application: in the night

[syllables]

PLAYER INFO

Player Name: jenna
Player Contact: pm to this journal, please!
Character(s) In-Game: n/a

CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: hermione granger
Age: 17
Canon: harry potter

World Description: while there are multiple wikis devoted to the harry potter series, i typically reference the lexicon.
History: if you don't feel like reading seven books, a wiki will do.

Death:
in attempting to escape from the ministry of magic, hermione (accompanied by harry and ron) attempts to apparate to the former quidditch world cup campsite in devon. while in canon, hermione is successful and ron is splinched, hermione will die having badly splinched herself, and wind up ... well, in beacon.

What are your plans for this character in-game?
hermione's journey in canon has been primarily centered around her relationship with harry, and as an extension, her role as a problem solver and necessary grounding device for him as his battles with voldemort and the world around them grow more and more dangerous. i'd like her to have the chance to learn how to be herself, without expectation or responsibility or her friends' lives hanging over her head — or, you know, maybe just experience something as hermione granger... and not hermione granger, best friend of the boy who lived.

What aspects of this game and/or its setting are you most interested in having this character engage with?
as a setting that isn't inherently logical (for example, it defies the practical knowledge that night must give way to day!), it will battle hermione at every turn. all that she knows is rooted in the logic of what can be proven, and to survive, she will have to adapt her way of thinking to embrace all that cannot be solved. a puzzle, yes, but one she will have to actively collaborate with other people to solve — which is certainly not her strong suit.

How does your character generally get along with other people?
hermione is compassionate, caring, and generally a good friend to make; that said, she can be difficult and argumentative, stubborn and hard-headed, a thorn in the side of anyone who agitates or offends her. she's a teenage girl still figuring things out, and while she's incredibly intellectual when it comes to book smarts, she's absolutely still learning how to navigate the more complicated web of 'what they don't teach you at harvard business school' hogwarts.

What is your character's mental state upon entering the game?
in sum: distress. she was in the middle of what boils down to a Protagonists Must Save The World mission, her friends' lives (and the lives of, admittedly, most of the wizarding world) were at stake, and she's the only one who thought to pack any supplies. if getting home is feasible or plausible, hermione will do everything in her power to make it happen... and if it's not, she'll have to come to terms with that. not that hermione has ever been very good at coming to terms with failing. it's sort of her worst fear come to life.

Skills/Abilities:
hermione granger is not only magical, she's considered 'the brightest witch of her age', and is recognized as impressively talented by both her peers and professors. well-read, well-practiced, and exceedingly motivated to succeed, hermione's magical abilities not only make the grade, but often set the curve. (as an example: hermione was the first of her year to successfully cast a non-verbal spell, and then later proved herself able to cast wandless magic, something even many adult wizards are unable to do well.)

as a witch, and a talented one at that, hermione is trained in a wide variety of magical arts. these include, but are not limited to: charms (easily her best subject), apparition (expected to be nerfed in-game), transfiguration, potions & herbology, ancient runes, duelling, and arithmancy.

as for non-magical skills, her list is perhaps less impressive, but no less useless: research, logic, critical thinking, planning... she's a type-a powerhouse, but one with an admittedly quite mean right hook. if you don't believe me, ask draco malfoy.

Flaws/Weaknesses:
hermione is prideful, often quick to temper, and suffers from a nasty vindictive streak that tips to violence when she's provoked. she slaps a fellow student in the face out of outrage, she jinxes another to ensure her friend isn't upstaged at tryouts, and perhaps most troubling, traps a woman in a jar in a transfigured state as a form of blackmail — all before her eighteenth birthday. she isn't cruel, but she often doesn't think before she speaks, and this tendency to snap can cause rifts between her and her friends, if not bigger ones between her and an enemy.

as for personal weaknesses, her friends by far top the list. harry or ron in danger would propel her, as would her parents — but, to a lesser extent, she would be equally moved by the prospect of pain or suffering to anyone or anything she cared about, from schoolmates to magical creatures and anything in between.

Personality:
known as the 'brightest witch of her age', hermione granger is, at her core, a witch dedicated to the pursuit of (and love for) knowledge. she is intelligent, by not by accident — it is her voracious love for reading, her devoted passion for not only consumption but understanding of new material, and her deep-seated fear of failure that propels her far past sufficiency and into excellence.

it is not that hermione is simply clever. she is far more than that. she is giving, compassionate, and loyal — even on top of her overloaded school schedule, and even in addition to more classes in her third year thanks to a time-turner, hermione sets time aside to help her friends with their schoolwork, and even to coach and guide them in their extracurriculars as well. the novels show her time and again devoting significant amounts of time to her friends, including harry's triwizard events in his fourth year, hagrid's pet buckbeak's defense in her third, and to dobby and his fellows in the creation and continued run of SPEW.

of course, she is not a perfect person. as touched on above, hermione can be misguided by her loyalties or her emotions, occasionally rash, reckless, and occasionally violent when she believes a situation calls for it. she has difficulty sometimes resolving interpersonal conflicts, typically opting to bail out of situations by running away (to the library, most often) or by shutting down, giving her friends the silent treatment until things are resolved to her satisfaction. it's worth noting that, while hermione is generally right in her suspicions or her accusations, her methods of communicating her feelings and/or resolving conflicts is often not as well developed as her intellectual mind. she does mean well, and she does care very much about her friends, but sometimes... she's just a teenage girl, doing her best.

Items:
— clothing: at the moment of her death, hermione is disguised in a ministry worker named mafalda hopkirk's wardrobe, but her polyjuice potion has since worn off. it is not, unfortunately, a very flattering outfit.
— magical items: hermione carries two important magical items. the first is her wand, made of vine wood with a dragon heartstring core; the second, and more interesting, is her handbag. bewitched with an undetectable extension charm (a charm even hermione details as "tricky"), it is stuffed to the gills with literally everything and anything she had thought might be of use in the horcrux hunt. the lexicon details the canon contents of this bag, which range from basic needs like clothes, food, and mementos such as a photo book to wildly unique items like the sword of gryffindor and harry's cloak of invisibility.
— special note: i don't plan to use any of the items in her bag as game-breaking or overly powerful, as i very much want her to have to learn and grow in the setting rather than just show up and conquer the world, and plan to check in with you before using anything too spectacular (like harry's cloak or polyjuice potion). please let me know if there's anything specific that wouldn't be permissible.

SAMPLES

Log & Network Sample: hermione at the in the night test drive meme