Application ~ Scorched

[tsingtauense]

Out of Character Information

Player Name: Merry
Player Journal: holdwine
Playing Here: Clint Barton/"Hawkeye" (antivillain)
Where did you find us? eisdamme
Are you 16 years of age or older? Yes

In Character Information

Character Name: Lily Evans Potter
Canon: Harry Potter books
Timeline: Prologue of Philosopher's Stone: 31 Oct. 1981, moment of death
Character's Age: 21, unbelievably. She seems so much older.

Powers: "a singularly gifted witch"^[SRC], possibly one of the "brightest of her age". "A talented student, Lily was a member of the Slug Club and was made Head Girl in her seventh year,"^[HPW] a position once filled by Minerva McGonagall. The Slug Club were Professor Slughorn's handpicked brightest and best, for a variety attributes—in Lily's case probably "charm and/or talent".
Skills: Has a particular gift for Charmwork (including Patronus Charm, with a corollary in Transfiguration), is an "excellent potioneer" (according to Slughorn^[wiki]), a powerful enough duellist to defy and escape the likes of Voldemort three times; and her strength of Love (and self-sacrifice—call it "will"/"purity of motive"?) created its own world-bending magic that fueled and changed in history. In Anatole, Love—any emotional intensity rooted in Love, however that's defined/manifested—will provide a direct power boost to her magic. Though may have the side effect of making her far more willing to use it, and use it in force.
Equipment: A willow wand and a baby blanket.

Canon History: HP Wiki entry

Lily was born 30 January, 1960 into a Muggle household, consisting of a mother, a father, and an older sister. She discovered her magic very early, soon aided and encouraged by a neighbouring wizard boy, Severus Snape, whom she befriended. Mr and Mrs Evans were very acceptant of Lily's magic, and even proud of it—or proud enough of Lily to be able to accept anything about her. The same could sadly not be said of her sister Petunia. Both these important childhood relationships, Petunia and Severus, would fall apart for Lily later, but have intense impact on her legacy.

At age eleven, Lily and Severus were excited to set off for Hogwarts School together. Their expectations, however, proved quite different. Severus had rather counted on it being him and Lily against the world, whereas she was excited and eager to meet as many other people as possible. And right from the start, she did. This did not sit well with Severus, and his reaction, drifting ever closer to the Dark Arts and Death eaters, did not sit well with Lily. She ended their friendship in their fifth year.

The foundations were laid in school for Lily's postgraduate activities: she joined the Order of the Phoenix in the First Wizarding War, personally defied Voldemort three times, alongside her school-boyfriend and then husband, James Potter. While Lily was pregnant, a prophecy was made about a child who might prove to be theirs, and made them go into hiding. They had a son, Harry, in 1980, in their secret home in Godric's Hollow. It was Lily's idea to make Peter Pettigrew, of all their friends, their Secret Keeper; not just (as she persuaded James) because Peter was a less obvious choice than Sirius Black or Remus Lupin, but because (as she persuaded Dumbledore) because Peter had never really risen to his potential perhaps because he'd never really been trusted with enough. She was sure he would rise to it.

When Voldemort broke into their home, she had little time to reflect on how wrong she must have been.

She heard James murdered. Voldemort gave her the opportunity to leave with her life. Not because she didn't want to live without her family (though she didn't), nor believing her self-sacrifice would save her son (though, unbeknownst to her, it did); but because if her son's short, short life was going to end tonight, whether he could really be aware of what was happening or not, the last thing in it would be his mother staying with him and fighting for him and loving him, even if it killed her.

So she stayed. Even though it killed her.

Personality: There are two answers to this section. BV and AD, or Earth and New Dodge, or youth and premature age, or…

BV/Earth/Youth: "Uncommonly kind"; gives of herself so fully and willingly, to anyone and everyone, as only the phenomenally self-possessed and secure can do. Has incredible inner strength which fuels her to be almost inexhaustibly gentle. She occasionally chooses not to be gentle. Just because she approaches everyone with an assumption of goodwill doesn't mean she's not prepared to be proven wrong, and won't act accordingly. The only times she's really yelled at anyone have been in defense of someone else—or when she finally gives up on all other methods when it's absolutely called for. (…Which is also in defense of someone else, really. That someone just happens to be the same person as the one she's yelling at. See: Severus Snape.) Her kindness, optimism, gentleness and generosity all stem from a place of power and decision: though she's led a somewhat sheltered—some might say "charmed"—life, she is not blind to the nature of the world, is wise beyond her years, and has decided that the best way to approach the pain of the world is not to add to it—nor even assume she can fix it. But she will fight entropy the only way anyone really can: in whatever increment is available, with steadfastness, not worrying about winning, only about enduring; because the bad things in the world just make the good things all the more worth appreciating and fostering; whether one can overcome the other is irrelevant. …Except or even in war?

AD/New Dodge/Aged: …numb. Is probably the word. Maybe shock. She doesn't give the impression of being in shock. But there are issues on which her brain simply shuts down. All personal and introspective, she's still very in touch with the world around her—far more so than the world within—but you can't rule out triggers. There may be some memory loss. It doesn't occur to her that she was killed, for example. Then again, she considers that possibility pretty much irrelevant. Except that it may explain why it also doesn't occur to her to try to take her own life… but no, she's not the suicidal type. Not even under these circumstances. But you'd think the thought would at least, dispassionately as an option out in the universe even if one she would reject, have crossed her mind.

And a third still: Anatole: It may be hard for her, initially, to believe her own eyes when presented with those who had been dear to her but appear here further along in time. They may find her rather changed, though through them, she may start to find her way back to her former self as well.

Why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting? If New Dodge was a haven, Anatole is like being back in a war zone. But not any of the wars she'd chosen: not the Wizarding War nor the defense of her family… rather, it is against forces (the Mist etc) with which she has no particular investment or quarrel, for the sake of people (Anatolians and Scorched alike) who never met her, and is ultimately about doing that which she's already done once, and lost, and doesn't particularly want to do again: finding a purpose and an individual identity.

At the same time… this is the first time ever she's been out in the world (or a world) as a single adult. She married James and had Harry right out of school, and was already committed to the war effort. She's never lived on her own, or sought work, or been outside the Wizarding fold. For all she's a wise and knowledgeable person, it's coming home to her that she has had a rather sheltered life. (If not a particularly sheltered death.)

And, painful and impossible as it may seem, she's still prone to care and to love. This will become increasingly apparent as she meets people in Anatole who've met previous Lilys, and cared about them, and though she doesn't know these people herself, she will quickly care about them back. And want to help them, and start to connect and invest in this world. Perhaps the fact that it's not the world in which she'd lost James and Harry will actually make that more acceptable to her.

So, in spite of herself, she will care, and will engage against dangers to defend them, and if that opens the floodgates of her trauma and grief… it will also make a reality that, whether she died on Earth or not, she is alive now. And being stuck with it, she has to deal with it.

Last but definitely not least… she has castmates in Anatole, some of whom (Sirius) can offer the kind of support she never thought she'd have again; some of whom (Hermione) she's never met but can give her news of Harry, which she'll have to deal with—the fact that he lived but that she's missed so much; with some of whom (Snape) she has such tangled, unfinished business.

And how can one move on and accept the loss of people who may appear at any time? How do you get on with a life without always looking to the Door to provide the dead? And what if it provides someone you don't want to face?

Maybe the old purposes aren't gone forever. If Voldemort ever came through that Door, Lily wants to be ready. So the last gift of Anatole—a thing she utterly suppressed, hid, and denied in New Dodge (see below)—is that she will once again start practicing and improving her Magic.

Previously Played Information

Previous Game: boomtown
Length of time there: 2 months and counting

Important development and/or events in your previous game: None for Scorched purposes. :-) The only reason I'm treating Lily as a previous-game import is that I'd like for her to have existed for a while being convinced that she'd survived but that Harry and James were killed, to have a bit more fallout (positive and negative) when she's reunited with castmates in Anatole.

So the non-canon history reads thus: she wakes up on a ship bound for New Dodge. Her last memory is of being struck down by Voldemort, though she doesn't imagine she was killed. (Or rather, she doesn't care either way. If James is dead, which she heard happen, and Harry dead, which she saw as imminent and unstoppable, then it doesn't matter whether she's still technically "alive" or not. For some reason, she apparently has to continue.) She assumed she must have been rescued from the rubble by Dumbledore &co., probably can't remember the specifics due to trauma, and is in New Dodge for her protection, or to rehabilitate, or… something. She only knew she couldn't attempt to return and aid the war effort without reclaiming control of her powers. So she spent time in New Dodge, a place peaceful for being isolated and barren, regressing since the barracks are more like living back at school than in a house, gardening in the greenhouse, trying to help build an entirely new world without any particular baggage, and simultaneously get away from herself and get back to some semblance of herself. She also spent a long time not doing any magic whatsoever. Then something happened that made her cast a spell—maybe there was a cave-in, maybe a fire… in any case, she used magic (having grabbed her wand, and the blanket she'd wrapped it in) to try and save somebody. There was a blinding blast: perhaps the spell was too late and the disaster happened, or the spell backfired. But suddenly she's in Anatole in front of the Door.

(…So her first question, to the first person she speaks to in Anatole, may be: "Did I save them?!" By which she means the person in New Dodge, but to a castmate may be taken to mean Harry/James.)

Writing Samples

Network Post Sample:
Some things you keep doing even when the one you do them for isn't there (bulleted tag)

Third Person Sample:
1.) a possible Door arrival

2.) [using a very old Scorched event as a prompt: Incantation]

The Clinic was overrun. Lily stood at the post she'd been assigned to, shouted directions at the top of her lungs to be heard over the confusion, sending refugees to the cellars, the injured to the infirmary, fighters to the perimeter. And because she'd been told to stand at the top of the stairs, to usher in the people and hold out invaders (which Sirius had convinced Anders she'd been able to do, even though she hadn't cast a single spell in Anatole and wasn't certain she still could—or would dare), and was facing the opposite way of the rest of the moving bodies, she was the first to see the puff of dust over the roofs. Coming from the marketplace.

She didn't have time to stand irresolute. She'd locked into a merciful, yet lightningfast effective, mindlessness. She grabbed the nearest volunteer and shouted for them to take her post, then was running down the stairs. As the tide of bodies coming toward her blocked her path, still unthinking, she grabbed the wand that had been hidden in her pocket all this time, and Disapparated.

She reappeared, with an unnecessary but entirely deliberate POP! in the centre of the marketplace. No, centre of a battlefield. The stone giants had cut a swath into the town square and were laying waste to the fragile stalls of the inner market, swinging bits of everything at anyone in arm's reach, and slowly but surely herding Anatoleans into their midst.

Lily instantly targeted the nearest one and shouted, "Defodio!"

A chunk of the golem's leg was blasted away. The golem overbalanced and toppled over. The people it had been herding shouted in amazement and scattered.

Another set of golems were advancing on the new distraction. Lily aimed her wand at one toward the rear of the group, cried, "Locomotor statua!" The golem levitated abruptly, as if yanked up into the air; and using her wand like a conductor's baton, she sent it swinging around and crashing into several of the others. They were sent in different directions, bewildered. But, as was becoming very clear, insufficiently damaged.

She whirled to see, sure enough, more coming behind her. She continued cast in increasingly desperate circles, resorting even to Expulso—something she'd never have thought to use on anything animate, even if hostile, though the explosions of the spell because more and more localised, smaller, less effective… And if she'd succeeded in momentarily fixing all the golems' attention on herself, there were still people unable to get past them to safety, and she didn't know how much longer she could keep this up.

Sure enough, when this time she aimed her wand and cried, "Expulso,"— nothing happened.

The golem who'd just failed to explode in front of her swung a massive arm and casually knocked her several feet through the air to sprawl on the ground.

Without the immediacy of the attacks, the golems seemed to lose interest in her, turning their attention back to moving targets. So Lily was reduced to laying there for a moment, trying to gasp some air into her mouth that didn't rasp her throat and lungs with dust, trying to stop her head reeling long enough to tell which side the ground was on, wondering if the ringing pain through her body was really incapacitating damage or just the shock of the impact…

When one sound cut through her vertigo as nothing else could have. The scream of a child.

A golem was making its way toward a sobbing boy, whose clothing was caught on a shattered wooden beam. There was a woman screaming somewhere, perhaps his mother, similarly trapped and unable to get to him.

But suddenly, hardly knowing how she got there herself, Lily was standing between the boy and the golem. Her wand glinted in her hand. Her hair shone bloody streamers in the grim light.

The golem eyed her for a moment, but not seeming to have any memory to speak of, simply continued walking.

And she leveled her wand at him and roared one more time, "Expulso!"

It hit the Golem square in the head.

This time, the head exploded. The vibration of it carried down into the rest of its body, which also burst.

Unlike the times before, the spell didn't stop there.

The resonant echo of the vibration flowed outward from that first golem like a visible wave. It thrummed everything in its path, leaving people and plants and wood and cloth, any organic matter, unaltered…

But in an outward-moving radius, everything stone—every golem and rock and collapsed building—shattered and burst into dust.

Out from the window of one stone building, the first of the line outside the ruined block of houses still intact, several refugees looked in horror.

The shimmering vibration front reached them, and abruptly vanished. Their curtains didn't even shake.

Everything in the circle from Lily to the standing houses was now flattened and covered in stone dust.

Lily stood at the heart of it, perfectly still, the only stone left of the lot.

The boy she saved was staring at her. Though he'd stopped crying in amazement at the spectacle of her defense, the look on her face made him start again.

She started toward him, only to stop as an Anatolean woman ran out from cover and scooped him up first, sobbing, and turning to wring and kiss Lily's hands in thanks. More people emerged to do the same. Lily stared at each of them, felt herself return their touches and smiles, but as if from a distance. When her feet started moving, the crowd parted for her, and she walked slowly away from them, away from the circle flattened by her magic, which hadn't really been hers—

…hadn't it?

Anything else? In New Dodge, she went by the name "Ell Evans". It's possible she'll revert to it for some situations in Anatole.