HISTORY
It was mostly chance that brought Gabriel Torres Cruz to the shores of Ireland in 1991... chance, and the fact he'd heard that there was a good spot for surfing near Sligo at the island's northwestern coast. Gabriel was a free spirit, born into a Mexican wizard family, who he hadn't seen in years. After graduating from Castelobruxo in his youth, Gabriel had decided to use his newfound freedom to travel whever the winds took him, and that was what he was still doing years later, owning barely more than a backpack and the clothes he was wearing, never staying in one spot for more than a few months.
It took meeting Méabh's mother while passing through Sligo to convince the charming Metamorphmagus to settle down, at least temporarily. Sorcha had been working at the local wizard inn for the night, slim and fair-skinned, and had clearly known how to handle herself around rowdy drunk pubgoers, which Gabriel (only somewhat deservedly) had been treated as as well. Gabriel had only been passing through, but it had only taken him a few days to realise that he wasn't going to get Sorcha out of his head anytime soon, so when he returned, it was with the intention to stay.
A year and a half later saw the birth of their first daughter, Méabh, followed by Fiadh after another four years, and it had been a happy six years. Gabriel loved Sorcha, and he loved Méabh and Fiadh, but while his wife and her family were deeply rooted in Irish soil, Gabriel was lacking those roots, and his soul yearned to travel. The relationship started falling apart, and when they finally broke, Gabriel left his daughters to be raised by Sorcha and her mother Niamh. While he stopped by to visit every now and then, those visits became rarer as time went on, leaving Méabh with rather vague memories of her father, and Fiadh with barely any at all.
Nevertheless, Méabh's childhood was mostly a happy one. A house of four women, one more obstinate than the next, was a challenge in itself; it was not rare that Sorcha and Niamh disagreed on how to raise the two girls, but they usually found a way in the middle. Méabh had her mother's stubbornness and her father's free soul, and between the two of them, Sorcha and Niamh raised her well... or as well as you could do something as impossible as raising a child.
Méabh proved she had inherited her parents' magical talents when she was eight years old, after she set up an absolutely brilliant prank for her móraí (grandmother), then in panic realised she had no place to hide and watch, and backed against a wall as Niamh approached. To her surprise, her grandmother didn't seem to notice her, and she later realised that she had somehow made her clothes blend into the wall behind her. The prank still didn't work, though. Her móraí was just too smart.
A few months after she turned eleven, Méabh started attending Hogwarts where she was sorted into Slytherin, where she quickly discovered a knack for potions and was not rarely the reason others got into trouble... never on purpose, of course. She soon hit it off with a Gryffindor in her year, Tala Takagi, and the two were almost inseparable. Which of course didn't mean there was any less trouble later on; after all, when your best friend was in a different House, you almost had to sneak out to meet them, didn't you? (She would have found reasons to sneak out, anyway.)
Graduation came and went, and Méabh spent the next few years travelling, following a sparse trail of clues with the unspoken goal of perhaps finding her father, who she had last seen when she'd been thirteen years old. The chase, however, proved unsuccessful, and when she returned, Méabh went on to train as an Auror with the Ministry of Magic. After her training was done, her skills in Potioneering quickly earned her a firm position within the department. However, this also meant that many of her days were spent inside a potions lab with little to no contact to anyone but her colleagues, which was not what she had wanted from the job, which she had pictured as more adventurous, giving her the opportunity to meet and talk to many different and interesting people.
It was Tala who finally gave her the push to set her sights on a different job; with her friend applying for a professor job at Hogwarts and the Potions position conveniently vacated as well, it seemed almost like a wink of fate. Whether teaching would be her true calling remained to be seen.
Mentions of Tala Takagi approved by her writer.
