Having a mental block. on Transfiguration

Professor Wolfe

July 09, 2010 2:00 AM

Intermediate Transfiguration Part 2 by Professor Wolfe

Janette closed her eyes, soothing the migraine that currently resided in her brain. She sighed. Migraines were terrible, and she didn't have a potion on hand to help her so she would just have to deal with it. She turned to her students, who were sitting in their desks waiting, and smiled.

"As you may have noticed, we've been working with animals mostly. For this lesson I would like you to change the animals before you," she said, gesturing to the caged animals, "into an inanimate object. Like so."

She took out her wand, pointing to the bird on her desk, and moved it in a clockwise motion, saying, "Victus ut Non." The bird changed into a goblet, which clattered to the ground. The woman winced. Smiling sheepishly, Janette picked it up again and placed it away from the edge. "The key is to think of what you want to turn it into. I made the bird into a goblet, but there really is no limit to what you can change them into."

"When you change it back," she continued, "move it into a counterclockwise motion and say, 'Non ut Victus'. Understand?" She waited for someone to raise their hand. After a moment she said, "Good. Now, you may begin, third years."

She then changed her attention to the fourth years. "No doubt something like this has already been taught to you, so I want you to make the animals disappear, with a vanishing spell. If you ask one of the older years, they will tell you that their old professor had taught them this. There really isn't a spell to say, no fancy wand work. What you must do is believe nothing is there. Tap the cage, with the thought of it being empty in your mind. Tap it again, and it, the animal, will reappear. Hopefully. If it doesn't.... well I feel bad for the animals, but let me know and I'll help you out." She paused for a second, and then turned to the Transfiguration books she didn't plan on using.

"If some of you are uncomfortable with vanishing the animals, you may use these books instead." She smiled. "You may begin!"

Subthreads:

Wishing I could make myself disappear by Cassy with Alison Sinclair

Having a mental block. by Cassie Kerrigan, Aladren with Edmond Carey, Cassie

Opting for the book by Pippa Brockert with Marissa Stephenson

0 Professor Wolfe Intermediate Transfiguration Part 2 0 Professor Wolfe 1 5

Cassy

July 09, 2010 2:30 AM

Wishing I could make myself disappear by Cassy

Vanishing spells. Ugh. Cassy groaned, wondering why in the hell Proff. J had to pick vanishing spells for the fourth years. They were so easy! She could be doing something more... productive, like playing quidditch, or, Merlin's beard, go fish would be better than this. Well, she did have a pack of cards with her. She looked at the poor animal in the cage, a rabbit, which she dubbed 'Bugs' the minute she saw it, and said,

"Just for a second, Bugs." She tapped the cage, imagining Bugs gone, and he vanished before her eyes. She taped the cage with her wand again, and he reappeared, frightened. "I wonder where you went...." She shrugged to herself, not really caring, before taking the cards out of her bag and shuffling them. She spoke to the person next to her, staring down at the cards,

"Wanna play 'go fish'? Or poker? Or bullshi- BS? Wait, no, scratch BS, impossible to play with two people. I'm open for suggestions," she said, shrugging. She looked up.

0 Cassy Wishing I could make myself disappear 0 Cassy 0 5

Cassie Kerrigan, Aladren

July 10, 2010 12:07 PM

Having a mental block. by Cassie Kerrigan, Aladren

Arriving to class, Cassie pulled out her Transfiguration book, her parchment, and her quill. She organized them very precisely on her desk. She absolutely hated to have anything out of order. It was what made living with her stepbrother, Juri, very difficult. Over the holiday, they had tried to decorate the tree as a family with disastrous results. She didn’t dislike or argue with him nearly as much as Veronica did, but there were certain things that got under her skin. Her family knew that she liked having the Christmas tree set up exactly the same way year after year. She always had the same color ornaments evenly spaced apart with sentimental ones in between. Everything was nice and even and symmetrical.

However, that wasn’t the case this year. Juri had begun putting the ornaments on just anywhere. When she had said anything, he said that was part of the fun. Christmas trees weren’t supposed to be precise. They were supposed to be a reflection of the people that had decorated them. She had countered back that precise was a reflection of herself, which had then resulted in their first outright argument. She had been trying to avoid one since then, especially since Juri and Veronica arguing about anything and everything made her incredibly uncomfortable, but this one was about the holiday. It just couldn’t be ignored. Finally, they had ended up with a half and half tree. One side was perfect. The other side a disaster.

Oh, well. She gave herself a metal shake. There was no point in getting herself worked up over what was over and done with. Instead, she focused her attention on what the professor was saying. Diligently, she wrote down the incantations as well as made sure to have her book open to the correct section. She wanted to make sure as little as possible went wrong, especially since they would be dealing with animals. Messiness was an inevitable factor, but she wanted to make it a minimum. Besides, she didn’t think the animal would appreciate it if she only transfigured them part way. She could just imagine its poor head looking down at an object of a body and freaking out. And could it be blamed? She would have done the same.

Studying the hamster, Cassie gave consideration to what she could turn it into. For her, this was probably going to be the hardest part of the lesson since she wasn’t a very creative person. After a few minutes and noticing others working on theirs, she turned to her neighbor and asked, “Any ideas on what would be a good object to transfigure a hamster into? All I’ve come up with is ham and that obviously won’t work.” If that was even possible, she shuddered to think that the poor little creature might get eaten in that state.

0 Cassie Kerrigan, Aladren Having a mental block. 0 Cassie Kerrigan, Aladren 0 5

Edmond Carey

July 11, 2010 12:09 AM

Not being very articulate. by Edmond Carey

Transfiguration lessons had been a tad rocky in the early days, but Edmond's tutors had taught him the theory of it well enough that the bumps had smoothed themselves out in only a short time. The classes were challenging enough to be interesting even so, but he seldom doubted his ability to finish an assignment.

He did, however, doubt his ability to take a seat in the lesson today.

There was no reason, now that their class arrival times had worked out in such a way that no one else had taken the seat beside whichever one arrived first, why he shouldn't sit with Cassie. They were classmates. Who got along well. They had even gone to a dance together, and he had hardly made a fool of himself the entire evening. It was illogical to still feel awfully as though he were going to be sick, or something not unlike that, any time he deliberately approached her instead of just crossing paths by accident. Of course, things were more complicated now - for some reason, certainly not one he could figure out, it seemed even more important that she not act like...midterm meant he'd caught some kind of fatal disease than it did with anyone here except Jane - but still. Emotions were acceptable, they were what separated normal people from sociopaths who broke the rules of society for their own benefit without considering the greater good, but they were not supposed to run counter to facts, which these did.

Purposefully, he blocked out facts about how different his upbringing seemed to have been from that of almost every other student he'd met and sat down. Stubbornness was also an undesirable trait, impeding reasoned action, but it did have its occasional uses.

The lesson did not seem too difficult, which was almost a disappointment. He had been hoping for something that would keep his full attention on it, with no extra space for the family or individual members of it or girls or anything else that didn't have to do with Transfiguration. Thinking too much was the only thing that ever really threw him off in class; while he was good at maintaining his concentration in Potions and Defense, his other classes were less urgent, and he sometimes lost focus. It was a failing he tried to avoid, but he couldn't manage it every time.

He was working out the incantation sequence in his head, to hopefully minimize the risk of only half-transfiguring the bird in front of him both because of a liking for birds and an equal dislike of failure and of traumatizing himself and anyone else who cared to look, when Cassie spoke to him. He reminded himself that her doing so was part of the point, a potentially good thing, and, so far, an indication that they might still get along as well as they had before... midterm happened, and then answered.

"It might be technically possible to turn a hamster into a ham - " and that is morbid; fantastic job, Edmond - "but I think you're right that it wouldn't, er, be a good idea," he said, to give himself a moment to think of something brilliant. He was not terribly creative, either; while he enjoyed drawing, he only drew things he could see, and only tried original images that inevitably went badly when made to do so by his tutors. "Perhaps a...stuffed version of itself? Not an actual stuffed hamster, though - " another morbid one - "one of those cloth things Jane collects that look like animals." He did not think he was being very articulate today. If he was not lucky, she might be offended that he'd suggested something so simple.

0 Edmond Carey Not being very articulate. 143 Edmond Carey 0 5

Pippa Brockert

July 13, 2010 7:01 PM

Opting for the book by Pippa Brockert

As Pippa heard the lesson for Transfiguration that day, her heart sank. Unlike in potions, where an animal could be harmed in order for the purpose of healing a wizard, vanishing an animal didn't really help them. Pippa knew it didn't hurt the animal, but at the same time, she didn't know where they went.

Furthermore, to make an animal disappear was hard . Pippa wasn't bad at Transfiguration, but she wasn't sure she was ready for this. She thought maybe she could have handled what the third years were doing but this was beyond her capabilities.

And she would not want to do poorly. While Pippa was going to be a proper pureblood wife and member of pureblood society-which was the only option for her, according to her parents and grandmother-she had been also told that no proper pureblood man wanted a woman who was no good at magic. It was why it Squibs rarely made good matches and why members of upperclass pureblood families did not usually marry muggles.

And, while Pippa would prefer to marry someone she loved, she did not want to let her parents down. She didn't need to get Os, because it was generally not considered good for girls to be too smart but she did need to adequately master spells.

It was all a delicate balance, one that Tawny questioned more and had a more difficult time with than Pippa. And Melora had just been like 'Yeah, I'm not doing this' and went her own way. Pippa's elder sister had gotten terrific grades, and she was twenty-five and not married.Instead, Melora was traveling the world again, now that she'd graduated from college. She rarely even came home anymore, and hadn't for midterm. Pippa wished she would, sometimes she missed her big sister.

The fourth year breathed a sigh of relief when Professor Wolfe said that those who weren't comfortable using an animal could make a book disappear instead, though Pippa wondered if the Aladrens would have an issue with that.

She got up and got herself a book. Pippa closed her eyes and tried to envision her desk being empty again. She tapped on the book and opened her eyes just in time to see it fade a little, like the ghost of a book. She tried twice more, with the same results.

Pippa turned to her neighbor and said. "This is difficult, isn't it? How are you coming along?"

11 Pippa Brockert Opting for the book 132 Pippa Brockert 0 5

Marissa Stephenson

July 21, 2010 7:17 PM

Wish I could. by Marissa Stephenson

Without feeling any particular despair or foreboding – a rare enough occurrence, in a class like this, to warrant mentioning – Marissa settled into her usual seat in Transfiguration and took out her book, notebook, and wand against all eventualities. People tended to move seats far more often than she remembered them doing in Muggle school, but she, mostly out of habit from her Muggle school, liked to stay relatively consistent, changing only when she wanted to sit next to a friend who’d arrived before her or when someone else took her chair before she could get to it. It wasn’t a big deal, just a habit.

Today, the person beside her chair was one of the fourth years, though not one she’d spoken to before. Since she was a Teppenpaw, though, Marissa doubted she’d prove hostile, which was good; fourth years could be helpful, in classes like this, for helping her figure out a way to work through especially stubborn spells well enough to get a partial effect. Of course, so had been Jose Hernandez, and he was in third year with her. She had even managed a few spells on her own in the class period before, though that was rare. But still. Fourth years had, presumably, already done all this that she was doing now, which made them the most reliable sources of aid the intermediate classes had to offer in the absence of fifth years.

As Professor Wolfe, who didn’t look her best today, started talking, Marissa winced slightly into her notebook, her face bent over it and her brown hair falling forward to conceal her expression from everyone and thing in the room except the college-ruled pages of the three-ring binder in front of her. Not only did it bother her, on some level she had been raised not to express because hunting was practically a rite of passage for men where she came from, to use animals in Transfiguration all the time, but it also sounded cursed difficult even for someone who was proficient at magic. She was more likely to kill something than to accomplish her objective, or kill something in the process of accomplishing her objective, and if her hysterics the one time she could remember her mother hitting a dog in the car were anything to go by, she’d end up in the hospital wing sipping Calming Draughts for the rest of the evening if that happened.

Unfortunately, using a book didn’t seem to be an option for the third years. She couldn’t really see why not. In the real world, they would be free to use magic as they wished, and there were very few circumstances she could possibly imagine where it would do her any good to turn an animal into a something else, and all of those circumstances were highly likely to end with her death anyway.

Perhaps she could just wave her wand as though she were doing something without actually trying to do anything. It was pointless in any case; when she had an active resistance to a spell for some reason and was conscious of why she didn’t want it to work, her chances of getting it right fell from minimal to none. All she could possibly do, if the spell were very simple and she were very frustrated and eager to please, was cause damage. That was of no use to anyone, and might even be to their detriment, if things went really wrong and she blew something up again. It was bad enough when she did that to inanimate objects; if it was to an animate one, she could only imagine that she wasn’t the only person in the room who’d be rather traumatized by the experience.

She was working on that sham when the student next to her, the Teppenpaw, spoke up. Marissa smiled self-consciously, inwardly, as she always did when she stepped off the clean road laid for her by the rules, feeling a rush of nausea and fear that she had learned to keep off her face. When she didn’t, people were more likely to realize she had been doing something wrong, and the shame that went with being punished wasn’t to be borne. “Not very far,” she said, indicating her still completely animate raven. “But I always have trouble with anything except associated inanimate-to-inanimates. I’ll probably never be able to do yours.” She had looked at some CATS preparatory tests, just to get an idea of what she would be going up against in the year after next, and had found even the basic theory of Vanishment went straight over her head.

16 Marissa Stephenson Wish I could. 147 Marissa Stephenson 0 5

Alison Sinclair

July 21, 2010 7:50 PM

That doesn't seem very healthy. by Alison Sinclair

She didn’t like to brag – well, she didn’t like to brag much - but Alison thought she was rather good at Transfiguration. Not prodigy level, maybe not even potential master-level, but pretty good just the same. The spells involved came to her easily most of the time, making sense on a level it took more work to make her other subjects reach; if she had the choice of getting more or less the same effect by a Charm or a Transfiguration, she would, nine times out of ten, pick the Transfiguration.

Vanishing was one of the last things Greta had introduced her to before she went home for that cursed visit to her parents last summer, and she had not been enthusiastic about it. Perhaps her old teacher had been envisioning an endless succession of useful objects disappearing into the nothing whenever she irked her charges, or just for a joke; Alison didn’t know. What she did know was a fair bit of the theory behind what Wolfe wanted them to try, and a little bit of the practice, though – and she had no intentions of admitting this to anyone, not after she’d spent the entire year sailing through lessons and no doubt creating an impression based on that – she had never successfully managed to Vanish anything, and what little she had been taught, she had been taught another way.

She had run into little inconveniences like this before, of course, where the way she’d learned something had not been exactly the way Sonora teachers wanted her to learn it. Greta was, for all her status as a housewife before her husband’s death impelled her to first work as a secretary and then to take in students, a very smart woman, and it wasn’t unlike her to devise a version of a simple spell that she thought worked better than the standard one, or to add or remove steps from a potion. Before, though, Alison had known enough to quickly make up the difference. This time, she suspected she was going to run into a little bit of trouble.

At least she’d never had trouble concentrating when she needed to. It was a point of discipline, begun with staring contests and carried on through doing large amounts of work at one sitting and standing still in heels for extended periods of time, enough that she could now wear them all day without really noticing. It also made magic easier, having that focus, which was why, with all her mind focused on what she was doing, she was able to make first the tail and then the back legs of the rat in front of her Vanish before her concentration was broken by a voice next to her.

Turning, a little irritated, to see what it was, Alison found herself looking at her roommate, Cassy. As the loud and dramatic one of her former group, Alison had never found herself particularly enamored of someone she perceived to be even louder and more dramatic than she was, and they had not gotten to know each other well thus far. “I don’t know those games,” she said, bringing back the missing appendages of the rat so she could start over and ignoring the fact that she’d technically just told a lie. Her brothers, bored, had taught her to play poker one night just before she turned thirteen. Since Greta considered cards something for older girls, though, she wasn’t very good at it. “Or any, really. Are you done already?” she added, looking at the full cage. If she was, Alison thought she might have just gained some new respect for Cassy.

16 Alison Sinclair That doesn't seem very healthy. 140 Alison Sinclair 0 5

Cassie

July 23, 2010 11:26 PM

Attempting to be creative. by Cassie

Cassie tilted her head in mild confusion at Edmond’s rambling. It was a word that she wouldn’t normally associate to her friend, but at the moment he had gone from a ham to a stuffed hamster to taxidermy back to a stuffed hamster. All right then. “I think the word you’re looking for is stuffed animal,” she said with an ‘it’s okay, I get what you mean’ smile. Pursing her lips, she thought about it for a moment. “That could work. I could model it after the one I got for Christmas.” Juri had gotten her something called a Zhu Zhu hamster, some sort of muggle toy. She didn’t really play with toys all that much anymore, but she supposed it was the thought that counted. But then, he had gotten Veronica and Delilah them as well.

Concentrating on the real hamster, she thought about the stuffed one and was pleased when the hamster changed from a brown and white-patched animal to a yellow and white one. Still alive. Some might have thought it was progress, but what she had intended had happened. Musing, she said, “I think I’ll name him Pipsqueak.” It was the name the one back home had come with and it seemed only fitting that this one be named after its model. Now, it was time to get serious. Taking a breath, she fully focused on what the hamster was to become. A Zhu Zhu pet. The proper incantation and there it was. A perfect yellow and white stuffed hamster complete with wheels. It wasn’t that hard. She thought changing it from inanimate to animate would be tougher.

Cassie ran a hand through her brown hair. Now that her part of the assignment was done, she didn’t have nearly as much to do other than take notes on what she did. But rather than worry about that now, she opted for talking more to Edmond. It seemed forever since they had really talked and she really wasn’t sure why that was seeing as he was one of the people she enjoyed talking to most. “How was your holiday?” It was a bit of a touchy subject for her with all of the new family stuff going on, but she figured Edmond could be considered safe territory. “Mine was…interesting to say the least with mixing new traditions with old ones. Though, I must say I much prefer the old.”

0 Cassie Attempting to be creative. 0 Cassie 0 5

Edmond

July 24, 2010 4:58 PM

Attempting to be clever by Edmond

"Yes, well...terribly imprecise term..." Edmond mumbled and trailed off, feeling a bit idiotic even while being cheered by the smile. And noting that she apparently shared Janey's liking for the imprecisely named objects in question. There was a good chance that Cassie wouldn't appreciate it if she were compared to an eleven-year-old, even one as precocious as Jane, but he thought Jane might like to know it. She had been feeling down, before midterm, about feeling too unlike other girls.

Of course, Cassie wasn't really like most other girls here either. As far as Edmond was concerned, this was not a bad thing in either case. Anyone, given the right combinations of genes - combinations he felt they'd both gotten, though differently, and different again with Jane because she was more his sister than his sister was - could be pretty, but it took more effort to be interesting and accomplished.

He considered what to do with the question about midterm. A flat avoidance of the question would be rude, and he had an aversion to lying to her, but he felt little desire to talk about any of it. "Mine was...similar," he said, deciding it would do. "Interesting, and with too many changes. But most of them won't be permanent until I'm about twenty-three, so I suppose it's not so bad. I'll have time to adjust to them all."

Putting unpleasant things off was bad practice, as it did nothing to resolve the problem, but Edmond couldn't see a solution to the problem that didn't involve him dying and causing even more, worse, problems, as he didn't have any brothers. Nor did he have any liking for that solution on its own, even disregarding the problems it would cause. A goal of his was to die of old age - the first head of his family ever to do so. His father might technically manage it first, but Morgaine said the family had already put it in the books that he'd died of illness in December, so it wouldn't really count.

Edmond found that disturbing. His sister said that, for all she'd tried her best to heal him, Father wouldn't live much longer anyway, so why had they decided to falsify all their family histories? Those, he had always been taught, were of the utmost importance. He knew the versions he and Jane had to learn from had been edited, taking out the things that a girl shouldn't know and that would bore anyone but the most dedicated of historians, but it had never crossed his mind, not once, that they could actually contain falsehoods.

"What traditions did you change?" he asked, then quickly added, "if you want to say." He gathered that there were new people in her family now, and he could see how she'd possibly find that difficult to deal with. Morgaine said that she wanted to minimize the amount of changes to his life, but that it was important that he come to know his own branch and he'd therefore have to spend some time in Georgia over the next few years. It wasn't something his two weeks of experiencing the place allowed him to want, or at least not mind very much. To have his new - that was not the precise adjective, but it was the best he could do - family around all the time would be deeply unpleasant.

0 Edmond Attempting to be clever 0 Edmond 0 5

Pippa

July 27, 2010 5:57 PM

Aw, I'm sorry. by Pippa

Pippa smiled pleasantly at Marissa. She had never spoken to her but knew she was friends with Quentin and a muggleborn. In fact, she and her cousin had had quite a conversation about the fall-out from the dance last term and their parents' reactions. Sometimes, Pippa just wanted to be able to do what she wanted in terms of relationships like some of her cousins could. However, her parents, and especially her maternal grandmother, were more traditional. As were Quentin's parents.

The whole thing was kind of silly. Pippa had no plans to marry Juri and she was pretty sure Quentin didn't have any to marry Marissa. It was just a dance but their old-fashioned families had blown it out of proportion and were now discussing betrothals. (With other people of course, they weren't planning to betroth Pippa to her own cousin. Not that things like that didn't happen in the pureblood world.)

Inevitably though, Pippa would go through with whatever her parents wanted. She just couldn't make them ashamed of her and upset with her. The Teppenpaw couldn't take disappointing them again. Nor did Pippa really want to deal with her younger sister pouring salt in her wounds.

Pippa only hoped that they wouldn't pick someone too terrible, like had happened to her distant cousin Rosemary, the family patriarch's granddaughter. Rosemary had been marrried off to a total monster from what Pippa understood. (Which, really wasn't much. Her parents didn't allow her to hear stuff like that and Pippa wasn't sure she wanted to know, even though her sisters would and she suspected Melora possibly did.)

She looked at the raven Marissa was supposed to vanish. Pippa knew the girl wasn't very good at wandwork, a drawback to the practical lessons. "It's all right." The Teppenpaw assured the other girl. "This is pretty hard magic and it's really often taught when people are a bit older. Usually people start with less complex animals, like worms." Pippa said ,trying to be comforting.

11 Pippa Aw, I'm sorry. 132 Pippa 0 5