Professor Increase Mathers
November 27, 2011 2:31 PM
Advanced Divinations: Graphology (6th & 7th years) by Professor Increase Mathers
To say he was nervous would be the understatement of the century. Increase Mathers, most recently made Professor of Divinations at Sonora Academy of Witchcraft and Wizardry, was not a man most would associate with a profession of serious professionals. He was lucky if he could button his shirt correctly in the morning, let alone find one that wasn't stained with coffee or food. Having an army of prairie elves lurking in the walls helped with having clean clothes, but Increase still managed to dump half of his breakfast on him before his first class, and then flub the proper cleansing spell so that it removed the food, but left behind an unfortunate gravy-colored spot along his chest. He tried to arrange his brown teaching robes to hide the stain, but since he was prone to hand gestures, the efforts did little to help.Increase paced along the front of his classroom, tempted to redesign its contents for the umpteenth time since the start of school. He'd gone along a variety of routes, from private cubicles with low lighting to an open floorplan with randomly placed tables and cushions. Nothing satisfied him, and in a pique of frustration, he finally settled on an amalgamation of the two: The classroom was petal shaped, with curved alcoves that allowed some privacy for the working groups, but also ensured a proper amount of exposure to the other student groups and himself. He was uncomfortable with taking the center placement, but the geomancy of the set-up was solid.
As his advanced class made its gradual entrance into the classroom, Increase made welcoming gestures and shooing movements toward the alcoves and the low tables that waited there, along with assorted pillows and cushions for seating. Once it looked like everyone who ought to be there was, Increase cleared his throat and fought to not scratch at the stubble of two-week old beard that covered his face.
"Good morning," he greeted, voice unnaturally high from nervousness. He coughed. "I'm Increase Mathers, and for those of you who know your history, there's no relation. Just parents with an overly-inflated sense of self-humor. I'm your professor of Divinations, and for our first advanced class, I thought we'd start with something interesting: Graphology.
"Those of you with Muggle parents probably know this as hand-writing analysis. You study the shape of words and letters, the way a person might, you know, press a pen to parchment a certain way or dot their i's a certain way-- that sort of thing." Increase coughed again and tried to not make eye-contact. He was feeling ridiculously self-conscious with this group of sixteen and seventeen year olds staring up at him. Next lesson, he'd sit for the lecture. Maybe make a rotating podium or something. "For wizards, though, it's a bit more complicated. You're not just looking at the hand-writing, you're looking at the feeling and history behind the letters. With a simple enough spell and enough mental force, you can learn not just about the person who wrote the letters, but what they were feeling and what that feeling came from.
"It's not about divining the future here, it's about divining the past. A sort of psychometry through aural interpretation. Okay." Increase tried to push up his sleeves and adjusted his glasses; he readied his wand and quickly wrote out a sentence that lit up across the air in his crooked, but blocky script. He read it out loud. "I just moved from Miami. So, what we'd do is this: First say this incantation Lacunis Transeum." At his words, the letters, to him at least, began to show an array of colors, arranged in geometric allignments. It almost looked like one of those 3-D puzzle pictures he'd loved as a kid. "Real simple, right? Nothing to it. What you can't see right now, but I can, is that once you say the spell, the letters are going to light up and create a sort of picture. It won't look like much at first, just a bunch of colored shapes, but you have to settle down into the picture. Try crossing your eyes, or leaning forward and then slowly backing up without blinking.
"You'll feel it when it's right, a sort of pop in your mind, right? And when that happens, you'll start feeling a sort of rush of emotions, of images. That's where the divining happens." Increase hoped he was making sense, but he'd have to make eye-contact to make sure, and he wasn't about to chance that. Last thing he needed was to start flubbering even more than he already was. "I want you to pair up and run the incantation on each other's words. Then write down your impressions and compare with your partner. Be honest with each other, or you'll ruin it."
Increase demonstrated briefly his own technique for falling into the aural picture the spell created from the words. His eyes gained a slightly drugged out expression and he slipped effortlessly into the pull of the letters. Had one of the students tried to do a reading on his sentence, they would have seen images of his studio in Miami, a smiling woman with too-black hair and laughing eyes, and a favorite pair of sneakers that he wore now. What meaning they'd draw from the images would depend upon the caster, but Increase found himself hoping that no one in the class suffered from anything terribly insightful. It could. . . complicate things.
"Okay, that's it for me. Let me know if you have any questions or need any help."
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Professor Increase Mathers
Advanced Divinations: Graphology (6th & 7th years)
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