First and Last Name: Imogen Ormerod.
Bloodline: Half.
Hair Color: Dark Chestnut Brown.
Eye Color: Grey/Blue.
General Build: Average.
Height: Short.
Birthplace: Clitheroe, Lancashire.
Brief Childhood History: When one scrutinizes her upbringing and early experiences, it doesn’t really come as a surprise to find that Imogen Edith Ormerod is often nonplussed by life, the universe and everything. She has always toed the line somewhere between magic and Muggle, urban and rural, creative and academic, dreaming and doing. She has been the only child, the golden child, and shortly afterward the eldest daughter usurped by her younger siblings. Thus far, Imogen has had a life as normal and as complex as everyone else’s.
Her parents, Sarah and Joseph, were both chartered accountants who met, of course, through their work. Sarah is a witch, Joseph a Muggle, and to this day they enjoy and subsist on a peculiar mish-mash of these two different lifestyles. It’s been a while now since Joseph, delighted and dumbfounded by his daughter Imogen’s free and boisterous spirit, quit his stifling & unfulfilling accountancy job to pursue his lifelong passion for visual art. The family have generally turned out poorer and happier for this decision; but the fact remains that father and daughter continue to inspire and feed off one another. Their reasonably quiet little Lancashire home is colourful and cluttered, but potentially horribly confusing for young Imogen in the long term.
Magic is not something Imogen really understands yet. Her mother’s observations about her own life at Hogwarts, all the wands and toads and talking hats, seem completely at odds with her father’s romantic pagan idylls – the goddesses with flowing, fiery hair, moon phases, glinting silver instruments. It’s no wonder the poor girl is a bit bemused, and Hogwarts will certainly be an eye-opening experience for Imogen.
Strengths (Including Personality and Academic): Perhaps her greatest strength is her unsurpassable ability to be absolutely everywhere & everything all at once. No, really – she is. She’s imaginative, inquisitive, intuitive, idiosyncratic and, perhaps most conspicuously, 100 per cent Imogen all of the time. She’s an odd little creature, certainly, but she marches to the beat of her own drummer without any contrivance whatsoever. She’s whimsical, shrewd, bold and positive, if a little self-serving, and if she plays her cards right this kind of attitude could definitely lead her to her own bliss.
In the universal war of distinction between matter and anti-matter, Imogen can definitely be perceived as matter. She is ‘things’, and lots of them, too. Everything she owns is covered in buttons, shells and sequins; she keeps an old, rainbow-striped sock full of foreign coins; piles and piles of battered and tea-stained old books are her absolute specialty, and she preciously doodles in the margins of these at her leisure. She somehow manages to bestow love on every single one of the junk object she hoards.
She isn’t a truly exceptional student, but an able and discerning one who, it will transpire, is particularly adept at Transfiguration. The concept makes perfect sense to the girl; it is reflective of the transient nature of things. She’s also delighted most of the time to get her hands dirty, so subjects like Care Of Magical Creatures, Potions and Herbology will suit her well.
Weaknesses (Including Personality and Academic): While Imogen’s street-smarts are perhaps better developed than they initially appear to be, she certainly has some strange ideas, and there is a lot she has not grasped yet. It would appear that she’s starting to address the old maxim that flies are better trapped with honey than vinegar, but even so, she has no real measure of tact or subtlety. Imogen’s honesty, blank-eyed innocence and her refusal to put a rein on her emotions could lead to an ugly undoing. Not only does she risk harming someone by (no doubt unwittingly) saying something peculiar or off-colour, but leaving herself so unguarded makes her liable to that self-same treatment. Underneath it all she is really rather fragile.
This could present an even bigger problem when combined with Imogen’s slightly misplaced sense of entitlement. She quietly suffers from delusions of grandeur. This started, as it often does, with her doting father’s over-zealous words of praise – that she was the most precious, the most promising, the most beautiful of anything he could comprehend. She will start to realise, slowly and sadly, that this isn’t the case; that she isn’t necessarily better than everyone else, or somehow immune from the words and actions of everyone else. That she isn’t really blessed. That she’s just a human finding her way in the world. Truth being told, it will hit her hard.
Academically, Imogen’s particular failing will be her wandwork – particularly in Charms and Defence Against The Dark Arts. It will take far more energy and concentration than she’s prepared to give, and she’ll get flustered very easily. It would certainly be difficult to imagine her mastering a Patronus charm any time soon.
What House You Feel Your Character Belongs In and Why: This wasn’t the neatest or tidiest of decisions, but I think that makes it all the more appropriate that Imogen be sorted into Hufflepuff; the house that takes ‘all the rest’, as it were. The strange ones, the kooky ones, and the ones with a notable capacity for caring – which is something I’d like to develop in Imogen. Hufflepuff house will help her to ‘level out’, and to become gradually more aware of things outside of herself.
