In her first life, not a one.Birthdate: October 5th, 1853
In her second life, Mistress Starling or simply, the Starling
One person on this earth may call her Dora, and only in private.
Out of character, Pan
A small but well-appointed townhouse in magical London.Hogwarts House: Slytherin Alumna (‘72)
Hawthorne, just shy of eleven inches, with a unicorn tail hair. Solid.Blood Status:
HalfbloodSocial Class: Middle Class
Two parents, both dead before her twenty-fifth birthday; her brother did not reach his seventh day.Appearance:
A grandmother, aunt, and some cousins, who she sees maybe once or twice a year.
A ward, presently attending Hogwarts.
Ethnicity: CaucasianHistory:
Height: Five feet, five inches
Hair: Blonde
Eyes: Hazel
Build: Slender, but soft, areas that were flat in youth rounding a bit more with time.
Attire: Favours darker colours, and tight, long sleeves, regardless of fashion.
Wand Arm: Right
Of Note:
- You’re not likely to see it, but she has five small feathers tattooed inside her left wrist.
- Always carries a silver pocketwatch, but never seems to check the time.
Her PB is Rosamund Pike.
Content Warnings: Sexual Assault, Pregnancy LossPersonality:
Timeline
1853-1863 With Mrs. Foxglove already in her late forties, the family despaired of ever having a child. Thus, Pandora’s arrival in the autumn of ‘53 was a blessing in spite of her sex: the family line would not end with her father after all. Her earliest years were full of attention—to her wants, to her studies, to her growth. It was, in every conventional sense, a happy youth. Spring 1864 The only dark shadow was Pandora’s single evident deficiency: a lack of magical gift. This was remedied in the spring of 1864 when she came across a starling with a broken wing. Curious (or possibly concerned—she cannot remember, but the former rings truer to her in adulthood), she scooped the injured creature into her hands, only to watch it fly away unharmed. 1865 - 1866
First YearPandora attends Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the Sorting Hat barley mussing her hair before loudly proclaiming her to be in Slytherin. Here, she throws herself into her studies, neglecting simple things like cultivating friendships.
Over the Christmas holidays, her parents deliver truly shocking news: now in her late forties, young Dora’s mother is miraculously expectant once again! The young witch is not sure how to feel about this, but feels deeply when, not two months later, she receives grave news from home: her mother died in premature labour to Dora’s brother. She returns home from school for the funeral, finding her father very much subdued.
Upon her return to Hogwarts, she does, however, make her first proper friend as she allows a housemate to comfort her in her grief.1866 - 1870
Years 2-5The years to follow pass with little to note: Pandora (the nickname Dora died with her mother) continues her time at Hogwarts, developing perhaps two close friendships but a handful that are friendly enough. In her third year, the curious mind adds Divination, Arithmancy, and Earth Magic to her course offerings. Her fifth year supply list arrives without a prefect’s badge—Pandora would not have minded, except she had hoped to use the accessory to garner extra access to the restricted section of the library. When her O.W.L. results arrive, she has earned Os across the board, a sweeping success that earned her a great deal of praise.
Her father barely noticed.1870 - 1872
Years 6-7She returns for her N.E.W.T. years with a full complement of courses: Alchemy, Astronomy, Arithmancy, Charms, Defence Against the Dark Arts, Potions, and Transfiguration. Her Exam results at the conclusion of her study are not so impressive as her O.W.L. scores had been, but still prove strong enough that she can have her pick of… well, anything, really.
In her father’s apathy, however, it is her maternal grandmother who takes “responsibility” for the newly graduated witch, pushing her not into a profession but into the Season. Pandora hates it.1873 She hates it the following year, too. Autumn 1874 With another season that Pandora was determined to fail, her grandmother largely washes her hands of the girl’s social future to focus upon a cousin instead. Pandora is now free to do what she wanted all along: she joins the Department of Mysteries as an Unspeakable. 1878 The details are not important. Indeed, Pandora would have locked that time of her life away in her memory forever if the physical effects of the assault had not made themselves clear with the a third missed monthly course. She was pregnant, she was unmarried, and everything she liked about the world in which she lived was in danger. She had allowed herself to be a victim, to cut away pieces of herself to avoid processing the experience, but she would not allow her life to be derailed.
Time is a funny thing. She had spent years with it as her primary focus.
The signing out of the time-turner was entirely above board, part of a study she was conducting. There would be no paper trail, no red mark in her personnel file against her. The rest of it, though… going back so far, it was unstable, a great risk. Once there, however, it took very little, to find and kill the man before he had found her.
She was, however, all but stranded in the past. She could not return to her normal life, for another version of her would already be living it. Pandora did not dare risk using the time turner to return to ‘her’ time, both because she was not sure how many turns it would take and did not want to overshoot, and because it had never successfully been done. She had just reclaimed her life, after all; she was not about to throw it carelessly away.
Pandora took rooms in Knockturn Alley, drawing frugally upon her account at Gringotts. It was during this time that she met the Rook.
When the stream of time flowed once again into the moment from when she had traveled, she bore not a child but a single small feather inked upon the inside of her wrist, the only mark of her ~adventures.
But time is a funny thing.
Her actions, for whatever reason, had echoed forth in the form of her father’s heart attack one month before the ‘now’, a natural death that Pandora knew she had caused.
She added another feather to her wrist.Summer 1880 Two years passed before she encountered him again. After all, a respectable Unspeakable and a criminal would have very little overlap, socially speaking, and it wasn’t as though she would seek him out (though she did consider it). But he found her, a stab wound in his abdomen hastily stuffed with torn cotton, decidedly not doing fantastic.
(She hadn’t been as careful with her identity as she had thought.)
(He had been betrayed; did not know who else to trust.)
A healer, it was swiftly made clear, was out of the question, but she sheltered him nonetheless, fetched a midwife he knew, still trusted, who patched him up well enough. Oh, it left a particularly violent scar, but he lived.
And so would Pandora, a different life than she expected.Autumn 1880 - Spring 1884 One can live all the lives they wish if only they have the time, something Pandora was able to obtain far easier than she expected. And from here, she joined the Rook in his world with half her life, continued to explore the Great Mysteries with the other. He cleaned house, set himself up as an ersatz king over a small piece of the underworld kingdom, and here the Starling was born, his right hand. The midwife, the Finch, was supported financially through proper medical training, even taking a position at St Mungos. And more and more joined their little flock.
Pandora inked on two more feathers.Summer 1884 Her fifth and, to date, final feather was a mercy: a friend from her second life survived the Laughing Plague, but the resulting quality of life… it did not exist. So Pandora put her out gently, quietly. She hadn’t accounted for the child, had thought the child had died of its own experiences.
Miss Pandora Foxglove, Unspeakable, spinster, vaguely unfriendly, now had an amnesiac orphan for a ward.1893 Urquart’s audit of the time room identifies half a dozen missing time-turners—Pandora’s, of course, but five more, too. This is… suboptimal. It is convenient, then, when he perishes in the dragon attack in London.
(He was a good man, a good superior; her mourning of him as a colleague is genuine, but her relief palpable.)
She knows that who succeeds him will determine the risk to her future, her life, her happiness, her world.
Her hat is thrown in the ring but comes up short as she falls into the Assistant Head position. Followup of the audit is, mercifully, placed under her purview.
Other:INTELLIGENT — PRIVATE — AMBITIOUS — LOYAL
SKILLS:
- Languages: Fluent in spoken English and French as her parents spared nothing when it came to her education; proficient in written Latin.
- Particularly skillful at illusion magic and dueling.
- Skilled at reading others—their body language as well as their potential. This might seem to some as a sort of magic, but it is simply a skill honed over the years.
- A gifted occulmens
TRIVIA:
- Boggart: A large, broken hourglass, representing her fear of losing her particular grasp of time.
- Amortentia: TBD
- Patronus: In school, a honey badger. As an adult, it has become a European starling.
- Keeps a pensieve hidden in her bedchamber where she puts all her Difficult memories rather than actually dealing with them in a healthy fashion.
- Pandora is demisexual and biromantic.
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