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Is this a Primary or Secondary Character?: Primary

Full Character Name: Clementina Griselda Ainsley
Character Birthday & Age: 1990 April 5 (19 yrs old)
City & Country of Birth: Ling Bar Hospital, Beckside, Nottinghamshire, England
Blood Purity: Muggleborn
Alma Mater: Hogwarts (Ravenclaw)
Job/Position: Intern with the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures

Wand: 11 2/3 Inches, Willow Wood, Unicorn Hair Core
Inflexible, but with a knobby surface that follows the contours of the wood.


Physical Description:

Height: 5' 7"
Weight: 127 lbs
Eye color: Grey-green
Hair color: ash blonde, bleaches to near white in the sun
Skin color: pale, freckles easily

Tina is beautiful, in a 'shouldn't you be in school?' kind of way.  Her face is heart shaped and youthful, made more so by her childish freckles and big eyes.  People tend to speak to her condescendingly at first, mistaking her for a precocious sixteen year old.  She has no noticeable scarring, having erased the mark  where her appendix was removed and cleaned up some pocking left by chickenpox, scars that made her feel conspicuous among her adopted culture of magically healed wizards. 


Personality Description: Tina is not a reckless person.  She is careful, meticulous, quick but naive and hopelessly idealistic.  In the way of many geniuses throughout history, she has no sense of defeat either.  At worst, there are temporary setbacks, challenges, Hegel's loops--but progress is inevitable, and sooner or later, she knows she'll have to win, statistically speaking.  This supreme confidence of progress counterbalances a baffling timidity of person.  She has no self-confidence to speak of, and continually sites 'experts' rather than give her own opinion.  It is an irritating habit that only disappears when she feels at home and comfortable with someone.  In a crowd, struggling with a subject in which she has no references, she tends to fall silent, becoming just another Ravenclaw wallflower.  So it's a good thing she knows a little bit of something about almost everything and hardly ever lacks for a book to cite or a fact to spew. 


History: Her mother, with less common sense than love, named her daughter Clementina Griselda Ainsley, much to the horror of her relatives, who quickly nicknamed the child 'Tina,' a name which stuck with her throughout her years.  Only telemarketers, her mother and people she hates call her by her actual name.

By the time Tina was two, her parents knew something was a bit, well, off.  Toys zipped across the floor of their own accord, locked doors opened mysteriously and Mrs. Ainsley could swear that the dolls had different faces every time she picked them up.  Mr. Ainsley's cousin, Leander Tracy, finally volunteered some useful information: their daughter was a witch. 

Of course, Leander was immediately dropped off the family reunion invites and the family attempted to go on with their lives as though this rude accusation had never surfaced to begin with.  They tried desperately to enforce some semblance of normality on their daughter, sending her to the time-out corner whenever something unduly suspicious happened.  For a while, it seemed as though this worked: the strange occurrences became rarer, until, by the time Tina turned five, they'd stopped all together.  The Ainsleys relaxed their death-grip on their daughter's existence, stopped living with the curtains drawn and generally just got on with it.

Until Tina entered elementary school.  A boy who'd made fun of her name suddenly developed a rash of blistering purple boils, and the Ainsleys' fragile peace shattered into a million pieces.  Of course, Tina couldn't credit that she'd done it--she protested her innocence, remembering only the burning shame as the other children laughed (really it was more of a quiet, nervous giggling) at her, and, briefly, a strange tingling sensation in her fingers.  The Ainsleys would have pulled their daughter out of public school right then and there, but they hadn't the money for a private school and didn't have the time to homeschool her, so they tentatively allowed her to go on, peppering the moments before school with warnings and wagging fingers. 

Tina didn't learn to read until she was eight, at which point a whole new world opened before her eager eyes.  By the time she was nine, she'd cleaned out her parents' meager bookshelves and made a sizable dent in the children's section of the local library.  Her teachers waxed poetic over her accomplishments in academia, and she even managed to get on well with most of the kids.  Her parents couldn't have been prouder.

Her acceptance to Hogwarts and the subsequent unveiling of the magical world naturally came as a bit of a shock.  All ready looking forward to sending their brilliant daughter on to become a doctor, her parents' dreams of glory were suddenly derailed.  They argued, and ultimately decided to leave it up to Tina: would she become a witch?  Or continue living normally, preferably becoming a distinguished medical expert at some point?  To a ten year old fascinated with fantasy novels, this wasn't even a question.

Hogwarts went well for little Tina.  She was (unsurprisingly) sorted into Ravenclaw, where she befriended many charming and unusual miniature scholars.  She read Freud next to Merlin and Marx next to Flammel, comparing Winston Churchill to Cornelius Fudge and FDR to Albus Dumbledore, but most of all, she read about Harry Potter.  He was her hero well into her fourth year, when she finally decided she was much too old for heroes, though his story continued to inspire her to make brave but foolish gestures in the names of various causes.  In her fifth year, she met James Lotusorder through a prefect's prank, and though she initially found him boorish and incredibly reckless, it must have been a case of 'opposites attract,' as they soon became a couple. 

To nobody's surprise, Tina aced her NEWTs, earning Os in all but Defense Against the Dark Arts (an E) and Care of Magical Creatures (a horrifying, barely-passing, A).  Applying for an internship with the Ministry of Magic fresh out of school, she was surprised to find herself saddled with the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures after applying for the Department of Magical Cooperation.  If this was not, in fact, a mistake as she believes it to be, then perhaps she was accepted there because of her remarkably open-minded attitude towards the creatures and her leadership (however briefly) in the W.E.C.H.M.O. (Werewolf, (house) Elf, Centaur, Hag, Merfolk, Other) Alliance, which the Headmaster at the time ordered disbanded because, as he put it, 'they are a danger to themselves and someone has to tell them.'

Clementina Griselda Ainsley is currently living in a tiny apartment in Diagon Alley with her boyfriend of some four-odd years, James.


Describe your job duties and how you go about them: As an intern in the D.R.C.M.C., Tina's duties are twofold: do the boring, unskilled grunt work that nobody else wants to do, and learn the trades of her more experienced colleagues.  Her workday may entail everything from registering werewolves (a simple data-entry spell that needs inordinately minute supervision) to assisting Ms. Amherst wrestle dragons.  Though Tina enjoys the office work, delighting in troubleshooting the magical filing cabinets and streamlining mundane spells, she dreads all the hand-on experience that comes with it.  Never quick enough on her feet, her colleagues spend a lot of time pushing Tina out of the way of rabid werewolves, charging dragons and irate centaurs.  Still, it's only been a month since she started work, and she's bound to improve with practice.  Her best work is with House Elves, a group she treats with a respect many wizards lack, while instinctively understanding their cultural disposition towards labor.  Typically, her coworkers regard her with a mixture of condescending amusement and grudging respect as she serves as a valuable resource, dredging up encyclopedic knowledge of almost every creature or situation they throw at her.  When she doesn't know something, she spends hours of her free time researching it, a real time-saver for the rest of the department. 

Elaborate on your expertise in your field: Tina is uniquely qualified for her internship in the department--i.e. she's not qualified at all, at least not in a traditional sense--her worst marks were in DADA and Care of Magical Creatures, two classes essential to her new job.  On the other hand, unlike many of her more competent peers, Tina suffers from unwavering idealism and empathy for whatever creature is trying to bite her this day.  In a new era that seems increasingly sympathetic to the werewolves, house elves and other 'lesser' beings of the wizarding world, these traits may prove useful to the department.  Besides which, Tina is hardworking, determined, intelligent and flexible, with a knack for dealing with house elves.


Writing Sample:

Sum up your character in one paragraph: The idealistic and encyclopedic N00B of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, Tina is so fresh out of Hogwarts you can still smell the ink drying on her diploma.  Uncertain how she got the internship, but glad for the work, Tina lives with her boyfriend in Diagon Alley and when not busy with her new job, she's busy keeping James out of trouble.