tables, he smiled at the student next to him.
"Wanna work together? How did . . ." He looked around to make sure Professor Brooding couldn't hear him. "How did your dream journal go?"
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Freddie Zauberhexen, Teppenpaw
Wait, dream journal?
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Anya Delachene, Pecari
August 28, 2019 4:58 PM
What dream journal? by Anya Delachene, Pecari
Potions was one of the few classes where Anya didn’t pick a backrow seat where she could sit on her desk and not be in anybody’s way. Potions class tended to have cauldrons on them, so there wasn’t any room for her sit there safely. So she just sat wherever.Today she was near the boy from Flying lessons. His English was a little rough, but she liked him. He seemed nice and appeared to enjoy fun. All too many people in this school didn’t. It was important not to sit too close to those or they got all cross when group work got assigned.
Anya liked group work, especially in potions where she had trouble staying on task by herself. Having somebody else on hand to remind her when to add the chopped spleen was immensely helpful.
The lesson started, as it always did, with talk. Blah blah blah. It was all in the book. Why did she need to talk about it so much first before they could actually do the thing. Potions was great because there was almost always a thing to do. Other classes ran the risk of full period lectures, which just made Anya stare longingly out the windows desperately awaiting the moment of sweet release. Worse, her bladder conspired with her desire to be gone and she usually had to pee at least twice those days, and she got a lot of stink eyes and doubtful looks, like she was just asking to use the restroom to get out of the boring lecture.
Fortunately, Professor Brooding wrapped up before that happened today, and it looked like they were doing sleeping draughts. Wait a minute.
Did she just say they were supposed to drink them tonight? Anya was totally not doing that. She slept like a log, thank you very much. Dad warned her about potions and not taking them when she didn’t need them. Quietly. When Mom wasn’t around. Because Mom had developed a potion dependency problem at Sonora when she was young and Anya wanted nothing to do with anything like that.
So nope, no thanks on the sleeping potions.
The boy - Freddie, his name was Freddie, she remembered that now - asked to work together. “Perfect!” she confirmed.
Then he asked about the dream journal and she stared at him blankly for a moment before she remembered. Oh. Fiddlesticks.
“Um,” she said, “I never remember my dreams.” Which was actually true most nights. She tended to crash as soon as her head hit the pillow and sleep like the dead until she woke up naturally, long before she needed to be awake. “It’s pretty empty.” Which was to say, she’d completely forgotten she was supposed to be doing one and she didn’t even have one sitting next to her bed.
“Was that due today?” she asked worriedly. She was doing so bad with homework this year. “How was yours?” she returned the question.
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Anya Delachene, Pecari
What dream journal?
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Freddie Zauberhexen
August 30, 2019 9:56 PM
Exactly. *wink* by Freddie Zauberhexen
Freddie felt a little better that he wasn't the only one who had forgotten the dream journal, although he also sort of felt bad for it. He supposed that professors probably enjoyed grading things, and it was a bit of a bummer if they didn't have anything to grade. Or maybe it was better because now she didn't have to do as much grading? He supposed that wasn't a good way to decide whether he was going to do his homework or not."I have not done much of it," Freddie admitted, grimacing a bit before letting his usual easy smile return to his face. "So the real question is whether I make it up, or just fess up. What do you think?"
Anya was well known in his year because she was very exciting, and he was pretty jazzed to be working with her. She was easy to talk to and pretty straightforward. Except she was a girl, and so far girls weren't ever really straightforward. That was a lesson Hana had taught him by accident quite a long time ago.
"Are you going to take the potion tonight? Mama and Papa always have some at home for sick people and sometimes if we had bad dreams, they would give us a little bit to help us sleep. I don't know if it will be the exact same as Professor Brooding's though."
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Freddie Zauberhexen
Exactly. *wink*
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Bridget Ferguson,Teppenpaw
September 08, 2019 11:42 AM
But at least I did it. by Bridget Ferguson,Teppenpaw
For the past few weeks, Bridget had been keeping a dream journal in Potions as they had been assigned. However, there were days when she...wasn't completely honest in what she wrote. Sometimes, her dreams were unpleasant and awkward or even downright upsetting and she didn't care to have a record of those even if nobody ever saw it, so she made stuff up.Besides, Bridget didn't need to write her bad dreams down to remember what they were about because they seem to have recurring themes.Mama dying. Both her parents dying. Both her parents dying and having to go live with her paternal grandparents. Which was about the worst possible thing that could happen given that Grandfather was a monster . His abuse was at least a contributing factor to her father's alcoholism. And what he'd done to Grandmother was....well, monstrous. No other way that she could put it. Sometimes, these dreams included doing the same thing to her.
Of course, when Bridget woke up, she realized how little sense this made. Even if that happened to her, she had a whole bunch of people she could live with before she'd end up with them.
Dreams made no sense. However, you never realized that when you were in them and the terror one felt during a bad one was real. Bridget didn't need to be reminded of it. She had enough in her waking hours to stress her out.
So, she lied.
And she didn't feel the least bit bad about it.
Bridget got out her ingredients for the Sleeping Draft and turned to the person next to her. "Would you like to work together?" She asked.
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Bridget Ferguson,Teppenpaw
But at least I did it.
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Anya
September 12, 2019 4:46 PM
‘I do not remember having a dream tonight’ x20 by Anya
Anya raised her eyebrows in impressed surprise as Freddie admitted to not doing his dream journal and raised the possibility of making thing up. That had potential if she could just remember to do it. More likely, though, she’d continue to forget about it and just not have anything at all to turn in. She wrote DREAM JOURNAL in large letters on the top of a piece of parchment (the one where she would have taken notes if she’d been paying enough attention to take notes) to remind herself she should probably do something about the assignment.“Well, it’s dreams,” she said in answer to his question. “You can write down whatever you can remember about any dream you ever had. Dreams are slippery things so she’ll get it if you don’t remember very much. It’s still technically a dream journal, even if your dates are wrong. Or I bet your sisters are writing theirs in German.” Her experience with the German twins was definitely more limited to the Pecari one, and Anya felt confident that one’s grasp of English was nowhere near strong enough to manage writing in it while still half asleep. “I don’t know if Professor Brooding can read German, so then you could just write whatever you want.”
When he asked about taking the potion tonight, she shuddered a little and shook her head. “I have a family history of potion abuse. I don’t think I should.” Granted, she was about as different in temperament from her mother as it was possible to be, and she wasn’t actually related by blood anyway, so the risk was probably super low, but Anya didn’t want to take any chances. “Do you think Professor Brooding would let me skip it?”
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Anya
‘I do not remember having a dream tonight’ x20
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Freddie Zauberhexen
September 18, 2019 10:38 PM
Oh, that's a different sort of problem. by Freddie Zauberhexen
Freddie nodded, following Anya's logic. Except then she said "sisters" and Freddie wasn't sure whether it was his English or Anya's comment that didn't make sense. Then she said "theirs" though, and he was pretty sure that was just used when the noun was plural."I only have one sister," Freddie blurted out. He looked around the room to find Johana Leonie, noticing Hilda as he turned. A smile grew on his face. "Do you mean Hilda?" he asked, pointing. "They are only friends."
He thought about what it would be like to have sisters plural, and decided that Hilda and Johana Leonie would have to be twins. Hana and Hilda. And Heinrich! He would get a brother then too. That would be sort of fun, but then he'd be the youngest and that might not be so much fun. He'd also be the only one without an H name, although his parents might have opted for Hans or Helbert and Hana's name wasn't really an H.
"I am trying to do more English, but I might use German just this one time. Who do you think does her . . . uh. When she has the books in all languages. And the ingredients. Who does that?"
Freddie was surprised that Anya was talking so bluntly about her family history with him, particularly on a topic that wasn't easy to talk about for most people. The Zauberhexens had helped more than a few people with the withdrawals and other difficulties that came from stopping drugs or potion abuse, and he couldn't imagine how much harder it would have been to watch if it had been someone from his own family dealing with it. Except that . . . he wasn't totally sure that's what Anya was talking about. "Abuse" was a hard word, and he didn't know if it meant the same thing all the time. He thought he remembered it from some of their English speaking patients but they also talked about child abuse sometimes, and that was the same word but didn't mean the same thing.
"Potion abuse," he repeated, hoping it wasn't insensitive to ask for clarification. "That is when you do not use them rightly? I am not sure of word 'abuse'. I think Professor Brooding shall let you skip, very much yes."
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Freddie Zauberhexen
Oh, that's a different sort of problem.
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Anya
September 19, 2019 3:26 PM
Let’s try to avoid all problems by Anya
Anya was taken aback slightly when Freddie claimed to only have one sister. There were definitely two other Germans in their class and they all had a last name that was Something-hex or Hex-something or something like that so they had to be related, right? She wasn’t entirely sure because she always stopped listening to the roll call after ‘Delachene’ got called, and that was hard enough to listen for and it was only four letters into the alphabet.But no, the blond Pecari one was ‘only a friend’. Huh. What were the chances of two German families with girls the same age picking the same American school? Weird. But okay. It couldn’t be any more unlikely than basically any movie plot ever, so she could suspend disbelief and accept it.
“Oh, sorry. I thought they were twins,” she apologized.
Freddie asked about the translations on the ingredient jars and she just shrugged, having no idea at all. “Translation charms?” she guessed.
She was relieved with Freddie agreed that it was unlikely she would have to take the sleeping potion if she told the professor about her family medical history, but when he asked for clarification, she hesitated. The easiest way to explain was to give the details, but there was a world of difference between saying ‘I have a family history of a thing,’ and saying ‘My mom has serious anxiety and overdid the calming draughts when she was at Sonora to the point where it permanently messed up her hormones and until my little brother came along she thought she was infertile because of it.‘ That was definitely TMI.
So she only said, “Yes, when they were young, one of my family members consumed more mood altering and sleep assisting potions than they should have. I was told not to take any without a healers’ supervision and signed parental consent, if it was not life threatening.” Specifically, Dad’s signed consent, because Mom did not even know about this stipulation.
Anya suddenly wondered if Dad had given this talk to Jasmine, too, or if he somehow thought Anya specifically might be prone to the problem. Anya didn’t have the anxiety that led to Mom’s abuse, but maybe he thought she’d self-treat herself for the injuries she frequently earned playing and climbing around. That was not an unfounded fear, though mostly she kept it to simple band-aids, but as she aged and learned healing magic, how likely would it be for her to turn to something stronger instead of bothering with the hospital wing if she got unlucky enough to sprain an ankle or snap a bone?
Pretty dang likely, that’s how likely it was.
Okay, Dad had a point and a good reason to bring it up with her.
And this was not going to be the top of that slippery slope. She had nothing in common with Mom. She would not allow a self-medication problem to be the only exception. “I really don’t think it’s a good idea for me to take this tonight.”
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Anya
Let’s try to avoid all problems
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