Identification

Anticipating another new advanced branch of a first-year subject, Luca's class went out to the back of Gardens area where their teacher of Care of Magical Creatures and his entire family, from the looks of it, lived. The man, Denzel Rivers, dean of Thunderbird, lounged near a house built inside a magically modified tree trunk, big peaches hanging down its branches, fragrance of fruits wafting towards the incoming students. Three rows of circular widows with a cross in the middle separating four coloured stained glass adorning them to pass a rainbow-like light inside, one protruding far away balcony on the first floor, one sticking out of the plant thinner balcony higher up, flower and herb pots on the entire length of their railings, not leaving any gap.

Below the roof that the wide balcony provided, a family of four sat on a swinging sofa hung on ropes to its floor. Dean Rivers in a purple t-shirt and fedora of the same hue on his head, a string hanging under his well-defined chin if he wanted to take it down and put it on his back, stained by earth and grass jeans, and leather sandals. Black woman in denim overalls worn over a white long-sleeved shirt was swinging the sofa with one leg as her kids aged three and five from the look of it, each held a Jackalope and fed it carrots handed over by the woman from a big bowl of vegetables on her knees with more magical rabbits crowding under their feet, Luca's teacher on the other side of his kids helped them tease and poke all over the creatures' groomed furs with a smile until the class arrived in front of his lawn and he had to go to work. Taking a handful of greens from the bowl and putting them inside his pocket, the man went to introduce himself, walking slowly amidst a swarm of small creatures.

"Welcome everyone to your first lesson of Care of Magical Creatures, finally you get to see whole of the animal alive instead of only a tiny ingredient from it, right?" he opened the wooden gateway leading inside his big fenced-off yard, including a pond with rockery on its shores, a cultivated field, and a grove of twenty or so trees.

"Must be nice living here all the time…" Bryce envied the kids in a murmur under his nose that Luca overheard, the boy wondered how many under eleven little wizards were stashed by their parents around Ilvermorny and why he didn't see any so far in his first year.

"Come in, today we learn about those critters common in Gardens, and how they came about, last person close the door, please." the teacher led them away from the house, inside the woods, and onto a tree stump. "Eh, somebody to run and carry a Jackalope in here?" he realized there was no rabbit anywhere near as he stood on the stump and asked, looking at a person from the Thunderbird's Club, Flock of Stormbringers, standing the furthest away, marked by a badge of radiating outwards deep-blue feathers touching their quill shafts, a pattern of purple lighting on them. The called boy nodded and sprinted back. "Well, sit down and wait for him." Professor Rivers encouraged the class to plop down on the growing freely grass, which they did.

"Here!" the boy came back holding a rabbit with deer antlers attached to its head in his arms, the teacher took it with one hand from him by the neck. The innocent eyes of the docile rabbit overlooked the crowd as it curled up into a ball motionlessly.

"Thanks, as you can see, here is an example of a domesticated magical creature we are fairly certain origins of. Addition of magic in rabbits that wizards kept over generations somehow mutated antlers on them, no idea why. No further change in behaviour and no abilities of note, in the wild they are rare, gravitate towards wizards' gathering places. They taste slightly more tender than common rabbits." the creature shivered visibly as it heard the word 'taste', the man let it go for now and took out his wand.

"How can you eat this cutie?!" a girl sitting near Luca grabbed the running her way rabbit and started stroking it along with her friends, accusing the teacher loudly as she stared at him fiercely.

"We don't, usually, too much trouble for too little meat, but they need to be hunted from time to time because of population control, buggers would take over the streets left unchecked. Imagine roofs and grounds of Ilvermorny covered in grey mass with brown branches sticking up… Luck or misfortune of a rabbit's foot goes undecided in a heated debate lasting over the entirety of last millennium, their only realistic use are powdered antlers you learned about in the Identification class and to feed other bigger predatory creatures in the Forest behind me." he pointed with a thumb to a wall of trees, by coincidence Luca followed the direction with his sight, and saw a pair of Pukwudgie's standing on a tree there, chatting as they gazed at the distant from them ongoing class.

"Look, Predators are watching us." Luca whispered to Bryce and pointed discreetly at them, having rewatched the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie in the magical theatre.

"What? Where?" the puzzled Bryce didn't see them at first.

"White feathers, see, they stick out like a sore thumb. Why wear all that camo if you insist on having obvious white and red headgear?" Luca couldn't figure out what was that attire supposed to camouflage, a creature with working eyes clearly shouldn't miss the abrupt lines of white inside a dark forest.

"I see, I see. It is quite noticeable." Bryce nodded in realization, the class ongoing.

"Accio, Gnome." the teacher chanted into the air, waiting for three seconds, he caught with a practiced grab a humanoid creature one foot tall with a bulbous head similar to potato's that flew over the students' heads. "Why Accio, which can only summon an inanimate object, was capable of bringing a Gnome into my hands without a problem? Well, if you observe this fella carefully or rather generally gaze around him, you will spot that potato-like head and brown skin not very far from your staple dinner's meal wrapping. Yes, it is how you think it is, they are literally plants given a bit of sentience and by one miracle or another grown limbs. They taste…" the same girl that questioned the idea of eating a bunny, stood up in a huff and pointed at the humanoid creature with a worm sticking out its mouth, confused as to how it got from the underground tunnel to an open-air, took a breath to scream murder, preempted by the teacher's risen voice. "Don't get outraged, I didn't try, but it is written that their insides are yellow and tender after some boiling, going great with butter!" the girl choked on her words and sat back coughing, with her friend patting her back.

"Imagine a field of potatoes pulling themselves up from the ground and running to hide as a farmer comes to harvest." Bryce whispered as he shook his head, musing on the picture.

"Their diet and habits are similar to moles, going towards magical households even from a large distance, on the same instinct as Jackalopes, living where wizards are active seems to have some benefit or allure for them. Watch out for their sharp teeth, they are considered pests, but a couple of protective charms over your crops and fences take less time to set up than throwing them out constantly, like this." the man took a pose of a Discobolus sculpture, with one hand containing the Gnome drawn back, the other bent, and hurled the creature outside his yard in a beautiful parabole, Thunderbirds in class took the lead cheering for the perfect throw.

"Nice!" Luca overlooked the landing point of the creature, must have been two hundred feet away.

"The last of what you will see today is a Knarl, hedgehog, but with changed behavioural patterns and darker brown skin compared to their non-magic-containing cousins. They hate if you feed them, are suspicious of laying there food. Go around and search for one under the tree or bushes and shout for me to take it, or just petrify it yourself and bring here." the class went on for a while longer, a list of harmless magical creatures inclined towards settling in the nearest magical household as they randomly mutated given as homework to transcribe from the subject's book into a roll of parchment for the next lesson.

Awaiting near the wooden gate leading to the fenced-off Production area of the castle grounds, a plump witch that was supposed to teach them Herbology stood having a conversation with a kitchen employee that carried a large bag in her hand effortlessly, cast with stretching and weightless, Luca speculated.

"How's today's lunch going?" the newly met teacher spoke.

"On track as always, we imported some palms over summer, dates and coconuts already growing nicely." the employee smiled with visible joy.

"Oh, headmaster went to discover other thing than a chicken?!" the surprised teacher exclaimed

"As if, it was Juno's initiative, she went and brought them herself. Go, teach." the cooking witch scoffed at a suggestion to give headmaster any credit for enriching the school's menu and went away as the class waited, chatting among themselves or listening to their exchange.

"Hello, my job this year is to prevent you from starving in the future, impart knowledge of how to magically augment earth, crops, and other things for a plentiful yield. Those of you coming from a no-maj society might be under the impression that you can only have one harvest a year or even every couple of years. In the Wizarding World, your biology lessons are irrelevant…" she went on as they crossed the fence into the picturesque fields and orchards of the place, explaining the best manure to use for each plant, and to be sure to wear dragon-hide gloves while weeding after a sprinkle of dragon dung or risk losing fingers to whatever aggressive little vine grows on it. They started manually cleaning fallen fruits and plucking stubbornly budding offshoots around the apple trees, the reason for that given in plain voice: not everything, after all, can be done by magic, or rather they don't have enough knowledge and control yet, and perhaps never will have, to do everything with it, personal and future family consumption could be limited to a square of soil thirty feet long and wide if planned intelligently, so doing it the old-fashioned way had to be studied. After that, the teacher moved them to a field of recently harvested wheat, she stood and demonstrated the primary method of boosting agriculture: pouring raw magic into the earth, in a similar fashion as they did in Potions.

"Behold, your future loaf of bread." the teacher joked as she squatted and pointed her wand to the soil, budding green saplings penetrating the layer of dirt above them to shoot into the sky. After five minutes, the woman panted exhaustedly, area she managed to reinforce more or less containing three hundred of the crop as Luca estimated, now small immature green stalks. "I shortened the growth cycle by around a month, this is how much the plant can accept in a while, go try yourselves. Stop when you get tired, go on, spread and pour it in. In our next lesson, we will learn specific incantations developed for protection of wheat from vermin and birds. The last thing to remember is that this method only works on non-magical vegetation." she remarked and watched as the crowd run away quickly in groups, helpless Luca the only kid left behind.

"Here we go…" the boy sighed, once again in the limelight as his classmates turned after having run anywhere from fifty to a hundred feet away, depending on how courageous they were, to witness what disaster will the boy bring to the field.

"Granger, right? Could you go further away from me?" the teacher apparently also heard about his melting of the school's fundaments that almost collapsed the entire building as his reliable classmates exaggerated, Luca trotted away resigned, the students in front of him running away screaming playfully. With nobody in a range he thought reasonable, the boy bent over, ready to jump out on sign of trouble, and put his tentacle into the ground as far away from his body as his arm reached, intently focused on its tip. To a familiar sensation, power from inside his soul smoothly released and saturated nearby seeds and land, the scene at first a carbon copy of what the teacher managed to achieve, went crooked as soon as three seconds later. Luca and his audience realized that the area his magic cruised through encompassed the entire field and beyond, an ocean of green climbing higher and higher to the sky, immature seeds growing larger and larger at the top of the stalks until their colour changed to gold, signifying ripeness, but the boy mesmerized by what he did, forgot to stop the outpour of his magic. Wheat grew around him, singular kernels of it thumb-sized, he was fascinated by watching the jungle he had a connection with by magic rise up.

"That's enough, enough!" he couldn't see anyone behind the dense foliage grown higher than where his forehead would be standing up, but a shout brought Luca to his senses, and he stopped the magic before it completely turned the space around him into an impregnable wall of cellulose.