...in a galaxy far, far away. on Transfiguration

Professor Skies

August 30, 2017 10:21 PM

Intermediates - a long, long time ago... by Professor Skies

"Good morning, and welcome or welcome back to intermediate transfiguration," Selina greeted her newly assembled third, forth and fifth years. Every year, it came as something of a shock to see students who still seemed freshly sorted, still seemed like new faces to her, stepping up into the middle class.

She began with handing out a syllabus for the term, giving a few details on the topics they would be covering. Switching spells got quite a large unit, as did the theories but not the practical side of vanishing and conjuring, all of which tied in with animate to animate transfiguration, which would form the bulk of the work.

"Today, we will be looking at living things but we'll be starting small, looking at plants. We will also be learning about the impact of evolution on spell difficulty.

"Now, who can tell me what the theory of evolution is?" she asked. She took responses from a couple of students, guiding and rephrasing anything that wasn't quite right, until she felt they'd got a pretty accurate summary.

"Now, when we look at any living thing, we can also examine its evolution. With plants, for example, very simple ones like algae and lichens evolved first, and they have remained virtually unchanged ever since. It's unsurprising that these plant forms are much simpler than others -for example, they lack a vascular system, that is a vein structure for distributing water throughout the plant. We can therefore use knowledge of species evolution to predict, to some degree, how difficult a transfiguration will be. Of course, there are many other factors -can you give me some examples? " she asked. The subject of what made different transformations easy or difficult had been covered very thoroughly at beginner level, and so this was just a quick recap to check they were all still awake. "To start this lesson, I want you to read pages one and two of this handout, which details the different evolutionary stages of plant life, and will help you have a greater understanding of the different structures involved in the plants you are creating today. Your homework will be to read the rest, which discusses the evolution of marine and animal life on earth. There are some attached questions for you to complete," she sent a stack of papers around the room with a wave of her wand.
"Today, we will all be starting with a piece of cloth, but third years will be making lichens, forth years will be making ferns and fifth years will be making orchids. Lichens use short brisk wand motions, ferns soft fluttering ones, and orchids a flowing motion," she demonstrated each of these, taking particular care to go slowly and have the students practise with her for the latter two, both of which were a bit more complex. "There are some catchall spells for creating plants, and we'll look into those more in future lessons. They come in handy if you don't know the Latin name for the plant you're trying to create. However, using its name as the spell will make your work easier, and as you have those available to you today, I suggest you use them," she gestured to the shelf at the back, where there were a variety of nature books. "I leave it up to each of you to choose your own particular variety of the plants I have mentioned. You may begin."

OOC - feel free to answer the questions posed, just make sure another student hasn't already given the same information. You may also include details that your character is reading in the handout, and there are plenty of online resources to do with plant evolution to give you quotations, should you wish.

Subthreads:

There was a horse. And then there was a pegasus. by Ben Pierce, Pecari with Kyte Collindale, Pecari

I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.. by Emerald Brockert,Aladren with Amelia Layne, Aladren

...I saw some grey-green stuff on a tree. by Simon Mordue, Crotalus

...in a galaxy far, far away. by Joseph Umland, Teppenpaw

0 Professor Skies Intermediates - a long, long time ago... 26 Professor Skies 1 5

Ben Pierce, Pecari

August 31, 2017 4:48 PM

There was a horse. And then there was a pegasus. by Ben Pierce, Pecari

Ben entered the Transfiguration room with a bit of trepidation. It was now his fifth year, which was basically synonymous with CATS. Of all his classes, Transfiguration was the one one he felt the least confident about. This was very likely going to be his last year taking it, but first he needed to squeak in an A on the exam.

He was one of the taller kids in the class now, so he took a seat at the back, not wanting to block anyone's view of the board. (Well, hoping not to draw too much notice to his decidedly mediocre spell work also played a roll, but if anyone asked, it was totally because he was tall.)

Most transfiguration theory flew like a snitch way over his head (and was just as elusive sometimes) so he was surprised when he actually could answer her first question. He had nothing against his girlfriend winning Prefect this year, he was super proud of her and happy for her success, but the though had crossed his mind that maybe he hadn't gotten it because her grades were better.

He maybe wasn't as brilliant as an Aladren, but he hoped his peers didn't think he was dumb. So he raised his hand, hoping to show the professor and his classmates that he wasn't as much as an idiot as his past grades in this subject may have indicated, and answered, "The theory of evolution is that over time - like hundreds of generations - living things slowly change as the strong ones survive and the ones with less favorable traits die off before making babies, and the species as a whole adapts to their environment and improves their chances of survival and sometimes become a whole new species from what they started as. Like horses becoming pegasuses. Pegases? Pegasi? Winged horses." He thought that was pretty close to how his mom explained it when they'd gone to the zoo and the subject had sort of come up. Mom was a doctor so she ought to know. She probably knew the plural of a pegasus, too, but that wasn't really the important part today.

He listened to the rest of the lecture, and it seemed to make sense. Cool. So far he was on top of this. Okay, yes, it was still the first day and there were little kids in the class who had been beginners just a few months ago, but there was a lot to be said for starting off on a high note. Get a running start and all that.

As he began flipping through a book on flowers, trying to find a good orchid to make, he asked his neighbor, "What do you say when there's more than one Pegasus, anyway?" It was probably something he'd never need to know ever again, but it was bugging him and he wanted to know.

1 Ben Pierce, Pecari There was a horse. And then there was a pegasus. 339 Ben Pierce, Pecari 0 5

Kyte Collindale, Pecari

September 19, 2017 9:59 AM

And then mental nudity by Kyte Collindale, Pecari

Oh, Merlin, he got it already. They had exams. It was like the teachers thought that they’d all somehow managed to tune out the past four years (which, ok, was maybe like… up to eighty percent accurate in his case but whatever) and hadn’t realised that their fifth year classmates were doing them. He knew. They didn’t need to remind him every five damn minutes that this year ‘really counted.’ What was that meant to mean anyway? Had they just been going through the motions for four years, had none of that mattered? (Again, in his case, eighty percent yes, but still - whatever!). He’d already invented a game to make it bearable. Every time a teacher mentioned the CATS, he was allowed to mentally remove an item of clothing from the nearest attractive classmate. He’d started out with ‘mentally undress a classmate’ but the teachers mentioned CATS so often that it was getting a bit much, although it had made him consider some of the boys more than he had before. He still thought the girls were more interesting, in that he knew what naked boys looked like already but not naked girls, but if any of them wanted to do it for real, he didn’t think he’d be particularly picky.

He took a seat next to Ben (who whilst frequently nearby and not a bad looking person was given the mental privilege of keeping all his clothes on - a distinction he shared only with Raine). He was surprised when Ben raised his hand. Not that Ben was thick, obviously - Ben was the entire reason Kyte ever passed anything. Just, on the whole, he and Ben weren’t in-class-question kind of people. What proceeded to come out Ben’s mouth then sounded so exactly like something a teacher would say that Kyte almost did a double take. He’d expected the question to need a one or two word answer at best. That had been a paragraph. He pretty much gave up trying to concentrate on the class at that point because a) it was way over his head b) clearly Ben was capable of explaining it later, if need be.

When they were set to work, Ben asked what he said in response to winged horses.

“I say hot damn, wanna go for a ride,” he grinned.

He picked up a nature book, turning to the back. Professor Skies had patiently taught him the concept of an index during their academic support classes. As it made the time spent dealing with books considerably shorter, it was a piece of information that had stuck, although when it was something like looking through the nature books, he didn’t mind sometimes just flicking through the pages and getting merrily distracted by all the other cool things.

He ran his finger down the list, past orchid (which he mentally pronounced along the same lines as the place where apples were grown, dismissing it as such), searching under O-R-K.

“I don’t think there’s any in here. Why’d she bring us this book if it doesn’t have the flowers we need in it?” he sighed. “What did you find?”

13 Kyte Collindale, Pecari And then mental nudity 335 Kyte Collindale, Pecari 0 5

Emerald Brockert,Aladren

October 18, 2017 5:25 PM

I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.. by Emerald Brockert,Aladren

Emerald was really looking forward to being an Intermediate this year. It was so exciting to be moving on to more challenging and more interesting topics. Okay, so she would have to be in the same room as Lily Spencer, but she tried not to focus on that as the other girl was not worth it. The Aladren had decided to take a page from Ruby's book and look at the positives, albeit not for the sake of itself. That just wasn't her. She did,however, take care to sit far away from Lily and then forgot her existence while she was immersed in learning.

It was nice having her sister here now. They had always been close though that didn't necessarily mean Emerald was going to spend every moment with her. She still wanted to have her own life and friends and she wanted that for Ruby too. However, she was going to do her best to make the first year feel at home here. Well, okay, not home as in their home with their mass of siblings and somewhat neglectful mother but comfortable. Emerald hoped Ruby would make lots of friends and that nobody would mess with her. If that happened she would have to step in. And said person would be lucky she had done it and not waited for Topaz to show up. Topaz was vile to them all but Emerald was pretty sure the nine year old would use tormenting her siblings as an excuse to be vile to someone else. And that person would be sorry as Topaz had a mean streak larger than Professor O'Malley's pregnant belly.

Of course, there was also the fact that their grandfather was the Headmaster and he could certainly be intimidating to most people. The third year wasn't all that worried though as Ruby was such a sweet person that Emerald couldn't imagine anyone not liking her.

Class began and Professor Skies handed them the syllabus. Transfiguration was a favorite class of Emerald's. It was always so informative and interesting. She jotted down a few notes on evolution, even though she did know what it was though not the exact theory. What Ben said was pretty close to what she knew. Briefly, Emerald wondered about such a thing with regards to humans. Sure, they all had bodies that were similar, some shorter or taller, thinner or fatter with different hair, eye and skin colors, but they all had the same internal organs and the Aladren figured that those with health issues that were caused by heredity didn't make it to have more children with those issues but then again some people were only carriers because they had had those children to start with. Not to mention physical ailments not caused by heredity that left people able to live well into adulthood and capable of having kids such as asthma.

Emerald wondered whether Jemima Wolseithcrafte was grateful for that one or not. She knew the seventh year to have a relatively large family, only one child less than her own set of siblings, but maybe it was different to be a fourth child than a first.

However, what she was really curious about with regards to evolution was personality characteristics. If they were similar to physical characteristics surely "weak" personalities would die out but what exactly was considered a "weak" personality? Someone not very forceful? Or shy? Or kind? And what was so great about "stronger" personality types? Some people with strong ones were in all actuality horrible people. Even though Emerald herself wasn't exactly unfailingly kind herself, she knew that it was better to be kind and sweet like Ruby or Owen than an evil brat like Topaz. People like her younger sister were the sorts to seek power and take over and ultimately destroy the meeker or softer types and that wasn't a good thing. A world run by someone like Topaz was a rather awful thought.

She turned to the person next to her. "What do you think? Do you think evolution applies to personality?" Maybe they had some answers and a spirited intellectual conversation was something she'd enjoy.

11 Emerald Brockert,Aladren I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.. 358 Emerald Brockert,Aladren 0 5

Amelia Layne, Aladren

October 21, 2017 6:39 PM

La-da-di-da-da-di-da-da. by Amelia Layne, Aladren

Amelia’s first two years at Sonora had been, all things considered, delightful. There had been hiccups like losing Quidditch matches and forgetting the odd homework assignment, but nothing serious. Her lessons had come easily to her, getting along with her classmates and roommates had come easily to her, nothing too dramatic had happened in her family, and everything had been generally good.

This was why Amelia was not, if she was to be honest, particularly enamored of the prospect of joining Intermediate classes. Logically she knew the lessons were sequenced and divided up and such, but she couldn’t quite get past the fact that they were still lessons where they fifth years would be in the same room as her. They were the first classes, too, that really ‘counted’ – if she screwed up her lessons now, she could screw up her whole life. That was unlikely, of course, but what was likely was that she was going to have to work a lot harder to maintain the same level of performance now, a thought she didn’t meet with the unbridled enthusiasm she thought most would think her House meant she should – though why they would do so, Amelia could scarcely guess. Yes, Aladrens were supposed to love learning, but they were also supposed to be logical, and that meant that the path which promoted the greatest rewards with the least efforts, to her way of thinking.

Of course, in fairness, she had to acknowledge a couple of things. One was that she was not exactly applying formal logic to the problem. Another was that it was entirely possible that other Aladrens simply didn’t perceive an increase in difficulty – that she wasn’t in her House so much because she was of a type as because she wasn’t of three other types. She preferred not to think too much about that, though, and luckily, Intermediate classes gave her plenty of other topics to put her mind to.

One was the theory of evolution. Amelia nodded through the introductory remarks and looked at the cloth she was supposed to be turning into lichen, thinking this task probably wouldn’t be that bad, but that the fifth years were doomed. Amelia admittedly knew little about orchids except that they were infamously finicky and hard to keep alive and that some people collected them, but even this was enough to know that they looked more like miniature trees than like any sort of handkerchief….

She was distracted from this line of thinking by Emerald. “I…huh,” said Amelia, thinking about the question and trying to quickly organize some ideas. Her first thought was God, I hope not - she loved her family, but there was no denying that Mama was kind of a head case, Lionel was too easygoing for his own good, Granddad and Grandmother and Aunt Emily and Uncle Geoff and Alicia were all a bit neurotic, and God alone knew what sort of person Amelia’s father had been. Then she realized that was heredity, not evolution, and that in fairness, she couldn’t argue that line – more than half of those people had managed to reproduce, after all, and Alicia presumably at least occasionally did things that could at least in theory have that result. That left her to look quickly for a new line, which she fortunately was able to find before she made herself look stupid taking one of the first ones that had occurred to her.

“I guess it depends – kind of – on what you mean ‘personality’?” she said. That didn’t make sense, though – did it? “I mean, personality’s a lot of things put together, right? And you have to teach babies how to behave or they don’t know, so some of what we just – naturally do, if you keep naturally doing it that way, then you aren’t going to get along with people and that means you’re probably not going to have babies with them.”

Well, logically, that assumption worked, anyway. However, Amelia’s family history suggested that it didn’t always work that neatly in reality. However, that certainly wasn’t something she was going to discuss with Emerald. Their dormitory worked on a delicate balance, she thought, which involved a lot of not acknowledging that Emerald’s family was doing just fine, Flo’s wasn’t really doing well at all, and Amelia’s didn’t even really exist by the standards of Emerald’s, Flo’s, or Kit’s…..

“What do you think?” she asked.

16 Amelia Layne, Aladren La-da-di-da-da-di-da-da. 360 Amelia Layne, Aladren 0 5

Simon Mordue, Crotalus

October 21, 2017 6:47 PM

...I saw some grey-green stuff on a tree. by Simon Mordue, Crotalus

Last year had been horrible, dreadful, awful, generally no-good, and all-around unpleasant, or so it seemed to Simon now. At the time, of course, he thought that he had only considered the second half of it so; the first half had, honestly, been unremarkable, but the second half had been so dreadful that it had colored his memories of the whole in a tint he could not quite see past anymore. He was careful never to say anything himself, aware that he was not allowed to have opinions really, but he once had heard his parents speaking in severe tones and saying things that implied they, too, were more annoyed about Uncle Nicky disgracing the family than about the shock to his cousins or Aunt Cynthia’s nerves, and Simon agreed with them about that.

Now, though, it was a new year – or a new school year, anyway. Technically it was still the same calendar year that it had been when his sometime uncle had decided on a whim to expatriate himself and discard his wife, sons, and brother, but coming back to school would have marked the beginning of a new section of Simon’s life even if it had not also marked the transition into a new level of his schooling. Since it completed the latter task as well as the former, it was all the better, and he embarked on his new classes determined to distinguish himself well enough that his classmates, at least, would not primarily associate the name Mordue with Uncle Nicky being an idiot.

Part of this would involve making extraordinary efforts in all his classes, but he had decided the best strategy he could apply would be to focus on Potions and Transfiguration in particular. They were often considered the most difficult subjects, which added to the prestige of succeeding in them, and they had the most important teachers, the Deputy Headmistress and a member of Society. Therefore, Simon was careful to look his very best when approaching his first Transfiguration lesson, to sit next to a respectable person, and to look intently over the syllabus when it was handed out, as though nothing could interest him more.

The theory of the lesson sounded like something he was going to have to work long and hard to get his head all the way ‘round, but the task for the day sounded…manageable, anyway. Lichen. That was like the greenish-grey stuff that grew on tree trunks at home, wasn’t it? The bit of cloth he had was blue, which wasn’t too far off from green or grey. He could imagine, too, the threads that made up the weave of the cloth rising up into the textured ridges and bumps of the stuff that grew on tree trunks…the question was just making it alive, and visibly so, without the helpful prop of a bit of tree trunk….

He read the handout, his eyes widening a little at the descriptions. They were actually composites between other things, and also not parasitic? Well, that addressed the lack of tree trunk, though he still didn’t know what they were going to use to hold themselves together if not the surface of his desk. They could live inside solid rock? That was…impressive. They were entire miniature ecosystems?

“This handout makes lichens sound a lot more interesting than our assignment did,” remarked Simon to a neighbor.

16 Simon Mordue, Crotalus ...I saw some grey-green stuff on a tree. 369 Simon Mordue, Crotalus 0 5

Joseph Umland, Teppenpaw

October 21, 2017 10:56 PM

...in a galaxy far, far away. by Joseph Umland, Teppenpaw

Joe didn’t think Ben Pierce was dumb, but he didn’t think Ben Pierce was exactly a scholar, either. Therefore, Joe was slightly surprised when Ben described the theory of evolution about as well as Joe himself could have. Nevertheless, he put his own hand up to add the one more specific word he knew to Ben’s description once the Pecari finished it in order to get his own academic year started on a high, positive-attention-from-teachers note.

“They change through genetic mutation,” he offered. “Which can happen spontaneously – just a copying error in DNA, or RNA, or, er, one of those – “ his semi-recitational tone faltered for a moment, as he had never paid enough attention to John’s rants to distinguish between DNA and RNA in any substantial way, before picking back up – “or which can happen because of something that gets added to the environment – pollution, concentrated magic, whatever.”

This last word also lacked the semi-recitational tone of the rest, and the two which preceded it had an additional note of something akin to weariness. John had an interest in the impact of concentrated magic on birds, an interest he had been pursuing at Sonora for years, and Joe had found himself treated to lectures on said work on an extremely regular basis over the summer. He suspected there were literally hundreds of pages of…stuff…on the topic; at the very least, John’s handwriting had visibly changed between writing the earliest scribbles and writing the later ones, and the early pages were also showing age visibly. He suspected that under the circumstances, and how complicated things still kind of were under the surface even with the family externally re-approaching something resembling homeostasis, John simply hadn’t known what else to say and so had hidden behind facts and the social mask based on a liking for them which John had so painstakingly crafted over the years. Joe could respect that, and so he now knew more than he thought he had ever wanted to about magic and genetics and John’s thoughts on same.

He was suddenly a bit gladder to know it, though, when he got the handout, because he was not sure how his reputation would have looked at the end of class if he had not established that he knew something that only a smart person should know before they got their actual assignment for the day. Orchids. From cloth. The only thing orchids and cloth had in common was that they could be the same colors, as far as he knew – that and cloth that was not wool was generally made from plant fibers, but still. When he retrieved a book, he found some information about orchids, and then his eyes promptly crossed at the sight of all the technical words related to the flowers in question. The only thing that stuck out clearly was that apparently, there were twice as many kinds of orchid in the world as there were birds, and nearly as many orchids as there were bony fish.

Something about this last tidbit struck him as absurd. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was – maybe just the sound of the phrase ‘bony fish.’ He had to admit, when he thought of fish, he tended to sort of take the bones for granted – he didn’t think of eels and sea snakes and whatnot as fish, assuming sea snakes even lacked bones. Didn’t regular snakes have some? He wasn’t sure; herpetology had never really been an interest of his. The lessons Mom called Magical Civilizations when he was at home had involved some really brain-bendy poetry about runespoors and archetypes, but he only remembered that as weird and impractical; poetry wasn’t really thing, and archetypes made him uncomfortable.

Okay. Okay. Breathe. Think. This stuff isn’t relevant – at least not right now. The complexity of the orchid was part of what made it a difficult transfiguration, and eventually he suspected he’d need to understand some of it because of the relation between this and inanimate-to-animate transfiguration, but if he could produce something that looked like an orchid today, he’d be all right. Learning was important, but – well, management was, too, and the best way to manage this situation, with Professor Skies, was to set a smaller goal he could actually reach and then get to the point later. If he could even make it partially organic, or texturally correct…it if it looked right on the surface, but he didn’t really bother with more than that, it might last longer, but that came with its own problems. If it lasted long enough to be inspected, for instance, then any credit that might accrue to him for making something that lasted a bit would vanish. Better, he thought, to aim for the middle, maybe….

Now just to figure out which orchid he should focus on. Picking a specific one would, he thought, make his task somewhat simpler, because he’d know the full Latin name and would be able to work that into the spell. Vanilla, he decided, would be good; he thought he knew what that smelled like, so that would be one more detail he could add – maybe. He didn’t know much about the chemistry of smells, but they had worked on them in charms before, a little, so maybe….

He looked through books until he found the plant in question. The flowers had, it turned out, the additional advantage of being fairly simple-looking by orchid standards, if rather large and, unfortunately, yellow when his bit of cloth was red. He was mildly interested by the fact that apparently, in the wild, they lasted only one day. That probably, he thought, explained something of why vanilla pods were kind of expensive, and real vanilla flavoring. As it wasn’t relevant to the transfiguration, though, he put it aside in favor of rolling the cloth up into a cylinder, propping it up against his textbook, and, with a flowing motion of his wand, incanting “Orchidea planifolia” while looking at the image of the vanilla orchid in the book and trying to keep that in his head above all else – an exercise which ended when someone beside him spoke.

16 Joseph Umland, Teppenpaw ...in a galaxy far, far away. 329 Joseph Umland, Teppenpaw 0 5