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Archived Applications / Paloma Summers
« on: 26/10/2012 at 23:35 »
Application for Salem Institute
→ CHARACTER INFORMATION.
Name: Paloma Summers
Birthday: August 29th, 1962
Hometown: Santa Barbara, California
Bloodline: Halfblood
Magical Strength (pick one): Divination
Magical Weakness (pick one): Transfiguration
Year (pick two): Third, second.
Biography:
Paloma was born in 1962 to Ximena and Paul Summers. When they met, Ximena was a recent immigrant from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, holding down two jobs as a secretary and a waitress. Paul was working as a high school physics teacher. She served him coffee one Friday night at a diner while he was grading papers, and after that, he found an excuse to go to the diner as many times a week as he could. After Paloma’s birth, they became pregnant with a son, but Ximena had a miscarriage. Ximena, who was a muggleborn witch, never told Paul about her heritage; she decided to wait until Paloma turned eleven to see whether she even had magic before they broached that subject.
Except that conversation was never to happen the way she'd planned. In 1969, when Paloma had just turned 7, Paul’s draft number was called and he was shipped abroad to the Vietnam War. Left as a single mother, Ximena did the best that she could to raise Paloma on her own. For Paloma, that meant a handful of teenage neighborhood babysitters to pick her up from school until Ximena could get home from work. She always had a homemade lunch to take, though, and a bedtime story to put her to sleep, so she never doubted that her mother was doing everything she could.
In the meantime, it left Paloma a fair amount of freedom as a young girl; her babysitters were frequently too occupied on the phone with friends or boys to pay too much attention to her. She was left to her own devices to fill the margins of her storybooks with doodles or wander around the backyard catching bugs and getting her dresses muddy.
On her eleventh birthday, Paloma was shocked to see an owl swoop down – in the middle of the day, no less – and drop a letter into her lap while she sat on the porch. Her mother had to sit her down and explain to her what being a witch meant, and that she would be attending a special school called the Salem Institute, the same school Ximena had graduated from years before. Paloma was unrepentantly fascinated by all of it, and didn’t stop asking questions as the weeks rolled by until her mother brought her to the iron doors of the Institute and kissed her a teary goodbye.
Despite the massive change of environment and world-view that the move brought, Paloma found that she loved it at Salem. She particularly enjoyed her Divination classes, and though she hated the taste of tea, would happily drink cup after cup if it meant more practice reading the leaves with a friend. She kept in touch with her mother with frequent owls, and through her, heard news of her father in Vietnam.
Paul returned home in 1973 to find that his daughter was on the other side of the country learning how to practice magic. There was a massive argument that raged for several weeks, only abating when Ximena brought Paloma home for her summer break; it was difficult for him to stay angry in the face of his happy eleven-year-old daughter. When she returned to school in the fall, he was doing his best to be accepting and understanding of it, though he still had difficulty hearing about the details of her studies.
When the time warp slipped the wizarding world backwards, Paloma found it more difficult than some of the other students. She had been raised in a muggle household; all of her childhood toys and memories were clashing with her new life. Her father had disappeared in the span of an instant. Though the inevitable turn of time has left her slowly succumbing to changes in her memories, her memories of her father are the strongest bastion holding out; sometimes she uses those memories to try and remember more, but that swiftly gives her a pounding migraine.
If you are applying to be a first, second, or third year, your biography must be at least one hundred words long.
If you are applying to be a fourth year or above, your biography must be at least three hundred words long.
→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.
Note: This section is optional, and is up to you to complete.
Society Request: Rook
Personality:
Paloma is naturally quite inquisitive, and is fascinated by the smallest details of the world around her. Unlike some of the other curious students that surround her in her classes, though, her innate curiosity isn’t accompanied by any extraordinary intelligence. Her grades in her muggle classes were unremarkably average, and her grades at Salem continued that trend, with the notable exceptions of Divination and Magic & Ethics. She can have endless patience to deal with friends’ problems, and will sit for hours letting someone ramble and cry at her in the common room; this patience does not, however, extend to her academic studies, as she becomes very quickly frustrated with things that she does not understand. This isn’t helped by the fact that she’s easily distracted. She has a good sense of humor, though it’s balanced by a somewhat limited sense of good social timing, and she has a knack for asking the wrong question at the wrong time.
Appearance:
Short and slender, Paloma is the sort of girl that gets picked up jokingly by larger (frequently male) classmates. She usually wears her long, dark brown hair down, or pulled back by a headband to keep it out of her eyes. Her almond complexion and dark eyes are just like her mother’s, though she has her father’s sturdy nose and chin. She is constantly grateful that she wasn’t cursed with his poor eyesight, as she believes that she would look foolish in glasses.
→ SAMPLE ROLEPLAY.
Please reply to the Sample Roleplay below.
There was something to be said for individual work, Paloma thought. She was hardly the class genius, and on her best days her History of Magic essays were speckled with red ink and comments. It wasn’t that she disliked working with other students – in fact, it was just the opposite. She relished the chance to get to know the other kids better. She had met her best friend Casey that way in first year, bonding over the shared misery of a Potions essay.
No, she quite enjoyed that part. She just always felt so guilty. At least when she was working on her own, if she messed something up, it was on her own head. Accidentally writing that the Goblin Treaty of 1823 was actually signed in Paris rather than in St. Petersburg wouldn’t drag down someone else’s grade. But in a group project, she always felt like the bumbling girl, forcing her partner to explain everything fifteen times or, worse, edit her paragraphs in secret before turning the assignment in.
It helped that this essay was at least on something she was familiar with, if distantly. She had learned about the Civil War when she was still in muggle school. But that was ages ago, and she could barely remember what she learned in Charms last period. She sunk slightly lower into her chair, eyeing the pile of books. She’d read the last paragraph at least three times already, and none of it was sinking in. She flicked her eyes up to Simon’s face briefly, then back to her papers. He didn’t exactly look happy. On the other hand, she couldn’t blame him.
Still! They weren’t going to get anything done by sitting here, and if she wanted to be a better group member, then she was just going to have to go ahead and do it. After all, you didn’t learn anything by moping about it, right? Right. She sat up, plunking her elbows on the table, and opened her mouth to volunteer to start gathering up quotes to cite.
Simon beat her to it. "How about I write the essay and stuff? You can just put your name on it. Sound good?"
Shutting her mouth, Paloma deflated. “Oh,” she said before she even realized it had slipped out. “Oh, that’s…” she trailed off, looking for the right thing to say. The problem was that it didn’t seem like there was a right thing to say in this case. She chewed the end of her muggle pen anxiously. “Well, I mean, you could. If you wanted.”
Guilt and embarrassment seeped through her. God, was she really that bad of an essay writer? Maybe she got things wrong every once in a while, but she hadn’t gotten a failing grade on anything this year, even in Transfiguration, which she hated. She’d tried so hard. Hurriedly, she added on, “But that’s not fair to you, you’d have to do too much work. Isn’t there anything I can do to help?”
→ ABOUT YOU.
Previous Characters (if applicable): None
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