OPEN Office Hours — Transfiguration

Office of Transfiguration — OPEN
Professor N. White

Quick Start

• This thread is Professor White’s in‑character office.
• Only one visitor at a time; the sign will read OPEN or OCCUPIED.
• All posts must be 200+ words.
• You may lightly godmod the professor using the pre‑approved actions.
• The Sitting Block is optional to attempt; ask for your DC roll if you want to try.
• Before you step into Professor White’s office, please take a moment to read the guidelines below. They ensure smooth role play, clarity, and a good experience for everyone..

Office Rules

— Welcome! All students and faculty should feel free to stop by for IC interactions whenever the OPEN sign is up.
— I prefer owls to Discord.
— Please read the description below before posting.
— Please follow all site rules, which I have linked here.
— Remember, all posts must be a minimum of 200 words. I will be strict about this.
— There should be only one person in the Office at a time. When the Office is Occupied, it will say OCCUPIED. If you see someone in here with Professor White, please do not enter the thread and post.
— I will respond to posts within two (2) weeks, and hopefully sooner.
— You have one (1) month in which to reply. If you do not respond within that time, I will consider the thread to have been abandoned, and I will reopen it to other students. You are always free to return at another time.
— Should multiple people — no more than three (3) at one time — wish to speak to Professor White, please reach out to me before posting.
— You may godmod Professor White, but only lightly and not before checking it out with me beforehand. There will be a reducio below with some things you may say she is doing when you enter her office.
— I am here to help you, so if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know.

Reducio

These are pre-approved actions you may use if you wish to mention the Professor upon entering. What you may not say is that you are in her office when she is not.

• Reading recent copy of Transfiguration Today
• Polishing her transfiguration instruments
• Dusting her terrarium
• Practicing wand-precision exercises (exacting, micro-movements)
• Grading homework
• Writing lesson plans
• Re-inking her quills with color-coded magical inks
• Practicing her spellwork

A week before term begins, the new Transfiguration professor unlocks her office for the first time… and nothing inside is quite ready for her.

It was a week before the new school year was to start, and the new Transfiguration Professor at Hogwarts, Nimue White, was moving into her office. She stepped into the nearly empty space assigned to her and inhaled. It smelled like every other professor’s office she had ever entered at Durmstrang. She wrinkled her nose. Stone. Old magic. Dust. That was no failing of the house-elves, however. Dust simply came with the territory.

Turning her thoughts away from the mustiness and more toward her aching arms, she gratefully unburdened herself of the heavy, charm-cloaked object she had just carried up five flights of stairs. It was the only thing she had insisted on carrying herself, and she allowed herself long-awaited moments of relief as she set it down safely beside the hearth. With soft words and a practiced gesture, she lifted the concealment charm and began inspecting her most important teaching piece to ensure it was unharmed. Finding nothing amiss, Nimue turned her full attention to the rest of the room.

The prior professor had left things in a tidy fashion, but the bare bones of the office, the nothing-special desk, the bookshelves that looked as if they might buckle at any moment, all reinforced her enthusiasm to make the space entirely and unmistakably hers.

“Hogwarts might be centuries old, but my office doesn’t have to reflect that,” Nimue said aloud.

She walked to the center of the room and turned slowly, letting her eyes trace the tall, arched windows. Those she would keep as is. They were both beautiful and friendly. Everything else was negotiable.

The walls came first. Nimue watched as the stone transfigured into a bare stucco finish at her command. She tried a deep charcoal color on them to begin with. Too heavy. She tried a lighter grey. Too pale. For her third Colorvaria! she tried something in between. It was still too cold a color. She pressed her fingers to her temples and muttered, “Nej, nej, nej.” ^[1] She stood back, squinted, and finally settled on a soft charcoal grey that looked like a foggy morning just before the sun teases its presence at the horizon. She nodded once. “Ja.”^[2] That is the one.”

The bookcases, she reasoned, should be dealt with next. She wanted height and presence, but she did not want the medieval clutter and look that some professors seemed to tolerate. She knew exactly what she wanted, and envisioned the bookcases in her father’s office at home. Deftly her wand followed the prescribed pattern as her incantation was breathed into existence. Almost instantaneously, Nimue had her preferred charcoal bookcases with regular glass doors. Not true barrister fronts, but clean panes that opened smoothly. She added drawers at the bottom that could pass for barrister drawers if someone squinted.

The shelves were soon filled with books in muted colors. Their cracked leather spines in shades of slate blue, deep grey, olive, and varying shades of burgundy warmed and brightened the otherwise dark palette of the room. She had many more books, but those she would keep at home. These were her go-to books when she needed citations or the occasional refresher. They were well used, and their spines had softened with time.

When she stepped back and looked at the bookcase with nothing but books in it, it felt too cold and uninviting. A quick peek in her trunk revealed a few silver instruments she had collected over the years: a set of rune calipers, a transfiguration compass that measured magical density, a small articulated arm used for stabilizing delicate transformations, and a silver prism that revealed structural flaws in spells. She also tucked a few plants between the volumes because she liked the way living things softened the geometry.

Beside the bookcase, Nimue placed a terrarium she had crafted during her apprenticeship. It appeared empty at first glance, but the moment she looked at it, a tiny landscape shimmered into view, a shifting scene that changed depending on the mood of those who observed it. For Nimue, it showed a miniature fjord at dawn, the water glowing with pale gold light. She smiled. “You will like meeting new people,” she murmured to it.

Her desk was next. She approached the nothing-special desk the prior professor had left behind and rested her hand on its worn surface. “Let us try this,” she said softly. With a slow, deliberate sweep of her wand, the wood reshaped itself, curving into a graceful kidney-shape. The grain deepened and swirled, becoming burled and rich, polished to a shine that mimicked marble while still holding the warmth of wood. It was exactly as she had envisioned it. She nodded once, satisfied, and along the student-facing side of the desk, she carved a short runic inscription — her gentle reminder to her students to “Remember to Think.” Finally, she levitated it into place in front of the bookcases.

It was then Nimue realized there was no chair left behind to transform. She chuckled to herself at having to conjure her own chair. Once again she raised her wand, but this time she intoned clearly, “Inanimatus Conjurus!” The cushioned chair she envisioned for herself appeared instantly. It was comfortable and modern, with none of the intricately carved lions or stiff wooden backs she had so deliberately avoided. It, of course, was positioned on the professor’s side of the desk.

The rug took longer. A plain one was too dull, a patterned one too loud, and medieval tapestry designs generally far too ‘Middle Ages’ for her taste. Eventually she found a rug depicting Swedish lions in blacks, greys, and muted whites. She levitated her desk once again, along with her chair, and then laid them down on the rug before stepping back. It worked. It grounded the desk without dragging the room back into the past.

Grabbing a daffodil-colored phial from her trunk, she began polishing the new woodwork with lemon oil, making the room smell bright and clean. A few small pots of rosemary were placed around the office because she liked the way the scent sharpened her thoughts. After setting her favorite on her desk, she paused and breathed it in, smiling. “Focus is always welcome,” she said. “Good.”

Upon hearing her own voice, Nimue paused for a moment and listened. The room had lost the hollow echo she remembered from when she first entered. Somehow, it sounded less like stone now. Satisfied, she turned her attention to the final details.

Office security was now on her mind. She enchanted every handle in the room, from the desk and bookcase drawers to her office door itself. If touched by anyone other than Nimue, the enchanted handles, with the exception of her office door during office hours, reshaped themselves into a small metallic replica of her face. It was not frightening, exactly, but chastising, like Marley’s face in A Christmas Carol. The eyes narrowed, the mouth pursed, and the expression seemed to warn, “Think carefully.” Nimue laughed to herself the first time she tested it. “That will keep them honest.”

Lastly, she turned her attention once again to the hearth and to her very favorite piece in the office — the student’s sitting cube, or, as it would be known to her students, the Sitting Block. It was not a particularly gripping name, but she had been gently warned off her original choice — Your Shapely Seat — by her cousin Rigel, the Professor of Astronomy at Hogwarts. Some finer points of English still escaped her, so she was grateful for his advice before she blundered into trouble on Day 1 of her teaching career.

It was important to Nimue that the students felt welcome and had something uniquely theirs when they came into her office. Not everyone would succeed in making it their own, at least not initially and maybe not even for years, but that was okay. Failure was just as important a part of learning as success, and both would be a part of everyone’s journey in learning the art of Transfiguration.

The cube began as a block of polished black marble with faint white striations, heavy and uninviting. Nimue liked that about it. It was a plain, stubborn thing that demanded imagination, something every transfigurer needed in abundance. She walked around it slowly, fingertips grazing the cold, smooth surface, already picturing the chaos her students might one day bring to it.

Nimue knew there was no end to the imagination of children, and she wanted to keep that alive in them. She envisioned things like a flying carpet hovering at eye level, a saddle on a mechanical bull snorting steam, or even a levitating disc of light. And she knew, without a doubt, someone would be seated on a throne across from her one day. The only question was: what kind of throne? She chuckled to herself. “Someone may even conjure a chair out of fire,” she said aloud. “And I will have to pretend I am not impressed.”

She pointed at the cube with her wand and tried a simple transfiguration. The marble reshaped cleanly, held for a moment, then sagged and collapsed back into itself. She grumbled. “Nej. Not good enough.”

She refined the spellwork over the course of half an hour and tried again. This time, the form held. She sat on the stool. It stayed steady beneath her. When she stood, the stool automatically untransfigured back into the cube with a soft, satisfying shift of stone.“Ja,” she said quietly. “That is what I wanted.”

With a flick of her wand, the marble block levitated across the room and came to rest in front of her desk, precisely opposite her chair. It looked almost ceremonial there, waiting for the next student brave enough to test their imagination.

Triumphantly, she went to her desk and took out some plain, ecru stationery from a drawer and reached for her quill. She scripted a few, neat lines and read the whole thing over for errors. Then an idea flashed like lightning and she grinned as she was inspired to add one final line. Pleased with the note, she folded it in half and “tented” it on top of the marble block. Her few lines were instructions to future visitors, students and adults alike.

Reducio

Decide what you want to sit upon.***
Ask Professor White for the incantation if you do not know it.
Take your time to visualize your seat; we are not in a hurry.
Once you have it pictured, point your wand at the cube and cast.
Many will not succeed at first. But you are always welcome to try again at your next visit.

*** Your “chair” must have you in a seated, upright position.
The marble has been enchanted to prevent lounging

.

Now, what will you make?

Slowly she stepped back and looked around the room one final time. The tall windows were still exactly as she had found them, and beneath the new surfaces, the old Hogwarts stone remained. But the room no longer felt like something she had been given. It felt like hers now. Most importantly, there was the stubborn little block of marble waiting for someone else to decide what it could become.

Nimue smiled.

She had not merely decorated the office. She had transformed it.

And, she thought, that seemed like an appropriate way for a Transfiguration professor to begin.

^[1] — No, no, no. (Swedish)
^[2] — Yes (Swedish)