Physical Description

A deceptively (or perhaps perfectly suited) babydoll face is probably the first thing that people notice about Neely. It is round and puppyish, with the sort of weak chin that lends itself to convulsive sobbing, and a koala's swollen cheeks to paint a "cute and fluffy" picture that is far from the truth. The girl's puffy lips seem to take up the extra room that her tiny nose leaves, and they hide a set of babyish teeth that are rarely flashed. Neely prefers to smile with her lips because she thinks it makes her look simultaneously older and cuter.

Neely's eyes are a very light blue, and have a naturally narrow shape reminiscent of spring leaves. They're framed by decidedly thick, dusky brows that are several shades darker than Neely's loosely curled dirty-blonde hair. The women in Neely's family have a lengthy history with thick eyebrows, and Mrs. Woolfolk claims that they're an inherently Pureblood attribute. Neely is oft tempted to pluck them, but fears looking like one of those Quidditch WAG new money girls who always hang around the stadium where her father has a box. For similar reasons, she never steps outside without applying a dab of sunblock elixir "borrowed" from Mummy's beauty cabinet.

Neely's face is home to several tiny and sporadically placed freckles and birth marks, which the girl is always trying to be rid of with the aid of potions, charms, and makeup. Many of them have disappeared as she's grown older, and she thanks Merlin for it. Fair features and faux innocence aside, there is an indecipherably sinister quality to the young girl's face, and it is definitely more befitting her personality than the rest of her of appearance. This air wonderfully compliments the group of people with whom Neely is most likely to be found.

Neely stands at a monstrous (ahem) 5 feet, no inches and has little hope of growing into a luxurious amazon, given her mother's similar build.

Personality Description

Neely is both the instigator and the tattletale. She has a love for drama and a flare for starting it, but prefers to dance around the path of trouble instead of across it, for fear of blemishing her reputation. Even so, the word gossip is akin to gospel, in Neely's opinion. While nibbling sweets in a quiet corner of the common room, or moving through corridors like a harmless sprite, the girl is bound to be privately stirring up something. Neely is arguably less mature than some of her friends, but she feels she makes up for it in gamine cuteness.

The problem with Neely is that her attention span isn't exactly stellar, and she finds most people to be positively bland. She childishly cannot stand the idea of not being special, and thus attaches herself to people who have an exceptionally elitist appeal. Having spent a few too many dinners in the company of boring adults before the age of ten, Neely craves disruptions to everyday "gray" life, enjoys artful undermining, and will gladly laugh at the expense of others so long as she can get away with it. All with a melodic hum and a childish expression on her face, of course.

While not trollishly stupid by any means, Neely isn't the brightest of her friends. School doesn't hold her fascination, and her own brand of cleverness has very little to do with textbooks or numbers. She just doesn't have the same knack for paying attention that many of her housemates possess. Neely's ambitions lay largely outside of the classroom, and it would be fair to label her somewhat academically aloof, even while also noting that she is wittily fiendish.

Neely has absolutely zero qualms with peaking at others' test papers, or paying older, nerdier students to help her with some of her homework. Her conscience, or lack thereof, is Neely's biggest enabler. Why would Merlin have blessed her with a such great monetary allowance if she wasn't free to spend it as she pleased? It's a prime argument. She mightn't even bother with tutors or crafty cheating methods, but her prestigious upbringing and Slytherin aspirations have at least taught her that decent grade reports are a must if she wants to make anything of herself. (Social networking most unfortunately can't count for everything.)

Neely is a touch more naive than the people with whom she likes to keep company. This becomes more obvious the longer people spend time with the girl. She has an underlying aversion to growing up and facing those things which she finds even remotely unpleasant-- which is ironic, because Neely simply can't wait to be old enough to step into the suave London clubs, or to openly don that rebellious cherry red lipstick she smuggles into her school trunk each semester. The girl just doesn't want to do the dirty work to get from Point A to Point B. She's been spoiled by her parents and by the luxurious laziness associated with money. This is one of the reasons that the Slytherin often appears like a rogue child playing dress up.

Miss Cornelia has a great talent for tantrum-throwing. She can produce tears in a finger-snap, and often uses this ability to her advantage. When things get too rough, or if Neely wishes to distract someone, she simply turns herself into a victim. While she doesn't regularly plague her friends with her sobbing, she'll cry if it helps her get out of trouble. This, paired with her tabloid-ish love for scandal, occasionally inhibit discretion-- but Neely learns to be more careful each year she ages, particularly with the examples her friends and older housemates have set. Neely is obviously not the sort of person who believes in quickly ripping off bandages. Even small doses of pain can't be tolerated, and she is likely to let you know about it.

Ambitious as any of Salazar's clan, Neely makes her aspirations and desires known as often as she tries to elude or trick people. She is blunt about just as many things as she is devilish. Not ever letting the mewing cat out of the bag would be dreadfully boring, after all. Neely will insult her peers, tell people they're wrong, brashly cast hexes, and callowly retort for the sake of being right or getting what she sets out to have. She is not an earner, but a taker. This is a double edged sword that sometimes comes back to nip her, but like most hungry creatures of habit, Neely repeats her sins instead of repenting them.

Neely loves her material possessions almost as much as she loves her parents. Possibly more, because shoes never tell you "no". Neely treats clothes like small children treat toys: the new and shiny things are always the ones that hold her attention, until something newer and shinier appears in her morning mail beside her glass of extra-sugary Pumpkin Juice, and then the "old-new" things are just old news. Care packages are something her parents have always been diligent about sending, undoubtedly because they feel guilty about choosing work and success over familial bonding. Neely is just fine with this arrangement. Some of her favorite things include giant, colorful sunglasses, lavish coats, absurdly expensive candy, and iced hot cocoa (she can't quite handle the strength of coffee, but enjoys the trendiness of carrying around sweet drinks). She can be picky about her friends, but definitely prefers to spend her time with other people.

History

The youngest child of Ollis Woolfolk, a Quidditch enterprise entrepreneur, Neely is also his only daughter. She has two older half-brothers who would probably like to see Cornelia decapitated.

Exactly three years after the death of the first Mrs. Woolfolk, the second took over the title. Corina Ruhl was eighteen at the time, barely old enough to play sister the Woolfolk boys, let alone step-mother. It was only another year before Neely was born, and instantly became the light of daddy's life in that annoying way that only the youngest daughters can manage.

By the age of five, Neely's name was printed at the top of Ollis' will-- the heiress apparent to the Woolfolk fortune. Among the Woolfolk family, the scandal was almost on par with something Henry Tudor might have tried. Yes, despite two perfectly healthy and much more capable male heirs, Mr. Woolfolk caved to his wife's metaphorical emasculation and put their daughter first in queue. When retelling the real-life "love story" to her joyous little meal ticket, Corina spun a much more romantic and lighthearted tale that (quite literally) involved fairy dust and midnight serenading. This misfortune has undoubtedly contributed to Neely's entitlement issues.

Before her acceptance to Hogwarts, Neely was educated at home, mostly by a hybrid team consisting of timid nannies, matronly tutors, and doting house-elves. The older she became, the less time Neely was able to spend in her young mother's company. They still went on their routine mother-daughter shopping excursions and lunched by the water, but more often than not, Corina could be found retreating at hotels in the Mediterranean or the Swiss mountains, while Neely was still stuck in London learning how to read and write.

Neely's need for affection seemed to double in a very short span of time, and the spoiling at the hand of her father escalated accordingly. Truth be told, a cleverer witch than what she'd been labeled, Corina knew full well that spending as much time away from her husband and daughter and ensure healthy, happy marriage-- and a good position in society for Neely.

On the night before she boarded the Hogwarts Express, Neely sobbed enough to drown a city. The theatrics worked wonders, and she was sent to Hogwarts with not one, but three trunks full of "leaving gifts". These little perks made her feel right at home in the school dormitory, and allowed for Neely to try her hand at generosity by extending the luxuries to her roommates. Making fast friends with similarly well-off girls, Neely found that she enjoyed being away from Daddy much more than she could have imagined. She gained a newfound respect for her ever-evasive mother, and adopted the habit of writing home with frequency. Her letters, of course, always inspired newer and better owl-delivered boxes of things she didn't need in the first place. While at school, she kept well out of the way of her Gryffindor brother, Demetrius.

Preparing for her fifth year, Neely has increased her monetary budget for tutors... as well as the shadier of "helpful" students. Though ambitious, she frequently changes her mind about her future. All she knows is that she won't be stuck behind a desk unless she's manning the staff of Witch Weekly or controlling the buying department of a wizarding apparel company. The word Ministry, while alluring in terms of prestige, usually makes Neely blanch in private.


How Do You Fit Into Your House?
Neely has many desires, but doesn't play by the rules. She will do whatever she has to do to win the prize... everything but hard work, that is. She is ruthless and deceptive like many a snaky Slytherin, if also a little more naive and less magically-talented than the great names in history books. She is quicker to commit the crime than to do the time.

Writing Sample

Removing the protective shade of an open copy of RunWitch (issue 67, Spring/Summer runway edition) from her youthful face, Neely winced at the sun overhead and used her elbows to maneuver into a sitting position on the stone bench upon which she'd been slumbering relaxing for the past twenty minutes. The watch on her wrist told her that it was almost time for Transfiguration, which was perhaps even more tragic than the pair of little orange shoes that had been plastered to her right cheek while she cat-napped. Looking down at said shoes on the now-crinkled page, the girl shook her head as if remembering a deceased friend.

Neely stuffed the magazine into her bag and sprang to her feet with newfound energy. Her own shoes were decidedly much cuter, and easier to color-coordinate. She admired them against the courtyard's dusty floor, and then shoved a pair of purple sunglasses onto her face and headed for the castle entrance. Midway across the slightly-pebbly terrain, however, Neely encountered a pair of second years who... were building a miniature version of Hogwarts? What?

"Cute," she said innocently and full of enthusiasm, approaching close enough so that she towered over the model and covered it with the shade of her shadow despite being barely five feet. It was pretty cool, the little replica, and the pair of students seemed to have got the detail down to the grand staircase in the Entrance Hall. Neely wondered whether it was for a class, and why she hadn't been assigned anything so interesting when she was twelve. She felt positively archaic.

"But this is definitely in my way..." The little smile on Neely's face, neither friendly nor malicious, but somehow very practiced, instantly drooped into a frown. She tilted her chin downward, revealing a glimpse of blue behind her thick sunglasses. "And I thought we were too old to play with dollies." Neely still had a dozen porcelain figures sitting in a row on the top shelf of her wardrobe back home. They would be saved for her own Little Neelys, if she ever decided to endure the pain of child-bearing. Maybe she would just adopt cats. All called Neely, too, of course.

The Slytherin lifted a black mary-jane pump to leap over the display like a heeled hopscotch participant, but thought better of it mid-move, and landed right in the foyer of the Hogwarts model. By accident.

"Oh my golly Godric! Whoops!" She sang, tapping the sticky base of her shoe against the ground, and sounding absolutely delighted. Her mouth opened in sheer shock, but whatever her eyes conveyed was still carefully concealed by her glasses. Professional actresses were a thing of the past. Neely didn't need a stage. "Merlin, I am so sorry. I can't see a thing in these shades." Except for every tiny detail of the toy castle. "But I guess we're even since you destroyed my shoes," she concluded cheerfully, shrugging one shoulder forward like a coltish starlet playing with her mother's boas. Neely adjusted her purple sunglasses for the umpteenth time and kept walking.

Sum up your character in one paragraph.
Neely is a tricky little gamine whose ears and mouth work almost faster than her brain. She enjoys being young with a decided lack of responsibility, but is eager to accept the perks of adulthood. Spoiled by her parents in more ways than one, Neely is probably more naive than she could ever fathom. Her nosiness, calculated theatrics, and attraction to things that are only interesting on the surface may be impairing to the girl as she grows older. Even so, Neely is stubbornly determined to embrace success and to enjoy her life exactly the way she wants it.