Hestia Jones (_andcuriouser) wrote, @ 2017-07-11 15:50:00 |
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OUT OF CHARACTER. NAME: Kathryn AGE: Literal crone. Painfully over 18, painfully EMAIL: againstalltides{at}gmail.com IN CHARACTER. BASICS NAME: Hestia Nadezhda Jones FIRST IMPRESSION: The most Ravenclaw-ish Slytherin you'll ever meet. Morbidly curious, genuinely friendly, perpetually sleep-deprived. A bit of a Department of Mysteries weirdo. AGE & BIRTHDAY: 24 | December 22 BLOOD STATUS: Pureblood SEXUALITY: Heterosexual MARITAL STATUS: Single OCCUPATION: Unspeakable with the Department of Mysteries RESIDENCE: Currently couch surfing since her former flatmate had the temerity to invite her boyfriend to live with her. APPEARANCE HEIGHT & OVERALL BUILD: 5'3" with a slight build. APPEARANCE: There is absolutely nothing striking about Hestia's appearance. Her short statute and slight frame make it easy to overlook her. Long days and nights working in the Department of Mysteries have taken their toll; she tends to sport perpetually dark circles under her eyes. Still, she's quietly, unassumingly pretty with small features and wide blue eyes that seem never to settle on any point for long. Her gaze is shifting constantly, inspecting everything and everyone that comes across her path. She also tends to fidget, frequently playing with a bracelet or flipping through a book at hand. There is always something distracted about her air. Her clothing is always neat and consists of good quality fabrics, but is almost uniformly boring. She looks deceptively demure, with her wardrobe of modest skirts, cardigans, and delicate antique jewelry. She has sported the exact same conservative, overly feminine style since her time at Hogwarts and sees no reason to change it now. Her entire look is utterly unobtrusive. PERSONALITY LIKES: Dusty tomes. Leaning new spells-- the more elaborate and weirder the better. Curiosity cabinets. Breakfast for dinner. Eureka! moments. Cozy pubs. Traveling with guidebooks. Biscuits. Exchanging presents. Puzzles. Window seats. Catacombs. Ingenuity in herself and in others. Quiz nights. DISLIKES: Libelous Quibbler articles. Being scolded by her superiors. Pastels. Alarm clocks. Blind dates. Failed experiments. Being expected to cook. Having her questions brushed aside. Small talk. BOGGART: A figure tied to a burning pyre PATRONUS: An owl PERSONALITY: Hestia is possibly the most Ravenclaw-ish person who never actually, technically got sorted into Ravenclaw. From the first, she has always wanted to know absolutely everything! right now! not a minute to waste! Each moment seems to present her with a new source of wonder-- a hilarious Muggle invention, a charmed object of unknown properties, the latest concocted potion. She is almost inexhaustible in her desire to get to the bottom of things. Her endless curiosity can be wearying to outsiders, and it can also make her occasionally behave thoughtlessly as well. When wildly caught up in some mystery or new obsession, Hestia has a tendency to only think of the puzzle at hand, not the feelings of others or even her own basic needs. She has passed more than one all-nighter at the Ministry without having made the conscious decision to do so and she frequently bores her conversational partners with whatever topic has currently seized her interest. Outfit her in tweed and she would fit the stereotype of the absentminded professor to a T. Hestia's basic temperament is sunny and non-judgmental. She is certainly one of the most irrepressibly cheerful people in the altogether gloomy Department of Mysteries, and would give other departments a good run for their money. No matter how many times people disappoint her, she continues to believe the best of everyone and seems genuinely surprised each time someone lets her down. While being open natured and affectionate is all well and good, it also means that she tends to get bogged down in others' problems too easily and possesses a boundless optimism bordering on the naive. She always thinks compromise is possible in any situation and it takes considerable evidence to the contrary to convince her that there are individuals who simply cannot be reasoned with or persuaded. Having once harbored a degree of purist beliefs herself, she is not even willing to dismiss pureblood extremists out of hand. No one is beyond redemption, as far as Hestia is concerned. While she has a firm, nearly unshakable sense of right and wrong on matters of importance, when it comes to day-to-day issues she is easily persuadable and finds it difficult to say no to anyone. For all her book smarts, she is not always very perceptive about people. She trusts knowledge and expertise completely, and believes that the right book or proper spell can solve any problem. Hestia loves magic and respects knowledge in a reverential manner that most people reserve for their religious beliefs. FAMILY SPOUSE: None SIBLINGS: None PARENTS: Hieronymus Jones, Ekaterina Makarova OTHER NOTABLE RELATIVES: Her paternal grandfather, Hippolytus Jones, was a professor of Ancient Runes at Hogwarts from 1937-1976 and her mother's side of the family were infamous as ardent supporters of Grindelwald. HISTORY HOGWARTS HOUSE: Slytherin EXTRA-CURRICULUM: Dueling Club for two years (she dropped out when it interfered with school work); Charms Club NEWTS: Ancient Runes – O Arithmancy – E Charms – O Defense Against the Dark Arts – O Divination – O Potions – O HISTORY: No one expected Hieronymus Jones to ever do anything as conventional as marry and produce a daughter. The idea of him even meeting a worthy woman seemed farfetched. He spent every waking moment in the back of his shop, Jones' Ancient & Arcane (a slightly less dodgy and far less successful rival to Borgin & Burkes), fiddling with magical artifacts of questionable legality or reading ancient spell books. He had a hard time parting with his more rare treasures, which meant that the store never turned a real profit. He was on a trip to Moscow in hopes of acquiring a particularly intriguing book of dark magic when he encountered Ekaterina Makarova on the same quest. She was every bit as fascinated by the arcane and ancient as he was. Intellectual passion (and other passions) ignited, he promptly set about persuading her to return with him to England as his wife. Despite their brief and sudden courtship, the two got along swimmingly. They might have differed on notions of blood purity (Ekaterina was firmly a purist, Hieronymus was contemptuously dismissive of Muggles but thought the whole matter of bloodlines quite silly), but it never caused them any real conflict. Neither had any real head for business, and they only managed for the store to stay afloat due to royalties from their books. His publication of Magical Hieroglyphs and Logograms and his wife's book Olde and Forgotten Bewitchments and Charmes sold well and drew at least a few extra customers into the shop. Still, research and not profit was what motivated them. Hestia's arrival on the scene was very much an unexpected surprise to both her parents. Somewhat at a loss for how to treat a child, they settled on the simple solution of behaving as if she were an adult. From a young age, she helped in the shop--wrangling cursed objects and assisting customers of dubious intentions and reputations--while spending the rest of the time learning Russian and pouring over ancient tomes. Doing everything, in fact, but playing with other children. Aside from a few neighborhood friends, the only people she encountered that her own age were the children of mostly pureblood families who came into the shop. Hestia gobbled up learning, fascinated by the idea of forbidden magic and spells. She didn't mind that there was no room in her family's schedule for learning practical skills at all. Who wanted to bother with mundane things when a life of magic awaited her? She'd have spells soon to mend her clothing and cook her meals, she was absolutely certain. Hogwarts was the apotheoses of all Hestia's hopes-- books, learning, and likeminded people her own age! The Sorting Hat struggled with her request to be put in Slytherin, telling her firmly that she would do better in Ravenclaw. After a bit of back-and-forth, the Sorting Hat conceded that her interest in dark magic would be more readily accepted if she were placed in Slytherin and she was sorted into that House. She fit in with her fellow Slytherins right away, able to impress students of much higher status with all that she had seen and experienced in her father's store. The purist talk didn't bother her overly much, she had grown up hearing her mother's casual bigotry where Muggles and Muggle-borns were concerned, and she certainly didn't want to risk friendships or her fragile social standing by calling people out for a prejudice that she somewhat shared. Her contentment with life in Slytherin began to fade over the years and disillusionment with purist ideas set in. First, she was confronted with evidence that despite her considerable academic abilities, a mere Muggleborn had surpassed her in almost all of their shared classes during her second year at Hogwarts. Later she began to suspect that while her own interest in the Dark Arts was purely academic, others in her House relished the violent spells forbidden from the Hogwarts curriculum but discussed in whispers after hours. Only now, as an adult, does she regret not speaking out about the purist talk and taking a stand against Voldemort. As a student, she simply buried her head in the sand and focused on her school work. She had little time for socializing, so caught up was she in the academic side of life at Hogwarts. She was regularly at the top of her class in subjects that interested her--which was most of them--but struggled mightily with more practical courses. She spent the summer before her final year at Hogwarts bent over her books studying compulsively and barely seeing the sunshine. The net result of her tireless efforts was that she performed very well on her NEWTS, although that "E" in Arithmancy still stings. An acquaintance of her father's had watched her performance over the years and offered her an internship with the Department of Mysteries. Her first day in the Brain Room was a traumatic one, she was chased out of the room by a cranium. But the work was too fascinating for her to be intimidated into quitting by the various frights and shocks that made up day-to-day work at the DOM. She rotated through the various departments for two years, proving herself adept at the mixture of patience and ingenuity that characterizes DOM staff. While she applied for a position in the Death Chamber, she was instead placed in the more generalist position of Spell Researcher and Analyst working across the different offices. To say that Hestia is obsessed with her work would be an understatement. She would continue to show up at the DOM without fail even if they stopped paying her. She spends nearly as many hours inside the Ministry these days as outside of it and has little in the way of a personal life. THIRD PERSON EXAMPLE A hike had seemed like a good idea at the time. Hestia had packed her bag and departed early that morning, not telling anyone where she was headed. It had felt so freeing--heading out to the woods with only a map and her grandfather's enchanted compass for guidance. She hardly qualified as outdoorsy--she spent most of her waking hours bent over crumbling textbooks and inspecting decaying tombs--but after a year defined by constant disappointments and broken hearts she was eager to be alone in nature with her thoughts. And then it had happened. A strange, shimmering shape appearing between two tall, ancient elms. No sooner than she had reached out with one, questioning hand than she found herself falling, free-wheeling through space. She had landed with a hard thud, the ground knocking the breath out out of her body. She had barely had time to recollect herself before she was unceremoniously captured, cold hands yanking her limbs into place and securing her wrists together with a rough material that burned her skin. Her captors dragged her through the forest with no consideration for her comfort, roughly urging her on with harsh shoves and practically dragging her along the ground when she tried to resist. Finding herself captured by a band of hooded strangers in the middle of the woods should have been frightening enough, but more terrifying than that was the forest itself. It was a forest alright, but not the one Hestia knew. Not the one she had entered that morning. It was all too bright. The sky. Her captors' malevolent eyes. Even the green blades of grass. Everything made her eyes hurt, caused her to head to throb. She struggled not to trip over the cord binding her wrists, finding it difficult to keep up with her captors, finding it impossible to do anything other than shut her eyes against the dizzying array of colors that assaulted her vision. "You don't have to do this," she whispered to the stranger holding her shoulder in a punishing grip. "Really. I didn't mean to intrude on whatever... this is. Truly." He grunted inarticulately at this, tightening his grasp so she had to quicken her pace to keep her balance. |