Nathan Xavier
October 09, 2021 10:46 AM
Beginner Class: Pumpkins by Nathan Xavier
Nathan stood in front of Greenhouse One as the beginners began to arrive for their class. It was a nice fall day, when it was still pleasant to be outside, but the greenhouse was no longer sweltering and choking in its humidity. It was definitely still quite warm within the greenhouse, but a two hour class inside of it no longer felt like cruel and unusual punishment as it had for most of September.It was the first class after lunch break, so they trickled in by singles, pairs, and small groups, rather than the large mass that might result if everyone left one class and headed straight here. It gave him a bit more time to greet each person individually, ask after their weekend (it was a Tuesday, but Herbology didn't meet on Mondays), and return their latest homework assignment. This early in the year, for Beginners, it was only marked as Pass or Fail, and they had to do pretty badly to get a Fail, but he had added some comments if he felt they were missing anything significant or if they had made particularly astute observations.
As they walked in they would see the greenhouse had already been decorated for Halloween. There were pumpkins up and down the work tables, and fake spider webs spread inexpertly by a six year old and a three year old along the shelves that lined each glass wall. Colorful craft spiders made out of pop-poms and pipecleaners climbed along the webs (Dora and Otto had made the spiders; Nathan had enchanted them to move).
"Hello," he greeted the whole group of the them a minute or two past when the class was supposed to begin, when it seemed like everyone had arrived and settled into one of the seats around the two central tables that ran the long way down the middle of the greenhouse. This was the larger of Sonora's two greenhouses (the smaller being used exclusively for the more dangerous plants studied in Advanced classes and very occasionally by fifth years), and it had plenty of seating to accommodate the Intermediate class which hosted three grade levels at once. The Beginners only had two year groups so they could spread out a little bit more.
"I'll take a moment to remind everyone that my office hours are every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 11:30 to 12:30," which was a large chuck of their lunch break, but most questions wouldn't require the entire hour, and they'd still have half an hour to grab a quick sandwich before their Potions lesson began at 1 even if it did, "or by request if you can't make it at that time. You don't need to be struggling or failing to stop by. If you just have a question about something we covered, or want to talk about the current unit to help understand it better, that's a great reason to swing in. Sometimes a quick chat about something early in the year that you mostly understand but don't fully grasp can help smooth out some rough sailing that might have occurred once we build on those concepts later." Especially among the first years, who had only a month's worth of study, it was still far too early yet to tell who was really struggling, who was still adjusting to how Sonora did schoolwork, or who might just be having a bad day, so he wasn't yet going to recommend outright that any one person in particular should attend office hours, but he wanted them all to remember the option was open to them.
"Alright, so we are still in the Magical Flowers and Fruits unit, and since we've just hit October, we're going to take a day to look at pumpkins. Pumpkins are not, in and of themselves, magical, so there's nothing special we need to learn about growing them. However, they are very culturally significant to the magical world, and that does give them a little bit of induced magical power. Non magical people once believed that carving out faces and setting a candle into a pumpkin could ward of evil spirits, and to an extent, it could. Anyone with even a little bit of magical talent could, even untrained. create a ward through sheer belief and the act of following ritualized steps, by crafting a Jack o' Lantern. It wouldn't stop anything attempting to approach intentionally, but an aimless wandering spirit would avoid it because the could pumpkin retain enough latent belief magic telling it to turn away that it would seek a path of lesser resistance.
"These worked because pumpkins do have a surprisingly good ability to retain magical intent. A trained witch or wizard can make a very strong ward using a pumpkin as an anchoring point. The only problem is that the ward's integrity does deteriorate as the pumpkin begins to rot, so it's not a common anchor for long term wards. But if you need a short term one, and you have a pumpkin available, it's a very good choice. What we're going to do today is you're going to make jack o' lanterns. You're going to make them, holding the belief in your mind, that they will keep away our little colorful spiders." He caught a bright yellow and orange one that was wandering on the fake web nearby, to assure everyone that they weren't going to need to face any real spiders today. He put Dora's creature back on its web.
"Once everyone is done, we'll have the spiders walk around the tables and we'll see if they stay away from the jack o' lanterns better than they stay away from the normal pumpkins. You should be able to find enough carving tools on each table for everyone to have one. They are sharp, so be careful. If anyone wants help taking the seeds out, just raise your hand and I'll be around. There should be buckets under the table for collecting the seeds. Any questions? Have fun. We'll be putting all of the finished jack o' lanterns around the school grounds to decorate for Halloween."
OOC: Welcome to Herbology! Tag me if your character gets hurt carving their pumpkin. Nathan will catch on if there's blood and won't let things get too bad. If you want to skip to the end and show how well your jack o' lantern is (or isn't) keeping away the spiders, that's fine. Have fun! Happy October!
Subthreads: It's all a little scary by Xavier Lundstrom with Phil Carson
I know those! by Iris Cobb
1
Nathan Xavier
Beginner Class: Pumpkins
28
1
5
Xavier Lundstrom
October 09, 2021 9:25 PM
It's all a little scary by Xavier Lundstrom
Xavier did not bound into the greenhouse with a cheery ‘hi Professor Me’ like he had for most of the previous year. He stared at a point just behind Professor Xavier’s left shoulder and said ‘Fine thanks’ and ‘Thank you’ when the professor asked about his weekend and returned his homework. He glanced down at the passing grade without much reaction. Writing facts about plants had never been one of his problems. There was a bit more ink than usual across his assignment, suggesting that he hadn’t put as much care and attention into it as he maybe should have.He took a seat. Even as wrapped up as he was in his own problems, he could scarcely fail to notice the decor. It reminded him of home. His mom went all out for Hallowe’en. She was one of those people who thrived on making others happy. He could remember cutting out big crepe paper bats to tape up in the windows, and how she’d put a fan just behind them so that their wings would shiver and move in the corners of people’s eyes. Their porch was always covered with the most cobwebs and skeletons. And his and his siblings costumes were always, absolutely objectively, the best. He vividly remembered being an alien one year, and all the polystyrene balls she’d stuck on pipecleaners to make him a headband full of wiggling extra eyes. He remembered sitting and fidgeting through face painting complaining that it was taking too long, but how she’d said the results would be worth it—and they had been. He hadn’t just been painted green, she had contoured a strange, martian face over the top of his own, with shadows and highlights. He remembered walking down the street, holding her hand. She was dressed as a superhero, her cape fluttering in the breeze, and it was the world’s most accurate costume because she could do anything.
Except fly in and rescue him from all this.
Professor Xavier began speaking, kicking off with a very detailed reminder of his office hours. Xavier wondered whether this was a pointed way of trying to make him stop by without singling him out. Herbology was one of the classes he wasn’t failing too badly. But hey, he was at risk of turning into a horrible magical explosion, so probably everyone was watching him extra closely.
They would be looking at pumpkins today. Xavier kind of wanted to yell that wizards didn’t fricking own pumpkins. There was almost an acknowledgement of that, but the class for the day rubbed a heck of a lot of salt into an already open wound. They wanted him to spend classes carving pumpkins. Like he would have done at home. Okay, not exactly like he would have at home, because there was something about focussing his energy and channeling magic into it to make it a ward or whatever. If Xavier couldn’t channel magic through his wand, he doubted he could shove it into a pumpkin with the blunt force of his hands. It also wasn’t like home in about four other very significant ways.
“We still do this,” he said, to his neighbour. “He said non-magical people used to do this. We still do.” Perhaps Professor Xavier’s point had been about the folk belief that went with it, rather than the act itself, but Xavier wasn’t about to let wizards just take pumpkins. Barely anyone dressed up here for Hallowe’en. The school got decorated but it wasn’t the same as it was at home. It wasn’t a wizard only thing. And he should probably just keep his head down. He should just smile and nod and say that yes, this was a wizard thing, and he liked how they did it, and he loved the magical world the mostest. Because maybe if he said all that, they’d let him go back to his own once in a while, however backwards that logic seemed. But he just couldn’t. He couldn’t just let go of the fact that everything in here was tugging on some of his happiest childhood memories and that he had no idea when he’d ever get another chance to create more like them. “I used to do this every year. With my brother and sister, and my dad—” His voice was ranging unsteadily. It had started out deadly quiet, pitching to a volume that projected beyond his table as he got to the middle, but now dropping again as his throat closed up. It was shaking. And it wasn’t the only thing. The pumpkin on the table began to quiver. Xavier didn’t notice. He was too busy squeezing his eyes shut and swallowing hard against the last words. “—and my mom.”
13
Xavier Lundstrom
It's all a little scary
1529
0
5
Phil Carson
October 09, 2021 10:55 PM
I am a little afraid, I admit by Phil Carson
"Hey, Professor X," Phil greeted the teacher as he walked into the greenhouse. He had mostly gotten over his disappointment that the man wasn't bald or in a wheelchair and did not seem able to read minds. (These were all things he could still accomplish in the future, though, so Phil just had to assume he met the guy too early.)He also thought maybe maybe the rest of the class was starting to forget that he had shouted out "NO WAY!!" the first class of Herbology when the man introduced himself as Professor Xavier.
It was a crime Phil wasn't sure he could ever forgive that the man's parents hadn't named him Charles, but it was hardly something he could hold against Professor Xavier himself. If they were going to go so far as to have a son with that surname, who became a professor at a school for gifted youngsters, the least they could do was name him Charles.
He just had to make do with the fact that he got to write to his friends back home that he was really and truly being taught by an honest-to-God Professor Xavier at his new school, and ignore that not all of the details matched up. How many comic book nerds got to say that?
He sat down and looked over his returned homework while he waited for class to begin. He'd apparently mixed up two of the flowers that he'd been talking about in it, and he tried to mentally fix it in his brain which one was which. It was kind of weird, needing to learn a whole new set of flora that he'd never known existed before, but he could name the entire Norse and Greek pantheons, and keep them straight, so he figured he should be able to learn the names of a few more flowers.
Pumpkins were at least something he'd heard of before. And honestly, the Halloween decorations were refreshingly familiar, too.
He dutifully took notes during the lecture, but felt like this was a class that barely counted as putting a thin veneer of learning over having a pumpkin carving party. It was kind of interesting though, the idea that belief alone could be enough to ward off some wandering evil spirits. (Even as the implication that wandering evil spirits were real was kind of terrifying, but they'd had a month of DADA, too, so this wasn't as surprising as he wished it was.)
Still. Pumpkins could retain magic intent. That was neat. And they just had to believe carving out a face into the pumpkin would keep the spiders away and it would be so. He'd accepted worse logic from comic books, so he was willing to give it a go. And he'd figured out over the past month that belief and mental thought and concentration were seriously important parts of using magic, so it made sense. Willpower was a big part of most fictional magic systems, too, and that was maybe something that had seeped over to general human consciousness from people who actually knew what they were talking about.
We still do.
Phil startled slightly, not expecting his neighbor to talk to him, though he should have. He was still getting used to so much of Sonora classwork being done in pairs or groups, and even when the assignment was solitary, the teachers didn't seem to mind people talking amongst themselves.
"I know," he agreed. "I'm muggleborn." This seemed to be the most frequently used term to describe a person born to non-magical parents.
Phil nodded along as his neighbor described his family's Halloween traditions. The other kid's pumpkin was doing a weird and magical shake-up, but he assumed this was normal. The pom-pom spider were walking around, so pumpkins must shake and shiver sometimes, too. The other kid's unsteady voice and expression were much clearer indications that something was wrong. He wasn't sure what was going on exactly, so he tried to distract from whatever was upsetting the guy with his own family traditions. "My dad and stepmom helped me make one every year, too. I guess this year, they'll have to get Loki to help them." He grimaced slightly and shuddered, imagining the disaster area that would be the entire apartment if Loki got anywhere need a pumpkin de-seeding. He hoped they were keeping his room closed and locked while he was away. "There'll probably still be pumpkin seeds stuck to the ceiling in January. That's what happens when a God of Chaos gets involved." Or a one year old. Same thing.
He turned the pumpkin in front him around, trying to decide which side looked the best for carving on the face. Making his decision, he took a quill and quickly traced out the triangle eyes and nose, and then, as he was about to contemplate how he should make the mouth, he began chewing on the quill's feathered end before spitting it out in disgust. "Gah! Yuck! I miss real pens." They always ended up chewed on, but it helped him think. Quills were just nasty when they got in his mouth. Which they did. Way too often. That was another habit he was going to need to break now that he was a wizard.
1
Phil Carson
I am a little afraid, I admit
1536
0
5
Xavier Lundstrom
October 09, 2021 11:30 PM
Of me or them? by Xavier Lundstrom
Well, study hard, or they’ll take you away.Xavier bit back the response. It wasn’t true. There were a handful of other Muggleborns he knew, and this hadn’t happened to any of them. Just to him. However angry he was, however much he wanted to shout, it would only mark him as an outsider. It would let everyone know there was something wrong with him, and it would probably go down on his permanent record of being a bad wizard, which they would use to keep him from seeing his mom.
The first year student started chatting away like everything was perfectly normal, and like Xavier wasn’t balling his fists under the table and sounding like every word was being wrung out of him by force. He opened his eyes, noticing that his pumpkin was shaking. That was a loss of control. His heartbeat began to match it, speeding up, hammering against his chest. He wasn’t supposed to be acting like this.
Snippets of Professor Wright’s lectures flittered through his brain. All the things about calming himself down. But the part that kept broadcasting itself the loudest was that you couldn’t just flick a switch or tell yourself to relax. It didn’t work like that. He could let Hallowe’en go, couldn’t he? He had last year. But it had hurt to do. And the only balm he could apply to that wound was telling himself he’d see them at Christmas, Christmas would make up for it, and this year, he didn’t even know if that was true—
The kid was rambling about letting Loki help with pumpkin carving.
“What?” he asked, trying to force himself to focus on the one thing around him that wasn’t shaking. Trying to give himself something to think about. “Loki isn’t real.” He was ninety-nine percent sure of that. If he was real, he probably wouldn’t be helping with carving pumpkins. The kid had said he was Muggleborn, right? So, why would his family be invoking Loki? Not that superheroes were the same as wizards. That was a silly way to think about magic. And besides, superheroes usually did good things.
He tried to keep his eyes firmly on the first year, even though the pumpkin still rocked alarmingly in his peripheral vision.
13
Xavier Lundstrom
Of me or them?
1529
0
5
Phil Carson
October 10, 2021 12:31 AM
The casual mention of wandering evil spirits by Phil Carson
He eyed the shaking pumpkin and wondered idly if its shaking was getting worse. If Loki was here, it might concern him more, but she was safely home in Montana. She’d probably touch it and explode pumpkin seeds to every corner of the greenhouse, but she wasn’t here, so it was probably fine.“Loki’s real,” he promised with resigned certainty. There were times he very much wished she wasn’t, but when he opened his eyes (and often uncovered his ears), she was still there. Accidental magic was supposed to be wish fulfillment, but it had clearly failed him. Or more likely, her divine Chaos power was just too strong for his paltry untrained magic potential, and so she was immune from being accidentally wished out of existence. And so were the supervillain catastrophes she made of his stuff.
He continued, “I mean, her real name is Felicity, and she’s one, but I’m pretty sure my half sister is the human incarnation of a Chaos God, so I call her Loki.” It was not a moniker their parents had adopted, sadly, but he was pretty sure dad, at least, thought it might be accurate. His first kid had been a Phil Coulson after all, so he much know all toddlers weren’t like that. (Not that Phil knew any other toddlers for comparison either.)
It occurred to Phil to wonder if Loki would be magical, too, and he had to assume she would be. Loki the Norse God was a mage. And there was no possible way the disasters she created so frequently followed the laws of physics, so clearly she already had access to her powers.
Phil was sure he couldn’t have been that bad even at that age.
“You said you had a brother and a sister? Are yours younger, too?”
1
Phil Carson
The casual mention of wandering evil spirits
1536
0
5
Xavier Lundstrom
October 10, 2021 8:08 AM
Oh. Yeah. Thank goodness there's none of those round here. *nervous laugh* by Xavier Lundstrom
This kid was weird. And probably annoying. Xavier was getting the distinct feeling that he really didn’t want to try to have a conversation with him on a regular basis, because he was one of those people who just said stuff and expected you to know what he was talking about even when it was obscure as heck. He was probably the kind of person who dropped minor Star Wars characters into conversations. Not that Loki was obscure (or from Star Wars) but honestly, who came up with that as a reference? And then just talked about it without any context? Was this what he sounded like when he talked about non-magical stuff to other wizards? Jeez, he hoped not. He hoped they could actually tell enough about his culture to know that he wasn’t a weird Muggleborn.Because, of course, that distinction mattered. And was entirely applicable that way round, when he was potentially about to paint the greenhouse orange with the insides of a pumpkin, and be one step closer to blowing himself up.
Whilst he didn’t particularly enjoy Phil’s company so far, he did think that having to concentrate hard on what he was saying was beneficial. He thought the pumpkin had stopped shaking slightly. It was weird how it was hard to be angry when you were annoyed. The mild, mundane crud that Phil was irritating him with was several steps down from the all consuming, destabilising rage that was building up inside him, and so… well, it functioned as a distraction if nothing else.
And then Phil actually did something conversationally normal, and turned the tables on him. He half shook his head, but he couldn’t answer the full question non-verbally. He could feel his jaw clenching around the words.
“Older brother. Younger sister.” He didn’t dare try and say their names. A pair of cracks had appeared at the top of his pumpkin at the mere mention of their existence.
13
Xavier Lundstrom
Oh. Yeah. Thank goodness there's none of those round here. *nervous laugh*
1529
0
5
Iris Cobb
October 12, 2021 7:32 PM
I know those! by Iris Cobb
Herbology was easily Iris' favorite class. It felt like it gave her some small connection to her garden back home amidst all the other strange things that they were learning about at the school. Granted, there were some strange things in herbology as well, but even those felt more 'normal' than most of her other classes. She made her way to the greenhouse after lunch and greeted Professor Xavier cheerily. Then she went to find a seat while examining her homework. As usual, it was mostly good, not perfect, but not far off either. She made some mental notes of the professor's written comments, he (unsurprisingly) had some good points.It was only after she'd taken her seat and looked up that she noticed the decor. Her first thought was wondering if the greenhouse had been infested and they would be learning about how to keep plants safe from spiders today. Iris wasn't squeamish about spiders, she hardly could be being Billy's sister, and upon closer inspection she noticed that the spiders looked odd. Even odd for around here. They were very colorful, fuzzy and... had some metal? Some strange type of magical spiders apparently. They didn't seem to be bothering her, so she didn't bother them. That was usually the best way to deal with most spiders.
When the professor began speaking, she started off with a reminder of information that she already knew. Maybe that was some subtle way of telling them that they should all come to see him at some point to do some sort of informal progress check? She scribbled down a quick note in case she thought she should see him. Then he moved onto the topic of the day. She didn't like it, but also loved it at the same time. The thoughts of wandering spirits made her think of Tumbleweed again, and the idea that carving a pumpkin could help keep them away was a wonderful thing! Why hadn't they learned this before they had gone? She could have brought a pumpkin along. She wasn't sure about the rest of the lesson, here she had the chance to create something that could keep away terrible ghosts, and she was supposed to use it to ward off cute, harmless spiders? That seemed like a waste.
She could, in theory, not do great with this class assignment but have a safe and possibly ghost free spot somewhere around the school once they were put on display. It was a tempting thought. But one she wasn't sure she could act on. The assignment was to make a spider ward. She sighed. There was another minor problem with the assignment and she turned to her neighbor for clarification. "We never really celebrated Halloween back home, how do you make a Jack o' Lantern?"
2
Iris Cobb
I know those!
1526
0
5
Phil Carson
October 21, 2021 8:32 PM
I haven't seen any. by Phil Carson
Phil nodded when Xavier corrected his assumption that his siblings were both younger. The brother was actually older. He felt like if the older brother was at Sonora, the Pecari would have mentioned it, so either he wasn't magical, or he was attending a different school. Given that the conversation started with a reference to non-magical culture, he was going to guess the former. Maybe that meant Loki wouldn't have magic? Plus, she was only a half-sister, so maybe it was Mom's side that had the magic gene? He could hope. Not that it would matter. Phil would be graduated by the time she made it here. Way younger sister for the win. Still, it would be cool if he could just be the unique one. And safer for the planet.Xavier was cracking his pumpkin open with magic, but Phil was sure he couldn't do that yet (and it didn't look like Xavier was doing a super good job of cutting it in a nice even circle either), so he picked up his knife and started hacking at the top of his pumpkin, thinking No spiders, no spiders, no spiders. This pumpkin keeps away all spiders, real and crafted. Once he got a circle carved around the stem, he pulled it out and looked at the seeds inside. This was the gross part.
"Did you ever reach into a pumpkin and pretend the seeds were brains and we're zombie scientists?" he asked, wondering if this was a common cultural thing, or something only the Carsons did. He was pretty sure the zombie scientist thing, at least, was all Dad, but you never knew unless you asked.
1
Phil Carson
I haven't seen any.
1536
0
5