alchemical blurb

[mswoods]

The following day, Sadde has Transfiguration in the morning.

She is all over it at lunch.

"Okay, so, Transfig is just about the coolest thing," she says first thing to the Ravenclaws as soon as she sits at the table.

Comments

[mswoods]

"Well, Professor McGonagall and Professor Slughorn definitely know. Unless they gossip the others don't, but if they don't gossip I don't see the appeal of even being a teacher."

[chanuphis]

"If they wanted to gossip wouldn't they be reporters?"

[mswoods]

"Well to gossip in general I suppose, but I mean I can't imagine spending the largest part of my life teaching teenagers and prepubescent kids magic and not gossip about them. I bet they even talk about which students are gonna end up together and stuff."

[chanuphis]

"That would be so weird!"

[mswoods]

Sadde morphs her vocal cords and relevant internal anatomy into Sprout's and says, "Bet you ten galleons Norris and Jeannie get married by the end of next year," inventing arbitrary names.

She then does the same with McGonagall and says, trying her best to imitate the witch's accent: "Nonsense, Pomona, ms. Barrow has had her sights on ms. Holland for ages, she will break up with mr. Jackson before the holidays." The accent's not very good.

[pleating]

"Did you have to practice to get their voices?"

[mswoods]

"Their voices in particular, no, but voices in general, yes," she says with her own. "By now it mostly feels like an incomplete full morph? I only have to think about them and their voices and what they look like but not morph completely into them, kinda."

[chanuphis]

"So that means if you morph people you can learn things about them you wouldn't necessarily be able to describe? Like if they have a birthmark or something."

[mswoods]

"I guess so? I never really checked, and metamorphmagic has some opaque limitations. Like, I can't really turn into any animal completely, even if I can turn many parts of my body into other animals'. But morphing into people is not too difficult, even without thinking about the specific anatomical features I'd have to copy, so yeah, I think so."

She starest at nothing for a second then says, "I hope post-pubescent me is reasonable enough to not want to morph into her crushes to, er." She clears her throat.

[chanuphis]

"Oh my god."

[pleating]

"Okay leaving that aside," snickers Karen, "can you be, like a mermaid? Or can you - turn into 'whoever I'm thinking of right now'...?"

[mswoods]

"No to the second - I still have to have a goodish mental image of what I'm gonna turn into to do it, it's actually sorta like Transfig. I dunno about the first, though, I can turn into people I've only seen pictures or videos of, and can copy features of animals I've only ever seen in books, but I can't turn into fictional humanoid creatures. Now that I know several of them are not in fact fictional I don't know how that will affect magic, if at all."

[msmaxwell]

"Can you turn into an elf? Or, like, get pointy ears like an elf's, I'm pretty sure that's all that's visually different."

[mswoods]

She thinks about it and covers her ears with her hands so no one will see it. When she uncovers them, they're still normal-looking, but she says, "Yeah, that I can do. But that's different, it's just the ears, it's like turning any other part into an animal's. Are elves real, by the way?" she asks the resident purebloods.

[pleating]

"...Yyyyeah but their ears don't look like that. At all."

[msmaxwell]

"What do they look like?"

[chanuphis]

"House elves - I'm not sure why the adjective; there may be other kinds but if so they're hopelessly obscure - are yea high and they have huge, slightly flappy-looking ears, big eyes, weird noses, and heads too big for their bodies. Wizards use them for domestic tasks, with, by and large, the elves' enthusiastic agreement."

[mswoods]

She raises an eyebrow. "Really? That's... interesting? And really peculiar. Are they artificial?"

[chanuphis]

"I'm not sure. They might be sort of domesticated, like dogs only magical."

[mswoods]

"Are House Elves trained from birth to perform those domestic tasks, like seeing-eye dogs are? Are they sentient?"

[chanuphis]

"They're sentient, and they can talk and everything, and I have no idea how they raise their children but I guess they must train them - probably the parents, not the wizards."

[mswoods]

"Huh. It sounds- kinda weird, that a whole sapient species is used for domestic tasks?"

[chanuphis]

"Yeah, it's very weird, but I've met a couple of them and they are very emphatic that it's what they want to do. I mean, they could be lying but following up on that doesn't seem like the highest priority since they'd need some reason to lie about it, like 'not wanting me to butt in'."

[mswoods]

"I guess," she says uncertainly.

[pleating]

"Hogwarts has elves," Karen says. "I'm not sure how you'd find one, but you could maybe do it and then talk to them if you want."