Okay, this isn't to bad? Right? on Charms

Grayson Wright

July 15, 2022 8:28 PM

Advanced Charms - Double, double, toil and trouble by Grayson Wright

All of the students in the Advanced class were, in the absence of any transfer students, familiar sights to its professor, and after five or six years of listening to him correct their wand movements, he was just as familiar of a sight to them. The sixth years, however, might have noticed that his posture was slightly more relaxed than usual (fractionally, if only fractionally, decreasing his usual resemblance to an outsized, slightly anxious, very fussy bird), and now that the one day a year where he wore a hat was over, the students probably all noticed that his hair had gone significantly greyer over the summer than it had been in June. He also looked rather tired, but as he finished marking attendance and called the class to order, his smile was genuine enough as he looked around the room at everyone.

"Hello again, everyone," he greeted them. "Welcome back. Sixth years, welcome also to the inner circle, glad to see you chose to remain with us. I won't tell you that this class is one you'll find easy, since, well, that's unlikely, but I will say I'm confident you can all rise to the challenge - if I didn't, I wouldn't have accepted you into this class, because here is where you'll get a much clearer idea than you might have had before about why both those who are very skilled at and those who are very unskilled at charmswork can make for very dangerous witches and wizards - involuntarily in one case, or if so inclined in the other.

"For the first few weeks of this year, we're going to go through some charms that may superficially seem simple enough: charms that extend the duration of other spells in time and space, extension and containment charms, advanced animation charms. You'll do a lot of practical work on the spells and a lot of research on things like factors of effectiveness - after your CATS, you should all have enough of a grasp on basic theory to only need moderate refreshers on points like why spells are categorized as they are and such, so by the end of class, I want a brief written explanation of why what I'm about to do isn't an example of a conjuration."

He picked up an empty metal inkwell from his desk and tapped it with his wand while pronouncing a single word: "Geminio."

Another inkwell, identical to the first, seemed to materialize from thin air before falling to the ground with a very solid-sounding clatter. Putting his wand down on the lectern, Professor Wright reached down and picked up the copy; no sooner was the copy in his hand than a third inkwell fell from seemingly nowhere to the floor.

"Doubling charm," he informed them, putting the first copy on the lectern and picking his wand back up. "From geminus, 'twin' - you find some experts who believe the spell is particularly effective between May 23 and June 21, the point in the solar year associated with the constellation Gemini. Each copy is worth less than the one before it - you could put ink in any one of these, and since I am at least a reasonably skilled wizard whose powers are as stable and fully developed as they're likely to get, they might even function until, I don't know, let's say the end of this week - but at some point, without yet more spellwork that would also be harder to perform on these objects than on objects that are more 'real,' you'd eventually still open your bag and find your ink everywhere except where you wanted it. "I'm sure you can all see why it would be very illegal for me to try to sell these things - and, by now, you might have spotted another problem with this spell, too - finite incantatem."

While he had been talking, the inkwell had continued to replicate; by the time he terminated the charm, the lectern had more inkwells on it than there were students in the room. At the second charm, though, the number finally stopped increasing.

"Homework," he said. "You'll each take one of these false inkwells and make notes on how it changes over the next week - we'll discuss at the first class after that. Now, if I - the original caster - hadn't ended the enchantment, those probably could have continued replicating...at least until tomorrow night, maybe another day. Most of you couldn't keep the effect going for more than a few hours, since it should be several years before your powers are fully developed. You'll still begin by replicating spare quills, though - a ton of feathers will kill you as surely as a ton a pewter, but it takes a lot longer to produce a ton of feathers, so there's more time to intervene if something goes wrong, highly unlikely though that is. If you need a spare quill, there's plenty in the box," he added, pointing to the box in question. "Any questions? You may begin working."

Subthreads:

Okay, this isn't to bad? Right? by Valentine Duell

16 Grayson Wright Advanced Charms - Double, double, toil and trouble 113 1 5

Valentine Duell

July 17, 2022 1:02 PM

Okay, this isn't to bad? Right? by Valentine Duell

Valentine was not sure about this. The whole next two years of advanced classes were just going to be very, very difficult. She just knew it. But, it had to be done if she was going to pursue her hopes of becoming a wandmaker. As was her tradition at this point, she arrived at class early. Ordinarily this was to give her some time to work on her game for the gaming club, but this early in the year that wasn't a necessity yet. She'd known this was going to be a rough academic year so had planned out plenty for the club over the summer. That would hopefully allow her to work on class stuff instead before the actual class began.

As Professor Wright began to talk, she could just feel that uneasiness in her stomach grow as he said the class was 'unlikely' to be easy. It did help that he thought they could all handle it though. If he didn't think she could do it, he wouldn't have let her in here. So she would prove him right. Hopefully. She listened intently as he then began the actual lesson.

It turns out that she knew this spell! Well, she'd read about it a little while back, but hadn't been able to make it work at the time. She hadn't tried again lately, maybe she should have. Gary had written it down in his 'Magical GameMaster spells and tricks' book he'd put together for the gaming club. It'd passed from him to Ness and then to her. He'd written down that it was a great spell when you needed a big army of miniatures for a huge fight. There had been notes that they didn't last terribly long, but that was a bonus because it saved on storage space. You only needed one of each type of figure for any given encounter. You could then just duplicate them when you needed them and they'd vanish after you were done.

Val couldn't help it as she prepared her quill and her wand. She let out a maniacal little giggle, if she could get this working.. well, then the gaming group may have some more fun times ahead of them. The process was familiar enough by now, she knew what she needed to do and what she wanted to happen. Visualizing the effect she wanted in her mind wasn't an option, so she just did the best with what she had.

"Geminio!" She called to the quill while she tapped it with her wand. Nothing happened and she grimaced slightly. However, when she picked up the quill another one appeared. It was not a twin however. The new quill was a scraggly mess of a feather and the tip was tarnished and blunted. The quill dissipated before it even fell to the desk. "Well," Val commented to her neighbor, "I guess that sort of worked."

2 Valentine Duell Okay, this isn't to bad? Right? 1490 0 5