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lilipad
GENERAL
NAME: Lilika [LIH-lih-KAH] Michelle Ignacz
NICKNAMES: Her parents sometimes call her husa (goose). Generally speaking, she doesn't take well to nicknames from strangers.
AGE/DOB:
BLOOD STATUS: Halfblood.
GENDER/PRONOUNS: Female / She/Her
SEXUALITY: TBD
HOMETOWN: Originally from Braddock, Pennsylvania. Moved to Tulpehanink, Elk County, Pennsylvania when she was eleven. Tulpehanink is a rural, conservative, farming community with a population of ~1700. It is not a strictly wizarding community but there is a decently sized magical population, though they do tend isolate themselves from their no-maj neighbors.
CONCEPT: Chameleon ‘cool girl’ pursues cheiromancy, cheerleading, and a change of pace.
PHYSICAL
APPEARANCE: Lilika's sense of style is intensely curated and deliberate. She doesn't wear clothes, she designs outfits. She loves vintage clothing—especially late-60's to early-70's fashion—and jumps at the opportunity to get into costume. Her preference is for bright, bold colors and borderline obnoxious prints (especially floral patterns that pay homage to Hungarian folk dress).
She enjoys standing out in a crowd, even if her slouchy posture and disinterested pout say otherwise. Her height and abnormally large facial features draw attention naturally, so she's come to expect wandering eyes, which she only encourages by wearing ultra-short skirts and skin-tight bell bottoms. She tried rolling up her school uniform skirt when she first came to Gooseberry but it didn't look quite right, so now she opts to change into her cheerleading uniform the first chance she gets.
Lilika's strengths definitely lie in clothing design; she doesn't have much knack for makeup or beauty spells. Typically, she'll leave her face bare beyond the heavy-handed application of muggle mascara.
(x)
HEIGHT: 5'10"
PB: Liv Tyler
PERSONALITY
LIKES: Trinkets, troll dolls, bugs, birds, dancing, bike riding, cryptids, conspiracy theories, urban legends, mascara, mini-skirts, bell bottoms, fortune telling, FROGS, folk music, reality TV, real talk, mushrooms, Vízbevető, plums, spa days, Stevie Nicks, Nicole Richie
DISLIKES: Wind, early mornings, direct questions, skeptics, artsy cinema, drugs, jam sessions at parties, drama, love triangle tropes
PERSONALITY:
Lilika has trust issues. She doesn't have much reason to justify being so suspicious of the rest of the human race but ... well, she doesn't have much reason to be trusting either, now does she? Perhaps being overly cautious is cultural or perhaps it's astrological—in any case, it's a prevailing feature of Lilika's inner monologue. Always expecting the worst of others' motivations, Lilika tends to be critical and spins even the most innocent situation into a slight.
That said, Lilika dislikes and avoids confrontation. A slight perceived will be a slight internalized and never addressed. An inability to express her frustrations is neither fun nor productive, so she tries to avoid facing situations that will force her hand. Instead, she surrounds herself with buffers––stronger personalities than her own and large, boisterous groups. She enjoys being an unapproachable figure, shrouded by the wit and beauty of others.
Lilika's attempts at protecting herself often come across as flippant and flighty. She doesn't like to share too many personal details and dodges situations that may back her into a corner. Her refusal to commit to plans and reluctance to be alone with new people can come across as self-involved and stuck up. Only those closest to her are likely to get a straight answer and even then it may take a bit of pressing; she has a subtle, but frustrating, habit of answering questions with questions of her own. She's been described as mysterious but perhaps cagey is more appropriate.
While she styles herself as intentionally inaccessible, she is nonetheless quite magnetic. At 5'10" with a loud, infectious laugh, Lilika doesn't exactly blend into the background. Adventure and excitement tend to swirl around her and though she tries hard not to be at the epicenter of drama, she does enjoy being the center of attention. When she is at ease, she can be quite silly—her childhood love of mischief hasn't faded entirely just yet. With her close friends, she has a somewhat cruel sense of humor and enjoys pressing on soft spots. It goes to follow that her closest friends are kind and reserved because she can dish it a hell of a lot better than she can take it.
Lilika is unusually perceptive and intuitive. She can typically tell when someone is lying to her or themselves. She picks up on body language cues in conversations across the room and can usually predict breakups or makeups even before the people actually involved in a given relationship. Unless pressed, she keeps these observations to herself because she's found that people don't like being told their lives are so formulaic. Instead, she'll act on her final conclusion (i.e. avoiding someone she finds shady or being unenthused about a dying relationship) without revealing what led her to that deduction or explaining why she is behaving in a particular way. Even though she is correct in her assumptions far more often than not, it tends to rub people the wrong way and lead them to believe Lilika is needlessly judgmental.
SKILLS
LANGUAGES SPOKEN:
- ENGLISH 🍄 Fluent.
- MAGYAR 🍄 Broken conversational. Lilika's parents speak magyar frequently enough that she has an easy time understanding the gist of conversations but tends to mix up words with similar meanings when she speaks/writes in magyar.
PATRONUS: Lilika can successfully cast a wood frog patronus!
SKILLS:
- PALMISTRY/CHEIROMANCY 🍄 Cheiromancy is Lilika's favorite hobby and foremost academic interest. She is a firm believer that true palmistry cannot be taught and is a natural skill that is inherited. Sure, anyone can compare a hand to a page in a book but only a select few can truly predict the future and see into a person's past just by looking at their palm. Lilika truly believes she is one of those talented few with the gift but it's difficult to prove because her readings are often of the deep and distant future. Additionally, when her predictions hit close enough to home the people she is reading often lie, making those "I TOLD YOU SO!" moments much less sweet.
- CHEER 🍄 Lilika is coordinated, flexible, strong, and capable of being quite LOUD—all traits that make her a formidable cheerleader. But, her real strengths lie in creating a vibe. Don't mess with the Azurcrest Cheer Squad. At her height, Lilika isn't a particularly talented tumbler but she is a powerful base and knows how to arrange routines that let her teammates shine. (Yeah, Riley, that means you're getting launched 8 million feet into the air on the regular).
- FUNGICULTURE 🍄 You don't spend the majority of your formative years living on a portabella farm without learning a thing or two about cultivating mushrooms. She understands the science and the process but wouldn't spend her time sifting through manure based compost unless her parents specifically asked for her help. She can also identify most mushrooms and knows their magical properties, as well as their use (or lack thereof) in the kitchen.
- HURDY-GURDY 🍄 Lilika's father is a talented folk musician and made a point of passing on Hungarian musical traditions to his only daughter. While music isn't Lilika's greatest passion, she is competent on the hurdy-gurdy (and can passably play the cimbalom). She rarely plays with anyone but her parents but will practice with Webster from time to time.
HISTORY
FAMILY MEMBERS:
- FATHER 🍄 Andras Ignacz. Former steel worker, would-be professional folk musician, and current portabella farmer. (60). Halfblood.
- MOTHER 🍄 Lívia Ignacz (Dankó). Homemaker and portabella farmer with a side business growing/selling rare magical mushrooms. (59). Halfblood.
HISTORY:
PARENTS: Romeo and Juliet have nothing on Andras and Lívia. The feud between the Ignacz' and the Dankó's dates back to the turn of the century. It's still not entirely clear to Lilika exactly what triggered the animosity between the two families but there is no doubting that the hostility remains alive and well. Rumor has it that Lilika's great-grandfathers entered into a shady business deal together shortly after immigrating to Braddock, Pennsylvania from Hungary and somehow the deal soured. After a couple stiff plum brandy nightcaps, the neighborhood hens back in Braddock loved to embellish the tale with ancient accusations of cuckoldry and even murder but Lilika takes this information with a palm full of salt. All she knows is that her extended family wasn't (and still isn't) happy about her parents being together.
Andras and Lívia met through mutual friends at a high school dance. They kept their budding romance a secret for as long as they possibly could but it was clear to anyone with working eyes that the pair was madly in love. Andras proposed just five months into their relationship and they secretly married at city hall two days after Lívia's eighteenth birthday. Their parents were furious, no more so than Lívia's mother, who promised to see to it that no Dankó would ever carry the Ignacz family name.
The young Mr. and Mrs. Ignacz brushed off the threat and went about building a life together. Andras worked in the steel mills by day while he pursued a career in music at night. Lívia went back to school to become a herbologist and made ends meet by tending bar. Lilika loves perusing pictures from this time—her parents always looked so happy. And they truly were happy for a while! But once they really started trying for a family, things weren't quite so smooth. Lívia had an impossible time conceiving despite insistence from Healers that both she and her husband were perfectly healthy. Though she didn't want to believe it at first, Lívia eventually came to believe that her own mother had cursed her. If not explicitly, then at the very least the collective Ignacz and Dankó clans must have been running interference with the sheer volume of evil eye energy they were casting in Andras and Lívia's direction.
Schisms widened until eventually Andras and Lívia entirely removed themselves from their tight-knit Hungarian immigrant community. Despite continued attempts, the pair didn't conceive until after twenty-four years of marriage. The morning Lívia discovered she was pregnant with Lilika, her own mother passed away.
EARLY LIFE IN BRADDOCK: After two and a half decades of trying, Lilika's arrival into the world seemed like an honest to God miracle to her parents and they treated their only daughter accordingly. While they were hard on themselves, they were always soft with Lilika. She was a mischievous child from the get-go, though she favored subtle acts of rebellion rather than outright revolt. She very rarely got caught doing anything naughty but when she did the punishments were never too severe. For all she knew, everyone's' parents were push-overs, so when she had play dates with her childhood best friend, Webster Knox, and his muggle cousin, Tony, she had no problem dragging them off on misadventures. What's the worst that could happen? A slap on the wrist? They were more or less free to roam and explore, so long as they returned for dinner.
But as she grew closer with Webster (and grew up in general), she began to recognize the value in focus and hard-work. While her impish side certainly didn't disappear entirely, her love of trouble making waned naturally with age. By the time she was finishing grade school, she stood out as a clever and dedicated student—if a touch boisterous.
MOVING TO TULPEHANINK: Just before Lilika entered the sixth grade, her father was laid off; Braddock's steel industry had been on a sharp decline since the seventies. Lilika's parents were prepared for the possibility and quickly packed up, moving their small family to Tulpehanink, Pennsylvania.
They had been quietly squirreling away money for some time, so they were able to purchase a nice chunk of land and start over as fungiculturalists. The Ignacz's make their living growing and commercially selling portabella mushrooms but Lívia specializes in small batches of rare mushrooms with powerful magical properties. Most American potioneers on the East Coast have probably dealt with her, at least tangentially.
Lilika took immediately to life in Tulpehanink. She had always loved being outdoors but didn't have many opportunities to truly immerse herself in nature when she was living in Braddock. In Tulpehanink, she could stomp through streams and dig salamanders out of creek banks. She delighted in getting dirty and felt more powerful as a woman and a witch when she was out basking in the moonlight.
Plus, she enjoyed feeling like a big fish in a small pond. It wouldn't be a stretch to suggest Lilika is full of herself. She considered herself to be something special back in Braddock and her ego only grew when she transferred into a minuscule magical 6-12 school with an abysmal graduation rate. Her fresh face and relative brilliance won her a small following amongst her peers early on.
Without intending to Lilika launched herself into an extremely insular social circle. While there is a decently sized magical community in Tulpehanink, the fear of being found out by the no-maj community is nonetheless palpable in the rural, conservative community. Witches and wizards largely socialize with one another and avoid their no-maj neighbors, shrinking Lilika's social circle in a way that she hadn't experienced in Braddock. To constrain things even further, Tulpehanink is an aging town with a teensy population of magical folk below the age of twenty-five. In an effort to settle in, Lilika quickly wriggled her way into an extremely tight-knit group of Tulpehanink boys with a reputation for being aloof, charmingly quirky, and a notch or two above the rest in terms of intelligence.
PRETEEN & EARLY TEEN YEARS IN TULPEHANINK: Young and naïve, Lilika reveled in the elitism of a closed off friend group. As preteens, the Tulpehanink boys were not unkind and happily included Lilika in their capers (though there was always an unspoken understanding that her inclusion—as a girl and an outsider—was tenuous). Lilika found herself molding her tastes to those of her new friends and quietly rejecting a lot of her childhood interests. A mutual love of the outdoors sustained the group as they spent hours combing creek banks for crawfish colonies and building tree fort clubhouses but most of her 'girly' hobbies—dancing, fashion, fortune telling—fell by the wayside. At the time, Lilika didn't recognize her own discomfort but looking back she would come to realize that she only truly felt like she could be herself when Webster came to visit over the summers.
Puberty hit Lilika fast and hard; she shot up seemingly overnight and was regularly mistaken for an eighteen or nineteen-year-old when she was only just beginning to tag -teen onto the end of her age. The attention her new body attracted felt nice at first and she foolishly leaned into it, purposely courting notice. She had no female friends to dissuade her and she wasn't about to listen to her mom's advice—ugh!
Half the boys in her friend group became infatuated with her and the other half began to project a mild disdain for girls in general. Her freshman and sophomore years of high school were miserable. The Tulpehanink boys were constantly fighting, dividing, and reuniting in new amalgamations; no matter the true cause, they always found a way to blame Lilika for their arguments. Fed up, she tried to remove herself from a toxic situation and build a new social circle but the rest of her peers had already formulated an opinion of Lilika as a stuck-up, know-it-all, hussy.
FLEEING TULPEHANINK: With the fervent support of her parents, Lilika began looking into transferring schools the summer between her sophomore and junior year. There weren't any other public schools in her area and a daily commute to a public school in the city felt overwhelming, even with side along apparition. A boarding school—a fresh start—seemed like the best answer. Gooseberry's focus on the outdoors appealed to Lilika and the opportunity to study under the notorious Nayan Chettri swayed her to fight for acceptance at Gooseberry over a simpler transfer to Ilvermorny.
Lilika applied on the merits of her solid GPA, moderate musical abilities, and divinatory talents. The only problem was that her tiny school in Tulpehanink didn't offer a music class OR divination, so she had no way of proving she had any skill in either. She was ultimately rejected at the beginning of her junior year with the kind advice that she should reapply with a few more references and extracurriculars.
Determined, Lilika gathered letters of recommendation from every one of her limited pool of secondary teachers and even went so far as to press her elementary homeroom teacher back in Braddock for a reference. She retreated from her social life in Tulpehanink, only staying in touch with Webster via owl, and picked up a number of childhood hobbies that she had neglected over the years. Over the next several months, Lilika joined a Hungarian folk dance troupe, re-honed her ear for the hurdy-gurdy and cimbalom, and tried out for her school's pathetically underserved gymnastics team. She reapplied to Gooseberry over winter break as a Hail Mary pass and, much to her surprise and delight, she was accepted as a midyear transfer.
GOOSEBERRY: Wary of repeating old mistakes, Lilika kept to herself for the second half of her junior year and largely flew under the radar. Not wanting to appear a phony to Gooseberry staff and risk having her acceptance revoked, she did pursue the extracurricular activities she had applied using. Or, at least, something similar. Cheerleading became the stand-in for folk dance, gymnastics, and ultimately, her social life. Lilika was content to play the supporting role (literally and figuratively) for her more outgoing housemates and kept her nose out of Gooseberry drama—supernatural or otherwise. While Lilika was very interested in the entities in the woods, and still is, she was largely unaffected by the events at the end of her junior year. She suspects ANoN had no interest in keeping her at Gooseberry, which is just fine by her.
Having escaped her first semester at Gooseberry unscathed, she could in good conscience pester her best friend, Webster, into applying for his senior year. Lilika had no doubt he would be accepted without question and is elated to be entering her senior year with her oldest and dearest friend at her side. Being offered the position of Cheer Captain after Kenzie's resignation came as a welcome and thrilling surprise, too...
This might just be Lilika's best year yet!
SCHOOL
YEAR: Senior
HOUSE: Azurcrest
SORTING: While many of Lilika's inner monologues sound like bad poems by members of Azurcrest's moody rival house, her outward actions are all Jay. She's cautious and careful in the planning stages of her life but once she feels like no one is watching her she can be quite impulsive, adventurous, and gratification seeking.
WAND: Pine, turul tail feather, springy, 12.5"
FAMILIAR: Lilika did not come to school with a familiar but she has a bad habit of capturing bugs and small amphibians. She likes to build terrariums for her hostages and keep them on her desk. After about a week, guilt sets in and she releases her captives back into the wild.
PETS: Lilika's parents own a Mangalica pig named Woolford (Wooly). They originally purchased the pig as a meat hog but became attached.
CLASSES:
- Charms
- Herbology
- Potions
- Transfiguration
- Astronomy
- Magizoology
- Divination
ADVANCED STUDY: Divination - Lilika is dead certain that she is a true Seer and gets quite huffy when people suggest that the sight isn't real. While her preferred method of divination is cheiromancy, she is interested in learning other techniques and hopefully translating her passion into a viable career.
SENIOR PROJECT: Still not entirely certain! Something to do with cheiromancy.
ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: Never brilliant but always solidly capable plus. She was a straight-A student back in Tulpehanink and continues to maintain good (not perfect) grades, though it no longer comes as easily to her. She prefers and excels at classes where she can channel her natural magical energy, like Divination and Herbology, and struggles with heavy theory and memorization. In class, she rarely speaks unless called on but will talk in small groups and help her friends.
EXTRACURRICULARS:
- Cheer Captain 💗
- Boating Club
- Gardening Club
- Outdoor Exploration
OOC
NAME: Aleena
EMAIL: See Player Contact Page
CDJ:
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optimistprimeOTHER PREFERRED CONTACT: Gooseberry Meme Tumblr
TIME ZONE: AK Standard Time
MISCELLANEOUS;
Date: 2017-11-09 04:05 am (UTC)TABLE OF CONTENTS;
Date: 2017-11-09 04:08 am (UTC)2. Drop Box
3. Time Table
4. References
TIME TABLE;
Date: 2017-11-09 04:10 am (UTC)REFERENCES;
Date: 2017-11-09 04:16 am (UTC)Cimbalom