Professor Lilac Brockert
January 20, 2012 11:59 PM
Love birds [Third, fourth, and fifth years!] by Professor Lilac Brockert
Professor Brockert was very, very pleased to be able to call herself such. Her classes probably grew tired of hearing it; in her excitement, she had probably re-introduced herself to each of her classes two or three times. She tended to be an excitable person, as all of her students had to know by now, and this was no exception. She was also a very big fan of the Mrs. that now accompanied her name, but Professor was what she was supposed to use for this situation.For today’s intermediate class, Professor Brockert made sure to place plastic bottles on each of the desks, one for every student if she counted correctly. It wasn’t hard to count on normal standards, but her mind continually swam with happiness. She was sure, at least, that there would be enough. There just might have been a few extras that could easily be disregarded.
As her students eventually trickled in, she smiled good-naturedly, unable to help herself from thinking about how some of them--the ones that were related to Seth--were not her own relatives as well. It was interesting, and there was a good number of them, however distantly, although none thus far so close as Ryan. Likewise, she wondered if her husband Seth had such thoughts when he saw his new niece Sally about the grounds.
“Good day, class!” grinned Professor Brockert. “Today we’re going to turn these bottles into birds.” The incantation scribbled itself upon the board behind her. “Avifors is our spell. Keep in mind that this spell will work on other objects, not just these bottles.” The bottles were simply an easy sample to find. “Consider this recycling, if you’d like.”
“There isn’t really a wand movement to accompany the incantation, just point at your bottle. The light produced should be a bright blue, and the bottle will take the form of whatever bird you imagine in your head.” A lot of Transfiguration seemed based on imagination; many took the form as imagined in the mind of the witch or wizard performing the spell. “And please, no birds of prey.” She didn’t want to see any large, carnivorous birds swooping up gentler songbirds or something.
“Don’t confuse this spell with Avis, which is a Conjuration spell.” The two were very close, but there was a sufficiently noticeable difference. Personally, she had made the mistake more than once in her history. “Now, watch me, if you will.” Professor Brockert aimed her wand at the bottle sitting on her own desk. “Avifors.” The blue light shot from the tip of her wand and lit the bottle momentarily before the bottle was replaced by a green love bird, which flew off the desk and landed on her outstretched arm. “Get the idea?” She sat the bird back on the desk and Untransfigured it. “If no one’s got any questions, feel free to get started.”
OOC: Welcome to class, third through fifth years. Let’s see some nice, long, creative posts with a bunch of descriptions. Those would make me very happy. If you need Lilac, go ahead and tag her. If not, just post with your neighbor, compared birds or bottles (or whatever happens in-between), or just do your own thing. Happy posting!
Subthreads: Playful birds. by Renée Errant {Crotalus} with Kate Bauer, Teppenpaw, Renée
Beware the Bottlebirds by Daisy Thorpe, Crotalus
Not my usual choice of flying object, but okay by Arnold Carey, Aladren with Josephine Owen, Josephine
Those are not my cup of tea at all. by Arthur Carey, Aladren
Why is it always birds? by Fae Sinclair (Crotalus) with Topher Calhoun, Crotalus, Fae
Wasn't there a movie about those? by David Wilkes, Aladren with James Owen
Not quite by Autumn Collins, Crotalus
*hopes to be one someday* by Hope Brockert, Teppenpaw with Addison Thornton
You sure you don't mean love <i> beetles </i>? by Kirstenna Melcher, Teppenpaw
Um...not sure that really fits in this case. by Ryan O'Malley, Crotalus
Class closed (nm) by Prof. B.
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Professor Lilac Brockert
Love birds [Third, fourth, and fifth years!]
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Professor Lilac Brockert
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Arnold Carey, Aladren
January 23, 2012 5:48 PM
Not my usual choice of flying object, but okay by Arnold Carey, Aladren
Arnold kept his reaction to the events of the past minute to looking kind of red in the face around his good-natured smile until he was actually seated, but once he was in a desk and cheerfully greeting his neighbor, he did take a second to rub his right side, which had recently had an unfortunate collision with Arthur’s left elbow, in what he hoped was an at least halfway-stealthy manner. Sure, he regularly collided with other things with significantly more force, and it had been pretty stupid to start to say, “Hey, Professor Cros – “ before he remembered she was married now and had told them about it fifty-some-odd-times, but had Art really needed to hit him that hard to shut him up? That had actually kind of hurt.He didn’t think about it long, though, because he was distracted by the lesson. He was a little confused about what Professor Cros – Brockert, darn it, Brockert - said about considering the work they were doing ‘recycling,’ but wasn’t too worried about that, either, because it was cool to think about turning something that was just about as inanimate as it got, being generally one of the more personality-free things associated with eating now that he thought about it, into something alive.
It was a cool idea, but for some reason, thinking about it made him almost…uneasy, somehow. He didn’t know why, didn’t even really know that was why he was feeling uneasy, just that he suddenly did, just a little. Since he couldn’t place the feeling, though, he tried to just ignore it and try to picture a bird in his head.
That wasn’t easy, either. Visualization was kind of difficult for him for some reason, at least when it came to Transfiguration; he got through in the end because he did have imagination, just not one which applied itself well to Transfiguration, and Arthur spent a good portion of each Saturday explaining the theory behind it all until Arnold was pretty sure he didn’t so much understand as he got confused on such a higher plane that he just imagined he understood and that worked well enough, but he usually had a little trouble in the beginning phases. Arthur thought part of the problem might be that he was trying to picture whatever it was he was supposed to be making perfectly, but Arnold read that more as Arthur projecting his own tendency toward perfectionism onto his brother than anything real. He cared about his lessons, of course – he would fall into enough hot water for both of them at home if he did not – but not that much.
His bottle loomed in front of him, challenging him to make it a bird. He looked back at it, determined. By the end of class, one way or another, it was going to bear at least a pretty strong resemblance to a bird. He pointed his wand at it and said the incantation with that thought firmly in mind.
When he lifted the wand again, it…well, it no longer looked like a bottle. That was the part Arthur said to focus on when he was working on spells. Progress was progress; of course instant completion was preferable, but not everyone could be Arthur and Alice. Everyone else had to take their progress wherever they could get it.
“Well, it’s something,” he said aloud, reinforcing this idea to himself as he looked at his neighbor again, looking over their work as he did. He wasn’t being nosy, just evaluating how he was doing so far. “How’s it going for you?”
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Arnold Carey, Aladren
Not my usual choice of flying object, but okay
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Arnold Carey, Aladren
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Josephine Owen
January 26, 2012 4:13 PM
Not my usual choice of partner by Josephine Owen
Sharing classes with the fourth and fifth years was always infitely preferable to sharing classes with the first and second years. Jospehine had already been an academic opponent to her brother when just in her second year, and James was in Aladren. The lead that he managed to maintain on her performance was due only in part to his being older; the rest was down to Josephine's insurmountable laziness. She could knock out an essay in an hour, and cast charms of an acceptable standard without really researching or rehearsing them, and so she didn't see the need to put herself under unnecessary pressure. She tested well, too, and had an uncanny memory for useless facts, a skill which often lent itself well to cue-dependent recall.Transfiguration was usually one of the classes at which Josephine excelled. She was sufficiently smart to understand the theory, and sufficiently creative to construct a acceptable representation of their object for the class. The ony trouble she had was adjusting to the difficulty of the spell whenever they made a jump in material. She suspected today might be one of those jump days, as Professor Brockert was asking them to create a living creature from an inanimate object. Josephine didn't doubt her capability of such as spell, but knew that, as a third year with very little animate transfiguration experience, she wasn't likely to perform especially well at least for the first few attempts.
Resigned, therefore, to practise, Josephine concentrated hard on her empty bottle and the image of a magpie. She thought the lack of differentiation in its monochrome coloring might present a more accomplishable challenge for her initial attempts, and it just seemed easier to produce a relatively small bird compared to something like an eagle. The first time she cast the spell, the Pecari succeeded in a bird-shaped bottle with a black feathery exterior. She chewed her lip while she contemplated what needed to be improved upon, and even scribbled down a couple of notes. The bird-creation was nowhere near alive, no matter which way she looked at it, and that was a pretty crucial factor in identifying a bird. Unless the bird was declared dead, of course.
Right then, another go. This time, the bottle was shaped yet more like a bird, and tilted its eyeless head a little as Josephine stared at it. The feathers were dull and not the glossy look she'd been going for, and it lacked the white streaks that identified a magpie from a blackbird at distance. It did, however, have a beak, and feet, and it was moving a little. She doubted it would pass, muster, though. Again, she made a few notes, and only looked up as the boy seated next to her said, "How's it going for you?"
Josephine blinked at Arnold Carey a couple of times. Why was he speaking to her? He never spoke to her. She tried not to make the same mistake she'd made when talking to Fae Sinclair for the first time, however, and resolved to be pleasant. "It's going okay," she answered, with an optimistic nod, which her pseudo-magpie tried to mimic. She snuck a glance at Arnold's work, and tried not to feel too superior. "How about you?"
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Josephine Owen
Not my usual choice of partner
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Josephine Owen
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Arnold
January 28, 2012 6:11 PM
Change can be good by Arnold
He had never been much good at keeping track of who was in his year and who was not – he had only really realized that most of the current fourth years were not when they weren’t in some of his classes last year – but when Arnold did take the time to sort through people, he thought of his year in terms of Quidditch and that big group of Teppenpaws, which was also directly linked to Quidditch since the Teppenpaw Beaters were part of it. He and all his roommates played Quidditch, those guys played Quidditch, Topher Calhoun played Quidditch and his roommate had – that was virtually every guy in the year, and the girls were notable for other reasons, the Crotalus ones for being Fae and Alice and the Teppenpaw ones for being part of the big group of Teppenpaws.Pecari, however, had only turned out one third-year Quidditch player, who he forgot was in the year as often as not, and so he tended to associate the Pecaris immediately around him with other things. Sara was older than him, he was always half-convinced Demetra was, too, and he kept having the vague idea that Josephine Owen was a Teppenpaw, or possibly an Aladren in the year below his. It was, then, with some surprise that he noticed her robes just now. She was a Pecari? Weird.
“It could be worse,” he said, gesturing to his oddly-shaped blob of plastic. “It could have blown up or something. I’ll get it down in a few more tries.” He managed to say that with only a trace of defensiveness. He was sure of it, for one thing, and he had learned early in life not to get very tense when it came to other people doing better than he did at things. His brothers were altogether too fond of it. They did it all the time. He sometimes did envy Arthur and Anthony the amount of time they spent with their parents that didn’t involve being told how idiotic what they’d just done was, but he had learned to get his attention in other ways and be okay with that.
“Besides,” he added, “I don’t think she’s really going to notice, anyway.” He nodded toward Professor Crosby. “She doesn’t look like she’s really paying a lot of attention to anything.” He really hoped that wasn’t a universal result of getting married, because he was inevitably going to have to at some vaguely-defined point in the future, and he liked being able to pay attention to even as many things as he did. Lack of focus was already one of the things he got called down for fairly often at home, he didn’t want that to get any worse.
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Arnold
Change can be good
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Arnold
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Josephine
February 02, 2012 11:36 AM
We fear change by Josephine
Arnold was right - his creation blowing up definitely would have been worse. Josephine had never managed to blow anything up, or even set anything on fire, but the first week that her sister had possessed a wand had indicated to her quite strongly that these results were very possible when a person tried too hard, or did not focus sufficiently. Neither did she doubt that Arnold would acheive a better result with a few more tries, so she simply nodded her response.She'd just turned back to her own, far superior, work when Arnold's 'Besides,' drew her attention back again to her yearmate. She was entertained by his comments on the professor, and allowed an amused smile to grace her lips. "When does she ever?" Josephine quipped about Professor Brockert's inability to pay attention. It wasn't the pointof the class to impress the professor, though, obviously. Not that Josephine would mind occasionally being in the good books of a professor or two, but it wasn't an aim of hers. They seemed to take umbridge when she interpreted the directions for an assignment n a creative manner, or had punctuality issues with her homework. Sheer standard of work was never sufficient to draw positive attention to oneself (in her experience, anyway), but she could comfort herself that in the long run, performance was all that mattered. The professors didn't grade their external exams, and Josephine would have no time then to alienate the examiners, whow would judge her based purely on knowledge and skill, at which point she would come out a winner.
"But yeah, she does seem to be even less grounded than usual." (If that was a side effect of being married to the school's groundskeeper then Josephine didn't want to think about that too much at all. Grown ups falling in love was not romantic in the slightest, especially when it applied to teachers. They should know better by their age.) The class could probably take advantage of this and laze around in class, and while she was always tempted by the prospect of procrastination, Josephine knew she'd much rather get her classwork out of the way in class, and leave as much time to herself out of class hours as was humanly possible. Then she could dither and procrastinate to her heart's content. For this reason, she turned back to her bottle and took a third attempt at turning it into a magpie.
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Josephine
We fear change
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Josephine
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Arnold
February 15, 2012 10:55 PM
Sometimes, anyway by Arnold
Arnold had to bow to Josephine’s logic. “That’s a good point,” he admitted, thinking about the professor just in general terms. If she’d been born a Carey instead of a Crosby, he was pretty sure she would have been disowned by the time she was his age for excessive and unseemly good humor. He had spent, he thought, at least half of his life being told to calm down and he thought she would beat him any day of the week.His point, too, though, was acknowledged. She was further out of it than usual, and while he knew he wasn’t much of an Aladren, the kind who could safely make correlations or whatever word Arthur would use for it, he associated her introducing herself to them so often with the rest of it. The one was because she was married, so if they did go together, then so was the other, but that was…weird.
Mr. Brockert, he concluded, must have been a widower, like Arnold’s father had been when he married Arnold’s mother. Widowers could get away with marrying because they just wanted to more than other people could; he supposed widows probably could, too, but Grandmother had spoken enough about what a scandal it was for an old maid from a family to work at the school that he was pretty sure this was Professor Crosby’s first marriage. Which made her just like his mother – reasonably prosperous families, but ones liberal enough to let her get away with working. Though that did make him wonder, now, what Professor Brockert was doing here now….
He was distracted from attempts to reason out his Transfiguration teacher’s behavior in terms he could work with, though, by his neighbor attempting again to do their Transfiguration assignment. He should probably follow her example and do that, too. Turning back to his own bottle, he tried the spell again, and this time, he ended up with a cloud of feathers, which fell to the desk to reveal something which actually did look kind of bird-like. Not alive, but bird-like. That was progress.
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Arnold
Sometimes, anyway
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Arnold
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