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Archived Applications / Roo Hopland
« on: 28/04/2021 at 15:42 »

Application for Hogwarts School


→ CHARACTER INFORMATION.

Name: Nathaniel Ruther Hopland

Birthday: March 24, 1948

Hometown: London, England

Bloodline: Halfblood

Magical Strength (pick one): Conjuring/Summoning

Magical Weakness (pick one): Transfiguration

Year (pick two): Fourth, Third

Biography:

The goal had initially been to graduate, to follow the same suffocating routine as his peers, to do the same tricks with his wand, to say the same ancient words, and eventually, his seventh year would materialize right before his eyes. And while the illusion of graduating had never been as sharply defined as, perhaps, the possibility of expulsion, he could at least picture it. That had been enough for him—in his first year.

Three years later, that illusion had been shattered, and then spat on, and then scooped up and tossed into a bin with all the other willful, inconceivable thoughts.

He wanted to graduate, he did, just like how he wanted to be on a winning Quidditch cup team, his name etched onto the plaques in the trophy room for eternity. But in either case, the details of how he got from point A to point B were no longer as obvious to him, or as cautiously optimistic.

Try as he might, Roo couldn’t do the same things his peers did to get ahead. A practiced flick of his wand here, an occasional attempt at discipline there, repetition and memorization, none of it helped the way it seemed to help others. In his first two years, sheer brute force (and a five-fingered pinch of luck) was the only thing that got him through to the next. His third year, however, was where his thuggish ways of conducting magic—and himself—caught up to him: he failed all his classes.

There’s nothing quite so devaluing as recognizing that you’re going to fail a class—let alone nine of them—months ahead of time, as was the case with him. It wasn’t the sort of situation where he teetered between an unacceptable, barely passing grade all year and his final exams tipped him over the wrong edge.

No. If only it had been that.

This was a scenario where he teetered at first and then let himself fall backwards, his grades tumbling uncaringly down into the abyss with all his other responsibilities—until it was too late to climb himself back out.

He’s not sure what has to change for his fourth year. He reckons the answer is roughly somewhere between something and everything.

The thing is, he doesn’t need good grades for where he’s going. The national Quidditch league needs someone with a good arm and precise hand-eye coordination, not a git who can recite the top five Transfiguration spells for the modern wizard on the spot. But he knows better than to believe he can claw through the next four years the same way he got through the last three, getting the same results, hearing the same shrill lecture from his mother, year after year, summer after summer.

Maybe fourth time’s the charm. Or maybe he should drop out now and get a head start on his professional career with the English U-17 team.

Hah. If only.

→ RETURNING STUDENTS.

Link to your last levels request (if you never posted one, link to your last accepted student application): Levels Request

Number of New Levels Requested: N/A

New Levels Request: N/A

How your character kept up with their studies: There was no gap in his attendance at Hogwarts. ICly, he finished out his third year and continued on to his fourth year.

→ SAMPLE ROLEPLAY.

Option 2:

It was just one class.

He could skip one class, his first class that morning, and catch up on sleep in the gardens. It was what he told himself—one class.

Naturally, that was how it began. One class that week, two the next. Before he knew it, he was delegating all of Tuesdays and Thursdays to the pitch benches, the gardens, the alcoves of the clock tower, or anywhere else he could slot his body for a quick doze, undisturbed.

That year would be different, he had promised, and he intended to keep that promise. That ‘different’ would just have to begin next week.

Or—

(—there was a scuffling noise, a shout, and the tell-tale heaving breaths that precluded a—)

—not.

Eyes fluttering open, they cut to the boy’s ducked head long before the sneeze worked its way through his sinuses. The flowers, inanimate though they were, recoiled in disgust when it finally hit, or maybe that was just Roo projecting. His lip was curled at the boy when their gazes clashed.

“There’s no bloody rat here. You think I’d be laying here”—he gestured to his stretched legs, his cloak and bag strewn to his right—“if there was?”

→ ABOUT YOU.

Please list any characters you have  on the site (current and previous): Lucy Hopland, et al.

How did you find us?: Google

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Archived Applications / Roo Hopland
« on: 01/04/2020 at 00:21 »

Application for Hogwarts School


→ CHARACTER INFORMATION.

Name: Nathaniel Ruther Hopland

Birthday: March 24, 1948

Hometown: London, England

Bloodline: Halfblood

Magical Strength (pick one): Divination

Magical Weakness (pick one): Transfiguration

Year (pick two): First, Second

Biography:

When I was six, maybe five, maybe even before that, it went like this: my mum, Lucille, would have me on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and she would drop me off at my dad’s, his name’s Noah, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I did the weekends with my mum because my dad had Quidditch games. If I asked, sometimes we would go and watch him, but most of the time we didn’t. Eventually, I stopped asking.

When I told my mum that I liked going to my dad’s place because I got to spend a lot of time at my uncle Jacks’ bakery—and that no, no one was looking after me, but I was a big boy, I knew not to touch the hot stuff—she got really mad.

Then, it changed to this: my mum would drop me off in the evenings on Fridays and pick me up on Sundays. This was a little better. My dad’s place was filled with people on the weekends, so even if my dad fell asleep while watching me, or he had to go out for the night, there would be others to look after me. They were fun, they did magic tricks and taught me dirty words. Sometimes, though, there was no one, and I was responsible for putting the lights out before bed.

When I told my mum that I didn’t like going to my dad’s place on the weekends because they—who? Oh, his friends, mum. Yes, there’s girls—were very loud when they came home very late, she got really, really mad.

Then, it changed to what it is now.

Now, every Saturday or so, my mum will ask, “Do you want to spend time with your father today?” I’ll say yes, she’ll give me a galleon for food, and I’ll reassure her, “I know the way.” And she’ll let me go.

But I don’t go to my dad’s anymore. I haven’t been over there in a while, but I know better than to tell my mum that.

Now, I do my own thing. I’ll take the galleon and bargain with Fat Jimmy over on Landing Street for the newest Muggle baseball cards plus some other stuff. What I do with the leftover change depends on my mood that day. Sometimes I’ll spend it on sweets at Honeydukes if I can be bothered to make the trek over there. Sometimes I’ll try to buy bootleg pro-Quidditch tickets for cheap. Sometimes, and more often lately, I’ll save it. I’ve got a bunch of money saved up.

One time, my mum owled my dad to let him know that my step-dad, Cyrus, would be picking me up directly from my dad’s place. We had somewhere we needed to be as a family, a birthday dinner. I hadn’t been aware of that ahead of time, obviously, because if I had, I would’ve hung around outside my dad’s place at the right time.

So, imagine my surprise when I see my step-dad rock up to the tiny park in South London, where I was in the middle of betting on a Gobstones tournament bracket, with that look on his face.

“Don’t tell mum,” was all I could think of when he asked me if I had anything to say for myself.

My relationship with Cyrus has always been weird like that. Cyrus isn’t my real dad, not in the biological sense of the word (my friend Benny explained what that means to me; his mum’s in Pediatrics), but I also don’t consider the man a step-dad. Cyrus does too much around the house to be delegated to a step-anything. From what I hear from friends who have step-parents, they’re supposed to be good-for-nothing freeloaders. That’s not Cyrus.

I don’t call him step-dad, but I also don’t call him dad—it’s weird.

I’m pretty sure Cyrus never told my mum about the whole lying thing. I think it’s because Cyrus hates having to deal with my dad as much as my mum does and telling her would just lead to another unnecessary change. There’s a chance he might have, and there’s a chance my mum knows and goes along with it anyway, but I doubt my mum has the capacity to be anything but furious with me. Either way, Cyrus now makes me tell him where I’m going on the days I go to “visit” my dad.

“In case something happens,” he says. “Whatever,” I say. It’s better him than my mum anyway.

Sometimes I don’t do all of the things that I usually do on my days off. I don’t go see Fat Jimmy. I won’t bother with Honeydukes or Quidditch tickets. I’ll just go to a nearby park, lay back to watch the clouds, and think.

I’ll think about how my dad could never bother to be a real dad; how I can’t bring myself to call Cyrus “dad” to his face; and how much I hate my mum for making two separate families. Most of all, I’ll think about the real reason I started pretending to visit my dad.

The days I’m supposed to leave, right before I walk out the door, it seems like a weight is lifted off my mum. I’m not dumb, I recognize the way she rushes me out the door. It’s like the three of them—her, Cyrus, and my dumb half-sister, Poppy Jane—can’t wait to be the picture-perfect family without me.

Those days, I’ll think about it for a good, long while, and eventually, I’ll come to the same conclusion I always do: I don’t care.
permission to powerplay the characters in this bio has been approved.


→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.

House Request: Hufflepuff

Personality: Despite what his mother coos or what his aunt sneers, Roo is neither strictly his mother nor his father’s child. He is the amalgamation of the worst parts of both. He’s the physical embodiment of his mother's stubbornness, her willful decision-making, and her brief, almost manic bursts of industry. He’s his father’s boorishness, addictive nature, and fiery, often misplaced anger. Surprisingly, the one good thing he's learned from them, from watching them dance around the issues of their co-parenting, is to confront problems, namely people, head-on. His is the kind of confrontational nature that screams because I felt like it! and you have no choice but to accept it.

Appearance: The apple didn’t fall far from the Ross tree with this one. With fair skin, dirty blonde hair, hazel eyes, and an average build, he’s the spitting image of his father’s side of the family. Perhaps because of his brutish ways, and the perpetual state of rumpledness that boys his age carry, the scrapes on his chin might lend one to think he’s older than he is. It helps his case that his interest in American culture shines through the most in his sense of style. He’s the canvas-shoe wearing, rolled jeans, white crew socks beaming, greased hairstyle type—or, at the very least, he tries to be. Sometimes he can’t be arsed.


→ SAMPLE ROLEPLAY.

Option I.

'Course he'd heard about the death of Emma Birch. He'd have to be dead himself to not have. But that was the thing about Hogwarts, rumors flew around their heads more than brooms. So, instead of giving the girl's spirit the respect it deserved, everyone dismissively added her to the list of, quote, unquote, beings to potentially be mindful of.

For reference, the cursed cup of pinto beans under his favorite fifth-floor urinal was another one of those beings. It occasionally growled and no one could remember when it had first appeared.

He used the word potentially because, like most rumors, no one had ever actually seen Emma Birch's ghost. That didn't stop the opportunistic, though—those like Roo. His side hustle depended on those too gullible to find the truth for themselves. Emma Birch's spirit was a fear that hung over the entire first-year class, so when the older girls approached him with a few sickles, he had done his duty.

With his back pressed into the jagged, stone walls that separated each pillar, Roo stood deathly still. The soft pitter-patter of feet too slow and unsure to be a student who navigated the dungeons with ease told him all he needed to know: his next victim had arrived.

When he was sure they were close enough, while remaining out of sight, he began. The end of the beater's bat thumped rhythmically against the wall by his knees. He didn't stop, even as the girl called out. Instead, he chimed in with a high-pitched half-sigh-half-gasp, his interpretation of a summoned spirit crawling out from the bowels of the dungeon.

And he would've gotten away with it, too, had he not been wracked by a coughing fit in the next moment.


→ ABOUT YOU.

Please list any characters you have on the site (current and previous): Lucy Hopland, et al.

How did you find us?: Google way back when.

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