Lye, Rita | Elsewhere Adult

[Rita Lye]

E L S E W H E R E   A D U L T

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Rita Lye
Gender: Female
Age: 21
Blood Status: Muggle-born

Education:  
Ilvermorny, Wampus House, Class of '47

Residence: 
A small but spacious flat that she shares with two other girls that sits above a store in Diagon Alley

Occupation
Waitress/Tea Lady/Dancer/Singer/Model

Do you plan to have a connection to a particular existing place (for example: the Ministry, Shrieking Shack) or to take over an existing shop in need of new management?
Muse, The Royal Flush, The Moulin Rouge, The Sinner's House, The Ministry of Magic (tea lady)

Requested Magic Levels:
Adult characters have 32 starting levels to distribute across these four categories (less levels can be used if you so desire, but no more than 32). The number of levels on the lowest ability must be at least half of the highest ability.

If you want levels above the usual 32 total, or a significantly uneven distribution of starting levels, please fill out and submit the Special Request form here.

• Charms: 7
• Divination: 10
• Transfiguration: 8
• Summoning: 7

Do you wish to be approved as a group with any other characters? If so who and for what IC reason?
n/a

Please list any other characters you already have at the site:
Arminia Meadowes, Caledon Angelus, Abraham L. Styles

Biography: (300 words minimum.)
For as long as she could remember, Rita wanted to see the world.

It wasn't a sense of adventure which captured this desire. Rita Joy Lye came into the world on a hot summer day in 1930. A blessing to a single mother, an actress and singer named Winnie Lye, with a voice that trapped its listeners like a moth to a flame. Rita grew up never knowing who her father was. She and her mother stayed in a bedroom in a house with throngs of other actresses and visiting men. She didn't long for a father, like so many of the other little girls who didn't know their daddies, like her own mother had. If they were anything like the men who came to visit her Mama on the nights Rita had to sleep in the closet, she could live without one. The house was beautiful. Old, and perfumed, with silk and flowers and dresses everywhere. Its own sort of magic.

When she was ten, she shared her first kiss with her friend Penny. Penny had lovely auburn hair and golden eyes and was ten-years-old too. The kiss happened in the park across the road the children in the house were allowed to go and play in. They'd fallen on the ground after running around the biggest tree, laughing so hard that Rita thought her insides would burst from her chest. Her head fell next to Penny's, and she remembered seeing one of the older girls kissing one of her friends when they thought she wasn't looking. And Penny was her best friend. Though it was a moment in her childhood, the softness of Penny's lips brought something to life in Rita.

This moment was put aside when an alarming letter arrived for Rita Joy Lyre on her eleventh birthday. Addressed to her from a place called Ilvermorny. A school for what her mother would call "gifted children". She told everyone that Rita was exceptionally talented, that she could make things happen that no one else could. Rita didn't know. But Winnie did. It made her cry tears of unbelievable joy when Rita went away for her first year of school. If she had stayed, she would have been put to work that very year.

Rita had only ever heard about witches and wizards from some of the books that travelled around the house. It never mattered to her - she didn't like reading, and much preferred the moving pictures her Mama took her to sometimes - but leaving the house did. It had been her home. She had never longed to leave.

When Rita, nervous and unexpecting, was called to stand on the Gordian Knot in the Ilvermorny sorting ceremony, she had no idea what to expect. Four large carvings loomed in front of her. Silence melted into seconds until a deafening roar brought the panther to life. The Pukwudgie followed weakly by lifting its arrow to the sky, and a small shudder of wings signaled for the Thunderbird to stake its claim, but another loud roar from the Panther sent both into submission. Such defensive power captivated Rita into the Wampus house. She grew there and thrived there for the next seven years.

School during a war brought a different atmosphere, even for the distanced Americans. Rita pushed through these years with as much of an embrace of art and beauty and love as she felt her body could endure. When she left her school, years after the war, she felt ready for whatever fight would come for them next.

This fell in the unfortunate form of the gradual loss of her Mama. Though Rita's return home left her aware of the romances of the house she grew up in. Having found her own voice, as bright and burning as the sun, Rita took as much performance and waitressing work as possible, sticking to the crowds she knew while longing for a more prominent magical community to fit herself into. But the comforts of her home enchanted her. Soon, she found she enjoyed dressing in the burlesque requirements of so many of her venues. Her beauty and talent made her popular. It made her money, though the other attentions of men never much interested her unless absolutely necessary. She preferred the softness of a woman's embrace. The freedom Rita sought came at a high cost. Winnie, long unwell and broken by the effects of a war-time lifestyle, found herself unable to carry on past the year of 1949.

Rita's grief carried her all the way to the magical communities of London, England.

Roleplay: 
You come across one of these posts on the site. Please select one & reply as your character:

Option One -
Amelia Nixon was many things, but she was never a pushover reporter that people could just usher away with a busy shuffle past. She was dedicated and eager to cut to the very middle of the current political tensions because she was Amelia Nixon and her articles would most certainly become front page material. 

“Sir, please! It’s for the Prophet, how do you feel-“ 

Another one brushed passed her, the shuffling busy masses making their way through Diagon Alley for the lunchtime rush. This had been the best possible time to get people, but none of them were giving her anything to go with.

Only momentarily discouraged, the short red headed lady took a seat on a nearby bench. Her quill resting in her left hand and her notepad ready in the opposite hand. Amelia pouted, tapping the quill against her leg as she scanned the waves of people for somebody - anybody - who looked like they had something to say.

She had been dreaming of her name in bold print, Amelia Nixon: The Source of Today’s Tomorrow. She had been dreaming of the larger office and the secretaries that would fetch her the morning coffee and fetch her anything she needed. The VIP interviews and the most exclusive press passes. But all Amelia had was a page seventeen piece on the rising number of frogs in London. 

Hardened by a day of no success, the reporter stood up and started to trod off down the alley. A loose stone on the cobble path caught her heel, sending the distraught girl toppling down to the ground.

“Merlin’s fog watch, my heel is broken! Help!” she yelled as she tried desperately to recover her shoe frantically in the middle of the Diagon Alley moving crowds. 


Roleplay Response:
It had been an exhausting, glorious night.

Well, technically a "morning", as she had only stumbled back into her clothes half an hour ago after falling asleep without them at six a.m. It was very often how her days played out since her arrival in England. Wake up late, fall asleep even later. She loved it. Thrived on it. Rita Lye could do many things - some incredibly indecent things if one really thought about it in the current feeling of society. The Brits were rigid. Rule-bound. Nervous about a lot of things. They cared a lot about someone's blood status, but pretended they didn't, and had a hell of a darker history than the place she'd travelled from. Their tea was always "hot". She hadn't been able to find a decent Coney dog since she'd moved.

But she loved it all the same.

Rita adored the voices and the spell she could put over them. She was in awe of the flair so many witches and wizards dressed in. She inhaled the whiskey and the ale and the coffee. She ate up the old world sensibilities that bound a lot of what the Brits did to their immovable tradition.

Diagon Alley was probably her favourite place in the world. The colours and shops and magic of it all, that cackled and thrived after the war tried to snuff it out. Rita moved down the cobblestoned street that afternoon. Her robes were of a brilliant shade of violet. They flowed off of her rail-thin frame, floating around her feet as if she hovered off the ground. Wild hair twisted into appropriate coiffe that it stubbornly refused to remain wholly in. A shameless walk back to her home after a night spent living. She didn't notice any stares, didn't pay them any mind. The dreamy smile melting her face blurred out any feelings of strain or shock felt by the few who felt them.

It was only when someone toppled over in the busy throng of people just a few feet ahead of her that Rita paused. The poor woman, mercilessly pushed aside by the lunch-time crowd, managed to get up. Minus one shoe.

Rita slipped around the passing strangers, eyes fixed on helping the woman. She'd noticed that pair of heels in the window of Navarro. A mental note had been made to look into buying a pair for herself once her scattered pay amounted to enough. Finally, she stopped, folding herself over gracefully to pluck the shoe out of the cobblestone wedge it found itself in.

"Here you are!" she chimed, holding out the damaged heel as she stood back up to full height. A smile illuminated her energetic face. The awareness of her accent fell smack dab between her and the redheaded woman. "Lovely shoes. You wouldn't want to upset the pair. That'll go back together in no time!"



OTHER
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[Calypso Ross]

Accepted!