Professor Skies
June 29, 2014 7:18 AM
Advanced Class - it's a jungle in here by Professor Skies
“Good afternoon,” Professor Skies greeted the advanced class. Although she was doing her best not to show it, they were the group that she was most concerned about. Not only did the seventh years have important exams at the end of term but they had taken on more of the responsibility for running the school than any other age group during the staff's absence in the first half of the year. True, they could defer their exams, and if the last term had shown anything, it was that they were an organised and capable lot, but she felt guilty for having left them at such a critical time, even if it very much not been by choice.“Today we will be continuing our work on conjuration. You may split the class time between your current essays and the practical project.” The homework was being piled on to ensure that they caught up but she was cutting them some slack in allowing class time to be used that way. The current task was on the factors affecting how long a conjured object lasted.
“Today we will be conjuring plants,” as with any other branch of magic, working through from inanimate objects to living things was the usual order, though of course their was room for moving sideways with inanimate objects in terms of their size and complexity.
“Nature books are available at the back. Please select a suitable target for yourself. You can also cross reference this with the chapter in your books that you read for homework,” the set reading had detailed the theory of the species evolution effect on transfiguration; in short, the fewer evolutionary steps an organism had undergone, the simpler it was to conjure. The chapter also had a table of plant groups to help students choose appropriately. The chapter would also detail the wand movements and spells for different plant types. Unlike vanishing, conjuration spells tended to be highly specific to the object one wished to bring forth.
OOC – as usual, points are given for length, realism, creativity and relevance. You are welcomed and encouraged to make up appropriate wand movements and incantations for your character to be using.
Subthreads: Conjuring quillwort. by Alicia Bauer, Aladren
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Advanced Class - it's a jungle in here
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Alicia Bauer, Aladren
July 10, 2014 3:38 PM
Conjuring quillwort. by Alicia Bauer, Aladren
Numbers had never been Alicia’s strongest suit anyway, and by the time she spread her stack of conjuration notes out over her desk in Transfiguration, the equations she had been struggling with for two days were indecipherable, a mass of bird footprints and random lines drawn by a child overlapping in sand. Rubbing her eyes, she willed herself to focus on the last one currently on the page, sure she was only two steps from figuring out how the proper number and length of wand movements had been calculated and that success and not having unfinished business on her mind would help with conjuration.Technically, she didn't need to do it - all she needed to know for the Arithmancy and Transfiguration exams she planned to take was the basic theory of spell-building - but she was in no mood to just do what she had to do. She had figured out by the second week in January that with the teachers around, doing the things she had gotten used to doing with half the trouble, she was now susceptible to becoming really, really bored, and throwing herself into her studies was the only way she had found to combat either her boredom or the discomfort of being a schoolgirl again. That feeling had never really gone away, and Alicia was beginning to suspect that it never would.
This was not good. Her semester with a degree of power might have gotten her a special award for services to the school and served as an effective (if unconventionally-manifested) aphrodisiac, but now her power was gone and showed no signs of coming back any time soon. Next year, she would be more or less free, but not powerful, and after that, it would be university, which would be followed by marriage, which….
Well, she didn’t know exactly what that was going to be like, but she thought waiting at least two or three years to really try anything to further their ambitions would be wise, which meant more tedium. Gathering intelligence was seldom very exciting. Alicia was holding onto the hope that she could use their new opinions on the ridiculous subject of Quidditch politics to convince them all to let her get a job. She thought she had enough connections now that, if she kept them up and kept working on them over the next few years, she’d be able to get something respectable enough after college, maybe even by then with a little authority attached to it, especially if she kept working on her reading Spanish and added the spoken language to it before she needed it….
Right now, though, all she could do was work, and so that was what she did. This project alone had kept her hidden behind walls of arithmancy and numerology textbooks and Latin dictionaries for whole evenings, by turns happily absorbed and then frustrated, but never thinking about much beyond the pages in front of her.
She got through the two steps, then realized she had made a mistake in the one before them – the correct addition was in another nine, not a seven and three; she must have been more tired than she’d thought the night before – and changed her mind about finishing it before she focused on the work Professor Skies had assigned and was giving them class time to work on. The composition of the spell was one factor in how long a conjured object would last, but she’d try going back through it later, after she ducked into the Cascade Hall for whatever tea and sandwich combination was being offered as a snack today. Others – mass, complexity, living versus dead, strength of the witch or wizard doing the conjuring – would be easier to work with and to apply directly to today’s task anyway.
Stacking the mathematical notes back together, she went through others until she found the page detailing the evolutionary development of plants. Algae were the easiest, redwoods right out. She decided, for today, to try for a quillwort – l. lacustris - as a lower-intermediary step: lycophytes, according to the book, were the most primitive of the vascular plants, so it was a step up from moss without going into the greater complexity of the gymnosperms or angiosperms.
“Elicio cavumherba,” incanted Alicia, moving her wand through six movements, almost like drawing a circle and then a star within it, though the tip of her wand came down straight at the end instead of finishing it, all the while willing the slim, grass-like picture from the page to come to life in front of her. Green sparks trailed after her wand, coalesced, and then a slightly slimy-looking, none too pretty clump of…well, something organic and greenish at the top fell to the desk in front of her.
Carefully, Alicia lifted one of the longer bits with the tip of a quill, examining it. It was about half as long as her hand, looked more like a fabric plant than a real one, and she doubted it would function, especially since the roots in particular were too short and knotted and generally mangled, but it felt like a plant and none of her classmates were screaming, running, or trying to douse flames, so that was not too bad for the first try with a more complex organism than she’d previously tried. Lifting another bit, she checked her watch and wrote down the time to get an idea of how long it lasted for her paper and then began taking notes over what she’d gotten more generally.
Elicio cavumherba. Call up, draw forth the hollow herb. Other spells used other variants: call up in another sense, call together, call forth, to name…a few seemed to be nouns treated as verbs and put into the imperative, which just looked odd on paper to her. She thought, though, that she remembered something from a late-night reading session during the shut-in, maybe it had been something in Bond’s Thoughts Regarding the Controll of the Magical Energies, or had it been Allendon’s The Ordered Powers…
She tapped the feather of her quill against her chin absent-mindedly, trying to remember – she had read a lot in those nights when she couldn’t sleep; the freedom to read whatever she wanted, at least, was one thing she missed without any reservations whatsoever - then looked up when she heard someone speak to her. “Hm? Oh – “ she looked down and saw that her plant-thing was gone. “Hold on just one second,” she said, hurrying to copy down the time. “Okay, sorry. What did you say?” she asked apologetically, a little embarrassed to have let her attention wander.
OOC: Scientific knowledge for this post came from Campbell and Reece’s Biology, 7th edition (2005) and Wikipedia. Latin knowledge came from the Oxford Latin Desk Dictionary (also 2005).
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Conjuring quillwort.
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