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GENERAL
NAME: Chloe Jane Shepherd
NICKNAMES: “cmdrchloe”. It’s the username she uses most often online. IRL she just goes by Chloe.
AGE/DOB: 16; February 13; Pisces
BLOOD STATUS: Muggleborn
GENDER/PRONOUNS: Female; though she likes to put up a fuss about “gender” she still considers herself female and prefers she/her pronouns
SEXUALITY: She identifies as bisexual, though no one has to label themselves if they don't want to!
HOMETOWN: Orchard Grove (a fancy rich suburb outside Atlanta, GA).
CONCEPT: Internet addict trapped in the “great” outdoors just wants to nap.
PHYSICAL
APPEARANCE: During junior year, Chloe sported dyed hair, often in shades of green, teal, and blue. She dyed it back brown when she was going home for any extended period to appease her mother, but this year, she came back to school with the dark brown still intact. The green and blue is still peaking through, if you look.
Her dress is eclectic, and it’s not out of the question for her to mix pyramid spikes and floral prints. She is particularly fond of graphic tees with geeky references, and seems to have a never ending supply.
HEIGHT: Average - 5’3”.
PB: Jodelle Ferland.
PERSONALITY
LIKES: The internet, floral prints, bright colors, Mountain Dew Code Red, video games, Asari, fanfiction, fanart, tumblr, staying up late
DISLIKES: Sunburn, bugs, grass, dirt, large social gatherings, sweating, getting up early
PERSONALITY:
Though she may be an introvert, Chloe doesn't always manifest it by being exactly shy. She doesn't avoid talking to people and she doesn't hide from social situations. Like many introverts, social stimulation exhausts Chloe, but rather than retreat, she tends to react by becoming increasingly awkward. She's very friendly, but she has a tendency to say the wrong things, and once she starts, she sometimes enters into a panicked spiral of saying-the-wrong-things that tumble and pile on one another.
Interests for most people are pastimes that they enjoy, but Chloe tends to tumble into her interests like Alice down the rabbit hole. There is rarely such a thing as a passing interest, with likes becoming loves that swallow her whole. She is particularly drawn to artistic hobbies and escapist pastimes. It’s easy for her to become obsessive, to stay up until the crack of dawn working on some art project, scour the internet for esoteric reference t-shirts, or disappear for a week binging some new show or book series,
Chloe is genuinely a kind person. She has a strong sense of empathy, and can’t stand to see people or any kind of creatures suffering. Even the creepiest of crawlies, she doesn’t want to see hurt. Someone please put that spider in a cup and carry it outside! She tends to assume everyone has a reason for what they’re doing, even when they’re doing wrong things. She wants to see the best in others and likes to see them happy.
With all the emotional fortitude of an overripe peach, Chloe can’t handle confrontation. Just the suggestion of confrontation leaves her bruised. When she can, she tends to run away and hide. Literally, physically hide, trying to find some unexpected place to tuck herself into until the storm can blow over. When things go badly - when there’s conflict - Chloe often internalizes the blame. Because she wants to see the best in people, that sometimes means she has to see the worst in herself. She will often assume the fault is hers, and try to mold herself to solve the problem.
Desperate to be liked, Chloe will go to great lengths to please people. Because she tends to be introverted, and have a limited social circle, it means that she holds her few friends even dearer, and is all the more invested in making sure that they like her. It’s not hard to talk her into doing something that will get her into trouble, and the closer she is to someone, the more influence they can exert.
Chloe is also something of a rebel. This seems counter to being a people pleaser who will follow her friends off a cliff, which isn't untrue - it's definitely a conflicting interest. She wants to exist counter to the norm, and takes pride in being unique! She wants to argue that societal norms are artificial constructs that no one needs to follow! She wants to be proudly weird! If you were to meet Chloe and think “manic pixie dream girl” that would be just fine by her. That’s sort of the vibe she’s trying to give off, taking all her best traits, combined with her odder quirks, and turning it into something appealing and eccentric. Of course, she does still want to be liked. Badly. Ideally, she could be weird and also liked, but this is high school, and that's not always the case.
SKILLS
LANGUAGES SPOKEN: English. Memes.
PATRONUS: Cannot cast a corporeal patronus
SKILLS:
· Visual Art: Chloe enjoys creating art in a variety of mediums, including sketching, painting, clay sculpting, and jewelry making. She also takes to new mediums well. After taking magical rudiments, for example,she has developed a greater interest in sewing.
· Creative Writing: She’s pretty good at it, despite the fact that her subject choice may not have universal appeal.
· Internet Savvy: Chloe is muggleborn, but more than that, she spends a lot of time on the internet, and she knows her way around.
· Video Games: She may not be particularly competitive, and versus games aren’t her favorite, but Chloe’s at least passably good on pretty much any video game she sits down to play.
· Archery: She has gotten pretty good over the course of the year, so long as she wears her glasses. She likes to pretend she’s the protagonist in a YA novel.
HISTORY
FAMILY MEMBERS:
Gracie Shepherd (nee Anderson), muggle, mostly retired model, columnist for a regional women's magazine.
Chase Shepherd, muggle, CFO of Shepherd Textiles.
HISTORY:
Chase and Gracie met at a party when they were 22 and 26 respectively. Chase was set to inherit his family's textiles business, and Gracie was a model. They made a gorgeous couple, everyone agreed. They dated for several months before Gracie got pregnant. The ensuing wedding wasn't exactly a shotgun wedding - there's not usually champagne at a shotgun wedding - but Chloe was born six months after her parents were married.
Odd things always seemed to happen around Chloe: as an infant she would escape her crib and be found hiding in spots she couldn't have possibly gotten into, toys that had been placed on high shelves would be found in her possession, items changed color when they were certain they hadn’t looked like that just yesterday. Gracie was at least partially convinced that her baby was being followed by a benevolent spirit, perhaps Gracie's dead grandmother.
Of course, Chloe wasn't being watched over by a spirit - she was magical. A very nice man came to explain it all to them shortly before Chloe's eleventh birthday. Once they were convinced, Chase and Gracie found it all overwhelming, but not necessarily bad. Their daughter was a witch! They were upset, though, that she would be going to a boarding school all the way up north in Massachusetts. Their girl was too shy, too odd, to manage unsupervised. But then, what choice did they have but to send their magical daughter to a magical school? For her part, Chloe was ecstatic. She wasn’t weird, she wasn’t haunted, she was magical! Unicorns were real, fairies were real, dragons were real, and she had real life magical powers that she was going to learn to use.
At Ilvermorny, Chloe was sorted into Pukwudgie, and everything about the school and the people there was fascinating and amazing and just like something out of a book. However, she found it just as hard to make friends there as it had been in muggle school. Even if she didn't yet understand the social circumstances behind it yet, the kids with magical backgrounds already seemed to have formed into social cliques before they arrived, and she didn’t seem to fit into them. She didn’t find it particularly easy to make friends with the other muggleborns, either. Somehow, magic had turned out not to be the panacea to all her problems she had been hoping for. No one ever made fun of her, but she couldn't shake feeling out of place. She eventually managed to find a small circle of friends, made up of other oddballs, but she was never what you could call popular at Ilvermorny.
Chloe received her very own computer the summer she returned home from her first year at Ilvermorny. Her parents wanted to make sure that she didn't lose touch with the muggle world. For Chloe, the internet was a wonder. Maybe even more than magic had been. She could be whoever she wanted to be, be the type of person she wasn't irl: bold, brave, independent, cool. Online, she made friends. Lots of friends! Her parents never inquired what she was doing online - so long as she wasn't looking at porn, it was fine, right?
In her sophomore year at Ilvermorny, Chloe - who had henceforth almost never gotten in trouble for anything more serious than tardiness - got caught sneaking off school grounds to try to get internet access in the nearest muggle town. Leaving the grounds unattended is strictly prohibited, and the administration had A Talk with Chloe's parents. Chase and Gracie decided that it would be a wonderful experience for Chloe to get some fresh air and spend some time outside for once. For her part, Chloe took it as confirmation of her theory that her parents are disappointed in what a weird outcast their daughter turned out to be.
Gooseberry wasn’t so bad, though. Sure, she had to take Outdoor Education and do a lot of outdoorsy stuff, but some of her friends from Ilvermorny were already at Gooseberry, and she even made more friends in her new house. For the most part, the faculty were wonderful and kind. It was a strange place, and odd and creepy things sometimes happened, but she felt like she could belong there.
Then the end of the year ended with mass kidnapping. Brother - the entity she had identified with, readily accepting the narrative of his controlling older brother preventing this lonely creature from trying to interact with them - kidnapped her along with other students, placing them in magical comas to be saved or die when the clock ran out. Chloe dreamed of being a strong, decisive hero; while she slept, other people were actual heroes. She felt guilty for needing to be saved, weak and useless for not being able to join in to save others, and nothing at all like the Chloe she’d dreamed. Over the summer, she obsessed over her dream world, drawing it, painting it, writing about it. It was her newest fandom, and she couldn’t get it out of her mind. She wants to go back to Gooseberry, where her friends are, where she feels like she fits in. She is also scared though - scared that if she goes back, it will happen again, and maybe also a little scared that it won’t.
SCHOOL
YEAR: Senior (Grade 12)
HOUSE: Ribbonfin (Gooseberry), Pukwudgie (Ilvermorney)
SORTING: To be honest, Chloe would have never really fit in in any house other than Ribbonfin. Sure, the emblems made their perfunctory arguments, Azurcrest and Coppertale in particular arguing that it was for exactly this reason their houses could teach her so much! If anything, their enthusiasm and aggression just pushed her further away. If their emblems were like this, what must their students be like? And anyway, Chloe had friends who had already been sorted into Ribbonfin. Given any choice at all, she was going to follow where they went.
WAND: Kudzu, unicorn tail hair core, 10
FAMILIAR: A Savannah Cat named Garrus.
CLASSES:
· History of Magic
· Herbology
· Charms
· Potions
· Astronomy
· Aesthetic Magic
· Magical Rudiments
· Muggle Technology Studies
ADVANCED STUDY:
Muggle Technology Studies; Advanced Level
When Chloe found out that this class would be offered, she was desperate to get into it. The internet is her happy place, and though you'd think she'd have gotten used to going most of the year without internet, she hasn't. Besides, she's very interested in learning to design video games, but she never thought she'd have the chance attending a magic school.
SENIOR PROJECT: Chloe wants to use the journal network created at Gooseberry as a proxy for the internet, and create a magical "video game". It would be similar to a choose your own adventure novel, but multiplayer, and would utilize moving magical artwork (that she will create) in lieu of "graphics".
ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: Chloe does well in classes where she gets to express her creativity. She also responds well to teachers full of encouragement and positive reinforcement. Over the course of last year, she managed to turn all her C's into B's. Now she has mostly B's with a couple of A's.
EXTRACURRICULARS:
· Archery
· Gaming
· LARP
· Craft Club
· Aesthetic Magic TA.