Though hardly a diminutive girl, Bethan Ellis boasts a particularly diminutive stature. At her full adult height she only stands at an even five feet, which isn’t anything to mock considering that’s her height after the life changing growth spurt of fourth year. She has come a long way since the days when she could comfortably fit in a cabinet without ducking, and she’s proud of it. Following the miraculous, celebrated growth spurt came the development of her womanly figure. If you’re kind, you can go ahead and suggest that Beth has ‘curves’ – though in reality she’s just a squishy, slightly plump blob of a girl whose slight pudge about the edges could very well put the Pillsbury Doughboy to shame. This adds a certain warmness to her appearance that might have people making inaccurate guesses as to the content of her character. After all, the cheeks that are the focus of her round, heart-shaped face look awful angelic and pinchable. She holds herself rather assertively, however – head up, shoulders back, eyes on the prize. She walks as though she knows where she’s going, even when she’s completely lost.
Beth isn’t that blonde you’ve heard about. Although her hair is certainly blonde, you won’t find her twirling her wavy shoulder-length tresses around her finger and staring into space like a moron. There may be a reason that blondes get stereotyped, but she certainly is not that reason. She’s blonde because her mother is blonde, and her mother is blonde because her mother is blonde – not because any of them inherited the stupid gene along with the magic and the double jointed wrists. Most of the time her hair is pulled back into a knobby, sloppy, uninspired ponytail – typicallly with hair falling into her face. Her eyes are a light shade of hazel – those are from Dad – and are rather round, framed by thin but rather expressive brows. These features are all linked together by her very pale, borderline albino skin, which picks up a rosy hue in the cheek area when Beth is feeling embarrassed or otherwise completely stupid. Her nose is a blob that gets larger toward the tip, and it rather round for her tastes. It sits above her little smirking lips, which take the form of a stunted cupid’s bow. She considers herself rather typical, and she certainly doesn’t radiate sex appeal, but she’s not about to put on a shroud and go into hiding, either.
Something most people may not know, though which is incredibly characteristic of the girl that Beth has grown to be, is that a large percentage of her body is covered by burn scars acquired as a very young girl. The scarring, acquired during her first, life-altering exposure to dark magic, is a large, ugly, disfiguring reminder of how much shit there is in the world. As it is a serious injury caused by runespoor venom, which cannot be treated with magic, it’s with her for life, and though it’s taken its toll on her self-image, it’s a reminder of what she feels she was put on earth to do. The angry, puckered scarring covers most of her back, parts of her chest and abdomen, and her left arm above the elbow. It’s because of her secret disfigurement that Beth is incredibly modest. Her school robes do the trick when it comes to covering it all up, but when out of them, Bethan is never seen without a modestly cut long sleeve shirt on. Some people think this is strange, having caught her sweating through her sleeves on a particularly hot day, but most of the time you wouldn’t even notice. Even after living in a dorm with other girls for seven years, she still won’t change in front of people – the idea of locker rooms mortifies her to the point where playing quidditch wasn’t even be an afterthought for that reason alone.
She is a girl who couldn’t walk a quarter of a mile in under two hours because of the pull of distractions, yet she’d singularly pause everything she’s doing if someone needs their butt whooped. She wants to be a free spirited girl and make you laugh, but she yearns to be taken seriously. She wants to be held and adored, but if you touch her, she’ll bite you. Frankly, she’s a bit confusing unless you’ve known her a while – and in order to do that, you’d have to posses the rare skill of being able to tolerate her never-ending energy, her easily diverted one track mind, and her disregard for the concrete things in the world. Her nature may be confusing – but luckily the only one who needs to get it is her.
Foremost, she is a flamboyant extrovert, and wants to know everybody’s business. She can tolerate having a conversation with pretty much anyone who could tolerate having a conversation with her. She is far from shy – actually, her brazenness can come off as a social disorder in itself. Eternally curious and interested in others, she will fire a million questions at you before you can ask her what on earth it is she thinks she’s doing. Frankly, most of the time she doesn’t know what she’s doing, which is the beauty of it all! Just because she may strike up a conversation with you, however, does not mean that it’s going to remain a conversation for long. She is opinionated, and holds a very polarized view of the world. If Beth thinks you’re wrong, you will hear it straight from her lips. She is quick to transition from perky chatter to outright screaming. When not being outright abusive (and she wouldn’t deny that this was the case), she does tend to swing toward the sarcastic. She has made more than one small child cry just for speaking in their general direction. The sooner she can get that written up on a shiny plaque for her room, the better.
Beth is, in a way that doesn’t exactly make sense, both focused and extremely scattered. She has her goals – goals that aren’t always logical, but which make her happy (for example, becoming an auror, which is all she can focus on these days). While she will go very far to achieve those goals for herself, that doesn’t mean she isn’t going to take seventeen pit stops and a potty break along the way. She has a rather unconventional way of going about things, and finds herself constantly trying to make excuses for her behavior. Most of the time her excuses are completely random, don’t make sense to anyone but her, and don’t actually cut it – but that doesn’t mean she’s not behind them one hundred percent. She thinks in circles, and sometimes she needs to go all the way around a problem before she feels ready to cut through the center and get to the point. She’s a bit of a slob, and more than a little disorganized. If she has her homework in on time it’s a miracle – it’s even a miracle if she can find a quill with which to complete said homework. Just because she doesn’t have the essay, however, does not mean she won’t know the defensive spell she should have been writing about – she’ll have been too busy practicing it (sometimes on human “volunteers”) that the essay probably just slipped her mind. She’s excited about the practical aspects of magic and the world, and would rather be out there living it than sitting around reading about it.
Most of the time, Beth appears to be without stress and worry, to feel so confident about herself that she’d accidentally come to class in pajamas and still raise her hand higher than the most astute Ravenclaw, and to have fully embraced her fun-loving spirit. While this is partially correct, it’s not entirely true. There is a silent part of her that is so self-conscious of everything she does that it’s a surprise she can even go about her day. All of her insecurities start with her body – short, stubby, and screwed up – and extend to every aspect of her life. Most of the insane, compulsive stuff she does is just to keep herself from thinking, because the more she thinks, the more comes up for her. Furthermore, Beth yearns to be great. She has a belief that she was put on this earth to do something about all of the scum that’s on it and she feels pressure to do the job right and to do the job now. In fact, one of the biggest aspects of who she is happens to be her draw toward independence. She wants to ‘do it herself’, as long as that ‘it’ is something important to her – and especially if that ‘it’ is something that somebody claims she can’t do. She can’t stand healers, and would rather walk around tracking blood everywhere than admit that she needs help dealing with something dumb and superficial like an injury. She licks her wounds in private – both real wounds, and internal ones. She’s more likely to forego sleeping and eating than she is to cry in front of another living soul.
She is a bit self-involved and obnoxious, but at her core, Bethan actually wants to help people. She has a superhero complex and a martyr complex, and both are hard for her to shake. She is more interested in stopping the bad guy and taking that triumphant hit than she is with protecting the victim, but she does relate to the victim, whether she makes it clear or not. It’s easier for her to cause pain and fight back than it is to acknowledge her own pain – or anyone else’s. She’s useless during a tragedy, and doesn’t know what to say when someone’s crying. She’ll kick someone’s butt or verbally abuse someone if you need her to, but she can’t do much more for you than pat you on the head and give you a lolly if you’re upset. She cares quietly – the same way that she hurts. Showing weakness kills her.
Ultimately, Bethan Ellis is that crazy, loud, obnoxious girl that people have told you about. She is probably the one that beat up your older brother, or possibly the one who struck up a conversation with you at dinner, chatted with you for an hour straight, and didn’t even bother introducing herself. She is driven, but misguided. Underneath all of that, she is a teenager who hurts like other teenagers. She has a wand, though, and a will, so what else could she possibly need?
Bethan started life as the youngest (and last) child in the Ellis family, having been conceived out of love in a fit of joy on the part of her parents many years after the birth of her older siblings. Her brother Owen was already ten years old when she was born, and her sister Brynn was seven. Her parents had raised both of her siblings in their small but reasonable family home in Swansea, Wales, in the same area where her father grew up. Her parents had married out of love, having met at Hogwarts years ago, and had started their family rather early. They were young and stupid back when Owen was born, but by the time they had Bethan they were older and experienced and supposedly knew what they were doing. Whatever the case, she was born into a loving and supportive household where her muggleborn parents were doing their best despite the impending war. Her father, handy with charms and good with his hands, was working a lucrative job in magical construction where his blood status wasn’t being questioned so readily. Her mother worked for the same firm as a part-time secretary and bookkeeper, but she was a full time mother to all three of her children. They were comfortable, and they didn’t speak of the war in front of their children. Home was a nice, safe place where Beth grew up absolutely swaddled by attention from everyone. Her big sister was her idol and the world was her oyster. There was never a happier baby.
Naturally, it wasn’t long before the ripples started to form on the water, and the war in the wizarding world became an unavoidable topic of conversation. Bethan was four years old and both of her siblings were at Hogwarts when the inevitable tragedy that would grow to define Beth’s life occurred. All her parents had done was taken her down to Diagon Alley on one perfectly normal Saturday afternoon in order to replenish the potions supplies for the house and visit with some friends in London. It was just an unfortunate coincidence that a malicious attack was taking place at a nearby institution, and that five-year-old Bethan was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her flesh came in contact with highly dangerous runespoor venom, which was being used in the attack, and immediately the corrosive substance ate through her clothing and began to eat away at her skin. ‘Horrific’ would not even begin to describe the small details that Beth can remember from that day – little things like the smell of her open wounds, the way the pebbles in the road pressed into her face, and the sound of her own agonizing, frantic screams echoing back in her ears. It was a nightmare. Bethan was rushed to the Spell Damage ward at St. Mungo’s where healer after healer stood ready to declare the little girl a lost cause. Nobody knew who to blame except for death eaters, whose name was, more and more, becoming synonymous with 'evil.'
Her family was supportive, however, and sat with her every minute of every day. Even as she lay in the hospital bed drugged into a potion-induced stupor and unable to be so much as touched by her parents, she could feel that support. They sat and they talked to her. They sang to her. They consistently placed sweet kisses on the corner of her fevered temple and allowed their lips to linger so she’d know they were there with her. They brought her things from home. They played her music that was familiar. They even managed to arrange for the muggle grandparents on both sides to visit. Slowly, slowly, she regained her strength. She was eating more calories than could fit in a four year old’s body just to stay conscious, and taking more potions than some adults took in their entire lifetimes, but the day came when she knew where she was and, not long after, she was able to sit up without help. She was in hospital for an incredibly long time but she was never, ever without support. It was a long time before she was strong enough to do more than sit, and a very long time before the angry scars that covered more of her tiny, four year old frame became slightly more subdued, but it happened. There eventually came a day when she was well enough to go home. The nightmares still came, and she slept in her parents’ bed every night, but she was alive.
Springing back from something like that is never easy, especially for a young girl who should have been up and out, working on motor skills and learning letters and exploring her world. Needless to say, she was a little behind and, having been affected by trauma, wasn’t coping easily. Her parents were there for her, however – and when they could be, her siblings were, too. Her disquiet was showing up most significantly in her play, the only way a child really has to communicate what they know and understand about the world. Her parents helped her redirect her play, so instead of playing out bad guys hurting people over and over again she could play aurors instead and practice helping people. Her parents talked to her about good people and bad people, and helped her to feel safe again. She sprung back quickly, eventually regaining mastery over her world. She was still a little delayed when it came to reading and focusing, and her nightmares still showed up every now and then, but for all intents and purposes she had come back from her traumatic experience as a strong, resilient little girl.
It was clear that from the time Beth was able to, she wanted to do everything for herself. She’d been babied and taken care of long enough and she didn’t want to be the little sister any longer. She was always looking to gain mastery over her world by touching and doing and trying. She was a very hands-on girl. Her parents had considered sending her to a muggle school, where both of her siblings had gone before her (given that her parents were both muggleborn and hadn’t been harmed by it), but when it came down to it, they didn’t want to risk being reported to authorities because of Beth’s profound scarring, so instead her mother taught her at home. Her education was more or less self directed – when her mum couldn’t get her to sit and read, she would take her outside to plant flowers, or let her help with potions in the kitchen. She got an education, if an atypical one, and by the time her Hogwarts letter came, she was ready to leave home and take on the world. Brynn had just graduated from Hogwarts, having finished her studies there despite the interruption caused by the war, and Beth was more than a little excited to head out and not have to be the baby any longer. She wanted to take on the world! More than that, she wanted… well, to become a superhero, really - and Hogwarts was the only place in the world where she could do anything remotely like that.
Being in a real school environment was a hard transition for Bethan, who didn’t realize that it would be so, well, institutional. Sure, she’d grown up hearing stories from her brother (a fellow Gryffindor) and her sister (a Hufflepuff like her parents), but they both made it sound like it was an educational free-for-all. Up until that point Beth’s entire life had been an educational free-for-all, so trying to really sit down and learn in an actual classroom was harder for her than for her peers. Her grades first year were, frankly, a bit rocky, but it was a learning process. She was attuned to Defense Against the Dark Arts right away, and immediately excelled at practical wand work. She would never be a star scholar, but to say she wasn’t focused would be untrue. She was selectively focused. Sometimes being an eleven year old girl was hard work, and she refused to believe that schoolwork was everything. How could it be, with a whole castle at her disposal?
Blessedly, her grades improved as she fell into the routine. She was still a bit of a spitfire, though, and saw her fair share of detentions. It was hard to believe that the pint-sized blonde was getting in trouble for fighting of all things, but she was intent on defending her ideals. The hardest part of second and third year, however, was dealing with her body image. Though it is hard for everyone, she knew her situation was a bit different. There was a difference, after all, between disliking your nose or your underdeveloped breasts and being sensitive about a legitimate deformity. Her major growth spurt came at the beginning of fourth year, however, which was enough to encourage her to drop the petty stuff and get on with life. She still wasn’t keen to show off her body, despite the fact that she was beginning to become legitimately interested in boys. It was a strange contrast, but this time she struggled with it silently.
Fifth year brought positive change. Beth found solace in dueling, at which she was a crafty and relentless opponent (at least in her own mind), and in the dream of eventually becoming an auror. There was nothing else she could dream of doing. She was sure she’d die if she ended up in a desk job. She wanted a way to help people – and becoming an auror would also be a way to come to terms with what had happened to her years and years ago. She wanted to be the good guy. She wanted to save the day. She wanted to kick ass and take names and finally be the one coming out victorious. After all, she wasn’t afraid of dark magic – not anymore. She was only afraid of not being the one up against it – after all, it could be anyone else in the world. It could be helpless little girls! She didn’t mind taking another hit if it meant someone else didn’t have to. It was not just a goal – it was an obsession.
It was that obsession that drove her through the insanity to her seventh year, though she didn’t make it that far quietly. With all of the insanity at Hogwarts, how could she just sit down, shut up and study? There’s too much to do, even now – and she can guarantee she’ll be doing it all.
When she entered the field (if you can even call it that) she was, erm, entry level? She certainly wasn't an experienced barmaid coming in, but it helped that she was friendly, unafraid of people, willing to own up to her mistakes with a smile, and able to stick up for herself when things got rowdy. Now that she has been working there for a good number of months, she finds the position fairly comfortable. You can only slack off so much when things are busy, and when it's calm then chatting with patrons at the bar and wiping off glasses is technically part of the job description... so can she really call it slacking? Her very sociable nature is one of her strengths, so although some of the work itself is mindless and the apparent purposelessness of the job is slowly killing her soul, the rest suits her quite nicely!
Beth's duties predominantly include serving drinks (and making them, when applicable), sending food orders over to the kitchen, keeping things tidy (including patrons who may have had too much to drink, but also glasses and counters and floors), collecting money and making change, and keeping things interesting at the bar. There's a bit of busing and dish washing, of course, especially when things are slow, but Beth isn't the sort of girl who likes to let things get too slow to begin with. She's generally on top of things, keeping a constant conversation going while she works. She loves running into old professors and mates from school, so she can get distracted occasionally when the chit-chat becomes more appealing than wiping down the bar, but she does add something to the ambiance in the ancient pub.
“This is maybe the best, most greatest, most astoundingly phenomenal thing I’ve seen in my entire life,” Beth remarked, her words spilling from her mouth in a speedy but hallowed way. She bounced onto her toes as she cradled her treasure, her eyes nearly popping from her head as she looked down at it with a sort of crazed affection. She was clutching it with fervor, as though it was likely to fly away at any moment. “What’re you looking at?” she snapped brusquely at a nearby onlooker, walking past with a stack of books in their arms, “It’s mine, you know. You can’t have it.” She released some steam from her nose, dragon-like, as her eyes fell back upon the object in her hand and the loving look filled her eyes again. It was an awful lot of fuss to be making over a crunchy leaf, even if it was big and pretty.
“Hey!” she called to the group she’d been walking with, “Hey, weren’t you waiting for me? That’s the sort of thing you ought to tell a girl – if you’re suddenly done waiting for her, she deserves to know,” she yelled, her voice an aggravated singsong as she put her hand on her hip and glared toward their retreating backs. Frankly, anyone walking anywhere with the girl should have been used to this by now. Where there are nifty things, there is inevitably always a Beth along to collect them sooner or later. She dragged her feet through the grass, allowing the duller leaves to get crushed underfoot as she made her way toward the group, who had slowed slightly now that she was actually making a bit of progress. They didn’t stop, though – no, that would just be too convenient. No matter how much closer she got, the crowd was always just too many steps away. “This- this is just ridiculous,” she muttered to herself as she made the decision to stop traipsing along and just run already. It didn’t take long before she was practically bowling them over, throwing her arms around nearby necks and shoulders, her breathing a bit rough. She fell into step with them like she’d been there the whole time, triumphant smile on her face.
“Missed me, didn’t you? Don’t have to tell me,” she muttered to them with a short laugh, shaking her giant leaf in the face of the companion to her left, who she was enveloping almost completely. “Don’t you like it? I thought it was worth a stop, anyway.” She pulled away suddenly, ripping her arms back as she held the leaf over her head so she could admire it better, turning it slowly in the dim sunlight. She was quite a few paces ahead by the time she realized she was alone. She turned her head around and gave the group a look, her eyebrows darting downward.
“Ugh,” she grunted, “You lot are so slow. You’d think I was a marathon runner the way you’re trailing behind me like the elderly.”
Beth is a high energy, scatterbrained blonde who loves people and doesn’t fear getting in a fight if it means defending her ideals or someone else’s. What she lacks in height she makes up for in approachability, and though she might scare people away with her boisterous nature and willingness to get into trouble, she is not a hard person to talk to. She is self-conscious but hides it well behind a long sleeved shirt and a perky, sporadic way of getting things done. She’s a bit violent, but means well, and hopes to one day funnel all of that energy into becoming a hard working, dedicated auror.
Bethan Ellis: Barmaid at The Three Broomsticks