Name: Helene Zauber
School: Koldovstoretz
Year: Third
Status: Wizardborn
Appearance:

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Helene has straight, dirty-blonde hair, clear blue eyes, and fair skin. Her build is athletic, and she stands at about 5 ft 3 in height. She dresses very practically for the work she does, in simple, old fashioned clothes. She likes long skirts (good for carrying things), vests, plaid and brown colours, woollen pants, and dress shirts.

Personality:

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A stubborn girl, Helene is far more down-to-earth and serious than the rest of her family. She values all things practical and finds little importance in the theoretical. She dislikes parties, games, and gossip, as she sees them as a waste of time. Any hobbies that she does have are done sparingly, and she multitasks as much as she can. She likes order and cleanliness and looks down on those who are not like her. Her family isn’t poor, but they dislike outsiders, so she does most of the housework.

History:

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Born on February 6th, 2011, Helene grew up on the outskirts of the smallest town in Russia. Its name was Chekalin, and it boasted just under a thousand residents. With such a small population, there wasn’t much of a social scene, but that didn’t bother Helene and their family. Saskia, Helene’s sister, was the only one with any genuine desire to socialize, but she had always been a bit of a black sheep. Helene’s mother might have been extraverted, too, had she not been bedridden for as long as Helene could remember.

Despite Saskia being five years her senior, Helene felt more like the older sister. She was the responsible one. She did most of the chores, made many of the meals, and made sure everything was in order. Her sister, on the other hand, had always been more dependent. While sweet and probably the most caring person there was in their small town, she was very unserious. She preferred to party and have fun over chores and hard work, and her only contribution to the household was her sewing. Her only other interests were painting, the piano, and soccer, all of which Helene found entirely useless. However, she loved her sister dearly, and she didn’t blame her too much for her faults. Besides, the music and the art brightened their gloomy house to be almost bearable.

Her father, Fraser Zauber, was a quiet man. His skinny frame made him look a bit like a scarecrow, and this odd effect was only amplified by his green thumb. No, literally, his right thumb was green. It was a weird genetic defect, but it wasn't unheard of among wizards (Celebrity Herbologist and radio personality Tilden Toots was known for having three green thumbs). Fraser worked as a wandmaker, though he hardly needed to. The Zauber family had generations of wealth from both sides, and they were so self-sufficient that they rarely needed to use their fortune. They grew their food from a little garden in the back, Saskia sewed their clothes, and Helene made any furniture that they needed. The only reason they ever went out to the village was to buy meat, supplies, and anything else they couldn’t procure themselves. It made it easier that they had magic, but even that had its limits. When they needed to buy things, Saskia did it, as she was much more comfortable socializing. It wasn’t that the villagers were mean or anything; Helene and her father were just very uncomfortable around other people. They preferred the solitude of their own home, and while Saskia had insisted on going to the village public school, Helene opted to be homeschooled by her father.

Her mother, Eidel Zauber, might have been the better option for a teacher, but she’d been sick since Helene was eight. First, she’d contracted Cerebrumous Spattergroit, a disease that not only made her bedridden and caused her skin to break out in purple pustules but also had the additional symptoms of severe confusion and memory loss. She spent her first year at a wizarding hospital, but when no improvement came, she insisted on returning home. They let her go after assuring that proper measures would be taken since they didn't see any hope of her getting better any time soon. Her room was quarantined, and only her husband or the occasional doctor ever entered. To ensure that he wouldn't get the sickness himself, he would use charms such as the bubble head charm and the cleaning charm. The duration of her sickness was somewhat suspicious, and some close friends of Fraser suspected that someone was behind it. Eidel had been an Auror before she became bedridden, after all, and was often a part of highly classified cases. However, they had no way to prove ill intent, and they trusted Fraser enough to let the issue drop. After all, Fraser had been horribly depressed after his wife became ill, though he tried to stay strong for his children.

Her older sister was in her second last year of school when Helene started at Koldovstoretz in 2022. She had the option to start earlier, but she opted out of this, as Helene knew that her father struggled to manage things when she was away from home. Saskia decided the same, but Helene could tell that this decision pained her. Saskia belonged with people, and in Chekalin, there simply weren't many social opportunities for her to explore. When she finally did go to school, she quickly gained a large group of friends and seemed happier than ever before. On the other hand, Helene was quite the opposite. She hated being at school, she hated her teachers, and she was thoroughly annoyed by the other students. She completely kept to herself, and only a few close friends weaselled their way into her life.

Reducio

The reason Eidel fell ill was indeed due to criminal intent. She'd been working on a case when she discovered that another auror (Logan Krause) was being paid off by a group of criminals to keep quiet. She feared reporting this, because of Logan's power in the ministry, and was infected before she could. She tried to explain later, but the confusion linked with the disease made her claims baseless, and after a while, she was so dazed that she stopped trying. Logan had been a close friend of hers before she fell ill, so it was easy to infect her by taking a sample from the wizarding hospital and mixing it in with her food. Currently, Helene is completely unaware of this, and sees Logan as something like an uncle.

First Magic:

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One sunny day of July, Helene was feeling especially irritable. She'd been trying to fix a cabinet all day, and all Saskia was doing was painting. She let it slide because she didn't like being cross with her sister, but when Saskia asked about the cabinet, Helene lost her temper, grabbed a tube of paint, and squirted it against the wet canvas, ruining her sister's art. However, she immediately felt guilty and grabbed a towel to try to clear it off. Surprisingly, it worked perfectly, and the painting returned to the way it was. Puzzled, Helene turned to a grinning Saskia and then realized: she'd performed her first act of magic!