||Stella Mae Dawson||Hufflepuff|| Inactive

Coming from a long line of pureblood witches and wizards, Stella, along with her younger siblings Ava and Jonah, had grown up being told about Hogwarts and her family's scattered House history. Her grandparents were Slytherins, but her mother and father were a Slytherin and a Gryffindor when they attended. Even before this, though, the Dawson family name had been documented several times in most of the houses. There were generous amounts of these wizards and witches being either Ravenclaw, Slytherin, or Gryffindor, but scarcely any Hufflepuffs. Sure, there was the occasional Hufflepuff here and there, but not nearly as common as the other three houses. The last Hufflepuff in her family had been her great-great grandfather, whom Stella had never so much as seen a simple picture of. An incident had happened a good twenty years after her great-great grandfather had graduated, and he had been at fault. This soiled the Dawson family name until Stella's grandparents were finally able to right it.

Growing up, Stella has been 'taught' that, status-wise, she is technically above those who aren't pureblooded wizards/witches, but she's always thought that to be a ridiculous notion. Even as a young girl, Stella had looked up at her parents and simply asked, "Why?" It didn't occur to her to believe that she was better than anyone else, no matter their bloodline. But her parents just shook their heads. It was how they'd been taught, they'd said. Perhaps, Stella thought, if you can be truly taught to believe such notions, then that must be why there were hardly any Hufflepuffs in her family dating back. Her parents told her that, with her optimism and attitude, she had a chance at being sorted into Hufflepuff, but they were sure that with her level of intelligence she was more likely to be sorted into Ravenclaw, or rather, with her coy and clever ways, even Slytherin. Stella decided that the sorting hat would do the deciding, and she wouldn't go against or question it.

Stella's magical ability first surfaced when she was five years of age. She had just been innocently trying Pockys for the first time, and soon found that the box was empty! Desperately wanting more, she demanded that her mother supply her with more. Her mother had been trying to explain that there wasn't any left when a swarm of Pocky boxes hurled towards Stella at all angles and stopped short of impacting against her.

Childhood memories
Growing up in a large family with many cousins and her two siblings, Stella never made any friends outside of her family and hadn't really experienced what it was like to speak to someone who wasn't related to her or natively from Scotland. However, this didn't keep her childhood from being any less fun. Whenever her cousins visited(which was often), the Dawson children would often form a group of fifteen while Stella's cousins on her mother's side would form another, and they would play a couple of rounds of competitive rugby. While Stella was easily the best kicker out of the entire family, her older cousins would never allow her to play as the fly-half. "And let you have all the glory?" Her oldest cousin, Quentin, had joked when she'd first asked, ruffling her curly, burgundy hair with a laugh. "We wouldn't want our fragile baby cousin getting hurt." Said Quentin's younger brother, Malcolm, speaking in the tone that her parents had used to talk to Ava and Jonah when they'd been babies. Stella had gritted her teeth in frustration, but had let it go and resorted to watching from the side of the yard.

Every summer, after all of the cousins had successfully infiltrated the Dawson house and everyone had a place to sleep, they would all head over to the nearest lake and spend hours at a time swimming in the water and playing. Sometimes they would play water polo, sometimes they played imagination games and assigned each person an individual character-- sometimes they would combine the ideas. No matter the game, they always found a way to entertain themselves.