FULL NAME: Lydia Blue Dwyer
NICKNAMES: Lyds. Occasionally without the s. Her brother calls her Deetz.
AGE/DOB: 16 | December 2
ndYEAR: Junior
BLOOD STATUS: Halfblood. (Her dad's a Muggleborn. And while her mother's family is pretty prominent, they make no claims of blood purity.)
GENDER/PRONOUNS: Female | she/her/hers
SEXUALITY: Y'know. Whatever.
HOMETOWN: Snake Island, Boston, MA
An "uninhabited" island that is now predominantly inhabited by her family, the families of several of her grandfather's designers, and the building that Tavernier uses as it's non-storefront HQ. Her grandfather purchased it when he realized that the best chance he had in regard to getting his daughter settled in one place was literally putting a flag somewhere and declaring it Where They Were Going to Live, Like Civilized People.
Her parents also have an apartment in Boston proper that is closer to their own shop. It's small, comfortable, and where her family spends the majority of their time. And is not, in any way, another way for her parents to bemuse themselves with middle-aged quasi-rebellion.
APPEARANCE:Lydia's simple. She doesn't go much in for fashion most of the time, to some degree of woe from her mother, opting for practicality above all things. Her hair is usually up, her face is generally bare, and her nail polish is usually chipped. (If there's any polish involved in the first place.) Typical outfits consist of skinny jeans and a t-shirt, all covered up by a slouchy (and often oversized) sweater. Or a hoodie she stole from her brother. And boots.
Always boots.
Despite being in the business, so to speak, Lydia doesn't wear a lot of jewelry herself. Or at least not anything extravagant. (Not unless she's fiddling with something she wants readily on hand.) Her ears have been pierced several times, but they usually house simple hoops and studs. And she always wears a nameplate her brother made (poorly) for her.
Lydia has a thick Boston accent she feels little to no shame about. (Her mother very well could have taught her children to speak better, but she didn't. Because she thinks it's funny.) Her r's tend to disappear off of certain words only to mysteriously
reappear in places where they have no business being. And there's maybe some unexpected ah's and some aw's hanging around, but she can't realistically be expected to account for those either. It's fine. Don't make it weird.
HEIGHT: 5'4"
BUILD: Built like a particularly malnourished stickbug. Eats like someone whose corporeal form is willingly housing no less than six very hungry demonic entities.
PB: Ciara Bravo
INSPO: Link What would others say is their most prominent personality trait — what's the first thing people notice about them?Lydia Dwyer makes for a somewhat confusing first impression. Or maybe it's more that there are two very disparate first impressions a person might get of Lydia Dwyer - and that the two are both diametrically opposed and not entirely inaccurate.
Before she goes and opens her mouth, she gives off the distinct air of a doll-like and cherubic thing, all skinny limbs and wide eyes. The kind of girl who speaks in a soft and small voice and who only enjoys soft and small things. When she goes and ruins the whole thing by actually speaking, on the other hand, it's very clear that there's nothing small or soft about Lydia's voice. It damn well carries. And exactly as far as she needs it to, at that. Often colorfully. If a person heard her first, they just might assume that she talks too much and listens too little. That she's never taken the time to be soft for one single moment of her life.
She's a contented contradiction - a doe-eyed doll with the mouth of a sailor and sharp-tongued bruiser who plays mostly with delicate tracery - but mostly, right at the gooey center of her, she's patient. Lydia's an observer, a professional at learning from the outside of the trial and error process before trialing the whole thing herself. She doesn't rush, takes in every fiddly little detail with the eye or someone who might need to replicate them later. Because she might. And if she does, she wants to get them correct.
How would this character describe themself? What do they think are their best and worst qualities?Y'know. Alright, or whatever. Lydia doesn't think poorly of herself, by any means, but she'd sooner shrug than act like she was in any rush to extol her own virtues. She does just fine, she supposes. Nothing terrible, but nothing remarkable. If her family was polled, she'd definitely be voted least likely child to die via horrific curse or unfortunate explosion, so that's something to be proud of.
If pressed, she'd admit that she's patient with people. That she wants them to like her and that she'll do almost anything for people she likes. Things that would annoy most other people tend to amuse her. She doesn't hold people's mistakes against them and, if necessary, she'll explain the same thing to someone ad nauseam, with the same still attention she pays to her own work. Her trouble, she thinks, is that she isn't particularly eloquent about it. All of her fastidious care is lost on words. She doesn't pluck them out carefully or reign herself in, more of a sledgehammer with sentences than her usual fine-edged pliers. She's sarcastic and always sounds a bit more prickly than she intends. She doesn't mind this about herself, not exactly, but she is very aware that it isn't the most charming of personality traits.
What drives them to action? Doing good? Getting rich? Receiving praise?Fascination. Lydia posses a great deal of genuine curiosity about seemingly insignificant things. She likes seeing new places and running her fingers over new textures. She can lose hours of engrossed concentration to the whirls and divots to be mined from quarters of inches. She likes figuring out what makes small motions tick and how to render them all burnished and shined around the curve of someone's wrist or onto someone's ring finger.
She isn't much into it for the money or the recognition. Her parents keep a small selection of things that she's made in their shop, and while she likes it when they sell, it doesn't matter to her whether or not they're popular. (She'd much rather gift them to people when she's finished and get started on trying to perfect something new.) She knows how to replicate the elegant, simplistic lines that people favor in their accoutrements with ease, but enjoys picking up new ideas or techniques more than she considers making any particular name for herself.
How does this character handle tense social situations like arguments/fights?Nobody likes a fraught social exchange, but Lydia doesn't let herself get terribly ruffled by them. She'll wait out a person's ranting, let them blow steam until they've gone empty on it, and then renegotiate terms from there. And when it comes to a fight? It depends entirely on the fight we're getting into.
Most of the time, Lydia is near-impossible to rile. She has a galling ability to tilt her head and look supremely unimpressed with every single word coming out of someone's mouth. Throw in a thousand-yard stare and she'll out-stubborn you with the same level of patience she can use to painstakingly render thousands of scales onto an inch-long snake. You may think that she's going to blink first, but you may also be very deeply mistaken. You're going to blink first. And she's going to laugh at you for being ridiculous.
When she does get riled, however, she's a hellion. Particularly if she feels like someone is messing around with somebody she cares about. She isn't the sort of person to throw the first punch, but she has a sharp tongue and is far too ready to step to a person three times her size for someone built like a particularly rowdy pile of twigs.
How do they adapt (or fail to adapt) to change?Lydia's family traveled often throughout her childhood and that meant that you either learned to adapt to the ever-changing world around you or you were routinely miserable. So Lydia went with the former. She stumbled over poorly constructed sentences in foreign languages until she learned to grin unabashedly at her own, accented butchering of greetings. She wanted to make friends and so she watched and she listened and she barreled forward with every intention of making it work. And with every intention of fixing the parts that went wrong the first time. She likes her creature comforts as much as the next person, but change is an opportunity to perfect something old and to hopefully pick up something new.
What are their opinions on rules? How do they interact with authority figures?While Lydia might occasionally make use of a more colorful selection of verbiage, it isn't to imply that she lacks the capacity for displaying impeccable manners. She doesn't. Her mother made very sure of that - and, more importantly, she's happy to make use of them. She might sound like a punk, but frequent travel means frequently needing to make a good impression. And while respecting people in authority just because they are in authority doesn't make much sense, if she isn't going to go out of her way to be rude.
Rules are important. Lydia doesn't often need micromanaging in this area, as she's very happy to take in all of the appropriate details of the things expected of her on her own. She can take or leave some of them, sure. But she always knows them. It's vital to know which things people think are important, to know how to get by within these lines, even if you aren't necessarily going to share the opinion on line-positioning yourself. She might throw them by the wayside when she feels that's the more important position, but it's still better to have read the book beforehand.
FUN FACTS:✦ Her first name stems from the
Lydian Hoard, a oft-stolen and arguably cursed collection of artifacts from Turkey.
✧ Her handwriting is neat and small and her notes are almost always covered in curlicues and vines and knots. This often makes it look like she isn't paying attention during lectures, but honestly she's incapable of paying attention if she
isn't drawing them.
LANGUAGES: Other than English (and some Flemish and French from her mother and grandfather), Lydia's language skills are less encompassing and more rudimentary. Her family traveled often throughout her childhood, but she tended to only need just enough to get by with choppy not-sentences and lots of gesturing. She never needed to be fluent. She only needed enough words to be able to find someone to play with - and each and every word is horribly accented in ways that made children her own age laugh at her. (Which was also a good way to get people to play with you.)
HOBBIES: drawing, learning what sort of dumb shit people have gotten themselves cursed with over a pair of fancy earrings, casual observation, broomsports, eating, using very tiny tools to make very tiny things, letting her (very spoiled) snake sleep inside of her hood
SKILLS:
jewelry-making : It's the family business, after all. Though Lydia's design aesthetic skews a bit more on the quirky and avant-garde side than the sleek, traditional designs Tavernier favors. She can produce them just fine. She just likes things that are exceedingly intricate or almost alive. Things with wings that flap and petals that unfurl.
filigree carving : Largely an offshoot of the first thing, sure, but Lydia excels at intricate whirls and ornamental decoration. She's all about the fiddly little details and delicate tracery. The woodcarving in particular is something she picked up on one of her summer vacations, and Lydia tends to utilize this particular skill to modify her broomsticks more than anything else.
drawing : Still a very detail-oriented activity. She uses fine-tipped pencils and can cram a surprising amount of details into even the smallest of margin spaces. If she's going to draw someone or something for a reason that isn't assigned, it's very rarely in their entirety.
broomsports : You don't need to know how to speak to play games with someone - and most wizarding communities have some sort of broomsport to get in on - so Lydia's always played in one form or another. It's one of the few things she doesn't have to keep small and fine and delicate, which is a very different kind of satisfying.
FAMILY:William Dwyer | Father | Cursebreaker/Jeweler
Daddy is a magi-archeologist and cursebreaker, one that specializes in removing curses from jewelry and gemstones. But anything golden or glittering will do. (Look, people steal that sort of shit a
lot. Because they're idiots. It invites a lot of death and dismemberment.) He does less of the adventuring these days, but he'll pick himself up when somebody comes around with something intriguing enough to interest him. Currently co-owns a small shop with his wife. They sell the best "knockoffs" on the market.
Briolette Tavernier-Dwyer | Mother | Former "Face" of Tavernier/Jeweler
As beautiful as she is brilliant, Ma is arguably the brains behind their entire family unit. She's clever and sensitive and well-loved in the wizarding community both for her face and for her designs. Anything she designs inevitably ends up as the most popular item Tavernier puts out - and the most fun one for her to repurpose for her own shop window.
Luke Dwyer | Brother | 20 |
Prospective Wizard Indiana Jones IdiotLuke Dwyer is big, blond, and beautiful. He graduated when Lydia was a Freshman and was a very popular broomsports success during his high school career. He's has never had the head for design work - but he's
always more than ready to run full-tilt toward something shiny and potentially ready to explode in his face.
Jacques "Jack" Tavernier : Grandfather . Owner & CEO of Tavernier Jewelers
Where Muggles have Tiffany and Cartier, wizards have Tavernier. Known for their quality of design and brilliant charmwork, they have a well-earned reputation for being the best in the business. (No stone will shine as bright as one from Tavernier. Guaranteed, or they'll re-spell it for you.) Jack is a hardworking man when it comes to his business, but definitely a softhearted one when it comes to his family. Now if they would all just stop running off into the
wilds all of the time.
BACKGROUND:William Dwyer, just a few years out of higher learning and slowly gaining a reputation for success with removing finicky curses from the sort of shiny things fought over by museums and people with family names older than the dirt he dug them up from, ended up apprenticing in Tavernier Jewelers through sheer force of personality. By all accounts, it wasn't the job for him. He was unqualified and unpracticed and, honestly, almost entirely uninterested in the business aspect of jewelry-making. But the key to taking a thing apart well is knowing how it works well enough to put it back together again. And, when it came to anything that shone, Tavernier was the best.
Briolette Tavernier was the best that Tavernier had to offer, even if most people only knew her as the beautiful thing smiling back at them from wizarding jewelry advertisements. William didn't care much for that - he was brash and he laughed loudly and all he wanted was for her to teach him things. (An unusual request for her at the time.) He brought her still photographs and sweeping stories of places that she'd never been. So when he jokingly asked if she would like to come along one day, she said yes. And then she
did.
So they lifted up their roots and never
quite managed to completely set them back down again, despite starting a family and setting up a business. Luke was born on the bank of a river and Lydia actually managed to wait until they arrived at a hospital - the more practical of the two of them from the very beginning - but neither of them waited until they were anywhere near what they would consider home. As time passed, some of the pictures in their albums were still, yes, but some started to move and some weren't taken in anyplace more fantastic than their living room. By the time her parents had gained joint-custody on their good reputation for success, they were two children in and they had struck up a balance that worked.
Education mattered and both Lydia and her brother were dutifully toted off to class with every expectation that they would excel. But any
break from school was an opportunity to escape to someplace strange and dangerous - and opportunity that was almost never passed up on. Their holidays were rarely quiet. Her father picked out the most interesting offer and they packed up their bags. Lydia has eaten bugs and what she strongly suspects was
something's brain-matter. (Her father offered her money.) She's also slept overnight in an empty sarcophagus (Luke dared her.) and in huts and in trees and in palaces. She grew up in a world that was wide and wild and wonderful and she liked every little detail. She
especially liked the details. She asked questions, always intrigued and always willing to watch and to try until she could do it herself.
When they weren't traveling, there was almost always something else to fix her attention on. Lydia spent most of her time underfoot, sticking curious fingers into her father's projects or spreading out her own rudimentary mess of papers on the other end of her mother's drafting tables. She spent a great deal of time trotting along in her brother's wake too. Tangling her fingers in his shirt hems when making friends, shoving him into catacombs or out of trees, breaking into their grandfather's vault and eating chips next to gemstones that cost more than their house - and finally off to Pekenpaugh after listening to him crow for three solid years about how
amazing he was and how much he was enjoying himself. And, yeah. Okay.
Maybe the idiot was right. But she's not telling him that.
WAND: Maple, 14", Unicorn hair core. A simple wand for someone so interested in fine details, but she's fond of it. There's a small crystal at the hilt that she has a habit of rubbing her thumb over when she's thinking.
(✧)FAMILIAR: A Mexican black kingsnake she refers to solely as Sweetheart or Darling. Are either of these things his name? Possibly. Are they just ridiculous terms of endearment? Also possibly.
CAREER GOALS: Lydia's going to end up making something. She's
always making something. She has a feeling she'll end up more like her parents - someone who wanders and explores and picks up new ideas - but she knows that she wants to create and, for now, that's a good enough answer for her.
PART-TIME JOB: Nothing at school. But she does send things home every so often for her parents to stick out in their display in exchange for some spending money.
CLASSES:charms (H): The bread and butter of the family business. Lydia's interested and clearly knowledgeable. Cleans up on the practical application.
potions : She wouldn't say that she's naturally talented in this area, by any means. But she's good at following directions - and she's
excellent at precise measurements.
transfiguration : A necessary evil, but one that she's good at. If you want to make something that works, you have to know how the pieces go together.
artificing (H): The part where she gets to make the somethings! Lydia's always ready with new ideas and never hesitates to get her hands dirty.
herbology : While she doesn't
mind crawling around in the dirt, Lydia's far more interested in the aesthetics than she is in anything else. Often looks very tempted to whip out a pencil.
hermeticism : She's ready and willing to see what the last two years of equations are going to mete out in terms of magical feats. It's something new and interesting.
outdoor magic : Lydia might
look like a mouthy toothpick, but she's wiry and well-versed in how not to die in potentially hazardous environments.
aesthetic magic : Lydia isn't great at every medium, but she's definitely intrigued by them - the more nuanced and complicated the better. She likes learning new things and is always willing to make a spirited attempt.
EXTRA-CURRICULARS:quidditch (beater) : Lydia enjoys the everliving
hell out of herself on a broom. She's observant and precise and absolutely ready to bash some heads in.
adventure club : Okay, so it isn't an actual jungle out there or anything. But an adventure is an adventure and she's
going on an adventure, alright?
magirobotics : Yet another intersection of beauty and brutality. Lydia's a big fan of making something that utilizes her skillset in a new way. Though, y'know. If you could
please just let her make the robot pretty, you guys.
SORTING?: To be entirely honest, Lydia knew she was going to end up in Thorntrail. Her brother had rested his elbow on top of her head and told her exactly where she was going to go. They'd always been opposite forces, she and Luke, who had just started his last year in Mothgarden - and her lips had already been twitching upward the second the Fall Door, with it's intricate carvings, had started asking her practical, sensible questions. She'd taken a moment to think on the Summer Room (just one contrary moment, just because she could) and then she marched herself right where she knew she belonged.
NAME: Jackie
EMAIL: yourbodyanditsbones@gmail.comCDJ: ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jacksprattOTHER CONTACT: ✦ ✧
✦TIMEZONE: EST
