 Bathes in Maple Syrup | Dancing Lobster | Moy Pomidor | Seneca's Beard | That Is So Fetch!
Freya followed his gaze toward the Tentacula and immediately looked back at him with a look that suggested he had just proven her point rather than his.
"It has challenged me, most definitely," she informed him matter-of-factly. "But it seems to not have learned proper duelling etiquette."
Her attention shifted back to Nyle as he continued, and despite herself, she found her expression growing more thoughtful with every comparison he made between Herbology and Defence Against the Dark Arts.
At first she looked skeptical. Then curious. Then mildly annoyed. Because the more he explained it, the more it made sense.
"So you're saying I should stop thinking about them as plants and start thinking about them as threats. Hostile, unpredictable, occasionally poisonous threats." A beat following as her eyes swept across the greenhouse once again. "That actually sounds much more familiar."
The admission came reluctantly.
Painfully reluctantly.
Yet she couldn't deny the logic of it. Every plant had identifying features. Strengths. Weaknesses. Behaviours. Habitats. It wasn't so different from learning how to recognize magical creatures or dark beings before they became dangerous.
"Oh, that's irritating," Freya pointed accusingly at him, eyeing the plant as it reached out toward her again. "You've gone and made Herbology sensible."
When Nyle asked where she was getting stuck, however, she stared at him for a moment as though the answer should have been obvious.
"All of it?" A laugh escaped her as she shuddered slightly. "No, that's not entirely fair. I know what hyetal means. High rainfall. Wet environments. Lots of moisture. It's everything that comes after that where things start blurring together. The terminology isn't usually the problem. It's remembering why one plant develops certain traits while another develops completely different ones. And the leaves all start looking ubiquitously similar after a while."
As he elaborated, Freya found herself processing the information far more than she had with the textbook. Most revision guides seemed determined to present Herbology as an endless collection of facts to be memorized. Nyle, meanwhile, was treating it more like a chain of cause and effect.
"I don't think my textbook has ever once asked me why a plant developed a trait," she admitted. "It mostly just informs me that it did and then expects me to remember it forever."
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