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

[alicornucopia]

"Of course, Miss Woods."

[mswoods]

"Can Transfiguration help with healing? Like, if I break a bone, can I Transfigure it better? Or, say, would a metamorphmagus be able to morph bruises away?"

[alicornucopia]

"Transfiguration is generally not as good at healing as specialized charms, and I am not an expert in metamorphmagi, but I believe it is possible to apply transfiguration principles to the subject if one has a talent for that."

[mswoods]

"Cool! And are there, like, types of injuries for which no specialised charms exist, so that Transfiguration would really be the best choice?"

[alicornucopia]

"Not injuries, no. I suppose there might be diseases so obscure that I haven't heard of them with this property but more often than not such things are just beyond magical healing altogether. Miss Swan, you may go." Miss Swan goes.

[mswoods]

She nods thoughtfully. "Okay! Thanks!" Then Miranda goes and- "Wait, does that mean I may not go?" she asks.

[alicornucopia]

"You should stay here until your next class, possibly longer. Magic alone cannot do everything and you will need some rest."

[mswoods]

"Oh. Okay, I guess I can skip learning how musical Singing Mustard is," she says, shrugging. "I just have a date with the Library later today and it'll be very cross if I don't show up."

[alicornucopia]

"I am sure you will be well in time to visit the library today."

[mswoods]

"Good!"

[alicornucopia]

And then Madam Pomfrey is distracted by the victims of a potions accident.

[mswoods]

Sadde is distracted by her own thoughts, mostly.

...she may be playing a little bit with metamorphmagic.

She hmms softly, looks at Madam Pomfrey to check that she's not likely to look at her too soon, and morphs herself a year older.

Huh.

She morphs herself a year younger.

Hmmmmm.

Eventually she morphs back to her own age before Madam Pomfrey can notice anything wrong.

[alicornucopia]

Madam Pomfrey notices nothing.

One of the potion accident kids blinks at her, but seems to decide he was seeing things.

[mswoods]

Sadde was counting on that! Apparently the instinct is strong even amongst wixen.

...just to have some fun (it is her third day, she's allowed to have fun now, right?), the next time she catches one of the kids' eye without Madam Pomfrey's attention she morphs her tongue into a lizard's and does the little tongue-flick thing lizards tend to do. Just for a fraction of a second, then her tongue's hers again.

[alicornucopia]

The kid yelps. Madam Pomfrey assumes it's a response to a wand jab and apologizes perfunctorily.

[mswoods]

Sadde doesn't giggle, that'd just give it away. She can't trust the everything-is-normal instinct that much. She acts thoroughly normally for the rest of her stay, only ever doing interesting things with her metamorphmagic when she's fairly sure no one else is looking.








Eventually she's released. Her next class is History of Magic, which she finds absolutely fascinating in spite of it being taught by Binns. Then it's dinnertime.

[pleating]

"Are you doing okay?" Karen asks.

[mswoods]

"Yeah! And I have experimental results!" she announces.

[chanuphis]

"Oh yeah, what happened?"

[mswoods]

"So I couldn't exactly turn five or twenty-five while I was in the Hospital Wing, but I turned twelve-and-ten-months and then ten-and-ten-months, or maybe the other way around, I don't remember. Anyway, it feels..." She pauses to think about it. "Weird. Like, it feels like this is not the way I'm supposed to be. After doing it with the age thing, I noticed I feel the same thing when I morph stuff like donkey ears or a duck beak or whatever, only much less so. So, like, there's some sense in which I'm supposed to be this age and not some other age, and this species and not some other species, but there's not any sense in which I'm supposed to be a boy and not a girl or vice-versa. Or, I dunno, any given ethnicity or eye colour or hair colour as opposed to any other."

[chanuphis]

"Huh, that's weird. How long do you think you could stay like that if you did really want to?"

[mswoods]

She shrugs. "No idea. It felt uncomfortable but not too much? ...the best analogy I can find is wearing clothes that don't fit you but in your brain. Maybe it gets worse the longer I stay that way? Or maybe it's proportional to how far from what I'm "supposed to be" I am, or both. I still haven't really understood which kinds of things we get for free and which we don't with magic. Anyway, it bears testing. "

[pleating]

"Yeah, you could go around with bunny ears for as long as you can stand, and when anyone asks you how you got them you can say someone you don't like hexed them on."

[mswoods]

She grins. "Bet you I can find someone to be my scapegoat by tomorrow," she says.

Then she thinks some more and her grin broadens, becoming positively wicked.

[msmaxwell]

"What are you thinking?"