Physical Description: Alex has reddish brown hair that tends to frizz at the slightest hint of humidity. She usually wears it up in a pony or braided to help hide its rebelliousness. Her eyes are hazel but appear green from a distance. At 4'6", she is of an average build and somewhat slender.

Her face is a rounded heart shape, and her small nose is dusted with freckles. Her lips are full but usually chapped from her bad habit of biting them when concentrating. A pair of slim square glasses frame her eyes, often slipping down her nose's bridge.

Mental Description: If realism were a religion, Alex would probably give sermons. She is neither pessimistic nor optimistic in her worldview and likes to get down to the facts. She is an odd mix of curious and cautious, always wanting to know more without taking the risks of finding out outside of a book.

Despite her studiousness, she is extremely naive and empathetic to her own detriment. Trust comes too easily, and her loyalty is often not properly earned before it is given. She yearns for real friendship and acceptance while hiding behind her determination to be the best student in her class.

Biography: Someone looking in from the outside might call her background troubled, but Alex doesn't see it that way. Both of her parents were muggles from a long line of muggles. How she sees things, her mother fell in love with a rich man's-her father's- money, and he did not love her in return. She's never met her father, and she's heard nothing good of him from her mother's mouth. The only thing she'd gotten from him was her surname.

Her mother never quite got over the loss of a wealthy lifestyle, despite having to move herself and her young daughter back home to Irvine, Scotland, with her parents. She soothed herself with wine and young men. Alex had grown used to spending most of her time with her grandparents, who were salt-of-the-earth folk.

The family home was small, but its proximity to the harbor developed a love of the sea in Alex. She would often wander down with a good book and enjoy the noises and smells of the place. Nothing eased her mind like staring out into the vast horizon and feeling smaller than a speck of dust on her sleeve.

Magic was not even a consideration for her in her life, being attracted to things that could be proven through science. Every small mishap her early magic may have caused could be easily explained away. A trick of the light, an overactive imagination. The idea of magic could lead to a very dangerous thing, hope. Hope was intangible and unhelpful. It provided nothing but disappointment as far as she was concerned. Nothing should be looked forward to without sufficient evidence that it would be worth doing. Thus, an acceptance letter to Hogwarts was quite a wrench in her well-oiled machine of reality.

First Instance of Magic: Until her letter, Alex refused to remember her first memory of magic. Her grandmother and mother had been fighting; she was maybe five years old, sitting on the kitchen floor banging pans with a spoon. She couldn't remember what they had been arguing about, but at some point, the angry words had escalated in volume, and Alex had been frightened. She loved both of these people and had never seen them so ready to hurt one another. When she thought she could not take it anymore, she let out a sob, and the wine bottle next to her mother shattered. Alex had been picked up by her grandmother and brought to bed, and the incident was never spoken of again.