Intermediates - Trade you this sand for some sand on Quidditch Pitch

DH Skies

November 10, 2018 8:31 AM

Intermediates - Trade you this sand for some sand by DH Skies

The intermediate students had been advised at the end of their last lesson that today’s class would take place on the Quidditch Pitch, and a notice reminding them of this had been left pinned to the classroom door. The pitch was set up in a rather bizarre fashion. The hoops laid out flat across the grass were not terribly odd, not exactly - they were Quidditch equipment after all, though rarely were they laid flat for that purpose and there was also the fact that this was Transfiguration class. The hoops were also filled with what looked like sandbags in differing sizes and colours. The stands had also been modified to accommodate improvised writing desks, little planks of wood which hovered at a convenient height relative to the benches, and would adjust themselves according to who sat there.

“Good afternoon,” Professor Skies greeted them, gathering them round her in the centre of the pitch, “As you should be able to guess, we are continuing switching spells today.” Switching spells - which allowed for the instantaneous replacement of one object with another, had been a major unit for the intermediate class this term. “As you have all been working well on this, I thought it was time to test your skills over a greater distance, and with larger objects. As you can see, there are three different sizes of sack, the smallest for third years, middle for fourth and largest for fifth. Each pair of sacks comprises one black and one white so you can tell when you have switched them - and I can tell the difference between a switching spell and a colour changing charm, so you are only harming yourselves if you try to cheat.” The sand inside the bags also matched their exteriors, so she would be able to tell if they had only partially swapped over.

“As you may recall from our last lessons, switching is closely tied with vanishing and conjuring. It is seen as a simplified form - although two objects are involved, this makes things easier owing to a sense of balance, especially in this scenario where your objects are more or less the same. I won’t say much more about it, as your essays on why switching spells are considered Transfiguration are still in progress, and you should be finding some of these things out for yourself. I would like at least twenty minutes of practise on the practical from everyone. After that, you can choose to practise further or write your essays.

“As I mentioned last time, ability in casting switching spells has been found to be strongly predictive of ability to Apparate, so consider this useful practise for that, especially for those of you who will be of age next year,” she added. Apparition was something that a lot of witches and wizards looked forward to doing immensely, and so adding the glamour of that to the otherwise possibly dull task of moving sandbags would hopefully give the students a bit more motivation. Selina had explained the concept when she had introduced the subject in the previous class, to be sure that everyone knew what it was.

“As with all our previous practises, the spell is suppuno with an open double loop wand motion plus the name of the object you are trying to acquire - in this case, that is the same as the object you are exchanging, a sandbag. As always, you should keep your gaze on the object you wish to acquire, and you can make the spell easier by specifying the colour of the target. You can make the spell harder by moving your hoops further apart.” The class had been practising summoning spells for a few weeks now, so this information was revision. The wand movement was a little like an infinity sign that wasn’t fully closed, starting with the object they wanted, circling around the object that they were getting rid of, and back to pointing at the target.

“Find yourself a hoop, and begin.”

OOC - you may post either doing the practical, the essay or both. Posts will be marked on relevance, realism, creativity and length. Your character has some experience with this type of spell already. Catch me in chatzy if you have any questions.

Subthreads:

So any other sand will do? by Tatiana Vorontsova, Pecari

13 DH Skies Intermediates - Trade you this sand for some sand 26 DH Skies 1 5

Tatiana Vorontsova, Pecari

November 26, 2018 2:52 PM

So any other sand will do? by Tatiana Vorontsova, Pecari

Tatiana paused at the entrance to the Quidditch Pitch. Her mouth remained in its usual straight, polite line, but one of her eyebrows twitched up at the sight before her. She had spent a great deal of time on this Pitch over the past three years, and it did not look like this normally.

Of course, she supposed that should not be surprising. They were here for a Transfiguration lesson, after all. Transfiguration lessons were all about things looking different than they usually did - and more complex stuff, but Tatiana customarily only thought about that when she had to work on an essay. She thought she understood the ideas well enough from studying her Russian-language Transfiguration books (in deference to the increasing difficulty of her classes, she had started forcing herself to study more thoroughly, copying passages in both Russian and English, but she still didn’t entirely trust herself to understand things as fully in the English book as in the Russian one) but it simply didn’t occur to her to think much about theory in any language when there was no task before her requiring her to do so.

She settled at one of the floating desks after the lecture, pressing down on the surface skeptically before determining it was going to stop at the proper height and that writing on it was probably safe if she could not knock it out of the air when actively trying to do so. Unfortunately, she suspected she was going to need to spend some of the class writing - working on the stupid essay. The amount of technical terminology and the complexity of the ideas involved meant that her essay was coming along slowly; she had finally determined she was going to have to draft it in Russian and then translate it into English. Anton Petrovich considered this method of writing dishonest, since it did not help her learn to think in English and often produced an overly literal translation, but she would never finish it if she had to look up words just to put together every thought. It was easier to start with the thought and then find the words, and Professor Skies would likely never know either way. Besides, she hadn’t explicitly said rough drafts couldn’t be written in another language.

Still, Tatiana worried a bit about the essay, whether it was complicated enough to please the professor. Her thesis was that switching spells counted as Transfigurations instead of Charms because the objects achieved their transposition through Vanishing Space. Charms of motion moved objects through observable space, with appropriate time delays and issues with running into stuff and et cetera. Switching spells appeared to instantaneously swap objects’ positions - either they moved outside of time in Another Place, or they were simply transformed into each other - instantaneously. Somehow, Tatiana thought the two moving outside of space for a moment seemed more likely - more in keeping with everything else they did in magic - than third years being capable of transforming two objects at once, and her English book in particular seemed to agree with her, but it all seemed so obvious and simple that she didn’t know if it would be good enough for Skies. The woman’s fairly prominent role in many of Tatiana’s more humiliating school memories made her want desperately to impress, just once.

First, though, she had to practice for twenty minutes. Small bags. Right. At least this spell-word was one of the easier ones to pronounce. The complexity of the wand movement tried to make up for it, but she found this easier to deal with than some sounds which didn’t quite exist in Russian but did in English and Latin.

Not sure how heavy the sandbags were, she decided to start with one of the closer hoops and fixed her eyes on a particular sandbag. She felt - something - as she attempted to cast the spell, but did not see results. Heavy, then - or at least for her level of dexterity with this spell.

“We will be tired when this class over,” she remarked to a neighbor.

16 Tatiana Vorontsova, Pecari So any other sand will do? 1396 Tatiana Vorontsova, Pecari 0 5