Accepted! -- Sparky

Your Nickname: Indie Lee
Have you read and do you agree to the Code of Conduct?: Yes
Are you over thirteen? Yes
How did you find us and decide to write with us? Friend
If you have written other characters here: Yes
If Yes, list them all: Dessa Share
Is this a Primary or Secondary Character?: Primary

Full Character Name: Absinthe Lenore Darby
Character Birthday & Age: February 9th 1993
City & Country of Birth: Oulton Broad, Suffolk, England
Pureblood, Halfblood or Muggleborn: Halfblood
House & Year: Ravenclaw, 6th year

Wand: Unicorn hair core, Rowan wood, eleven and a half inches

Physical Description: Thea has the slight frame and creamy skin of someone who has never been subjected to physical labor, or time outside doing anything but lounging, even a day in her life. She is only five feet tall, even, and she sees her shortness as something of a hindrance. She has light brown hair that she takes great care to make sure is properly coiffed—the Muggle way. Her eyes are blue and she considers them to be one of her best features.

Thea is very classically pretty, and receives her fair share of attention from boys. However, she claims not to believe in love--although harbors secret romantic tendancies--and is quite awkward around them.

Her style tends to be more on the formal side. She favors dresses and skirts—always hitting right at the knee, must keep it classy— over pants, and has an affinity for knee socks.

She has a bad habit of nail biting that she absolutely detests, and refuses to give in to, which leads her to keep her arms stiff by her sides at most times unless she is truly relaxed. Years of ballet and debutante classes contribute to her already lofty posture, leading her to hold herself in an almost uncomfortably straight up manner.


Personality Description: Nail-biting and schooling aren’t the only reasons for Thea’s posture. A third contributing factor would be her astronomical sense of self-importance, which, to be fair, is a characteristic acquired through her upbringing.

Thea’s full name is the fault of her mother, and if she had her way, she would have it expunged. It sounds to her like the name of a character in some low-class fantasy novel. Instead, she goes by Thea, an abbreviation that she leads people to believe is her full name.
Thea has been described as prissy, and it’s true. She holds her nose high and takes pride in her family’s high standing in the Muggle world. In fact, she’s a tiny bit like a blood purist, except she sees magical folk as the inferior ones. This mindset might have landed her in Slytherin if she had been a pureblood, but instead repelled her from it. However, this is an opinion that’s been tested many times over the years of her schooling, and she’s grudgingly had to amend it.

When Thea first arrived at Hogwarts, she was determined not to talk to anyone past what was necessary. She still believed them all to be slightly insane, and she could in no way comprehend everyone's odd obsession with magic, when all she wanted to do was lock her wand away--as she did every time she returned home from the summer holidays. She harbors a secret love for Hogsmeade, although she acts as if she's being dragged there whenever it's time for a trip. It's the only place where she lets her fantasies about another life cautiously emerge, imagining a home there with the mother she never knew. She is relieved when she first arrives home for holidays (all of them, because she takes any excuse to go home), back to a world where she knows what to expect. However, the cold atmosphere at home gets to her quickly, and therefore Thea really doesn't have a place where she feels comfortable--other than Hogsmeade, although she tries as hard as she can to forget that each summer.

Thea is manipulative, and regularly alters her behavior and the way she comes across in order to get what she wants. Although she believes in keeping her cool, she can get very confrontational when she’s upset. However, she has never had a physical altercation and is, in fact, secretly terrified of violence. When she wants something, she sees no reason not to go after it. That being said, Thea isn’t evil. She does truly care for those closest to her, but often doesn't know quite how to show it. She is skilled at hiding her emotions and maintaining her signature unflappable façade.

Thea is quick to become annoyed, although good at hiding it. Her response is usually condescension, and seemingly polite statements with hidden barbs. She’s clever enough to think up retorts, but sees bantering as unladylike.

Mostly quiet by habit, due to having been raised under the philosophy that children are to be seen and not heard, Thea then grew into the mindset of a demure society-lady-in-training. She finds overly loud or outgoing people to be obnoxious, and assumes them to be attention seekers.

Thea is a very bright individual, but she is constantly caught between her belief that learning magic is a waste of time, and her inborn need to excel in everything she attempts. The result of this is that she rarely speaks up in class, but makes mostly excellent marks.
Thea is a rather solitary being, in part because other kids have never seemed to like her very much, and also because she simply doesn’t enjoy a crowd. She does appreciate having a few close friends though, people she would never think of manipulating, to whom she unconsciously opens up more.

Having been taught to be ashamed of her dubious conception, Thea is very secretive about her mother, and her father’s time with the mysterious woman. It is something she rarely allows even herself to wonder about. However, recently she has begun to wonder more and more about her mother. Overwhelmed by schoolwork and ashamed of her interest in the woman who abandoned her family, Thea is increasingly more stressed and emotional. One might consider her on the edge of a breakdown of sorts, but she refuses to fall apart.

Buried deep inside Thea is the same rebellion that possessed her father, the same flightiness that infused the mother she never knew. However, it has been beaten down by years of careful preening, and she generally sees it as a flaw within her. In her darkest hours, though, Thea sometimes questions whether she really wants this constrained Muggle life she leads when the entire magical world is open to her, and even wonders what her life might’ve been if her mother had taken her instead of her father.


History: : As a rebellious and insubordinate twenty year old, Marcus Darby, eldest son and heir of a prominent Muggle family, was fed up with his world of rules and social contracts. After a series of increasingly insurgent antics, he delivered the final blow to his parents when he met a beautiful and spontaneous woman and ran away with her, determined to prove to his parents that he could live out from under their thumb, determined to shirk his family name.

Their tryst lasted exactly thirteen months, to the day, before Marcus returned home with his tail between his legs and a baby girl with an exceptionally odd name.

The woman was a free spirit who found herself suffocated by Marcus’s lofty ideals. When she became pregnant, the two believed that they might be able to pull together some sort of life for themselves and their baby. However, after Thea’s birth, her mother began claiming that she was a magical witch. Marcus realized the woman he loved had lost her mind, so he took the child and left.

Fast forward a few years, and the entire Darby family is perfectly happy with acting as if this incident never transpired, which would be perfectly simple if it weren’t for the constant reminder of baby Thea. So Thea spent her early years living with her father in the enormous manor of her grandparents Effie and Ranald Marcus, being raised as any proper young Muggle lady should. She attended private schools to attain the very best education possible, receiving lessons in piano, equestrian arts, and ballet. She grew up to be a perfectly polite young lady, and was everything the family could’ve wanted out of an heir—albeit female—and Marcus never gave another bit of thought to the woman’s madness, until the day Thea’s Hogwarts letter arrived.

At first, the family simply refused to believe it. Magic? Impossible. Clearly a hoax. However, their insistence upon ignoring the letters only resulted in more letters and eventually a visit from a Hogwarts teacher who proved beyond a reasonable doubt that there was, in fact, such a thing as magic, and there was a school where Thea was meant to go to learn about it.

Thea didn’t want to go. She saw the whole thing, even after it had been proven, as ridiculous and common. Wave a wand like some kind of lunatic? Chant spells? Absolutely not. However, when Marcus admitted to Thea and her grandparents that Thea’s mother had spoken of such a place, Thea found her curiosity piqued just the smallest bit. She didn’t know much of her mother, and if this was something connected to her, it might be worthy of further investigation simply on the grounds of knowledge. These thoughts were not something that Thea would admit having to anyone, least of all herself.

There was no way that the family was sending Thea to this Hogwarts, they decided. However, her magic was not willing to be tamped down, and soon things around her were exploding without her control daily, and she had levitated several of the gardeners high enough that they had to be paid to keep their mouths shut about the strange goings on in the Darby household. The only option was to send Thea to school so that she could learn to control this curse before it could besmirch the family name.  Even after her first year, she continued to attend Hogwarts, her family paranoid that if she stopped then her magic might once again become unmanageable and embarrass them all.

Her relationship with her father is fairly distant. He sees her as a constant reminder of the woman who he once loved, as well as a mistake that had dire consequences on his life. She gets most of her love from her grandparents, who treat her as if she were their own.

Thea attended Hogwarts and learned to control her magic, although she couldn’t quite hide her disdain for the magical world. During her summer holidays, she attends Muggle classes to assure that she doesn’t get behind on what her father and grandparents call her “proper education”.


Classes:

Core Classes Astronomy Charms Defense Against the Dark Arts Herbology History of Magic Potions Transfiguration No

Electives No Arithmancy No No Muggle Studies

How Do You Fit Into Your House?: Thea is sort of a Ravenclaw by default. She’s too quiet, calculating, and logical for Gryffindor, and not really brave enough. She possesses none of the warmth, loyalty, and willingness to help that Hufflepuff prizes, and her disliking for all things magical ruled out Slytherin.

However, she also does have genuine standing in her house. Although she dislikes the work at Hogwarts, Thea is quite intelligent and one of her favorite things to do is read.


Writing Sample: N/A

Sum up your character in one paragraph: Thea is a girl from a Muggle high-society upbringing who is embarrassed by her magic and is deeply insecure. She comes across as high-strung, prissy, and distant, but secretly questions her beliefs and wonders what the magical world might hold for her.