1864 In the Woods Lovely, Dark & Deep	Deep in the woods of northern Georgia, Joni is born to Ashila under the open night sky; the only people in attendance are the members of the traveling “Woodswells”, the horses that pull the caravans… and her towering grandfather.
1865-1874 A Childhood Under the Sun	From the earliest of her memories, Joni is a happy child – she plays tag with the other children in the caravan, she picks flowers and makes them into crowns for Muma to wear, and her grandfather carries her way up on his shoulders when she tires. She is larger than all the kids (yes, even those older than her) from an early age – even though Grandpa teasingly calls her “runt” and Muma calls her “sproutling” – but is certainly not the only halfbreed or non-human about; no, she never feels out of place with the other large families that make up the “Woodswell”s (a name, she’s told, everyone uses when traveling through towns, though the surname belongs to no one), because at least half of the caravan are magical and a third not entirely human. The caravan, she realizes as she grows, is a band of misfits that have made a family with each other; she would not have it any other way. Auntie Greenleaf teaches her (and others) to read and write, a goblin that simply goes by Enoch can sometimes be bothered to show the little ones the math that goes into keeping the troupe’s books, and Miss Celly takes time out of her brewing to make sure everybody knows their edible plants from their poisonous neighbors. Everyday on the road is an adventure.
1875 Magic at Last	Typically, the caravan threads the line between the magical world and that of the muggles: the human – or human-passing – members of the traveling group will go to nearby villages to hawk wares and find odd jobs; mirroring them, the non-human and magical members of the company will venture to magical towns to do similar things. Grandpa always stays behind to watch the little ones, like Joni, (too visibly inhuman to be in the company of wizarding kind, much less that of non-magical folk) but children are horribly curious creatures; Joni feels very clever when she sneaks away with the small veela lad Sampson that afternoon. Slipping away to poke around a nearby muggle farm is entirely her friend’s idea, but as one of the few people he trusts and tolerates (however begrudgingly), he lets Joni tag along. They marvel at the livestock they see, especially a fine thoroughbred specimen while past his prime. Showing off his magical prowess – a gift Joni is not sure she has – Sampson summons the horse towards them. They’re not very quiet as they pat the curious creature and Joni is overly tall — any of that could be the reason the muggle farmer finds them. He swears of devilry and evil as he levels a flintlock rifle at them, of fairies and giants and Joni puts herself between him and Sampson… the muggle man shakes with fear, even though it’s Jo staring at the barrel of the old rifle and it’s herself and her friend being threatened. His fingers twitch, spasm as she starts to lift her hands, to placate – there’s a click from the gun — the horse shrieks and bolts as the bullet ricochets off an invisible force mere inches from her nose, burying itself in the wooden fence post next to her head. She shakes, as wide-eyed as the farmer standing before her, and Sampson takes her hand in the stunned silence of the moment, dragging her away. More shots are fired in their wake, but nothing hits, the two children vanishing in the woods like they’d never been real at all. When the two teary-eyed and frightened youngsters return to safety, to a worried and disgruntled Grandfather Woodswell, they blubber their ways through the story – words jumbled and talking over each other – but once it’s all out, the elderly Giant spends the rest of the day moving the wagons to a new, secluded spot (word is sent to the folks in town by a bird); when everyone is resembled and plainly bewildered, the ancient creature explains the situation not only to the group at large but, unfortunately, to their mothers; no one is surprised when the pair are grounded and put on extensive chore-duty… As a silver lining, Ashila starts Joni’s magic lessons (though it’s a month or more before she and Sampson are allowed in the same area long enough for her to show him).
1876-1886 Glimpses of the World Outside	Very, very few of the magically capable people in the Woodswell caravan use wands. In fact, the first time Joni ever sees one used is when she trails her mother into a magical village and watches an older man summon a fallen leaf for the amusement of his grandchildren; Muma said that wands had their benefits and deficits – with a wand, she’d be less likely to scorch her finger tips lighting candles; at the same time, though, using a wand too much can make people incapable of performing wandless magic (apparently, wide-eyed Joni learned, most magical children can perform wandless magic, but through schooling lose the ability – the idea scares her a little). Time passes and the seasons, despite always looking similar, are never the same. Joni joins the other women of the caravan in venturing to nearby magical towns and villages, picking up odd-jobs where they can; she spends most days as a maid, able to reach places other ladies (and some blokes, too) cannot reach as she continues to grow and grow and grow. She never gets anywhere near as tall as her Muma, let alone her grandfather, but she meets the same derision from the human members of magical society nonetheless. If it weren’t for her natural resistance to hostile spellcraft, there would have been many a time mean-spirited teens (carrying their parents’ prejudice without knowing why) would’ve hurt her or gotten her fired… or both. But none of that matters, because she could always retreat to the safety of the fold, protected by her family. At this point in the group’s history, It’s rare for the traveling folks to pick up new faces – with children always darting around underfoot, it’s simply too dangerous. However, while sweeping through the Finnish countryside, an exception is made for young boy left dying on the side of the road; Miss Selina, a werewolf the spends an awful lot of time with Sampson’s mother, takes the freshly turned vampire in and vouches for him, which buys him an unspoken period of probation with the caravan. While others, especially the grown adults, are leery of the volatile boy, Joni reaches out to him – from what she understands of vampire creation, he didn’t truly have a choice in the matter, much like many of the partially human members of the Woodswells had no choice in their conception. (Plus, he’s grouchy like Sampson and, if her persistence could win him over, surely this bloke wouldn’t be much harder). He’s shifty and jumpy, but, as the days turn to months and then years, he returns to the wagons after each visit into a town; which, if nothing else, earns him a home with the traveling group. He sheds his old name and takes a new one, which Miss Selina has the honor of sharing with the caravan at large: Orlando. He’s not very good at wandless magic, but he does know nonverbal spells – and, as he grows comfortable, he shares that knowledge as best he can with other members of the company (including Joni, though the two of them, along with Sampson, spend more much time laughing at her failures than cheering her successes in the subject). She and Grandfather like to sit and listen to his stories of home and the world he left behind – it’s so fascinating to hear about, when normally Joni only gets to catch glimpses of life outside the caravan.
1887 The End is Inevitable...	To live on the outskirts of a proper, civilized society is to be othered – and, ultimately, to be outside the scope of the law… In all the ways that entails. And, unfortunately, that means one night things come to a head; Joni will never know how the muggles knew where the caravan was or how no one saw them coming until it was too late… But by the time she’d been dragged from her bed (read: manhandled from her sheets by Sampson and Orlando), several of the wagons were ablaze and a few more were moldering ruins – the campground was chaos: angry muggles with pitchforks and guns and blades and flaming torches, her people scattering like rats from a sinking ship into the woods, and the horses panicking as the flames mounted into the moonless sky. She’d stumbled for a moment, a call for her mother on her lips, eyes frantically searching and barely pulling up a protection spell to avoid a lead ball through the eye. After a few, painfully slow heartbeats, her mother’s voice shrieked through the crackling, but by the time Joni turned it was too late. Grandfather crumpled to the ground with a roar, Miss Selina dragging Muma into the nearby forest. Joni started towards him as the muggles fell upon him, stabbing and shouting and shooting – but then, Orlando was there and so was Sampson and, between the pair, they managed to half-carry her to safety. She screams as their home – as her Grandpa – becomes a column of smoke that will persist well into the morning. (She’ll spend years as a fitful sleeper in the aftermath of it all, waking to phantom memories of muggles coming to murder her in the night – many of the company will do similarly). In the morning, the braver members of the caravan sneak back to the campfire; when the all clear is given, others follow. Her Grandfather isn’t the only casualty – Sampson’s mother, for one, is brutalized next to the corpse of horse – but he is one of the more horrific; she will never unseen the headless stump on his shoulders, or the nails plucked from his fingertips, or… The Woodswells’ bury their dead, pack up, and flee westward.
1888 ...to Begin Anew is a Choice	The world – the civilized Wizarding world – that the Woodswell travelers take refuge in while in western Europe is… different, from what Joni is used to. There’s more cities, for starters, and the places look so sophisticated – even if the people still treat her and the folks of her caravan poorly (especially those like her, unable to pass as human). And, frankly, it’s nice. Joni likes it – the novelty of it all helps her move past her grief… This, the world at large, is what her grandfather always wanted to see, to be apart of it; in the wake of his death, Muma and her had found his journals in his wagon (thankfully, barely charred) – they were each bound lovingly by hand and held the dreams and ramblings of a non-human man (taught to read, write, and articulate the common tongue by his late wife) simply wanted to enjoy his life as best he could. Muma had let her keep the journals and she cherished them. Sampson has grown distant, inadvertently taking Orlando with him (she’s not surprised, having caught the pair kissing more than once under the wagons), and her people are not the same cohesive band of travelers they’d once been. There’s tension in the air, a wound that needs healing – but Joni cannot do it. She tries, surely, but this is a hurt that will only heal and scar with time… Time that Joni does not know if she wants to spend waiting for the new normal to become comfortable to her. She feels poorly about watching the distant horizon, for lingering in view of the magical cities and towns in Switzerland, yet cannot help herself in wondering about life beyond the wagons… like the seed of unrest and curiosity Grandfather carried has no been planted in her own heart, simply from using his journals to help her grieve. She thinks herself not too obvious, of course, until one night Old Vashti (now the oldest member of the traveling company, the seer the new de facto leader with Grandfather Woodswell gone) comes to her with a gift: a vine wand. Under the watchful eyes of everyone, Old Vashti tells Joni to go – to submit to the forces of fate and go where it carries her. Teary-eyed, Muma nods in her peripherals and, though there’s varying reactions to the blessing, Joni feels… freed. In the morning, the wagons go off down the road and Joni stands in their wake, with only the lingering feeling of Orlando’s crushing hug around her waist and a ghostly impression of Muma’s kiss on her cheek as she turns back around and fords into the city looming over her back.
1889-1892 Bravely Onward, Into the Unknown	Without the shelter of kinsmen to return to, the blatant discrimination against others – like herself – is harder to escape; work is harder to find, too. A stable, consistent job is not often in the cards for her, so she finds herself wandering ever westward, taking seasonal work or temporary posts whenever she can. She’s a maid, a farmhand, and even an assistant to a blacksmith – whatever honest work she can find, she takes and gives it her all, no matter how overly masculine the work is or how unkind her employers are. More than once, unfortunately, she has to leave a town after fending off particularly handsy bosses – growing up, Muma and Grandfather always impressed upon her to be careful with her size and strength, to be gentle with others and the first time she breaks a man’s wrist with a harsh jerk, her stomach sours; she spends the next days on the road feeling ill, the sound of cracking bone haunting her sleep almost as much as the memories of fire. Her travels take her from Switzerland to France, then up to Belgium – birthdays pass with little fanfare and, sometimes, when she lets herself feel lonely, she wishes her people did not move around so much, because she cannot write to them… Instead, she murmurs her thoughts into the fires at night, or into a water basin if she is within a town (there’s some old wives tale, she faintly recalls, Grandfather spoke of all water and all fire connecting to each other). She picks up an abandoned puppy near an equally abandoned farm, the first real companion she’s had in ages. In the wilds between France and Belgium, she finds more permanent work with a group of magical creature researchers – her strength and natural resistance to hostile magic lend a great deal to saving a few overly nosy blokes and helping catch smaller, more wily beasts for study. The pay is good, she learns more hands-on skills about chomping wood, building traps for food, and setting tents but it does not last; as she moves from the Belgian coast to Normandy, the group moves deeper towards the Black Forest of Germany and so her employment ends. She briefly works with a fellow in potion-making, but finds she does not have the stomach for it, which in turn leads to work for a carpenter for a bit while his apprentice is away visiting family. Bbetween how minimalistically she was raised and the cheap accommodations she is barely allowed to live in, penny-pinching is no great deed; everyday brings something new, she adds to her collection of skills by the month, and she learns a great deal more now that she has access to more libraries and newspapers than she ever did in the shelter of the wagons.
1893-Present Giantess of London	After saving enough, she hops a boat to the British Isles. Ireland and Northern Ireland come next, beautiful countryside and she picks up a job as a maid (and live-in nanny) for an elderly pureblood widow. The woman is a… handful to say the least; she has an opinion on everything Joni does (or is) and not many of them are kind. After years of moving around the continent, though, Joni finds the majority of it just… rolling off her back, as if she was a duck swimming around the pond. It’s a choice, she begins to decide the longer she works in the tiny home this women’s grandchildren have set her up in (read; banished her to), a matter of attitude – the old pureblood decides to take her misfortune and hurt feelings out on innocent parties, but Joni cannot find it in her to be similarly cruel. Oh, there’s plenty of chances and sometimes she really wants to give as good as she gets, but what would making the old bat more miserable accomplish? Temporary vindication and satisfaction against someone as frail looking as Old Vashti? No, in the long run it’s not worth the energy. The night the old woman dies, she fires Joni – and sends her and her canine companion off with a blind ginger cat for her troubles. (It’s probably for the best, in the end, and her grandchildren are none of the wiser of the bulky severance pay tucked away in Joni’s pocket). She does some hard labor jobs in the aftermath – hauling and tying down crates – for a shipping yard before yearning enough to comfortably hop ship to the Scottish coast. She arrives during the start of the blizzard; she rarely, if ever, travels by apparition flukes (the one time she did, she lost her lunch), so it takes great effort during her travels to make her way to magical London. Her magic is missing, a giant, gaping hole in her existence, wherever there is snow sitting about and it doesn’t take her long to connect the dots: there’s nothing normal about the weather. Somehow – probably because she’s so used to roughing it, or perhaps because her lineage is made of stronger stuff – she manages to keep moving south, past Hogsmeade and Irvingly. Because the snow is impervious to magical removal, she gets to snag a few coins here and there as she goes, knowing (and, more importantly, willing) to shovel the snow out of peoples’ way by hand. London isn’t doing much better, though in spite of the weather, finding a place to stay is no harder than anywhere else in Wizarding Europe – several spots with vacancies turn her away for obvious reasons, leading her deeper and deeper into the rougher parts of the lower city. When she does find a place, she’s surprised that the young widow running the shabby apartments doesn’t send her away (especially with a dog and cat in tow), but it quickly becomes obvious the younger lady is in financial straits herself, as there are painfully few people boarding. The pair haggle at a price – Joni understands, truly, that the widow needs the money to keep afloat, but the price she clings to is ridiculous – and eventually settle on something unconventional to an extreme: half of the down payment up front and becoming an on-site handy-man of sorts (the whole place is poorly insinuated, the shutters in shambles and a draft, but the woman is obviously too poor to buy proper help to fix the place up). The first while is spent keeping the snow piled away the home in between discussions of repairs and… well, Joni thinks the whole thing is the start of a beautiful friendship (the landlady is a delight when she isn’t tearing her hair out over the small things in life). Thankfully, the blizzard doesn’t last forever; and, when it ends, Joni has managed to find work at a local bookstore – Flourish & Blotts – as well.