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

[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."

[chanuphis]

"Sometimes magic just does weird things. It's not all wizards doing things, other magical creatures have their own. But the general principle isn't a bad guess. As long as you remember that weird things can be advantages in a weird enough situation."

[mrwoods]

"I guess. At this point we should probably just hit the library and see if anyone's ever written anything about it, I don't know if we can actually argue ourselves into a conclusion. Although I do have another interview with an elf later."

[pleating]

"The first one didn't know what you wanted to know?"

[mrwoods]

"I asked her to try to describe to me what it felt like, this whole 'elves must do chores to be good elves' thing, but she said she wasn't good at describing feelings. She said another elf called Winky might, since she talks about her feelings all the time, or something."

[pleating]

"Huh."

[mrwoods]

"'Huh' is right," Sadde nods.

[chanuphis]

"Figuring out all the details of how you feel is kind of hard even for humans and the elves won't have a lot of practice being the kind of detailed I think you want," Miranda says. "Don't expect too much."

[mrwoods]

He scratches his head again. "I mean, observably you're right, but it feels kinda weird to me. I usually know what I'm feeling and why. I guess maybe the whole thing involved in not becoming The Incredible Hulk whenever I got annoyed when I was little helped with that, some."

[chanuphis]

"Yeah, I'm really good at it too and that's why I noticed that most people aren't."

[mrwoods]

"Do you have a convenient explanation for why you're good at it like me or is it just a you thing like the notebooks?"

[chanuphis]

"Oh, the notebooks are how I'm good at it. I write down what I'm thinking and pick it apart until I know how it works."

[mrwoods]

"Oh. That's interesting. I should start doing that, I've only been using that little notepad to write down things I want to remember except I often forget to write it down there." Pause. "I should probably write this down," he says, grinning, and grabs the pen and notepad from his pocket to do it.

"...I should probably not try to do it in a notepad, it doesn't sound like it'd fit on this tiny page."

[chanuphis]

"Yeah, I go through the big ones pretty quick doing this on top of class notes and reminders to myself."

[mrwoods]

"I almost never take notes," he says as he finishes writing on his 'pad, then tilts his head a bit, looking at something he wrote on it. "By the way, I started reading my new books last night, or well one of them anyway, and on the introduction it said that we can't normally transfigure things into gold, but it didn't really go into why. Do you know?"