Hogwarts School: A Harry Potter RPG

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→ CHARACTER INFORMATION.

Name:  Agnes Ogden

Birthday: 6 March 1934

Hometown:  Savannah, Georgia (current resident of Bantry, County Cork, Ireland)

Bloodline:  Halfblood

Magical Strength:  Divination

Magical Weakness: Charms

Year (pick two): Fifth, fourth

Biography:
0/XXII
Agnes wrote.

When she wrote, she liked to imagine that it was someone else she was writing about, another girl with another life,  but her imagination was not that vivid; plainly, it was herself, only better.

The girl that Agnes wrote about did not have a name, because Agnes could never think of a name other than Agnes to give herself and, by extension, the girl about whom she wrote.  Her own middle name was Marie, which she felt was only ever filler and not at all fitting, and which would give the girl she wrote about away as herself with only very little thought on the part of her readership (she had, consequently, no readership).  Her last name was Ogden, which she knew to mean Oak, so sometimes she fiddled with names Drusilla or Eila which also meant Oak, but Drusilla felt too formal and Eila not quite formal enough.  Instead, The Girl remained as such, just The Girl, usually capitalized, sometimes not.  She--both Agnes and The Girl--felt more mysterious (and therefore more exciting) for it.

While Agnes had brownish-red hair, mousey and not worth noting and worn with short bangs in a short bob, The Girl had True-Red hair, and it hung in poetic waves around her waist when she wrote it to do so.  Sometimes it was blonde, because she had heard once that blondes had more fun, or sometimes black when it fit symbolically, or sometimes The Girl’s, too, was brownish-red, but the brilliant, shining kind that braided thickly and could hold a curl.  The Girl had green eyes, because green always seemed unique to Agnes, whose eyes were as brown as the non-red parts of her hair and just about as remarkable.

Both Agnes and The Girl dressed in simple dresses, usually florals, worn at the hems in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way, and in sensible shoes (Agnes had a flair for realism when it came to footwear).  The difference came in the amount of each--Agnes had only three and one respectively if you didn’t count mucking boots, and The Girl had as many as Agnes had ideas in her head.  Some days, especially days after the post was delivered and the catalogs came in, those were many ideas indeed, a dress and suitable sensible shoe for each.

The Girl was sixteen; Agnes, fifteen.  Sixteen felt better--infinitely older, endlessly more mature, more alluring, more sophisticated, more of many things that Agnes wasn’t but wished she could be.  Both of them lived on a farm, both of them tilled the soil, tended crops and cooed to cows and clucked at chickens, but when The Girl did it, it was always in a romantic, floating sort of way, written up in soft, yellow light, and it looked like jazz sounded--fluid and distant at the same time.  When Agnes did the same, it smelled like manure and disturbed dust, catching in her nose and making her sneeze.  Each of them watched sunrises, but The Girl’s were always more golden, and when they went to bed at night, Agnes was not the one with silken sheets and matching nightgowns.

It wasn’t all bad for Agnes.  Some things The Girl did were the same as the things Agnes did.  They both coaxed something from the nothing of soil the same way, their lithe fingers working through coarse dirt, their fingernails muddied and scrubbed meticulously clean in the exact same fashion.  Each girl read the tarot, carried cards with them in their bags where they went, swaddled in the cloth cut of last summer’s dresses (though, admittedly, The Girl’s readings always fit the circumstance much better, because Agnes could create them to).  Agnes hummed, and she liked that about herself, so she transferred the quality onto The Girl, projected it onto her like The Girl was the Big Screen and Agnes herself was the film, like both of their lives (real or imagined) worked together like a sort of Picture House, terribly out of place in the small Irish town they occupied.

Only The Girl did not stay in Ireland like Agnes did.  Agnes herself only left to one place--to school, to study magic (The Girl knew it all already, used it fluidly or elected not to to use it at all as a matter of artistic integrity) and people (this was another habit she shared with The Girl)--but The Girl went much farther.  She traveled to London, where lovely women with posh accents and red dresses rode in cars and where The Girl was one of them.  She traveled to Paris to go shopping (her funds, unlike Agnes’, were unlimited) for dresses, especially after the previously mentioned post days when Agnes made many dress-ideas for her, and when she was in Paris The Girl traded in flock and fowl in favor of poodles (though Parisians loved The Girl for her pastoral charm and often requested of her stories of her rural life back home).  The Girl even made it across the pond to America--to all parts of America, all the best ones, back home to Savannah and then on to Boston and to New York City and to Chicago and Hollywood, where she was frequently mistaken for a film star due to her poetic True-Red hair and unique green eyes blinking behind black sunglasses, and then The Girl pushed past the border to Mexico City where colors were bright and the soil didn’t smell like peat all the time and she, as if by magic, knew the language and the best place to find a drinking chocolate.

They were different, Agnes and The Girl, and Agnes herself knew it; she had a flair for realism when it came to things that weren’t her writing.  But they weren’t--not really, not where it counted, which is to say inside of themselves.  The Girl thought the same things that Agnes did, things that were deep and sometimes a little dark, incongruous images and clever twists of phrases, in a brilliant cacophony of words and colors and sensations battering themselves against the sides of each girl’s skull, pulling at the corners. 

The real difference, the difference that mattered, was that The Girl did something about any of it--The Girl said her words, screamed them in the street sometimes, or whispered them across pillows, or laughed them easily standing effortlessly at some high table at some high-end party.  She said her words, which were her thoughts, the same ones she shared with Agnes; she declared them, plain and assertive, or otherwise The Girl howled them, weeping, to the moon alone, or let them drop plainly to the floor, leaving other people to pick up the mess of them.  The Girl, brave, bold, bared the soul they shared to the world, and the world, wide-eyed, loved The Girl for it.

But Agnes?

Agnes wrote.


XVII
Short shift, 3PM - 7PM, dinner rush, The Hind, not much of a rush.

Note to self:
Man--wide brown eyes, hair in curls like a poem, reading a book and having a glass.  Unassuming until saw title of book--The Sound and the Fury--and so I said “you know he got it from that Shakespeare play, the title that is,” because I was overcome in the moment to see another body reading the likes of William in Bantry of all places.  And so the man, he turns to me, and his eyes are a color of brown I can’t find words for and he says to me “I was never much for the classics” and his voice is ripe like the sun in the fields and sounds like mine and not the darned singing all the folk here from Bantry talk, but smooth like a good wholesome song and rolling on down a river, nice and round and smacking of home home home.

So what do I do?

Pour him the whiskey neat he ordered then run off home for my own dinner and to give my tips to Daddy to get some more flour when he gets up to the Mill next.

Note to note to self:
Make it better in the rewrite.

Next shift, Sunday after church rush, 12 Noon - 4PM


VIII
1.
She missed Savannah.

She wasn’t meant to, and The Girl knew it, so she kept it close to her chest like the secret it had to be, and only really let it out of its cage there beneath her ribs at night, when the wind howled across the barren fields.  It made it hard for the secret and The Girl to breath, the howling wind, but each of them were survivors, so they did what they must.

There, in the howling wind of the night, she took out her secret about missing Savannah and she held it in her hands; she looked at it blankly, trying to make it a part of someone else and not of herself.  Sometimes it worked.  Sometimes it did not.

Her secret of missing Savannah was a beautiful thing, even if it stole away her breath, even if she could only look at it at night when no one else was looking at her.  It was constructed in the color of Spanish moss--that sort of muted, white-washed green, with knobs of pale brown here and there and (she loved them in memory, where they had made her skin crawl and itch once) the tiny pops of bright-red chiggers crawling delicately in the tendrils.  The Girl could meander around it as if on cobblestone streets, and it was all bathed in the cloying fragrance of magnolia blossoms even though they would be out of season by now.  It sounded like cars on cobblestone, or horse hooves on cobblestone, or children running across cobblestone in the poor part of town.

The Girl forgot parts of Savannah, in her secret about Savannah: the sudden silencing of the shipping yards, the crowding of sleeping three to a bed, the ripping feeling of the eldest sister leaving the same sheets, the damned shipping yards again and the rumors that floated around them and the deals and then eventually the setting off of a passenger ship to a place far away where you could buy land for next-to-nothing! Oh, golden grains waving!  Oh, a new sort of Promised Land!

(Sitting where she sat, her secret and Savannah in her hands as the wind howled, she laughed; she had to, to imagine that her father hadn’t dragged her and the rest of them here, where the only golden grains waving were imagined in the same way she imagined it was appropriate to laugh.)

She looked at it blankly--Savannah and Bantry, the beautiful parts of it, the tragic pieces, too, the parts she replayed when she cupped her hands so on such nights, looking down at them--trying to make it a part of someone else and not of herself.  Sometimes it worked.  Tonight, it did not.


2.
The walkway down to Bantry Proper from Greater Bantry always felt like waking up to The Girl.  The the cobbled stones beneath her feet were flatter and more evenly laid than the ones her family had planted to mark the paths into and out of and around about the farm, and as she trod down them and towards The Hart, the stones carried with them the salty smell of the bay and the calling of shorebirds and not the smell of peat or the sound of chickens needing to be fed.  The walkway down to Bantry Proper was a pause, an exhale, a stretch in the morning sun even though it was the afternoon sun then, close to setting in the same direction that the cobbled stones lead.  It felt like waking up, in this case from last night’s un-nightmare, and it made her think less--not think-not, but think-less--of Savannah, and as the gulf air filled her lungs and as the gulls’ cries filled her ears, she thought Bantry Proper might be like waking up, too, if she was only open to the possibility of it.


3.
The Hart was only a slip of a pub--a pub only because the locals called it one and because they pulled ales and poured spirits damned near round the clock...and because the sign outside read The Hart which made it seem official enough to be called a pub.  In reality, The Hart was nothing more than the bones of an old house on the high street that someone had, at some point, had the good sense of putting a counter in, and shelves behind the counter, and bottles on the shelves.  With the addition of a heavy, silver-colored cash register, it stopped being a house and started being The Hart.

It was also where The Girl worked--no more than a few hours a week, never enough to interfere with her studies, and only enough to help her family get by, what with the way things were.

“Hello, Harold,” she said to Harold as she entered, expertly plaiting her long, red hair into a thick, sensible braid as she sidled behind the bar.  From underneath, lithe fingers plucked her apron, and with equal litheness wrapped its strings from front to back and front again, trying it in a bow across the front of her green dress.  Harold polished the same glass he always polished when Wednesday afternoons were long and slow, when the dinner rush was as slow as the steady movement of his pristine rag over his spotless glass.  Old Orel sat in the same corner table he always did, the only one in the whole of the place with a upholstered chair, which he had dragged down the main street from his house in town to The Hart himself after his wife died last winter.  It didn’t seem out of place, like Orel didn’t seem out of place, because nothing in the place matched--not Harold or Orel, or the glasses each of them polished off, nor any of the chairs at (for that matter) any of the tables.

There was nothing at all--not the tables or chairs, or the men, or their glasses full of different kinds of emptiness, not even about The Girl herself, with her red braid and green dress and bow-tied apron--that hinted the day might be anything other than ordinary.


4.
The Girl was washing her hands when she saw him, her hands plunged deep into the lukewarm, frothy waters of the wash basin, rubbing themselves together.  Her hands were thin little things, more suited to books and letters than soil or spirits, but with things as they were...well, she would have missed him if she hadn’t turned to her right at the last minute, avoiding the bustling body of Harold pulling through with a tray to take to the back full of dishes he had decided were dirty enough to re-wash.

So she turned to her right, to avoid Harold, and she she it--just some words, a title she knew but didn’t own: The Sound and the Fury, unassuming black print on an unassuming cream spine.  Like she might frighten the binding away, The Girl went very still, deer-like, hands still dripping suds into the wash basin.  Her eyes drifted slowly, skillfully up, green eyes working over the arm that held it--lithe, tanned, cuffed into a blue button-front shirt rolled to the elbow,

I don’t rightly know why I even bother, because I ain’t even got a better idea of what I might of done other than what I did do, and everything that comes out for this is garbage beside.

Art imitates life imitates art, my big toe.

Note to self:
Quit writing.



→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.

House Request:  Ravenclaw or Gryffindor, with Slytherin as a wild card.


→ SAMPLE ROLEPLAY.
In the gardens she felt more at home, as if somehow being among the blooms transported part of her soul back to the flowering city from which she hailed, or at the very least to her small corner of the garden in Bantry.  With her fingers in the soil, she worked among the stems and stalks of the lavender plants this morning, pruning them back before the colder weather could come for them--which it soon would, she knew all too well.

Agnes spent her time in the gardens--less frequently in the green houses, for they felt far more boxed-in and it made her anxious--the way some students spent their time at their duties in the hospital wing, or others on the Quidditch pitch.  It was a familiar place, which was important of course, but what was more it was a place of lightness--a place where the task at hand was equal parts pleasant and mundane, where her body could work independently of her mind, which was free to wander as it wished.  It was when she was in the gardens that she did her best writing--all of it in her only ever in head, the ideas floating in and out like the tides on Tybee Island, and as fleeting as the tides beside.  It was also where she studied the important things, like the soil, leaf structure, the motion of the sun through the sky, the movement of wings and the sound of the wind they created.

Presently, she watched her hands as they picked through her plants, her dainty fingers--so much better suited for bookishness--indelicately snapping off the spiked stalks of minute flowers and setting them aside beside her.  Under watchful brown eyes, her fingers moved, carefully sorting out greens from flowers with the tenderness and familiarity of a sister and then, with the flick primarily of her middle finger, the action became aggressive, indifferent, deadly as she separated one permanently from the other.

As she worked, she tried to imagine her work from every angle, and to imagine it done under hands other than her own--the rough, cracked hands of a farmer, the soft, paper-white hands of an old maid, and, more than the rest, the hands that were hers but belonged to The Girl.   She focused on those then, imagining a flash of true-red hair cascading across her face and coloring the light shining onto it and onto her work, and how it would make the muted purple blossoms more vibrant and special.

She jerked, accidentally snapping two spikes of greenery in two, when she heard the unexpected sneeze.  From her belly, she let out a sigh, then looked up from her work.

“Hello, Hugh.”

Hugh was a boy from her year whom she knew by name and not much else, other than her writer’s notes that he was a bit of a whiner and that he had a rat he called Merlin, which she thought was a little on the nose in two ways, which were:  one, he was a magical rat named after a magical figure, which would be a bit like Agnes getting a six-toed tomcat and naming it Hemingway; and two, ’Merlin’ was also, she had learned, a sort of swear that the magical community here used, in vein of naming a poorly-behaved hound dog Damn.

It was, at least, an interesting character trait to borrow some time.  Agnes shrugged to herself.

“Looks like you’re the only one starring, Hugh,” she sighed, returning to her work.  She had only just been getting the flow of it, and now she’d have to observe it again to get a real feel for it the way she liked to for research.  “I don’t need help with nothing, as I’m managing just fine on my own here, but I was about to ask the same of you.”

He seemed to be struggling, what with the snot and all.


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