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]

"Turvy is not so good at describing feelings like that, sir, Turvy is sorry."

[mrwoods]

He nods. "It's okay, I already got a lot of information from that, you were very helpful! My other questions are mostly cultural and I should probably go grab breakfast before class starts, but one last question: do you know another elf who would be better at describing feelings like that, and if so, do you think they'd be willing to talk to me about them? It's totally okay to say no."

[alicornucopia]

"...Turvy is not knowing if Winky is being good at talking about feelings but Winky is certainly doing it very much," Turvy says. "Turvy can be asking her if Mr. Sadde likes."

[mrwoods]

He nods enthusiastically. "Yes, that'd be great, thank you, Turvy!"

One of the other Slytherin firsties walks into the dorm right about then and blinks. "Blimey, Woods, what are you doing talking to a House Elf?"

[alicornucopia]

Turvy stands up on Sadde's pillow, bows deeply to the other boy, and then vanishes with a loud CRACK.

[mrwoods]

Sadde was looking over his shoulder at the other boy and is quite startled by the crack. In fact, he even jumps a little, and blinks at the spot where Turvy disappeared from.

"Er..." He blinks a couple of times before turning to the other boy. "I was asking her questions. About House Elves, in general, you know."

[peterxy]

"Why?"

[mrwoods]

"Because I'd never met one and was curious!"

[peterxy]

The boy scoffs. "Never met one? What are you, a muggle?"

This is not the same boy that had been talking to Sadde on the first day.

[mrwoods]

"Muggleborn!" he says, grinning, and then he laughs at the shocked look on the other boy's face. Sadde claps him on the shoulder once as he's leaving and goes to the Great Hall.

[chanuphis]

His Ravenclaw friends are at breakfast. "Did you get an elf?" Miranda wonders.

[mrwoods]

"I did! She was very helpful! I think there's a good chance a significant part of their makeup was either designed or strongly influenced by humans."

[pleating]

"Why do you think so?"

[mrwoods]

"Well, she seemed to act as if there was some sort of... strong instinctive component to their preference for doing chores. What she said is still consistent with purely social or cultural drives, I guess, but if that were the only thing I'd expect there'd be Elves who just don't want to do the same thing in spite of upbringing and society and stuff. Well, I guess it's also possible that they just have a generally submissive mental makeup that humans co-opted for their own uses, but that just passes the bucket to why they have this generally submissive mental makeup in the first place."

[chanuphis]

"I mean, you aren't wrong," says Miranda, "but I notice you aren't wondering why mustard sings."

[mrwoods]

He blinks and thinks about it for a few seconds. "Well, prodding my brain, it seems like I just assumed singing mustard must be mostly artificial, because muggles have had a lot of success creating artificial plants and not so much artificial sapient beings. I mean, the only instance I knew of of sapient beings was humans, and humans just evolved, so that's my starting point for other sapient beings, whereas it would surprise me not one bit if wizardkind made singing mustards. Actually, I'd be quite surprised if I found out we hadn't."

[chanuphis]

"Do you also think wizards made merfolk and giants and centaurs and hags and goblins...?"

[mrwoods]

"No, that's kinda the point, I don't think wizards made most sapient beings! Because making sapient beings is hard! I think."

He pauses again to try to think of a better way to phrase it.

"What I mean is that, like, if I find a thing that looks like it has a purpose, like it's meant to be used by someone or to accomplish something specific, then I assume humans - or, I guess, other sapient beings - made those things. Singing mustard looks like it has a purpose, flutes look like they have a purpose, notebooks look like they have a purpose. They don't look like things that would just- evolve, you know? Flutes and notebooks aren't even alive to evolve in the first place! And as far as I know, centaurs don't really have a purpose in that sense either, they just are, like humans, or cats. If I found out that centaurs were born with suspiciously saddle-like humps on their backs, though, I would start suspecting at least some artificial influences in their design. So when I find a species that apparently has innate instinctive preferences for doing chores, it looks like it must be artificial."

[chanuphis]

"I'm not sure it's actually chores in particular. You could probably get an elf to do other tasks, they'd just need different training. And weird things do evolve. Cats domesticated themselves because humans were attracting rodents and it was convenient to coexist with them. House elves could be like cats, only we wouldn't put up with cat behavior from anything that could talk so they're submissive and obedient."

[mrwoods]

He scratches his head. "I guess. Do we offer House Elves anything like that? Like, are there any intrinsic advantages to living with us? They can apparently teleport, so I assume they can pretty much choose where to live, unless that teleportation power is really restricted or something."

[chanuphis]

"I'm not actually sure how much magic house elves can do besides Apparition. But their masters do feed them and shelter them. They could maybe survive in the wild - or at least they could if they wouldn't be really depressed about it all the time - but they might have some deficiency in, say, figuring out what to do next after doing a thing, or forming societies big and interconnected enough to prevent inbreeding, or something like that, and they solved those problems by getting humans to fill in. I'm not sure about any of this, you understand, I'm only guessing."

[pleating]

"...What's 'evolving'?"

[chanuphis]

"It's like how you breed a plant or animal to be the way you want it, except instead of you it's things like food scarcity and weather, and instead of the way you want it it's whatever makes the thing better at dealing with those things."

[msmaxwell]

"I think that's probably the shortest explanation of evolution I've ever heard," Willow pauses her eating to say.

[mrwoods]

"Yyyyeah, and before I learnt about magic I was pretty sure all things that are alive evolved one way or another, at least until humans started doing the whole 'society' thing if you wanna exclude domesticated animals from the definition of evolution."