Professor Skies
January 09, 2015 6:02 AM
Beginners - don't get in a tangle by Professor Skies
“Good Morning,” Professo Skies greeted, one she felt that most of the class had assembled. She would allow a little leeway for late-comers in the first weeks but as the first years shared classes with the second years, it should have been easy enough for them to find their way.“You have already been introduced to me as Deputy Headmistress Skies,” she acknowledged, looking out over the new faces and trying to remember which colours she had seen each of them turn. “However, during class, you may address me as Professor Skies, or simply ‘Professor.’
“Transfiguration is a complex branch of magic. You may find that your work here proceeds more slowly than in other classes. Work hard and work patiently, however, and you will find it yields rewarding results. Furthermore, just because it lacks the flashes and bangs of some of your other subjects, you should not take any lighter an attitude. You are still waving around a stick with the power to do all manner of things, trying to get it to turn things into other things, and still with limited control of your own ability. Whilst you are unlikely to Transfigure your classmate by accident - and your homework will be to read chapter two of your book and write an answer as to why - you could still hurt them. I do not broker messing about,” she informed them, seriously but not sternly. If they broke this simple rule, they would find that Professor Skies was perfectly capable of firm but fair strictness, but it was not in her nature to growl and be intimidating.
“Today, first years will be turning shoe-laces into ribbons, whilst second years will be aiming for the same result from a twig,” she informed them, a box of these materials that had been sitting on her desk began making its way amongst the students. “The first stage in this will be to fill out the handout coming around now. Second years should by now be familiar with this, so may take one or do their own from scratch. This is a Transfiguration table,” she explained, as a pile of sheets followed the box, both pausing by each student. The sheets had a simple two column table with a list of attributes, such as size, shape and colour down the left hand side, with empty spaces to their right. “When Transfiguring, it is important to fully visualise the changes that must take place. This will help you do so, as well as allowing you to channel your energy more efficiently, focussing on those areas that require the most change. The attributes should be considered relative between the object - that is, you do not need to specify the dimensions for size, only whether you are trying to change this, and in what sort of way.
“The spell you will all be using is cordone,” behind her the chalk scribbled this on the board, along with the pronunciation ‘cor-don-AY.’ “You should use a long, flowing wand motion,” she explained, demonstrating it slowly, “As follows, cordone>” she cast the spell in its completeness, transforming the quill of a student who had looked like they were daydreaming. She turned it back, before setting the class to their task.
“You may talk quietly amongst yourselves, and ask your peers or me for help if you are stuck.”
OOC: Welcome to Transfiguration. Posts here are graded on your realism not how well you claim to have performed, so keep it in line with what could be expected of someone of your character's age and experience. You are being supervised and Professor Skies would not allow anything to get out of hand, so please give me time to intervene if you are having/causing trouble, and tag me in the subject line to get my attention.
Please put your character's name and house in the author line.
Posts are marked on length, realism, creativity and relevance. Enjoy.
Subthreads: What about knots? by John Spencer, Aladren with Jemima Wolseithcrafte, Teppenpaw
Confident in my abilities. by Barnaby Pye, Aladren
Trying it out by Ginger Pierce, Teppenpaw with Anna Clarissa Cooper-Flemming, Pecari
It won't be an issue by Kelsey Atwater, Crotalus with Sammy Meeks [Pecari]
Playing with molecules. by Aislinn Nicolls, Aladren with John Umland, Aladren
Not getting anywhere. by Sutton Nicolls, Pecari with Caelia Lucan
13
Professor Skies
Beginners - don't get in a tangle
26
Professor Skies
1
5
Aislinn Nicolls, Aladren
January 18, 2015 9:11 PM
Playing with molecules. by Aislinn Nicolls, Aladren
Entering the Transfiguration classroom, Aislinn headed straight towards the front to take a seat. She liked sitting in the front where there were less distractions. Not to mention, she didn’t have to worry about someone taller than her sitting in front of her and then not being able to see the board. Or what if the professor was soft spoken? Then, she ran the risk of not being able to hear the professor and thus, missing something. No, it was always best to sit in the front.Once she was seated, she made sure that she had everything that she needed and placed it neatly on top of her desk. While waiting for class to begin, she browsed through her book. She had already looked through it last night, but it was nevertheless fascinating and she was sure that she would need to know this class for future purposes. She had already grilled her dad on what classes he had needed in order to become a mediwizard. Yes, this was incredibly valuable.
She didn’t have to wait long for class to begin, as the professor, who turned out to be the deputy, seemed punctual. Aislinn wrote down ever word that the professor said. She could certainly understand that the subject could be extremely complicated. It made sense that it would be given the complexity involved in reforming a structure. She thought of all the molecules that had to shift in order to make it possible. She added the idea to the right side of her notes where she liked to add personal thoughts and additional material.
Aislinn continued to think about that as they were presented with their assignment to change a shoelace to a ribbon. The basic structure was the same, which would be helpful. The length would be able to stay the same since a ribbon could come in any length. The color would also be able to stay the same so she could discard that for now. Her main focus would be on the texture. The shoelace was one of the flatter types rather than rounded. Again, that was helpful. So, she would need to make it thinner and more like satin. She wrote that down as well.
Now, if she were to make it thinner, would it be better to make it wider as well with the idea that the molecules were just rearranging or would it be easier to keep the width, but picture the molecules just becoming smaller in order to take up less space? It was an experiment of sorts, because the easiest way to transfigure the shoelace to a ribbon would be to make it the simplest way. She decided to try to make it wider, allowing the molecules to stay the same, but to simply shift them. After all, in water, ice, and steam, molecules shifted naturally. It would be best to try and keep them in a more natural state.
Aislinn decided to focus on the widening before anything else. She performed the spell a few times before getting it just right. Once she was satisfied with the thinness of the shoelace/ribbon, she turned her attention to the texture. She wasn’t sure how else to make it silkier other than to will it. If she thought about the molecules, it went beyond anything that she had learned in school. Molecules naturally changed the texture based on how tightly or loosely the bonds were formed. Did any of that hold true here?
Maybe? Ribbon wasn’t as strong as a shoelace. She thought of the molecule bonds become looser as she performed the spell. She pictured the shoelace becoming silkier, more ribbon-like. The first time, it didn’t do much other than making it look like more of a fancy shoelace. She tried again. Each time brought her closer to her goal. It seemed to even be getting easier.
Pausing, Aislinn wrote down some other thoughts in her notes. She was in the moment of processing, allowing her quill to twirl back and forth between her fingers. Unfortunately, her thoughts were interrupted when her quill went flying. “Uh, oh,” she whispered. She hoped she didn’t ruin someone else’s work. The quill landed under another student’s desk. Shaking her head at her own stupidity, she went to fetch it. “Excuse me, my quill is under your chair.”
0
Aislinn Nicolls, Aladren
Playing with molecules.
297
Aislinn Nicolls, Aladren
0
5
John Umland, Aladren
January 23, 2015 1:43 PM
Isn't it awesome? by John Umland, Aladren
In his first year, Transfiguration had rapidly become John’s either (depending on the day and how frustrated he was with the Care of Magical Creatures textbook) favorite or second-favorite class. The other subjects had their high points - the creativity required for Charms, the precision of Potions, the ego boost of learning a new jinx or hex in Defense Against the Dark Arts - but Transfiguration combined all their virtues, and in a way which was just. so…....There was a word. John knew there was a word. He just didn’t know what the word was. Whatever it was, though, it was a positive word. Everything seemed to just fit together. He knew there were still massive gaps in his knowledge, which was why he had faith that he just didn’t understand yet when something didn’t seem to match up, but it all made enough sense that it awed him - along with, of course, the fact that it worked physically as well as in his head. Scientists could use a particle accelerator and an exorbitant amount of electricity to turn one element into another, but usually not in useful quantities. John, a twelve-year-old with a grade six education, could create full-sized, complex things with one word. True, his current best conclusion, after arguing a lot about it with both himself and other people over the summer, was that what they did in class was just molecular manipulation, not actually, as he had thought last year, nuclear transmutation, which was why he thought they just (to use his mother’s terms; John thought he might almost understand what they meant, now, even though Mom had looked at him funny when he'd tried to explain about molecules and last year's Defense classes implying the soul was a physical thing. Mom was pretty strictly a liberal arts person and didn't understand about elements and chemical bonds and stuff) changed the accidents and not the essence, sort of like making a temporary magnet, and the changes didn’t last, but still - even the most modest conclusion he had been able to draw still left him routinely doing something not unlike catalyzing and inhibiting untold thousands of chemical reactions at once. With his brain. And a stick. Which, no matter how complicated he’d ended up speculating that wands might really be by the end of the summer, was still unspeakably insanely awesome.
He had been looking forward to getting back to it all summer, but as he approached the Transfiguration classroom door, he hesitated. He had loved it last year, but...what if he got bored this year because of the first years? He had gotten bored a lot in his other classes because of the first year curriculum last year and he'd been a first year. He didn’t want to ruin his good opinion of this class, one of the two that least often let him down, now. Since he was pretty sure Professor Skies would not accept his argument as valid, though, he went in anyway and found a seat, looking for one which opened toward the wall, with only one neighbor. Ideally, he would have liked to have had the wall both behind and beside him, but the back row was supposed to be for bad kids, so the middle aisles were what he usually aimed for. That was the territory where he could do almost whatever he liked, happily ignored by everybody most of the time. Today, though, all the aisle-ending seats were near the front and he frowned as he took one of them instead.
John did smile a little, though, when Professor Skies mentioned how dangerous the subject was and took one of the charts she handed out out of habit. When they were released to work, though - thankfully doing something at least a little harder than what the first years had been assigned; there wasn't really any new theory, but the task itself was demanding enough to hold his attention for a while - he began writing on his own parchment instead, the metal tip of his dip pen scratching a little against the surface.
Transfiguration: Cordone.
He put his pen down and rummaged in his bag until he came up with his dictionary, which he opened to the ‘r’s. A ribbon was a long, narrow strip, usually of fabric but sometimes of something else. He wrote that down, then added, Twig: a small shoot/branch, usually without leaves. For this, a small, roughly cylindrical piece of wood. He flipped to ‘w.’ Wood: Hard, fibrous substance that makes up most of stems, branches, roots beneath bark.
He twirled the twig between his fingers, thinking, then started to sketch what he remembered about plant cells: hard cell walls, wobbly rectangles in most of the slides and diagrams he had seen, with a big vacuole in the center which was surrounded by organelles. Plant biology was not the subject he knew best, but he thought it would do. Next to that, he drew a cross-hatch pattern, which he labeled weaving - cloth.
If there was a specific fabric ribbons were usually made from, though, he didn’t know it. He knew his mom had tied them in his sister’s hair sometimes when Julian was younger, but borrowing one of Julian’s to tie together something he hadn’t expected would need tying together was as much interest as he had ever taken in ribbons. He was lucky enough to have been born in an era when it did not seem it was fashionable for guys to wear their hair long enough for ribbons, though John thought he'd keep his that way whether it was stylish or not since he thought long hair just looked inconvenient and couldn't understand why his sister and mother didn't cut theirs off. Cotton, though, was a plant fiber. If he could turn the cell walls into threads, getting the energy to do it with from (he thought) the breaking of the chemical bonds holding the atoms together in twig compounds, he thought it would work. Cotton: Soft fiber, he added, wondering how that would affect the Transfiguration. Was it harder to be hard or to be soft? He looked up fiber: a thread, thread-like object, or long, tapering, thick-walled plant cell. Okay, that helped. He started writing again, copying some topics down now from the basic Transfiguration chart.
Size: Ribbon will be longer, but wider than twig. Imagine twig being unrolled - shape: flat vs. cylindrical. Colour: - He thought for a moment - this was not one of the parts of Transfiguration he was better at - and then wrote white just for simplicity’s sake. Cotton was white, peeling back a bit of the bark on his twig revealed that its wood was light, and he was sure he was a little out of practice after a whole summer of barely being able to use his wand at all.
He didn’t know, and didn’t know how he could find out, if the equations would balance at all, but since state of Arizona was still not a sheet of glass despite people who didn’t have that information Transfiguring things every day, he assumed he wasn’t going to be the one to blow it up. He hypothesized that if the bonds breaking did not produce enough energy to complete the transformation, the wand would provide some (somehow - either pulling it from the environment or generating it or just using what was built up, since apparently, they sometimes built some up), and that if the bonds breaking produced too much energy, the excess would be absorbed by the wand, maybe a little get discharged as thermal energy through it. His wand did get a little warm sometimes, though it had yet to burn him. He wasn’t sure what was scarier about that, the implications about how magic worked or the implications about how wands might work, but since he was aware of not knowing enough to really speculate about either, they both unnerved him a little when he thought about them too much. He’d looked for an old cracked wand he might cut open, the better to figure out how that half of the equation worked, in the junk shops over the summer and had spotted a few, but hadn’t been able to solve the problem of Mom still not thinking he was old enough to roam freely in town, which rendered him virtually incapable of making purchases without her knowledge and approval, which he’d known that project wouldn’t get.
He didn’t have time to think about it too much now, though, because a glance up at the room showed him that a lot of his classmates had already stopped writing and started casting.
John’s main difficulty in gaining control had been learning to cast spells with his eyes open. Casting spells, especially more complicated ones like Transfiguration spells, usually went better if his mind was completely on just the spell, and the problem was that his mind was almost never that quiet. When he could see, there was a whole world of things to distract him from what he was supposed to be focused on. Fury, terror, and the written word could make him focus, but none of them really helped with the crucial time it took to wave his wand and pronounce an incantation. He had gotten the problem more or less in hand by the end of first year, but it had been all summer since then, so he gingerly picked up his wand and gave it a warning look.
“Work with me on this,” he muttered. He had a friend who talked to computers and he’d once heard Mom talking to some containers she was trying to make fit into a cabinet, so he didn’t think it was that strange. Squinting, he tried to picture the process - the twig splitting and flattening first, then the cells hollowing out, extending into a woven pattern as they turned into cloth and stretched out longer - he needed the twig to go through while performing the wand movement and saying, “Cordone,” all the while desperately trying not to think of a cord instead of a ribbon.
He failed. The twig did begin to look fabric-like, but also still twisted into a cylinder - like a cord. He dutifully wrote down his results and where he had gone wrong and then started over.
Attempt Two: he wrote after finishing his second try. Process successful. Threads in long, wide, flat arrangement. Problem: Too loosely-woven to be of any use.
The weave had come into existence, but hadn’t tightened up, leaving empty spaces between threads. It was like the world’s most boring piece of lace, as all the patterns were neat rectangles. John looked at the sleeve of his robe, picking up the hem and pulling it closer to his eyes to study the weave of a real piece of fabric. The places where each thread went over the one beneath it, or under the one beside it, seemed to make tiny rectangles similar to the rectangles of cell walls….
Before he could do try again, though, he noticed a person. Girl person. One of the first years in the House. Her quill had somehow ended up under his chair. "Right," he said, then shook his head, edged the chair out a bit, and reached down to retrieve what he assumed was the quill in question. "This one?" he asked, offering it back to her. "Welcome to the House, by the way. I'm John - the second year Aladren. Having any luck with your shoelace?" It was uncomfortable, trying to chat casually with someone he didn't know, but he felt obliged to try to be nice and welcoming to the new Aladrens.
16
John Umland, Aladren
Isn't it awesome?
285
John Umland, Aladren
0
5
Aislinn
February 02, 2015 7:38 PM
Undoubtedly so. by Aislinn
“Yes, thank you,” Aislinn answered, taking the quill. She had every intention of going back to her work. Partly so she didn’t bother the boy with his work, but mostly because she found no need to actually try to socialize with other people. However, the boy continued to speak and introduce himself, which meant that she was going to be forced to be polite and introduce herself. “Nice to meet you, John. I’m Aislinn Nicolls of the Pennsylvania Nicolls.” She didn’t really have to add the last part, but she wanted to sound as grown up as possible since she was talking to an older boy, a second. She wanted to establish that she should be treated as an equal despite being younger.Besides, she should probably get used to it. Her grandparents were always trying to get her and Sutton to introduce themselves that way, because it was considered the proper way to do so. She wasn’t really concerned with the proprieties of it all, but she wanted to someday work in her grandparents’ hospital as a mediwizard like her father and she knew that her grandparents were very concerned with keeping up appearances. It was apparently important to impress the purebloods, but keep connections open with everyone else. She wasn’t really sure why, but it was the way it was for a reason.
“Oh, I was able to get the texture and size about right. I haven’t tried changing the color or anything. I thought that leaving it the same color would be easiest, but I suppose I should try to change it since it would be more of a challenge.” She didn’t add that it would most likely get her the best grade possible and really she wanted to have the best grade in the class. It didn’t seem the appropriate thing to say, especially to an Aladren since he was probably trying to get the top grade as well. “How is your work progressing?” She looked over to his desk to see what he had done. It was a simple question, but it would determine how her work was in comparison.
0
Aislinn
Undoubtedly so.
297
Aislinn
0
5
John
February 06, 2015 9:29 AM
Difficult, but rewarding. by John
The formal introduction Aislinn Nicolls offered was not a form John had ever heard before he came to Sonora, but it was one he had heard people offer each other more than a few times since then. The main thing those people all seemed to have in common was being Americans (he had, happily, managed to avoid encounters with the type back home, so he didn't know if the Canadian ones did so as well; he supposed hoping that if they did, they were at least the ones who’d invented it was patriotism) who’d refer to themselves as having ‘pure’ blood. This made them sound to him rather like a species of talking showdogs, a comparison that started feeling less like a comparison when he thought about how they apparently really did breed their relatives like livestock.No such efforts had gone into arranging the situation which ended with John on the face of the planet, and he was pretty sure (given that at five, he’d still been completely illiterate, poorly socialized, and come with a Squib brother) that his parents hadn’t imagined they were investing in much of a pedigree when they took him in. They would have both had to be completely delusional to imagine his original surname was anything to brag about, much less brag about so much that he made a point of telling everyone where he was from so they didn’t get him confused with any of those low-rent other People of Surname, and he thought his parents were about as sane as any people who’d raised five kids could be. He also thought they were as good as or better than anyone else’s parents, which made the tendency of the talking showdogs to look down on them both because Mom was Muggleborn just one of those things that really annoyed him. The assumption that genealogy was supposed to tell something about a person didn’t do much for his temper, either.
“Good for you,” he said, his tone and expression both bland.
He did not offer up his own surname or the fact that he was from the Canadian province of Alberta. This seemed like as good a test for new acquaintances as any. Those who acted snotty could be safely dismissed, but the others might be secretly sane people whose parents were just complete morons. A year’s observation made him think some of the kids might really not be that bad, or at least might have the potential not to be….
His opinion of Pennsylvania Aislinn improved a bit when she said she wanted to make the work more challenging. “Transfiguration’s good for that,” he said. “You can always push it a little further...anyway, I haven’t figured out where the end point is yet.” There had to be one - they were not gods - but he thought it would be a few more years before he figured it out. In his last year at home, it had sometimes taken a deliberate effort not to reach out and experiment with what he could do, an effort which had felt about as natural as doing everything with one hand tied behind his back (John refused to be one of those wizards who couldn’t get out of a paper bag without using a spell, but he’d been born able to use magic the same as he’d been born with two hands, and could, to the occasional confusion of adults, do most things besides write with his weaker hand, even preferring it for some tasks), but his level of control hadn’t progressed as fast as he would have liked since he got to school and the freedom to practice all he liked. Case in point, his twig-ribbon.
“It’s...progressing,” he said, looking at the widely-spaced threads. “I defined my terms before I started - “ he pointed to his sheet of notes - “and I got this from, er, working with the definition of ‘fiber’ and what I remember about the structure of plant cells. It’ll work eventually - I was looking at how this - “ he plucked at his sleeve - “works to revise the visualization when you dropped your pen.” He glanced at her ribbon. Texture and size. Texture was surface - the same substance could have different textures, depending on what was done to it. Size change might be explained several ways - multiplicative magic, which he’d only read about in his sister’s textbooks but thought the rest of them might perform on a small scale in sometimes, or just stretching charms of some kind - if the substance remained consistent and the upper layer was - smoothed out, or just that was Transfigured - was there a spell to test the internal consistency of their products?
He picked up his pen, wanting to write it all down so he could remember to write his mom to ask, but remembered in time that he was talking to someone else right now. "Texture and size - that's interesting," he said. "Are you aiming for a specific new fabric or for those changes?" That wasn't exactly what he wanted to ask, though. "I mean - how are you defining 'ribbon'?" he asked. "What's the quality that makes a ribbon instead of a shoelace - like I got a rope-thing the first time I tried it, because the spell made me think of cord - cords are twisted, ribbons are flat - but shoelaces can be either...."
16
John
Difficult, but rewarding.
285
John
0
5
Aislinn
February 23, 2015 6:55 PM
That it is. by Aislinn
When John pointed to his sheet, Aislinn leaned in a bit further to read it. She was curious to see what kind of work a second year was doing, but when he mentioned the structure of plant cells, she glanced at him a bit in shock before it changed to one of delight. Even if he was overall competition, the ability to discuss such matters with someone was a wonderful change of pace from those she had gone to school with previously. “Changing from a twig is definitely a bit more challenging given that you’re going from a completely different structure due to the cell wall. It’s rather rigid. Perhaps, if you focus on getting rid of that, it will give you the flexibility you need for an overall change?”She wasn’t sure if what she said made sense to him or not and it was something that she felt that she would have to do further research to truly be able to present as possibility, but questions were always the starting point to any experiment. Perhaps, one day she would present a thesis in the basis of transfiguration. She could see it now, something along the lines of transfiguring the DNA of cells in order to manipulate them to perform other functions. Of course, at this point in time, she had no idea how this would actually be feasible or even how to go about such a thing, but again, it was just a starting point and something to think about for the future.
Aislinn thought for a moment on what John asked. “Well, a shoelace usually isn’t as flat as a ribbon. At least, I think so. Although, some shoes do use ribbons for laces, but overall, I think the ribbon tends to be flatter. But you are right that it is a loose definition. Specifically, I would say that the shoelace can be lengthened by repositioning the molecules and And maybe the texture could be dependent on the closeness of that positioning. Now, the color could be more difficult, because biologically speaking, color isn’t just dependent on positioning, but rather an actual genetic function. So, I’m not quite sure how to account for that. Any thoughts?”
0
Aislinn
That it is.
297
Aislinn
0
5
John
February 25, 2015 5:16 PM
One of my favorite things to do. by John
John blinked in surprise when Pennsylvania Aislinn seemed at familiar with at least the concept of cell walls. Her introduction suggested she was one of Them, but he didn’t think They usually knew such things….“Could,” he acknowledged.
Or, he thought, he could end up with a puddle of translucent goo on his desk, either because he sometimes over-did it (Transfiguration took a good bit of energy to complete, but also a high level of control over its application, and John did not reliably have that yet. Sometimes he had a feather when he needed a feather and a hammer when he needed a hammer, but at other times, using magic felt like trying to use one and looking down at the last minute to find the other in his hand, and swinging a hammer when he needed to place a feather just so was as useless as dropping a feather when he needed to swing a hammer) or because of unknown factors arising from him thinking on that level when he really didn’t know the physical properties of either wood or fabric that well. That was the kind of problem he ran into a lot. Magic seemed to function similarly, in one way at least, to how he’d read that computers did over the summer while researching more secure ways to encode his letters and personal notebooks: it did what he told it to do, which was not necessarily what he wanted it to do. Not yet, anyway….
His thoughts ran on, moving further and further away from the word he’d spoken, speeding toward charmswork. He tried to reel them back in, if only so he could communicate meaningfully and with passable grammar.
“Since I’ve already got it to threads, though, I was thinking – “ he pointed to his sleeve. “Weaving looks like a lot of tiny rectangles, yeah? So do cells all together, like this.” He pointed to the rough drawing of plant cells he’d put in his notes earlier. “I thought of trying to use that….” He paused for a moment, another thought occurring to him. “But now I don’t think that’ll work,” he finished abruptly. “Because each thread is a whole thread. I’d end up with a gazillion tiny pieces of thread and I don’t even know if that would turn back into a stick after.”
Now he wanted to know, though. He wasn’t totally sure it would refrain from exploding, though, so he decided not to try it on purpose right now. The Gardens, as far as he could tell, had been made just so students could try out things that might explode in relative safety and privacy, and he’d spent five years studying how to get around out of doors, so being in a maze didn’t bother him that much. He usually just remembered the way that he’d come, but trusted in his ability to find his way out again even if he forgot the details of how he’d gotten in for some reason.
Aislinn’s thoughts on the difference between ribbons and shoelaces seemed to concur with his – more or less. “Color’s probably – artificial? Most cloth is dyed, right? It’s not naturally this.” He pointed to his green sleeve again. “That’s adding an element.” Which reminded him of another definition of ‘element,’ which reminded him of what she’d said about her Transfiguration plan. “Molecules – so I guess you’re keeping it the same fabric? Might need to be careful with that, make sure you’re not just…stretching, changing the size, since that’s Charms.” Which raised a new question in his mind: Transfiguration was molecular manipulation, which gave him interesting thoughts about possible limits on what could be transfigured and into what, but if the molecules remained of the same kind they were – could that be the difference between Transfiguration and Charms, put into scientific terms instead of philosophical ones? Maybe Mom would know; he would have to do some more reading and write to her….
16
John
One of my favorite things to do.
285
John
0
5
Aislinn
February 27, 2015 12:07 AM
Quite an interesting discussion. by Aislinn
Aislinn’s head tilted while listening to his thought process and she nodded when it abruptly changed. “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you are on the right track. Maybe if you use the weaving pattern, it would work, because then each one would account for the individual cell? Unless, you just go by the twig having natural fibers and do it that way? Like not going into as much depth?” That was probably an odd thing for her to say given that she had a tendency to overthink. It was part of what made her entire existence. The inane amount of questioning. The thinking and coming to a conclusion and rethinking and coming to another conclusion. The ability to think of many different paths, but now, maybe it was over thinking. Maybe?Aislinn blushed a little when John pointed out that the color would most likely be artificial. It was a bit of an embarrassment to make such a mistake among a fellow Aladren. “Of course, it would be artificial in this case. I was getting ahead of myself and thinking about living things, which would have the color be within the DNA. But in theory, even in a living creature, it should be a relative easy color change if you’re going on the idea that it’s dye-able.” It made sense given that people could easily dye their hair using makeup charms, but then, that went more into Charms than into Transfiguration.
She thought for a moment on what he asked in regards to keeping the same fabric. Would it be more like Charms? “Well, I suppose it would work similar to water. When water molecules come together in a tighter arrangement, you get ice, which changes the form. And when they are in a looser arrangement, they become gas. So, I suppose with the fabric, it would be changing it into a different form of the fabric instead of changing it into a completely new fabric. But you think that’s more into Charms?” She paused for a moment in thought. It was all becoming rather complicated. “Transfiguration and Charms have quite a few similarities. Perhaps, they’re interdependent? Or maybe it’s just different in approach?”
Or maybe not. She had read that Transfiguration was more scientific based while Charms was based more in creativity. So, Transfiguration was like science so this should be easier. Charms was more like art and she had never done well in that class. It was something about the creativity part. She didn’t like the whole baring your soul sort of thing. She didn’t like putting how she felt on display. It was easier to put thoughts on display. There was less to criticize. It was more based in having an opinion or an idea and supporting it with fact. As long as you could put fact to it, there wasn’t much that could be argued with. Anything creative was subjective. She didn’t like it at all.
0
Aislinn
Quite an interesting discussion.
297
Aislinn
0
5