#hl mc tzipora strausser

[littlexredxhoneyxbadger]

How about 14 for the ask game for all of your MCs. ☺️

In reference to this post.

14. "What are your MC's hobbies?" Thank you so, so much for submitting an ask! I've been waiting for an excuse to talk about my brainrot children, and I really appreciate the opportunity to flesh them out. I did my main four, since I haven't really fleshed out or decided everything for Cassie or Chana yet, but I hope you'll enjoy these regardless.

Mary Frances Garratt Collecting rocks. Frances loves her rocks and has been known to skive off and wander off the path to collect them; plants, potions ingredients, and everything in between aren’t far behind. She’s small – barely 5’0 – and can’t swim, but she’ll go waist deep into the nearest body of water at even the slightest chance of finding the specific ingredient she’s looking for.

Beyond that, Frances can also be quite domestic. Her interest in plants, herbs, and potion ingredients transfers over (and primarily comes from) her time in the muggle world. She grew up very Catholic in a household with very traditional gender roles, and after her parents passed, the family she lived with used her primarily for “women’s work” – i.e. being a maid to them, and a nanny to their three children. Frances has a lot of built up anger for ways she was treated by the parents, but loved the children and teaching them things that she was never taught (and had to figure out herself).

Frances isn’t exactly a foodie, though (though she is the anti-thesis of the phrase “never trust a skinny chef”). She likes pastries, and she’s a fiend for most mixtures of sugar and flour, but a lifetime of sensory processing issues (and as a fellow autistic girlie, I sympathize) has left her with more of an enjoyment of the cooking process than eating it. Baking, though? Oh, this girl is definitely the kind of person who would make homemade cookie dough at 2am and eat half of it raw while baking the rest of it.

Fun fact: Mary Frances was named after my paternal great-grandmother, may she rest in peace. She had a 3rd grade education, married at 13, had 7 children, and never learned to read. My grandfather, her youngest child, describes her as the smartest and kindest woman he ever knew.

Esther Han-Ostberg Esther’s the creative one of the bunch. Born deaf, she still enjoys music from the vibrations, but enjoys visual medias far more. She grew up fairly isolated, one might even say a fair bit sheltered, but always found solace in painting, specifically with acrylics because she has exactly zero patience for oils. Poetry is a big one too, since she can’t hear the lyrics of someone singing; for Esther, it was a way to express her thoughts and stories in a slightly unconventional way, as opposed to strictly writing them down.

Stars are an interest of hers as well. Her father, a Swedish muggle, was a geologist who dabbled in some other forms of science, notably astronomy, which was a big part of the way that Esther got her name (which is both Persian and Hebrew for “star”), and though she didn’t have the greatest interest in stars or astronomy as a child, stargazing became a bonding experience for Esther and her father – a way for them to engage in something that didn’t require Esther to hear in order to enjoy, and didn’t require her father to be magical to understand (and especially given astronomy may or may not have been how Esther’s muggle father and witch mother met).

Daniel Harper If ever there was someone to call a horse girl (or boy, in this case), it would be Daniel. Like all of my MCs seem to be, Daniel grew up isolated and was the youngest of six sons born to two magical parents. His father split early on, when Daniel was a toddler, embarrassed at the possibility of having a squib for a son; Daniel’s mother, who wasn’t much better, remarried a wizard named Eric (who again, wasn’t much better), who bred and trained thoroughbred horses for racing and steeplechasing.

There, Daniel found his passion. He was isolated and bullied, in both worlds and by his entire family, but he had the horses, and when he was a pre-teen, he met a palomino filly not expected to survive the night following her birth, and it was there that he found his first love. The palomino, who’s coat color did not make her a particularly sought after item, was allowed to stay on the farm, and from there, Daniel found his best friend.

He named her Naomi, meaning “gentle” and “beauty”, though he chose it less for the meaning or more to make a pun: “NEIGH-oh-mee”.

Daniel trained Naomi all on his own after years of teaching himself how ride, and how to hunt on horseback. He slept in the barn with her and the other horses, was up all hours of the night and day to care for her and the others, and dedicated himself to caring for the creatures that – in his opinion – were nothing more to his family than a means of making money. No respect for the creatures, no love of the breed or sport, only love of the next sale on their mind.

But even years later, as he rides Highwing, he thinks back to his horseback riding and remembers fondly.

Tzipora Strausser Tzipora is a music lover, through and through, specifically piano. Growing up with a deceased mother and a father who toiled away all day as a miner, Tzipora could never have afforded the privilege of hearing music on a daily basis – much less ever learning to play an instrument or owning one.

But one of her earliest memories after her father’s death was at the orphanage that she grew up in. She was only six years old, unable to speak English or Welsh, only German, having immigrated to Swansea from Dusseldorf with her father less than a year prior, and most of the caretakers at the orphanage were at a loss of how to communicate with her. Though Yiddish, which many of them knew snatches of (being an Ashkenazi Jewish orphanage), shared some similarities with Tzipora’s native German, it still wasn’t enough to bridge the gap. The orphanage, run by a rabbi and his wife, was attached to a shul (synagogue), and one of Tzipora’s most vivid memories is of the first time she heard a cantor playing the piano during a Shabbos service. She couldn’t understand the words of the song, but with the notes, she didn’t have to.

After the service, she wandered away from her age group’s caretaker, climbed up onto the bench of the piano, and just started tapping each key to make a sound. When her rabbi approached her and asked her about the piano (in a language she couldn’t understand at the time, Welsh), Tzipora began to cry and thought she was in trouble for touching the piano without permission. However, the rabbi sat next to her on the piano’s bench and wiped her tears away, took her hands, and without a word exchanged between the two, taught her every chord he knew.

Tzipora always wanted to be a cantor or some kind of musician as a child, though cantors were rare in Orthodox Judaism at the time, and female cantors even more so. But even then, everything could change, and she could be sent from foster home to foster home, and then back to the orphanage and onto another foster home, but despite the fluidity and technique of how someone could play a piano, the songs always remained the same, and she knew that she could always find solace in tickling the ivories.