Accepted! ~ElleAbout You, the Writer:We will never ask any member to disclose any personal information.Your Nickname: Jessica
Have you read and do you agree to the Code of Conduct?: Yes
How did you find us and decide to write with us? I’m a long standing member
If you have written other characters here, list them all: Akiva Katz, Archer Radley, Phineas Maele (secondary), Fillin O’Hare (Dropped), Jordyn Dimbleby (Dropped)
Full Character Name: Marguerite “Margo” Frances Amherst
Character Birthday & Age: 26; August 8, 1982
City & Country of Birth: London, England
Pureblood, Halfblood or Muggleborn?: Pureblood
Alma Mater: Hogwarts, Gryffidnor
Job: Dragon Research and Restraint Bureau, Administration of Overseas Personnel
Wand: A
red oak wand. 11 inches long, naturally stained with a Swedish Short-snout dragon heartstring core. The handle is thick and stays the same thickness through about half of the shaft, until tapering inward. The red oak is very strong, though not flame retardant as there are clearly burn marks on it. The wand itself is inflexible and rigid and worn from use. It is definitely a well-used and exercised piece.
Physical Description:Margo is a tall woman, at five feet and ten inches tall, she’s definitely got several inches on most average women. When she was younger, she was horrified about her height, being so much taller than everyone else. It was embarrassing and made it hard for her to control her long, lanky limbs. As she grew up, she tended to grow into her size, though and filled out a bit with age and work. She always had darker skin and dark hair though, as a byproduct of her mother’s heritage, and she’s got strong features with a lean, muscular frame.
She used to be exceptionally skinny, bony even. She was an awkward teenager, but found a place outside, rather than in. Though she could never play quidditch (far too difficult to control her muscles and play at the same time), she was an ace at care of magical creatures, and spent most of her time out of doors. It made her fingers calloused, cheeks ruddy, and her body strong. It also created a distinct lack of exceptional fashion sense, which has carried over into her adult life.
Her favorite pieces of clothing are dragon-hide boots and her dragon-hide jacket. Of course, the difference between her dragon-hide apparel and some other is that it was not harvested from a poached dragon. Some less conscious consumers may buy the skin of a dragon that did not live a long healthy life, but Margo knows where to shop and how to make sure her things are environmentally conscious. As a result, her dragon hide is covered in scars and marks – clearly an indication of the dragon’s long, fulfilled life.
In addition to her dragon hide clothing, Margo has a dragon tattoo on her shoulder. It is of the magic variety and the blue and green scales with wings compliment her darker skin tone. The dragon mimics her emotions and often blows billows of blue-purple fire if she is angry. It likes to keep its perch around her shoulder, but has been noted, at times, to travel wherever it pleases. Not unlike her dragon hide, Margo has several scars herself. Scrapes involving quick escapes and up-close-and-personal contact with several species of dragon are visible all over her arms, torso, and even one nice scar about her left eyebrow. She has some serious burns scars on her lower torso and thighs. They are no longer painful, but are scarred.
The largest, most noticeable injury is usually fairly well hidden, in fact, virtually unheard of unless she wears the odd skirt or dress (very rare). During a feeding time observation, Margo and a fellow researcher were both injured. The incident itself will be explained more in history; however, the result was a burn wound that rendered her calf almost completely crisped. After losing consciousness and being transported to emergency medical treatment – the right leg up to the thigh had to be removed and has been replaced by a prosthetic. Fortunately, it does not deter her and her penchant for edginess has always made her somewhat proud of the metal piece on her leg. There was never any doubt that she was going to walk again, so she wears it proudly.
Build/Body type: Lean, lanky, and almost boy-ish
Estimated Height/Weight: Approximately 1.78 meters (5’10 inches) and 65.77 kilograms (145 lbs).
Hair color: Dark Brown
Eye color: Brown
Skin color: Ruddy and Tan
First Impression: Probably a bit taken aback.
Any odd/outstanding features?: Her prosthetic leg and Blue/Green Dragon tattoo on her shoulder. It moves, mimics emotion, and breathes blue-purple fire (also artwork).
Personality Description:She’s got a certain penchant for living life in the fullest way, no matter what she is doing, and refuses to let other people tell her just how they expect her to live her life. She likes to push people’s buttons and the boundaries of anything she can. At her current job, she likes to decorate her space creatively, find fun things to put up and use (including, but not limited to dragon figurines that fly around – good for delivering memos, photographs, and controlled fire lamps). She throws in a bit of Irish pride with a flag on the entry way to her space.
When dealing with people, Margo can go from one extreme to the next in a short span of time. She’s got a short fuse which means she has an extremely short temper, but that is not always the first thing that comes off. She’s friendly, almost to the degree that it seems like she’s prying, but its part of her job to investigate people – to know what they want and how to get it. If someone is interesting, she’ll likely engage them often and be genuinely friendly. If they piss her off, she’s likely to get cold and aloof within seconds. The fact she makes snap judgments is apparent when her mood shifts so suddenly. She likes to figure people out – and then, depending on how she feels about them, use it to her advantage in that way. Of course, it tends to go backward since Margo is a bit immature.
Sometimes, the twenty-six year old woman can act more like a fifteen year old boy than the best of them. She has a tendency to use low-brow humor, cheap sarcasm, and even cheaper insults when she wants to. Her flirting falls much along the same lines. Insults take effort and time to construct, so when she insults someone, it’s far more meaningful than just ignoring them completely. Some men do not understand this method, but she has presumed that those are the ones with sticks up their bums anyway, and the worthy ones will sling the mud right back – after all, what’s not fun about getting a little dirty?
She can, at times, come off as a bit of a flake – never one to suggest commitment and speaking the way she does, it can set up for the wrong reputation. The idea of being too young for settling down and previously having moved from place to place add to that reputation. Now that she’s at the ministry, especially among the dragon researcher community, she’s earned herself a bit of a bold stripe. It’s just an age thing and she assures everyone (including herself) that she will calm down… someday. For the time being, it’s not really in the cards. Of course, if anyone messes with her about it, her pride is bound to kick in and that short fuse is going to fizzle up.
History:Margo was born the fourth of six children to a pureblood family in London, England. Both of her parents came from very proud, families and maintained connections to each of their communities. They summered in Spain and spent the year in England, having all of their children grow up bi-lingual and in touch with their roots as Spanish witches and wizards as well as English ones. They were not very close with their relatives from the Amherst side (despite frequent contact with them), as Wulfric married an eccentric woman and fostered a more… liberal wizarding family, by pureblood standards.
The Amherst family expanded rapidly: Raul, Camila, Tomas, Marguerite, Delia, and Mateo filled the family home in London - it was said that it would probably never be empty. It took a lot to get attention in the Amherst home, and Margo was always good at getting it – though not always in the most… productive ways. Even from a young age, she showed a penchant for mischief, rough housing, and general chaos wherever she chose to go. She was a constant thorn in the side of her older siblings and pretty much a bully to the younger, despite how much she loved all of them.
The family was as close as any pureblooded family could be and lived in a comfortable way. All the children were brought up with a healthy love for quidditch, had several puffskeins, and all looked forward to going to Hogwarts. Margo especially, and when she was eight, and desperately wishing for her show of magic (the rest of the family liked to tell her she was a squib and teased her mercilessly for it), it finally came on the eve of her ninth birthday. Probably considerably earlier than some children, Margo lit her brother Tomas’ toy broom straw on fire as he flew through the air, throwing water balloons at her.
It was from that point that Margo was just antsy to get to Hogwarts. She daydreamed, night dreamed, and every other sort of dream one can have about getting there and vowed, beyond anything, she would be even better than her siblings in school. While her other siblings were scattered around in several of the houses (clearly no pattern or reason to anything in this Amherst home), Margo just waited. And caused some trouble while she waited. And then waited some more.
When she was finally on the verge of her eleventh birthday, Margo received her letter and that was the end of it. If no one could shut her up before, the young woman was incorrigible, talking about how amazingly she was going to do in classes and how much shame she was going to put the rest of her siblings to in basically everything. For some reason, she always talked a big game and eventually, when she actually got to school, she got to play that game too.
Like she expressly demanded, the ruddy brunette was placed in Gryffindor, though not without some of an argument – the pig-headed-ness was the cincher with the hat. Now, on the threshold of her greatness, as she declared, she was not expressly good at this game right away. In fact, Margo was flat out terrible. She did not do well in class, she was a troublemaker, and had issues with authority. She didn’t like to constantly be inside and much less did she like doing homework and sitting up studying all hours of the night. It took adjusting, but thankfully she had some older siblings to steer her in the right direction, or she would have been absolute mess.
That was not the only thing that was a mess. Margo was an awkward teenager – more awkward than anyone could have imagined. She was tall and horribly skinny with no curves to speak of. Her frizzy hair was out of control and her skin was neither clear nor properly moisturized for the amount of time she spent in the son. Not to mention the fact she fell all over herself all of the time, always in a rush to get somewhere and do something she probably wasn’t supposed to be doing. The craziness of her own lifestyle just magnified her awkward appearance. But, things got crazy though, far too crazy for anyone to imagine. Margo was too young and too naïve to understand most of what was going on for a long time, and the things that plague a normal schoolgirl.
Of course, as things got more intense, more dangerous, even Margo was afraid (though she pretended she was not). In the face of adversity, she attempted to be a strong, young woman. Of course, she was absolutely horrified of what was going on and how many of her friends and schoolmates were punished for things beyond their control. She got in trouble constantly, particularly as the years went on, but never left. Her siblings didn’t either – they were pureblood status on both sides protected them from most harsh punishments.
It was tough, but when the war was over, life resumed, slowly but surely. Things were never really the same, even Margo wasn’t the same. She was slightly more low-key than she had been before, and she actually paid attention to school. She didn’t completely give up some of her old ways, but she reined them in, something about the atmosphere really wasn’t conducive to making too many disasters happen. At home, she was the same person, but at school, she buckled down a little bit, thought it best to be an example, rather than a nuisance.
She figured out her real passion in life – care of magical creatures, which focused heavily on the idea of something a little more exciting than the puffskeins they had when they were kids. Margo wanted to work with dragons. Ever since the Tri-Wizard tournament when she watched the champions fight off the dragons, she was enamored with them. They were powerful, dangerous, and exciting, so Margo set to know as much as she could about them – advancing quickly through the COMC materials and then eventually, on the eve of graduation, landed a position through the Dragon Research and Restraint Bureau (DRRB) in Wales.
Welsh Greens were an easy and relatively slow place to start, but it was experience and Margo was going to take it. She got to spend time on the reserve and working closely with the dragons who primarily eat sheep, making them the least human dangerous of most dragon breeds. She spent about three years on that reserve, and then when her training and intern period was sufficiently completed, she transferred to Sweden for short-snout work. She spent her time there working on food aggression and hunting techniques. She only spent two years in Sweden as well, wanting to really expand her research to a more aggressive form of dragon.
She applied for a transfer to Romania and was granted the switch. Travelling across the country, she made her way to the Carpathian reserve where she could study Romanian Longhorns. A relative of the Hungarian Horntail, the dragons are exceptionally aggressive and exist off of sheep, cows, horses, and other mountain creatures – and people, if they can get their claws on them. Her research was going very well, compiled quite extensively as the preliminary work for a book or some sort of publication. After working so closely with the dragons and the situations she was getting used to, about a year and a half into her Romanian research there was a huge accident.
Her and a colleague were observing a feeding time, which included the use of a live animal for hunting pattern research. The cow they were using, unfortunately, was not as docile when faced with a dragon and ran toward the researchers, who thought they were safe. The Longhorn chased the cow and charged, spouting fire as he went. Being a male, his aggressive tendencies were higher, and he was stronger. As he charged through the two researchers, blowing fire and trying to get to the cow, Margo was knocked unconscious and suffered from severe burns. Her right leg was broken in eight places, crushed under the weight of the dragon’s tail, and bones protruded from the skin, she also had several broken ribs, a concussion, the burns, and a smashed wrist. She was completely out of it, thankfully Greorgi wasn’t knocked out.
He only suffered a broken arm and mild concussion. He was able to get them both into the safe area, away from the dragon (though it disturbed her already broken leg) and emergency medical teams were alerted. The leg had to be removed immediately and her burns were treated in St. George’s Magic-Medical Hospital in Bucharest. She was in the hospital for almost nine months. At that point, when her recovery was assured and everything was starting to stabilize for actual distinct periods of time, Marguerite was returned to England and continued with care and upkeep at St. Mungo’s – and attained a job in the DRRB in the ministry.
Her new position was directing overseas personnel and finding placements and transfers. It was difficult at first. She had a lot of chips on her shoulders, which made office work the least appealing thing at the time, but still relearning how to function on her own, how to walk with her prosthetic leg, and live alone while managing all of that, well, it was overwhelming and the job really helped ease a lot of issues in her personal life that couldn’t be managed in the field. It’s been less than a year since she returned and healed, so Marguerite is still a relatively new employee. She’s getting better at her job – and she likes it a lot more than she used to – which is picking everything up in her life.
She’s also started communicating with her family again. Since they’re all spread out, some in Spain, some still in Britain, others travelling, she’s trying to rejoin a lot of the family things that she’s missed out on – which has been hard, considering her profession wasn’t exactly always conducive to communication and then there was the accident – it’s been very difficult to transition back home and into a normal environment. Not to mention most of the rest of the Amherst family (her dad’s brother and other siblings along with their children) found the whole thing to be absolutely horrendous and embarrassing – it was just a family catastrophe.
A personal thing, she’s been able to deal with it – she makes enough for a decent flat in Magic London and gets to work by floo. She has enough time to go out and enjoy her life, but also finds it hard – at times – to go places without stares. Thankfully, she’s always been a bit of an attention seeker, so that’s not a complete issue. It’s just adjustment and change to get used to. Margo’s taking her attitude with her though and she’s just going to let it go where it goes.
What is your job description? How do you go about your job?
How did you get your current job? How does your past and abilities justify your current position?:Margo is a very recent transfer to the Dragon Research and Restraint Bureau, at least the administrative end. After eight years in the field (various locations including Wales to start, then a brief stint in Sweden before the final transfer to Romania), Margo endured an almost fatal accident that caused her to have to transfer back from the field and recover for almost a year, leaving her without field work and eventually returning to the office. During Hogwarts, Margo was skilled at COMC and Herbology, but little else. She was passionate though, and worked hard.
At her previous positions in Wales, Sweden, and Romania she was researching eating and hunting habits of different dragon breeds. Her focus was on aggression and techniques, varying dietary habits and routines. She compiled enough research for various publications, but has yet to put anything together – it’s a plan she has for when she eventually has the time for it, but the project has been put on hold because of her injury and the move – some of the research is still packed away – though she would never disclose this disorganization to her employers at the ministry.
As she started to work for the ministry, it was not what she exactly wanted to do. It became quickly apparent that even if she didn’t love it at first, she was good at it, and keeping track of British personnel overseas, keeping up correspondence with various reserves and setting up opportunities for those interested in positions really grew on her – and played into the control freak side of her personality. She’s got a handle on what is going on, even if it’s a bit disjointed at times. Her filing system is known to her – though the idea that anyone else could figure it out is almost preposterous.
Now, however, she is absolutely in love with the job and enjoys keeping up with everyone. She has people skills (in the professional world) and is not afraid to weasel her way in with people and be persistent when she needs to be. Her headstrong attitude and willingness to advocate for herself and others makes her very good at negotiating positions and pay
Sum up your character in one paragraph:Marguerite is a whole lot of person. She’s got a big personality, a big heart, and a lot of quirks. Her past experiences have contributed a lot to her adventurousness, but her accident has also taught her a lot about perseverance and grit. Margo’s got a lot of that, and despite the fact she’s not incredibly close with all of her family anymore and living on her own, she’s got strong roots and a strong sense of self. Underneath the exuding confidence there is a twinge of doubt about a few minor things, but overwhelmingly, she’s got a spice that you just don’t find everywhere.
Margo Amherst: Owner of Death & Co.