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The relief in Tay's heart was beyond words. She had been desperately afraid that the illustrious Professor Saul would refuse her membership as his apprentice, and yet...here she was.

Most people's images of wizards were of tall, willowy men with long hair and beards; most images of witches were of thin, birdlike women with huge noses and warts and a cackling voice. Sorcerers, in her experience, fell somewhere in between in terms of looks. Tay had started off as a witch and was now in training to be a sorcerer, and yet she looked nothing like the typical magick-user. She was short and squat, with wiry brown hair and cow-like brown eyes. Her older brother had once compared her to a bulldog and she had tried to turn him into a frog.That had been a disaster; she'd accidentally turned him into a white rabbit and been unable to turn him back for quite a while. Even now he still tended to stamp his feet when he was afraid and run for a hole--to say nothing of his oversized front teeth.

Now she roamed the greenhouse, smiling as she looked at the plants and things growing there. At one end of the greenhouse she found a small pot of flowers that had not grown properly. The stems hung limply over the edges of the pots, short and alarmingly pale green, while the buds had half-heartedly begun to develop and then simply stopped. Tay felt her heart moved to pity for the plants. Without thinking, she set out to do something.

She waved her hands around the plant and murmured an incantation that was as familiar to her as breathing. This was the only spell she had no difficulty with, and as she chanted, the plant glowed a healthy green and then slowly straightened. It grew to a rather large size, and then the buds burst open like fireworks, revealing healthy scarlet flowers, shaking out their petals delicately.

Lowering her hands, Tay stepped back to admire the pot of chrysanthemums, smiling as she did so. Finally, she thought. At least something is going to go right here.
"Ah... a green witch."

There was the Professor. Tall and intimidating. And the hint of what was either a sneer or a smirk on his face. He did have a habit of sneaking up on you. Almost like he was always there, watching, and only chose now to reveal himself... which was terribly likely. It was said he practised Dark Magick, and it's very likely that invisibility was in his list of talents.

"Ms. Taygeta, isn't it?" He glanced about at the plants all around him. "Finding things to you liking?"
Tay squeaked, caught off-guard by the intrusion of another into her thoughts, and whirled around, losing her balance and stumbling backwards into a stack of empty clay pots, which crashed to the ground. She squeaked again and covered her mouth with her hands as she realized who the tall, saturnine person behind her was.

"Professor! I...er...I didn't see you there," she gasped. Flushing redder than usual, she began hastily re-stacking the pots that had fallen. One of them was broken. She bit her lip and tried to remember the spell to fix it, but...

"Oh, bother!" She frowned. True, the pot no longer had a crack in it. However, that was because the pot no longer, technically, existed. She had managed to accidentally form it into a terracotta rose...which, incidentally, had a fine crack up the middle of the stem.

Tay blushed deeply as she looked sheepishly up at the Professor. "I'm sorry, sir. I...I've always been better with plants and things than I have with things that aren't alive...I didn't mean to break the pot, honest. I--" She stopped short of saying I can fix it, really I can, because she doubted she could. It would probably take several days and involve a certain amount of swearing.

To calm herself, she looked back at the chrysanthemums. That, at least, had gone right. "Yes, sir," she said softly. "I like it here very much, sir."
The Professor carefully knelt, and examined the manufactured plant. It was a rather pretty rose, but still had the texture of terra cotta, and the offending crack up the stem.

"You have rather rudimentary transfiguration skills, my dear..." he said darkly, turning it in his hands. "And a certain trouble with focus, I would think." She'd had a good start, but it seemed her magick was terribly specialised. She'd need to learn how to translate her magick into more than just the photosynthetic. He looked down at the girl, squat and desperate. And then to the rose.

His eyes dulled as he held his long, pale fingers around it. His hand shook ever so slightly as he felt the warm power of his magick engulf the thing, and then the spell was done. The beginnings of scarlet brought out a bold hue of red, and the stalk glistened green with life, the scar gone. He held it out to her. "You will need to meditate, and practise. Might I recommend, if you get a chance, Avani's Charmed Gardening? He's an India-born wizard, lived for some time in Great Britain. You may find it interesting. But also Master Cesare's Minutes of Meditation. Preferably before lunch," he added, checking a time piece on his wrist. "So as you can best capitalise your hour of silence, mm?"

There was a very good chance someone with that level of skill in green magick already owned Avani's Charmed Gardening, but wonderful as green magick was, without proper concentrations, it was quite useless. Although it did give one hope for the garden. Cesare's tricks, while simplistic and short-lived, would be far easier to master than years of... say, tai chi. Even a simple breathing exercise would be some form of improvement. He turned to her previous spell, and his fingers brushed against the crysanthemums, which were practically dancing with energy, smiling and a great deal pleased. "Good work on the 'mums. Florence will like you." Indeed. Florence rarely liked anyone in his gardens, particularly not wizards and witches who merely came in to cut off herbs and blooms as they had need, never paying much attention to the hard work it took to keep things green. And he worked alone. Perhaps he would snap at her at first, but he'd grow to like this witch if she proved to be consistently competent in her green magick.