#repetitive clickclacks

[babelrpg-blog]

below the cut, you will find admin Christine’s sample application for Billie Weasley to give you an idea of what we’re looking for in an app. applications will not be posted in full, when we post acceptances.

OUT OF CHARACTER:

Name: Christine Age: 24 Pronouns: they/them Timezone: GMT Activity: medium/high -- I’m a full time grad student but am usually on to do replies at least every other day Triggers: [redacted]

BASICS:

Character name: Billie Arthur Weasley Gender and pronouns: transgender woman, she/her Date of birth: 29 November, 1970 Occupation: Curse Breaker Former Hogwarts house: Gryffindor Boggart: muggles, she’s heard, call it claustrophobia, the sense of the entire room closing in around you, pushing in until you can’t breathe, but for her, it’s just strange, now -- when she was younger, her boggart had been a giant, oversized spider, its legs clickclacking as it moved towards her, but now... ever since she returned to England, it’s the feeling of being trapped, of not being able to breathe, of being buried alive.

PERSONALITY

A true Gryffindor at heart, Billie is courageous and a little reckless, and despite a fairly laid-back exterior, she’s always searching for some kind of new adventure. However, before all else she is principled and determined, never compromising her own morals or beliefs or desires for anyone else’s sake. She always sees the best in others, even when it means she ends up expecting too much or misjudging someone’s motivations. When she doesn’t get her way she can be incredibly obstinate and hold grudges.

HISTORY

one. She grows up surrounded by war. You wouldn’t know it, though. She’s eleven when the war ends, just starting her first year at Hogwarts, and the only influence of the entire thing on her life is a double funeral, the second-hand black dress robes her mother leaves on her bed the morning before, a dreary churchyard in Ottery St. Catchpole. She didn’t know her uncles Gideon and Fabian well -- at one point, her mother had been close to her older brothers, but the war had pulled them apart when the twins joined the Order and Molly distanced herself in order to keep her children safe.

She never thought it stuck with her; a simple fact of the world was that the world had been at war when she was young, and that then it had been over. That war happened, it ended, and things got better. She’s sheltered from it; which, she thinks now, is exactly what her parents wanted. What business does an eleven year old have, understanding the intimacies of war? Only, not every eleven year old is so lucky.

two. Hogwarts is easy, when she puts her mind to it. She likes learning, she makes friends with ease. She is the kind to set her mind to work easily, to get things done well, and she takes to magic fast, particularly adept at Charms and Defense Against the Dark Arts. Her life there is, for all intents and purposes, simple; she becomes a prefect; she becomes Head Boy. She plays quidditch, for two years, and then leaves the team after a repetitive stress injury in her shoulder  in sixth year makes catching difficult and Keeping impossible.

This is not the interesting part of her story.

She meets and exceeds the expectations before her; that’s just what is done. She is driven, but not to anything in particular. Not by anything in particular, except that she is the eldest, and she is to provide a good role model for her brothers. People -- her parents, her professors -- set expectations in front of her and she does the only thing she has ever known to do. She feels a vague discomfort, sometimes, that she doesn’t understand. She kisses a few girls. She kisses a few more boys. She is generally well-liked, generally unobjectionable. But she discovers no great passion; she feels restless, for seven years.

She looks through a list of possible post-Hogwarts jobs and the required OWLs and NEWTs to get there. She thinks Curse Breaker looks fun, looks adventurous; it’s a job with a tangible goal, and it’s very, very far away from England.

three.  Molly is... well, a bit suffocating. Even with six other siblings, Billie’s Hogwarts years are filled with the constant fretting and doting and scolding, a mother’s love, sure, but honestly, a bit much, what with the Bill, darling, don’t you think it’s time for a haircut, and we’re so proud of your OWL scores, dear, only-- don’t you think Curse Breaker is a bit... well, dangerous?

It takes moving to Egypt for three years to give her the space she needs to be anything other than the child her parents wanted, the brother her siblings looked up to. The Curse Breakers she works with are a rowdy lot -- overachievers, like she had been at Hogwarts, but mellowed by time and adrenaline and the easy skillfulness with which they navigate the cramped tombs and sidestep certain death. Young and beautiful and reckless and brilliant, they inspire her, teach her how to be a little more free than she’d ever let herself be.

One, in particular, a handsome wizard a few years her senior with hair dyed and shaved like he ought to be in a muggle punk band, takes a liking to her, and Billie Weasley falls in love for the first time. Around everything else, they spend hours lying in bed talking about the world, about their world views, and he’s a strong believer in reinventing yourself without the influence of parents who expect too much of you. She doesn’t know if she agrees that her parents expected too much of her, but she does start thinking about the places where her heart doesn’t meet their expectations of her.

four. She comes out to Charlie, first. They were always the closest, their shared drive for adventure keeping them in a lockstep through most of their childhood. She came out to him first, too, when she came out as being bisexual, at sixteen, and that feels... harder, than it is now. Harder than it is to write him a letter saying, Charlie, I’m a girl.

She doesn’t know, for a long time, how to tell the rest of her family. Charlie accepts her without question, of course he does, he’s always been the type. Fred and George couldn’t care less, tell her she’s got to make her name something that still begins with B or else all those jumpers will go to waste. Ron doesn’t seem to notice that anything is different; he’s much the same as their father, that way, adapting in a slow and halting way to pronouns and the like, harmless and well-meaning. Percy thinks it’s all daft, rolls his eyes, doesn’t speak to her much at Christmas.

Ginny, eight and lonely, is ecstatic to have a sister, insists on braiding her hair and sharing her jewelry and talking about boys late at night and all the things she’s always wished she had someone to do it with. Billie humors her, holds her close, doesn’t let her notice that when she presses her face close into her sister’s hair, there are tears in her eyes.

Molly... tries, bless her. Not hard enough. But she tries, in her own way. It’s almost enough not to hold it against her. It’s enough to pretend not to.

five. She comes back to England after three years in Egypt. Temporary leave, they call it, but what it is is a bloody desk job. She can’t be trusted to do her job anymore. No, there was a tomb, just outside of what was once called Thonis, a tomb they weren’t supposed to go into -- too dangerous, one of the senior curse breakers had said, forget about it. He’d wanted to go in anyway, asked her to come, and she’d thought: it’s not safe. And in the tomb, there was a trap he didn’t notice, a rogue curse. The Healers tell her it severed his jugular, that it likely took several minutes for him to bleed out, alone in there, before he stopped breathing.

What she hears is: if you had been in there, you could have saved him. If you hadn’t been a coward, he would be alive.

She comes back to England a shell of the person she was when she left, a hollow thing. She moves back into her bedroom at the very top of her parents’ tall, tall house. It had been Percy’s, after she left, so he could have a room to himself; she doesn’t redecorate.

It is the first time she sees what has become of Britain. The first time that she, as an adult, fully wraps her head around what her world has become. And about what she has become, in her parents’ shadow. She goes to work every day, at a little desk in a back office in Gringotts; she reads the paper, every day. Starts to see the news about executions. Adjusts without much difficulty to the presence of muggles in their formerly closed-off world (he’d been a muggleborn, showed her his Sony Walkman and a handful of CDs one of their first nights together, told her about telephones and televisions and tele-everything, and it’s all she can think of when her dad buys one of each, every gadget he can get his hands on, a brand new Macintosh Classic that costs enough that Molly swats him across the head with her Witch Weekly when he tells her how much he spent).

She drifts.

six. No one can be stagnant forever. It festers.

It turns from depression to resentment, before she realizes it. And one day, sitting silently at dinner with her parents and Ginny -- it’s September, and Ron’s eleven now, so he’s started Hogwarts, and Fred and George and Percy too, and Charlie’s still in Romania with the dragons -- she snaps. She isn’t listening to the conversation but her father says something banal about an argument he overheard at work, something about the executions and the Minister, and her mother says well you wouldn’t want to get involved in all of that, save your own skin while you can, and something inside of her breaks.

She doesn’t remember what she shouts, hands shaking, as she stands up from the table, but when she thinks about it, it sounds a lot like maybe if you stood up for anything in your bloody joke of a life and she doesn’t mean it at the time but when she finds herself sitting in a pub in Diagon Alley an hour later next to Mary MacDonald, she thinks maybe she did mean it.

She thinks maybe there’s got to be more to life than saving your own skin. There’s got to be something worth fighting for, some adventure just around the next corner if only you’re willing to stick your neck out and take a risk.

She thinks maybe, maybe, there’s a reason the hat put her in Gryffindor after all.

INTERVIEW

Describe the recurring dream you’ve been having lately.

    ‘I’m, ah. I’m in Egypt again. Merlin, this is going to sound so bloody cliché. Right, Bill, bloody buried alive, how original--’

She runs a hand through her hair, then gets fed up halfway through, extracts it, pulls an elastic off her wrist and loops it quickly through the long mass of red, missing a few strands here and there.

    ‘Right, sorry. Ah, so I’m in Egypt, headed down into one of the tombs, and the tunnels are narrower than usual, like, barely broad enough across for me to stand without scraping my shoulders on the stone of the walls, so I can’t have my wand drawn as I make my way through them. And every time I reach the end of the hallway, there’s a fork, and every time, no matter which way I turn, it’s the same bloody hallway -- I can tell, the hieroglyphics are the same. But when I focus on the hieroglyphics to see if I can read them, to see if they say anything, they’re, well, they’re not hieroglyphics. They keep changing. First they’re, dunno, cyrillic probably? Then they’re Chinese characters, then they’re English but the letters don’t make up real words. And every time, as soon as they turn to English I hear someone screaming, from down the hallway, and it’s someone I know, but I can’t run because the hallway’s too narrow, and I can’t reach them because every time I turn I’m in the same hallway, and I must just exhaust myself, running in circles like that, because every time I wake up, I’m out of breath, and I never remember who it was screaming when I try to think about it...’

She’s quiet, for a moment, then clears her throat and leans back in her chair, only just realizing that she’s moved to the edge of it, dug half moons into her palms where her nails have grown too long for that kind of nervous gripping.

    ‘Sorry, bit morbid. But, er, that’s... been once or twice a week, now, for the past couple of months.’

What’s the most convincing lie you’ve ever told yourself?

    ‘That one person can’t make a difference. My mum used to say that kind of thing a lot, you can’t change the world on your own, all that. I think maybe she felt guilty, sometimes, after her brothers died, that she hadn’t done anything to help. Or maybe it was the opposite, maybe she was still mad at them for putting themselves in danger to try to make things better when they would’ve been safer at home. I don’t... know, for sure, why she did anything she’s done, but what I decide to do matters and if I keep hiding forever because I think I don’t matter, that I’m better off saving my own skin, I’m going to end up like her.’

What has been the most beneficial aspect of the Statute of Secrecy being abolished? What about the greatest deficit?

    ‘Well, my dad’s pretty chuffed about it, isn’t he? I’ve got to admit, having some muggle things around the house have been pretty nice -- the telephone, CDs, pencils are bloody brilliant. Muggle fashion’s amazing, too, much better than robes and all that. But, in all seriousness, I think we’ve gone about things all wrong -- none of this is about trying to make two worlds that have been separate for all this time coexist. It’s about building a world that works for everyone, even if that means starting from scratch. And I don’t think it’s working, this way. I don’t think it’s enough.’

Ten years ago, where did you see yourself today? What would you tell your younger self, if you could?

    ‘Ten years ago? I was twelve, I saw myself becoming a professional quidditch star, just like every other twelve year old whose ever ridden a broom. I know that’s not the point of the question or whatever, but it’s true; didn’t exactly have a remarkable sense of self at that age. What I’d tell myself, though? That’s a better question. Would’ve been bloody convenient to have realized I’m a girl before all of that puberty business, wouldn’t it?’

EXTRAS

inspo tag

details:

    wand: maple, unicorn tail hair, 11″, sturdy

    amortentia: sun cream, cider, cinnamon

    patronus: falcon

future plot ideas:

one of the things I’m primarily interested in exploring with Billie is the idea of a blind idealist who sees a sort of heroic, dramatic way of “revolution” or “saving the world” as the only way to make a difference or do something important; there’s a tension between her and Molly -- whose existence is a much quieter, more practical thing -- that I’d love to see come to a head, and see how that affects her interactions with characters like Atticus and Mary, for whom things like revolution are unavoidably a life-or-death situation. I want to see her realize she’s not entirely right in her worldview, to be forced to see things from the points of view of some of the other characters and have to come to terms with the fact that these things she believes with her entire heart aren’t necessarily as true as she thinks they are

expanded personality:

MBTI type: ENFP, the Campaigner

The Campaigner personality is a true free spirit. They are often the life of the party. More than just sociable people-pleasers though, Campaigners read between the lines with curiosity and energy. They tend to see life as a big, complex puzzle where everything is connected – but see it through a prism of emotion, compassion and mysticism, and are always looking for a deeper meaning. Luckily, Campaigners know how to relax, and they are perfectly capable of switching from a passionate, driven idealist in the workplace to that imaginative and enthusiastic free spirit on the dance floor, often with a suddenness that can surprise even their closest friends. Being in the mix also gives them a chance to connect emotionally with others, giving them cherished insight into what motivates their friends and colleagues.

enneagram type: type Eight, the Challenger

People of this personality type are essentially unwilling to be controlled, either by others or by their circumstances; they fully intend to be masters of their fate. Eights are strong willed, decisive, practical, tough minded and energetic. They want a lot out of life and feel fully prepared to go out and get it.

zodiac sign: Saggitarius

Your adventurous personality is accompanied by a straightforward and optimistic attitude. While others may take comfort in the familiar, you are always seeking to escape it. You are energized by new experiences, environments, and people, which explains why you are always moving towards something new. Your friends and family enjoy your adventures, but they truly appreciate your positive outlook. Your loved ones never fail to be uplifted by your ability to take the best out of any situation or person.