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Topics - Samuel Whitmore

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Archived Applications / Samuel Whitmore
« on: 02/12/2018 at 17:49 »

Application for Hogwarts School




→ CHARACTER INFORMATION.

Name:  Samuel James Whitmore

Birthday: 15 October 1943

Hometown: Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire

Bloodline:  Muggleborn

Magical Strength:  Charms

Magical Weakness: Transfiguration

Year (pick two): First, Second

Biography:

“Do you think that’s why they got together?”

The more he thought about it (and he thought about it then, green eyes squinting up at the darkening clouds from where he sprawled in the grass, the look on his face the certain one that he got when he thought about things, like he was only a few steps away from solving a particularly difficult riddle), the more he was sure that it had to be the reason.  Over the last five hours, he had considered many other options and this, going now on hour six, was the one he thought was most plausible.

Sam looked to his left, his cheek pressing against the steadily-cooling grass.  Laura, laid beside him, was still watching the clouds, but the look on her face wasn’t the same one his still wore.  It looked the same as it had going on six hours ago now, before everything had changed.

“That they knew they both had a bit of magic in them, I mean.  Well--”

No, thought Sam, shaking his head.  That wasn’t quite right.  It hadn’t been their parents, after all, who had received letters from some funnily-named school; those had been addressed very carefully to himself and to Laura, down to the location of their respective bedrooms on the second floor of the family’s home.

“That they had enough in them to pass it on to us?”

The look he gave Laura then was pointed and much more serious than the looks he usually gave her, for this, in the world-shifting moment, was a serious matter.  Laura didn’t see it, still considering the clouds as they changed from the pink and orange of sunset to a dusky, deep blue.  Across the space between them, Sam reached out, nudging her bony shoulder.

“Oi,” he said.  “Are you even listening?”

“Of course,” she said, and she finally looked at him.  Her look was the same as ever, like she was smiling without actually smiling, and a little far away.

Sam didn’t think it looked like she was listening at all.

“Well then?”

“They didn’t know, Sam,” said Laura, in a voice that was as smooth and even as the falling nighttime.  “That woman said so.  They’re both--”  She only hesitated a moment before trying out the foreign word.  “--Muggles.”

“That’s not--”

That wasn’t what he meant.

Under usual circumstances, that might have been what he meant--that his mother and her father had of course not know, literally, that they harbored in their makeups some spark of something that had, when it combined with the makeups of their spouses, somehow created something magical.  He knew as well as Laura did that Mary Whitmore and Parker Berry had met at the corner pub after work and had bonded over their shared experience as single parents, and that it was that (and, as Sam had teased his mother then and still) several pints that had brought them together.  Under these circumstances (which he supposed were less circumstance and more reality now; his eyebrows pulled together, creating a furrow almost too deep to belong on an eleven-year-old’s face), however, magical was not a figure of speech but something very real, a special kind of inborn talent that both he and Laura were apparently possessed of, making them (Sam let out a disbelieving sort of sound even thinking it) a wizard and a witch, respectively.  That, at least, was what the letter they had each been delivered not quite six hours ago had said.  Sam still wasn’t sure of its authenticity.  It seemed like something Mic from school might do as a kind of prank to play, though Sam doubted Mic was possessed of such a level of creativity.

“It must be pretty rare, right, having two of us in one house that are--”  The word felt bulky in his mouth.  “--magic, when are parents aren’t?”

“Yes,” Laura said simply.  “It must.”

“I just mean,” he said, sure that Laura wasn’t getting what he meant at all, for her face was still smiling in that not-smiling way that after two months together now sharing the same bathroom and each other’s parents he was still not quite sure he understood.  “Maybe they knew, Mum and your dad, that you and me were special like this, and that they’d need each other’s help, having magic kids, even without really knowing, kind of like--”  He felt foolish even saying it, for it sounded much more like an idea that Laura might have than one Sam would come up with.  “Like their own kind of magic, maybe.”

For quite a quiet while, Laura looked and Sam, and Sam looked at Laura, and both of their expressions rubbed off on one another’s just enough so that Laura’s not-smile looked a little serious and Sam’s serious look was almost a smile. It was the blue-eyed girl that broke the silence first, discounting the crickets from the nearby hedge.

“You just found out your a wizard and that is what you’re thinking about?”

There were other things, too, of course, that Sam was thinking of, and all of them had been swirling around in turn in his mind since a very old woman who called herself Pythagorea had come round to the house, “instead of an owl,” she had said, not least among them that it seemed strange that it was owls, of all birds, that apparently carried magical peoples’ post instead of crows, which were much smarter, or pigeons, which he knew from his mother’s stories about his real father’s time in the war were entirely capable of carrying messages even in the worst of circumstances. He had worried if all his schooling so far would still be of use, for he couldn’t imagine a magical world in which knowing his 7’s and 12’s multiplication tables should be important, or if his new school would offer his favorite subject, natural science, or if they allowed Year Seven students to go out for the football team, if they had a football team at all and hadn’t replaced it with some magical sport played on the backs of dragons.  A part of him, one that he wouldn’t talk about even with Laura, thought about how it didn’t seem entirely fair, lumping this new change on top of him, when he had only just started to get to the last one--had only just found the best place to arrange his posters on the walls of his new room in Parker Berry’s new house so they got some sunlight but not enough to fade them pale blue, had only just stopped making vomiting faces behind his hand (so much, at least) at Laura when his mum and her dad kissed at the breakfast table, had only just started to say “Laura’s dad” or “my step dad” instead of “Parker” when referring to his mum’s new husband--and how he would almost be willing, if someone asked him when he was alone, to trade in this whole magical thing it it meant getting a solid chance to get used to the new normal of his life as it was.

“Yeah,” he said, because it would be simpler than trying to explain any of this.  It was getting dark, and it had only been five-going-on-six hours.  He’d have a lifetime to try and explain all that, he supposed.  Sam shrugged.  “So?”

“You’re not going to have a single friend at Hogwarts, Sam Whitmore,” said Laura Berry.

“Yeah, well,” he said, and for the first time in what was inching ever closer to six hours, the boy laughed, short but loud enough that their parents might hear it through the window that opened to the back garden.  Again, his hand reached out and gave her shoulder a shove, and it was more like the kind of shove he had given her when she was not Laura Berry who was his step-sister, and not when she was Laura Berry who had started coming over with her father for Sunday roasts, and not when she was Laura Berry who stole glances at him though the backseat window of her father’s car when he came round to pick Sam’s mother up, but when she was just Laura Berry with the red pigtails who went to school with him and sometimes tried to trip him in the hall.  “Good thing I’ll be stuck with you, isn’t it?”

→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.

House Request:  Ravenclaw, first choice.  Not Slytherin, second choice.

Personality:

Samuel Whitmore is a good kid.

He may not seem like it at first, because it’s hiding under a few layers of Eleven Year Old Boy.  Most of the time, he’s not very serious, and is more than likely to tell you a joke or a story that starts with one time, I-- than spout a fact or start a deep conversation.  He’s easy going, especially around his friends, and can get a little wound-up when he’s hanging out with other boys, in which case he tends to really feed off their wreckless energy.  In these cases, he has been known to cause a ruckus.  He is generally kind, but is often teasing, particularly with boys he perceives as a little girly or with girls he perceives to be a little boyish.  Even the girls he finds himself crushing on--which are many and varied and constantly changing--find themselves on the receiving end of it now and then, but he’s much more likely to pay them a compliment (a habit picked up, perhaps, from years of giving them to his mum).

There’s three times that he can be trusted to take things seriously, and those are these:

One, school.  Brought up as the only son of a war widow mother in a thoroughly working class part of town, it’s been drilled into him since an early age that education is the way to move up in the world.  Though he’s not got much aspirations (of yet, at least) to move up, in so many words, the idea of taking his studies seriously (if only to please him mum) was one that stuck primary school.  It’s certainly reinforced by praise, and by the fact that he discovered early on that teachers are much more lenient with good students than bad ones when he and Mic from down the street both got caught taking a whizz on the fence at break but only Mic was punished when Mrs. Pritchett assumed it had been his ideas and not Sam’s because “Sammy wouldn’t do something so foolish.”  Somewhere along the lines, too, he actually started to really enjoy learning, though he’d never say anything so dorky out loud.  He particularly favors the natural sciences and history in the Muggle world, and is terribly excited to learn what the magical world has to offer.

Two, play.  For Sam, for now, that mostly means sports.  He grew up playing football in the parks with the neighborhood kids, and had high hopes of trying out for his school’s team before he got his Hogwarts letter.  Most probably, this will translate into a Quidditch obsession, if he can learn how to handle himself on a broom.  Since he works hard at schoolwork, he tries to balance it out with time spent at sport...though sometimes he treats sport a bit like school, looking up plays and famous players.  He thinks that this is also a way to connect with his father, who his mum assures him was very sporty and played in the Army Football Association before the war broke out.

Three, his friends.  This he is perhaps least outwardly serious about (that’s for pansies, after all), but when Sam becomes close with someone--which doesn’t take much, as he’s extroverted and chatty--he would do just about anything for them.  He’s willing to stay up late, or wake up early, or throw a punch if he needs to.

He can be vulnerable, particularly with his step sister, Laura, and his friend from Year Six, Ben, who never got his Hogwarts letter, or when circumstance lends itself to being a bit pensive.  He’s eleven, though, so barring major life changes such as the remarriage of his mother or something like finding out he’s a wizard and getting into Hogwarts, these times are few and far between.  His favorite food is a good meat pie, though he’ll never say no to a sweet, particularly from a pretty girl.  Last winter, his mum got him a bomber jacket for Christmas and it’s his favorite article of clothing, so he wears it every chance he gets.  The last book he read was Hogwarts: A History, but depending on who asked him, he might tell a white lie and say it was Quidditch Through the Ages (which he did read directly before, to be fair) because it sounds cooler.

Appearance:

For his age, Sam is of average height, and is built on the lithe end of the athletic side.  He’s only eleven, after all.  His hair is deep brown and curly--from his father, his mum’s always said--and doesn’t like to stay in place, so he can quite often be seen shaking it out of his eyes or trying to smooth one way or another without much success.  His eyes are green, almost the same shade as his mum’s, and his nose is quiet straight despite years of sport.  He can most usually be found wearing a smile that is easy going, but certainly has a particular look that overcomes him when he’s interested in something (his mum calls it the Sam Stare) or when he’s working on his studies.  He doesn’t care much for fashion and can be found wearing whatever is easiest or least dirty.


→ SAMPLE ROLEPLAY.


Option One:

“You fell for that, too?”

Sam had done exactly that--fallen for the legend of Emma Birch--only he had done it several days ago, within the first twenty-four hours of arriving at Hogwarts School.  As he walked up to his yearmate, he did so with a look on his face that said he had found himself similarly situated--which was to say, obviously cold and more than a little nervous--before, and the he had been as disappointed in the results that he was about to break to Evangeline then as he suspected she might be now.

“They pulled one over on us, Evangeline,” he said, because there always was a they when it came to things like this.  For him, it had been some of the older boys, the one with the cool hair chief among them, which he had overheard at the dinner table.  That was all it had taken to set the Whitmore boy off exploring, the desire to see a real live ghost overriding his usual compulsion for a sneaky peek into a book to back up such a wild claim first.  He had heard, after all, that Hogwarts had such things in the flesh, or whatever the equivalent of flesh was for ghosts, which he had supposed he could ask of the ghost herself upon finding her.  All he had found down in the dungeons that night was a kind of dank stink a bit like forgotten socks that clung to his jumper until the house elves (which were also something new and exciting) took it for washing.  From the jump Evangeline had given on his approach, he thought her search was probably just as useless, and certainly just as nerve-wracking.

“Emma Birch is about as much of a ghost as I am, and--” he said, then to prove that he wasn’t a ghost at all, he tried to shove his own hand through his stomach a few times.  It did little more than rumple his jumper (already soaking in that sock smell, he was sure) and make the muscles beneath twingle uncomfortably.

(He himself had found out later, knee-deep in the Spellbound archives, that Emma Birch had been a girl who had gone to school here but who had been killed, though not in the musty dungeons and certainly not by anyone who was still employed at the castle.  He had also found out that she was very good-looking for a dead girl, a fact that Sam, tucked away and out of sight of prying eyes, had found terribly conflicting.)

“But!”  He said it a little too loud, part to shake the image of Emma Birch’s haunting (but not really; he hadn’t found a single article about her being a ghost) eyes, and part because he thought it might make Evangeline jump again.  “One time, I saw one up in the Astronomy Tower.  I think it teaches the class.”  Sam hadn’t signed up for it; he could have taken that in regular--Muggle; he was still getting used to the new jargon--school and had instead filled his schedule with as much wand waving as possible.  Since he had seen the ghost floating up the staircase, he had only felt more sure in this decision.  “I bet if we were real quiet, we could sneak up there now.”

Sam smiled his most winning smile--a combination of daring and charming, or at least that was what his mother said.

“What do you say, Evangeline?  Want to go see a real ghost with me?”

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