Just another good vibration on Elective Hall

Giselle Duell

June 26, 2021 5:44 AM

Seek and ye shall find [Advanced Divinations] by Giselle Duell

The foretelling hadn't been about Jhonice's spawn. Giselle had mixed feelings on that, it would have been wonderful to have finally figured out what it was all about, but she really didn't want to have to interact with her cousin any more than was strictly necessary. Unfortunately that left things still wide open, and nothing was getting much clearer.

Is the darkness now or later? Yes

Is the darkness now? Yes

Will there be more darkness? Yes

What is causing the darkness? Darkness

That which is kept in darkness leads to darkness

And on and on like this. Sadly this wasn't anything new, this was the way the craft worked. It was just super frustrating when she needed to understand. She needed to be able to tell Professor Skies what was going on, how to prepare the school for it if necessary. The problem, well one of the problems, was that 'darkness' had to many meanings; evil dark wizards? Nighttime? The space between the stars in the dark tapestry above? The unlit areas deep down in the bowels of the earth? Metaphorical state of ignorance? Blindness...?

These thoughts ran perpetually through the back of Giselle's mind as she prepared for class. Today's should prove interesting she thought. They had been working through Myomancy, the study of the activities of rats and mice as a means of divination. As her advanced students got settled she smiled at them as she leaned against her desk upon which was the decently sized box that held the mice they had been working with for the unit.

"Welcome to class, we won't be needing our wands today so you can put them away." She began once her students seemed to be settled. "First off, as you may have guessed I won't be collecting the assignment I gave you last time. You will be able to evaluate them yourselves." It had been meant as a 'fun' assignment, simply answer the question 'What will we be doing in our next lesson?' She had not set any conditions upon their method, short of breaking into her office and looking at her lesson plans. Not that it would have done them much good, she wasn't much in the habit of writing down traditional notes to herself as other professors might. Giselle wondered how many of them got it right, and smiled a bit to herself.

"We will be wrapping up our unit on Myomancy soon, so for today..." she moved to pick up the box as if she were going to distribute the mice. However, she stopped with an exaggerated look of confusion on her face. Then she bounced the box gently. "Oh dear," She said with a slight look of concern before turning the box around to reveal a hole in the side that was definitely not made by a mouse. "They seem to have escaped. Oh dear, whatever shall we do?" She seemed to contemplate the situation. "With our wands away we can't just summon them back." She made an obvious flick of her own wand to refresh her mental image of the room. "It is a good thing I charmed the room so that they can't escape it. I guess you will each need to find your mouse using the bond that you have been cultivating with it over the course of this unit. We have been working on attuning ourselves to sense the magical energies around us all year and in this unit we have been using those attunements to interpret the actions of the mice. Now you will need to use them to divine what your mouse is doing and where it is." She knew this may be a bit of a challenge for her advanced class, but they were ready, they could do it.

"If you find that combining your energies enhances your abilities, feel free to work with a partner, I will be here if you need help." She paused and looked at the box, "But I really must get this repaired to hold them again before you all succeed in your task. You may begin."

Subthreads:

Just another good vibration by Jessica Hayles

Round and round and round I go. by Katerina Vorontsov

2 Giselle Duell Seek and ye shall find [Advanced Divinations] 1517 1 5

Jessica Hayles

July 19, 2021 7:51 PM

Just another good vibration by Jessica Hayles

Mice were, truth be told, not things Jessica had ever thought about in the slightest before she’d come to Sonora. She was not entirely sure, in fact, that she had known mice and rats were separate species before Sonora. Her knowledge on the subject of both had been limited to two back-of-the-mind thoughts, more trigger phrases for certain images than coherent ideas:

1) Black Death
2) Descriptor ‘rat-infested,’ synonym for ‘extremely unkempt/derelict/just plain nasty’

That Jessica, the current one thought, might have understood feeling a certain apprehension about going to her Divination class today, but Jessica expected that her past self would have been incredibly confused to know why her present self felt that apprehension. Past Jessica, probably, if anything, would have been relieved that the unit was ending, not gripping her wrist tightly under the table, silently trying to compel Professor Duell with a repeated thought: don’t let it be entrails, don’t let it be entrails, don’t let it be entrails.

She had tried to do her homework, but if she had a gift here, it was…slight. She could dwell herself into a sort of near-trance – but only near. There was always that one corner of her mind that would not let go and let her truly lose control of herself, at least not for anything short of complete panic. She was actually pretty good at interpretative exercises – reading tea leaves or cards or patterns in thrown things – but she credited that at least as much, if not more, to reading and writing poetry all her life as to her studying paying off. As far as watching the future play out in her head or a crystal ball or a mirror with a candle in front of it, though – when it came to all that, she was still in the dark, presumably due to that one cling-on corner of her brain. As a result of the convergence of these realities, the best she had been able to come up with for the homework had been a vague notion of ‘absence,’ hence her silent chanting: don’t let it be entrails, don’t let it be entrails, don’t let it be entrails.

Mice, it turned out, were actually cute. Especially once one got used to them, and most especially the one she’d been working with through the unit. She called it Buttons and it was very soft and curious and had tiny feet and she really, really had no interest in seeing its insides. After all these years of Potions classes, she was fairly immune to dealing with guts and such – but not when they started out inside something she had been explicitly told to bond with. She knew intellectually that was how things were, but the nice thing about being rich was all the unpleasant realities she could ignore. It was just a matter of concentration, and she infinitely preferred that effort to…sacrificing Buttons to Hecate or whatever. Stupid though it was, she thought Buttons might be the creature in the building who liked her best second only to Sadie maybe, and while she didn’t want a bad grade…there were limits she was not quite willing to go past to get them, and sacrificing Buttons to Hecate seemed like it might well be one of those lines. Her grades weren’t quite worth getting PTSD or something over, and wouldn’t have been even if she’d been particularly likely to do anything with her life.

Luckily, it was not entrails. Arguably luckily, it seemed her homework had been…within the neighborhood of accurate? Unluckily, she was…not that good at the exercises about attunement, feeling something. Sometimes when she worked with her wand, she felt warmth in her fingers, but she thought that might just be the wand generating heat as it worked. In the…air?, though….

Well, doubt did nothing to help with magic. If she’d learned nothing else in five and a half years, it was that doubt hindered magic. Unsure what else to do, she sat down on the floor, closed her eyes, and muttered, “heeere, Buttons, here, here…” while trying to feel something other than the occasional vibrations form someone else taking a step or something.

16 Jessica Hayles Just another good vibration 1442 0 5

Katerina Vorontsov

July 30, 2021 3:44 PM

Round and round and round I go. by Katerina Vorontsov

Myomancy had been an...interesting...unit. Katya had heard of using mice and grains for New Year's divinations before, but had thought of it as something rather rustic, a bit simpler than casting the rings but a bit more complex than casting the wreaths. It had been surprising to find it taken more seriously here, and to find it tied into the important work of learning to attune themselves to the magical resonances. A useful reminder, she supposed, that all of the magical traditions had areas that would surprise an outsider, and that made more use of things other traditions used less; it was a pity that it was far too expensive and time-consuming and difficult to learn new ways to do things one had already learned for anyone to realistically effectively sample them all. She knew it had once been the fashion for young men to go on grand tours, and sometimes young men still did so, but that was a year or two, not really time to do more than skim the surface.

Useful reminder or not, though, Katya was not sorry to see the unit drawing to an end. Or at least, she had been before class started. Once in class, she was, at first, mostly confused. The professor had had an accident? Well, that was unfortunate, but did after all happen to everyone sooner or later - but what was she talking about after that, her wand was right there in her hand...?

Oh - it was supposed to be humor. American sarcasm. She liked sarcasm as well as the next person, but she did wish...it was possible it was just lack of context on her part, but it seemed that a lot of the time, Americans simply said untrue things in a specific tone of voice, rather than using any real wordplay or double meanings. It wasn't as amusing that way, but then, these were people who found things falling on people funny, or saying things about people's mothers.

The instructions, at least, were clear, and did not seem to involve untrue statements pronounced just so. Find the mouse, without a wand. Use the bonds they had been forming with the mice to do so. So simple, and yet - not. Still, they had been working with their mice for a while, and Katya had often spoken to hers in Russian. She had no idea how long it took a mouse to recognize words spoken by a human, even on a basic level, but at least she sounded pretty distinctive, though how useful that would be, she still wasn't sure. It assumed the mouse was tame enough that it would want to come to a human, which was very contrary to the nature of mice.

She bit her lip, thinking. She had heard old song-charms for driving mice out of fields back home. Could she reverse that a bit, personalize it for her purposes, or would she accidentally draw every rodent for a quarter of a mile to her?

One way to find out, she supposed. First, to begin...circles. Walk left- you were banishing something. Walk right - that was drawing inside the circle. She tucked her left hand behind her and extended her right one slightly as she began to walk. Hopefully, everyone would just think she was looking around for her mouse and humming under her breath as she tried to reach out into the unseen and sense a location and draw its occupant in, not that she was doing something 'foreign' or 'odd' - But she couldn't worry about that. That just made her angry, and who knew what that might cause....

16 Katerina Vorontsov Round and round and round I go. 1418 0 5