TNFG-501 Lessons

Get ‘Em While They’re Here

Welcome
There were stacks upon stacks of gold lining the Transfiguration classroom today.  Professor Mitchell was seated behind her desk building a pyramid out of the Galleons in front of her, and the students found smaller gold pyramids at each of their seats. 

“Now, before you all go getting excited, this is leprechaun gold and will disappear shortly after class is over.  You can take some on your way out at the end of the lesson, but just know that if I hear any reports of ‘Bill ripped me off,’ you all will be serving detention with Professor Penrose,” the professor announced as she placed the pyramidion Galleon on her tower. “So, are we ready to begin?”

Introduction
Rather similar to last week’s topic on invisibility products, today we will be taking a closer look at items and products that are created with vanishing magic. Vanishing products range from novelty prank items, to various potions and ointments, to deadly dark artifacts. While we will only be touching on a few of these items in class, I’m sure many of you have seen and even used plenty of them without even realizing it. Before we get into specifics, though, I’d like to go over the general goals of and uses for these kinds of products along with how they are typically made.

Vanishing Products
The most common application for vanishing products, as you can probably guess, is as household cleaning aids. There are a number of potions and elixirs on the market to help your everyday witch or wizard dispose of unwanted dust, eliminate pesky stains, and rid pots and pans of stubborn grease. Additionally, Ragnar’s Readymade Recycler is a nifty little rubbish bin that sends recyclable objects to a recycling facility while vanishing everything else.  I know many of you are wondering why anyone would bother with commodities such as these when we can so easily use spells to achieve the same ends. Aside from being an aid to those unable to use magic to accomplish their daily chores, such as squibs or underage witches and wizards, magical cleaning products can actually be safer and more effective than their spellcast alternatives in some situations. Take dusting as an example. Sure, you could theoretically cast a General Vanishing Spell on all the dust in your house, but remember that in order to do so successfully, you need to be able to concentrate on the millions of tiny particles hiding in countless nooks and crannies without your mind straying to anything else. Do any of you believe you could accomplish that level of focus? I know if I tried, I’d probably end up with half a couch and dust remaining on my bookshelves. Dust vanishing solutions, however, are aerosolized formulas specifically brewed to latch onto and vanish dust particles and nothing else. You simply spray the product around your home, particularly in those places where the dust bunnies like to gather, and that’s that. Much easier, right?

Aside from cleaning, vanishing products find use in cosmetics (vanishing blemishes and old nail polish), security (vanishing door knobs and last resort capsules1), and pranking (which I’m sure you all know more than enough about). But how are these products crafted? Depending on the merchandise in question, of course, this answer varies. We can break vanishing products down into two categories: enchanted objects and potions.

Devices that are enchanted to either vanish something or vanish themselves are crafted with a number of spells from the Vanishment Form. This form of course contains both the General Vanishing Spell and the Partial Vanishing Spell in addition to the Anti-Vanishment Charm and the Vanishment Prevention Spell, but it also contains a few other charms that you may not expect. You see, because vanishment is such a powerful and volatile form of magic, impregnating an object with it is incredibly difficult. More often than not, the object itself inadvertently gets vanished. To prevent this from happening, additional charms are needed to stabilize vanishing spells and keep them dormant until the object is activated. This can involve some rather complicated spell weaving, especially for those products intended to cause the vanishment of other objects. Products that merely vanish themselves when activated, like your joke vanishing keys, are slightly easier to craft.

Brewed vanishing products are a fair bit simpler to create than their enchanted brethren. The magic that comes from ingredients with natural vanishing abilities is far more stable than any spell you or I could cast. That is not to say that you should not use caution if you ever attempt one of these brews, but they are slightly easier to work with, since the magic is already grounded. Common ingredients in these potions include ghost orchids, Moke skin, and Diricawl feathers. Ghost orchid in particular is a rather powerful, though rare and difficult to harvest, ingredient. You’ll learn more about them in your Seventh Year in Herbology class, but these magical plants have a tendency to vanish whenever a human draws near. There is a rather involved method of approaching a ghost orchid so that you may harvest its flower, involving a powerful invisibility spell and a number of specialized tools, but few have successfully mastered this skill. Once harvested, though, only a tiny piece of petal or a drop or two of extracted ghost orchid oil is required to produce some of the strongest vanishing potions. On the other hand, Mokes and Diricawls aren’t exactly known for their vanishing capabilities,2 but the magic in their skin and feathers, respectively, can be manipulated to produce the vanishing effect we desire. Potions made with Moke skin are also typically gentler and less reactive, so it is used most commonly in cosmetic products, as we will discuss in a little bit!

Leprechaun Gold
Turning to the coins on all of your desks, as I mentioned earlier, this is leprechaun gold. At first glance, these coins appear no different than your typical Galleon. In fact, it takes one of a certain skill, or a goblin, to discern leprechaun gold from true currency with the naked eye. There are, of course, spells and devices, such as enchanted tills, that can weed out one from the other, but those are not the topic of today’s class. Leprechaun gold does not technically fall into either of the two categories of vanishing products that I mentioned earlier, though I guess some could argue that it is, in a sense, enchanted. Its power comes from leprechaun magic, rather than woven spells or forms, but it acts in roughly the same way as the enchantments you will learn about in Charms next year. Try as we might, the specifics of leprechaun magic and how these coins are created have remained largely secret. You could create a near equivalent of the vanishing currency by using the Vanishment Form along with the Triggered Initiation Form and Charged Power Form.

Zandorff’s Zit Zapper
A handy little solution for the acne-ridden witch or wizard, Zandorff’s Zit Zapper is a serum that utilizes a patented mixture of Moke skin, tea tree oil, and a small amount of Bubotuber pus, among other things. Applying a tiny dollop to most types of blemishes will cause the blemish to shrink and eventually disappear. It does this by targeting the toxins in the skin that cause acne, cold sores, and warts, and shrinking them until they are small enough to safely vanish. It took Zachary Zandorff, the original creator of the product, years to perfect his solution. In his early iterations of the Zit Zapper, he ran into some rather unfortunate side effects, with the potion vanishing a little more than intended and leaving the user with small craters in their skin. In other attempts, the toxins were merely vanished outright and often caused a face full of pimples, as the scattered particles were simply spread throughout the skin rather than removed from it. If you’re having trouble picturing this, remember back a couple of weeks to our discussion of medical vanishment. If you vanish something inside the body, the particles scatter and end up throughout the body to places they ought not to be. 

Spot’s Stain-Eliminating Elixir
Spot’s Stain-Eliminating Elixir is a top of the line product that vanishes even the most stubborn of unwanted splotches on your clothing. It was invented in 1923 by Edward Livingston and is a staple in every wizarding family home even today. Livingston created this handy product as a means to remove the blotches and smudges that his dog, Spot, would leave on his freshly laundered robes every morning as he left for work. The elixir comes in a small can that you spray on the smudge in question. From here, it works similar to the dust vanishing products we discussed earlier, but of course, instead of dust particles, it targets anything that is not fabric or flesh. This does mean that you need to be careful where you point your canister - it will remove the hair from your leg just as easily as it removes the coffee from your coat. You will also want to avoid using it to clean any item or surface that is not a fabric of some sort or you may end up with some interesting results. While the vanishing magic is relatively weak, and aerosolizing it makes it moreso, it is still there and will do damage to something like a coffee table if you are not careful.

Historical Context
Now, while I trust that most of you will heed my warnings and not go about abusing the leprechaun gold I have given you, for those of you who might need a little extra convincing, let me tell you about the time these little coins nearly led to a full-on war between wizards, goblins, and leprechauns.

The year was 1867, and a wizard by the name of Duncan Collins had worked his way up the Ministry ladder to become the head of the Bureau of Magical Finance. He was a personable and well-liked individual, though some would say he was a little too confident for his own good. In fact, it was this confidence and a general sense of entitlement that eventually did him in. The Ministry at the time was in a fair amount of debt to Gringotts, and it was Collins’s job to find the Galleons to settle that debt.

After exhausting all of the Ministry’s typical outlets for gold, Duncan came up with what he determined was a fool-proof plan. He had a friend in Ireland who got him in touch with the matriarch of the largest leprechaun family in Cork, with whom he made a deal. In exchange one million Galleons in leprechaun gold, Duncan promised the leprechauns that he’d obtain a piece of hair from the heads of every Ministry department, including from the Minister for Magic himself (to what ends the leprechauns wanted these hairs, no one is certain). Whether or not he actually planned to fulfill his promise is unknown as the next step of his grand scheme did not quite go according to plan.

Duncan intended to use this leprechaun gold to pay off the Ministry’s debts to Gringotts, figuring that the goblins weren’t bright enough to be able to tell the difference. This assumption turned out to be remarkably incorrect, and the goblins, still a little sore from the events of the Goblin Rebellions the century before, did not take too kindly to the trick. Duncan never returned from his trip to Gringotts - many suspect the goblins locked him in one of the deepest vaults and abandoned him there - but his actions nearly set off another rebellion. Thankfully, then Minister Faris Spavin was able to smoothe over relations with both the goblins and the leprechauns (who never received their hairs) by pulling a couple of strings in both the wizarding and Muggle worlds to obtain the appropriate funds for both parties.

Conclusion
That is all I have for you today! As you all should know, next week will be our final lesson of the year, then I will be sending you on to your O.W.L. examinations! Be sure you are studying and reviewing your notes from all five years of your coursework; you never know what will come up on the test!

¹ Last resort capsules are curious little contraptions that I hope none of you will ever have to use. They are special boxes that vanish their contents if anyone attempts to break into them, and they are typically used by those with something of great value that they’d rather seen gone from the world than wind up in the wrong hands.

² Mokes can shrink themselves at will and Diricawls can make themselves invisible.

Leprechaun gold image credit
Duncan Collins image credit