Nathan Xavier
March 20, 2021 7:17 PM
Advanced Class: The Snargaluff by Nathan Xavier
Nathan stood at the entrance to Greenhouse Two, the smaller of Sonora's two green houses, and the one that was only used by advanced students due to the more dangerous nature of the plants being studied. Fifth years were very occasionally permitted inside for certain lessons, when the subject matter covered by the CATS was too risky to be encountered by the younger Intermediate students, so he would split the class, dismissing the third and fourth years early, and having the fifth years show up later, but there were only a handful of lessons when he found it necessary to do that.This was the first time the new sixth years would be meeting here as a matter of course, so he made sure to smile warmly at them and invite them inside, so they would be reassured that they were in fact in the right place despite it being in a different place than their past five years of Herbology lessons. He was also very clear on warning everyone, including the seventh years, on some variation of "Don't get too close to the stump on the table," before they went inside. It was never a good idea to entirely let one's guard down in Greenhouse Two, and he thought even the returning Advanced students might need the reminder after a summer away.
Once everyone had arrived, he followed the last student into the greenhouse. "Welcome back to Sonora, everyone. I hope you all had a nice summer at home. Welcome to Advanced Herbology to our sixth years, and welcome back to the seventh years. Plants in Advanced Herbology get a bit more dangerous, so I caution you all to be very careful of anything you find growing in here."
"For example, that stump you are not getting too close to is called a Snargaluff," he told them. "It will attack with thorn covered vines if it feels threatened. Snargaluffs do count as sentient, and they don't really need a lot of provocation to start thinking they, or their pods, are in danger, particularly since most wizards are mostly interested in Snargaluffs because they want to harvest their pods. You'll find a lot of the Advanced coursework for Herbology involved either advance concepts like medicine, sentience, or high threat values. Or some combination of two or more of those. To that end, our first unit is flesh eating trees," he gestured toward the snargalaff somewhat theatrically.
Fanged geraniums were an intermediate level plant, so there it wasn't like there hadn't been strong indicators that Herbology was going to get dangerous come RATS level material, but it still sometimes took people by surprise that the affable, genial, kind of clumsy old Professor Xavier really did work with things that could kill an unprepared wizard just as readily as anything Professor Tabitha Brooding-Hawthorne taught about.
"Snargalaff pods are about the size of a grapefruit, and usually green, and are most useful and potent when fresh. They are used in several varieties of potions, and can also be used as a weapon directly, as the pods can also extend tubers to attack anything they are thrown at. As I mentioned, Snargaluffs do count as one of the flesh eating trees of the world, so you should consider them very dangerous, though they don't usually go after people as a primary food source. However, they are not adverse to chewing on you if they do get a good hold of you with their vines or pod tubers."
"The best way to collect the pods is to work in groups, having two or more people try to restrain the vines while the last person darts their hand into the stump to grab one of the pods. That's what you're going to be doing today. Once you have a pod, you can open it up and collect the pale green tubers into bowls for Professor Brooding-Hawthorne." He didn't specify which. He did mean Mary primarily, of course, as the potion mistress of the school, but he didn't think Tabitha would refuse a few samples either. "If there are no questions, you may begin right away. There ought to be enough in there for each of you to grab one. Everyone should be helping each other out with the vines when it's not your turn to reach in."
He debated offering to sign a course drop form for anyone who didn't want to try the assignment - he always kept a few copies of the form in Greenhouse Two for the first month for the people who had assumed Herbology was going to be a quiet and tame class without risk of dismemberment (that's why he always started Advanced classes with Flesh Eating Trees of the World, so there would be no mistaking what they were getting into for their last two years) - but decided not to. The number of people who kept up with Herbology was already small enough without encouraging them to leave. But if anyone asked to drop the course, he certainly wouldn't make them them stay.
Subthreads: I'm sure this will be all good, clean fun. by Jessica Hayles with Sophia Priory
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Nathan Xavier
Advanced Class: The Snargaluff
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Jessica Hayles
April 17, 2021 8:36 PM
I'm sure this will be all good, clean fun. by Jessica Hayles
The fanged geraniums had been a thing, as had mandrake seedlings, and more dangerous items had come up in lectures and in reading for Herbology over the years, but somehow, Jessica still found it difficult to get her head around the idea of a greenhouse holding anything especially dangerous. The wild would, of course, to some extent, and even a greenhouse at home could very well contain things that would kill her if she was stupid enough to eat them, but if it was in a greenhouse and you were smart enough not to try to eat it, that usually meant it was there on purpose, which usually meant it was under control. Nothing to trip over, nothing which emitted actually poisonous fumes unless you had an allergy, nothing poisonous where little ones could reach it – everything neatly trimmed and organized into pots and labelled appropriately with both the scientific and common names of the specimen in question. All very civilized.Despite her difficulty with the concept of a deadly greenhouse, though, Jessica took Professor Xavier’s warning extremely seriously. Once inside the greenhouse, she put as much distance between herself and what looked like a tree stump as she could without risking contact with anything else inside. What made sense to her was all well and good, but she had seen too much in the past five years to let a little thing like that prevent her from vigorously following such an instruction to the letter. She eyed the thing warily, wondering, as she went ahead and put on her gloves despite the difficulty this introduced to note-taking, if she ought to go ahead and get out eye protection, too.
She didn’t do so – yet. The moment Professor Xavier, having warned everyone away from the stump, uttered the phrase attack with thorn covered vines, though, she went straight into her bag for goggles without a second thought, much less a single care for how silly they made her look. She’d look a lot worse if a flipping tree-octopus thing with thorns tentacle-whipped her in the eyeballs. The wizards had many marvelous cures to their credit, but Jessica was not going to test the limits of what they could do if there was any way at all to avoid doing so.
Another benefit of the goggles was how they partially obscured her expressions, but the coverage offered was not able to fully conceal her reaction to the next phrase she found objectionable in some way: extend tubers. Her mouth twisted in revulsion even as she reached up to try to scratch her shoulder despite the gloves, her skin suddenly crawling all over. She hated the word ‘tubes’, and ‘tuber,’ it seemed, was close enough, at least when combined with ‘extend’….
Finding the scratching ineffective, she gave up on it and just gripped her wrists instead, focusing on the pressure there until the spasm of anxiety passed. For the most part, anyway.
Enough had already been said that she wasn’t really entirely surprised by their assignment, and thus she was able to approach that with no more reaction than her mouth setting itself into a grim line of mixed distaste and determination. Before doing anything else, she took out the safety pins she usually used to pin up her sleeves during Potions and instead used them to fasten the ends of her sleeves as tightly as possible around her wrists, with part of the gloves extending beneath the seal point, minimizing the chance of skin touching anything today as far as possible. When that was done, she found partners, glanced at them, and sighed.
“I suppose cutting it open with the Severing Charm or a Gouging Charm would damage it too much for it to produce any more of these pod things the Potions department wants,” she observed glumly. “And that it’s too rare to just…get more, if we all killed these. I’m still kind of tempted to try Summoning the pod out, or Confunding the tree or something, though, before we just jump into a semi-sentient briar patch.” A lot of magic stuff was irritatingly resistant to something that should have been as useful as the Summoning Charm, but if objects so enchanted that they had ‘minds’ of a sort could be Confunded, then why not angry plants? “Or maybe a Cheering Charm, to ease it’s paranoia,” she added, though that was mostly a joke.
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Jessica Hayles
I'm sure this will be all good, clean fun.
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Sophia Priory
May 07, 2021 7:42 PM
Yup, seems like it'll be a real blast. by Sophia Priory
It was her sister's first year at Sonora, and Sophia was mostly just glad that Lydia had not been sorted into Aladren. And she was glad that her sister had met that other first year girl at the Concert last spring. Hopefully, that meant that Lydia would not cling to her .Although, to be fair, it wasn't the first year that seemed to think Sophia's job was to look after her, it was her mother. Lydia seemed to know better but Mom seemed to believe that it was the job of older siblings to look after younger ones and fuss over them and protect them like she had with Uncle Adam. That just wasn't the sixth year's personality, though, to be fair, she'd sort of been like that with Josie and anyway, she was a prefect.
That was the thing though. With Josie, the younger Aladren wasn't as inherently as needy a person as Lydia was, and, oh yeah, it was more that Sophia felt like she had a choice whereas doing what her mom wanted her to do with her sister felt more like an obligation and the moment something became an obligation, it made you not want to do it.
Come to think of it, Sophia wondered if Bridget would be expected to look out for Lydia now that they were housemates. It was unlikely though. Nobody ever expected anything from Bridget. Not the other sixth year's parents, who didn't seem able to form expectations in the first place and certainly not Sophia's.
As for being nurturing, well, she didn't really think that was a factor when prefects were picked in the first place. After all, nothing about Ness McLeod struck her as being such and the seventh year hadn't gotten prefect by default.
Professor Xavier began the class, explaining what that stump they weren't supposed to get to close to was. Sophia personally had not questioned this particular instruction, she had grown up in the magical world and while she didn't have an encyclopedic knowledge of every dangerous plant out there, she knew there was probably a good reason not to go near it. She couldn't understand how some people, even Muggleborns after their first few years, didn't seem to realize this.
It looked like today's assignment was going to be a challenging one. Which didn't bother her as an Aladren. However, she did hope that nobody decided to start throwing the pods. It was going to be difficult enough to deal with a dangerous plant without her classmates acting like a moron. She joined Jessica. "Well, we could try a full body bind on it." Sophia suggested. "It would keep it still."
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Sophia Priory
Yup, seems like it'll be a real blast.
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