Wand

Odette still possesses her Ollivander wand, which she keeps beneath her pillow in the hopes of performing magic again. It is 11 and 1/4 inches, willow, and unicorn hair. It is decidedly sweet, an agreeable thing to all who hold it, and radiates warmth that Odette can not quite attain any longer.

Physical Description

Odette has shoulder-skimming light brown hair which tends to go frizzy at the ends and a bit flat at the top if she waits too long or not long enough between washes. Even vampirism hasn’t allowed her to master that cool, shampoo commercial swing that she goes for when she runs a brush through her locks. When she dwells on this fact, though, she tends to remember that she’ll look 19 forever… and hair-washing becomes the least of her trying-to-look-good worries. Sometimes a girl would just like to buy a drink without people wondering about her Trace. Even if the only drinks she craves of late are St. Mungo’s blood bags.

Odette’s wideset eyes are a pleasing, gentle blue that holds none of the eeriness of of a certain vampire editor's gaze. Still as expressive as they were in witchhood, her orbs are not particularly accommodating of deception. Though she can lie in pinch, they do nothing to help her pull it off. Her saving grace is that a natural blush is much less frequent now.

She has an especially cute nose, upturned and well-matched with her wide mouth. They lend a silliness that is at odds with the stereotypical chill of her condition.

The young woman stands at a 5’6” with a modest chest, slim hips, and longish legs. Her theatre uniform does Odette no favors. Baggy at the waist, unceremonious at the bust, and perfectly boring from the belt loops down, it tends to make her figure blend in to whatever crimson curtain hangs behind her at any given moment during work hours. Off hours, Odette is usually a jeans and jumper girl, and after a long shift she usually trades her uniform for pajamas (cotton shorts and a t-shirt). Dressing up tends to involve a sun dress and a few strands of hair clipped back. She does have a sweet spot for blusher.

Personality Description

Odette is a warm, immediately companionable sort of girl. Having been raised by an auror and an innkeeper, it's in her nature to help others and to show hospitality. While this makes her ideal for her current role as an usher at the Royal Opera, it is not necessarily the first thing that springs to mind when one thinks of a vampire. A friendly hello from a fanged, blood-gulping Being is harder to swallow than a quick hi from a cheery if mousy Ministry witch. For this reason, Odette has suffered a bit of an identity crisis, and sometimes her friendliness can come across as a desperation to be liked. There are such things as overly helpful, overly chatty, and overly theatric-- and Odette can be all three.

Her optimism has not entirely disappeared, despite her current (and permanent) predicament. She still tends to be easily excited by good news, to cling to those small adventures and advancements that she's allotted now that the Ministry keeps close tabs (but also keeps her on the outside). But they are few and far between these days, and Odette finds herself wanting to rip her hair out as often as she finds a reason to laugh these days. Until vampirism, she never considered bad luck to be a fixed characteristic. And if she still believes such things are for downers, its much easier to fall into their trap now. Her first reaction to potential doom is panic. Her second is escape. What lies beneath is an earnest desire to right wrongs, climb walls, and seek a better life. Sometimes it just takes a while to get to that part-- and its often much easier to see for others than for herself.

The young vampire is exactly the sort who gets in over her head. Often. In her eagerness to stretch her wings beyond the low wage job and life she's scraped together of late, she can be clumsy or miscalculate. She's been chastised, shooed off, and even Silencio'ed a couple of times at work or at St. Mungo's for routine bloodwork (ha). She's deluged her case worker with her dreamy streak, only to be shut down (and tiptoe around advice or common sense). She's been warned more than once that her condition is not becoming to... anyone. Though she is perfectly smart enough to understand the gravity of things at the end of the day (albeit a long day), the minute details can be maze-like to navigate. She is still a teenager, after all.

The Hufflepuff's alum's unique brand of patience is usually channeled into things like gardening, choosing books, and dreamily standing post at the theatre. A strict diet of blood does not preclude culinary aptitude. Odette makes the meanest popcorn in town-- and has tried more than once to suggest it for the Opera House's menu. She is less adept at lying to authority figures, keeping her condition a secret, or turning into a bat. The fact that she has had to avoid her muggle family post-transformation has made her attempts especially messy.

History

CHILDHOOD

Odette is the only child of the late auror Cornelius Fairchild and his muggle wife, Mary, an innkeep who runs a cute old hotel and pub on the coast of Devon. The pair met in muggle London on a strangely agreeable day, weatherwise-- Mary was on a day trip, escaping the height of the tourist season back home and enjoying the sleek window offerings, while Cornelius was strolling back from a standard Leaky Cauldron lunch with his squad. The wizard had only a moment to meet her lovely gaze before it was wrenched away, those blue eyes darting in horror after a thief with a pocket knife who had nicked her purse. Knowing he couldn't very well leave it at that, lest he long for another chance encounter with that stare for years to come, Cornelius did what was instinctive for an auror-- and a fool-headed young man with a crush-- and darted after the petty criminal with his wand flashing before him. The thief was so bewildered by the laser-beam antics of the man's brandishes stick that he dropped the purse not halfway down the block and took refuge at the back of a slow-moving bus. And for Cornelius and Mary both, it was a short walk back to fate.

For years to come, Mary would groan over her own helplessness in the moment-- and smile delightedly when Cornelius insisted he hadn't called the Obliviators because he'd already been in love. And in fact, there was a romance in it: Cornelius could easily have lost his job, or at least have been harshly reprimanded for performing magic in front of muggles. And Mary could have called him mad, or insisted she herself had gone that way for what she had seen. But their trust in one another was immediate, and it lead to many an adventure-- some the normal, boring sort, and others bigger, darker. Thy were pieces that simply fit.

By the time Odette came wailing into the world, Mary's tight-knit family of innkeeps had welcomed Cornelius in as a son: a heroic London cop from a solid background with earnest aims. The sort of lad who would provide for Mary and Odette and retire to the sea to help continue the family business.

Odette's life began in the muggle world. From an early age, she knew her father was "special." If Cornelius had warned Mary that Odette would likely be special, too, it was a far off thing for the young mother, who had grown up chatting over a bar's edge with tourists from every walk of life. And so things happened in the usual, at least for a while. Odette went to nursery school, the muggle park, the muggle beach. She learned her letters with muggle books and sang muggle nursery rhymes. Her father occasionally read her little faiytales from a pocket-sized book by she'd thought was written by a beetle. But life was otherwise 'normal,' and good.

At five-years-old, Odette noticed the change in her once-twinkling father. Longer hours at work, a slimmer, scruffier face, a grayness that hung over him, despite his youth. He'd leave for work in the morning and not return for nearly a week. Her mother would stand in front of the kitchen sink, glancing over and over a the funny clock with her father's name on it, the one that said he was somewhere between Scotland and Unplottable-- when he'd told her grandparents he was training police forces overseas.

It was around this time the first signs of magic popped up. On a windless, humid late summer's day, Odette's kite would be the only one on the beach to find a wind-- and not just that, but dance. Its cloth ends would twist impossibly, taking up the mambo, an Irish jig, a Swan Lake solo. Only after the third time had Cornelius found the hours to hurry down to the beach and scoop up a delighted Odette-- blaming new-fangled American toys and banning her from the beach in the process. All the while Mary grew ever more anxious, worried for her husband and daughter.

Cornelius did his best to make it up to Odette, where he could. He began to show her magic, little bits of joy she could keep for herself in his absence. Mary had never banned it from the house. There had simply been an understanding that Odette was too young, that their world was too muggle, and that people liked to talk. But as became plainer and plainer that their child was not a normal one, Cornelius became ever more brazen and comfortable with performing wand magic for his little family. One evening he returned home from work early, looking somehow refreshed-- determined-- and performed a long, complicated series of spells that even young Odette knew were meant to keep her safe from the creaks in the floorboards and the dark corners of her room at night. Sharing this little bit of this world was a rare comfort to the man, something that brought back the energy of the young man who had swept Mary off her feet. Elsewise, he was a weary, closed book.

Late the next spring, after Odette's crying fits over the beach, the sweet the little magic shows, and the loss of a few teeth, Odette saw Cornelius for the last time. He'd promised a treat from the tooth fairy, hugged her goodbye, and stepped tiredly into the fireplace. It was nearly May of 1998.

It wasn't until June that the lonely owl came, in broad daylight, with regrets and regards from the Ministry for Magic, her father's wand, and a posthumous Order of Merlin, First Class.

HOGWARTS YEARS

The letter did very little to put everything into perspective-- perhaps Odette was looking at it from the perspective of a muggle world, her father the lone wizards in it. The fairytales and bits of history he'd supplied her with could hardly summarize the entire culture that lay hidden in plain sight. And Odette's mother, heartbroken and confused, was more a source of confusion and frustration than answers. It was not until her eleventh birthday some years later-- during which they fell into a ordinary muggle routine and regarded Odette's own peculiarities as a nervous laugh, the source of which was ever on the periphery-- that the answers finally came.

The visit from the Hogwarts staff might have been a scene from Cinderella, complete with the singing mice. Odette was so overwhelmed-- enchanted, enamored-- with what sprawled beyond the bricks of the Leaky Cauldron's back wall that nearly forgot her frustration with that M for Ministry emblazoned upon the now-faded letter back home. It was nostalgic, but new. Her brain buzzed with her father's stories, the tales of creatures and cauldrons and Hogwarts. With an Ollivander wand, arms full of heavy books, and parchment paper that was at once less convenient and more fantastic than her muggle schoolmates' fresh new composition journals, the child returned home and chatted her mother's ear off about the wonders of Cornelius' world. About how she would certainly be a Gryffindor like her father, or maybe a Hufflepuff-- they sounded suspiciously famimliar-- but definitely not a Slytherin. Mary smiled, gripped a dish rag tightly, and baked her daughter a cake while warning her not to get in over her head.

It was the hardest thing Mary would ever do, letting Odette go flying through the wall between platforms 9 and 10 at King's Cross. Her hands were shaking by the time she let go of the trolley. She'd had to pinch her own palms to stop them from migrating to Odette's coat (no, cloak) and yanking her back to safety. For Mary, her daughter was off into a world of romance, heroes like Cornelius, and danger.

Despite the visit to Diagon and the explanation of the magical world that the school visitor had given her, nothing could quite have prepared Odette for Hogwarts. It was truly beyond words. Though she'd waffled between exceptional loyalty to her father's house and a desire to test the limits of her character, the hat, like her heart, knew the truth. Hufflepuff it was. And if there was any disappointment, it melted as the hat slipped off and a table erupting in cheer beckoned her forth. The badgers were home. They were like Cornelius, a giant, loyal hug, with their own sort of bravery. They were certainly not afraid to get their hands dirty or defend what was right.

The cloud of Cornelius' absence seemed to dissipate, the more time Odette spent in the wizarding world. Her father's fairytales unfolded before her eyes, and the young witch began to feel a connection she'd thought was fading. More and more, Hogwarts became her home, as it had for so many students before her.

That first summer was a growth spurt in more ways than one. Odette overwhelmed her mother from the start: Wingardium this and Lumos that, trolls and leprechauns and doxies. Be-robed, wand-wielding, gravity-defying characters that could not possibly have popped out of her daughter's imagination. And pumpkin flavored everything. Though Mary was patient, kind, tried to encourage Odette where she could, her motherly and muggle worries both only grew. The life she'd imagined for herself and her daughter-- a quiet, seaside existence, comfortable and hospital and safe-- slipped further and further away, toward that muggle-repelling snippet of Scotland. It was not until much later in life that Odette came to understand this.

As her years at Hogwarts progressed, the young witch excelled in Herbology, History of Magic, and Transfiguration, all subjects that required an ironic amount of patience. Odette could be patient, despite her boisterous spirit. It showed itself in the form of nursery rhymes hummed to Mandrakes, vigorous Eraser Charms on essays about the development of the Ministry, and piles upon piles of socks that had been discarded for the one perfectly Transfigured into a telescope.

These seemingly random strengths created a perfect storm of candidacy for a not-so-cushy internship in the Department of Magical Transportation-- the closest Odette could get to a gig in urban planning, lest she manage Transfigure herself into a certifiable genius and qualify for a chance in Spell Development. But baby steps, right? By the start of her sixth year, she had earned those intern stripes and proudly wore a tiny broom badge that recognized her as a coffee-brewer, file-fetcher, and reader-of-hastily-marked-calendars. If she lost it in her first few weeks back at school, it did not make it any less earned.

POST HOGWARTS

Upon graduation, Odette was welcomed back to the Ministry with open arms (as open as Ministry arms could be), this time in a full-time, paid position as a Transportation department liaison who worked with International Cooperation to facilitate swift, happy travels across boarders.

Oh, how short-lived it was.

Hardly a half-year into her life as an official Ministry official, Odette took a wrong turn down the wrong alley at the wrong time of night. In the most unceremonious of vampire transformations, she was left for dead... and instead woke up with aching teeth, a sore, a sticky neck, and what felt like a massive hangover.

The headache subsided almost instantly, the tingling teeth did not. The pain was replaced by fear. Scrambling for her wand-- which would not cooperate-- Odette fled the scene, chased down by a pub owner and his underlings, and their huge, batty brooms. (Neither the cool sort of batty, nor the cool sort of brooms). It was not until she had followed a group of elderly wizards onto the Knight Bus (dodging looks at her blotchy, horror-scene garb) and huddled in a back seat that she had a chance to glimpse her drained face-- or lack thereof in the distorted reflection of the handrail. Odette bobbed this way and that, ignoring the blood and disorientation, and tried to coax a reflection. She might as well have been a ghost. Indeed, even the driver's mirrors did not pull through. Odette, reflexively rubbing her head, wondered if she wasn't really quite smashed.

Too anxious to sleep and too wary to ask fellow passengers whether they could see her (for clearly they had thrown looks her way at the door), the witch flagged her stop and fled the bus. In the bright, unforgiving lights of public muggle toilet, Odette realized just why her teeth felt so sharp. And why she mightn't see her reflection ever again.

Not an hour later, the forlorn, terrified former witch stepped not into her flat or the wait room of St. Mungo's, but into the lobby of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.

"I think I'm a vampire," she told a stern-faced old witch, who must have raised her eyebrows for the first time in a decade.

Describe your job duties and how you go about them.

Odette arrives for each shift about an hour after sunset. As summer draws nearer and the days grow longer, this is often means she starts work after the curtain call, but the management have politely accepted the confines of her condition. Odette makes up for it by staying later than most of her colleagues during the warmer months. Or will-- she has yet to work a full summer, though she's both looking forward to it and rather terrified at the prospect.

When she arrives for her shift, she usually helps prepare for events by checking that every red curtain is in place, the seats are empty of surprises, and the endless, spotless plush carpets haven't been trampled upon prematurely. She then helps usher and direct the night's foot traffic, and ends the rush hour near one of the doors, standing ready for silly questions and to lend a light.

If an event has already started or is near starting, Odette is usually shoved by some lesser trafficked door into the theatre proper, or is posted near the bar to ensure the attendees remain polite as they queue for their overpriced vodka. Keeping the peace is a huge part of her job. She occasionally finds herself stuck in rather prolonged discussions with the elderly or very young, but always manages to navigate them with enthusiasm. It has become routine to lend an arm to a toasted patron, and once or twice she's had to tail security to see someone out.

Elaborate on your expertise in your field.

Once a promising Ministry underling in the Department of Magical Transportation, keen to climb the ladder to wherever it might take her, Odette was promptly let go from her government job upon the discovery of her "situation." She was handed a sad stack of slightly-moist newspaper ads by the department receptionist on her way out. Odette (shockingly) struck out several times, mostly due to her Being status in and of itself, but also occasionally because of the sticking points of odd hours, no wand, and a rather un-vampire-ish constitution. The very few jobs reserved for vampires all seemed to rely to heavily upon looking the part (read: intimidating or sinister).

Odette finally, recently chanced upon the generous compassion of Ira Almasy and her underlings Royal Opera House beneficiaries. She has thus found herself in the no-frills, low-skill position of usher at the famous haunt. (Only there are a few frills and decidedly more skill involved than one might imagine.) 

Her qualifications include being a Professional Night Owl, an agreeable if toothy disposition, and the ability to stand still and quiet for long periods of time. Also, she's allowed to hold a flash light, thus scraping the need for a wand. Having worked in a government planning office that was itself a maze, Odette is decidedly not terrible at giving directions. She is, however, full of too much energy and occasionally overshares.

Writing Sample

See Waker Nolan.

Sum up your character in one paragraph.

Odette is a sweet and easily excitable young vampire who is still very much learning how to be a vampire. She is wistful, frequently seeming to forget that she has ages ahead of her. When she does remember, the promise of preternatural adventure is often balanced by silly, teenage worries. What will happen when everyone else around her ages? How does one hide ones fangs in front of a boss, a customer, a cute boy? Must she really resign to a coffin? The whiplash of her new condition has left an ache for witch-hood and a thirst for something... well... not especially palatable to the average girl. All in all, though, Odette is more a blood-bag-half-full sort of witch person being.

Character Name: Odette Fairchild
URL Link to Biography:

Type of Creature: Vampire

How did they become a creature? Odette was turned when a hungry, feral vampire chanced upon her in an alley and fed a little too vigorously. Though it could be worse (she could have been a complete goner), Odette had no desire to become what she is. Her maker is still on the loose, wanted by the Ministry for his or her crimes.  

Are they registered with the Ministry of Magic?: Yes

If yes, what does registry entail? Odette walked into the Ministry the night she was turned, suspecting she had been made a vampire.

She had had to give up her job in Magical Transportation and register with the Beings division. She receives regular St. Mungo's blood bags, has agreed to stick to Ministry guidelines on feeding, magic, and travel, and meets with her case worker when required.

Are they considered a 'Dark' Creature?: Yes

If yes, are they currently under pursuit by the Ministry of Magic?: No

What crimes have they committed?  Were they convicted? No. Odette does her best to abide the laws for Beings and to reach out to the Beings division when she needs to. She has never fed illegally, though she has known the strange and overwhelming hunger that accompanies her condition. Occasionally, she longs to return to her old life-- to walk and work and eat where and what she pleases, and to perform wand magic without permission. She knows the last desire is especially illegal-- and impossible besides.