[Nicknames:] Cass, Cassie

[Character Birthday & Age:] July 20, 1989 / 20 years old

[City & Country of Birth:] Hounslow, London, England

[Pureblood, Halfblood or Muggleborn?:]  Half-Blood (Muggle Mother)

[Alma Mater:]  Hogwarts, Hufflepuff

[Job Title]: Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, Clerk/Apprentice Enchanter

[Wand:] Hornbeam, 11 3/4 inches, phoenix feather core, springy with a deosil spiral   




[Build/Body type:] Average/Curvy

[Estimated Height/Weight:] 5’2”, 120 lbs.

[Hair color:] Dark brown, naturally, but always dyed or charmed eye-searing and unnatural shades (blue, purple, green).

[Eye color:] Brown (still working on an eye-coloring charm that doesn’t have unpleasant side-effects)

[Skin color:] Pale/warm

[First Impression:] Upon meeting Cassie, you might suspect that she was making deliberately jarring fashion choices, trying to be impossible to ignore.  After talking to her for more than a minute, you’d quickly mark that suspicion QED.  She often wears a mischievous smile that, while she was at Hogwarts, struck deep terror into the hearts of the joyless, but is otherwise quite fetching.

[Distinguishing Features:] Aside from her hair, Cassiopeia also dresses unusually, favoring modern muggle ‘street’ styles over typical wizarding fashion.  She is occasionally accompanied by her familiar, Tesla, a vervet monkey.





Cassie is an unstoppable force of positive chaos.  Her energy feeds into her personal drives, making most of her projects turn out as fantastic successes or spectacular failures, with little in-between.  Her vigour is invaluable in keeping her motivated, but when she deals with people she can sometimes come on a bit too strong.

She has a very creative mind, when it comes to coming up with new jokes or gadgets, or theories on how muggle technology works, and often finds inspiration in the most random things.  This also can make her distractable and unfocused, though more often in conversation than when she’s working.  Much of her creativity - including her style choices - stems from a deep desire to distinguish herself from the rest of her exotic and/or talented siblings.

Cassiopeia’s playful nature and lifelong love of pranking has never dimmed.  She’s always contrite if someone is (rarely) truly hurt or offended by one of her jokes - at least, if they’re not a prat - but no one she likes is off limits for pranks, no matter how strenuously they may have objected to the last one.  Cassie can be impulsive, though, often not thinking through all the consequences of an idea before putting it into practice.

Her carefree perkiness makes her irresistible to certain types of guys, and she’s a serial dater.  She can be very romantic and devoted in the moment, but never quite develops relationships into anything exclusive or serious.  Partially because she’s not sure what she wants, partially because if she ever does make a commitment, she’ll feel bound to follow it to the end...and partially because she’s had a long-standing crush on her boss, George Weasley.  Sometimes - in her less-proud moments - Cass fantasizes that her employer’s wife and children are just a *really* elaborate prank that Fred set up as a last-blast before his death, and one day they’ll explode into fireworks that spell ‘gotcha!’, leaving him both emotionally vulnerable and romantically available.

It’s probably worth noting at this point that Cassie is no exception to the Grimlish family’s attitudes toward death and other macabre topics, and she’s fully inherited her father’s sense (or lack thereof) of appropriate boundaries for pranks.

Cass is obsessed with muggle technology.  She finds it both intrinsically fascinating (“trained lightning”, she sometimes calls electronics), and of practical value, determined to find ways to re-purpose muggle artefacts, as well as find magical methods of reproducing anything worthwhile they come up with.  Specifically, ever since she heard about it, she’s always wanted to find a way to follow their path to the Moon.  Practically speaking, she hasn't made much progress yet, but it apparently took a whole passle of muggles six years to manage it, and she’s only seriously been at it by herself for three, so she’s not at all discouraged yet.



Cassiopeia Otylia Grimlish was born July 20, 1989 to Osgood and Antoinette Grimlish.  She was delivered in the Grimlish family mansion in Hounslow - rather than some exotic locale, to her later disappointment.  Her early childhood was rather idyllic - born to a wealthy wizarding family, raised in a wonderfully interesting old mansion, with one sister just young enough to still play with and two more grown up enough to look up to.  Her father’s frequent family pranks instilled in her early on a cavalier attitude towards frightening or unpleasant situations.

On her sixth birthday in 1995, Cassie was taken to a shopping mall in muggle London by her mother (a muggle herself).  She’d asked to make the trip specifically - she found her mother’s stories about the muggle world endlessly fascinating.  While they were there, they passed one of those booths selling crude dot-matrix printouts of your ‘biorhythms’ and supposedly interesting things that had happened in history on your birthday.  Cassie begged for one, then pestered her mother for the rest of the day with questions.

Her mother shrugged at the biorhythm graphs and suggested it was probably “what your father calls Arithmancy”, and she understood them just as little as she did that.  But she did her best to explain all the unfamiliar muggle names and concepts in the ‘On Your Birthday Throughout History’ section.  Cassiopeia was shocked and delighted to learn that, exactly twenty years before she was born, some muggles had - somehow involving a giant metal firework - first walked on the Moon.  Some years later they had apparently landed a Norseman on Mars, which she supposed was impressive, but Mars was just a dot, whereas she could see the Moon.  When she learned that this was a feat that had not yet been duplicated with magic - not that anyone in the wizarding world had seen any good reason to try -  Cassie was duly impressed and decided right then that she wanted to learn all she could about muggle artefacts.

The next couple years became a little scarier.  Opie, who was going to Hogwarts with Harry Potter, said that a boy got killed in the Triwizard Tournament, and Harry Potter said that You-Know-Who was back, though everyone said he was just crazy or wanted attention or something.  But the next year, the Ministry itself actually confirmed it.  Her father didn’t want to talk about it with her, but Rhiannon explained that You-Know-Who and the Death Eaters thought that wizards and witches should only marry each other and not muggles, because muggles might infect their children with non-magicness, but that was obviously wrong since mother was a muggle and all of her daughters were wonderful witches, except Cassiopeia, who was stunted and would probably never have magic and was bound to become a muggle plumbing assistant instead and blow herself up (Rhiannon’s grasp of muggle technology was no better than that of most witches).
 
In early 1997, the family was visited by Uncle Osiris, Osgood’s brother.  He rarely visited, because the rest of father’s family was rather sympathetic to Death Eaters, but after he left, father said they all had to pack up and move immediately, because “Britain isn’t fit company for a Grimlish right now”.  They ended up in South Africa, which sorely irritated Rhiannon, who’d been pulled out of Hogwarts in her second year.  But Cassie was thrilled, as she finally got to go on the sort of foreign adventure that the family’d had constantly before she was born.

They were joined by other wizarding families, some who just thought Britain was too dangerous, some who had actually been the targets of attacks or kidnapping attempts.  It cast a more serious cloud over the otherwise adventurous air of the camp, and Cassie decided she needed to do what she could to be useful.  Though the adults could aguamenti clean drinking water, it was too slow to get enough for washing and bathing for the large camp, so they’d acquired a muggle water filtration system.  Even at eight, Cass did her best to help with it, and actually came to understand it better than anyone except the few muggle spouses that had joined the refugees.

The local wizarding folk - though they had other names for it - had magic that was unusual.  Some of them occasionally used wands, of course, but they did other kinds of charms that were long and often involved chants and dancing.  Her father studied with them encouraged his daughters to learn what they could as well - Cassie threw herself into this with vigour, since she was still years from receiving her first wand.  She impressed the locals - and surprised her family - when at the age of eight she was able to perform the equivalent of the Mending Charm after a very determined ten minutes of exhausting spinning and dancing.  She’d been motivated, since she kept fouling up the water filtration system with her efforts to ‘improve’ it, and now it was easier to recover from those minor setbacks without upsetting - or indeed, informing - anyone.

The locals rewarded her efforts with a novel familiar, a quite smart vervet monkey, though they were as confused as everyone else when she declared she would name it Tesla.  She’d read a book about him before they’d left, and he seemed like the closest the muggles had ever come to having a real wizard on their side, but of course they hadn't understood him properly, which was sort of what you expected from muggles who weren't reasonable like mother.

In due course, word reached the camp that Harry Potter had killed Voldemort and the “Second Wizarding War”, as they were calling it, had ended.  There was vast relief and celebration, and almost all of the refugees went back to their homes.  But the Grimlishes had become too attached to the locals, and decided to stay to help - even as they learned more about it, it was clear the local magic wasn't nearly as easy to use for most things, and plus the natives lived alongside their own muggles, who couldn't use magic at all.

As interesting and rewarding as it was - though she hadn't had much success with anything else, by the time she was almost eleven, Cass could now pull off a wandless Mending with only a couple of quick pirouettes and some spirited clapping - Cassie itched to get back home, where it was much more convenient to acquire of muggle artefacts to take apart.  Plus, she was almost of age, and the nearest school for proper witches was not very well thought of.  Her parents apparently agreed with the latter sentiment, and in June 2000, the family bade a tearful farewell to all the friends they’d made, then moved back to Hounslow in time for Cassiopeia to receive her Hogwarts letter.

Their return also brought another discovery - Marietta now had two children, a twin boy and girl only a few years younger than Cassiopeia.  The family shrugged off the eldest sister's claims about the children coming from her vampire beau no one had ever seen, and welcomed them warmly.  Cassie only had a few months to get to know them before she boarded the Hogwarts Express, and they were a little nervous and wary at first, but she did her best to make them feel at home - family was family.

The Sorting Hat declared her an interesting case.  She certainly had ambitions grand enough for a Slytherin, but lacked the requisite willingness to manipulate others to achieve them.  The Hat thought her natural curiosity would serve her well in Ravenclaw, but Cassie refused - she wanted to be different from her sisters, and two of them had been Ravenclaws already.  The Hat hemmed and hawed a bit between the remaining options, but decided the girl's dedication and energy outweighed her courage by a hair, and shouted out,"Hufflepuff!"  The House table welcomed her enthusiastically, though if they'd known how many points she was going to lose them over the next seven years, the applause might've been dimmed a bit (but only a bit, they were Hufflepuffs after all).

While they'd lived in Africa, Ophelia had often told stories about her time at Hogwarts to help people with homesickness.  In particular, Cassie had eagerly hung on every word of the daring exploits of the Weasley Twins, who sounded like father on Pepper-Up potions and then doubled.  Plus, as they'd been very sad to hear when they got back, Fred had died valiantly in the Battle of Hogwarts, and she thought his memory deserved to be honoured.  So of course, when classes began, the eager Hufflepuff used the Weasleys as direct role models for her own behaviour.  After she was nearly expelled twice in her first month, her father owled her a letter about how while True Pranking knew no limits, if she wanted to learn enough magic to do some really wicked things later on, she'd need to more carefully pick her times and targets...or not get caught.  This made a certain amount of sense, so Cassie settled down a bit, enough to merely flirt with records for house points lost and detentions received, but shy of actual expulsion.

By the time her third year rolled around, Cassie had managed to pick up enough evasive manoeuvres and knowledge of secret passages that she rarely received even detentions, which was important, since she was now permitted to visit Hogsmeade, and detentions that could keep you from that had real bite.  Her first trip there was a typically wonderful experience.  She'd deliberately saved most of her spending money over the summer so she could go on a shopping extravaganza at Zonko's, and her dozens of purchases obviously included a wide variety of Weasley Wizard Wheezes products.  As it happened, one of the larger ones had a small animated picture of George on the back of the box, winking at her.  Her heart went all fluttery...she'd recently started looking at boys with more than casual interest, but this was George Weasley, winking at her.  Even after the contents were long-gone, she would keep the flattened box under her pillow for the remainder of her years at Hogwarts.

In her fifth year, she had the treat of her niece and nephew starting school.  Eli and Evie, being family, got a double-dose of pranking compared to her other classmates.  But Cassie also made a point of giving them help and pointers and short-cuts.  Cass had received advice from her sisters, but over the years she'd often wished she could've overlapped and had a higher-year looking out for her, so she did her level best to fill that role for the twins.

As her final year approached, Cassie longed for some oppressive evil a-la Umbridge to take over the school so she could go out in a blaze of glory as the Weasley's had.  But alas, Hogwarts remained firmly in the hands of largely benevolent educators, and she reluctantly decided that without the moral high-ground, such a dramatic exit wouldn't go over as well.

That said, bare minutes after Cassiopeia Grimlish departed on the Hogwarts Express for the last time, every four-legged piece of furniture in the school simultaneously animated and started running around like excited puppies, chasing the remaining staff and each other alike.  In later years, rumours would whisper that the staff hadn't managed to finite everything, and to this day there were still a few chairs and a divan prowling the upper hallways in a pack, chasing down anyone who took Hogwarts too seriously.  While the prank was never definitively traced to her, three details remained suspicious.  First, a handwritten list was discovered in the Hufflepuff girl's dorms which, based on the dates and check-marks in the margins, suggested that the furniture in question had been carefully inventoried and tracked down one at a time over the course of the entire school year.  Second, witnesses reported that as the Express pulled away from the school, Cassiopeia Grimlish was overcome with a fit of giggling that lasted for nearly fifteen minutes, and which she refused to explain.  Third, shortly thereafter, upon applying to Weasley's Wizard Wheezes for a position, Ms. Grimlish was hired after a suspiciously short closed-door interview, during which George Weasley was reportedly overcome with similarly unexplained laughter.








Most of the time she draws a small wage as a clerk, stocking shelves, helping customers and settling sales.  She's also in training as an enchanter, receiving a piece-commission on creating much of the shop's stock (the non-edible bits anyway - she’d always been rubbish with Potions) and trying to get her own new ideas to work.

Cassie spent the majority of her years at Hogwarts following in *the* Weasley's footsteps, pranking her way to infamy.  Her only N.E.W.T. 'O's were in Charms and Transfiguration, not from particularly applying herself in class, but due entirely to her self-directed efforts to learn new tools for creative mayhem.  She's also obsessed with muggle technology, and her (still often completely inaccurate) understanding of how it works gives her ideas for brilliant new 3W gadgets, a couple of which didn't even cause embarrassing explosions.




Cassie is an exuberant free-spirit, determined to make her mark by bringing light and laughter to the world.  She's always tinkering with muggle artifacts, and would love to travel to the Moon someday, even if she has to build one of their over-sized fireworks herself!