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

[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?"

[mswoods]

She shrugs. "I'm thinking about getting the bunny ears or whatever and then... keeping them. Even after people try to unjinx it. I wonder how many people I can freak out with the unfixable curse before they catch on."

[pleating]

"Well, the teachers will know," Karen says.

[mswoods]

She pouts. "Ruin my fun, why don't you."

[msmaxwell]

Willow giggles.

[pleating]

"Well, it might not have got around to all of them yet."

[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'...?"