Professor Mary Brooding

October 04, 2019 2:15 PM

Professor Mary Brooding

Staff
Subject: Potions
Written by: Turtle

Age in Post: 30
Birthday: August 19

The Second Challenge by Professor Mary Brooding

The goal of the challenge was straightforward: survival. Of course, students would not be allowed to perish, nor really in any threat of doing so, but it did make for an exciting event.

The sprawling deserts of the Mirage Chamber were warm and inviting in many ways, despite the sand that picked up on a magical wind, and the creatures that burrowed beneath the dunes. It was far from a barren desert, but not an oasis either. It was the sort of place that someone might settle were they traveling a great distance across this place and needed to camp out for the night, or for a few days while they took time to reflect. In fact, that was the most common reason for anyone to spend such time in the Mirage Chamber, and precisely the inspiration for the challenge.

With brilliant blue days, fiery dawns and dusks, and cool black nights where every star could be seen above, even the chirping of wildlife amidst the scrubby plants indicated a certain level of tranquility. A weary traveler was as likely to find a glittering hummingbird or a lumbering tortoise as they were to find themselves.

It was also a desert full of opportunity, and there was plenty of material to be collected and used for shelter, food and water, clothes, and potions. The students were asked to do just that. Although they hadn't known exactly where or what environment they would be doing this challenge in, they had been given enough information to know that they would be facing a natural environment with only their wands and each other. The beauty of it all was that students already had it in them to tackle this sort of thing.

Herbology had long since taught them how to find and handle the flora and fauna of the desert, while Care of Magical Creatures had taught them about any other living things they might encounter. Defense Against the Dark Arts had them readied for any less pleasant engagements of either type. Potions meant they were ready to brew for themselves whatever was required for such basic survival - wound care, health care, and even some nutritional care would be possible here. Transfiguration and Charms were ceaselessly helpful in any of these sorts of tasks.

This was an opportunity for every student, whatever their skills or interests, whether they enjoyed the physical activities that went into a challenge like this or the more quiet activities that would be important for any team to work together effectively, to prove themselves. What had they learned so far? What were their abilities? What was their potential? Everyone had something they could do here, and everyone's contribution was critical.

With three hours on the clock and only their wands to help them, students were tasked with collecting materials for and producing a stable shelter of some sort, and enough food (or the means to acquire it) and drink for their entire team, as well as brewing whatever potions they felt would be helpful. Although the students would not be staying overnight or for any extended duration in their fortifications, they had been asked to prepare as if they would be and their scores would come partially from their success in that regard. It was a perfectly feasible task with teams of this size, and the goal was more about how they did it and what they did than whether they could do it at all. With the Mirage Chamber charmed to ensure that multiple teams could enter at the same time but not find each other within or alter anything for the other teams, all of the students were released at the same time.

OOC - Welcome to the challenges! These will be marked in accordance with the guidelines above. As per class posts, each team member’s best post will be scored from 1-5, with each of their other contributions receiving a point - so, getting as many members in as possible is important, but being active and vocal within your team will help too.

As per Quidditch, you do not have to stick to a given posting order.

Bonus points may be given for being extra brilliant, or if a team shows particular use of a subject area over and above what other teams do.
Subthreads:
Team 13 by Professor Mary Brooding with Allegra Brockert, Felipe De Matteo
Team 12 by Professor Mary Brooding with Simon Mordue, Johana Leonie Zauberhexen, Beau Tate
Team 11 by Professor Mary Brooding with Topaz Brockert, Winston Pierce, Jeremy Mordue
Team 10 by Professor Mary Brooding with Zara Jackson, Ivy Brockert, Jezebel Reed-Fischer
Team 9 by Professor Mary Brooding with Katerina Vorontsov, Sophia Priory, Sylvia Mordue
Team 8 by Professor Mary Brooding with Tatiana Vorontsova, Ness
Team 7 by Professor Mary Brooding with Natalie Atwater, Jessica Hayles, Hilda Hexenmeister
Team 6 by Professor Mary Brooding with Isaac Song, Dorian Montoir, Heinrich Hexenmeister
Team 5 by Professor Mary Brooding with Nathaniel Mordue, Kir McLeod
Team 4 by Professor Mary Brooding with Cleo James, Anya Delachene
Team 3 by Professor Mary Brooding with Ellie Alperton, Ruby Brockert, Jasmine
Team 2 by Professor Mary Brooding with Amelia Layne, Peyton O'Malley, Evelyn Stones
Team 1 by Professor Mary Brooding with Freddie Zauberhexen, Caitlin Pierce
***Closed for points.*** (nm) by Professor Mary Brooding-Hawthorne
22 Professor Mary Brooding The Second Challenge 1424 Professor Mary Brooding 1 5

Professor Mary Brooding

October 04, 2019 2:19 PM

Professor Mary Brooding

Staff
Subject: Potions
Written by: Turtle

Age in Post: 30
Birthday: August 19

Team 8 by Professor Mary Brooding

Luke Powell
Tatiana Vorontsov
Jehan Callahan
Michael DiCaprio
Ness McLeod
22 Professor Mary Brooding Team 8 1424 Professor Mary Brooding 0 5

Tatiana Vorontsova

October 10, 2019 8:22 PM

Tatiana Vorontsova

Alumnus
House: Pecari
Written by: Grayson Wright

Age in Post: 15
Birthday: 14/27 July

I am full of ideas! by Tatiana Vorontsova

Tatiana Vorontsova did not, of course, own trousers, and during the first challenge, it had occurred to her that this was a problem. However, where there was a problem, there was generally a solution, and in this case, it had not been difficult for her to figure out what that solution should be. The only question had been in the execution.

At home, there was one person who wore trousers with some frequency these days, and that was her little brother Alexei Andreyeevich. Lyoshka was still young enough to fall in that middle period where trousers as day wear were common, the period between being a small child in short skirts (to make nappy-changing easier for the maids) and being a grown man in full robes most of the time (as an active child who was not big enough to think very clearly could get tangled up in his own feet and hurt himself too easily in them). Unfortunately, though Tatiana was by no means either tall or fat, Alyosha’s trousers were still too small for her to wear as-was, so some last-minute magic had been necessary. An Engorgement Charm had fixed most of the size issues, and hopefully, the Fixing Charms she had put upon them would hold the first enchantments in place long enough for her to get through the challenge. She had tried it out a few times in the past few days and had been able to keep the garment the right size and shape for several hours at a time, so she thought she would at least, in the worst-case scenario where the charms did not hold long enough to finish the challenge, realize her improvised culottes were shrinking and have time to fix them again before they actually cut off any circulation.

They swirled awkwardly around her calves (it had been so long since she had had loose fabric encircling each leg that she had almost forgotten how it felt) as she joined the team, otherwise dressed much as she had been for the first challenge, including the streaming red ribbons in her brown hair. This time, though, she had worn her favorite gold chain bracelet, reasoning that if she was supposed to survive something, she should be as undistracted as possible, and having completely bare hands and arms had been very distracting last time. Her fingers still felt all wrong without her rings, so she had also put on her white cotton gloves, hoping these would sneak past the line between ‘attire’ and ‘supplies’ on the grounds that she often wore gloves outside and could therefore pass it off as a cultural thing if pressed, and could charm them into something more durable than they really were if that became convenient, which she expected it would. She had also worn, perched at a rackish, dramatic angle on her head, one of her broad-brimmed, ribbon-trimmed sun hats, on the grounds that survival would involve being outside and therefore needing to protect her complexion. Her hats often fell off when she ran around outside, or had when she was younger and not forced to wear a girdle that slowed her down, but Mama had at least drilled the practice of putting one on into her whenever she went to face a natural environment.

“Hey all,” she said, trying out an English casual phrase she had picked up on her teammates, greeting them with a modest smile. “All happy? Ready?”

Inside, she looked around, and clapped her gloved hands in delight. “It is like my book in Egypt!” she exclaimed happily, but entirely in Russian, and so incomprehensibly to everyone else except possibly, for a few words, Jehan. “We must have voda - vater,” she amended, mangling the pronunciation. “Is hot, we get dry. Need vater. Maybe we make my hat a bowl. Or make it - eh, I don’t know word. Cloth house?” She held her hands up over her head in a triangle shape, hoping to convey the idea of a tent in the absence of the English word. They had been told to find supplies, but, she reasoned, her hat was in here, and therefore could be argued to be fair game.

“Probably make a better bowl, though,” she amended. The group was not large, but it would still put a strain on her hat to be enlarged that far, she thought. “Hat probably destroy, if we make a whole cloth house from it,” she acknowledged with a laugh. “We get sticks, make them a - house like a cloth house?” She raised her hands again. “Only with stick? No cloth. Need many sticks. Maybe we engorge charm sticks. This is good idea?” she asked, stopping for breath at last.
16 Tatiana Vorontsova I am full of ideas! 1396 Tatiana Vorontsova 0 5

Ness

October 17, 2019 8:17 AM

Ness

Alumnus
House: Aladren
Written by: Rhy

Age in Post: 13

And surprises by Ness

Bring only your wand. That was an intriguing, rather ominous statement, in a way. They never even went to class with only their wands. They always had books and parchment and ink and quills. In some classes, they were told more or less that these things were not particularly necessary, but Ness almost always found something to look up or write down, and the Aladren did not really like the idea of leaving all of these behind. Ness rarely went anywhere without some kind of book, just in case – even Quidditch training usually involved walking down to the pitch, nose buried in the latest library find, just because it otherwise felt like wasted time.

“Privet,” Ness responded to Tatiana’s greeting, giving a thumbs up to indicate that all was more or less well. Ness was certainly in a cheerful enough mood in spite of the lack of book, because it was hard not to be curious about what they were about to be facing, and curiosity was – in spite of its alleged feline slaying potential – a really quite wonderful and rather tingly sort of feeling.

“You’re wearing pants,” the Aladren observed approvingly, nodding to Tatiana’s attire. Normally, Ness would not have found pants remarkable or worthy of comment, but Tatiana had seen fit to show up to an obstacle course in a skirt and ribbons, so this was a decided improvement. It also showed Tatiana was capable of improvement (or what counted for it in Ness’ eyes) in that pants on a Pureblood girl really were kind of an unusual statement, and showed that Tatiana was not so bound to archaic gender norms that she was incapable of sacrificing some of her frills for the sake of practicality. That was good. This sounded practical, judging by the instructions they were being given.

Once they were in the fake desert, Tatiana said something in Russian (she seemed excited so Ness guessed it wasn’t a slew of swear words about the temperature, even if that seemed exactly what was warranted) and then switched back to English as she chattered away. Much like with the first challenge, Tatiana seemed actually full of good ideas, and equally not shy about sharing them. Ness had to admit that she at least had energy and… well, Ness’ idea of a Pureblood girl being shoved into a desert and told to survive it involved a lot more melodramatic fainting and a lot less being enthusiastic about getting sticks to live in.

“Tent,” the Aladren supplied, when Tatiana worked her way around a vocabulary hole with explanations and gestures. It was said in a neutral tone, not patronising or correcting. Ness just thought knowing things was nice. “But only for cloth ones. A stick one would be… a hut? Or a shelter?” the Aladren shrugged, “It sort of depends what it looks like.

“They are good ideas,” the Aladren confirmed, not managing to completely disguise the note of surprise, though it was balanced out with plenty of approval. Ness almost wanted to spend time with Tatiana after this was all done. Tatiana thought and that was interesting to Ness.

“We could also use the doubling charm on it, then we’d all have hats,” Ness added. Ness was just about rebellious enough to not want to wear a hat outside just because an adult had said so, but just about hot and sensible enough that right now it did seem rather reasonable. “We could transfigure each of our hats so that they… suit us,” the Aladren added, aiming for tact rather than saying the hat was outright horrible, presuming that Tatiana could at least reason that probably-cis-gendered boys did not want to wear anything with ribbons on it, and that that was not an offensive notion to someone whose concept of the gender binary had only seen them just venture into the realm of wearing trousers. From there, it was hopefully a small enough step to accept that Ness also did not fit such a hat, assuming that Tatiana hadn’t already assumed the short haired, t-shirt and jeans wearing Aladren to be a boy in the first place.
13 Ness And surprises 1419 Ness 0 5

Tatiana

October 17, 2019 1:06 PM

Tatiana

Alumnus
House: Pecari
Written by: Grayson Wright

Age in Post: 15
Birthday: 14/27 July

Boredom's not really my aesthetic. by Tatiana

"I take them from brother," said Tatiana, recognizing that her attire was being commented on. "Aleksey. Must do much charm to make fit." She supposed her prowess at making trousers fit her was a strange thing for a young lady to lightly boast about, but she was more pleased with her cleverness in thinking to begin the project at all than anything, really.

Hut. That sounded a lot like the English word 'hat' and she thought the German word for hat, so that one would be either easy or impossible to remember properly, though she would try. A hat to live under was a hut; perhaps that would help her hold onto the new vocabulary word.

"Hut," she repeated. "Hat for the ground. I remember this. And we need one." She saw some scrubby trees. "Maybe we cut...tree arms off," she suggested. "Use stick charm, make them stick, stay hut for us."

She nodded agreeably to the idea of her hat being doubled, repeatedly. "All need hat. Otherwise, Doryamama say we are little bad egg. I know spell. Not used too much, but I know. I try to make a hat."

She put her hat on the ground, then wiped her hand on Alexei's trousers to ensure a better grip on her wand. Point and flick - it was stopping the replication before they literally suffocated under the weight of hats that was the slightly tougher bit. "Geminio," she said, and one hat appeared. So far so good. She used her foot to edge her real hat a little further away from the identical copy, so she didn't get them confused, then tried, "Geminio trio."

The hat duplicated again - but then the second copy seemed to multiply from the first copy, and the third copy from the second. "Finite," said Tatiana hastily, remembering again the idea of suffocating in straw hats. This wasn't altogether unexpected, but even if each fake hat broke down a little faster than the fake hat before it, she doubted that would happen in the length of this challenge, bar something bad enough to destroy her original hat in the first place. "Here we go," she crowed, pleased with herself. "Now all have a hat - you make look how you want, if you want," she said, remembering Ness saying something about 'suiting us'. Seemed a bit impractical to her, really - a hat was a hat, and it was wasting time - but if it made her teammates happy, then she was fundamentally okay with it. Who was she, of all people, to object to more pretty things?
16 Tatiana Boredom's not really my aesthetic. 1396 Tatiana 0 5