Selina Skies

March 10, 2023 8:10 PM
The beginners class was progressing steadily. They had started with simple changes of state for the first years, such as changing a plastic cup to a glass one, or a paper plate to a china one, with the second years being pushed to alter additional features such as the size, colour or design. Towards the end of the first semester, they had all been working on simple object transformations, such as pebbles to buttons, again with design complexity setting it apart for the older group. Whilst it would generally take most people some planning, several attempts, and revision of their technique to get each new spell, they should have been achieving some consistent results, with everyone having their object mostly transformed by the end of each lesson. Anyone who was falling shy of that standard had been asked to attend office hours.

“Good morning class,” she greeted, once the students were assembled. “Today, we will be continuing with object transfigurations, though today you will be working on transforming either cloth or paper bags into gloves. This is a significant step up from where we left off last semester with pebbles to buttons. Can anyone suggest what makes it harder?” she asked, taking answers from a few different raised hands.

“By the end of the lesson, all second years need to have transfigured a paper bag, though you’re welcome to use a cloth one first to help you. All first years need to have transfigured a cloth bag, though anyone who gets done with more than half the lesson to spare can step up to paper.” That wasn’t something she predicted would happen, but it was always worth making the offer. “You can also extend yourselves by making a matching pair, or by elaborating on the design work.

“The spell is chirothecae.” The chalk wrote it out on the board behind her, along with the pronunciation. Kee-ROH-tae-ka. “Roll the r if possible,” she advised, demonstrating the pronunciation again slowly. “You will want to make a punctuated wand movement with a flick on each syllable, plus one additional flick at the end - one for each finger and the thumb.” She paused to demonstrate, producing an elegant lavender evening glove with some lace trim. “Small, circular wrist motions between each flick,” she advised.

“Before beginning, please make either written or visual notes - use the transfiguration table to write a compare and contrast, or sketch out the transformation process,” she requested. The modification had been made to support Quillan, although she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it sooner. She tried her best not to look directly at him whilst giving it. So far, she felt she was managing with him and Xarryn, though in both cases there were a few unanswered questions.

“You may begin.”
Subthreads:
13 Selina Skies Beginners - Glove Yourselves 26 1 5

Ida Stanford

March 13, 2023 10:14 PM
Ida arrived at class promptly as usual. She always left herself just a few extra minutes to get to class, in case she ran across someone who had forgotten that it was nearly time for class to begin. She did like being helpful, and ensuring that everyone was ready as they could be to handle their day. Once she found a seat in the classroom, she pulled out her class materials and waited patiently for the class to begin, saying 'hi' to her fellow beginners as was proper.

By the sounds of it, they were going to be doing harder things. That was good, she had figured out the buttons thing by the end of the semester, and was looking forward to what was next. Professor Skies' question seemed like a bit of an obvious one, mainly she thought it was a bit more of an intricate shape change, but she was okay with letting some of the other people answer. She took the notes and drawings as requested, and found that it did help her quite a bit as she worked.

Once she and the rest of the class were released to begin working, Ida began by examining her cloth bag. It fit over her hand, which was nice and convenient. It was plain white and would be a bit tricky for her to change into something like the very lovely glove that Professor Skies had made. She'd start with just a plain white glove, that'd work the best. Then she could get fancy afterwards. With that all decided, she got to work on her transformation sheets.

Once that was done, she took her bag, swished her wand and chanted out, "Chirothecae!" The bag twitched and the edge pulled and puckered up into a few sections that one might almost be able to call the beginnings of 'fingers' if you looked at them just right. Ida thought it wasn't a bad start. She turned to her neighbor, "How is yours going? Mine is thinking about maybe turning into a glove."
2 Ida Stanford No problem, right? 1571 0 5

Quillan Arcadius

March 15, 2023 4:49 AM
Quillan took a seat in Transfiguraion. On the whole, the class leant towards the practical, and most of the assigned reading came from the textbook, to be done in his own time. All of this helped Quillan, and he'd noted the shift to 'or draw it out' after he had both handed in some deliberately incomprehensible Transfiguration tables and spoken to Professor Wright about his difficulties. He appreciated the concept of the tables - it was good to slow down and think through the project in detail before beginning. Some people probably needed to be physically held back from jumping right in by being made to write it out step by step. Quillan was more than capable of giving quiet contemplation to things, and it was much less distracting for him to just think through the similarities and differences - which he could do with perfectly categorised clarity - rather than trying to put it on paper, at which point the effort and embarrassment of having to write became his main focus. He took the option to sketch instead, though his eyes flicked back and forth over the transfiguration table template, mentally assigning values to all the boxes. The material and colour were both flexible - they could stay the same or be changed to stretch himself. Both objects were manmade, but he didn't find that a very helpful link as it felt like it did little to affect what he needed to achieve. Shape was the biggest shift, and was what he should focus on before worrying about colours or fabrics. In his sketches, he had the fingers jutting out first, before he slimmed the rest of the bag out.

He ran the spell through his head a few times from memory, neither trusting it to be phonetic by the rules of English, nor trusting his own interpretation of what that would mean.

"Chirothecae," he cast, flicking his wand as instructed. A small bump appeared where each of his flicks had landed. A second attempt pushed each of them out a little further.

His neighbour, Idea, asked how it was going, and he was relieved to see they seemed to be on a level playing field. That was usually how it went for him with wandwork.

"Depends on what stage you count it a glove," he replied with a smile, picking up the bag and inserting his fingers into the little nubs. Each went in to about the end of his fingernail, and the remainder of the shapeless bag covered his hand. "I'm sure these will be the height of fashion next season if we pitch them right."

13 Quillan Arcadius Provided you like your gloves on the shapeless side 1570 0 5

Ida Stanford

March 18, 2023 8:49 PM
Ida giggled lightly at Quillan's demonstration of his progress. It looked a little bit better than hers, she wasn't sure that she could even get her fingers into the 'fingers' of her 'definitely still a bag'. After a quick, exaggerated critical visual inspection of Quillan's 'gloves' she responded, "Something along the line of, 'Do you need some extra storage space for small items close at hand? Wear the newest sensation, the glove bag!'" The idea was ridiculous and a fun joke. There would need to be some way to hold the back up on the wrist or arm to make that a practical accessory.

"How well can you write with it?" She asked out of sheer curiosity. That would be a necessity if it was... no this wasn't a serious thing. He was just joking, it was completely and utterly impractical. "Let's see if I can't get mine a little closer to a glove." Yes, that was a good distraction to get things back on track. Was he going to think she was crazy taking his joke to far?

Once more Ida flicked her wand at her own bag while doing her best to visualize the transformation she waned and chanting out "Chirothacae" The 'fingers' lengthened a bit, and the whole bag turned an odd orangey-yellow color. She looked at it for a moment in surprise before turning back to Quillan. "I did not try that color change. If anything I would have gone for more of a purple color."
2 Ida Stanford It's not ideal, but we can work with it 1571 0 5

Quillan Arcadius

March 18, 2023 9:05 PM
Quillan grinned as Ida immediately came up with a catchy tagline for their product. She was quick.

“Perfect!” he smiled. “Absolutely no charms that could come up with a better or more elegant solution. We’ll have conquered the market before you know it.”

He didn’t baulk as she asked him to do one of his least favourite things ever. For this, he had a built in reason to fail, and she was asking him only to demonstrate the act of writing, not actually produce content. He picked up his quill very shakily, struggling between gripping it with the tiny amounts of his fingers that were available, and palming it. There were some things he could write reliably, such as his own name, which was fortunately a logical demonstration item. He turned his parchment over, scratching a wobbly progression of letters, dropping the quill several times.

“I’m thinking they’re more of an outdoor accessory,” he concluded.

The distraction was fun, but they did also have a task to do, and as Ida turned back to her project, so did he. He cast the spell another time, focussing on lengthening out the fingers. Which was what he got, whilst the rest of the bag remained as shapeless as ever. Ida’s progress seemed more… lateral. She had made larger changes, ones that would count for more credit in the end, but which didn’t make her bag that much more glove-like—though she too had progressed with her fingers.

“Interesting,” he commented, when she said she had ended up with orange but would have gone for purple. He filed that away as useful knowledge to have about her. It didn’t absolutely confirm that purple was her favourite colour, but it suggested it. It was good practice to take these little observations about people and turn them into practical actions—for example, surprising her with purple gifts, without ever directly asking her favourite colour. As for why her transfiguration had ended up that way, he couldn’t guess, though he would very much like to know. “Are you sure you weren’t secretly thinking orangey thoughts, even on a subliminal level? What did you drink for breakfast? Any orange juice knocking around in your system?” he teased.
13 Quillan Arcadius Two shapeless, orange gloves coming right up 1570 0 5

Ida Stanford

March 20, 2023 9:00 PM
Ida smiled when Quillan complimented her idea. She wouldn't go so far as to think it was 'perfect', so she assumed he was being a bit silly as well. Still, it was nice to get a compliment. He attempted to write... his name maybe? It didn't look like it worked very well at all. "It was an excellent attempt," she told him, "but I think you might be right. How much harder would that be if you had it filled with various things as well?" Perhaps it would need an inner lining as well, something to protect your hand from anything you might put in it.

She thought about Quillan's questions for a few moments, wondering if they could have led to this result. "I don't think so..." Ida responded slowly. "I wasn't really thinking about color at all." She paused again a moment in thought before adding, "I had apple juice for breakfast, so that wasn't it." She shuffled the papers in front of her to her sheets she had worked on initially just to confirm. They had 'plain white' noted on them for finishing color. Where had the orange come from? It was an odd mystery.

Quillan's gloves seemed to be coming along nicely. "You are making better progress than I am, those fingers are really coming along." She smiled at him again, "You might be able to use those in class soon."

Her finger nubs were still taunting her and with something of a flourish, she tried again. The third flick must have been closer to right than the others as that finger lengthened much more than the others. Ida's eyes widened at the result and her face turned red. With a gasp, she quickly balled up the glove-bag and hid it beneath her hands. "I'm sorry. Did you see that?" She asked Quillan apologetically. "How..." She stammered a moment, "How do I fix it?"
2 Ida Stanford Shapeless might be preferable 1571 0 5

Quillan Arcadius

March 21, 2023 5:47 AM
“What are you planning on keeping in these gloves that’s so sticky or sharp?” he asked, raising his eyebrows as she stated that their hands might need protecting from whatever they chose to carry around.

“Do you own orange gloves?” he asked. His line about the orange juice had been a joke, but the thing was an unanswered question and he was an Aladren.

“We’re making different progress,” he assured her, when she complimented his work. “In the end, the orange counts for something, even if you didn’t intend it. At least, I think so… If it’s not in your plan, I suppose it might not… But I still think it should,” he added. Ida didn’t exactly seem to be struggling with a crushing crisis of confidence over the very minor differences in what they’d achieved so far but… well, Quillan was very familiar with slapping a smile over something you couldn’t do and pretending it didn’t bother you. He didn’t think that was what was happening, as Ida really had no problem, but he would rather be encouraging than competitive.

He took another shot at his own work, slowly and steadily adding a bit to each finger, but then Ida was suddenly balling up her glove and looking terribly embarrassed.

“I saw some movement out of the corner of my eye,” he said. It had looked like one of the fingers had been growing, perhaps more than the other. He tried to think what might be bad about that but as both an oldest child and having been strictly homeschooled, nothing much came to mind. “Are you worried that it looks silly now? Or like it’s pointing?” It was rude to point, after all. “I’m sure it’s not too bad, and I won’t take offence at a pointing glove,” he assured her. “And hey, it means you know how to lengthen the fingers, so you’re making progress, and whatever you did to that one, you can just do to the others. It’ll be fine.”
13 Quillan Arcadius Oh, how come? 1570 0 5

Nausicaa Scapetello

April 16, 2023 6:52 PM
Nausicaa sat at the front of the classroom, ready to learn. Transfigurations was one of the 'proper' disciplines of magical education, considered one of the more difficult, and therefore not one that she had any intention of failing at. Not that there was really any chance of that to begin with, but it was better to be prepared for anything. She was naturally pleased to say that she had been having no problems whatsoever with their tasks up to this point.

Nausicaa raised her hand at the question to answer that the larger size of the objects factored in to some extent, however the main increase in difficulty would be due to the change of a rather simple shape to a more complex one.

Once the professor began explaining the spell, Nausicaa took appropriate and well written notes. Not necessarily because she needed them, but because it looked good. She suppressed the urge to roll her eyes at the suggestion to use the transfiguration table. That was a crutch for those without the natural talent necessary for proper magical usage. The glove that the professor made was not terrible, if not a bit out of style. Nobody proper wore lace like that any more.

When it arrived, Nausicaa examined her paper bag. There wasn't much to see. Her mind started making notes of things to change, even the blithering obvious ones. The paper needed changed into cloth, the color needed to change from brown to... perhaps a soft powder blue. The fingers would need created and the rest of it needed to be reshaped for her hand and arm. All simple things really by themself, thus... a simple task overall. That was the function of this spell after all, convert the details in her mind into shaping the end result.

With the bag in front of her, she readied her mental image and pulled out her wand. Then duplicating the motions of the professor she spoke out with authority, "Chirothecae!" The bag began to change obligingly. Its color changed, as did its texture, fingers elongated out of it and it's width shrank down. Nausicaa frowned at it. That was not the color blue she had been going for, it was a few shades closer to it's original brown than it should be. When she moved to pick it up, her keen ears heard faint crinkling sounds as if there were still paper bits among the cloth. It had also shrunk a bit to much, and she was certain that it was to small for her. A total failure, how embarrassing. Perhaps she could fix it before anyone noticed.
2 Nausicaa Scapetello Proper fashion is a must 1561 0 5

Desmond Brockert

April 17, 2023 11:08 AM
OOC: Sorry Leo BIC:

Desmond had to admit that he’d been more than a little disappointed when pretty much the entire first year class besides himself, Charlotte and Misty had signed up for Quidditch. Why on earth would intelligent people want to waste their time, playing not only a sport but one that the first year associated with complete Neanderthals like Father’s cousin Eustace? Their time could be so much better spent doing something worthwhile, something intellectual rather than playing a sport and associating with people like Leo Lyons.

Honestly, the prank that the Teppenpaw had played was beyond disgusting and not just because it had been messy and smelled bad. It was the behavior, the action itself. Desmond was actually surprised by the boy’s sorting because Teppenpaws were supposed to be kind and caring types that wouldn’t hurt anyone. Even Liesl ,he had to admit, was a nice person even though he’d once thought, given her disturbing tastes, that she was like Topaz. He now knew this was not the case, even though he still wished that she would act normal. Partially because Desmond was embarrassed by the fact that she didn’t act as proper as she should and because, well, her life would be so much easier if she just would.

Leo and his horrid behavior, however, did not inspire any sort of compassion in him the way Liesl’s did. The Aladren didn’t care one little bit if things went easier for his classmate. If half their class-the half that Desmond actually wanted to be friends with-wanted nothing to do with Leo now, then he had made his own bed and had to lie in it. He was not Desmond’s sibling and Desmond did not have to care about him and want good things for him. Leo was either an immature idiot or an entitled jock who thought he could do whatever he wanted because he was a Quidditch player.

And the Aladren did not suffer either of these types. If the rest of them could behave themselves-even the Pecaris had not given into these most base instincts-than so could Leo. He needed to grow up. And if he thought he could do whatever he wanted and get away with it because he was an athlete, that was even worse. Desmond would never understand or think it was acceptable that athletes thought they were special and cool and felt entitled to behave like they were better than everyone else because they were good at something as trivial and unimportant as sports.

That was exactly how Eustace behaved. The Aladren did not have the trauma that some of his cousins had, simply because Eustace was not his uncle but the man did way more than just play stupid pranks.

At least his roommates and Alexander were not like that. They were still people Desmond wanted to associate with. Plus, the silver lining of the whole thing was that if they were so busy playing Quidditch while Desmond was studying and other intellectual pursuits, he stood a better chance of getting the highest grade average in their entire year group. Not that he wanted to be so competitive towards them as he knew that really wouldn’t help him make friends, but well, having the best grades was honestly really important to him.

And Transfiguration was definitely going to be the subject where he would indisputably be the best. At least among the first years as even if Charlotte and Misty were as good or better than him at the practical work, there was no way they would be as good as Desmond on the theory. Not that he thought they were stupid, but they probably weren’t as smart as him. Misty probably wasn’t even interested in academics. Pecaris usually weren’t.

Granted, other than the ones in his classes, he knew exactly two of them. One was Eustace, and the other one was his uncle Toby who was a total loser. He was the drinking and gambling sort who cheated at cards and lacked any sort of ambition whatsoever. Uncle Toby was one thing Desmond and Liesl agreed on, as neither was fond of him albeit for very different reasons, Liesl’s being that he was mean to Uncle Cory.

Whom Desmond also didn’t really respect since while he wasn’t…shifty and likely to do something legally questionable and morally gray at best, Uncle Cory also was less than ambitious, working for Adam Brockert, the Brockert patriarch’s great-grandson and Misty’s father selling wands. Making wands was highly respectable because a wand was essential to a wizard and making them was a highly developed craft but selling wands that someone else made? That was the sort of thing a house elf could do.

Or at least that was what his parents said. They did not respect either Uncle Cory or Uncle Toby so therefore they must not be respectable. Also, the former tried to advocate on Liesl’s behalf to Mother, supporting the fourth year’s odd ways instead of encouraging her to dress and behave like a proper young lady should. Besides,Uncle Cory should stick to parenting his own children-whom judging by how he encouraged Liesl, would all turn out to be utter disasters-and let Mother and Father decide what was best for theirs.

Professor Skies gave them their lesson for the day and Desmond received his cloth bag. He was pretty sure he would be moving on to paper before the end of class. The Aladren wrote his notes on the Transfiguration table which was tedious and probably unnecessary for him but he would do it because it was what his teacher told him to do and he respected those who worked in academic settings like Father who was a college professor though Desmond would respect them even if he wasn’t. He wasn’t Leo who thought he could disrupt a class by dumping frogs on everyone.

And it didn’t help that one of those frogs had fallen right on the Aladren’s head. He’d had to sit through DADA with his hair all greasy with frog, smelling terrible and then take multiple showers after class.

Anyway, once Desmond had finished off his Transfig Table, he turned his attention to his sack, imagining it separating into perfect fingers like the ones on his hand. Not that his fingers were perfect themselves, as he had no idea what it would mean to have perfect fingers and for all his-in his opinion, perfectly valid and justified-ego in academic and intellectual matters, Desmond did not have the same arrogance towards his own looks and saying his fingers were perfect just sounded a bit creepy and not in a way Liesl would appreciate.

What he meant was that hands, his and those others, were more..the correct shape of gloves, more so than the bag in front of him. And as Desmond did not have an actual glove available to help picture what one would look like, his hand was the best example available.

Chirothecae ” His sack began to shift into a glove with three deformed fingers, one deformed thumb-all of them too short, too long, too thin or too wide in some combination-and one perfect middle finger. While Desmond expected better, as in a perfect glove, it was a start.

Then he happened to spy Charlotte O’Malley’s work. Her glove had two perfect fingers and the rest were less…off than his own. How was that happening? He really did expect to be the best. However, there was still theory, Desmond would outdo her there and do so well enough to overtake her completely and compensate for any possible natural talent that Charlotte had more of than he did and still have the highest Transfiguration grade in his year. Honestly, it was just too bad Olaf was in this class or the first year could have the best grades in all the Beginners.

He turned to his neighbor, whom he had made sure was not Leo by sitting as far away as possible from the Teppenpaw boy “How are you coming along at this?”


OOC: Charlotte is also my character
11 Desmond Brockert My author thinks I "glove" myself a bit too much 1572 0 5

Nicholas Pierce

April 17, 2023 8:00 PM
The physical resemblance between Professor Skies and Alicia Pierce was, it had to be said, minimal - the best one could say was that they were both thin women. Professor Skies’ class was also not run anything like lessons at home had been – not only did he have to remain silent by default and either never forget or do without his reading glasses, but when he had first arrived at Sonora, he had been slightly thrown by the fact that something was just wrong with all the classrooms, before he’d realized that it was how odd it was to write something and not smell jasmine tea at the same moment as the parchment and ink; the three just went together in his mind, and having one component missing was, in a way, even more peculiar than not being allowed to lie on the rug to work when he really wanted to. The rug thing was just irksome; the jasmine tea was something he hadn’t even noticed until it had suddenly become the Absence of Jasmine Tea.

Despite these things, though, Nicholas couldn’t help but think sometimes that Professor Skies reminded him of his mother, somehow. He could only assume (since she had taught both of his parents, a fact which was just…strange…to think about; it really reminded him, even more than being in the same places that they had always described to him growing up, that his parents really had been…him-sized, once, and had not both simply sprung from his grandmothers’ skulls as themselves the way he knew them, like Athene from the skull of Zeus) that it had something to do with her being the Transfiguration teacher when his mother was really, really good at Transfiguration. The only problem was that he didn’t think of Professor Wright as especially similar to Dad, even though that comparison made more sense, since they were both Aladrens and both good with Charms and both had about the same hair color - all minor similarities, but still more common traits than in the other comparison.

Despite that difference, though, he still felt the same way about Charms that he did about Transfiguration, which was that while there was no excuse not to do well at everything, there was just a little… extra pressure to do well in those classes. Even though he somehow also felt weirdly bad about it when he did too well in them. Even though that made no sense whatsoever, and things that made no sense were intrinsically irritating….

As a result, when Professor Skies said that any first years who finished their assignment with more than half the class left could work on the second-year assignments, Nicholas made a face, though he tried to hide it behind adjusting his reading glasses. Now it felt like a challenge, like something that he should really try to do, and so, all contradictorily, he both wanted to do it and didn’t want to do it at the same time. What was he supposed to do with that?

Do it anyway, of course, was what he thought his parents would say. Which meant it was probably also what Alexander would say, because Alexander was the…more diligent twin, anyway. Which meant it was probably what he should do, if he could, though who knew…he thought his parents might have jinxed him with the old joke about growing up to be a curse-breaker, because somehow, he did seem to be a little better at undoing things than he was at doing them. Which was…a fact. Rather how it was just a fact that the second year assignment was a lot harder than this one; pebble to button, at least they were both pretty texturally similar, but paper to a comfortable glove, that was more of a jump.

A glove and a cloth bag. He drew an irregular shape that he hoped would represent a bad adequately in one part of the Transfiguration table. A cloth bag…looked a bit like a thumb? But he needed it to be five fingers, not a thumb….

He gave the spell a try, remembering the flicks and rolling the R as best he could. He had improved a lot in terms of smoothly executing such maneuvers, speaking and moving in very specific ways at the same time; he didn’t think he’d been the worst to begin with, not after all the years of playing with toy wands that only put out a few sparks and occasionally getting in trouble for doing the same with one of his parents’ actual wands, but it was different, doing it oneself, with one’s own wand. It had taken time to learn the way it was supposed to feel in his hand, and to synchronize that with the funny words that made up most incantations.

Despite all this progress, though, he did not exactly end up with a glove. Instead, he ended up with something which…texturally, felt a little different from the original fabric, which was interesting, but it looked like a mitten. Mittens and gloves served much the same function (well, some of the time, anyway) but they definitely weren’t the same thing.

“Nice job,” he remarked to Miss Scapetello, seeing her much more glove-like construction. “I think I thought too much about the bag looking like a thumb before I started trying to think about a glove."
16 Nicholas Pierce Some might argue style is more important than fashion. 1565 0 5

Nausicaa Scapetello

April 25, 2023 6:45 PM
Nausicaa glanced at the younger boy next to her. Her initial urge was to keep his attention and comments to himself. However, she was supposed to be recruiting minions as well. Mother said it would be easiest to do with the younger boys, as they were much easier to influence. She wasn't entirely convinced on that idea just yet. The boys she had tried to 'work' with hadn't yielded great results yet. These things took time but she would have liked to see some level of results by now.

It pained her, but she was just going to have to keep playing nice. So, she turned to her neighbor, Mr. Pierce. "Thank-you", she responded to the comment that she had to trust was genuine. Now she really should return a compliment as well. Nausicaa looked at Mr. Pierce's work and was at a bit of a loss as to what to say. It looked like he hadn't worked with Transfigurations at all before coming to school. The pierces were supposed to be one of the 'big' American families, were they not? Had they actually abided by those ridiculous rules meant to keep the common folk in line? Why?

"You have made some good progress," she lied. Perhaps he wanted some advice, his comment could be taken that way. "That is a possibility, did you fill out the worksheet the professor gave us?" She did her best to keep the distance out of her voice at the thought of those worksheets.
2 Nausicaa Scapetello An interesting theory 1561 0 5