Extracurricular Private Finished

"Right here, dove."

She'd heard the footsteps before the voice, but she hadn't recognized either as someone who'd come to her before, and so deigned to remain quiet. Ah... she did send out an owl a few days ago, didn't she? That was why she was here in the first place, wasn't it? It was, and she had almost forgotten, at least until she checked the enchanted watch around her wrist, imprinted with braille, and read the words there:

Meenauh Silmataurea, 4:30pm

This had led to a lot of cursing and panic before she realized that it was still four o'clock and no more, and that she could take her time in walking, but she liked to prepare her classroom before anything was to take place there, so she'd rushed to get there anyway. Today's scarf was wrapped in a neat, fast knot around her head, pastels and warm colors perhaps a bit less mystic than her usual deep colors, instead of the intricate weaving that could sometimes take more than a half hour to do.

Now she pushed back the chair behind her desk, near-silent against the floor due to the silencing charm she'd placed upon the feet, a trick that Aoi had taught her, and made her way over to the exit - or entrance, depending on which way you looked at it - to the little office.

"I'll admit that I'm still not sure how I'm supposed to pronounce your name, to start," the woman stated thoughtfully in greeting. "After all, I've only written it on parchment. Care to elaborate?" Beads brushed by her skin gently like a thousand tiny, cold fingers as she emerged from the mess that she called her office, clinking like laughing faeries as they swung back around her shoulders.

No cane could be spotted in her hand. Rarely did she need one in her own classroom that she knew so well, though she liked to keep it there for appearance purposes while teaching, and so that she didn't accidentally run over her students. There was only one in here now, though; she would have little trouble pinpointing her location.

By some stroke of luck she remembered to light the maze of tunnels that ran through the ceiling with a flick of her wrist, lanterns catching and glowing like fireflies. Light shone through the purple drapes drawn closed, but certainly not enough to light the room for a proper lesson. With another wave of her wand, the chalkboard wall at the front of the classroom glimmered, instantly ready for use.

She'd suspected the pronunciation to be something similar to that effect, but it was always good to check - her own name had been wrongly pronounced countless times in her ventures in the school, despite its not-so-difficult spelling. Really, what was so challenging about the word Cypresse? A cypress tree wasn't even an uncommon sight - for heaven's sake, it was a regular wand wood - though she could understand some confusion over her surname. Asians weren't as common in Europe as elsewhere, such as Taiwan, where she'd grown up, and America, where she'd worked before.

"Well, Meenauh," she began, letting the word roll from her tongue, "welcome to Transfiguration's Afterhours. Let's drop some formalities." Cy always felt obliged to match a conversational partner's level of etiquette when she spoke - she needed to remind herself that this was a student she spoke to, that even if some might frown upon it, she could act casual as she chose. And so she usually chose to make it clear that she liked to stay lax.

"My name is Cypresse Lian, but you can call me whatever you want. If you need suggestions, my friends call me Cy, or at least they would if they existed. If you want to stay formal, which I advise against, add a 'professor' or 'miss' onto the beginning of whatever form of my name you choose and it should resemble something respectful. Frankly I don't care." She'd had a range of nicknames over the years, from 'Cy' to 'Ress' to the 'Ressie' that only Aoi was allowed to address her with. Some had affectionately referred to her as Blind Chicken, with her permission, of course, but that was usually not the first choice.

"I did send you an Owl, and I'm glad to hear that you're an eager student - that's why I chose you in the first place. Let's jump right in." Sweeping the thick, gauzy fabric of her robe off the ground, Cy turned to the slate-smooth wall just to the left and behind the decorative desk, giving it a flick of her wand and allowing it to glimmer a couple times before another wave had the word -fors written in cursive, fanciful but clearly legible, on the surface. "Fors. A suffix of several - fourteen, actually - very important spells. Have you seen it anywhere, by any chance? Any spells that come to mind when you hear it?"

"Right," Cy affirmed at the student's definition of the suffix. "-Fors is used in a set of transformation spells that mostly deal with transforming things into animals or sometimes plants. The exception is Flintifors, which transforms things into a matchbox. There's Piscifors, Lapifors, Draconifors, Ducklifors, and a whole lot more," the woman paused as the spells listed began to scribble themselves down underneath the heading on the wall, "but they work mostly the same way."

She frowned at Meenauh's remark about Transfiguration as a whole. "Not quite. Transfig isn't just about changing appearance or form - if that was the case, then all you'd need is illusion. No, Transfiguration is the study of collision between the magical and the nonmagical. It's about magic's reaction with matter, and how to best use what we find out. When you transform an object, you need to understand what you're doing, or else you'll fail. But there's more to Transfiguration than just transformation." She raised her wand again, tapping it against her head with a quiet "Evanesco," and it vanished, revealing her deep, brown, very much authentic and original eyes. With a wink, she twirled her wand again, and it reappeared, this time in white.

"You see, there's Vanishment and Conjuration - you could say that's still changing things, but it's not just transformation that exists. And that should debunk anyone's claims that I've got empty eye sockets. My eyes work just fine, thank you very much, my brain's the idiot causing the problem. It's why I'm insane. Not really, but I like seeing what idiots will believe it. Moving on!"

Cy paused mid-turn to the wall with the Gryffindor girl's inquiry. "Well, now, that's what I call a good question. Ress is fine. The truth is, nobody really knows, because nobody can decide on a true meaning of the word 'life.' Some, like me, like to look at things objectively and say that the only thing that defines life is the requirements that qualify something scientifically, but others argue for the existence of a soul. That raises a lot more questions, like what forms of life have souls, and how they work... so nobody really knows. Maybe you'll be the first to find out in the future.

"You've heard of Gamp's Law, I presume? The five exceptions include life, but they're being challenged in modern magic theory because, well, life, food, money - those things aren't defined. But I'm still required to teach them, and there's no doubt there are limits, they're just not clearly defined yet." She smiled. "Now, with your best guess, common sense, and whatever knowledge of etymology that you have, what do you think the spell avifors does?'

It was a pause before Cy got her answer from the girl, but she waited patiently. "That's right," she nodded, little doodles of bird beginning to sketch themselves on the borders of the wall. "Avifors is the Bird-Transformation spell. The prefix Avis comes from the Latin word for bird, extending into a lot of English words - aviary, for example - and it's actually the name of another spell. Without the modifier -fors, it just conjures birds. The -fors tells you that it's a transformation spell, basically."

The woman raised her wand, making an infinity symbol above the watch on her wrist and whispering "Ah-vi-fors," enunciating the s often forgotten at the end, and the bronze wristpiece rose to morph into a tiny white crow-tit. "As for large birds, the spell will still work, it's just harder to do because you're manipulating more matter than a small bundle, and a very simple spell like this one will force magic to brute-force transform everything.

"Some other spells that were built for transforming large scale things, like... well, I can't think of much right now, but I promise they exist - they'll sometimes be easier to cast because they're built for it. It's usually easier to just transform a small thing into a small bird and engorgio the crap to the size you want. It's magic. Most things are possible, but sometimes it's about using several spells in a clever way to get what you want instead of learning one that does it in one go."

The woman tapped the crow-tit with her wand, and the white ball of fluff with a beak and two eyes returned to its original form as her braille wristwatch. "I taught the Second-Years this spell with a room filled with birds, and I used the method I described to make the larger ones. You saw me transform my watch; can you tell me what you noticed about how I cast it? Wand gesture, the way I pronounced the word?"

With a sweep of her wand, the infinity symbol of the gesture was sketched on the board with a small squeak of chalk. "Some people call it a sideways figure eight, but I find it easier to remember as an infinity symbol. The tricky part about this is making the two sides even, because a lot of people make one side bigger and that results in a weirdly shaped bird. It should feel," she paused, taking Meenauh's hand gently, feeling the wand that was already in her grip, "oh, wonderful, you have your wand out. It should feel like this," and she guided the smaller hand in the smooth looping motion.

"Now, the part that people get wrong in the incantation: when we're talking casually, we tend to say avifors with an ah like the a in hat. However, the word stems from Latin, so we have to have it closer to the ah like the one in father. AH-vi-fors." She cast the spell on her wristwatch again, this time turning it into a cuckoo, then flicked it back into the original form. "But of course neither of those things will matter if you don't visualize. If you noticed, I turned the watch into two different species with the same spell. That's possible because I was imagining different species.

"It might be easier for you to imagine birds that you've interacted with before. Chickadees in your backyard, hummingbirds by your flowers, pigeons stealing your food. The trick isn't just to see their form and shape and characteristics in your mind. If that were the case, I'd be screwed. It's to imagine the plain idea of the bird, form the meaning that the word gives off in your mind. Kind of like when you learn a new language, the words remain in your mind as different versions of words in your native language, and you have to convert the foreign word to your native word before you know what it means - that's when you'll fail at transfiguration. You have to connect the meaning to the word first. Now take that meaning and connect it to your magic."

She removed her hand from Meenauh's wand, placing the tip against her hand. "All right. Say the incantation, then move your wand against my palm. Don't do both at the same time, and don't use your magic. I'd have Ceta check your wand gesture, but she's on break. I just need to make sure you're doing this right."