Your Nickname: Tess
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Is this a Primary or Secondary Character?: Primary

Full Character Name: Violet Ada Ostrander
Character Birthday & Age: 1998-04-17
City & Country of Birth: Lexlip, Ireland
Pureblood, Halfblood or Muggleborn: Muggleborn
House & Year: Ravenclaw, 1st

Wand: 8 inches, rigid Walnut, Unicorn hair.  Carved in a twisting braid pattern.

Physical Description:
Violet is a little short for her age, and slight, though her cheeks still show a bit of “baby fat”.   She lets her copper hair grow long now that she can quickly (after a couple of tries) Calefax it dry after washing, but doesn’t otherwise fuss over it.  Upon encountering something new for the first time (be it person or otherwise) her blue-grey eyes are like little pensieves, soaking up every detail and storing them away against future need.  Violet unerringly follows the Hogwarts dress code, favoring grey over black where permitted, and varying her wardrobe only in the extremes of weather.

Personality Description:
Violet is a prodigy by muggle standards, reads and writes at a university level, speaks (and reads) several languages, and is well-versed in the muggle academic standards. Her attachment to muggle theories about how the universe works have so far been more of a hindrance at Hogwarts than a help, as magic casually and frequently violates many of the rules she’d learned so carefully.

To the average Ravenclaw, a goal of knowing everything about everything might seem sufficient.  Violet would only consider that a ‘good start’.  Her natural intelligence and curiosity compels her not just to know but to *understand*.  Not just what but how, not just how but why.  It’s not curiosity alone, however, but a form of self-defense - she knows better than most children that horrible things happen all the time, and explaining them can take away some of their power (if not their consequences) and help prevent them in the future.  This drive can sometimes lead to her asking more questions than might be considered appropriate for any given situation, however.

Violet is aware that people are much harder to understand than most other things, and will often be reticent until she believes she understands someone well enough to predict their actions and reactions.  When she thinks she does understand someone, however, she sometimes states opinions as self-evident facts, and this can come across as arrogant.  She also finds it hard to empathize with someone not wanting to know everything, which makes her share bits of trivia or corrections of fact even with people who don't appreciate them.  Despite these abrasive tendencies, she’s genuinely good-hearted and would never try to make someone feel bad intentionally.

She speaks with a noticeable Irish accent, though softened a bit from living half her life in the US (and without most Irish colloquialisms, except when she's under particular stress).  If she remembers to think about it, she can adjust her tone and vocabulary based on whom she's speaking with, but her default setting is 'professor'.

History:
Moira Scully and Karl Ostrander dated while attending Trinity College together.  Moira was a native of Dublin and was pursuing an advanced engineering degree, but Karl had come all the way from Florida in search of a world-class linguistics program.  After they finished their Master's degrees, they decided they couldn't bear to part ways, and quickly got engaged.  Their first child, Andi, was born in 1993, and a handful of years later, another girl followed - they named her Violet.

Andi had always been a bright, inquisitive child, but it quickly became clear that her younger sister was in an entirely different category.  Violet could speak in full sentences at twelve months (her first word was "why?"), and was reading before she was two.  She seemed to be devoted to her older sister, and often pushed herself so that she could do the same things Andi was doing.  Even later, when Violet started to rush past Andi, her older sister was never jealous and only encouraged her, taking pride since Violet had been her 'student'.

Moira worked for Intel Ireland, and in 2002, she was offered a huge promotion, though it would require her to move to California.  Karl offered nothing but support, and the girls were only excited, since the United States and California in particular were near-mythical places from which wonders regularly sprung.  She accepted the offer and the whole family packed up and crossed the Atlantic.

Violet was home-schooled for as long as her parents could manage, but by 2006 they needed to rely on outside tutors (mostly starving UC grad-students and co-workers from Intel her mother managed to rope in), as Violet's studies progressed outside her parent's particular areas of confidence.  While she spent ever more of her time lost in books and on the Internet, Violet never lost her devotion to Andi.  So it was that when Andi had football (or soccer as they called it here) games, Violet got permissions to go along and cheer her sister.  She also compiled detailed statistics on both her sister's team and the opposing players, because as much as she loved Andi, football was otherwise terribly boring.

On the way home from an 'away' game, the school bus the team rode in was in a serious accident.  The driver and several students were killed, including Andi.  Most of the other students were injured as well, though Violet (who had been nearly alone in actually wearing her state-mandated seat belt) was physically unscathed.  Emotionally, she was shattered.  After weeks of refusing to do anything other than eat and sleep, Violet became obsessed with the details of the accident.  She pored over the police reports, the insurance investigation, the transcripts of the bus driver's excuses for not properly enforcing the use of seat belts.  She studied automotive mechanics, first aid and paramedic technique, traffic forensics, wrote a computer simulation of the entire incident.  The site of the accident was close enough to her home to walk there, and she did so often, no matter how often her parents begged her to stop. Eventually her mother arranged to be transferred back to Intel Ireland.  Her parents decided that staying where they were was too painful for them, and unhealthy for Violet.  Their instincts seemed to be good, as the distance helped the family gradually work through its grief and loss.

Violet pretended to be fine.  She was very good at pretending, but her parents also wanted to believe she was fine, and so they did.  But Violet knew nothing was fine...the world was horrible and awful and unfair, and the only chance she had to keep everyone safe was to understand every single thing about it.  She'd stop what horrors she could, and try to make sure whatever she couldn't wasn't repeated through negligence.

When an old woman in a ridiculous outfit showed up at the door on her eleventh birthday, Violet's first reaction was to be irritated at her parents that they'd hired an entertainer of some sort.  Even before the woman introduced herself, the girl discarded this hypothesis, as she had no friends to speak of and her traditional birthday celebration since she was five was not a party, but to be taken out to a symphony. (Violet, once she realized her intelligence was unusual for her age, had read up on child prodigies, noted that many of them spent an inordinate amount of time practicing musical instruments, and decided this was a huge waste of time which she would skip.  But she still liked the music.)

When the woman claimed she was on the Board of Governors of a school for *witchcraft* of all things, Violet wondered if a trick was being played on her for some reason, but her parents' baffled reactions argued against that - they weren't that good at pretending, at least not after Violet had taken advantage of years to study them.  A few practical demonstrations later, the Ostrander family sat in stunned silence.  Violet didn't consider the woman's tricks anything approaching rigorous proof, it wasn't the same thing as centuries of experimental validation.  But she *had* appeared to turn into a cat at one point - it was at least a pretty strong *suggestion* that the world might be a lot weirder than even quantum mechanics implied.

Violet knew that the sensible thing would be to think things over, get more information.  But she could very easily imagine her parents after Ms. McGonagall left, starting to rationalize away what they'd seen, that they couldn't just let Violet go off to some 'cult', that she had too much potential to be wasting it on something so bizarre and implausible and irrelevant to the world they lived in.  And even if they were right, Violet couldn't let that happen - now she had to *know*, and it sounded like if she didn't go to this school, she never would.  So she accepted on the spot, putting her parents in the position of trying to talk her out of it without feeling like they weren't being properly supportive, which they couldn't, really.

Even Diagon Alley didn't *completely* convince her.  As impressive as it was, she'd lived in California for several years and the Disney parks put forth just as much creativity and attention to detail.  Yes, it was *implausible* that an elaborate deception was being staged for some reason, but not impossible.  It wasn't until Mr. Ollivander picked a wand for her (his assertion that the wand picked the wizard seemed like an obvious lie meant for children - sticks did not 'have preferences', no matter how fancy they looked) that something actually sparked inside her, when she waved the wand and colored smoke swirled into a delicate helix that matched the braided carving along the walnut length.  She *felt* the magic, it was like she'd been living with one eye tightly shut her whole life and it had just opened and everything was so *bright*.  McGonagall looked satisfied, not in the least because the incident had finally stopped (at least for several blissful minutes) Violet's seemingly endless string of pointed questions.

Violet had been warned, sternly, not to attempt to do magic at home.  But with several months until classes began, she had ridiculously more time than she needed to read all of her school books - as well as most of the extra books she'd purchased - several times over.  The problem was, it didn't help.  They were full of the most ridiculous nonsensical things.  Even granting that yes, magic existed, and yes, she could apparently use it...just didn't make sense.  This *couldn't* be how the universe worked.  If she could just do some experimentation, maybe she'd figure out what was *really* going on.  What happened next was obvious, at least to someone who knew Violet, if not in a dramatic sense...namely that she just kept re-reading her books and did not touch her wand at all.

As it happened, Violet was not insane.  She'd been told not to do something by someone with both obvious authority and obvious experience.  Lacking some specific reason to think she was mistaken, that was plenty.  But even if she hadn't been told not to, upon learning that by waving a stick and saying something in peculiar not-really-Latin, she could *violate various laws of physics*, her second instinct (only a hair behind wonder) had been a kind of existential horror.  The proper place to experiment with such things, if such a place existed, was in a deserted space station orbiting the moon of an uninhabited planet, preferably inside the event horizon of a singularity if it could be arranged (then again, if the laws of physics could be violated, even a singularity might not be an escape-proof container anymore).  But failing such a secure lab, presumably this 'Hogwarts' would have safeguards against mishaps, or it would not have remained standing for the hundreds of years her books claimed it had.

The Sorting Hat, once she was under it, suggested she would probably fit in fine in Hufflepuff based purely on this incident of uncommon sense, and be much happier besides.  Violet thanked it politely, but noted that it was pretty obvious where she would be most *effective*, which was rather more important to her than simply being happy.  Ravenclaw would help her learn as quickly as possible, and if she *was* allowed to break the laws of physics, she intended on fixing a great many things that seemed wrong with the world at her very earliest opportunity.  The Hat seemed nonplussed by this and amended its suggestion to observe that intending to remake the world according to one's own preferences was a very Slytherin sort of goal, but Violet again politely declined.  Only an idiot would intend on taking over the world from Slytherin, because you'd be watched extra closely there - it was a commonly known fact (at least amongst her books) that Slytherin produced the vast majority of Dark witches, at least amongst those who had attended Hogwarts.  The Hat noted that this bit of logic certainly did not make her sound *less* Slytherin, but acquiesced to Violet's firm preference and called out "Ravenclaw!"

For her first few months at Hogwarts, Violet was extremely frustrated.  She was doing poorly in many of her classes, something which offended her deeply.  Even more so since she hadn't been allowed to sign up for any electives, and was only taking the basic course load.  The problem was that most of the classes were practical.  She could just parrot answers of course, nonsensical as they might sound - History of Magic, in particular, was pretty easy, and Astronomy was completely normal as well which was a very pleasant surprise.  But she was also expected to *use* the knowledge, and that was hard.  You could read all the books in the world on how to play football, but you still had to *do* it to actually learn.  There were other 'muggleborn', of course, but they were more typical children and didn't have quite so much to un-learn, whereas Violet's hard-won scientific intuition kept clashing with how spells actually functioned, and so as often as not she was terrible at it.  She didn't *want* magic to work this way, and thus - for her - it often didn't work at all.  Plus, again like football, there was another component...whatever the magical equivalents of strength and stamina were.  There were some spells that were thought to be beyond younger witches and wizards merely because they were very complicated to learn or intrinsically dangerous, but a great many spells simply required more 'magical strength', which Violet could apparently only gain through time and practice, and failed spells didn't seem to count in that direction.

One way or another, something had to give...

Classes:

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

Electives No No No No No

How Do You Fit Into Your House?:
Violet has various rationalizations for why she is the way she is, but learning has always been what she's best at, what she enjoys most, what she cares about.  Further, though the Hat offered both Hufflepuff and Slytherin to her, it must take the good of the Houses and the student's preference into account, and there was little doubt that Ravenclaw would be best equipped to cope with her personality.

Writing Sample:
Violet tried to catch her breath and get her bearings.  It was noisy - yelling, screaming, crying, combined with occasional sounds of groaning metal or crunching glass.  The pressure of the seat belt on her felt oddly tight on her left side, and she realized it was because the bus itself was lying on its left side, and she, on the right, was being held in place by the belt.  Obviously there'd been an accident, though the shock had been enough that she couldn't remember exactly what had happened.  Fortunately, aside from a sore neck, she seemed to be ok, but from the sounds of it, the members of her older sister's soccer team had fared less well.

Andi.  Vi whipped her head to the left, looking for her sister.  Like most of the children on the bus, she hadn't been wearing her seat belt, so was no longer on the seat next to Violet.  She saw, below her, several girls in a tangled heap, trying to sort themselves out.  Violet got a firm grip on her seat belt, then released the catch and swung downward.  She dangled for a moment, stretching out until her toes found the side of a seat below her, then carefully clambered down.

The girl on top of the pile wasn't Andi.  Violet tried to help her get up, but she was heavy, and she screamed hoarsely when her arm was moved.

"God, I'm sorry, I'm sorry...can you just...here, try to sit up, hold your arm with your other hand so it doesn't move..." The eight-year old did her best to maintain her composure, but the older girl's obvious pain and terror was unsettling her.  She managed to help get her sitting with her back against the seat.  Meanwhile, one of the girls who'd been underneath her was struggling to her feet, seeming more irritated than frightened.

"Ugh, Andi, get off me, would you?" she said, pushing at another girl and wriggling her legs out from under her.  "Andi...?  Oh, God," she breathed, raising a hand to cover her mouth.

Violet looked.  Andi's eyes were open, but they weren't moving.  One was half-red with blood.  There was a pool of blood underneath her head as well.  It wasn't growing.  Her chest did not rise and fall.

She's not...she's not...breathing.  I have to do something.  What?  I know this, it's...why don't I know this?  Violet pushed the other girl aside and clutched at her sister's shoulders.

"Andi?  Andi...you can't...you can't..." she began to cry now, of pure pain and frustration. Wrong...wrong...you don't move someone like that, she could have a broken neck, you could damage her spine...but she's already...CPR!  That's it, CPR.  Violet quickly brought to mind the most recent CPR guidelines and positioned herself properly.  "Give me room," she said to the other girl, "I have to do CPR."

"Violet...she's..." began the other girl - Rachel, her name was Rachel - hesitantly, tugging at Violet's arm to try to turn her away.

"She's not breathing, I have to do CPR!" shouted Violet, not letting her finish, knowing what she'd been about to say.  She yanked her arm away and put her hand underneath Andi's neck and lifted, to tilt her head back properly.  She froze, and slowly pulled her hand away, staring at it dully.  It was covered in blood, and some hair, and other things which another child might not have been able to identify, but Violet could easily guess and knew very well ought to have not been there.  Rachel turned away and retched noisily.

Violet wiped her hand on her skirt and continued the steps of CPR anyway, her motions mechanical but determined, and her tears didn't stop.

Sum up your character in one paragraph:
Violet Ostrander is brilliant but socially awkward, and intellectually stubborn.  She always means well, but her raw intelligence is not entirely tempered by much wisdom, and even less experience.  If she can figure out how to reconcile her muggle beliefs with Hogwarts teachings, she's bound to become a force to be reckoned with.