Giselle Duell
July 01, 2023 4:05 PM
Intermediate Divinations by Giselle Duell
The divinations classroom was dimly lit by a myriad of candles. Each of the student tables had a few of varying height and thicknesses, while others were scattered about the shelves and walls of the room, and still others simple floated around the room closer to the ceiling. They were all different colors, shapes and sizes and seemed to match the standard randomness that was the decor of the divinations room. The tables were covered in the normal mixture of cloth drapery and such, and on those set a bowl of water at each seat.Professor Duell stood by her desk at the front of the classroom waiting for her students wearing a dress, hat, shawl and gloves that fit right in with the rest of the mismatched decor of the room. She welcomed them each as they entered and found a seat. Once they had all gotten settled in, she began.
"Welcome to the start of our new unit. If you were successful with your assignment in divining what we it was to be, you will not be surprised to learn that this lesson is on Carrowmancy. That is the discipline of reading wax drippings." She paused for a moment and summoned one of the floating candles out of the air into her hand. "There is a reason we focused on symbolism so much early on in the year. You know that it applied quite a bit to reading tea leaves, and the same principles apply here as well." Her free hand pulled a sheet of paper from her desk. "Step one is to write the question you want answered on your paper, then place it under your bowl of water. Face up or down, it does not matter."
With a quiet murmur, Professor Duell's paper left her hand and floated in front of her parallel to the floor. Her hand free once more, she retrieved her wand. "Once that is done, while you are focusing on your question, you will slowly tilt your selected candle and drip the wax into the water." She murmured some more words while circling her wand under her paper with it point upwards. A strange rippling of the air could be seen just above the paper. She tilted the candle in her hand and drips of wax fell towards the paper. However, upon striking the rippling air, the cooled and formed into small, hard droplets. They swirled around, grouping together and breaking apart.
"Watch how your drips behave, and watch for the symbols to appear and change. Make notes of what you see and how they could be interpreted." She released the candle to float one more, stopped her wand movement, and the shimmering stopped and the drips fell to the paper. "Yours will stay in the bowl for now. Feel free to empty and refill the bowl for multiple readings. I would like everyone to have an answer to a question by the end of the class. The simpler question you ask, the easier time you will have in getting an answer."
Professor Duell ran her wand over her own paper. The wax had solidified in place and she considered it for a moment before turning it to face them so that they could see her writing upon it and the symbols that resulted. "If anyone was curious,it appears as though we will be having turkey and eggplant for dinner tonight."
Subthreads: Who wants to go to the ball with me? by Phil Carson
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Giselle Duell
Intermediate Divinations
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Phil Carson
July 10, 2023 9:48 PM
Who wants to go to the ball with me? by Phil Carson
Phil had decided to take Divinations in part because he was curious about every aspect of magic, and in part because it seemed like a superpower. To be fair, all magic was a superpower, to some degree or another, so that wasn't particularly unique among the subjects taught at Sonora, but the ability to figure out the future, to know things before they happened . . . that sounded pretty darn useful.The problem was that it was far more of an art than a science and Phil was way better at hard sciences. It had been interesting learning about the different forms and symbiology and everything, but he was pretty sure he was going to drop it after his CATS, to focus on the subjects he did have a bit more natural talent in at the advanced levels.
Still, today's lesson did offer an opportunity to explore a question he'd been thinking a lot about since the Welcoming Feast. Specifically: should he try to ask out a girl or just plan on going stag and hanging out with friends.
To that end, he quickly wrote down a question, just to see if the wax told him anything surprising. Who wants to go to the ball with me?
He then turned it upside down so nobody else could read his stupid question and set his bowl of water over it. Leaving the candle on the table for the person sitting with him, if they wanted it, he summoned down one of the floating candles that looked like it had been doing a nice slow dance with another candle.
He focused on the question. Who wants to go to the ball with me? He had almost asked 'does anybody want to go to the ball with me?' but realized 'yes' would be a worse than useless answer and 'nobody' was as valid a response as any specific person. So he'd asked 'who' in the hopes that he'd get an answer he could interpret which would in turn would hopefully tell him if asking out a girl was doomed or not.
He slowly tilted his candle and drips fell into his bowl of water, forming interesting shapes but not ones he was immediately able to make any sense of. He took notes with his left hand, trying to replicate the odd design and how it changed as more drops joined it.
Professor Duell had let hers drip for exactly five seconds, so Phil righted his candle after the same amount of time and sent it back to dance with its partner again. He looked in his bowl again and copied the new design that had coalesced together while he'd looked away. He still didn't know what it meant.
Turning to the person seated beside him, he wondered, "Have you gotten an answer to your question yet? I'm still trying to make sense of mine." He showed them the shapes he'd drawn that fairly closely mimicked the outlines of his wax drippings. He wasn't great at drawing, and he was terrible at shading and perspective and fancy things like that, but he could replicate a two dimensional shape with decent accuracy, even ones as irregular as this. He just . . . didn't know what it was. Some kind of tower maybe?
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Phil Carson
Who wants to go to the ball with me?
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