Post by Deleted on Oct 5, 2020 19:59:46 GMT -7
Oliwia Lewandowska
pronunciation:
Aw-LEE-vya Lev-un-DAHV-ska
nickname:
Liv, Livia, Livvy
age and birthday:
14
December 2, 2010
gender and pronouns:
Cisgender female; she/her pronouns
basic info
blood status:
Half-blood (believes herself to be Muggle-born)
sexuality:
Heterosexual (questioning)
wand:
10 ⅞ inches, hazel, phoenix feather core, swishy
playby:
Mina-Giselle Rüffer
appearance:
Standing at 5'4" with a slim build, Oliwia has fair skin and straight, light hair—somewhere between "dirty blonde" and "strawberry blonde" in color—that extends down her back. She has blue-grey eyes, a mole on the left side of her nose near her nostril, and one earlobe piercing in each ear.
Oliwia's typical style on a day-to-day basis is relatively relaxed, bordering on quirky. She likes a lot of vintage or retro looks, but she typically mixes those with jeans and sweaters and the like. In her school robes, she tries to liven up her look with a handful of accessories, and it isn't uncommon for her to be sporting something that she's made herself.
education and jobs
schooling:
Hogwarts – Hufflepuff House (September 2022 –)
schooling status:
4th year
current occupation:
N/A
personality
likes:
Spaghetti hoops on toast; denim; peasant blouses; Herbology; sunny days; getting her hands dirty; social media; making jewelry; listening to podcasts; knick-knacks
dislikes:
Chocolate; winter; blood prejudice; how seemingly medieval the magical world is; abandoned buildings; ghosts; speaking Polish in public; dumb graphic tees; video games, especially violent ones; medical needles
erised:
Oliwia isn't really sure what she sees herself doing beyond Hogwarts, but she thinks that she'd like to do something on the artsy side. In the short-term, she would like to do well enough on her OWLs in another year so that she still has her options open in case she changes her mind. Also, she's made it pretty far without dying, so she'd like to keep that up.
amortentia:
Tomatoes, dewy grass, and white glue
boggart:
Oliwia fears breaking magical secrecy somehow and getting punished for it. Aside from that, she fears getting stuck in Newcastle for the rest of her life.
overall personality:
loyal
Like any good Hufflepuff, Oliwia is loyal. She's best described as being one of those people who doesn't have any particular group of friends but tends to float between different social groups. Even so, she is always willing to go out of her way to help other people out and will stick by them in times of trouble. Occasionally, it might be at her own expense, but it's what a good person would do, right?
kind
Oliwia is kind, and—as is the case with her loyalties—is so to a fault. She tries to treat people fairly and in the same way in which she would want to be treated. That also applies to those who have wronged her, because she hopes that, in being nice to them, they will then reciprocate that back to her. Unfortunately, that also makes her a vulnerable target, but she would rather be too nice than stand her ground and be seen as a bully.
hard-working
That old line from the Sorting Hat about Hufflepuffs and their being "unafraid of toil" is also applicable to Oliwia. She puts a lot of effort into her work and hopes that she'll reap the rewards of that eventually. If she doesn't in the end, at least she tried her hardest.
idealistic
Oliwia is very idealistic. She has a generally positive outlook on life and fully imagines a world in which other people aren't quite as malicious as they're made out to be. Eventually, in her mind, even the "bad guys" will come to see the errors of their ways. Oliwia isn't quite so naïve to think that everyone is going to suddenly become best friends someday in the future, but she is of the mind that some sort of "live and let live" attitude will ultimately prevail with enough dialogue.
stubborn
As sweet as she is, Oliwia can also be very stubborn. It's not that she's unwilling to consider other people's points of view; she is. Rather, her issue tends to be with an inability to motivate people to see things in the way that she does. She's not as gullible as some people might mistake her to be, and she's not lightly swayed from her thought processes.
artsy
Oliwia loves having various creative outlets. Even if she isn't a master at anything, she loves to craft just about anything she can get her hands on. Jewelry, embroidery, DIY-ing… You name it, and she has probably tried it at some point.
personal history
origins:
Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, England
relations:
mother:
Małgorzata "Gosia" Lewandowska, 51, linguist, Muggle woman
father:
Ian Atkinson, 59, statistician, half-blood wizard, unknown to Oliwia
maternal grandmother:
Judyta Lewandowska, 80, retired schoolteacher, Muggle
maternal grandfather:
Czesław Lewandowski, 83, retired businessman, Muggle
pets:
N/A
history:
Oliwia's parents met as researchers a number of years before her birth. Her mother, born and raised in Poland, had emigrated to England in the early 2000s and had chosen to stay because of the opportunities available to her as an academic. Her father, an Englishman and an academic himself, met her mother while they were both working at the same university. One thing led to another, and the two became more than just co-authors. Gosia Lewandowska, discovering that she was pregnant, wanted to risk neither her career nor Ian Atkinson's by revealing that he was the father of her child, and so she kept it a secret from the world, Ian included. If anyone asked, she simply explained that they weren't together anymore and left it at that.
Although the only child of a single mother, Oliwia never grew up feeling lonely or as though she needed a paternal figure around constantly. She had her mother, and she saw her grandfather when her mother was able to take the time to travel with her to Poland. When she became old enough to attend school, this usually meant going in the summer holidays for a week or two, but Oliwia saw herself as being more British than Polish. She could speak Polish along with English from the time that she could speak, and her mother insisted upon taking her to "Polish school" on the weekends to keep her connected to her heritage.
Still, Oliwia tried to assimilate herself into British life and to be like her classmates at school. She shared her hobbies with them, wore the same things, and ate most of the same food, and she didn't really understand why her mother was so adamant about keeping up her Polish roots. Even from the time that she was very small, Oliwia thought that it was apparent by the fact that her name was spelled with a "w" and not a "v" that she wasn't entirely "the same" as her peers.
And those differences only grew. No sooner had she entered primary school than there had already been a few incidents that her teachers had noted to her mother. Oliwia was mischievous, they felt, and she often found her doing things that she shouldn't have been, with no plausible explanation for what had happened. She wasn't a bad child, though, and Oliwia herself could have told them that.
For years, Oliwia found herself facing meetings with teachers and phone calls to her mother that she couldn't explain. She didn't know why or how some situations played out as they did. The one link was that she was usually already stressed or emotional when something would happen, which would make her reaction that much worse.
A short time before she turned eleven, however, it was all made clear in the most awkward visit of her life: She wasn't weird, but she was a witch and needed to go to a magical school for witchcraft and wizardry where she would learn to use her magical powers. Really, both Oliwia and her mother were certain that it was some sort of a prank or that they were being secretly filmed. As it turned out, there was actually a place called Hogwarts, and all of the things she hadn't been able to explain were because she didn't know how to channel her magic or use a wand yet.
It took another few months of preparation and a solid lie about her having been accepted to a completely normal boarding school later, but Oliwia Lewandowska made it to the Hogwarts Express, where she got her first taste of what the magical world was really going to be like. It wasn't all fairies and happy things; people could kill each other just as easily as they could in the non-magical world, including a student who was supposed to enter her own year and never even got the chance.
That wasn't the warmest welcome, but it set the tone for Oliwia, who decided from that point forward that she would have to be a force for good and happiness, because how else was she supposed to survive the hell that she hadn't asked to enter? The school dungeons seemed awfully close to medieval torture chambers, and she would always make a beeline for the safety of the Hufflepuff basement after every Potions lesson. The worst part was that she couldn't even communicate with her mother except for via owl. She supposed that there were probably people in the world who still used carrier pigeons, but switching from text messaging to live birds wasn't really what she had been hoping for.
As she began to make peace with Hogwarts (begrudgingly), even more murders sprinkled throughout the first few months of her very first year made Oliwia want out. Unfortunately, she didn't really have the option, so she put on a brave face and miraculously avoided not dying, which she theorized was only possible because she had ended up in Hufflepuff and not in Ravenclaw.
The ultimate reveal that it was actually Elaine Dupree, another student, who had been behind all of the murders didn't sit well with Oliwia, but at least she knew by the end of the year that she probably wasn't going to end up dying in her second year. She savored every last moment of her break away from Hogwarts that summer, but she made it back onto the train and hoped that maybe her first year was just a terrible, awful fluke.
Not really. Well, maybe a little. it was definitely interesting to have so many foreign students at Hogwarts, even if she was embarrassed to figure out if any of them were Polish. The only sort of weird thing was that the competition that they were there for was some combination of a blood sport and the Olympics. At her own school, no less.
As unusual as it was to her, Oliwia did grow to like the Tournament, and she was rooting for Anna Weasley all the way. It was a good distraction from the "school" parts of school, too, but the more pivotal event occurred when the delegations that had visited Hogwarts from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang had their respective transportation blown up upon their departure from the school.
That brought Oliwia's mood back down to about where it had been at the end of her first year—and maybe even worse because she had been eager to give Hogwarts a chance.
Over the following summer, Oliwia learned from some of her classmates that the American wizarding school had apparently been damaged so severely that their students had to transfer to Hogwarts. Anticipating a repeat of the Triwizard Tournament year and getting her hopes up too high only to watch them explode, Oliwia didn't get too excited over it, nor did she want to get too close to the Americans once they arrived at Hogwarts that September.
She had nothing against the Americans, though, and she knew that it was unfair to them if she was going to be standoffish all year, so Oliwia quickly abandoned that approach. There was another silver lining that came with being in her third year, and that was that she finally had permission to visit Hogsmeade on occasion, which gave her a welcome break from castle life.
Really, her third year was looking pretty good, especially when legislation was passed that allowed magical and non-magical technology to mix like never before. Having been stuck with owl post and all manner of other wizarding idiosyncrasies for a little too long, Oliwia was thrilled by the idea that she could get a smartphone that could do magic.
Looking forward to 2025, Oliwia began to wish that maybe she didn't have Hogsmeade privileges once dragons came descending down upon the village and the winter festival that was being held there at the time, but she had already survived a couple of other tragedies unscathed. She wasn't reckless, but she had begun to learn that most people in the magical world had a slightly different view of danger than did she. Plus, even more Aurors and the magical version of Interpol were brought in to deal with the fall of Azkaban that happened almost concurrently, and Oliwia had learned—if nothing else during her limited time at Hogwarts—that a bunch of wizards in law enforcement weren't to be messed with.
The lockdown of the magical world's borders with the Hag's Fever epidemic a few months later was less of a concern for Oliwia, who caught the disease when she was supposed to have been going to Poland the following week. It was awkward for her, especially when she thought that she was going to have to check herself into St. Mungo's somehow from hours away in Muggle distance, but she was also spared the awkwardness of having to provide an explanation as to why she couldn't really travel. Fortunately, she made it through without hospitalization and promised her grandparents that she would be there at Christmas, instead.
Glad to have spent the summer in Newcastle and not in attendance at the ill-fated Quidditch match, Oliwia has returned to Hogwarts for her fourth year and hopes that maybe this one will be better than all the previous years, which shouldn't be too hard to do.
site events reaction:
Going into Hogwarts as a first-year student (presumably Muggle-born, to boot) in the same year in which Elaine Dupree began her killing spree with a whole bunch of Muggle-born students made Oliwia initially apprehensive about what life at Hogwarts was going to bring. She wasn't really sure that she wanted to stay around, but she didn't really think that she had a choice and had to try to make the best of it.
Her second year was a little bit better. The Triwizard Tournament was relatively peaceful (at least as a spectator), and she did like it because of that. She began to get a better feel for what Hogwarts was really like when people weren't dying left and right. Then, well, multiple people did die after they had left Hogwarts, and Oliwia was back at square one with wishing that she could go back to the life that she had led before Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry had ever entered the picture.
The arrival of the Ilvermorny students and the much-needed (in Oliwia's opinion) modernization of wizarding Britain made her third-year experience that much better. Dragons and escaped prisoners? Maybe that wasn't as cool, but at least the prison escape didn't come with more murders, in hindsight…
By the end of the summer, she had also managed to survive Hag's Fever and avoid another mass casualty event. The death of yet another Minister for Magic, and the one with whom she had been most familiar as a relative newcomer to the magical world, hit Oliwia, too, but she had learned that it was just par for the course.
Now in her fourth year, Oliwia has tried to look on the bright side of things, because she doesn't think that they can get much worse.
alias
name:
mod audrey
pronouns:
She/her
age:
23
time zone:
US Central Time
reference:
How did you find us?
other characters:
@ezekiel, @chrissy, monday meadow weekly, @clarence, parvati patil macmillan, brody christopher dubois, penelope raisa bainbridge, kaylee māhealani mahi'ai, maxima ruqayyah greyback, @muffet, @dasha, samira ali warsame, felix valentin fortescue, @priscilla, @blair, camila calderón, @claricia, honey satheesh varma, @tamatha, sadhbh wormwood, emmanuelle antoinette picquery
