Physical Description

Gwendolyn has the high forehead and pointier jawline of many in her family, with broader features set on a narrow face. Her hazel eyes are often stuck in a lingering stare, one that regularly appears unsettling or uncaring. Even wide-eyed, she can look somewhat menacing. Gwen’s gaze is accompanied by pale, freckle-prone skin, a round nose, and wide, attractive mouth.

Gwen rarely bothers with makeup and hair-styling when she isn’t being paid to make herself blend in or stand out. Her dark-and-casual countenance often gives off a blase quality, one that is easily passed over in black-clad London crowds. Her hair is usually parted down the middle, limp but smooth at top, and a bit wavy toward the bottom as it ends in long layers near her shoulders. Her locks are almost black, with a slight auburn tone that is usually only noticeable in the sun.

The witch stands at 5’5 and is slim in an unremarkable way. Her pear shape is slight: somewhat narrow shoulders and a very small bust, longer torso and thighs that hold natural muscle. Gwen is soft in places and moderately toned in others, mostly from an active day job and typical young person’s diet.

Personality Description

Gwendolyn is quick on her feet, someone who slips in and out of a scene before she's noticed. Her capabilities have as much to do with street smarts and taking wisdom to heart as they have to do with book smarts or formal education. Memory is her greatest asset. She understands big pictures, but also knows that seemingly innocuous, small details or apparent dead ends are not what they seem; she remembers the little things and finds her way around roadblocks, often in head-smacking ways that make people wonder why they didn’t think of it first. While she is always trying out new bits of magic and accumulating tools, she doesn’t forget the sage old advice of not trying to fix what isn’t broken.

While her good memory helps her to avoid repeating mistakes in her professional life, Gwen still makes plenty (by choice or otherwise) on a more human level. Like her cousin, she can be a bit of a night owl. Bad habits don’t deter her when making friends, though Gwendolyn is certainly a people reader. She doesn’t always feel the need to say something, which can be a little unsettling or tense for the other party. Intuition plays a large role in her gauging of others. When she is talking, she actually has great range. But, in large part due to her job and the professional mistrust it entails, she sometimes comes across a little stinging, or at least standoffish. She has never been great at trusting others, but her job does not help.

The witch needs her down time, too: time to contemplate or do absolutely nothing, or a bit of both. She will spend a day off lounging around— and happens to think there’s nothing wrong with it, so long as no one is depending on her. She has weird, sometimes girlish, and occasionally endearing habits, like eating cereal from mugs, lip-synching songs at her ceiling, and rigging smoke alarms with all manner of things. Her laugh, when she’s caught off guard, can be childish.

Gwen  isn’t mean, but she isn’t the warmest, fuzziest type, either, not in her natural state. Upon appearance, she is not the first person someone would approach for directions. She simply doesn’t give off that air. When she’s having a particularly hard time with a case, her moodiness is often a little more apparent. Gwen can't let go of a mystery.

Despite a nearing-unapproachable nonchalance, though, Gwendolyn is a very good actor: a trait one might pick up in an old wizarding family full of ambitious types who secretly want to murder each other if they have to spend more than five minutes together. This helps on the job, where she employs it the most. Otherwise, she defaults to the same cool and casual exterior.

History

Gwendolyn Irving is the oldest child in her family, one of two girls, which is perhaps poor luck depending on which Irving you ask. Her father, luckily, came to accept quite early that he might end up with only female heirs, and is not particularly bothered by the idea of the family name dwindling. His brother can take care of that.

At a young age, Gwendolyn spent boring summers minding little cousins. These were among the first people she bounced ideas off of as she solved mysteries: who broke their grandmother’s vase, why her uncle was avoiding his wife, who the next Minister of Magic would be based on the facial expressions at the adults’ dinner table. While these behaviors were often chastised by elders, her father seemed to encourage them just as often, and Gwen’s more precocious habits— like reciting things she had memorized— were also encouraged.

Despite showing promise, Gwendolyn was sometimes a strange child, a little reflective or quiet for some adults’ liking. She could entertain herself for hours, and often preferred it to playing with others. Some children, she flat out found boring. She did not always have the glossiest way of communicating this.

Professors at Hogwarts seemed to find her talents more promising, and though there were a few classes that did little to inspire, Gwendolyn did mostly well in terms of marks. She probably could have landed herself in the auror training program or gone into the Department of Mysteries, and for a while the former seemed almost a sure bet. But Gwendolyn has never been particularly fond of authority, a trait which largely hampered those hopes of her parents.

After graduating, she accidentally fell into her first investigatory job while working at a Diagon Alley shop. By luck, she gave the right advice to the right customer— a monied conspiracy theorist hellbent on revenge against his brother for some seemingly imaginary sabotage. The customer, intrigued, invited her to help, and within days, Gwen solved a decades’ old “mystery,” providing the man with all of the evidence he needed for vengeance… which turned out to be not vengeful at all, but a brotherly truce.

The rush the job provided had Gwendolyn doing all kinds of research into making it a proper job— but mostly, becoming a Private Investigator was a journey of trial and error. By summer’s end, she had racked up enough clients by word of mouth to cut her shop shifts in half and take work out of her flat. A year later, and with a half-dozen new friends from similar walks of life, she began investigating full-time.

Career

Describe your job duties and how you go about them.

The sorts of jobs Gwendolyn is hired for fall into a few categories. More often than not, a client has a personal problem of a morally or ethically delicate nature, if not a legally dodgy one. Heavier cases involve blackmail or political sabotage, tracing the source of embarrassing information that might ruin a client’s reputation. Other times, Gwen will be hired to conduct gray, under the table investigations by established institutions, like banks and governmental departments who can’t afford to be seen investigating certain things. She will occasionally be asked to investigate things by fringe groups or hysteric conspiracy theorists, or those looking for justice or retribution in a supposedly solved crime.

Less exciting daily tasks include archiving memories in pensieve vials for record-keeping and mind-guarding purposes, clipping often arbitrary articles from various news outlets, and recording things aired on the wireless. Some of these records serve more as an insurance policy than a personal need for remembering (which Gwendolyn usually can without much effort).

Fieldwork requires a lot of patience and blending in in public. Gwendolyn sometimes waits hours while keeping tabs on suspects; other times, she has only seconds to react or slip past important people.

Elaborate on your expertise in your field.

Gwendolyn did well in school, perhaps, in some cases, more out of habit and ease with the structure than passion for all of her subjects. Nevertheless, she does have a passion for consuming and retaining knowledge: tiny details, the insignificant. She is not the sprightly sort who will always babble on about these fascinations (plenty of them are, in fact, quite droll), but she likes to keep them stored in her mind for a rainy day. Spy’s good luck.

She’s very good at blending in, watching, listening, following, and using her resources— from Weasley’s inventions to old newspapers to her wand.

Summary

Sum up your character in one paragraph.

Gwendolyn is a private investigator with an excellent memory and a knack for cracking wizarding mysteries. Her personal life is a bit of a work in progress, but she isn’t particularly bothered by that.