Selina Skies
May 23, 2020 12:02 AM
Beginners - Cheers! by Selina Skies
“Good morning,” Selina greeted the beginners. Usually, they looked awfully small in their first few days, both because this was the smallest size Sonora students came in and also as they adjusted to the world around them. However, as she’d spent part of the summer setting up a nursery, and spent yesterday meeting Zeus, eleven-year-olds suddenly seemed on the bigger and more capable side of things.“Welcome to Transfiguration. In short, this class is all about turning one thing into another. There are some things which may seem like small exceptions to that. We cover switching spells – instantaneously swapping the positions of two objects,” she demonstrated with a quick flick of her wand making the photo frame and the pen pot on her desk instantly reappear in each other’s space, before switching them back, “along with vanishing and conjuring – making objects disappear and appear.
“We will also look into a number of theory elements, such as how Transfiguration works, the types of spells and how they are constructed, and why various things fall into this category of magic as opposed to charms.
“We will be starting simply today. Transfiguration can be slow to learn. It can take time to achieve results. That said, we’ve stepped things down enough that everyone should have something to show at the end of today’s lesson,” she stated. She’d heard of curriculums where they set matchsticks to needles as the first class of the year, with the result being that barely anyone got anywhere. Perhaps it hammered home how difficult the subject was, but that didn’t seem to her to be a great way to engage students in learning it.
“The goal of this lesson is for everyone to make a drinking glass. You will be starting with these,” she held up a stack of bright plastic rainbow cups, suitable for picnics or small children. She kept one on her desk, and the remainder began making their way around the room, handing themselves out to the students. “For first years, you need only to change the material to glass. Glass can, of course, be many different colours. Whilst you are welcome to aim for clear glass if that is easier for you to visualise, you can also keep the colour the same as your existing cup.
“Two key elements of Transfiguration are what similarities you can work with as well as what differences you’re having to make, and how well you can visualise your end result. I’d like you to think about how that balances out with changing or not changing the glass’s colour, and discuss your experiences with your neighbours.
“For second years, I would like you to choose a different way to stretch yourselves – perhaps alter the shape, such as making a goblet, perhaps include more intricate designs. If you get done quickly, you can look into spells for other drinking vessels and have a go at making some of those.
“The spell for this is verrus, with a gentle, curving wand motion,” she demonstrated, turning one of the plastic cups into a smart cut class tumbler with much squarer edges.
“Please raise your hand if you need help. You may talk quietly with your neighbours as you work. Please begin.”
OOC - welcome to Transfiguration. Posting here can earn you house points! Posts should be a minimum of 200 words and will be graded on length, realism, relevance (how well you deal with the class content) and creativity.
Posts are marked out of character, based on the quality of the writing, so a character who says they are doing badly but does so in a well-written and detailed way can still score full points. Remember that Hermione, the best witch of her age, struggled with Transfiguration at first, so please keep your character’s ability level realistic. That said, I feel I’ve given you an easier task, as your objects are already more similar to each other, so there’s a little more scope for differing results. You are also free to make up relevant information that your character is reading in their textbook.
You are being supervised, so if things are going wrong, Selina would step in before anything got terribly out of hand. Please tag me in the subject line if there’s something that needs my attention.
Have fun, have a go, if you’re unsure about anything, ask on the OOC or in chatzy.
Subthreads: ¡Arriba! ¡Abajo! ¡Al centro! .... y pa'dentro! by Leonor De Matteo with Josephine Clyde
Time for a change! by Valentine Duell with Alexander Pierce-Beales
Taking a scientific approach. by Mara Morales with Quincy Wright
What's wrong with plastic anyway? by Mab with Aelia Astley
No alibi by Sadie-Lake Chalmers with Janis Rosemary Silver
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Selina Skies
Beginners - Cheers!
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Mara Morales
May 26, 2020 4:34 PM
Taking a scientific approach. by Mara Morales
Mara did not loathe Sonora the way her sister had - after that one short, disastrous flirtation with accepting the place and the world that came with it and trying to integrate her two lives - come to, but she had to admit that in a lot of ways, the best thing about it was the degree to which she was left to her own devices. Some of the stuff she learned in her outside reading was fascinating, but her actual classes tended to be rather...there was no way around it...dull, at least once the initial shine had worn off realizing that she was doing actual magic. It seemed to be necessary dullness - if one wasn't extremely finicky and detail-oriented, bad things could happen, which made stuff like basic wand movements and pronunciation important things to do - but it was dullness just the same.Transfiguration was, she thought, the shining example of that small problem that came with magical education. It was awesome, to think she might eventually be able to produce everything she wanted or needed, with relatively few exceptions, on the spot with the flick of her wrist - but sitting in her desk repeating a word or two over and over again while waiting for some simple object to look like some other object she was imagining in her head? Dull. Deathly dull. Nothing exciting about that, even after she had gotten to the point last year where she accomplished something on a regular basis. The stuff she read about in the library - little though she sometimes understood it - was fascinating, and she enjoyed writing her homework assignments for this class with those extra resources to draw on, but the class itself? Dull.
She still sat up and tried to look reasonably attentive, though, as Professor Skies introduced the class to the first years and demonstrated a Switching Spell, which was, admittedly, still a really cool thing to see happen. Her mouth twitched in a more or less sympathetic smile, though, when the professor actually told the first years - more or less, if not in so many words - about how dull of a time they were realistically in for. She had probably, she thought, heard the same thing last year, but had assumed it was just a warning for those who didn't work as hard as she did....
Well, she had learned quick enough that sheer stubbornness, while it did seem to help, was not all it took. However, she had always prided herself on not needing to hear the same lesson twice, and she had stuck to that ethic when it came to magic. Muscle memory was hard to entirely lose, but it could get a whole lot less useful over the summer - that was why some people thought that everyone ought to have school year-round at home, so the kindergarteners remembered how to read and the older kids remembered all their math. Mara wasn't allowed to do magic at home, but she had stolen a wooden spoon from the kitchen and tried to practice the movements she'd memorized over the course of her first year each day, so she wouldn't get too rusty, and she had dedicated the past two weeks to revision. She had spent much of the summer doing other magic-world readings, including borrowing her sister's intermediate textbooks, but it had seemed like a good idea to read up on her own books, the stuff she was definitely supposed to know, before she came back to school.
Accordingly, she felt fairly, if cautiously, confident as she sketched out a transfiguration table and began filling it in. The real item and the item-to-be were similar in that they were meant for drinking, and in that they were easily breakable, she guessed - cheap plastic cups were easy to crush, and glass was easy to smash. Plastic and glass...what was glass made of? She thought she had read once that glass was made from sand somehow, and she knew that sand was made from rock. Plastic, however, was a petroleum by-product. So the cup as it was would be a semi-organic substance, or at least derived from one - petroleum was responsible for carbon emissions, carbon was the basis of organic chemistry, therefore, plastic was at least partially organic - while the sand was not. So one difference - if, of course, she was right about all this - would be that to make plastic into glass, she'd have to jump categories entirely, stripping out the carbon and replacing it with...rock stuff....
She wrote this down, though she altered the ending to 'eroded rock particles' instead of 'rock stuff.' With any luck, the professor would pass behind her at some point in the lesson and see the amount of thought she was putting into her work, and the phrase 'rock stuff' just didn't have the same tinge of the serious or intellectual about it as 'eroded rock particles.'
The thing was, though, that she wasn't entirely sure this knowledge was actually beneficial to have. Looking at the words they used as incantations a lot, she could recognize some of the Latin roots she'd had to memorize lists of in elementary school, but when she had, out of curiosity, started looking up stuff in Latin dictionaries online, she had come to the conclusion that the grammar was a bit...sketchy, in places. Likewise, as diligently as she had read both her own and Jessica's textbooks, she hadn't run across any references to organic chemistry. She worried that trying to understand what she was doing might actually make it harder for her, but she couldn't help what she already knew....
There was nothing she could do about that, so she put it out of her mind in favor of designing a fancy glass and writing down details about it. She thought she would aim for one of those wineglass things, that was enough of a departure in shape, and to make it clear with a blue rim and blue edging around the base.
She took out her wand and firmly told it, "Verrus," mimicking the movement the deputy headmistress had made. The cup rocked back and forth on the desk; picking it up and holding it up to the light to see if any of it looked less orange than it had begun, or if the area just above the bottom of the glass looked like it had contracted inward at all.
"It's a start," she muttered to herself, putting it down again and beginning to make notes, asserting that it had rocked a little, and that she thought this was because the dimensions of the bottom had begun to change every so slightly. It was better than the first day she'd ever tried a transfiguration spell, anyway.
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Mara Morales
Taking a scientific approach.
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Quincy Wright
May 26, 2020 5:01 PM
SCIENCEEEE by Quincy Wright
Transfiguration blew Quincy's mind. Most stuff blew his mind here, but transfiguration really took the cake. Scientifically, it just didn't make any sense. How could one thing become another thing? Matter couldn't be made or destroyed, so where was the old matter going? Of course, the difference between one thing and another was just the elemental composition, atomic structures, etc., but that didn't seem like that was exactly what was happening. Maybe there was some balance in the universe. Enough people had been making glass cups into plastic ones and plastic ones into glass ones, that the overall total was about the same. Or perhaps it only looked like and behaved like glass, but was actually exactly the same cup as they would have started with. That was weird to think about.The unfortunate thing about today's lesson was that he wasn't really too sure what color his cup was anyway. It did seem to have a pretty wide range of colors on it, but it did make it a bit harder to know whether or not he'd maintained or changed the colors when he got to the new one. He liked the sort of light-blueish at the bottom of the cup, though, so he thought maybe he could try for that. For all he knew, he'd actually make it blue. Or it was already blue. Whatever worked.
The girl beside him was older than he was and she was taking very detailed notes with little tables and stuff. He recognised her from his own House, so he thought that probably detailed notes with little tables was pretty par for course. It looked like it might've been helpful, and it was definitely a better approach than winging it. He tried to be subtle about craning his neck to see what she was writing, but it just wasn't working out, so he tapped her on the arm.
"Whatcha doing?" he asked, trying to sound casual. Interrupting a classmate to talk to them was not his preferred method of interacting with others. That being said, he also couldn't just not learn about this method of doing transfiguration, especially since it looked like proper labnotes or something. "What's the table for?" He pulled his own paper and quill closer to himself, prepared to take notes on what she said and hoping to show that he was really serious and did really want to learn.
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Quincy Wright
SCIENCEEEE
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Mara Morales
May 27, 2020 5:56 PM
Have I blinded you with it? by Mara Morales
Mara tensed slightly when someone touched her, more out of surprise than anything. She had never been terribly touchy-feely anyway, and she had not expected someone to tap her in the middle of Transfiguration. She looked up to find herself looking at a curly-haired first year she recognized from the little flock with Professor Wright after the Opening Feast, who she thought she had also spotted talking to Morgan at said Feast."The table?" she asked. She pushed her notes page closer to him. It was written in a deep, green-leaning teal ink with a slight golden shimmer, one of the variety of fountain pen inks - among other things - which Dad had bought mainly for Jessica to go through, to cheer her up, but which Mara had also gotten her pick of. Since her paper was no longer with her and therefore would not be written on for at least a minute or two, she slipped the cap onto her pen, which was a slightly lighter shade of blue-green, so she didn't have to worry about the ink drying in the steel nibs. Quills were fun, plus necessary in her exams, but steel nibs and converters were more efficient and less messy for taking notes in class.
"It's something we learned last year," she volunteered. "You make a table comparing and contrasting the two things - the thing you have, and the thing you want to have after you finish the transfiguration." She pointed to the part of her notes which was about organic versus inorganic materials. "That part isn't really necessary," she said. "I just put it in because I thought of it, but I don't know if it's helpful to know or not." She smiled suddenly. "One of the things that makes me crazy around here is not knowing stuff like that," she said. "Whole new levels of only knowing what I don't know since I started here."
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Mara Morales
Have I blinded you with it?
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Quincy Wright
June 02, 2020 7:40 PM
Starstruck me I think. by Quincy Wright
Quincy examined the girl's notes with ravenous attention. A table for comparing and contrasting! That made so much sense. Except, it also served to underline the fact that they had no idea what they were doing because they didn't know enough about the materials or anything. He was thinking as much when the girl spoke to that and he looked up, nodding vigorously. "I want to know more," he said, almost reverently, before sliding her notes back to her with one last longing look. He tried to commit it to memory but since that definitely wasn't going to work, he started drawing it out on his own paper. "It might matter if one is organic and the other isn't. I wonder whether a non-organic glass polymer might be easier to get from plastic." He added the last more to himself than anything, and was momentarily lost in thought over the implications of being able to create organic matter from non-organic matter. That was not that far away from creating life itself. If chemical structures could be altered into completely different elements with just a wave of the wand, how many Muggle patients were dying of curable issues? Was it irresponsible to keep the two worlds separate?He shook his head to clear it. That was not the point of this class and he wouldn't be able to find that out if he couldn't learn the spell first. "Sorry," he said automatically. For Deidre's sake, he had learned that prompt apologies for spaciness were generally appreciated, if not outright expected. Glancing over his mostly empty new table, he frowned. "What color is this?" he asked, holding up his cup. He wouldn't be able to write it down if he didn't know. "And what color is this one?" he asked, pointing to the nice blue color that was probably violet if this was in ROYGBIV order.
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Quincy Wright
Starstruck me I think.
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Mara Morales
June 09, 2020 7:52 PM
Does that make me a star? by Mara Morales
"For what?" asked Mara, puzzled, when her seatmate abruptly apologized for nothing in particular, and then she remembered. "Oh. Yeah, I know what organic and inorganic matter are," she said matter-of-factly, figuring that the culture gap had been assumed where it didn't actually, for a nice change, exist. "I was thinking about that before you asked for my notes - I was trying to remember if plastic is organic or inorganic. Plastic is a petroleum product, right? That was why I was thinking it might fall under the organic umbrella, but I don't know the chemistry well enough to say for sure."She admitted this only reluctantly. There was nothing wrong, of course, with admitting that one did not know something. It was a way to learn. However, knowing that did nothing to make her like doing so one bit better, and it was all the harder here, when she so often felt like she was completely out of her depth and like everyone knew more than she did. When they were talking about chemistry - something that was not only of her world in general, but which her own father had gone to school for - she felt even more reluctant to admit to uncertainty, even if her logical mind did know that it would be ridiculous to expect someone who had only studied science formally up until fifth grade to definitely know all that for sure.
She was puzzled again by him asking the color of his cup, but decided to roll with it. There was always that thing people said about girls seeing more nuances in colors than boys did, after all. The existence of colorblind people was something Mara knew of, but that information did not immediately rise to the top of her mind as she glanced at the cup in question. "Purple," she said. "I guess kind of a...medium light purple? Not as gray as lavender, but not as pink as your orchid shades?" This determination was made on the basis of the more purple-ish lipsticks she knew of, but did not own - partially because her parents said she was too young for real lipstick, and partially because she knew both her parents would strongly disapprove of her wearing purple lipstick. The fact that orchid flowers came in a kaleidoscope of colors that had little to nothing to do with the shade usually referred to as orchid in the beauty community was, like the existence of colorblindness, something she knew, but which did not occur to her.
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Mara Morales
Does that make me a star?
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Quincy Wright
June 21, 2020 4:42 PM
Absolutely. by Quincy Wright
Quincy blinked, surprised. He wasn't sure whether it was more surprising that his classmate knew what organic and inorganic meant - although he'd known that from her table already - or that she didn't seem to mind his brief mental tirade. "My sister always gets irritated when I do that," he explained. "So that's why I was apologising. It is made with petroleum usually, though, you're right. Petroleum is organic but I don't know whether plastic is either." He frowned, although it was sort of nice not knowing something like this. Googling things was arguably harder here than at home, and it wasn't that easy at home. Still, he could probably manage today's lesson without this information, as his classmate seemed to agree.When she said the color he was pointing to was purple, Quincy halfway understood. He knew that purple was a color, after all. However, she lost him when she started comparing purple to grey and different kinds of flowers. He didn't think pink and purple were similar at all, were they? Sometimes they looked similar, but his mom said that pink was sort of like a light red, and the color he was pointing at didn't look at all like the color he thought was red. What the heck was an orchid anyway? He gaped at her for a moment; usually, he did just fine. Colors weren't that important anyway and if his dad wasn't colorblind too, they probably wouldn't have even tested him and known yet. Maybe that would've been better. But usually, people didn't go off with flower comparisons when he asked. Most flowers just looked sort of greyish anyway, so how could something be less grey but not so little grey as to be less grey?
"Purple," he repeated firmly, sticking to the only part of that that mattered. But maybe trying to get that color all over wouldn't be a good idea if he couldn't tell precisely what it was or whether he'd gotten it right. He looked down at his robe, which he knew was green even if it was the same color as oranges which were . . . well, not green. "This isn't anything like purple at all, right?" he almost demanded, wanting to greet to the point of being sure where he was going with this so he could start on the magic. Maybe he should ask Professor Skies if he could try for polka dots or something. "I'm colorblind," he added a bit sourly, hating that this was coming up as relevant so soon in his Sonora career.
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Quincy Wright
Absolutely.
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Mara Morales
June 22, 2020 11:51 AM
I was born to shine. by Mara Morales
Oh. Colorblindness. That would explain why he was asking her odd questions about the color of something right in front of him.Well done, Mara, she thought, a bit sourly, thinking in retrospect she should have suspected something like this. She knew that dudes were supposed to be kinda bad with precise shades of color compared to girls – not understanding the difference between teal and turquoise and stuff like that, calling it all ‘blue’ – but that was a stereotype and not something that should have required him to solicit female assistance for the purpose of this exercise even had he known the color but not the shade….
“Definitely not anything like purple,” she said matter-of-factly. “Sorry – I know people in the makeup business, back home, and my brain went to lipsticks.” A statement she suspected even a dude might find surprising, just looking at her. Mara was dressed the same as everyone else in the room, of course, but the elements of her appearance she had some control over were just as simple: her black hair was in a severe bun, as she usually wore it during classes so she didn’t light her hair on fire somehow, and since she was more fortunate than Jessica in the department of having naturally visible brows and lashes, the only products on her face after she washed it each morning were moisturizer and a touch of lip balm – not even tinted lip balm today. “Purple is made of red and blue, and you can darken it or lighten it with blacks and whites, and so you get all these different shades that each have their own names,” she explained. “Green has a bunch of shades too, but green is…” she bit her lip, trying to remember. “I’m pretty sure green is a mix of blue and yellow, but purple still doesn’t look anything like green, even if they both have some blue in them. They went together pretty well, though, before the TV made everyone who sees them together think of a talking dinosaur. But that’s…beside the point,” she acknowledged. “For you, I guess a purple with more red base would be better than one of the cooler, more bluey ones, at least if you're trying to make it different from green…huh.” She picked up her pen again and frowned at her chart. “Do you think it’s worth writing down, ‘is one color easier to get than another if they have a base color in common’?” she asked him.
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Mara Morales
I was born to shine.
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Mara Morales
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Quincy Wright
June 22, 2020 4:31 PM
Something like that. by Quincy Wright
It was fine. She went to lipsticks. That was weird to Quincy as he couldn't always even tell when folks were wearing lipstick, let alone what color they were, but sure. Do what you do. But then she started rambling on about different colors by comparing them to other colors and then comparing those colors to items based on their colors and none of it was remotely helpful for Quincy. He couldn't explain how mixing blue and red got purple because purple didn't look a bit like blue or red."I know how color works," he said grumpily, doodling on the corner of his chart. "I just can't see it. Saying two colors - that I can't see the way you do - mix to make another color - that I can't see the way you do - isn't really helpful. Quincy wasn't sure what talking dinosaurs had to do with colors so he left that comment alone. "I'm red-green colorblind," he added, feeling a bit as though his knowledge of the situation at least gave him a leg up there, where he otherwise might've been embarrassed. "A purple that's more red will look more like this." He tugged at his robe again. Describing the way he saw the world was not really so hard to do for other people because he'd been told it lots of times and his parents had explained it. He knew how other people thought he saw the world, even if he didn't really understand what it all meant.
It was good, he supposed, that she was asking his opinion still. Clearly she didn't think he was a complete moron, eve if she didn't think he understand how color theory worked. Still, he didn't really have much of an answer. "That's not a question I can help answer," he replied coolly. "But . . ." Well, he was a little curious wasn't he. Keeping it in would make him burst, he suspected, so he let out his pent up air and cocked his head, letting his curiosity replace his frustration for a moment. "I wonder whether colors that look the same to me would be easier to transfigure for me than they would be for you if they look really different to you."
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Quincy Wright
Something like that.
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Mara Morales
June 23, 2020 8:33 PM
...and then inevitably explode and burn out, if we go back to science. by Mara Morales
Mara struggled to get her mind around the concepts Quincy was explaining. It seemed strange to her that one would know how colors worked without knowing what they were, and that changing the concentrations involved in making secondary colors wouldn’t make any difference to how they were perceived…but then, her vision was fine.“Oh,” she said. “Sorry, I misunderstood how it works. Thanks for explaining.”
She had a naturally somewhat muted tone of voice, which she found generally unfortunate, as it didn’t express emotion well. Admittedly, the fact that Mara herself preferred to focus on practicalities rather than thinking or talking too much about feelings probably didn’t help, but her voice could cause miscommunications. She hoped it didn’t do so now, as she didn’t want to sound passive-aggressive, as she had noticed it was really easy for…basically everyone to do when apologizing. It was one reason why she was glad that they didn’t really do that kind of thing in her family, and instead just pretended anything that happened that shouldn’t have happened, simply hadn’t happened.
“Guess that’s what I get for thinking I remember reading something once but not really remembering where I read it,” she added. “I get it mixed up and end up sounding not very smart. Gotta work on that.” Which was true, and hopefully also enough. It would be weird if she went on any more about it, right? Maybe there would have been advantages to being raised in a household where people apologized regularly….
“That’s a good question,” she said when he offered his take on the issue of how perception might affect ability to transfigure something. “Want to test it out?”
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Mara Morales
...and then inevitably explode and burn out, if we go back to science.
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Quincy Wright
June 27, 2020 3:09 PM
Eh, supernovas are cool. by Quincy Wright
Quincy nodded, pleased and impressed by Mara's reaction. It was good of her to accept his response in stride and not something he'd seen many people do. Plus, he really did like talking to her and she was smart, so that was cool."Yes, I really do," he said, grinning his gap toothed smile at her when she asked if they'd like to test it out. "Do you want to go first?" It was the first time he would have done anything like this and he'd rather have as much information as he could before giving it a shot. "Limits the variables if I have more information," he added.
He took a moment to consider his chart and filled in a few more boxes. Then he looked at his cup a little harder. "We'll have to do it twice," he decided. "Once with colors that you would say are close or based on each other and once with colors I would." He looked around the room, figuring something that he could look at to see the colors would be easier for both of them. Then he remembered that he had a colorwheel in his bag for other homework purposes. He retrieved it and pointed to two different swatches, both of which were dark, murky yellowish. Probably. The first was labeled "lime" and the second "orange." He knew the fruits enough to know that other people did not think these were the same at all. "Those are about the same to me," he told her, wondering if there was much common between them for her. Then he pointed to the one in between, "lemon," and one further down labeled "grape." "Those aren't the same at all," he told her. Are they close for you? Or . . . you said blue and purple or green, right?" He looked closer, finding "sky" and "lime." "Those are about as dissimilar as you can get," he said, leaning towards her to show her, and looking up to confirm what his own eyes said was impossible. "What do you want to do?"
OOC - Color references found here
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Quincy Wright
Eh, supernovas are cool.
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