Physical Description:


Standing at an underwhelming 137 centimeters, or 4'6" depending on who you ask, Riley doesn't seem all that impressive at first glance. Her blue eyes and well-maintained brown hair are far from intimidating, and her small voice only serves to exacerbate her appearance as a normal little girl.

Mental Description:
Riley clings to adults in positions of authority like a leech on an infected wound. Maybe it's because she never knew her dad, or maybe it's because her mum always refused to speak of him in any serious detail, but Riley is often, unintentionally, seeking that older male role model in her life, and she has developed into quite a people pleaser. She doesn't want to disappoint anyone, older or younger, for fear of winding up alone.

If Riley's mum talks to her about her marks at school, Riley studies harder. If Riley's friends talk about Riley's hair being just a little bit messy one day, Riley wakes up an hour earlier than usual from then on to brush it a bit extra.

Biography:
Once, a young woman fell in love with a young man. The rest of the world didn't matter. Only their love mattered. They both believed love could get them through any problems they had, so they recklessly married months after they met.

The man had a secret: he was a wizard.

The woman learned this and accepted him, so strong was her love for the man. They lived a simple married life. She was a school teacher, which she enjoyed quite a bit, and he did something in the magical world that she didn't even understand. But she didn't need to understand. She just needed to be with him.

But life isn't a fairy tale, and there isn't always a happy ending. Maybe he wasn't so good after all, or maybe it was a misunderstanding, but the man found himself arrested and sent off to a place called 'Azkaban.' The woman had no idea just how terrible that place was, but she didn't have time to worry about it, because, days after she received notice of her husband's arrest, she learned that she was with child.

She would call that child Riley, and Riley's father's last name was all she would have of him.

Riley doesn't know about magic, or about her dad's arrest. She only knows that her mum loves her very much, and that sometimes, if she stays up just a bit too late, she catches her mum crying when she thinks Riley is asleep.

Riley has two close friends: siblings called Emily and Finn. The two siblings have been her neighbors since she was quite small, so they spent a lot of time together growing up.

Riley never knew her own dad, so she was very close to Emily and Finn's dad. It wasn't the same as having her own, but it was still nice to have a male role model. Since Emily and Finn never knew their mum, they spent their fair share of time with Riley's, so it was a very symbiotic relationship the children had.

They were inseparable. They went to school together, attended church together, and even took care of their homes' shopping together once they were old enough. The three were poised to be best friends for life, until Riley got old enough to attend Hogwarts.

She not only has to lie to her best friends about magic's existence now, but she also has to be shipped off to a magic boarding school where she can at most speak to them through letters. It's a terrible, lonely existence, and she's afraid of losing her best friends.

First Instance of Magic:
Riley's first time using magic was at eight years old.

She was spending the day with Emily and Finn, and they had a problem: there were two cookies left at the twins' house, but there were three of them. Emily insisted that Riley and she should have the cookies, while Finn insisted on Riley and himself receiving the cookies. It was then rashly decided that the three of them would have a competition to see who would receive the delicious sweets.

The nearby oak tree was large enough that the three of them climbed it all the time. It only made sense that they would race to the top to decide on the distribution of the two cookies.

The three of them began to climb, and it was all good fun until Riley felt her foot slip from its foothold. She began to tumble from the tree at an impressive fifteen feet or so from the ground. She'd have easily broken a leg from that fall, but she didn't.

Perhaps, she thought at the time, it was a trick of the light, but one of the tree's branches seemed to wrap around her ankle to stop her falling to the ground. When she stopped moving and looked up, her ankle was just neatly tangled in the boughs of the old oak and she was dangling upside down.

It took a while to get her free and on her feet again, but her appetite was gone, and she didn't dare mention what she thought she'd seen, even as her friends munched on the prize cookies.