InsaneJournal

OUT OF CHARACTER:

Name: Brandi
Timezone: CST
AIM: brandied plum
E-mail: brandied.plum @ gmail.com
Availability for Playing: ALMOST ALL THE TIME. I has no real job. :(
Previous Role-Playing Experience: NONE. AT ALL. EVER.
Where did you find us? Drunken bum on the street was rambling on about it.
Intended Journal: pinturn | ~pinturn

IN CHARACTER:

Full Name: Lisa Judith Turpin
Nicknames: Lis
Gender: Female
Age/DOB/Sign: 26 / 22 December, 1979 / Capricorn
Blood Status: Halfblood
Sexual Orientation: Straight
Schooling: Ravenclaw 1998
Occupation: Business partner to Morag MacDougal. Emphasis on the business: Lisa handles the business side of things for Le Croquis while Morag concentrates on being brilliant.
Residence: A small, tidy flat in London.
Wand Type: 10 in, beech, phoenix feather
Played-By: Bella Heathcote

Appearance: Lisa is a tiny little thing, standing at barely 5'1". She often strives to make up for this by wearing heels that add anywhere from two to four inches to her height. People are often surprised at how short she really is when they encounter her in bare feet or sneakers. Her blonde hair is usually left loose, or pulled up into ponytails when she's working and doesn't want it falling all across her face. Blue eyes and heart-shaped face make her look like a cute little sweetheart (especially combined with her height), and she's quick to a smile. She wears very minimal makeup, and she's a big fan of skirts, preferring them and dresses over trousers except when it's particularly cold. She isn't always on the absolute height of fashion -- she leaves that to Morag! -- but she manages.

Personality: "That girl who twitches really funny when you move something just an inch to the right." Lisa has actually heard herself described exactly like that. To call her a neat freak would be like calling a hurricane a "bit of rain and wind." She's compulsively obsessed with neatness and order. Anything disorderly upsets her, especially if something is moved from its proper place, even if only minutely. She is driven by a need to keep her life ordered and precise. She is never late, she never leaves a room without tidying it up first, she never wears the same clothes two days in a row. Everything in her flat and office is labeled and colour-coded. Some might call her neurotic and uptight. Lisa prefers to think of herself as neat and organised.

Lisa doesn't have the best social skills. She feels awkward around other people, and it takes her a while to really warm up to people around her. Her closest friends from school were her roommates, mostly because they were always there and it was easier for her to get to know her roommates and open up to them than it was with anyone else in the school. The times when she is most at-ease with other people is when she has something besides socialisation to concentrate on: like business, for example. She can talk for hours on business, numbers, and money with confidence, but the moment the conversation turns personal (and it's not with a friend), she gets tongue-tied and shy. She's a little better in writing (such as over the journals), but she's still shy about writing to anyone who she doesn't know very well.

History:

Father: Samuel David Turpin (halfblood, Hufflepuff alum, 1974); d. 18 November, 1979; former realtor
Mother: Patricia Sarah Turpin née Clarke (muggleborn, Hufflepuff alum, 1977); d. 16 April, 1998; former Healer

Paternal Grandfather: Isaac Samuel Turpin (halfblood, Ravenclaw alum, 1950); curator of the Museum of Magical History, London branch
Paternal Grandmother: Diedre Maureen Turpin née Bobbin (pureblood, Gryffindor alum, 1951); librarian at the Diagon Alley Public Library

Cousin: Marina Rosier (pureblood, Ravenclaw alum); socialite
Cousin: Melinda Bobbin (pureblood, Slytherin alum, 1999); hitwitch
Cousin: Malcolm Bobbin (pureblood, Ravenclaw alum, 1999); journalist at the Daily Prophet

Patricia Clarke enjoyed a bit of rebellion in her early post-Hogwarts years. Excited to be a witch, longing to be free of her muggle parents and their muggle ways, admittedly terrified of the war going on around her, and bolstered by the "free love" concepts of the 1970s, she was happy to live and love freely. Even as she fell in love with her boyfriend, Sam Turpin, who she'd always had a crush on in school, she still enjoyed far too much sleeping around with other men, none of whom Sam knew about. So when she showed up at his doorstep and informed him with tearful eyes that she was pregnant, Sam didn't hesitate to assume that the child was obviously his, and he insisted upon doing the right thing by Patricia and marrying her. They eloped within the week, and Sam was thrilled to tell everyone that he was going to be a daddy.

Sadly, Sam never did get to meet his daughter, or have the opportunity to wonder how he ended up with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter when he himself had brown hair and eyes: he died a month before Lisa was born, in an attack on Diagon Alley. A distraught Patricia moved in with her in-laws, and Lisa's grandparents helped to raise her as her mother went through training to become a Healer. Between the three of them all working, they managed to always have someone home to be with Lisa, and together they raised a happy, cheerful little girl, always regaling her with stories about her father. Lisa never wanted for love or affection in the Turpin household.

From the start, she seemed to take after her grandfather's tendency toward neatness and order, with a nearly compulsive need for things to be in order. She was the only child in the area whose toys and stuffed animals needed to be neatly lined up in their proper places when she was done playing. Her bedroom and playroom were always neat and tidy, and as she got older, she started balking if someone else put something away in the wrong place and wouldn't be happy until she rearranged things to be put away properly. Nobody was too surprised when she was sorted into Ravenclaw upon going off to Hogwarts: her favourite places in the world were her grandmother's library and her grandfather's museum, where she could spend hours reading the placards and wandering through the exhibits. Everyone was worried, though, about how she would do with having roommates and less control over her immediate environment.

Indeed, the transition to living at Hogwarts in a room with four other girls was difficult for Lisa. She kept her part of the room compulsively neat, and sometimes found herself tidying up her roommates' parts of the room, too. It was just something she couldn't help. She tried to not mess with their personal, private belongings, and she never went into anyone else's trunk, but anything that was out in the room might end up neatly folded, or slightly adjusted to be more perfectly parallel to the edge of the surface it was sitting on. It sometimes caused a little bit of friction between Lisa and her roommates, but she tried really hard to be nice and sweet enough (and definitely apologietic) to make up for it.

She tried to keep her years at Hogwarts as uneventful as possible. She concentrated on her studies, instead of everything going on around the school. Some years, it was more difficult than others to keep her head down, but she was determined to stay out of things. She didn't even particularly cheer anyone on in the Tri-Wizard tournament her fourth year, because the discord throughout the school over who was the "true" champion just upset her and she didn't want to take sides. She was happy to just keep her own life in order and ignore the disorder brewing everywhere.

Unfortunately, things turned upside down at the end of her sixth year. The Headmaster died at school, which was terrifying enough as it was, even without the fighting the followed. Lisa was almost tempted to not return to school the following year. That wasn't an option after her mother was called into the Ministry under accusations of stealing magic that summer. Lisa and her grandparents accompanied Patricia to the Ministry, where she was sentenced to Azkaban. Thanks to the Turpins being able to vouch for Lisa's magical heritage on her father's side, she was saved from having to join her mother in the magical prison filled with dementors. Her grandparents were positive that Lisa would be safer at school, so they would have sent her back to Hogwarts regardless, even if attendance hadn't been made mandatory that year.

Seventh year was terrible for Lisa. It quickly became common knowledge that her mother was in Azkaban, and Lisa fought to keep her head down to keep from being made a target in the school because of her mother. She did everything asked of her, she never fought back, and she just clung even harder to her need to keep the Ravenclaw 7th year girls' dorm absolutely tidy: she would even sometimes re-make everybody's beds just to have something to do to keep her mind off of the war and the fact that her mother was in prison, and just ... everything. When the war finally ended, Lisa felt lost. She found out that her mother died in Azkaban less than a month before the war ended. While going through her mother's things back at home, she found a letter from her mother, written the previous year and addressed to her. In it, Patricia admitted that Sam might not necessarily be her father. Patricia admitted what she was like when she first finished school, and said that she honestly does not know if Sam was Lisa's biological father or not, but that she knows that Sam would have loved Lisa as his own regardless, and of course her grandparents dote upon her and she's as much of a Turpin as any of her Turpin cousins.

Lisa retreated from the wizarding world for a while as she tried to deal with her mother's death and the information that she might not actually be related to her family. She applied to a university in London and pursued a degree in business. She worked for a while with a small business that arranged travel tours of various famous landmarks in Britain and Ireland, but when her best friend from Hogwarts and former roommate Morag MacDougal came to Lisa and said she was starting up her own business, Lisa jumped at the opportunity to help her out. She left her job with the travel tours company and set herself up as the business manager of Morag's burgeoning business. As Morag concentrated on the creative side of things, Lisa worked on the behind-the-scenes stuff, keeping the business going strong and staying in the green.

Connections:

• Morag MacDougal: business partner & bff!
  
• Melinda Bobbin: cousin!
  
• Malcolm Bobbin: cousin!

SAMPLES:

First Person: At least 100 words.

Third Person: At least 250 words.