(no subject)

[ghostbluster]

GENERAL

NAME: Liberty Chan
NICKNAMES: Bertie, Bert
AGE/DOB: April 20; 16
BLOOD STATUS: Halfblood
GENDER/PRONOUNS: She/her
SEXUALITY: Current hypotheses: homosexual, demisexual, asexual. Data inconclusive. Requires further testing.
HOMETOWN: Portland, OR

CONCEPT: Anxious scientist believes as many as six impossible things before breakfast

PHYSICAL

APPEARANCE: Liberty often looks slightly... disheveled. She puts more thought into her latest theory than into brushing her hair. She might have one pen behind her ear, or she might have one behind each ear and one that has fallen backwards and gotten caught in her ponytail. She doesn't mind adhering to dress code most of the time, particularly since being made prefect, but it's still never quite right. Maybe she missed a button or maybe her socks don't match, but she never looks quite put together.
HEIGHT: 5'8"

PB: Madison Hu

PERSONALITY

LIKES: Science, debates, studying strange phenomena, trying new snack foods, dad jokes, over sized sweaters and hoodies

DISLIKES: Closed minded people, history, fashion??, interpersonal drama, following rules for the sake of rules

PERSONALITY:

Liberty is willing to entertain any unlikely theory, dubious hypothesis, or doubtful theorem. She will discuss the minutia at length, examine every possibility for hours. She loves to debate, to passionately argue. That doesn’t mean she believes it. Sometimes, it seems like she doesn’t believe in anything. Even the most basic facts of nature and magic are up for question. She prefers to be constantly prepared for a paradigm shift, that moment where everything we thought we knew turns out to be irrelevant and we need to start completely over.

For the most part, Liberty seems unflappable. Whether it’s a big dance or an important test, she seems calm. Powerful beings in the forest kidnapped a bunch of kids? School might close? Okay. She has questions - so many questions - but she doesn’t raise her voice or cry.

Liberty likes to think this is because she is at least lowkey anxious at all times. It’s like people who wear ankle and wrist weights as they go about their daily lives to build up strength, except with emotions. By being constantly at least a little worried, she has built up a tolerance for when the bigger things rear their heads. Or maybe it’s less like strength training and more like muscle fatigue, and she’s just too tired to work up a response. Either way, the result is an Eeyore-like acceptance of the facts, assumption that the worst is going to happen, and a planning for the inevitable aftermath.

Liberty hoards knowledge like dragons hoard treasure (but only certain species, it’s a misnomer that it’s a common trait of dragons in general!). She has her prefered fields, but she thinks that all knowledge is valuable and ought to be treasured. Hermeticism is fascinating, but if you want to teach her about the ins and outs of bass fishing, she is happy to learn. The more esoteric, the better and more curious she is.

Because Liberty wants to know everything, absolutely everything, she thinks that the greatest flaw of the human mind is its inability to retain everything indefinitely. Her solution is to try to thoroughly document everything: outlining, diagramming, and sketching everything. She makes lists and then she makes lists of lists. She pins them up and she sticks them in her pockets.

Actually, Liberty is frequently surrounded by… stuff. A lot of stuff. She’s a verifiable hoarder of physical objects as well as knowledge, who sees a purpose in everything, and has a hard time just throwing things out. She’ll throw away wrappers, but she keeps all of her old notes, textbooks, half empty pens, notebooks. She swears she knows where everything is, so don’t touch it.

Nothing ever quite lives up to the grand ideas that Liberty has. She has big ideas, and big plans, but the real day to day world often happens on a much smaller scale and hypotheses don’t always prove true. She is a serial starter-of-projects, but rarely finishes them. Maybe something else strikes her as much grander, or maybe she just convinces herself that the end product will never live up to her idea, but either way the project is going into another box she’ll stack up in her room.

Liberty believes in adhering to the rules and maintaining order, she just doesn’t always acknowledge all the rules as valid. She learned from her parents that you don’t have to respect authority figures just because they’re in authority, and rules have no inherent power on their own. Over the course of her time at Gooseberry, she has methodically picked apart every single rule until she was satisfied in its merit or irrelevance. Curfew? Important for student safety. Dress code? Arbitrary.

While she can be good at anticipating problems, Liberty doesn’t always react well, even if she sees a problem coming a mile away. She needs time to collect data, analyze it, and formulate a plan, and she always plans for the worst. She is always ready to rebuild her stick house, but if it doesn’t fall, she isn’t quite sure what to do.

SKILLS

LANGUAGES SPOKEN: English. Some Chinese; She attended weekend Chinese school for years, but boarding school ended that.

PATRONUS: Cannot cast a corporeal patronus.

SKILLS:

• Science: By far Liberty's greatest interest.
• Baking: Baking is science that you eat! Liberty has a solid skillset in baking, but she likes to experiment, so the results can be tasty or... weird.
• Art: primary interested in sculpture, though she also has an interest in bio-art that's more difficult to explore at Gooseberry.
• Sports: Quidditch. This is Liberty's first year on the team. She is an enthusiastic learner, but she's definitely not a prodigy, and suffers from lack of experience.

HISTORY

FAMILY MEMBERS:

→ Father: Nian Chan, Writer
→ Mother: Lily Chan (nee Guo), former environmental scientist with the EPA
→ Uncle: Feng Chan, translator
→ Aunt: Elise Chan, travel agent
→ Sibling: Waylon Chan

HISTORY:

Liberty hasn’t had the most traditional upbringing. She vaguely remembers living with her parents when she was younger, though she doesn’t have any strong memories of any particular home. They never lived in one place for very long; they had an important mission, and they went where that mission took them, unburdened by roots.

Liberty’s parents, Nian and Lily Chan, were and continue to be staunch anti-Statute of Secrecy activists. When Nian, a halfblood wizard artist, met Lily, a muggle scientist working for the EPA, it was love, and he wasted no time in telling her all about the wizarding world. Lily was flabbergasted - and then enraged. All that magic could do - provide clean energy, feed the homeless, cure disease - and wizarding kind hoarded that knowledge? She fanned the flame of Nian’s already existing anti-establishment tendencies, and together they coalesced a movement. Together, they work on a fringe publication called the Rotfang Reader, which frequently covers topics such as muggle/mage equality, the evils of big government, environmental issues, the unconstitutionality of obliviation, and government cover ups. They dedicate a lot of the rest of their time to protests. These protests sometimes involve large scale attempts to reveal magic to the muggle world, necessitating swift and severe action by the Obliviators with MACUSA. Because of this, they’ve both spent a not insignificant amount of time in prison.

At some point when she was very young, she knows that she came to live with her uncle Feng, aunt Elise, and her cousin Waylon. She can’t recall how the exchange of custody went. She doesn’t want to think that her parents gave her up willingly, but she doesn’t want to imagine that her aunt took her away from them either. It’s one of the few things that her curiosity and need to know everything doesn’t cover.

Throughout Liberty’s childhood, her parents made sporadic appearances. They would show up with gifts and promises for the future, claiming that someday they would finish their mission and someday Liberty was going to come live with them again. Liberty believed them every time, even when they vanished for months at a time afterward. She idolized them in a way that’s only possible from afar, where she could fill in all the details about her parents and their adventures to her liking.

Her parents were her dream, the way some kids dream of becoming an astronaut or owning a pet nargle, but her real family was the one she saw every day. Her aunt and uncle were her primary caregivers, her legal guardians, and Waylon was her brother. After a while, no one even bothered to correct people who referred to Liberty as their daughter, and it’s been a long time since Liberty thought of Waylon as anything other than her brother.

With middle school drawing to a close, Liberty wanted something… more. More challenge, more knowledge. More weird. She researched her options extensively, and though she thought her aunt and uncle might not be in favor of her going away to a remote boarding school, they responded with enthusiasm. Gooseberry is a great school, and she loves it in spite of (or maybe because of) all the weird shit going on here. Still, she wonders if part of the reason they were okay with sending her off to camp school in the middle of Utah was to keep her even more out of contact with her parents.

Liberty took to school itself well, thriving in an environment with more funding and more individualized attention. If anything, her problem was that her interests were too wide. She wanted to take every single class that Gooseberry offered, pick the brains of every single faculty member, be involved in every club and extracurricular. Her fellow students, on the other hand? That wasn’t quite as easy. Liberty enters into every social interaction with the assumption that she won’t be liked, though she tries to be diplomatic regardless.

In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Liberty was made prefect. She was surprised by the announcement - wouldn’t someone more outgoing a better candidate? Someone tough and ready to lay down the law? Still, while she was anxious about it, she viewed it as a challenge, and more importantly, a learning opportunity, and entered the position with enthusiasm if not an iron fist.

This same desire to challenge herself led Liberty to get into new things at Gooseberry. Aesthetic Magic and Quidditch were two of these things, and despite her tendency to want to put things down to chase new interests, she stuck with them. Both art and athleticism are things that people tend to consider the opposite of science and intellectualism, but Liberty likes the idea of combining disparate interests, bringing a scientific mind together with heart and body.

When half the school vanished into some kind of (frankly, fascinating) hellscape at the end of last year, Liberty wasn’t exactly surprised. No, she hadn’t been expecting exactly that, but she had totally expected that something catastrophically bad would happen. You would think that her expectations becoming reality would have put Liberty off of returning to Gooseberry. On the contrary! This is now the most interesting place in the world. Sure, there was a lot of emotional trauma, but think of all the new phenomena to be discovered!!

SCHOOL

YEAR:Junior (Grade 11)
HOUSE: Ebonhide
SORTING: Liberty entered the sorting without expectations. Though she had researched the houses ahead of time, she was totally open to being put in any of the houses. As the emblems made their cases, she countered each and every point. It almost seemed like she didn't want to go into any house, the way she argued with them, but honestly, she was just having fun with it. Finally, Ms. Rhee had to go in and pull her out. By then, she more or less agreed that she belonged with the bears - deep thinkers and philosophers? passionate perfectionists? Yeah, sign her up.
WAND: 12", Pine, owl feather core
FAMILIAR: Currently has no familiar.
CLASSES:

• Hermeticism
• Transfiguration
• Potions
• Charms
• OE
• Artificing
• Astronomy
• Magical Rudiments
• Aesthetic Magic

ADVANCED STUDY: N/A
SENIOR PROJECT: She isn't sure yet, though she is fascinated in the Weird Stuff happening here. She has started several half studies and folders and boxes of samples. She's very interested in topics like: how the ghosts are muggles, whether ley lines have any effect on what's going on, exactly what those moose men are, and whether the hellscape from the end of last year was an alternate dimension or some sort of powerful mass delusion. The latter is her front runner topic, but is hindered by everyone's reluctance to discuss their trauma.
ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: Liberty is smart, but her grades tend to suffer from her scattershot focus. She also sometimes loses her homework; she's sure she put it somewhere for safekeeping, she just can't remember where? The result is mostly B's with a couple of A's in her favorite subjects. She starts to panic if her grades drift too far toward the C range.
EXTRACURRICULARS:

• Prefecting (less of an extracurricular, more of a job)
• Gaming
• Quidditch (Reserve)
• OE
• Frequently pops into other club meetings if the topic seems interesting

OOC

NAME: Cheryl
EMAIL: achurlishgirl (at) gmail
CDJ: iliekrp
OTHER PREFERRED CONTACT: N/A
TIME ZONE: EST