emma grace brown

[gracie]

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{ A B O U T . Y O U }

Name: fief.
Gender: female.
Age: eighteen.
E-mail: you has.
Twitter: you has.
Years of RPG Experience: six.
Other: teddy.

** all credit for Nina Brown’s character goes to the amazingful Didikins, a.k.a. my wife.

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{ Q U I C K . Q U I Z }

How did you find us? jesus.
What about ISS inspired you to join? because skar and i are gunna buy a teacup terrier and name him benbar after ben barnes.
Do you have any suggestions for us? the site could use more pimps, regulus says he’s getting lonely.

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{ A B O U T . T H E . C H A R A C T E R }

Name: Emma Grace Brown.
Age: Sixteen.
Gender: Female.
Year: Sixth.
Face Claim: Katerina Graham.

Canon or Original? Original (but related to the canon family).

Facial Properties: Grace’s face is very angular by all accounts; every chiseled plane seems to jut out, pushing and smoothing out the soft chocolate-colored skin above it. Family trait. The Browns have always been noted for their high cheekbones and excellent, if a bit severe, bone structure, and Grace, though she chooses not to identify herself as a Brown, is no exception. Her lips are wide and plump, a light pink color, often dusted with gloss or lipstick to enhance their natural sheen. Her ears are small and delicate, like the rest of her, and her eyes, a deep, piercing brown––almond shaped, and widely enough spaced to where they proportion her face exceptionally well. Her chin is slightly crooked, a congenital defect that doesn’t really bother anyone and isn’t that noticeable anyhow, and her hair, long, thick, and black, she wears alternately in curls or straightened. She usually doesn’t do much in terms of makeup except for a few highlights around her eyes and lips, and infrequently wears jewelry. Mostly just hair-clips or earrings, sometimes necklaces, if she feels like it. The most experimentation comes from her hair, though, as she loves to try different styles and vary it from day to day. Other than that, she remains mostly the same every day, paying more attention to the whiteness of her teeth than the makeup on her face.

Physique: As for Grace’s build, she is of a fairly athletic persuasion, laced with thin muscles up her arms and legs and impacted along her flat torso. This is due to the excessive amount of time she spends surveying the outdoors, jogging, and learning how to play various muggle sports from her muggleborn friends. Additionally, Grace maintains her slim, feminine shape through subsisting off healthy and whole foods––this is not too easy a pattern to master, seeing as she was used to eating a very selective diet back at home, because of her sister, Nina’s, various allergies. Grace had always been raised to be a picky eater. She is a small thing, standing at only five feet three inches in height, and weighing only 111lbs, but don’t let her size fool you––she is a fearsome thing on the broom, and can pack a few punches if she ever gets the chance. Her favorite muggle sport is soccer, followed by wrestling, and she’s got lots of her male friends to teach her how to play both. It seems as though she’s constantly outside, even in the winter months, and leads a very active lifestyle. However, she does have her sedentary moments, when she succumbs to one of her reading fits, and during those times her body mass indeed fluctuates. But, for the most part, she remains firm and active, and refers to herself as a little lean mean fighting machine. Eh, what can she say. She’s allowed her moments of vanity.



Wand Type: 10 inches, cherry wood, unicorn hair core.
Wand Expertise: Charms.
Patronus: Butterfly.
Boggart: Snakes.


Personality:

• • rebel • •

Ever since she began attending Hogwarts and learned how the other half lives, so to speak, Grace became very attached to said other half and began to disdain all that for which she had been raised. The pureblood parties, the promise of a wealthy marriage in the future, the lady-classes and the dresses and the pretension––they all failed to appeal to her, lost their allure, and in so doing, turned her off to that world completely. Sure, she still attends the damned balls, but only because her mother forces her to, and sure, she knows that her name is probably somewhere up there on some list of eligible bachelorettes but that, my friends, is most certainly never happening. Grace is different from her family in every sense, especially in her belief in love. She may be somewhat jaded when it comes to familial love, but in terms of romantic attraction, Grace holds higher hopes. Mostly, she gleans these sentiments from the novels she’s read from the muggle world, like Gone With the Wind and War and Peace, but also, she’s always had a sort of inborn, girlish dream of one day finding true love. Not that she really broadcasts that, though––she prefers to keep her romantic side in check. Mostly, she projects a sort of rough exterior, which she’s done ever since she was little as a way of coping with her parent’s neglect. She is proudly against everything they stand for, of course, and this pride is fueled by years of anger and feelings of worthlessness. She feels that this is their penance for treating her as they did; that her rebellion is, thus, justified. When she goes to the pureblood galas, she makes a big show of wearing the most outrageous and ridiculous outfits she can, much to the humiliation and disgust of her mother and the shame of her father. Additionally, she’ll constantly introduce herself as Grace Brown, and her mother will have to follow up and correct her with feigned-gentleness, ‘Actually, it’s Emma Brown. She means Emma.’ Grace will roll her eyes and walk away, not afraid to be disrespectful to her parents in public, especially to her mother, on whom she pins most of the blame for the neglect. She enjoys fighting with them because, sometimes, fighting with them is better than not speaking to them at all.

• • intellectual • •

Of course, being blessed with the wonderful middle-child syndrome, Grace often found herself spending time on her own, and this time she mostly filled with books. This commenced in her father’s massive library and eventually shifted to muggle literature which she attained at school and over the summer on her excursions to town with her muggleborn companions. Grace believes she has the best of both worlds, having read as many classics of both magic and nonmagical cultures as she could get her hands on, and has favorites ranging all over, well, all of literature. She reads, reads, reads, reads anything and everything she can find, spending hours in the library on rainy or snowy days when it’s too inconvenient to go outdoors after her studies. Her favorite muggle genres are philosophy and adventure, and her favorite wizard books are usually some kind of informational title on history or the like. She can spend hours sucked into an adventure book, and more hours still in the history of magical creatures (which she’s read approximately fifteen times over), it doesn’t matter to Grace. Everything is exciting. She has so much respect for all authors from both wizarding and nonwizarding worlds, and one day hopes to write something of her own. Sometimes she writes short stories or poems, but those are very amateur and private, and she prefers to keep them that way, for now. One of her favorite pastimes besides reading, though, is engaging in thought-provoking games such a wizard’s chess, and spending long nights in the common room getting random people to argue with her on any topic she can come up with. Debates are something she’s good at, though, sometimes, she can get a bit carried away.

• • hot-tempered • •

Indeed, when Grace gets very passionate about something, her temper can sort of get the better of her. She has some... violent, and, conversely, passive-aggressive tendencies that tend to land her in a bit of trouble when she’s not keeping them in check. She’s been known to be a bit of a sore loser when it comes to Quidditch and to chess, and, well, she’s liable to throw things across the room or pitch when she’s really in a tizzy about losing. Sometimes her mouth can run a bit too fast for her brain and conscience as well, and she’ll start railing off insults to anyone and everyone who are around her, just as a way of blowing off steam. This, of course, also lands her in a bit of trouble. She’s been in detention a few times, and is all too familiar with the penetrating and judgmental gaze of Professor McGonagall. ‘It’s a good thing I like cats,’ is all Grace has to say on that matter.

• • independent • •

Having been raised as a sort of ‘extra’ to the Brown family, Grace learned very early on that she had to entertain herself. This lead to the cultivation of a very uniquely individual set of traits which leaves her an independent and largely self-sufficient young woman. She would often, when hungry, go down to the kitchens, for example, and espy the maids cooking––later, she’d come and replicate their performance, indulging herself in the various delights they’d concoct. Grace is an exceptionally fast learner, and it only took a few spying missions to figure it out. She wasn’t necessarily as adept at cooking as she’d hoped to be, but her inventions were at least to the point where they were edible. Her philosophy was, as long as it could be chewed, it could be eaten. She wasn’t ever one to complain much, at least not about food and other such basic things. Grace takes it all as it comes, makes the most of it in the moment, and moves on with her life. In that way, she is largely self-sufficient: she can take care of herself and easily adapt to any situation, given her independent and, really, mature-beyond-her-years ways. She had attention from the nanny for the first six years of her life, but beyond that, she was essentially fending for herself: and then when her brother was born and got to the crawling age, it was all over. She may as well have had to take classes in self-defense. Bugs in her pillow, room always a mess, surprise attacks from around the corner... yes, welcome to the daily life of Thomas Brown, trickster extraordinaire. She had to learn to deal with his antics pretty early on, and deal with them she did––fairly well, at that. Grace has a quick wit that lends itself well to sticky situations, and really, she could reason her way out of a paper bag if given the opportunity. She’s a bit of a loner, though, at least at home she is, and prefers to stay out of such situations if she can help it. Grace can entertain herself for hours, really. She had to, growing up, especially after Nina had left. Thus came the day-long excursions into the uncharted territory of the family gardens and the woods surrounding, and there was born her love and passion for the sanctuary that became the wilderness. She feels most complete when she’s surrounded by nature, and even more so when she’s on her own.

• • escapist • •

Grace tends to have a few negative points to her character in that she’s not exactly very resilient emotionally: oh, sure, she can put up a tough exterior and repel most jibes that come her way, but underneath, what she’s really doing is escaping. She does this by allowing her fantasies to take over, by jumping headlong into that dream world which lies in the imagination. She had to do this many times, just... zone out, during the lectures she received from her parents about her disgraceful and unladylike behavior, and during times where she feels like her integrity is being threatened. She has a strong weakness for daydreaming and often spends hours just sitting in the courtyard, book closed in her lap, staring off into space and just thinking, just picturing, everything she’d just read. Books, for the longest time, have been her escape from every emotional hardship she’s ever had to deal with. She always had enough restraint to get through the first ten minutes of the drama and then would run up to her room, lock her door, grab her books, and plunge in without a second thought. See, Grace doesn’t like to feel things very much. She tends to avoid that touchy-feely bullshit. She doesn’t like talking about how she feels because she doesn’t like feeling how she feels. If she allowed herself to feel too much, then she’d certainly collapse under the depression building over the lack of her parents’ love for the past sixteen years––she couldn’t handle that. So she’s in denial; so steeped in denial that she can hardly see straight. But she doesn’t want to deal with all that crap. She just wants it all to be easy, so she simplifies it. She simplifies it by escaping. Because then, she’ll never have to deal with her problems. She can just bottle them in and channel her emotion into a good book on a rainy day. Because clearly, running from your problems solves everything.


Likes:
+ Muggle music/culture.
+ Drawing.
+ Poetry.
+ Professor Burbage.
+ Chocolate frogs.
+ Quidditch.
+ The outdoors.
+ Cats.
+ Being called Grace.
+ Her sister.
+ Singing.
+ Muggle literature.
+ Muggle sports.
+ Musty libraries.
+ Candy.
+ Originality.
+ Wild fashion.
+ Experimentation.
+ Rainy/snowy days.
+ Dressing up.
+ Reading.
+ Impressing people, especially teachers.
+ Attention.
+ Good-natured pranks.
+ Shoes (the only type of shopping she can stand).
+ Breaking rules, pushing boundaries.
+ Russian literature.
Dislikes:
– Ugly bugs.
– Purebloods.
– Her mother.
– Her brother.
– Snakes.
– Parties.
– Social events.
– Shopping.
– Being mistaken for her sister.
– Being identified as a Brown.
– Drama.
– Dancing.
– Potions class.
– Summer.
– Long trips.
– Being forced to do things.
– Being patronized.
– Stereotypes.
– Cliches.
– Boring people.
– Lovey-dovey couples.
– Awkward PDA.
– Getting in trouble with teachers.
– Clocks.
– Money.
– Obnoxious people.
– Bad hair days.
– Public restrooms.

History:

The second thing Emma Grace Brown had done wrong was being born impeccably healthy; perfectly, undisputedly, outstandingly healthy.

And the first thing? Was being born at all.

But not like she could have helped that. Her parents were totally in lust with one another, and, more importantly, were desperate for an heir to the withering family fortune. Theirs had been a good, old-fashioned arranged marriage, with Grace’s mother, Emma, hailing from the Greengrass family, and Grace’s father, Joseph, from the Brown family. The Greengrasses, of course, were not entirely thrilled with the idea of––what they considered to be––a marriage beneath their precious youngest daughter, but the finances being what they were, and the extraneous circumstances of their daughter’s pre-marital pregnancy also being what it was, they grudgingly consented and Joseph and Emma were wed quickly and with little ceremony, as neither family could really afford any large, typical pureblood wedding. But the two didn’t mind that much, for they had each other, and that was all that truly mattered. Romantic? Yes. But for the wrong reasons. They were young, each of them only twenty at the time of their union, and had deluded themselves into the notion that they were in love when, really, they were more in lust than anything else. They’d hardly known one another before their parents informed them of the match, and during their first meeting, fell so deeply with infatuation for one another that the consummation of their union evidently could not wait for their nuptial bed. That night, they whispered sweet nothings and dusted each other with kisses and promises of eternal love. For a time, they thought they were soulmates. Perhaps this was just a coping mechanism, used to combat the feelings of fear and impersonality of their arranged marriage, or maybe it was something they both needed to believe in order to go through with their parents’ wishes and honor their family heritage––either way, they were lying to themselves, and it was a lie that would bear the fruit of three children: Nina, Emma, and Thomas. Their first was conceived out of wedlock, but born into a secure and quite legal marriage to a foolishly happy witch and her equally foolishly happy husband, the newlywed Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Brown, at St. Mungo’s, on July the Third, 1959. This was the last truly joyful day of either parent’s lives, as within the next week they would soon discover that their little daughter was allergic to just about everything they tried to feed her and, consequently, very nearly almost died before she’d reached her second week of life. She was rushed back to St. Mungo’s and it was discovered that she was lactose intolerant and, additionally, had an allergy to glucose. Their beautiful little daughter was weak, infirm, and needed their attention more than ever. So much so, that, two years later, when Emma realized she was pregnant again, she hardly even noticed.

Joseph, of course, was hoping for a boy––a strong, healthy boy to carry on the family name. And Emma? Well, she was much too preoccupied with doting on little Nina to give much thought to the other baby growing thick in her womb. Joseph strongly urged Emma to be more cautious with their second child, seeing as he somewhat blamed Nina’s frailty on Emma’s inability to effectively manage her stress while carrying, but Emma paid little heed to her husband’s instructions, so wrapped up in the world of her little Nina was she. Even when Emma went into labor on the evening of November the Seventeenth, 1961, she was making arrangements for Nina to be properly cared for in her absence, courtesy of the lady’s maid and wet nurse that had been living with the Browns since their marriage. When her second child was finally born, both parents were mildly disappointed to realize that it was yet another girl. She was healthy, though, so at least they’d done something right. Joseph was so amazed at how similar his wife and new baby daughter looked that he decided to name her Emma, in honor of this likeness, and gave her the middle name Grace, after his own mother.

In short, the naming of this child lacked a significant amount of originality, and sadly, everyone knew it, and really didn’t care.

However, Joseph had always been partial to the little girl, taking quite a shine to her since Nina was always so crowded and suffocated by his wife. And Emma, eventually feeling a bit shamed by her own negligence, began to offer her newborn more attention, trying to be a bit fairer to both children––as fair as she could be, with one of them afflicted by myriad different health problems that required constant attention. Emma did get slightly confused, though, by the fact that her husband had given their daughter her name, and took to calling her Em in order to differentiate. Joseph, Emma, Nina, and little Em, then, made quite a picturesque starter-family, and began to slowly ascend the social ladder as Joseph attained a job at the Ministry and their pureblood status slowly spread throughout that higher tier of society. Emma fashioned herself into a darling housewife and doted as evenly as she could on both her little daughters, though Nina was, still, her notable favorite. Joseph continued to favor little Em, though, and shared with her from an early age his love of books and reading. Their estate had a vast library, where Joseph spent much of his free time home from the Ministry. All the books there were of varying genres, all pertaining to the wizarding world and all quite fascinating to his little pet, Em. She learned to read very rapidly, and by the age of six had already managed to read The Pureblood Manifesto, on loan from the Pryce family, dear friends of the Browns. Joseph was indeed very proud of her, whereas his wife, Emma, tended to believe that reading was not as fruitful an occupation as Nina’s debutante training, for instance, which would aid her in getting married sooner and wealthier than her younger sister. For a while, the parents seemed to be locked in a game of favoritism extremely reminiscent of Henry II’s and Eleanor of Aquitaine’s––Joseph and Em against Emma and Nina. This divided the two sisters early on, but, eventually, they grew closer, and came to love each other with that fierce intensity characteristic of many sisters. The catalyst for this event was the conception and birth of their young brother, and the youngest Brown sibling, Thomas––heir to the family name. When he was born, the world seemed to stop. Joseph and Emma both dropped their previous favorites in order to spoil young Tom absolutely rotten, coddling him and swaddling him till he was five years old, and even then still treating him as if he could walk on water. Nina and Em were forced to share a room, seeing as Nina’s room was to be the new nursery for Thomas and Em’s was to be his playroom. It was this that brought the sisters together, and from then on (Nina was, at the time, eleven years of age and Em was nine) they could scarcely be separated. Thomas was a spoiled little brat who treated his older sisters with a level of disdain only classifiable as wretched, and often went out of his way to mock or harass them. Joseph and Emma, however, were too in love with their little heir to reprimand him for his rather rude and mischievous ways, and instead chose to reward every single mannerism and behavior of his with new toys and an unending surplus of attention. This bothered Nina and Em to no end, and the two bonded over their mutual dislike for their brother, and their consequential appreciation of one another. At least they had each other.

And then Nina went to Hogwarts, and, suddenly, they didn’t have each other anymore. Em was left alone to deal with her asinine little brother and with her blind and ambitious parents. She hated it. Hated them. She was nine years old and she didn’t understand why she wasn’t good enough for her parents to love her as much as they loved Thomas. And Nina. Because after Nina received her acceptance to the most prestigious school in the United Kingdom, her earlier favoritism seemed to be sparked once more (though it never really had left, seeing as she was still constantly babied due to her medical conditions), and it seemed as though once a week, Joseph and Emma were writing her and bragging about her to all their friends. Joseph hadn’t taken Em in his library for months, and so she had to become creative in her ways of entertaining herself. There wasn’t much to do around the manor. It was a fairly average-sized place, not too large, and not too small: just right, really. But to Emma, of course, it needed to be bigger, so that she could host those enormous pureblood galas she’d always dreamed of hosting. Em didn’t mind its size. It was big enough for her. She’d always been rather petite, so anything really overwhelmed her. She was an adventurous little thing, always had been, and being on her own so frequently (without Nina, and unnoticed, of course, by her loving parents), she was able to sneak out of the manor and play in the neighboring woods with the various animals and such found there. She had a few bunnies that she viewed as her companions, and deer, too: the region in which she lived was full of vegetation and wilderness. Indeed, it was quite isolated. Like her.

Two years later, Em received her acceptance letter from Hogwarts as well, and her parents displayed a genuine show of pride before they gave her all her sister’s hand-me-down robes, cauldrons, and books and shipped her off to Diagon Alley for an awkward mother-father-daughter shopping excursion, in which she purchased her small ebony black cat, Mr. Milton, whom she insisted upon having as opposed to an owl, much to the annoyance of her parents, and was matched with a lovely cherry wood wand. When she left for Hogwarts, Em couldn’t have been happier. She was going off with her sister to a world away from her parents and from her menacing little demon brother, and she would finally be able to spread her wings and make a name for herself. After the Sorting ceremony, Em joined the other first years in her new House and was able to make a few friends, though she was admittedly a bit terrified and shy in the beginning. Eventually, though, as she got more and more comfortable at the school, she began to blossom. She was never a social butterfly, but she did develop a group of close friends, and also cultivated an interest in Quidditch, which she would eventually pursue once she reached her fifth year. She was, all in all, a responsible student: kept up her grades, associated mostly with purebloods, but... after a while, she started mingling with the muggleborns. In her second year, she met a girl by the name of Isadora Ackerman, who showed her that muggleborns and muggle culture really wasn’t all that abhorrent. This spring-boarded Em into a crazed quest for more information about the non-magical world, and eventually she found herself developing somewhat of an obsession with all things muggle––which she, of course, had to keep secret from her parents and from her other pureblood friends. It was in her second year that Em, also, began calling herself Grace, because, toward the end of that year, she began to find herself gravitating toward the muggleborns more than her own ‘kind,’ so to speak. And she came to loathe her family even more. Nina got a letter from home per week. Grace got one per month, if she was lucky.

She hated them. And as far as she was concerned, she wasn’t one of them. She was a witch, and yes, she may have been pureblood, but to her, that meant nothing. To her, she was just the same as anyone else.

Hogwarts was her home, now, and its students, her people.


And you can suck on that, mommy and daddy.




Sample Post: Please refer to posts by Regulus Black, Juliette Benoit, Severus Snape, and Alecto Carrow. (:

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{ C O N T R A C T }

I solemnly swear that I, FIEF, have read the rules, understand clearly what my responsibilities are now that I am joining ISS, and will abide by these standards set by the staff.

[Andromeda Black]

ACCEPTED