Hogwarts School: A Harry Potter RPG

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character name: Lecuyier, Yseult Margot

Previous and/or Current Character(s) if applicable: Essy F, Elly S, Annie S, Immy S, Vivy A, Noah C, David R, Sophie T, etc.

Character age: 27

Character education: Private tutoring, 8-18.

Strength and weaknesses (details please): Focused. Mae Lecuyier makes an excellent employee due to her dedication and her inability to truly multitask. She reads voraciously, but doesn't care for literature, and she works best in silence. When left to her own devices, she's alarmingly productive and can emerge from long hours in isolation completely refreshed.

Strange. While she can carry a decent conversation, Mae seems to have no real thoughts of her own - she neither likes nor dislikes someone, has no interests of merit, and can be a bit distant at times. In interviews, she comes off as wholly unimpressive - average, really, until one delves further into her work.

Physical description: Of an average height and a curvy build, Mae Lecuyier has sandy-blonde hair that reaches just past her shoulders and falls in light waves. Her eyes are dark blue and set wide, the irises touched with gold flecks that almost come out to hazel, and her teeth are remarkably small. A rather nondescript woman, her cheeks are round and dusted with the lightest layer of blush each day and she tends to dress in soft, monochromatic textiles.

Personality (nice, rude, funny etc. Paragraph please.): To say that she inhabits her own world would be putting it too lightly - Mae can hold a conversation and be completely removed from it at the same time. She doesn't do well with interpersonal relationships, though she's welcoming to an extent. She's sociable when pushed to it.

Push is probably the best way to put it, too, for upon further inspection Mae seems to have no depth. She likes broad topics like cooking, or reading, but lets on little beyond that - her dislikes tend to match whomever she's with. Often, those conversing with Margot get the distinct sense that she's glad when a conversation ends, though she never once stopped smiling.
 
Hopes and dreams. Why are you teaching at Hogwarts?: Teaching at Hogwarts is a remarkably prestigious position that any young woman would hope to gain. Working with children lends excellent perspective on one's field of choice (Mae's, for instance, is Onieromancy), and she hopes to take the conclusion of her latest research project and capitalize on her new success by pushing her skills onto others.

Biography (500 words minimum. There is never such a thing as too much.):
The mirror was splattered, proof that she had been there before. Cloudy droplets of water tapped from the tip of her toothbrush, spraying against the porcelain sink, the large mirror, the dark walls. Had Margot spent more time there she might have cleaned, but it was not home and she was not interested in making it so.

A hand on the spigot, an untamed rush of water petered out into the low basin. Beneath it, the drain almost looked clean, though she knew that it was gold beneath the layers of powder and dirt. Water flushed and pooled, her mouth tasted of spearmint.
There was no towel to dry her hands, so she raked them through her hair and used the wetness of her fingertips to tame the flyways in her light waves, the soft, low swell that wrapped around her head. Darker streaks of strawberry fled in and out, and she had hated them once, didn't mind them so much anymore.

Wide blue eyes framed in only the lightest dusting of mascara met her own as she finished tapping the toothbrush and dropped it into the overfilled wastebasket without looking down.

Time to go.

---

Margot Lecuyier was born in April 1947 and lived one of the most unremarkable childhoods known to man. She doesn't speak of it much, glossing over her time spent in France, her education at Beauxbatons, the fashions that she wore and no longer cares for, the interest that she once felt in art history. Sometimes she mentions her high marks in Divination, her poor scores in Ancient Runes, sometimes she even discusses the tournament she entered at fourteen (inter-school, out the first round). On dates, she breezes through her life as though it means nothing, and erases almost twenty years with an expressionless wave of her hand.

It's very easy to get to know Margot - and she goes by Mae, if you please - she's warm, inviting, accomplished. Every so often she'll lapse into silence as though she's forgotten a conversation at hand, but the next moment brings smiles and apologies, follow-up questions or anecdotes. Well-raised, they call it, and she was, with good manners and excellent associates, but all of that's irrelevant. The past, Mae says, doesn't amuse her.
She's much more interesting now, she insists with a smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes but tempts her cheeks, small dimples appearing around her mouth. She has a bit of an overbite, but not enough to warrant fixing, and a small dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose when it's sunny.

An excellent conversationalist, Margot found a job in the French Ministry with relative ease - family name made her a shoo-in, she says - and she started from the bottom and worked her way up.

She did it right, she'll tell you in almost-perfect French, she didn't use her name to get ahead. She was that good from the start.

A few years ago, she led her first study following the lives of five grieving families and the supposed occurrences of their loved ones returning. Margot thought it was bogus, but it was published and reprinted three times the year following.

Sometimes, people were gullible. But the dead remained dead and the past never rose again.

She hoped. She prayed.

---

The room was large and cavernous, high arching walls in a gradient of slate and charcoal. No windows, light radiated from everywhere and nowhere at once in a foggy glow, and they could not be seen save for the neon belt around Mae's waist, the bright orange of Francois' sneakers. Smoke rose and swelled between them, the silent amphitheater an entire world beneath Paris.

Only the dripping of water broke the silence, a steady ricochet creeping through the dim room, faulty structures showcasing the error of man. Mae thought of this while she waited, wand in one hand, water in the other. They had sent six away and one had returned.

Something had gone wrong.

They had been in the room before, a traveling chamber, there had been ten of them once. It was a routine excursion, breaking the afterlife and journeying into it - they recreated it in the chamber as best they could to ease the transition, they wore neon to be found once more. Traveling was like taking a bath in ice water, only there was no surface to be found - either you acclimated or you died.

Mae pursed her lips and tasted cherry chapstick, the gloss of petroleum reminding her of a world above and not the clouds which threatened to envelope them both. Francois said nothing and neither did she, the room so damp they hardly needed to breathe. Amalgamated in the mist they waited, the youngest members of the team and the two who -- by rights -- had no right to be there at all.

She was seventeen years old.

They landed with a crash, all blood and screams, disoriented and disembodied in the haze. Francois' shoes moved first, fighting to reach the lime shirt, the vicious yellow laces, and Mae followed suit in the next moment.

It was the pink bracelet she saw first, the blue eyes and the blood-streaked hair she saw next. They had been caught, someone shouted, they couldn't get back, but she heard none of it and knew none of it and only saw the blonde girl collapsed in her fellow researcher's arms.

She shouldn't have felt glad, but she did.

And she shouldn't have felt victory, but she did.

And she shouldn't have smiled, but she did.

---

Out of the washroom the flat was empty, furniture covered in white sheets or hidden in boxes stacked by the front door. Mae had left the keys with her uncle, said goodbye to her family the week before. She had packed with distance and she did not prioritize, her things packed away and recognized for what they were - things. Insignificant, insufficient, not enough.

It was never enough, never enough for Mae Lecuyier.

Pink lips twitched and she thought about it for a moment, how she would miss the way the light streamed into the dining room in the evening or the living room was painted in blush and violet before the dawn. The clatter of the street below reached her through an open side window - she would miss that, the cacophony - the neighbors who always burnt their food.

Or, she would have missed it, had Mae been able to miss anything at all.
Turning on her heel, she exited through the kitchen door, her heels titillating precariously as she cycled down the five flights and pushed against the alley door. Her fingernails were clean and long, white against pink devoid of polish, for Mae didn't believe in such things, and she wore soft textiles in black and gray rather than the starched bursts of color so in vogue. She was a Lecuyier, the Minister's family, and she did as she pleased.

Waving goodbye to a neighbor as she turned the corner, her hands wrapped tightly around the varnished box clutched to her chest. A bag draped off of her shoulder and banged gently against her hip, all leather and no form, filled with nothing of consequence - cheques, a camera, her wallet, some cigarettes.

No one stopped to ask her where she was heading, though Mae would not have told them if they had, and Paris was a large enough city that only a few blocks rendered her a stranger. In the warm morning, tourists had begun to clog the street corners, flocks meandering through the parks, and Mae cut into them and through them - she did not hide in shadow, she did not run.

Instead she walked, one foot in front of the other, away from her flat and the toothpaste, away from the chamber and the pink bracelet, away from her childhood - whatever it had been, but she wasn't running away for concretion lay in every step.
Margot Lecuyier had started over once, and she could do it again.

She smiled.

SAMPLE ROLEPLAY
(Please respond to to this in third person past tense. Do not write the other characters' reactions. Only your own.)

The water by the lakeshore rippled, dark under the overcast sky, and thick with moss growth. Ripples grew into small waves, spreading in concentric circles that sloshed against the rocks and sent a small family of mice living in a rotted out log above the waterline scurrying for cover.

And then the lake exploded.

A fountain erupted, splattering muddy water and assorted bits of lake bottom. Something very, very large thrashed and roiled, tentacles slapping wildly at the surface.

Elizabeth despised the squid, and more importantly, she disapproved of it. It was disorderly. Truth be told, she was the sort of woman who disapproved of a great many things, the disorderly ones most particularly. A tall, severe woman in her forties who never smiled, Elizabeth was so parsimonious with praise that it was said that if good will could be saved up she'd be sitting on a pile of it like dragon over a horde. The school's Headmistress was very good at disapproval.

Brown water flowed in a tent around her upraised wand, blocked by an invisible umbrella.

“He has a cold again!” Pythagorea Proud, the school’s much-harried Deputy Headmistress fussed, as she shook a spatter of mud off of her arm. She hadn’t been as quick with her wand work. “He won’t take his medicine. We’ve been trying all morning. Someone is going to have to deal with him!”

Arms folded, the tip of Elizabeth’s pointed black and very sensible shoe tapped against the rocky bank. She glanced over at their newest Professor, her expression thoughtful. “You’ll do,” she offered flatly, her tone leaving little room for argument. This was going to prove to be a very different sort of interview...

Roleplay Response:

She had never been to the United Kingdom before - not Ireland, nor Scotland, certainly never Wales. It was, perhaps, a bit odd that she had never been to England.

But they weren't important enough to merit a visit to the Minister's family, even if their name spoke otherwise. Margot didn't ask and she didn't mind, for London held no interest for her and Scotland was yet another adventure.

She should have felt invigorated, but she didn't.

Standing primly at the edge of the lake, her heels were caked with mud and her legs chased goosebumps as she teetered uneasily with the other women. Blondes and old hags, but Scotland was new and Paris had lost its shine. Margot was glad to go, she cared little where to.

Screeching, and her light blue eyes fell on the older broad - and she was quite broad - appraising. For a moment, fire flashed before her, the lancing sort that flew straight through the air and alighted on top of the woman's head, charring what was left of her hair and turning her into ash. For a moment (and only a moment), Margot imagined that she could smell the scent of burning cloth.

A blink, and it was gone.

"You'll do,"

"Oh," she breathed, a pretty smile flushing to her lips. Tiny teeth peeked out as she glanced, wide-eyed, from one to the other. "Well then."

A beat, she stepped forward.

Avada Kedavra.

No, that wasn't right, and it was only her first day. She blushed harder and banished the thought.

Bending at the waist, her hands found purchase on her knees as she looked to the water. "Hello?" She called. "I hear you're unwell?"