CHARACTER INFORMATIONCharacter name: Alessandra Vanserra
Previous and/or Current Character(s) if applicable: Clem Petrova, et al.
Character age: 19
Character education: Homeschooled, Mirto, Sicily
Strength and weaknesses (details please): Alessandra is a tenacious witch with a passion for anything she throws herself into, if she commits to it, she will find a way to bring life to what she wants. Stubbornness is a family trait, along with a deadly sense of curiosity, both of which can often work in her favour. She adores being around other people and learning what makes them who they are, but it means she often lacks her own self-perspective.
However, Alessandra’s youth and relatively sheltered upbringing on Mirto means that she seeks only the fun life and the new experiences she can find, especially social situations. This makes Alessandra slightly unreliable, in that she gets distracted, and will often change the path of her thoughts halfway through something.
Physical description: Short and slender and light on her feet, Alessandra looks as if she might be blown away in a strong breeze. She has pale skin, strong brows and dark hair that she chopped roughly above her shoulders prior to leaving Italy for England. Her lips are always painted bright colours.
Often she can be seen wearing bright coloured shirts with scarves woven through her hair, with dangling earrings. Family superstitions means that Aless wears bracelets and anklets with bells wrapped twice around each ankle to ward off bad omens.
Personality (nice, rude, funny etc. Paragraph please.): Alessandra is chaotic and nice. She won't always finish a thought trail, but she shows genuine interest in other people. She grew up as a peddling diviner, so she is not backwards in coming forward to offer soft life advice. Aless can’t hold a grudge and finds it hard to remain angry with anyone, believing that maintaining negative energy will turn her into a negative person.
Hopes and dreams. Why are you teaching at Hogwarts?: There is no noble pursuit behind any of the choices this witch makes. If she’s honest, Alessandra first and foremost wants a job, and secondly somewhere to live that isn’t a dingy room above a smelly pub. Since she never had the traditional school experience Alessandra is quite taken at the idea of trying to get in and teach at a place like Hogwarts. She imagines she will learn just as much as she teaches, but boy does have things to teach and stories to weave.
Biography (500 words minimum. There is never such a thing as too much.): The bones rattled in the windowsill as the wind changed direction. Alessandra Vanserra paused, her fingers still curled around one end of a worn and slightly bent wooden spoon, and threw a look at them over her shoulder. They rattled again, and she shivered, twisting on the spot in a flurry of motion. It launched a splatter of red sauce across the otherwise clean little kitchen, dripping against the tiles.
“You stop that!” Aless waved the wooden spoon at the bones thread through string, as if they might listen. Of course, they didn’t listen, they rattled together again. Alessandra tilted her head and tried to focus on the pace of her breathing. She tried to remember the way she had taught, and let the emotion, the feeling, the predication to come to her instead of seeking it out. A shudder worked, knot by knot, down her spine, bile acrid beneath her tongue.
Change was coming.
It wasn’t a new fortune but it was, at best, repetitive. Day by day it appeared in the soggy tea leaves, in the drip of the wax in their best candle, at the base of the washbasin when she looked too hard. Inevitable change had been coming since the old lady, who was currently resting her eyes in chair by the fire, had first developed a rattle in her chest. Alessandra had known it and ignored it. With each little foretelling, she wiped it away, and even now she pulled the bones down from the windowsill.
“
Leave it,” The woman croaked from the chair, her blanket slipping from her lap. It startled Alessandra who hadn’t known she was awake. The bones rattled again.
“A storm’s coming,” Alessandra whispered in soft Italian.
”
You’re a little liar, mi tesoro.” The woman wheezed, and coughed heavily, a handkerchief pressed to her lips. “
Don’t touch my bones.”
Alessandra watched her sadly. She had grown at the hip of an old and superstitious woman, not her mother, but her grandmother, Giana Burlusconi, who had already raised five children and had no business raising her daughters' child, but Teresa Vanserra had never come to collect her daughter again. Her grandmother owned a small Diviner’s parlour that hosted locals and tourists alike, and she had home-schooled her youngest grandchild at the same table, covered in a purple cloth and smattered with stars. Alessandra had learned the rules of the world by looking at the moon through her grandmother’s crystals and mapping out continents of the world as they spilled in thrown wax. Magical lore and a tainted retelling of history was filled with old superstition and coloured heavily with an old lady’s beliefs.
Within time, the old woman’s many superstitions in life had become her own, and talismans and bells tinkled at her wrists and ankles. Alessandra had turned fifteen and realised there was nowhere to go in Mirto, Sicily.
By sixteen she was itching to leave but stayed for the woman she had raised her without complaint.
By nineteen she had found a strange piece within the simplicity of her life there, telling soft fortunes to burned tourists with toothy grins and then dining and dancing with them at night. It had been fine, until the old woman began to cough and refused to see a healer.
A little silver spoon swirled against the side of the fine porcelain teacup, tea leaves spreading, and she set it down firmly beside her grandmother, ignoring the crimson stain on the white piece of cloth. A good cup of tea would fix everything. Alessandra smoothed the woman’s hair, pressing her lips to her temple gently.
“Relax, Nonna, I’m making dinner.”
The old woman said nothing in return, her eyes half closed. True to Alessandra’s words, a storm rolled through Mirto that night, the light flickered in their little cottage, and the bones on the windowsill sang a song of goodbye. By the time the clouds passed, and the sauce was perfect, her grandmother’s chest had stopped its paced rise and fall and the silence left behind felt too large for the entirety of Italy.
The teenager hadn’t been able to bring herself to watch and stared up at a waning moon as she cried.
Change was not coming, change had already visited and pressed a kiss to their brows, setting both Giana and Alessandra free in different ways. Peace was equally balanced with immeasurable guilt as Giana left one world for the next.
Within thirty days she had been laid to rest, her little parlour had been sold. All the most important of trinkets and wares, use-softened tarot cards all packed into one of Giana’s worn suitcases and Alessandra carried it with her as she set foot in London for the first time in her life.
Change had come and braced with her Nonna’s trinkets she was ready to enjoy it.
SAMPLE ROLEPLAY(Please respond to to this in third person past tense. Do not write the other characters' reactions. Only your own.) It was the largest office in Hogwarts and, perhaps to students and newcomers, the most intimidating. The shelves were filled with various odds and ends, with a place of honor for the Sorting Hat, and the walls held all the portraits of past Headmasters and Headmistresses.
In the middle of the room sat a large desk. Everything was in order, for the current occupant had always despised a messy desk. It was the sign of a messy mind, and she had always favored neatness.
A clock sat on the desk, which currently showed the time to be 2:05. The meeting was supposed to begin at 2:00 precisely.
Along with order, Anneka valued punctuality. She was a very busy woman these days. Even during the summer, she had a number of matters to attend to. Interviewing and hiring staff was only of those matters. The newest potential member of her staff wasn't making a good impression.
She paced the room, black heels clicking against the stone floor. When the door finally opened, Anneka turned, her expression reminiscent of a Russian winter. "You are
late."
Explain yourself was what her face said.
Roleplay Response:Soft bells tinkled as Alessandra raced down one hallway and then another, the sound of them cheering her own in the pursuit of the headmistresses office. It was a novelty experience that left her a little giddy since she had never been inside of a school before, let alone visited the woman who ruled one.
Of course, she was late. Alessandra was never on time and being early may as well have a curse word in her vocabulary.
In this instance she had become distracted many times over. First, by grounds and then by a curious portrait in the hall and before the little witch knew it, she had wasted ten minutes debating whether the background to his portrait was aquamarine or cerulean.
Now, she burst through the door to Anneka Ivankova’s office, red skirts swirling around bell laced ankles, her crisp white shirt half untucked and strands of her dark falling from the scarf she had woven through it. The entire outfit was more at home on the island of Mirto, when the sun was high in the middle of the day than at a job interview, but Alessandra didn’t care. She was always unapologetically herself.
In face of the headmistress's wintery stare, Aless flashed a wide smile. All white teeth and preparation for soft stories. The same smile that had lured in tourists for petty fortunes.
She thickened her accent, mostly for effect. “Your school… it’s
amazing!”
