Slugging McGonagall
I had always held off human transfiguration until NEWT level, and avoided it until seventh year. It is just messy, if they can botch up a teaspoon to a ladle on the first try, imagine the chaos caused when unprepared students transfigure amongst themselves. If they cannot handle basic changes in shape and size, they most certainly cannot be counted on to handle changing complex living beings into other complex living beings. As a result, after OWLs I filter out the incompetent and spend sixth year doing preparative tasks and assign summer work that ought to start them off on human and basic animal anatomy.
That is also why I keep Poppy in the room with me whenever I have seventh years turning each other into various animals and materials and back. Even the most competent of students make mistakes, and, to my misfortune, some of the most competent of students seem to make them on purpose for the pure joy of unbridled discord.
Namely James Potter and Sirius Black. I've been lucky though, Potter has been far more manageable since the middle of last year. It is truly a miracle and I must thank Miss. Evans for her excellent work of training Mr. Potter. I keep Potter and Black separated though. Just in case.
***
I've found that just because the students know the human body and can work with it, they can't necessarily turn a human into anything on the first try successfully. So, to avoid causalities, I start them off with small, less complex animals, and work my way up. Usually I start with insects, then mollusks or cephalopods, depends on the weather, then snakes, lizards, fish(which is tricky to score, considering I have to eat gillyweed and dunk my head into a glass tank of saltwater to get a good look at them without the possibility of suffocating them when taking them out of the tank for too long.), mammals(start off with rats, usually the easiest class of the whole process, and ending with either a kangaroo or platypus, depending on if they choose the extra credit), then birds. Afterwards we move on to fungi, plants and, eventually, substances, and why Pygmalion's famous Animation of Galatea was such an advanced piece of magic for his time and how it led to the eventual ability to restore those turned to stone by various dark creatures and wizards to their original state.
This year's group handled insects with aplomb. There were lovely ants, beautiful butterflies, Evans managed a magnificent cicada, Pettigrew somehow turned Black into good-sized Rhinoceros beetle, and Potter's bombardier beetle was perfection. Altogether, the whole thing left me quite optimistic on the smoothness of the first mollusk, slugs, lesson.
I was sorely disappointed.
***
I was giving the final round of reiterating reminders, advising caution and all the usual pre-spell work nattering that I must do to be sure that everyone knows what they're doing before all setting them off, when a most curious thing happened. Black raised his hand.
Sirius Black, of all people, raising his hand, looking eager to ask a question that may be relevant to the task at hand. After a moment of gathering my thoughts, I allowed him to voice his question.
I wish I hadn't, or better yet, that he had asked to visit the lavatory or something to that nature.
"What kind of slugs will we turn into?"
I had never really thought about it before, but I hadn't a clue, the spell is rather vague, so long as the transfigurer is concentrating on turning the human into a slug, it really doesn't matter what kind of slug they become so long as a recognizable slug is produced with functioning slug body parts.
"Will I turn into one of those slugs that you find all over the place after it's been raining, or one of those flesh eating ones that are always cause Hagrid grief? Perhaps one of those big ones that live near those big trees, eh…" Black looked pointedly at Remus. How he was supposed to know what slug Black was talking about with such vague clues was beyond me.
"Er, banana slug and redwoods?" Black nodded vigorously. How he actually knew was even further away from my realm of comprehension. Then again, Black has me in a bit of a daze at the moment and I really don't know why, I blame the stress. Poppy seems amused though, if I didn't know better I'd say that she enjoys my pain.
"Yeah, will we turn into banana slug or perhaps a sea slug? What happens if we turn into a sea slug? Or a…", I finally found the voice to discontinue his ridiculous list of slugs and inform him of the mechanics of the spell, requiring thought of a slug and how the slug is the kind the caster is thinking of at the time.
"Slug's having one internal foot that they move by, will lose the second foot if get to attached to the slug foot, or will they merge together to try and mimic it?"
"Where do slugs keep their air…"
"If the slug's slime is used for ease of movement, will becoming a slug to the purpose of…"
"If the slug is nocturnal…"
"If you're turned into a slug before you turn into something else, then will the second thing be cancelled out because you're already in an altered state, or would you become a combination of slug and the other animal? Or would the turning of the other animal while you're already an animal cancel each other out and you'd be left human?"
He kept talking. I couldn't stop him, my own morbid curiosity got in the way.
"Aren't slugs hermaphrodites?", I was slightly terrified with where he going with that, but nodded, nonetheless.
"If we turn partly into a girl when we turn into a slug, would we turn back still part girl, of perhaps entirely girl?" Not if you did it right. "If a guy gets pregnant as a slug, will he turn back into a male and kill the slug babies, or turn into a girl automatically to preserve them? Does she then have slugs, or would they turn into humans too?" He continued to speak, still on a similar topic. The matters brought up, though thought provoking, is absolutely absurd and unprecedented. Why would he want to know whether the slugs active hours will have after effects? Whether the antenna are really slug arms, so you'll end up with an additional set of arms growing out of you're head? If you continue to produce slime, will you be able to climb walls? If Slughorn is the result of a slug, walrus and unicorn, and thus unfit to teach(I might have laughed if Horace wasn't an esteemed colleague), and at what point in my class does he expect the slugs to even have a chance to get each other pregnant? I'll admit, occasionally a student ends up the wrong gender in the restoration of their humanity, but it's a blunder easily fixed. It was at this point in time that I forbid further questions. I just brandished my wand and started muttering and he stopped. I assume he thought I was about to bake him into my ginger newts.(Because teenaged troublemaker is a key ingredient in every baked good. Obviously.)
Eventually the time came for the actual transfiguring. The first of each pair to do the spell started without consequence. The slugs were wonderful, really. Usually, now that I think of it, we end up with mostly garden slugs, the occasional flesh eater and one or two banana slugs. This class I got a great variety, courtesy of Black and his list. I got sea slugs, banana slugs, a few flesh eaters, Black himself made Pettigrew into a yellow slug with lovely dark spots.
The transformation back brought about unusual amounts of problems, presumably because Black got the ways it could go wrong ingrained in their minds right before they could work with the spell. Poppy and I took care of the several students who had either lost a foot or merged their legs, maintained reproductive organs they had as a slug but hadn't before, gained sudden additional appendages, kept their eyestalks, had a sudden taste for wood, and got splinters on their tongues or couldn't breath properly. The once-slugs did a fine job after learning what not to from their partners. They spent the rest of the class alternating turning one another in and out of slug-hood.
Mr. Black received detention for trying to turn Pettigrew into an ostrich directly from a slug, despite explicit instruction that we'd be doing humans to slugs and slugs to humans only today, and ostriches are in no way a creature that one can be mistaken for a human after successfully changing Mr. Pettigrew back four times without similar results.
I then switched his Pettigrew with Lupin, hoping to discourage further hi-jinx. I found that no more attempts were made towards an ostrich.
***
"James, could you turn me into a slug?"
"Why?"
"I want to see if something glows in the dark."
James, like McGonagall before him, was afraid to ask.
A/N- I thought this up in the middle of the night, when I had slugs on the brain. It is silly, and McGonagall isn't believable to me(too much like me, not enough authority), but, if I were Sirius, I'd wonder too. As for the glow in the dark bit at the end, it has to do with the slug Peter was turned into. As for the switching partners, I don't imagine Lupin would let himself be turned into an ostrich. It also has to do with the bit at the end, but it's obscure and I don't think anyone will get it.