𝙴𝚙𝚑𝚎𝚖𝚎𝚛𝚊𝚕 𝙰𝚛𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚟𝚎 ⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

Lottie was born on a bitter fall night, her wails echoing through the halls of the hospital like the screech of a banshee. Years later, she would go on to wonder if the reason for all of her crying was because of the pressure that fell upon her the moment she took her first breath.

Her mother and father, both wealthy ministry workers who cared more for their paperwork than their own children, had immediately placed her into homeschooling with expensive tutors and rigorous lessons, including basic muggle schooling as well as the extended history and fundamentals of magic and wizardry. Occasionally they would request evaluations of her monthly work, usually just a letter grade telling them where she was on a spectrum, but they didn’t care much as long as she wasn’t failing.

Despite her upbringing, there was a constant poetic piece of her that seemed to latch on like a tick. It started when she was just a little girl, sneaking into her parents' work rooms and snatching books off the shelves to cure her boredom. She had been particularly attracted to the poems, the way the words sounded when they rolled off her tongue and the shapes of the paragraphs, short but wordy. As she grew older, it just seemed to stick, a love she couldn’t shake off. But she knew her parents would never let it be anything more than just that, so she kept it to herself.

Until the age of 10, she was the middle child in a family of two brothers and two sisters, two of which were still attending school, Ethel and Francis. The two that were no longer in school were a complicated matter for the family. Louis had gone on to get a lower ranking position in the ministry, a success through the eyes of their parents and nothing more. However, Anadil had taken her graduation as a doorway out of their lives. She had sprung into the muggle world and started a bold career in theatrical arts, auditioning for every play and musical she could find and making her name known. Her parents, outraged by this, had cut her out of their lives completely, taking down her pictures and ridding the house of anything that could spark even the faintest thought of her. Not long after, they had another child.

While all this was happening, somewhere along the way Lottie had received her letter from Hogwarts. Amidst the drama that emerged from her sister moving away and her baby brother, Eugene, being born, she was guiltily relieved by the opportunity to get away from the stress and the arguments, and of course, the homeschooling. Her parents spared her no pride, but there was that masked relief that allowed Lottie some hope. When the day finally came, she waved her goodbyes at the train station, promising to write monthly and swearing to herself that she wouldn’t make the same mistake her sister had.

It had been a chilly December evening, all the Winfield children crammed into their home and left to their own devices while their parents were away on a short business trip. Lottie was, naturally, bored out of her mind.

In search of something to keep herself from dying of boredom, she had snuck away to her parents work room while the babysitter was busy with her more troublesome older siblings. Her mother and father had left in quite a rush, for reasons unknown to her, so the room was cluttered and appeared to be much more lived-in than normal. On the edge of one of the desks, a candle still burned hazardously.

On that same desk, though, was a shiny looking book entitled something about magical economics. But at the age of seven and a half, all she saw was the glimmering print of cursive words on the cover, and the flourishes on the spine. So, with a big leap, she hopped up on the chair and crawled onto the desk.

With that motion, though, she accidentally bumped the whole table, causing the candle on the edge to topple over onto the desk, the glass casing breaking to start a small fire on the probably very important paperwork.

Lottie, in horror, scrambled off the table and tried to find something to extinguish the fire. It wasn’t long after that the babysitter had started banging on the door, demanding Lottie come out. The banging continued, and Lottie still hadn’t found anything, and finally the door blasted open. But the babysitter didn’t look horrified at the sight of fire. In fact, the fire was gone.

Due to her homeschooling, Lottie has a hard time socializing with people, much less people her age. She has a tendency towards being quieter and secretive, lacking in areas of small talk and even just talk. She struggles with reading others emotions, going more off of her teachings than anything. She also can sometimes end up coming off as pretentious due to her background, making her a bit difficult to communicate with.

She takes pride in her abilities, especially when it comes to magic, as has had years of research and preparation for magic use. This pride takes many forms, some for better and some for worse, either causing her to come off as proud or egocentric. Many appreciate her efficient nature, while others can be put off by it, especially when she wants something done a certain way.

Although she has a dedication to her studies, she somehow always finds herself back to what she finds most intriguing. She spends hours researching the Greeks and Romans and the beautiful, poetic way that everything fits together in mythology. She reads sonnets and ballads and plays and everything she can get her hands on, all the while concealing her love for it from her parents so that they don’t get any suspicion that she may want to pursue muggle history later on in life. Upon entering school, she finds that she just can’t shake that secretive nature she always kept up at home.

Quiet and even as she may be, there is nothing shy about her, despite her tendency to place herself into embarrassing positions. She has a clear and articulate way of speaking, and a vocabulary larger than most her age, at least in the muggle world. She is a fluid and easy talker, but responding is what catches her. Others need to initiate conversation, or else she just won’t talk at all.