Hogwarts School: A Harry Potter RPG

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→ CHARACTER INFORMATION.

Name: Elena Sophie Richter

Birthday: February 13th 1943

Hometown: London

Bloodline: Muggleborn

Magical Strength (pick one): Transfiguration

Magical Weakness (pick one): Charms

Year (pick two): First (Second)

Biography:
August 1934. Leonard Maximilian Richter and his wife Katharina were no longer willing to put up with the political shift in their homeland. Initially drawn to the resistance, he soon starts to fear for his family, especially his wife and unborn child and urges them to leave the country. With the need to avoid drawing too much attention, preparations take a while, but in early 1935 they leave for London. Unwilling to put his pregnant wife through a longer journey, he decides to settle there for a while rather than moving to the US as initially planned.

Even though they had been taking all possible precautions, Katharina suffered a miscarriage, doing lasting damage to her health. After that, the pair was far more careful. Despite their shared wish for a child, it would be years before they would try - and fail - again. At this point, the doctors advised them against another attempt, warning that Katharina might not recover this time.
Despite all this, and despite the growing mistrust towards their people all over europe, especially once the war started, they settled in rather well, eventually deciding to stay indefinitely. With doctors in high demand, it wasn’t too long before Leonard found work and Katharina, too, found work eventually, though it was dull compared to what she was used to.

Then, in 1943, in the middle of war, destruction and death, a small miracle happened. Katharina gave birth to a little baby girl, and though both mother and child were left weak, hanging by a thread for several days, both made it through and against all predictions, the new mother did recover in time, though never to full health. Caught in the middle of a war against their own people, knowing full well that what family and friends remained in Germany were probably either dead or suffering, this tiny child was their beacon of hope, a small ray of sunshine in a dark time. A hope for a better future.

Elena grew up protected, sometimes too much so, especially by her father. The small family had already gone through a lot, and it showed in her parents’ attitude towards her, but even more so it reflected in the way she was raised. For as much as her parents loved her and wanted to protect her from any possible harm or pain, the world was a harsh place and they knew that all too well. Deciding that the best way to protect her was to prepare her as best they could, they held her to nearly impossible standards, intellectually and morally. Praise was always hard earned and never absolute, while she was constantly presented with new challenges. Learning was not over when she got home from school, and while that left little time for friends and fooling around, she would consider her childhood a happy one.

She didn’t need people and most of her classmates tended to stay away from her anyway. After all, nothing strange ever happened without her around. No matter, she didn’t need them. Not as long as she had her family, not as long as she could rely on the power of her own mind. Logic, creativity, science. Those were the foundations on which she built her world.

Books didn’t whisper behind your back, science didn’t care that strange coincidences kept piling up around her. It was the nature of coincidence to be unexpected.
It seemed a done deal. Elena would continue her education and then head off to university to dedicate her life to a subject of her own choice - or several, more likely.

And then the letter arrived. Completely ridiculous, of course. Magic… a bad joke, nothing more. There was no such thing as magic, everyone knew that. Old superstition, nothing more.
But wasn’t it dangerous to discount any possibility just because ‘everyone’ knew it wasn’t real`? Everyone had known that the earth was flat and the center of the universe. Everyone had known that the world was created in seven days and that evolution was just a myth.

Magic…

Now that the seed had been planted, she couldn’t quite shake it off anymore. Maybe there was something more to all those coincidences. Maybe the world was bigger than they knew if she just gave it a chance?
Well, she couldn’t not investigate now. Not anymore. And though her parents were against it, though it took a long, heated discussion to convince them to even give it a chance, eventually she did get her way. With certain conditions attached, but those hardly mattered.

She needed to know more.


→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.
Note: This section is optional, and is up to you to complete.

House Request: Do your magic.

Personality:
Elena is a quiet one. She watches and listens more than she talks and usually prefers the company of a good book - unless she finds someone truly interesting. Then she won’t relent until her curiosity is satisfied and if she finds in that time that she enjoys someone’s company, she might even stick around, for as distant as she is most of the time, she has no real wish to be alone. Her trust, however is hard to come by. Too long has she had to listen to nasty rumors about herself or those select few she actually cared about. She knows full well what people, especially children are capable of, and it will take time to get her to open up a little more and allow herself to get emotionally involved.
That said, she believes that the knowledge and ability to help come with the responsibility to do so, and she will not hesitate to offer a helping hand, whether or not she actually cares, and she will even overcome her aversion to crowds when it comes to this.

What drives her forward is a deep desire to learn and understand all that she can about the world, and especially this new facet that just revealed itself to her. The world is full of mysteries and she is determined to unravel at least a few of them. Not just for the challenge they present, though she would claim that as her only reason. But there is also ambition, the ambition to show the world just what a single little girl can do, and a need for positive recognition that add just as much to her drive as the intellectual challenge does.
When it comes to magic, she may be a sceptic, but she also firmly believes that every theory deserves a chance until proven wrong, and she is determined to figure out just how it works - whatever it is.

Question every rule, every law, every custom. Those in power may or may not be there for a reason, but that doesn’t mean they’re infallible, nor that they will make good decisions.
History can be a harsh teacher sometimes, and while her parents had to learn this one the hard way, they made sure to raise their daughter to be a critical thinker from the moment she was old enough to ask questions. However, they might have gone a little overboard in this particular endeavor. While she will follow any rule she believes in to the letter, those she doesn’t see the point in will be blatantly disregarded, without the slightest hint of a guilty conscience.

Appearance:
At first glance, Elena doesn’t stand out much. Usually found at the fringes or off by herself, the quiet girl usually does little to attract attention. Though tall for her age, she has a knack for melting into the background, and her slim stature makes her seem smaller than she actually is.

Light hazel eyes are usually fixed on a book or hidden behind a curtain of blond hair, but when she does look up, they seem to analyze every little detail and appearing too old, too serious for a child her age, and the firm set of her jaw speaks of someone who doesn’t back down easily.

While she at least makes sure to look clean and neat, she doesn’t put too much effort into her appearance, going for practicality over aesthetics, and despite her best efforts, it is not uncommon to find her with ink stains on her hands, dust on her clothes or the occasional twig caught in her braids, simply because she was just too busy to clean up until now.
She never goes anywhere without a large leather bag neatly packed with at least one book, paper, ink and varying other tools.


→ SAMPLE ROLEPLAY.
You come across one of these posts on the site. Please select one & reply as your character. Remember, you can only roleplay your own character's actions, not Evangeline's or Hugh's.

Option I:

This place was ridiculously large. Even with a building half the size of this castle (really, need she say more than that?) the school would have fit comfortably, by her calculations. And who needed dungeons in this day and age anyway?

Elena eyed the cold, slightly damp corridor ahead of her skeptically. Everything quiet so far, and as desolate an area as she had picked tonight, the risk of detection was minimal anyway. Still, if she was going to break the rules, she might as well do it in a sensible manner. Not that this rule in particular made much sense, therefore, there was no reason for her to adhere to it. What point was there in a curfew? If a student was tired, they'd sleep. If they weren't, they wouldn't sleep anyway – and whether they were awake in their dorm, the commons or somewhere in the rest of the castle shouldn't really be an issue.
But most adults seemed impervious to such logic, for some reason. Even her own parents, who usually had excellent minds faltered when faced with this particular conundrum, falling back on the same old phrases most adults seemed to favor when faced with a situation they didn't know or care how to handle. 'You'll understand when you're older' or 'You're too young to understand', followed by 'It's for your own good' and, if all else failed 'Because I said so'.

Really, if they wanted those arguments to work, they shouldn't have raised her to question everything, to rely on facts and reason and always look for the most logical solution.

Lips curved upward in the hint of a smile, she continued to explore the corridor and the adjacent rooms, doing her best to map out another portion of the castle, even though she doubted it would help much for now. Things had this annoying habit of moving around in this place, and until she figured out which did and which didn't, the castle would likely remain a disorienting maze to her.

At least while the stairs moved, the corridors and rooms themselves seemed to stay in place so far. It was something, at least. A place to start.
She was just about to open another door, slowly and careful not to make any noise, when something made her stop, her hand only inches from the dark wood. The sound had been too faint to make it out, but she had definitely heard something...

"Hello! Is Emma Birch here?"

The words cut through the silence, uncomfortably loud in comparison. After straining to hear anything at all, it made her jump. Her hand hit the door, just enough to set it in motion and a low thud followed by a long creaking noise disturbed the once again silent corridor.
The eleven-year-old looked at the door for a moment, eyes straying to the small opening and the darkness beyond, then she glanced down the corridor, trying to make out the source of the voice, weighing her options before turning away from the door with a sigh. Later, maybe.

From the sound of it, the other girl couldn't be much older than she was, and she had probably only spooked her further. Even if she really just wanted to be left alone tonight, leaving a scared child alone in the dungeons... probably a bad idea. Especially when she wasn't entirely innocent in the matter. And besides, she had heard that name before.

Emma Birch. If the stories were to be believed, the Slytherin had died at this very school years ago... and that was about all that the stories she had head agreed upon. Some claimed an accident, some claimed murder, some decided to take the easy way out and claimed she had died under 'mysterious circumstances'. Translation: I don't want to give too many details so I won't end up contradicting myself. Just about the only other things that seemed somewhat consistent throughout the various accounts was that she had died in a classroom and supposedly haunted the dungeons.

So far, she had always put those stories off as just that. Stories. Stories meant to scare naive little first years, to give grounds for dares and probably a number of other, equally idiotic reasons. For while she'd had to concede that ghosts did, in fact, exist – the only other possible explanations would have been frequent and consistent hallucinations that she shared with the entire school and that seemed even more far fetched – she had never seen even the smallest hint of this one, and the stories were just too inconsistent. But maybe the two of them could uncover the truth together?

Her decision made, she approached the other girl, doing her best not to spook her further. “Not quite. Why are you down here looking for ghosts?” She eyed the girl for a moment. “It doesn't seem like your favorite pastime.” Another moment passed while she watched the girl. Good god, she was tense. “Relax. I'm pretty sure that someone incapable of interacting with physical objects would have a hard time actually hurting you.”


→ ABOUT YOU.

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