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application for eastbound
Jun. 2nd, 2021 11:02 amPLAYER NAME: Chel
CONTACT: PM
INVITE STATUS: the ol' modly green light
CHARACTER: Lily Evans
CANON: The Wizarding World
CANON POINT: Immediately after stepping off the Hogwarts Express for the last time at the end of seventh year, 1978.
BACKGROUND:
Born to unmagical parents in an even less magical place, Lily Evans began trailing after her older sister Petunia just as soon as she figured out how to walk. In a working-class town like Cokeworth, there wasn’t much to do beyond whatever it was Petunia was doing and so the Evans sisters kept to themselves, becoming a fixture at myriad woodland tea parties and the reading room of their local library, where Lily swiftly gained a love for just about any book she got her hands on.
Some of her earliest memories were of sending blades of grass propelling across the lawn, watching as they lifted off from between her fingers with just a thought’s worth of effort. When she was four and fell down the stairs and every lightbulb in the house stopped working - it was something of a bizarre coincidence for Harold and June Evans who had no idea that it was very common for young witches and wizards to unwittingly use magic in times of great duress.
It was the boy from Spinner’s End that spelled doom for the contentment between the girls from Cokeworth. Well, him and the way Petunia reacted when Lily finally gathered enough courage to share with her some of the inexplicably strange things she could do. Where Petunia was grounded, Lily was idealistic, though she tried her best to tamp down her more fanciful notions for the sake of sparing herself Petunia’s dismissal.
She had believed that the flowers would be the thing to impress her older sister and prove to her that not everything unusual was wrong. To her dismay, (but not to her surprise) the moment Lily showed Petunia the way she could make the delicate wildflowers that grew around their home lift off her palm and hover spinning in the air, her older sister recoiled in anger and called her a freak.
Severus Snape, the odd boy in the shabby clothes from the poorer part of town didn’t think Lily was a freak at all, in fact, he thought quite the contrary. In her friendship with Severus Lily found someone she didn’t need to pretend around. Whether he agreed with them or not, she could share every odd thought and the strange new things she found herself able to do without fear of dismissal, or worse - rejection. It was the boy from Spinner’s End who first told Lily about Hogwarts - about who she was, and what she was capable of becoming once her acceptance letter came.
The moment that it did, nothing was ever the same with Petunia - something that still hurts if she lets herself dwell - and things changed with her parents as well. Harold and June Evans had never thought themselves the sort of people who’d have something as uncanny as a witch in the family, and they couldn’t have been happier. The praise and excitement her parents lavished on her only made the resentment and disdain her sister had for her worse, and by the time it came for Lily to begin her first year of school she couldn’t wait to leave.
For Lily, attending Hogwarts was akin to being handed the moons of Barsoom and the Pyramid of Cheops on a silver platter. Every story she had adored that Petunia turned her nose up and deemed ridiculous was suddenly validated as the world revealed itself to be more full of wonder than she had imagined it actually could be.
The moment she received her schedule of classes on that first day of school, nothing could stop Lily Evans. The life of a witch, of a member of magical society, meant paths she didn’t believe existed, were open to her, and the world couldn’t go back to being the same size it was.
School was not without its pitfalls, and though she did brilliantly in her classes - showing the kind of enthusiasm and cleverness that makes for the sort of pupil that kept their professors on their toes - there was a division among the student body she hadn’t been aware of before her arrival. For those coming from magical families, the rift between Pure Blooded wizards, whose lineage showed exclusively magical folk, and everyone else had existed, peripherally for some, and far more vividly for others. For Lily it was a new concept that Severus was quick to enlighten her on, having surrounded himself with people who had a lot to say on the matter.
That festering rift in magical society made itself apparent in subtle ways at first; Horace Slughorn, one of Lily’s favorite professors making passing remarks about how her talent for Potions could make a person forget she wasn’t pure-blooded, the gaggle of miscreants Severus chose to associate with making sniggering remarks under their breath whenever she, or another student lacking their desired pedigree passed by became more and more common as the years went by.
The whole thing seemed foolish - she was as capable as anyone else among her fellow students, and while a good portion of her peers felt the same way as she did, that unsettlingly adamant swath of those who felt differently grew more brazen and more sinister in their actions as time passed. It wasn’t uncommon for fights or pranks to leave students injured or ashamed as two sides of a silly debate, inflamed with all the bluster being young can galvanize a person with entered what felt like a perpetual tug-of-war to Lily.
Those who elected to be overt, either in their prejudices or the revulsion being exposed to said prejudices can evoke in a person, weren’t above humiliating other students, and while the fondness Lily’s professors had for her helped keep her spared from such cruelties, Severus could not say the same for himself. Even though she didn’t agree with a goodly portion of Severus’s new fascinations, Lily stuck by her friend, much to the chagrin and ridicule of some of the students in her house. One student in her year, James Potter, seemed particularly disdainful of the friendship Lily and Severus had and invested more time than Lily wished he would in disparaging Severus and trying to catch her eye. Not one for the appeal of arrogance, and disgusted by the way James and members of his inner circle pranked first and asked questions later, she was swift to add rebuffing him to the laundry list of tasks she filled her days with.
There was something to be said for having a family that was removed from wizarding society. During the school year Lily stayed engrossed in the classes she was taking, devouring books in the library, and finding quiet private spaces to practice the magic she was learning in class (along with more advanced magic, some devised by Severus himself, like The Muffliato Charm). When she was back in Cokeworth, however, Lily could be just another girl home for the summer holiday.
Away from Hogwarts, there was still contention though at home it came from Petunia and the small cluster of mean girls she cultivated while her younger sister was away at school. For the sake of avoiding the inevitable spat, Lily was usually locked in her room with stacks of fantasy novels and the occasional trashy romance, accompanied by the stack of records she couldn’t wait to return home from school to play (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars a particular favorite, but then what girl her age wasn’t daydreaming about being Lady Stardust?). There were enough diversions that Lily could forget about the mounting tension back at school, and affecting the wizarding world at large.
Until she couldn’t, until her oldest friend turned on her, blurting out hurtful, hateful things that people who care about one another have no business saying to each other. He had been humiliated by James and his clique spectacularly, and while Lily empathized deeply with how much pain the years of bullying brought Severus, she could no longer pretend that the terrible things he himself was spouting were a meaningless way for him to vent, and just a product of the people he surrounded himself with. He had left her with no choice but to believe that he meant everything he said, and the pain of losing her best friend hovered over her like a stormcloud for the next two years.
Lily found herself easily caught up in the side that chose dissent against blood purism. As her time as a student wound down to a close, she spent less time with herself, and more time involved with those in the student body who believed that regardless of magical lineage, everyone deserved to be treated the same.
Once, she believed that after Hogwarts the world would be hers to explore and learn from - wanting nothing more than apprenticeships in exotic locales with the authors of the books she spent every term borrowing from the school’s tremendous library, but the world around her was too close to the brink of war to hide behind a book anymore.
In her last year of school, she became Head Girl which bore all the prestige someone who had worked as tirelessly as Lily had craved and the unfortunate caveat of having to deal with that year’s Head Boy - James Potter. It took months of amiable cajoling to get her to regard him with anything but brusqueness, something James had gotten used to receiving from Lily. Enough evenings spent making rounds together gave him the chance to turn that dry disregard into conversation, and eventually, a few dates as her final year at school came to an end, with the promise to write, and maybe see one another over the summer.
This was a period of great change for Lily Evans and wizarding society on the whole. Voldemort - the figurehead of the purist movement was on the brink of declaring war on the rest of magical society, while whispers of a mounting resistance movement resounded with Lily. She only wished setting down all those other dreams in favor of doing the right thing didn’t have to be quite so painful.
ABILITIES | POWERS: Lily has been a student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for the last seven years and ended her academic career as Head Girl and among the top students. She has a particularly strong grasp on:
Potions: Described as subtle science, Potion making is the study of combining ingredients in a cauldron to create elixirs that must be consumed for their effects to be felt. Potions can be made for a multitude of reasons such as healing or doing someone harm, changing one's appearance, and inducing sleep among others.
Charms: The magical discipline focused on making objects adapt properties they would not normally have. Summoning an object from across a room, unlocking or locking a door, and causing a person to be unable to make noise are among the Charms students learn at Hogwarts. Due to Charms being a discipline that serves as something of an umbrella for spells that do not fit into other areas, and for the sake of brevity, a more comprehensive explanation of Charms including a list can be found here.
Transfiguration: The area of magic concerned with taking something and changing it into something else, Transfiguration is among the more complicated, and difficult areas of magic to learn. Using Transfiguration, a witch can change things, both inanimate and live into other things, some examples of this include changing rats into water goblets, disguising a person as a bone, or a chair, or changing the features of a person or animal's body (ie, elongating the ears into rabbit ears, or changing the color of someone's hair).
Beyond these subjects, Lily has also studied Divination, Herbology, and Arithmancy, and while knowledgeable on these subjects, does not possess the natural flair for them as strongly as she does for the ones detailed above.
Apart from magic, Lily's abilities are limited but as a teenage girl in the late 1970s, she is absolutely terrific at rollerskating.
PERSONALITY:
Described as 'uncommonly kind' by those who know her best, Lily is the first person to offer a helping hand or an accepting ear even if it isn't the wisest thing to do. Her deep sense of compassion stems from the belief that there's good in everyone, and while this does make her a good friend, it can also make her extend more patience than some might deserve. She wants the people she cares for to be as wonderful as she believes them to be, and will stick with someone longer than might be wise to help them be better. While the loyalty she feels towards those close to her is enduring it is by no means coddling; she may not walk away from a person because they did something she believes is wrong, or harmful, she will tell them exactly what she thinks of their actions and why she believes them to be out of line. She would never do something as unconstructive as telling someone off, but she is not above giving anyone a good, analytical, dressing down.
A lot of her willingness to hold onto relationships longer than they might serve her comes from a stubbornness that years of academic success has fed into. During her time as a student, she has rarely heard that she's wrong, or going off-course, and while she isn't uncompromising, she is generally dubious of the input of others at first. She has never had a reason not to trust herself, and so she does implicitly - while having faith in yourself is a good thing, it leads Lily to believe that she can help, even when she can't.
Her enthusiasm for life is evident in her demeanor and coupled with her quick wit she can easily hold her own in conversation with and befriend both her fellow students and her professors. She loves to make others laugh, and has been described as cheeky, though she's never too rude when she takes the piss out of someone. That happiness and sense of excitement for both her life at present and her future, feed into Lily's sense of drive. She is tremendously goal-oriented, spending a good portion of her time at school neck-deep in homework to keep her marks high, thus broadening the possibilities she would be met with post-Hogwarts. Ever since she found out that she was a witch, she has wanted to get everything out of the magical world that she possibly could, and that aspiration has been her focus. She will always want to be better and smarter than she was the day before, and she hopes the same for the people she cares for.
When confronted with failure or rejection, Lily can become very obstinate and brusque, working to internalize her deep dismay over having failed. She's not above being sulky or using that cleverness her teachers love to make snide remarks, that while not hurtful aren't helpful either. Lily can move past slights with ease but will become unforgiving when pushed too far; it pains her to cut people out of her life, and will only be driven to do so after her extensive patience has been run absolutely dry. She simply doesn't like to give up, on others, or herself.
One of the most important things to keep in mind with Lily is that she's young. At eighteen years old she's grown-up between her parent's house in a working-class town in the Midlands, and a boarding school that, while magical, does not take the place of experience out in the real world. Also, a bit of a nerd really.
SAMPLE: one two three
INVENTORY:
Her wand: 10Âľ" long, made out of willow wood, with a unicorn hair core
The clothes she's wearing
Her school bag containing:
fifteen pencils, and a sharpener
three notebooks (one filled cover to cover with notes from various classes and meetings with professors, one partially filled with personal musings, in addition to even more notes from various classes, and another that is unused except for the first page because it fell to the bottom of her bag and she forgot about it)
a sensible cardigan
a smaller bag with a hairbrush, a tube of lip gloss, tissues, and an emergency ballpoint pen (blue ink)
a change purse containing ten sickles, twenty-five knuts, and about ÂŁ25.85 in a frustrating combination of notes and coins befitting an octagenarian
a very well-loved copy of Wuthering Heights
and an absolutely destroyed bag of Monster Munch, the contents of which are now pickled onion flavored powder
NOTES: n/a
CONTACT: PM
INVITE STATUS: the ol' modly green light
CHARACTER: Lily Evans
CANON: The Wizarding World
CANON POINT: Immediately after stepping off the Hogwarts Express for the last time at the end of seventh year, 1978.
BACKGROUND:
Born to unmagical parents in an even less magical place, Lily Evans began trailing after her older sister Petunia just as soon as she figured out how to walk. In a working-class town like Cokeworth, there wasn’t much to do beyond whatever it was Petunia was doing and so the Evans sisters kept to themselves, becoming a fixture at myriad woodland tea parties and the reading room of their local library, where Lily swiftly gained a love for just about any book she got her hands on.
Some of her earliest memories were of sending blades of grass propelling across the lawn, watching as they lifted off from between her fingers with just a thought’s worth of effort. When she was four and fell down the stairs and every lightbulb in the house stopped working - it was something of a bizarre coincidence for Harold and June Evans who had no idea that it was very common for young witches and wizards to unwittingly use magic in times of great duress.
It was the boy from Spinner’s End that spelled doom for the contentment between the girls from Cokeworth. Well, him and the way Petunia reacted when Lily finally gathered enough courage to share with her some of the inexplicably strange things she could do. Where Petunia was grounded, Lily was idealistic, though she tried her best to tamp down her more fanciful notions for the sake of sparing herself Petunia’s dismissal.
She had believed that the flowers would be the thing to impress her older sister and prove to her that not everything unusual was wrong. To her dismay, (but not to her surprise) the moment Lily showed Petunia the way she could make the delicate wildflowers that grew around their home lift off her palm and hover spinning in the air, her older sister recoiled in anger and called her a freak.
Severus Snape, the odd boy in the shabby clothes from the poorer part of town didn’t think Lily was a freak at all, in fact, he thought quite the contrary. In her friendship with Severus Lily found someone she didn’t need to pretend around. Whether he agreed with them or not, she could share every odd thought and the strange new things she found herself able to do without fear of dismissal, or worse - rejection. It was the boy from Spinner’s End who first told Lily about Hogwarts - about who she was, and what she was capable of becoming once her acceptance letter came.
The moment that it did, nothing was ever the same with Petunia - something that still hurts if she lets herself dwell - and things changed with her parents as well. Harold and June Evans had never thought themselves the sort of people who’d have something as uncanny as a witch in the family, and they couldn’t have been happier. The praise and excitement her parents lavished on her only made the resentment and disdain her sister had for her worse, and by the time it came for Lily to begin her first year of school she couldn’t wait to leave.
For Lily, attending Hogwarts was akin to being handed the moons of Barsoom and the Pyramid of Cheops on a silver platter. Every story she had adored that Petunia turned her nose up and deemed ridiculous was suddenly validated as the world revealed itself to be more full of wonder than she had imagined it actually could be.
The moment she received her schedule of classes on that first day of school, nothing could stop Lily Evans. The life of a witch, of a member of magical society, meant paths she didn’t believe existed, were open to her, and the world couldn’t go back to being the same size it was.
School was not without its pitfalls, and though she did brilliantly in her classes - showing the kind of enthusiasm and cleverness that makes for the sort of pupil that kept their professors on their toes - there was a division among the student body she hadn’t been aware of before her arrival. For those coming from magical families, the rift between Pure Blooded wizards, whose lineage showed exclusively magical folk, and everyone else had existed, peripherally for some, and far more vividly for others. For Lily it was a new concept that Severus was quick to enlighten her on, having surrounded himself with people who had a lot to say on the matter.
That festering rift in magical society made itself apparent in subtle ways at first; Horace Slughorn, one of Lily’s favorite professors making passing remarks about how her talent for Potions could make a person forget she wasn’t pure-blooded, the gaggle of miscreants Severus chose to associate with making sniggering remarks under their breath whenever she, or another student lacking their desired pedigree passed by became more and more common as the years went by.
The whole thing seemed foolish - she was as capable as anyone else among her fellow students, and while a good portion of her peers felt the same way as she did, that unsettlingly adamant swath of those who felt differently grew more brazen and more sinister in their actions as time passed. It wasn’t uncommon for fights or pranks to leave students injured or ashamed as two sides of a silly debate, inflamed with all the bluster being young can galvanize a person with entered what felt like a perpetual tug-of-war to Lily.
Those who elected to be overt, either in their prejudices or the revulsion being exposed to said prejudices can evoke in a person, weren’t above humiliating other students, and while the fondness Lily’s professors had for her helped keep her spared from such cruelties, Severus could not say the same for himself. Even though she didn’t agree with a goodly portion of Severus’s new fascinations, Lily stuck by her friend, much to the chagrin and ridicule of some of the students in her house. One student in her year, James Potter, seemed particularly disdainful of the friendship Lily and Severus had and invested more time than Lily wished he would in disparaging Severus and trying to catch her eye. Not one for the appeal of arrogance, and disgusted by the way James and members of his inner circle pranked first and asked questions later, she was swift to add rebuffing him to the laundry list of tasks she filled her days with.
There was something to be said for having a family that was removed from wizarding society. During the school year Lily stayed engrossed in the classes she was taking, devouring books in the library, and finding quiet private spaces to practice the magic she was learning in class (along with more advanced magic, some devised by Severus himself, like The Muffliato Charm). When she was back in Cokeworth, however, Lily could be just another girl home for the summer holiday.
Away from Hogwarts, there was still contention though at home it came from Petunia and the small cluster of mean girls she cultivated while her younger sister was away at school. For the sake of avoiding the inevitable spat, Lily was usually locked in her room with stacks of fantasy novels and the occasional trashy romance, accompanied by the stack of records she couldn’t wait to return home from school to play (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars a particular favorite, but then what girl her age wasn’t daydreaming about being Lady Stardust?). There were enough diversions that Lily could forget about the mounting tension back at school, and affecting the wizarding world at large.
Until she couldn’t, until her oldest friend turned on her, blurting out hurtful, hateful things that people who care about one another have no business saying to each other. He had been humiliated by James and his clique spectacularly, and while Lily empathized deeply with how much pain the years of bullying brought Severus, she could no longer pretend that the terrible things he himself was spouting were a meaningless way for him to vent, and just a product of the people he surrounded himself with. He had left her with no choice but to believe that he meant everything he said, and the pain of losing her best friend hovered over her like a stormcloud for the next two years.
Lily found herself easily caught up in the side that chose dissent against blood purism. As her time as a student wound down to a close, she spent less time with herself, and more time involved with those in the student body who believed that regardless of magical lineage, everyone deserved to be treated the same.
Once, she believed that after Hogwarts the world would be hers to explore and learn from - wanting nothing more than apprenticeships in exotic locales with the authors of the books she spent every term borrowing from the school’s tremendous library, but the world around her was too close to the brink of war to hide behind a book anymore.
In her last year of school, she became Head Girl which bore all the prestige someone who had worked as tirelessly as Lily had craved and the unfortunate caveat of having to deal with that year’s Head Boy - James Potter. It took months of amiable cajoling to get her to regard him with anything but brusqueness, something James had gotten used to receiving from Lily. Enough evenings spent making rounds together gave him the chance to turn that dry disregard into conversation, and eventually, a few dates as her final year at school came to an end, with the promise to write, and maybe see one another over the summer.
This was a period of great change for Lily Evans and wizarding society on the whole. Voldemort - the figurehead of the purist movement was on the brink of declaring war on the rest of magical society, while whispers of a mounting resistance movement resounded with Lily. She only wished setting down all those other dreams in favor of doing the right thing didn’t have to be quite so painful.
ABILITIES | POWERS: Lily has been a student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for the last seven years and ended her academic career as Head Girl and among the top students. She has a particularly strong grasp on:
Potions: Described as subtle science, Potion making is the study of combining ingredients in a cauldron to create elixirs that must be consumed for their effects to be felt. Potions can be made for a multitude of reasons such as healing or doing someone harm, changing one's appearance, and inducing sleep among others.
Charms: The magical discipline focused on making objects adapt properties they would not normally have. Summoning an object from across a room, unlocking or locking a door, and causing a person to be unable to make noise are among the Charms students learn at Hogwarts. Due to Charms being a discipline that serves as something of an umbrella for spells that do not fit into other areas, and for the sake of brevity, a more comprehensive explanation of Charms including a list can be found here.
Transfiguration: The area of magic concerned with taking something and changing it into something else, Transfiguration is among the more complicated, and difficult areas of magic to learn. Using Transfiguration, a witch can change things, both inanimate and live into other things, some examples of this include changing rats into water goblets, disguising a person as a bone, or a chair, or changing the features of a person or animal's body (ie, elongating the ears into rabbit ears, or changing the color of someone's hair).
Beyond these subjects, Lily has also studied Divination, Herbology, and Arithmancy, and while knowledgeable on these subjects, does not possess the natural flair for them as strongly as she does for the ones detailed above.
Apart from magic, Lily's abilities are limited but as a teenage girl in the late 1970s, she is absolutely terrific at rollerskating.
PERSONALITY:
Described as 'uncommonly kind' by those who know her best, Lily is the first person to offer a helping hand or an accepting ear even if it isn't the wisest thing to do. Her deep sense of compassion stems from the belief that there's good in everyone, and while this does make her a good friend, it can also make her extend more patience than some might deserve. She wants the people she cares for to be as wonderful as she believes them to be, and will stick with someone longer than might be wise to help them be better. While the loyalty she feels towards those close to her is enduring it is by no means coddling; she may not walk away from a person because they did something she believes is wrong, or harmful, she will tell them exactly what she thinks of their actions and why she believes them to be out of line. She would never do something as unconstructive as telling someone off, but she is not above giving anyone a good, analytical, dressing down.
A lot of her willingness to hold onto relationships longer than they might serve her comes from a stubbornness that years of academic success has fed into. During her time as a student, she has rarely heard that she's wrong, or going off-course, and while she isn't uncompromising, she is generally dubious of the input of others at first. She has never had a reason not to trust herself, and so she does implicitly - while having faith in yourself is a good thing, it leads Lily to believe that she can help, even when she can't.
Her enthusiasm for life is evident in her demeanor and coupled with her quick wit she can easily hold her own in conversation with and befriend both her fellow students and her professors. She loves to make others laugh, and has been described as cheeky, though she's never too rude when she takes the piss out of someone. That happiness and sense of excitement for both her life at present and her future, feed into Lily's sense of drive. She is tremendously goal-oriented, spending a good portion of her time at school neck-deep in homework to keep her marks high, thus broadening the possibilities she would be met with post-Hogwarts. Ever since she found out that she was a witch, she has wanted to get everything out of the magical world that she possibly could, and that aspiration has been her focus. She will always want to be better and smarter than she was the day before, and she hopes the same for the people she cares for.
When confronted with failure or rejection, Lily can become very obstinate and brusque, working to internalize her deep dismay over having failed. She's not above being sulky or using that cleverness her teachers love to make snide remarks, that while not hurtful aren't helpful either. Lily can move past slights with ease but will become unforgiving when pushed too far; it pains her to cut people out of her life, and will only be driven to do so after her extensive patience has been run absolutely dry. She simply doesn't like to give up, on others, or herself.
One of the most important things to keep in mind with Lily is that she's young. At eighteen years old she's grown-up between her parent's house in a working-class town in the Midlands, and a boarding school that, while magical, does not take the place of experience out in the real world. Also, a bit of a nerd really.
SAMPLE: one two three
INVENTORY:
Her wand: 10Âľ" long, made out of willow wood, with a unicorn hair core
The clothes she's wearing
Her school bag containing:
fifteen pencils, and a sharpener
three notebooks (one filled cover to cover with notes from various classes and meetings with professors, one partially filled with personal musings, in addition to even more notes from various classes, and another that is unused except for the first page because it fell to the bottom of her bag and she forgot about it)
a sensible cardigan
a smaller bag with a hairbrush, a tube of lip gloss, tissues, and an emergency ballpoint pen (blue ink)
a change purse containing ten sickles, twenty-five knuts, and about ÂŁ25.85 in a frustrating combination of notes and coins befitting an octagenarian
a very well-loved copy of Wuthering Heights
and an absolutely destroyed bag of Monster Munch, the contents of which are now pickled onion flavored powder
NOTES: n/a