Nimue White || Professor of Transfiguration

S t a t s

Stamina: 6 || Evasion: 7 || Strength: 2
Wisdom: 20 || Arcane Power: 10 || Accuracy: 15

A b i l i t i e s

Year 1 – || Year 2 – [ || Year 3 –
Year 4 – || Year 5 – || Year 6 – [size] || Year 7 –

A d u l t L o g s

Nimue stands at 171 cm and has an effortless hour-glass figure that fashion models starve themselves to achieve. Her soft, dark walnut brown hair frames her heart-shaped face in playful, bouncy waves. Her eyes are also a deep dark, chocolate brown, but where once they were bright and wide-eyed, warmed by the inviting smile that often danced in twinkling flashes at others, they have lately been lidded, seemingly devoid of almost any joy. To look upon them now is like looking at two briquettes of dusty coal.

Though she was born and grew up in Sweden, she is not the stereotypical Nordic snowbunny in her coloration. She, like her father and her older brother, is a dark Swede. Her skin is olive colored, and her lips are often rouged in corals or reds. She prefers dresses and blouses with open necks and this is partly due to her fondness for a beauty mark to the upper right of her sternum that looks loosely like a crescent with just a tiny drop spilling off the end.

She is exceptionally bright, and knows it, but has never felt the need to advertise it. She is accustomed to being a person who understands things quickly, but what she truly enjoys is being intellectually challenged while reaching that understanding. Although she can be quite confident in her knowledge and skill, she can be much less confident in her emotional relationships.

The dark Swede is also polished. Years of being raised in a wealthy, pureblood home where hours were expected to be invested with house elves, tutors, and nannies on the niceties of society were not, as it turned out, a waste of anyone's time or galleons. Her family lived in the deep well of satisfaction that came from knowing Nimue knew how to conduct herself in almost any formal situation.

Almost.

She knew how to enter a room and graciously command the attention of anyone in it, speak with a number of people on a variety of subjects, and maybe most importantly, she knew how to handle criticism, all while revealing remarkably little about her personal life.

Yet with all of her charm and grace, there was a stiffness beneath it all. Not a coldness, exactly. Just a distance. Self-protection.

She had spent years accepting what was expected of her, not because she was some compliant rag doll, but because it was the pathway she saw to creating the least of amount of friction for her herself, yes, but mostly for her parents.

She had never thought much about the concept of happiness. She thought more about duty. Years of accepting what had been expected of her, rather than asking herself what she actually wanted had taken a numbing toll. Her broken engagement to Soren Jarmlinger, her father's mentee and business heir-apparent, was her own declaration of independence and the first instance, when the stakes truly mattered, that she acknowledged, 'No, I don't want this.'

So when Nimue arrived at Hogwarts in the autumn of 2026 as the new Transfiguration Professor, she felt more unsure of herself than at any time in her life. And that, she knew, had to be a good thing.

Her life had been an easy one in terms of creature comforts. Emphasis on creature comforts. Her mother, Belladonna White (née McCoire) met her father, Magnus Stellan White, in the air during a Quidditch match at London's Quidditch stadium in summer 1978. He was a lethally accurate first string Beater for Durmstrang and she was a moderately talented second string Seeker, who happened to be a gorgeous Veela. After Magnus single-handedly knocked her team's Seeker out of the game with one hit, Belladonna answered her team's call of duty. The game could have gone to Durmstrang with just one hit, but when Magnus positioned to launch the bludger her way, and caught a glance of her, he stopped his swing mid-air. That moment allowed Belladonna to find the snitch and grab it, and the rest was history.

Bad history.

They met because he would not bludger her. They married because it seemed like the sensible thing to do. And the rest of their lives together were little more than a long succession of oncoming bludgers in the guise of indifference. And that indifference ricocheted to everyone in the far corners of their "home".

Nimue had friends. She had an active life. And she also had a brother, Arden Hanbury White. Arden was eighteen years her senior and Nimue adored him. He was also a squib. That fact was of some consternation to her father, and possibly to Arden, but it turned out he was Nimue's biggest supporter and cheerleader her whole life while living with her parents and then when she attended Durmstrang.

While at Durmstrang, Nimue studied hard. She had myriad interests, particularly duelling, but her studies always came first. That wasn't a punishment for her. It was a joy. She had a real gift for Charms and Transfiguration it turned out, and her ease with both subjects, particularly Transfiguration, led to the happy discovery of fulfillment when able to help others with complex concepts. The one down side she experienced was usually being judged by her beauty and not her brains. She could understand it being the first thing to strike someone, but did they simply tune her out thereafter? For someone as beautiful as she was, she felt unseen too much of the time.

When she graduated from Durmstrang, she undertook several years of advanced studies in Applied Transfiguration at the Royal Institute of Arcane Studies in Gamla Stan Stockholm. This was followed by an apprenticeship with a specialist in magical transformation and spatial alteration. Her work eventually took her into magical theatrical production, where she used Transfiguration constantly to create and alter scenery, props, stage effects, and occasionally costumes and sets during live performances. It was demanding work: transformations had to be precise, stable, reversible, and often performed under pressure.

Although she enjoyed the technical challenge, the theatrical world was not ultimately where she wanted to remain. So, she packed up and left her little apartment for home where she began a lucrative business of tutoring young witches and wizards in preparation for their O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s, with a focus on those struggling on the conceptual side of Transfiguration. Nimue discovered before too long that she was better than fair at explaining why a transformation worked rather than simply demonstrating how to perform it.

It was also during this time that she was proposed to by Soren, and for reasons she still cannot fathom, accepted his proposal. Her mother, acting in perhaps the most motherly fashion Nimue could ever remember, convinced her to imagine a life more fulfilling for herself than what she and her father had. So, Belladonna, having heard about an opening at Hogwarts from her father, Nimue's grandfather, Angus McCoire, decided to take matters in hand and applied for the position of Transfiguration Professor in her daughter's name.

Before giving it to the owl to deliver, she had second thoughts and spoke to Nimue about it. Nimue was not at all aggravated or irked in any way about the development. In fact, she wondered at her lack of concern at the prospect of leaving Sweden and Soren, and then she realized her mother was right. She did not want to flatline the rest of her life with mere comfort and mediocrity, so she ripped up her mother's faux application and sent in one of her own.

She always told her students to change their perspectives by changing their relationship to the subject. Now it was time for her to do the same.

Nimue was 4 years old when her magic first showed itself. It was a quiet, Sunday morning and she, both of her parents, and Arden were seated at the much too long dining room table for breakfast. Tressa, the Whites' senior house elf, filled everyone's juice glass with fresh orange juice, and came to Nimue's place last. The pitcher was no longer holding much orange juice, so Nimue asked, "May I pour it, Tressa?"

Tressa smiled and did not hesitate in the least. The pitcher thunked gently against the wood of the table top, shrouded in a crisply ironed, pristine table cloth in buttercream yellow. As Nimue tried, with both hands, to wrest the heavy pitcher from its place, she let out an exasperated sigh. Not one to give up easily, she stood and then got upon her chair, balancing herself on her knees. Then she leaned over precariously to pour the juice.

Her father had been watching the whole spectacle, casually peeking over the top of his morning paper, curious to see how it was going to end. The pitcher proved heavier than Nimue anticipated, and it tipped too quickly, knocking over her juice glass. A bright bloom of orange spilled across the table, and her father said nothing but shook his head, and went back to his reading.

Nimue felt her face go hot from both anger and embarrassment, and she had just grabbed her napkin to help Tressa dab up the citrus surge when all of a sudden the orange juice began to lift upwards in perfect spheres, catching the morning light. They hovered and glistened for only a few seconds, like tiny amber lanterns, before drifting back into the pitcher in a quick, but orderly fashion. Nimue, with her napkin hanging limply from her hand, stared at the hovering droplets. She was both bewildered and mesmerized as her mind scrambled to understand what had just happened.

Arden had already leaped from his place across from her and had rounded the table behind their father on his way to scoop her up and give her a tight, congratulatory hug. "Far¹, the magic will not die with you after all." He squeezed her closely to him and whispered in her ear, "I am so proud of you, Lilla vän²."

Nimue threw her arms around his neck, squeezing hard and giggling. She knew something of consequence had just happened, but she was pretty certain it wasn't the now unspilled-spilled juice itself her brother was praising.

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1 - Far is 'Pappa' in Swedish (formal)
2 - Lilla vän is a Swedish endearment meaning 'Little dear one'