You: Name: Kat Contact: TheUpperEchelon (AIM); literaryfaery[at]gmail[dot]com
Character: Character Name: Madeleine Gallagher Pantheon: N/A Age: 18 Occupation: Student of music composition at Columbia University
Personality: At first glance, Madeleine is a rather reserved young woman. She has "polite, meaningless small talk" down to an art form, but she won't go out of her way to start a conversation with just anyone. She much prefers to be the observer, watching people interact with each other and with their surroundings -- she sees the elegance of dance in everything, and to her the sounds of New York City are their own sort of music. Why on earth would she want to distract from the natural beauty of such things by talking? But because she's so constantly distracted by her surroundings, Maddy is also easily lost. She'll be following a couple across the street and watching how they behave around each other, and before she knows it she's six blocks past where she meant to go. It wasn't so bad in Chicago, where she never ventured out much beyond home, the Academy, school, and her music teacher, but in New York she's constantly having to consult maps and Starbucks employees in order to figure out how to get where she needs.
Behind the exterior shell, Maddy really isn't a whole lot more outgoing. Oh, certainly she's much more personable and warm with people she trusts as friends and family, but she isn't the type to be the loudest voice in a room. Definitely a follower rather than a leader, she has always found her role in social groups as the listener, the crying shoulder, and the logical one. She keeps calm in emotional situations and considers all sides of something before dispensing advice; sometimes her cool head has led people to label her unfeeling and stoic, even coldhearted. Nothing could be more patently untrue -- Maddy just has trouble expressing her emotions through words. She keeps her more volatile emotions tucked away inside, and instead airs these grievances through playing her violin. While she no longer takes ballet, she still finds an equal amount of stress relief through dance.
History: [Note: References to Opium, and the whole fact that she's his child, were all completely approved by the man himself.]
In the early 1990s, Louisa Gallagher was an up-and-coming dancer in the Joffrey Ballet Company in Chicago. One night, after a performance, a man was waiting outside the dressing room door. He was attractive, charming, and had come backstage (as certain important persons were occasionally allowed to do) specifically to meet her. It was enough to turn the 21-year-old dancer's head, and she let him take her out to dinner that night. They began a relationship that lasted several months... until Louisa caught him with another woman. That was enough for her to end things with Oscar Drood, even though she had only recently found out she was pregnant with his child.
Madeleine Grace Gallagher was born on August 26, 1992. Her mother Louisa, no longer dancing with the Joffrey Ballet, took a position as an instructor at the Joffrey's Academy of Dance. Funny thing about Madeleine's birth, though -- the hospital bills for the birth and subsequent stay of mother and child were paid in full by a benefactor who didn't leave a name. Afterwards, money was sent to them every month. It never came with any kind of name, letter, any sort of contact, but Louisa knew who it was from. She put it aside in a college fund for Madeleine, and didn't tell the child that her father was sending money to take care of her. Louisa made enough money to provide a comfortable, if not lavish, lifestyle for her daughter and thus saw no reason to touch "that man's" money.
Madeleine herself grew up as a bright, happy child. Despite her lack of a father figure --Louisa married when Maddy was five, but it was a short-lived thing-- she certainly never lacked for love. The Academy of Dance was where she spent a great deal of her formative years; when Maddy wasn't taking ballet classes of her own or sitting in on her mother's, she enjoyed the run of the place. More often than not she could be found sitting in on the company's rehearsals, but it was the orchestra she watched rather than the dancers. At nine years old, she begged and pleaded until her mother allowed her to take violin lessons in addition to her ballet classes. Between the twice-weekly violin instruction and four ballet classes a week, Madeleine didn't have much time for a social life. She didn't mind, though. Her peers vastly underwhelmed her, with their devotion to American Idol and the rapidly-expanding genre of reality shows. She focused on her dancing, her music, and her studies, and everything was precisely as she wanted it to be.
Everything up until her junior year of high school, that is. When Madeleine started looking at colleges and deciding where she could and couldn't afford to go, Louisa sat down and explained to her daughter about the monthly sums that had been accruing in a bank account for the last eighteen years. Madeleine had never known much about her father; Louisa refused to talk about him beyond the basic story of how they met and that he wasn't the sort of man to settle down with a family. With money no longer a primary concern in picking a college, Maddy aimed high and applied to Columbia University in New York City. She was accepted early decision, and two months ago arrived in the city with her violin, her pet canary, and her father's money.