Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Transfiguration Trouble

With the end of term quickly approaching, maybe it's not surprising that I got into a little trouble in Transfiguration yesterday. More than a little trouble, really.

It started out innocently enough - Professor McGonagall transformed herself into a cat again, just like she did at the beginning of the year. It's always exciting to see - so of course some mates and I started talking in the back of the classroom about such transfigurations. It would be soooooo neat to be an Animagus, wouldn't it?

There didn't seem to be any harm in trying. After all, remember that lesson with the toothpicks we were supposed to turn into needles? I tried and tried, but couldn't do anything but make the tip of my toothpick a little bit silver. But nobody got hurt and no major laws of spellwork were broken, so a little experimentation never hurt anyone, right? Now people are saying that I should have known better - that if I'm so weak at Transfiguration, maybe I shouldn't have been mucking around with humans and animals.

But it's the end of the semester, and we were having fun. So somehow it seemed like a good idea to try to turn myself into an Ocelot. Who wouldn't want to be an Ocelot?

So I was supposed to turn into this (notice all the spots on the arms):

But all I ever got was this:

And now I can't seem to go back! All day yesterday, and now today, I've been walking around half-ocelot, or somewhat less than half-ocelot, with a spotty arm. I suppose I should be glad that I only got that far, and didn't stay human but develop an urge to go hunt reptiles. Madam Pomfrey says she can't fix me, and that I will just have to gradually get back to human over time. So now I'm going to spend the rest of the term - and maybe even part of the summer - all ocelotty!

I told my Muggle friends about this, and they say it just looks like I had an accident with a garage door and a can of spray paint. Boy, that would be really embarrassing! At least with Transfiguration trouble I learned something, even if it's sort of a lesson in what not to do.

1 comment:

Erika said...

oh dear, i hope you return fully to your human self soon!

Lily