Evelyn Takamura ○● COMC Assistant-Crow

[Evelyn Takamura]

CHARACTER INFORMATION

Character name: Evelyn Takamura

Previous and/or Current Character(s) if applicable: Ars Cadwallader, Nadine Aleshire, Red Märchen, etc.

Character age: Twenty-Two

Character education:

Salem 1938-1941
Hogwarts 1941-1944 (Dropped out)
Crow’s Creatures 1947-Present (First hand experience with dangerous magical creatures and their care Especially for Crow)

Strength and weaknesses (details please):

Strengths:

Compassion and love of animals and only animals: Evelyn is fearless around monsters that would make most ministry workers squirm. Under Crow’s guidance, she’s studied quite a few of them up close and can maintain composure even in life threatening situations.

Fierce determination: Although there was a point in her life where she gave up everything, Evelyn will rise to a challenge. Even as a shell of her former self, she’s still more personable than her counterpart and takes work quite seriously. (For the most part.)

Crow’s Friendship. Not to be underestimated when it comes to his reputation with students and on days where he might feel like deviating from scheduled lessons.

Weaknesses:

Apathy  Evelyn wants to be at the castle, but becoming an assistant professor has never been an aspiration of hers. (To be fair, she never really had dreams at all.) Still, this is entirely Crow’s chaos, and she’s in it to babysit him. This may cause her to have a short temper with students, or anyone who might not share her oddly biased opinion of him.

Fear  To be fair, something could go terribly wrong. Combine minors and monsters, and somebody’s bound to get eaten eventually. In the shop, it was easy to lay out of the ministry’s sight, but at Hogwarts that might be different. Evelyn is especially afraid for Crow, as even if she’s proud of him for venturing out somewhere he’s liable to make a mistake.

Physical description:

Anyone who once knew Evelyn as a student may have trouble recognizing her, but also find the changes so subtle they wouldn’t be able to discern why. Tired, and almost so remarkably plain its disconcerting, her expressions only fluctuate from vacant to mildly angry in most circumstances—and any other emotion might be read as decidedly fake. Unlike most girls her age (as her temperament and circumstances alienate them from her at all,) she gives no regards to fashion, and wears whatever is cheap and salvageable, although she seems to have a fondness for scarves. Typically, she also favors jackets or a bag of some kind to keep trinkets to distract Crow, snacks, and various other useful odds and ends . It’s been a considerable amount of time since she’s afforded (or thought about) a haircut, and typically wears all of it in a messy bun, which seems to always fall apart by the end of the day. Especially if a certain bird consistently plucks at it.


Personality (nice, rude, funny etc. Paragraph please.):

It’s hard to see what lies in a girl with a heart as cold as an ocean, but on the surface she’s bitter, and exceedingly serious. Anyone who failed to introduce themselves to her before all her doors shut may have an exceedingly difficult time finding anything within her outside of cold indifference. Still, while beside crow, she’s still a paragon of calm rationality, and has a tendency to judge in favor of rules and laws, (so that it might keep the both of them from sinking.) Although it may appear Evelyn’s short tempered,
(especially when dealing with a certain middle aged four year old) she has the patience of a god, and is rarely truly upset.

At the bottom of her soul, however, her defining quality still lurks, obvious but latent: an almost masochistic desire to care for others. Time and time again, this nature has betrayed her and left her with unattended funerals and betrayal, and so her focus shifted slowly from people to animals. Her run ins with mortality and abysmal self esteem have led her to a sort of existentialism, and yet she admires a man she thinks immortal and infamous.

Hopes and dreams. Why are you teaching at Hogwarts?:

Evelyn possesses not a shred of hope, but rather wanders to and from where she’s needed. To be fair to her, she’s probably rather irritated Crow has dragged her back to Hogwarts for this ridiculous masquerade, but for two years they’ve watched over each other, and she thinks teaching might do some good for him. (Especially if they can both be in the menagerie, which might feel a bit like home.) Additionally, she’s fiercely loyal to him, and determined to act as his translator for the outside world. As his assistant, all she can want is a zero death count, and a minimal amount of lawsuits and serious altercations. (If it pays like he promised, she might dream that the shop might not completely tank, but she’s not holding her breath.)


Biography (500 words minimum. There is never such a thing as too much.):

If dreams and nightmares are analogous, then she shall never sleep. Hope is the cosmos expanding into infinity, perpetually away. Cyclic and cynical, a timeless gem. An antediluvian ballad of sin, with ordinary roots—a loss of innocence unfolds in a field salted by perseverance.

It begun with such a loss, of culture and family, of a language and sense of belonging. With a new name, a Muggleborn orphan girl was stranded in muggle San Francisco, unaware that magic lie latent in her blood. Unable to make friends (or perhaps unwilling, plagued by some sense of difference,) she and the other children avoided each other most days (others, they fought with handfuls of sand and mud.) It was by chance she met a strange old fisherman, completely alone in the world aside from an army of feral cats. With nothing to offer her but love and a few old sheets of origami paper, he became her Grandfather, and the summer days passed with faint meows for fish skins and waves crashing on the docks.

Until a letter came—

At first, it seemed like a cruel joke—there was no way she was a witch. It had to be something discriminatory, or some sort of prank (although from whom or what reason she couldn’t really discern.) It was only with encouragement from her Grandfather she packed up her precious cat, Prince and a few meager possessions to head across the country and start school at Salem. For the first few weeks, everything felt like living a faerie tale, until a new set of insults took center stage.

Mudblood, they sang, and once again she was isolated.

Letters came and went, and she learned spells and words of cruelty. Even in poverty, in this world that was never hers, (as neither of them were,) she still smiled and kept her diligence. It was never her dream to excel at anything—she merely sought survival.

Quietly, she marveled and kept mostly to herself.

In the muggle world, a war shook the world. As hostilities and alliances shifted, Evelyn
was displaced for a third time—this time to Britain to restart her life at Hogwarts as a fourth year. Without understanding, or knowing, she clutched at the meaning of being an adult. In this strange country, she sought herself, and for a time, she found something, a fire in her shadow—what she lacked.

A Transfiguration professor who taught her infinity.
A golden house filled with friends and encouragement.
A familiar stadium and microscopic faces—snow and wind in her hair.
A wretched boy who knew no more than her.

“Mudblood” he sang again, and she fought him down. The crimson badges no longer bothered her, not so much as the searing absence of letters from her Grandfather, or news from the United States. With a face of glass, she brushed her fears away, and cried only in private, in gardens for her dorm was for laughing and celebrating Quidditch matches.

Bombs fell, and the news came in a wave. The same boy was there, with far kinder words. Evelyn, who’d only lived with a name given to her for strangers, only vicariously wondering about the idea that—somewhere, in Japan—she had to have parents, wept for a destroyed country. What could be left of it? It was impossible to draw a line where muggle and magic ended, and she felt pain for a land she couldn’t remember.

At last, the war was over and a single letter arrived. The United States government (who to their credit, took the time to find a way to post her), had lost quite a number of their innocent prisoners—chiefly among them, her Grandfather, her adopted fisherman. This was cruelty, and it continued to unfold.

Like stone, Evelyn’s resolve was chipped away, until she finally dropped out due to apathy depression her sixth year.

With no will, and no faith in the world, she lived for a few months in dilapidated apartment with the same boy, who tried his best to care for her. There was nothing the pair of them could do for themselves, and they struggled as London turned darker around them.

Their only solace was the other—until he was taken from her.

Less was possible. All this time she’d held her hands open, and now she could feel even the air slipping between her fingers. All at once, she was destroyed—bested.
The next months were odd jobs. Robotic. Anything. Even a break at the Daily Prophet gave her no solace, as she was still not tempered, or ready to pick up her shattered glass mask. Anything could harm her, and everything would. Still, it gave her income and time to sew up her wounds, but she couldn’t stand the masquerade.

A chance meeting led her back to an old Professor—someone she’d believed in, for better or for worse. If she’d sold her soul to a demon, she knew she should have felt it, but oddly working as a clerk in a shop of monsters and horrors felt…ironic. The true nightmares were in the streets, in words, in papers and wizards who claimed Britain. (Not even just the German ones.) Poison and pinchers were nothing in the face of adversity, discrimination and death. Aside from that, it felt right to take care of something outside of herself—to avoid giving up on the world entirely. The circumstances in the world changed, crescendoing into fire and flame, yet for her, time slowed as she began to heal.

All of her happiness had leaked, but finally she was growing whole.

Two years passed, and now a grotesque counter covered in dust and cobwebs is home. Visits outside of family are rare, and her family consists solely of Crow. An odd match made in hell, Evelyn watches over the infamous dark wizard as he, well, he watches over the beasts the two of them might dub “creatures”. (“Pets” far too friendly of a term for the sort of things they deal in.)

Now, Evelyn intends to follow Crow back to Hogwarts as he pursues his passion for Magizoology—as he might accidentally come into contact with impressionable teenagers. All she can be sure of the coming term (or probably any recent occurrence) is that it probably, definitely, was never in her job description.


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:

It felt like being oil on water, or a molecule unable to bond with any other due to its abhorrent weight. This position felt wrong, and Evelyn was an anachronism within these halls. The atomic mediocrity tugged at her constantly as she struggled to adjust—from black and yellow cloaks to the nearly constant presence of laughter—all she could think about was how much these things used to mean to her, and how much they’d driven her to insanity in those final months.

Strange though it was, her comfort came in the form of Crow’s shop, filled to the brim with dusty ancient scripts and a particularly familiar set of peculiar jars. Watching him attempting to pack, it has hard not to ask just to stay home. Cancel the class—no harm done. None of this had seemed to be his most brilliant idea, but now as it came to be a slow reality, Evelyn wanted to jump ship.

It couldn’t show though—if he knew she knew, then he really might do something, and all in all, this was good for him. For the shop. That was the goal here.

Yet it took all afternoon to get through things.  For some awful reason, she had to have an interview with the Headmistress, (really), yet Crow kept inventing some new reason to hold her. It was a requirement for her to go, yet what would they make of this? Would anyone really hire a Muggleborn dropout? 

Finally, with him distracted, she ran. It took longer than she expected, as she’d never even dreamed of walking through those doors before, and she practically fell through the doorway, breathless.

"You are late."

Time wasn’t really a thing Evelyn had ever been concerned about since—well since Hogwarts. It was hard to be late at a job where the shop was indefinitely open or closed, and she was always welcome inside regardless. It also baffled her that the Headmistress probably already knew what this was about—how Crow had definitely gone in and insisted about his assistant, yet Anneka could chide her and know the man they were both dealing with.

“I’m sorry.” The words came out before she could muster the sincerity. All of this was an absolute circus.

“I—“

 It was difficult to articulate how much this meant to her, now that she was here. It wasn’t for her sake, (at least, she’d never intended it to be,) but rather for his. This was incredibly important to make him—not normal but perhaps slightly happy again—so five minutes late or not,  she had to recover.

“I won’t be late again.” (A downright lie, it was hard enough to get Crow to unlock the door of his shop, so she didn’t doubt it would take her an hour a lesson to find the bird
and drag him to teach a lesson.)

“Also, I hate to be like this, but I don’t want to be out for very long…”

(Already she was thinking of Crow staring at a dusty old calendar from a year or so back, when she last changed it—it was really a moot point with him—but he’d probably be trying to figure out where she’d gone.)

Perhaps the wrong phrasing, but the truth. Already, she felt as if there were some of the more palpable questions weighing down on her, but she was determined to just get it over with.


Ditto on Crow’s lesson plans pm! Please refer to that for Eves! #squadgoals <3