Gemima McCoy
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| Gemima McCoy | |
|---|---|
| Biographical Information | |
| Born | 3 January 1993, 25 |
| City of Birth | West Bromwich, England |
| Blood status | Muggle-born |
| Also known as | Gem |
| Physical Information | |
| Gender | Female |
| Relationships | |
| Father | Isaac McCoy |
| Mother | Maeve McCoy |
| Siblings | |
| Magical Characteristics | |
| Wand(s) | |
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| Education | |
| School | Hogwarts |
| House | Gryffindor |
| Class of | 2011 |
| Occupation | |
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| Character Information | |
| Dusty | |
An intelligent, determined girl who doesn’t accept that anything is impossible, with enough innovation and persistence. Although stubborn to the point of being bullheaded, she does learn from her mistakes – she just needs to learn how to do without nearly killing herself first. Curious and loves to experiment, interested in just about everything, and impossible to keep down. She loves to create things, whether performing magic, making new and interesting potions, or just cooking up a storm. Her sin is pride and her virtue is the joie de vivre that gives her a desire to learn.
Physical Description
Gem is average height, stocky, with pale skin, freckles, and lots of curly dark hair. Her eyes are brown and her face is broad. She tends to have broken fingernails and burn marks on her hands and arms. Gem is a little vain about her appearance, especially her hair.
Personality Description
Gem is driven by curiosity, with a liking of both experimentation and the feeling of accomplishment; and an interest in everything.
She’s completely unwilling to accept the idea that she might be wrong. She believes strongly in everyone’s right to their own business and expects no one to meddle with hers, thank you all the same.
This is not to say she’s necessarily contrary – she is willing to obey authority figures as long as she has no specific need to disobey them. On the other hand, if she does have a specific need to disobey she does not give it a moment’s thought.
Gem’s favorite subject is potions simply because there are certain principles that apply to it that you can experiment with and predict – none of the guesswork that she feels goes with subjects like Charms.
As long as people don’t try to intervene in her business, however, she quite likes them. She finds just about everyone interesting and therefore enjoys spending time with people just as much as she enjoys experimenting in the potions dungeons; she just doesn’t like them to mix. Gem is really quite a friendly person and very easy to get along with as long as her boundaries are respected properly.
Due to an unfortunate incident in her first year involving stolen gillyweed and the Hogwarts lake, Gem avoids entering bodies of water deeper than her waist if at all humanly possible. In addition to her fear of water, swimming has a tendency to mess with her hair, a feature about which she is really quite vain. In general, Gem likes to keep herself looking neat (which is pretty hard when she spends most of her time making things explode; she’s more or less given up on her hands) but her hair is really the point where she draws the line. She uses this excuse to get out of swimming quite a lot.
Because of a strong liking for music, particularly American jazz, Gem developed a talent for dancing as soon as she was old enough to realize that she was quite unable to produce music herself in any way. She sticks to partner dance and is eager to teach anyone who will listen. Her favorite is the East Coat Swing, but she’s also quite good at many more traditional English dances.
Gem has a chair two places away from the fire in the Gryffindor common room. Do not take it.
History
Gemima McCoy was born to Isaac and Maeve McCoy, the third child of a middle class nonmagical family. Her two older brothers, Stephen and Caleb, are four and six years older than she, respectively.
Caleb is also a wizard. Upon graduating school he decided that he wanted more extensive learning opportunities that he felt only a muggle university could give. He has strong opinions about Wizarding isolation, largely that it is a Bad Thing; he thinks muggles are much more resourceful and intelligent than the magical community appreciates. For this reason he went through rather a lot of trouble to obtain muggle accreditation and enrolled in Oxford university, studying engineering.
Stephen is not a wizard but is quite as talented as his more magical siblings. He also attends Oxford and is studying to be a barrister. If he is at all jealous of his brother and sister and their abilities he keeps it too himself; in fact, he keeps to himself most of the time. Nevertheless he loves Gem and Caleb very much and can usually be persuaded to spend time with them when his studies allow, although they often don’t.
Gemima is very close with both her brothers, although Caleb, in particular, is her regular partner in her experiments when they are together, even though he thinks Gem needs quite a bit of reining in. Gem disagrees with him about studying muggle subjects; although she understands his point of view, magic is simply a far more interesting area of study for her than mundane engineering that she can accomplish with a wave of her wand.
No one in Gem’s family, extended or otherwise, is a witch or wizard other than she and her brother; her parents took the revelation that their son was a magical with a sort of shell-shocked calmness that continues to this day whenever the subject comes up, as if they still do not quite believe it. They reacted much the same way to Gemima’s letter.
Gem herself much prefers the magical world to the mundane school she was in beforehand, although this could just be that she was for the first time challenged at Hogwarts.
Gem never treats failure as anything but a temporary setback. She can take a crushing defeat and get right back up again, taking with her only a greater determination to succeed.
