Alisa Sokolova

Full name: Alisa Alekseyevna Sokolova
Year: Sixth Year
Date of birth: January 15th, 2006
Blood status: Half-blood

Avatar: Eva Green (/Alisha Nesvat)

Appearance:
Alisa has dark brown, curly hair, like her mother. She’s thin as a stick and a good bit taller than the average 14-year-old, which makes her stick out in a group of her peers. It also makes her somewhat self-conscious about her appearance, as her body doesn’t match the beauty standards she would like to fit into. Her skin is fairly light, with a few freckles here and there, especially across the bridge of her nose, and her eyes are clear blue in color. That is something that she got from her father’s side of the family, same as the tall build. When at school she normally wears wizarding attire, which makes her fit in with the crowd a lot more than muggle clothing would, but during the summer break she wears the same jeans and shirts as all the other teenagers in her neighborhood.

Personality:
If one would need to describe Alisa in one word it would be spiteful. She wants to get back at the cousins who mock her daily for being a lowly half-blood, at the classmates who look down at her because she reads muggle science books, at the parents of her muggle friends who think she’s the child of a good-for-nothing school dropout who drove his wife away.

Alisa wants to prove them wrong, all of them. She has lived with the assumptions of others dictating her life since she was 9 and it has made her a defiant person. If she feels attacked her retaliation will be prompt and hostile, if not downright nasty. Words are weapons, weapons that have been used against her and her family, and now she uses them to get back at the world. Her natural stubbornness only makes it worse for her, as she won’t back down from a fight unless somebody makes her.

She’s different with her family of course: adores her father and loves her grandparents – her mother’s parents – dearly. Alisa is very attentive to their needs and moods, especially those of her father Aleksey. He’s the most important person in her life, and she will go out of her way to be there for him whenever she can. She helps him with muggle crossword puzzles, always cleans the dishes after dinner and will listen to him for hours when he explains her this or that triviality about his work. This, the patience, is a part of her too, but it’s one only her close friends and family get to experience.

Underneath the bravado and the biting words, Alisa has the potential to be a good friend, an unbiased listener, somebody who can see another person without prejudice because she knows how it is to be judged for simply being who you are. Those are qualities few people get to see, however, as she doesn’t consider most of her peers worth the effort to be kind to them.

History:

Reducio

Alisa Alekseyevna Sokolova was born the daughter of the pure-blood wizard Aleksey Vasilyevich Sokolov and the muggle woman Marya Miroslavivna Volkova on the 15th of January 2006 in a muggle hospital in Saint Petersburg.

Her parents had met at the Saint Petersburg State University just over 2 years earlier. Her mother had been a student of the Faculty of Physics, while her father had taken courses at the Faculty of Chemistry. They had been opposites from the start.

Aleksey was the heir of the Sokolov family, who prided themselves on being able to trace their pure-blood ancestry back for hundreds of years down the family tree. He was the older of a set of twins, destined for greatness according to their parents, smart and good-looking and with enough money that the former two didn’t even really matter. As the older brother it was Aleksey who was raised to become the next family head, while his younger brother Nikolay had more freedom to do as he pleased, both at school and at home. Aleksey had been fascinated with the art of potion brewing for a young age, and while it wasn’t the profession his parents had envisioned for him it still carried the prospect of great prestige. At 15 he left Durmstrang to learn under a master in the field – an honor that rarely was awarded to one that young and that his parents paid good money for.

Six year later, at 21, Aleksey had learned what he could from only one master, and moved on. He needed to make a name for himself, his family agreed, to become his own man. Muggle university wasn’t what they’d had in mind, but he didn’t care much for their protest, stating that he wanted to learn new techniques, see new ideas, learn things the old masters had never been taught. Nikolay wasn’t impressed either, somewhere between wonder and disgust at the thought that his twin wanted to spend time around dangerous muggles. He’d met a fascinating young woman, however, after finishing his 8th year at Durmstrang, and didn’t give more than a token protest. So Aleksey moved from the family seat in Ekaterinburg to Saint Petersburg to study.

Marya was the only daughter of two muggle storeowners who owned a small grocery shop in the middle of Saint Petersburg. She was the apple of their eye, their clever little girl who completed their little family. The shop was always busy, but Marya liked to around when her parents worked, enjoyed being among all the people who knew her name and smiled at her when they saw her. She was a happy child.

School was easy for the girl. She was a fast learner, liked to read and was especially fascinated by science. Both the teachers and her parents were delighted by her eagerness to learn and she went through school like a whirlwind, picking up all that she got until suddenly it was over and she was supposed what she wanted to do with her life.

The concept of going to the stars had always fascinated her, and when a film they showed for university orientation showcased an astronaut, Marya knew what she wanted to do: bring people up there, make the universe available to people, to send them up there into the endless sky to learn even more about the world. The Facility of Physics at the state university took her gladly.

This was where they met.

A common lecture in Chemical Physics brought them together, and their thirst for new ideas was what made them meet again and again, to discuss theories and latest breakthroughs. They shared a love for creating new concepts and a willingness to leave behind the old in favor of trying new approaches – the difference between them was that Marya didn’t know that there was a world she didn’t know of hidden right inside her own, a world of magic.

Aleksey showed her, one summer night, drew star maps into the air with the tip of his hand, levitated her by her clothes and conjured a bouquet of flowers for her. They started dating a month later.

Marya’s parents were smitten with the polite young man her daughter brought home, so well-mannered and careful, albeit a little bit scatterbrained at times, but he made their daughter happy so who were they to complain? Aleksey’s parents… didn’t know. Dating a muggle was taboo, a real one, something that wouldn’t be simply seen as eccentric like his stay at a muggle university. He knew that his family wouldn’t tolerate this muggle girlfriend, but somehow made himself believe that they wouldn’t find out.

Then Marya became pregnant. It came as surprise to both of them, an unforeseen accident, but a gift nonetheless. Still Aleksey didn’t tell his parents of his partner and child, told Marya that they were uptight aristocrats who had their own views of the world, outdated views that made them intolerant.

Alisa was born in the middle of a snow storm.

Her parents married in spring, less than four months later and only then, their small family, complete, did Aleksey realize that this, his muggle wife, their child, his muggle parents-in-law, his muggle friends at university, the potioneers he discussed muggle science with just as much as the new articles in Potions Today, had become his life. His family had been replaced, his values had too, as had the belief in the superiority of wizards and witches his parents had tried to instill into him as a child – but maybe that one had been a lost cause from the beginning.

So he went home, alone, to tell his family of his wife and daughter. He went home and came back to Saint Petersburg 2 days later, disowned and shunned from the family until he renounced his muggle wife and the shame he had brought to the family.

Nikolay was the one who took his hardest. He had admired his brother’s smarts and drive, had been envious of his position as future heir of the family and the special attention Aleksey got from their parents and grandparents.

Aleksey dropped out of the muggle university to begin work as a Potions Master again, to brew and sell so his wife could continue her education and gain the PhD she had studied for for so long. He went home, to Marya’s parents his time, and confessed his secret to them, showed them magic because they deserved to know what they had gotten into by allowing him into the family. It was their acceptance, their belief that his magic didn’t change who he was as a person, that made him turn on the Sokolov family and pure-blood society for good.

Their new life was a happy one. Marya graduated from university and gained a position with Roscosmos to work on the development of new Russian space ship concepts. Aleksey became a stay-at-home dad then, who took care of Alisa and helped out in the family shop while brewing potions to sell and working on developing his own recipes.

Every odd year his birth-family would try to contact him, something his father or his mother, his brother being the most persistent. They missed him, they said, wanted him to come back to wizardkind and leave the muggles to themselves. Aleksey always declined, to the anger of his family who wouldn’t understand why he had picked muggles over them.

When Alisa was 9, her mother was involved in an accident – or at least that was what military officer who came to their flat told them, that there had been an accident with a prototype and experimental rocket fuel. He was vague, only told them that Marya had been transferred to a military hospital and was unconscious.

Even at her young age Alisa understood how distraught her father was. They wouldn’t let them visit until the next day, and Aleksey made plans to use magic to get into the hospital on his own, to find out what had happened to his wife. Alisa was so distraught by her mother’s disappearance and her father’s crying that she used accidental magic that made them both fall asleep at night.

When they visited the hospital Marya was still not awake and remained comatose for the next 3 weeks. Nobody would tell them what had happened to her, and save for a few cuts and bruises on her legs and arms that healed she looked fine. Aleksey had his suspicions, but was too upset by his wife’s bad state to investigate them.

Marya woke up, however, finally. Alisa still remember how happy she had been to see her mother again, that she could hug her again and go back home and that everything would go back to normal- until her mother recognized neither her nor her father. Marya had no memory of them, didn’t remember anything that had happened in the last 14 years. Her memory ended over a year before she had first met Aleksey, and while she remembered her old friends and parents, she saw her husband and daughter as strangers.

Alisa cried for days, not understanding why her mother didn’t remember her or want to be close to her, watching her father try to make her remember with everything he knew. He even tried magic to restore her memory, but it helped nothing and left Marya upset and horrified. She hadn’t retained her memory of magic either and was scared when her unknown husband pointed his wand at her. Her parents tried to explain, to smooth things over, but it didn’t help.

One day Marya was gone from their flat, leaving a note that she couldn’t deal with all this anymore and that she wasn’t sure if she would come back.

She didn’t. Instead Alisa’s uncle Nikolay came knocking at their door not even a week later. She had never met him before, he was a stranger to her, but he offered her to came home to their family, him and her father both, and Aleksey cursed him out, screaming, Statue Of Secrecy be damned. Only years later did she understand that her father didn’t trust his brother, had taken his wife’s mysterious loss of memory and his brother’s convenient timing and taken it to mean that Nikolay had been somehow involved in what had happened.

Aleksey stopped working on Potions, didn’t touch a cauldron for over a year but instead went to help her grandparents with the shops – there were two then – to escape the memories. They grieved together for their wife and daughter, the woman they had lost. Alisa staid close them, didn’t want to lose her father and grandparents like she had lost her mother. She barely left their side and didn’t even want to go to school or play outside for long.

That ended when she was 10 and started Durmstrang. She begged her father to let her stay, but he sent her away thinking that she needed to have a chance to grow up, away from the pain their family shared. Alisa wasn’t excited for it, however, the magical school her father had gone too. She didn’t have friends there and it was far enough from home that she would only see her family during the holidays. The thought frightened her.

School was both better and worse than she had expected. She liked the material better than muggle school, liked the teachers better because they didn’t know her history, didn’t treat her like a broken doll. The other students she could learn to care for, maybe find friends. That had been her plan until she’d first met the Second Third boy Kirill Nikolayevich Sokolov – her cousin. Kirill told everyone about her, that her mother was non-magical, that her and Alisa had shamed the family, that Marya had run away from them because muggles hated wizards.

She found friends eventually, but only few would ignore Kirill’s talk long enough to bother to get to know her. Many of the other students didn’t, however, having never met a muggle and thinking of them as vile and cruel people who couldn’t be trusted. It only got worse when her younger cousin Nikita joined the school a year later.

Alisa had been delighted at the offer to visit Hogwarts along with the Quidditch team – not because she had any interest in Quidditch, but because it would be the first time in almost 4 years of school where she wouldn’t have to listen to her cousins’ taunts every day.

Family:
Mother: Marya Miroslavivna Volkova / Sokolova (muggle)
Father: Aleksey Vasilyevich Sokolov (pure-blood)

Uncle: Nikolay Vasilyevich Sokolov (pure-blood)
Cousins: Kirill Nikolayevich Sokolov (pure-blood), Nikita Nikolayevich Sokolov (pure-blood)

Grandfather (father's side): Vasily Ivanovich Sokolov (pure-blood)
Grandmother (father's side): Natalya Yurinichna Sokolova (pure-blood)

Grandfather (mother's side): Miroslav Pyotrevich Volkov (muggle)
Grandmother (mother's side): Elvira Daniilovna Volkova (muggle)

TRUNK

Alisa Alekseyevna Sokolova Stats: Stamina: 9 Evasion: 9 Strength: 4 Wisdom: 11 Arcane Power: 13 Accuracy: 9

Abilities:

Year 1 – Evasive Maneuvers

Reducio

The second thing Durmstrang taught Alisa, after the fact that everything on the castle grounds would kill a First Year student given the chance, was how to dodge.

She met her cousin Kirill for the first time on the first morning after they had come back from the survival training with the headmistress. Having a full night of sleep in a comfortable bed, the luxury of a hot shower in the morning and a breakfast table laden with delicious-smelling food made it her best day in well, pretty much exactly a week. She still didn’t know the other First Year girls well, missed her father, her grandparents and her friends from muggle school, but on that morning she had hope. Hope, that now that they were in the castle things would settle down and she’d be able to learn to get accustomed to life at Durmstrang.

The thing was that they shared a name. She hadn’t known that she had any cousins, had seen her uncle exactly once and never met her grandparents on her father’s side of the family. In theory Alisa was aware that there was a Russian pure-blood family called Sokolov, that she had relatives, that they featured prominently in magical society, but it had never affected her in any way.

Kirill on the other hand knew of her existence, knew that he had a cousin by his blood traitor uncle who had shamed their family by marrying a muggle. When he heard that there was a First Year girl in the dorms who shared his name, a name reserved for the great and the powerful, and that she was a half-blood, he knew who she was.

Their first interaction was horrible. Within ten minutes Alisa had a goblet of apple juice poured over her head by the Third Year and been cursed to hell and back. It earned him a detention, but if anything Kirill was proud of it, of having shown the girl her place.

Alisa spent her first year of school learning to anticipate when the spells would come flying, when somebody would try to trip her up from nowhere, when somebody was about to shove her from behind. Any place without a professor present meant that she was open game to her cousin and his pure-blood friends. They used her as target practice for the new spells they had learned or simply try to push her around bodily.

She didn’t know what the thought, that maybe she would leave Durmstrang if only he made school dreadful enough for her. Alisa, however, was stubborn and a fast learner. They didn’t learn many spells that were useful for dueling in their first year, with meant that she couldn’t fight back, but it didn’t mean that she had to take their bullying. Instead Alisa adapted. Her reflexes got better, her senses a bit sharper, her intuition better.

Running was for cowards, Kirill yelled after her once, but then he was a Third Year and never alone when he came for her, so she didn’t think he was the authority on that. Run Alisa did, however. She was lanky and fast and became good at jumping and ducking. It wasn’t always enough of course, there were days when she came back to the girls tower drenched in melted snow, or with her scarf missing, or with a scrap on her hand from when she’d fallen down. Still, she didn’t give up and vowed to become even better at dodging the attacks. She wouldn’t give her cousin the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

WC: 595

Year 2 – Fearless

Reducio

If you are exposed to something enough, you will become immune to it.

Alisa had been a happy child when she’d been younger, before her mother had been put into the hospital, before she had lost her memory and left them all alone. It had shaped her to see her lying motionless in her hospital bed, the machines in the room beeping but not a sound coming from her mama. She’d been so scared, scared that she would never wake up, that she’d never talk to her or play with her again, that she would be gone. In retrospect it might have been the more merciful path, to watch her mother die, to mourn her but keep all the good memories of her while doing it. Untainted.

Instead Marya had woken up, woken and looked at Alisa and not recognized her. Her mama had looked at her like she was a stranger, without the love that used to be in her eyes whenever she looked at her daughter. That had scared Alisa more than the coma, that no matter what she told her or showed her, her mother didn’t know who she was.

Then, one morning, she’d been gone. What if she’d never come back? What if she’d never see mama again? There was more fear, fear and grief and Alisa had cried for days. What if her father would forget about her too? What if he’d leave her too, and her grandparents as well and she’d be all alone? She had latched onto them, afraid that they would vanish from her life as well, that all the people she loved would be gone one day.

The thought staid with her, a nagging fear at the back of her mind, one that was always there no matter how hard she tried to push it away.

Going to Durmstrang only made it worse. It separated Alisa from her family, meant that she’d be away from them for months on end. What if they wouldn’t be there one day, if she came home to an empty flat?

Then there was Kirill (and later Nikita) who made her afraid to leave her dorm on her own, to walk through the corridors or be outside by herself, to still be in the library after dark. They and their stuck-up pure-blood friends haunted her whenever they had the time. There were others of course, older girls the dorm who looked down on her for her muggle mother or pitied her because she had ditched them, but Alisa learned to tune them out, to ignore their words and their looks.

She’d spent four years of her life afraid until one day she didn’t flinch anymore when somebody said something nasty behind her back, didn’t cringe away when her cousin walked by her on the way to class.

Alisa had become numb to it, the fear. She was so used to it, so attuned it, that somehow it stopped mattering. What if Kirill would hex her? He’d done it multiple times before and he’d do it again, being afraid of it wouldn’t change anything. What if the older girls judged her for a mother who’d run away and never come back? Alisa couldn’t change their opinion, couldn’t change that they considered her inferior just because of her blood.

She was too stubborn to give in, to hide and cry and pity herself. Fear was useless. It stopped affecting her the same way it affected other people. It was a permanent companion that she knew was there but stopped caring about.

WC: 593

Year 3 – Perfectionist

Reducio

On the first day of her Third Year at Durmstrang, in the early afternoon when the students had just arrived at the castle an Kirill was already staring at her hatefully from across the courtyard, Alisa had enough.

She was done being afraid of him, and she would be done running from him and standing in his shadow as well.

His mother was a pure-blood and her mother a muggle. So what? It didn’t make her father any less talented of a potions master, didn’t make her uncle any less of a vile asshole, didn’t make Kirill any less of an arrogant brat. Who did he think he was, looking down on her just because he’d grown up in magical society and she hadn’t?

Those thoughts had always be there in the back of her head, a source of bitterness and anger she’d tried to ignore because felling that way wouldn’t change anything. Even if it wouldn’t, however, even if he would get away with casting spells at her in dark corners, she was done giving him the satisfaction of saying that she was below him, that her father had been rightfully cast out from the family (Alisa knew that he’d left long before they’d cast him out, but her cousin obviously had never been told that particular fact about their family history).

Alisa Alekseyevna Sokolova would show her cousin and the whole school that she was just as good as any of them, that her father was a great man with a great daughter, and could call stick their entitlement up their asses.

She’d always been one of the better students. Alisa enjoyed studying, enjoyed learning new things, learning about magic. Class had been one of the places where everyone treated her the same, where the professors graded her just as harshly as they graded a student with more magical blood in the family. It came easy to Alisa to study even harder, to practice any spell another and another and another time until she got it absolutely right. She enjoyed history and astronomy, sat over books well into the night, memorizing all the information she could, piling up more and more knowledge.

Her grades got better and her spellwork more advanced, her jinxes came harsher and she was the first to raise her hand in class more often than not. Alisa wanted to be the best. Because if she was the others would have to live with the knowledge that they had lost to a half-blood girl with a muggle mother.

She was done with their shit. Spite made her strive for perfection, to be the best of her class, her year, to be the one the professors used as an example to show the other students how diligent they should be in their work.

The fight was on.

WC: 471

Year 4 – Advanced Casting

Reducio

By the time Alisa had made it to Fourth Year her cousin Kirill was a Sixth Year fresh into the Combat Class of Durmstrang Institute. Oh, she had become good with spells, adept at throwing jinxes and the occasional hex, at looking like a well-behaved girl the moment a teacher appeared to see what the ruckus was about. Her eyes were blue and big and gullible enough to fool an adult who didn't know better, who hadn't seen first hand how vicious her spellwork could become the second her cousins were involved.

She had become somewhat of a standout pupil, at least in those subjects were first grade wandwork made the difference between good and excellent work. The professors had noticed how persistent the teenage girl was the moment spellwork was involved. Alisa had the advantage of having a Potions Master for a father, of having grown up reading books, and while it helped her in the subjects that related more to pure theory, ironically it was magic where she shone the most.

Her rivalry, if it could be called that, with her cousins and her spiteful need to outdo them and any other pure-blood had pushed her onto the path of becoming an brilliant duelist one day – a skill that Alisa bitterly needed the moment Kirill started studying martial magic in earnest.

No matter how good she was, her cousin was two years older and getting proper training at how to whip somebody's ass in a duel.

Another child, a less stubborn person, would have given up. Alisa had found friends, true friends, by then, had gathered somewhat of a reputation, had been invited to visit London for the School Quidditch Tournament. By all accounts she was making her family proud – and they were, her father elated that she had found a second home at Durmstrang, her grandparents beaming whenever they saw her report card at the end of the school year, telling their friends of their bright granddaughter who had earned a scholarship at a high-class boarding school.

The thing was that for Alisa it wasn't enough.

One day, she would put Kirill on his ass (Nikita was another matter, a boy younger than her, the second son, not as wicked as his elder brother). He had become the bar she measured herself against, the wall she needed to climb to prove that she had truly made it, that she'd become an accomplished witch.

Alisa wanted to be peerless. She would do better than any pure-blood. She would show them, once and for all, that her muggle blood was no taint to be ashamed of, that it was what made her better.

So picked up her wand again and again, until her fingers hurt and her eyes swam, to throw that jinx one more time, and another and another.

WC: 471

1.) Is your character a Broom Racer? No.
2.) Is your character a Quidditch Player? No.
3.) Is your character a Duelist? Yes.