CHRM-101 (#2) Spellcasting Basics

Is the visualization just one of many tools for concentrating on your magic or is it... how should I put this... real? The idea is, is it just a way to concentrate on your power or is it the only way? Are there others?

Does Levicorpus count a variant on the levitation charm? (Nevermind, it does, as stated in the textbook.) If none of the other spells work on people, why does it? And what was the magic used at the 422nd world cup, by the death eater forces there? It was certainly not only Levicorpus, as they had more control over the bodies than that.

<->

Professor, your lecture contradicts the book. I made a chart!

Spell Title	Lecture Incantation	Textbook Incantation
Levitation Charm	Wingardium Leviosa	Levioso
Hover Charm	Levioso ?	Wingardium Leviosa
Rocket Charm	?	Alarte Ascendare?
Floating Charm	?	?
Locomotor charm	?	Locomotor?

Edit: Oops, I mixed up my textbooks. Frankly, I think the book I read makes more sense than the other, but oh well...

 So, testing... Wingardium Leviosa! *points the wand at her phone* Well, that was pathetic. Maybe I would try it on something lighter. *quickly makes a paper aeroplane* Wingardium... Leviosa! I think it might have shuddered a bit! *tries again, with a wider sweep on the swish* Okay, it moved, but only because I sent a draft at it. *and again, closer to properly this time, with a very vigorous flick* *the aeroplane shoots across the room and embed itself half an inch into the wall*. Oh for crying out loud! 

...half an hour and about a hundred tries later, the room is littered with paper aeroplanes. 

*gathers them all in a pile* INCENDIO!

My wand

Wand Length: 10 3/4 inches (the length of my forearm, plus half an inch)
Wand Flexibility: Only the tiniest bit of yield
Wand Wood: Spruce
Wand Core: Thestral hair

I was wandering in the forest one day and came back to my mother to tell her I'd made an imaginary friend. Well, I said invisible, but she assumed that meant it only existed in my head. 

It was actually thestral colt. It eventually rejoined its group, but that was after the day I went to get my wand, at ten years old. The wandmaker, Jimmy Kiddell, recognized that I was covered in thestral hair. He made several wands out of it, and had me test them- the ash wand agreed with me best. Kiddell told me "The wood was a bit crooked, but it just seemed to feel right". There is a slight corkscrewing to the shape of the wand. I usually keep my wand tucked into a strap in my left wrist, point towards my elbow. The wand itself also contains, embedded semi-naturally (well, okay, deliberately by Kidell) near the base, a small Mookaite stone. 

I keep my wand slipped into some elastic straps on my left arm. I seem to be the only one to notice this, but my wand tends to feel warm in my hand- everyone else tells me it feels icy, which is strange, since I store it close to my body.

My wand tends to work best at pranks and creative new spells- not so great at serious spellwork that requires precision. Or maybe I'm just blaming it for my own failures...

I've been reading some books....

Interpretor is a gorgeous charm! It translates writing. I've the translation section of this blog after it.

(This, by the way, is totally made up, by me.)

HERB-101 Lesson 4

But that would only take up one plant, and training a dog to follow you takes years? Isn't that almost as inefficient as it is inhumane? Why not simply place a bird in a cage near the mandrake and then pull it up by magic from a safe distance? 

What makes Devil's Snare a magical plant? It just grows really quickly as far as I can tell. There are non-magical plants that do that. There are also non-magical carnivorous plants. Why hide its existence from muggles? They've seen weirder. And no sane muggle would approach it if they knew what it was.

Homework

A rather complicated query on the mandrake: If the scream of the mandrake can only cause one death, would it not most often kill flies, worms, or bacteria? Now, a possible answer is that the range of hearing of a fly is different, but then, so is a dog's range. Perhaps it is the complexity of the creature, or its intelligence. Also, the screams of a juvenile mandrake are known to only stun- is there a limit to the number of creatures it can do that to, and if not, then why would it have evolved the greater-powered one? Also, a mandrake only starts screaming if its mouth is out of the soil. Would that not leave it vulnerable to animals that burrow? Perhaps it simply kicks them. 

Also, having some knowledge of a normal plant's anatomy, I know that the mandrake is clearly not made the same way most plants are. Plants don't have muscles - in fact, they have rigid cell walls. On the assumption that the mandrake is in fact a plant and not an animal, you could consider it a very advanced form of the same things that allow carnivorous plants to move, but unlike, for example, devil's snare, a mandrake is not growing to cover things. Granted, perhaps it is a magical process, but surely we should study the process that animates them.

In class, you showed us infant mandrakes- how large to they become when fully grown? They seemed approximately human size as babies, are they six feet long underground as adults?

Now the most obvious protective necessity for a mandrake is earmuffs. They do also bite, so good protective gloves are probably needed as well. 

CHRM-101 Lesson One!

When was the memory charm (obliviate) invented? Is it possible that the memory charm fails when it comes to the subconscious, as natural amnesia sometimes does?  

While some muggle knowledge of the wizarding world is clearly passed through story from other muggles, has the origin of those stories ever been traced to people who have had said charm performed on them, or has been slips of the tongue by wizards?

Voltaire was a pseudonym for a wizard, are there any others like him? How much has that affected muggle knowledge?

Does the ISSS cover information? If so, what about those wizards that marry muggles?

I wonder if Lumos can be controlled to make different colours…. I’ve found that since I prefer blue to yellow, if I concentrate very hard on that sometimes my lumos charm seems to spark… am I just doing it wrong? Hold on…

Holy… Ohkay, I’m sure there are other wizards that have discovered this before, but ‘lumos azul’ produces a blue light… although I can’t get it to stay for more than a minute before going out.

An intro to this...

Basically, I'm going to Hogwarts! Hogwarts is Here is a website by fans for fans... but basically it's an opportunity for me to go to the school I've been waiting to attend since I was eight!

Here you'll find course notes, questions I'd ask during class, and the results of my practice.... most of what I will say here won't be canon to the books and may not even be canon to the website... but I shouldn't ever totally contradict book canon.

Something you'll need to know.... a little chibi of me waving my hand means that I'd be asking these questions in class- me holding a wand is me practicing. Anything else should be explained as I go. if you want to know what I'm on about, join the site!