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Tala Takagi
Status:
Muggle-born
Birthday:
10 Dec 1992
Nationality:
English
Residence:
Alconbury, England
Function:
Witch
Wand:
29,2 cm cherry wood and phoenix feather
Physical Description: Tala is of average height - 5'4", roughly - with a medium build, and has long, slightly wavy black hair and similarly dark eyes; she is of half-Japanese and half-Filipino descent. She has a fairly square face, pointed eyebrows, and often accentuates her features with plain dark eyeliner and red lipstick. Tala can often be found with unidentified animal hair all over her clothes. Don't ask her what animal it's from - she probably doesn't know, either.

Mental Description: Tala is bubbly, excitable, and pretty much a hippie. An animal lover her entire life, she enjoys their company to humans, though as an extrovert, she will never turn down a good chat. She is a bit kooky at times, unable to turn off the switch in her brain that tells her if she's talking to an animal or a human, and so will sometimes sternly tell a human whose feet are on her property to "Paws off!" The weirder the creature, the more Tala will love it, and she enjoys studying dangerous creatures in her free time, particularly enjoying any cat-like creatures like manticores or chimaeras.

Biography: Takagi Haruto didn't expect for his entire family to pick up and move to the USA in the spring of 1968 when he was just five years old, but that's exactly what they did. Leaving their hometown of Sapporo behind, the Takagis moved from Japan to the US to create a new life there after Haruto's father's passing. Haruto's single mother struggled to raise three children on her own in a new country, so Haruto, the eldest, worked odd jobs to support his family whenever he could, and at eighteen, joined the US Air Force. Soon he was stationed in Alconbury, England, at the RAF Alconbury, a joint base between the US Air Force and the RAF. That's where, in 1983, he met Lawin.

Lawin Villanueva del Rosario was also no stranger to travel. Born and raised in the Philippines, she was attending university at the University of Maryland, which just so happened to have a global campus in Alconbury; Lawin was spending a semester there as part of a study abroad program. Creeped out by a stranger hitting on her at a bar, Lawin asked Haruto if he would pretend to be her boyfriend so the stranger would leave her alone. It worked, and though Haruto desperately wanted to buy Lawin a drink afterwards, he didn't want to seem as though he were just another creep hitting on her, too. Luckily, Lawin saw right through that, bought him a drink instead, and the rest is history.

Married in 1989, the couple welcomed their first child - Isko - in late 1990, deciding to use Tagalog given names and Haruto's Japanese family name for all of their children. Two years later in late 1992 came the middle child, Tala, and three years after that in 1995, the baby - another son, Alon. Staying in Alconbury, the family was tight-knit and loving, and had three cats on top of the three kids.

Isko and Alon were always the best of friends, a pair of ragtag boys who enjoyed causing trouble, mostly at the neighbours' expenses; Tala, on the other hand, never got into trouble, but was always the mastermind behind her brothers' charades. Curiously, whenever the Takagi boys were ever found getting into mischief, middle child Tala would always be found with the three cats - Huckleberry, Kerfuffle, and Travis - and the amount of their hair all over her clothes always served as a convenient alibi.

But Tala was always a little different. At age five, in 1997, her father came home to find all three cats to be strikingly different colours than they had been when he had left - Travis was a deep emerald green, Kerfuffle brilliant white, and Huckleberry was, well, the dark purple of a huckleberry. At first thinking that Tala had somehow gotten her hands on some hair dye, Haruto asked her how she had achieved this feat; little Tala just shrugged and told her father they’d just turned those colors of their own accord, but she liked them better this way anyway.

Little things like this happened for the rest of her childhood, almost exclusively involving animals - floating dogs, sudden growth of horses' manes, etc. So when a representative from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry showed up at the Takagis' doorstep to explain that their middle child, Tala, was, in fact, a witch, no one was really surprised. More confused and relieved, sure, but there had always been something a little off about Tala Takagi.

Sorted into Gryffindor at Hogwarts, Tala quickly proved her worth as a lionhearted member of her House by trying to sneak into the Forbidden Forest to "chat with the centaurs" because she was "just curious!", but of course, she was caught and sentenced to a large amount of detention; later, she was always the first to approach a new creature during Care of Magical Creatures class during her third year. Not the best with book learning, Tala always excelled in her more hands-on classes like Care of Magical Creatures (obviously), Herbology, and Flying, though she always struggled with theoreticals like Transfiguration and History of Magic. After graduation, with CoMC as her only "O" (and mostly... mostly... everything else as "E"), Tala went off to be a Magizoologist, specializing in cat-like creatures such as manticores and chimaeras. (She particularly enjoyed this because it enabled her to travel the world, seeing her parents and siblings - who had ended up scattered across the globe, all entirely Muggle - often.)

She performed this job for twelve years until a coworker informed her that the Care of Magical Creatures position at Hogwarts was opening up. At first, Tala was hesitant to even apply; she loved her job as a Magizoologist, and she didn't want to let that go. But when a particularly nasty accident with a Griffin left her in St. Mungo's for nearly two months, Tala knew it was time to move on and take the next step in life...