Nicknames: Jules
Birthdate: January 18th, 1862
Current Age: 28 Years
Occupation: Personal Assistant; Researcher
Reputation: 7: Was removed from Hogwarts on suspicion of inappropriate behavior, though that was never conclusively proven. That particular scandal is long in the past and she has had no others — but remains unmarried and has made no real effort to engage with society in general or marriageable men specifically.
Residence: London
Hogwarts House: Gryffindor
Wand: 10 1/2 inches chestnut and unicorn hair, springy.
Blood Status: Halfblood
Social Class: Middle Class
Family:
Meriwether Binns (1828) – FatherAppearance:
Agnes Binns (1832) - Mother
Hugo Binns (1850) - Brother
Rosie Binns (1852) - Sister-in-Law
Albin Binns (1872) - Nephew
Isolda Binns (1874) - Niece
Emma Binns (1876) - Niece
Zachariah Binns (1854) - Brother
Juliana's best feature by far are her eyes, which are large, round, and usually alight with curiosity. She otherwise considers herself rather average looking, with a softer and rounder face than she would need to be considered really pretty. Her dark brown hair might have potential if she cared more for it, but she most frequently hides it away in a bun. She tends to dress in simple and practical dresses and often has ink stains on her sleeves from having sat down to write a letter or make a few notes at an in opportune time. She is a touch on the shorter side and was stocky for much of her childhood, until she left Hogwarts. Now, she could easily become overweight except that she often forgets to eat when she is in the middle of her project, which keeps her thin but in rather terrible shape. She is right-handed and has a habit of biting her nails when lost in thought.
History:Personality:Childhood
(1862 - 1873)After being born early in 1862, Juliana spends several quiet years at home, playing with her brother Zachariah and being taught how to read and write. She is a precocious and intelligent child who also has a proclivity for wandering off to investigate things of interest (strange noises, odd sights, etc) and getting hopelessly lost. The departure of her brother for Hogwarts in 1866 just makes her more likely to wander off as she no longer has an easy playmate to keep her entertained.
Her first sign of magic was to animate a favorite stuffed animal, who moved around the house and made noises for the next several months before the charm finally wore down. The adults in the house think the toy is a little creepy when it keeps moving but even creepier when it starts to slow and crawl as the magic wears thin. He eventually disappears; later, Jules suspected that her parents or nurse got rid of him, but at the time she was told he'd wandered off and her teacher used it as a cautionary tale about why she'd do well to stay home.
Hogwarts
(1873 - 1878)Juliana departs for Hogwarts in August of 1873. The Sorting Hat debates between Ravenclaw, Gryffindor, and Slytherin for her and is eventually swayed when she asks for Gryffindor, like her parents and the nice girl she met on the train. She doesn't seem to fit in with her housemates right away and wonders, sometimes, if she made a mistake by asking the Hat to put her in one house or the other. Now she'll never know where it actually would have sorted her. Oh well.
Jules does well in her classes, but gets distracted by tangents easily and asks questions that the rest of the students (and sometimes the professors) think are simply bizarre. As a result, she has trouble making friends and is the target of a few bullies. She doesn't let it bother her too much and instead focuses on her little side projects, which are subjects merely touched on in classes which occupy all of her spare thoughts for months at a time until she feels she has exhausted the subject.
Spring of Jules' fifth year brings disaster. After pestering some older students to lend her their access to the Restricted Section of the library, they decide they've had enough and want to play a prank on her. Her current obsession is werewolves, and one older student tells her that she can actually talk to one instead of reading about them in books if she goes to the Forbidden Forest during the next full moon and wears a special talisman around her neck and does some other frankly quite silly things. Although she is by no means a stupid girl, she is still a bit naïve and doesn't want to pass up the opportunity in case it is true — so off to the Forbidden Forest she trots.
When she is caught heading to the forest by a professor she explains honestly what she was doing, but the professor simply can't believe that a girl who aced all her previous DADA classes would believe something so silly and decides she must be making it up to cover for some other (most likely sexual) indiscretion she intended to accomplish that night. She is subsequently not only in trouble for breaking curfew and being a hussy, but also for lying about it — and during a series of interviews with frustrated faculty members where she stubbornly sticks to her story, she eventually finds herself expelled. Whoops.
Killing Time
(1878 – 1884)Her family is, of course, not pleased with this turn of events, and while some say they believe her story about trying to talk to a werewolf, others seem less certain. In an effort to prove that she wasn't lying, Jules throws herself into research on the subject more heartily, using both the library and Zachariah's book store. She is dismayed to find that there is no evidence at all to suggest that the thing the older students told her was possible — but she does have an intriguing conversation with a man at the library who noticed which books she was reading. Although he doesn't say as much, she remains convinced that he was a werewolf and that the things he was telling her during that conversation were true — even though she cannot find them in print anywhere.
This incident is the beginning of Jules' conviction that everything happens for a reason — not in the vague, religious sense that God is watching over us, but that literally everything is connected and happens for a reason — her expulsion from Hogwarts had launched her from her safety net and into the world, where she could meet actual werewolves, which was the whole point of her sneaking out to the forest in the first place.
She also, more or less, decides to devote her life to finding out as much as she can about werewolves and publishing that knowledge to fill in the frankly atrocious gaps in the literature. Since her family is still a little sensitive about the whole expulsion thing, she decides not to tell anyone right away — to keep them from worrying.
Her parents stage a modest debut for her after she turns seventeen in 1880, and at first Jules thinks she may go and do the whole debutante thing, because it seems like it would make her parents happy to see her married and why not? When a man who had heard the rumors about why she was expelled tries to make a pass at her on the patio of a party during her first season, however, she abruptly changes her mind and can thereafter only be dragged along to social events after much needling and prompting from her mother.
She instead focuses on her research, which is not going very well; everything she can find in print is contradictory, or mere speculation. One 1882 book on the subject so enrages her that she writes a very impassioned critique of it and submits it to the book review section of both the Prophet and a scholarly periodical, both of which publish it! The thrill of seeing her words in print — particularly in scholarly print — is almost too much to keep to herself. She doesn't want to worry anyone, though, so settles for leaving the Prophet open to the page of her review and waiting around conspicuously until someone in the family reads it and comments on it, which delights her.
Moving into 1883, Jules begins writing prolifically and sending things off anywhere she can, but is often met with rejection. Her ideas about werewolves (mainly, that they ought to be supported instead of hunted) are too radical, and based on no actual research to speak of. There is also the matter of her lack of credentials; no one wants to publish a piece written by a woman who didn't even finish her Hogwarts education. During this time she tells Zachariah about her writing and gets his help in finding places to submit, but is still met with disappointment.
This eventually leads her to the conclusion that she needs to begin conducting research of her own, and in 1884 she places a discreet ad offering compensation for any werewolf willing to be interviewed via owl. For science!
Into the Woods
(1884 – 1890)Someone answers! Jules is nearly beside herself with glee. Unfortunately, as soon as she furnishes the compensation she promised, they decline to respond to any more of her letters. Undaunted, she places another ad and specifies that compensation will be provided in halves, before and after the exchange of information. Of course, if she plans to pay people, it would help if she also had an income — so she starts looking for a day job. Her parents don't offer much resistance, since after four mediocre seasons they are under no illusions that she will become a society darling anytime soon.
Unfortunately, not having NEWTs or even OWLs disqualifies her from most of the work she would actually find interesting, and the things that she does have qualifications for on paper are well below her station. She can't just take up work as a welcome witch, or something — and such a career would hardly fund her research, anyway. After scouring advertisements she manages to land a job as a scribe for a nonagenarian who wants to publish memoirs. The memoir is pretty awful and her employer keeps letting the narrative wander, but it pays sufficiently.
Over the next several years, Jules begins engaging with first one, then a small handful of werewolves via letter. At first she is simply too excited to be actually talking to them, but eventually creates an actual interview protocol and starts doing research. She tells her friends and family very little of what she is up to, only making allusions to her 'project.' The first werewolf she makes contact with is somewhat sensationalist, but later she is introduced to a wider range of experiences and realities and begins to sympathize with her subjects and even grows to think of some of them as friends. In a few select circumstances, she arranges for in-person interviews so that she can get less guarded information than she might in a letter, and more candid responses, but even in these instances she assures her subjects anonymity.
In 1887 the old woman she had been working on the memoir with dies, which unfortunately stops her income. Quite fortunately (and quite unexpectedly), the woman leaves her a few valuable trinkets and baubles that had strong sentimental value and were mentioned in the memoir, along with the admonishment to finish the work they had started. Jules has no intention whatsoever of doing that now that she isn't being paid, and no sentimental attachment to any of the things that have been left behind. She submits the memoir to the publishers as-is and is unsurprised when they decline to publish it. She had submitted it less out of a desire to see it in print or any sense of loyalty to the old woman (who was sort of awful most of the time), but more to ease her guilt over the subsequent sale of all the trinkets left to her.
Jules is now a little richer than she had expected to be, but still utterly dependent on her parents for survival, as all of her income for the past three years has been going directly to her research. She keeps the small amount of money she has tucked in her bank account and finds another day-job, this time as a personal assistant to someone who is no more interesting than the old woman, but at least not as patently awful quite so often.
After continuing her research and periodically attempting to acquire new subjects through carefully placed advertisements, Juliana begins putting together a summary of her findings in 1889. She believes that her research is solid, but still worries that no one will publish anything coming from a supposedly-uneducated woman, so after some deliberation she decides to use a nom-de-plume when submitting to an academic journal. She is optimistic about her chances of being published now that she's presenting herself as a man, and a member of the academia (Professor Marlowe Forfang), and hopes that her work will finally correct many of the misunderstandings in the current body of literature surrounding lycanthropy and help advance werewolf rights and support services. Since she still hasn't told anyone exactly what she's working on, no one has yet informed her that this is perhaps a bit too optimistic.
People tend not to take Juliana seriously, so she takes herself very seriously to compensate. She is dauntless and sometimes reckless in pursing her goals, and tends to underestimate the risk in any given scenario if the potential reward on the other side is high enough. She is aware that these things are often bad ideas, though, at least in the abstract, which is why she tends to keep her activities to herself; to her friends and family she refers to what she does in her spare time as 'my project' and tends not to go into any great detail unless asked. She wants to prove herself as a researcher and academic, while at the same time feels very pessimistic about her credentials in the field (which is why she's decided to lie about them).
Jules is kind-hearted, but her tendency to focus too strongly on her passion project can sometimes lead her to not seem it; she has, on occasion, said "That's fascinating," when something like "I'm so sorry," might have been more appropriate. She has a very logical and analytical way of looking at things. She is very good at recognizing patterns, which comes in handy for her peculiar worldview: she thinks that everything happens for a reason, which means that if she gets lost and finds herself in an unfamiliar place, she will stay there until she figures out why she stumbled upon this place and not any other.
Other:TBD.
Pine trees, melted cheese, fireplaces.
Jules is bisexual, but has never acted on an impulse for either gender. She does have an inkling that she may not be wired exactly the same way as everyone else in this regard but hasn't told anyone this.
Juliana never obtained her apparition license and is not a capable flier. She likes to take the Knight Bus when she can get away with it (which is more and more frequently of late) and floos often.
Juliana has a tawny owl named Gertrude who is getting older and doesn't deliver mail quite as well as she used to; occasionally the letters go to the wrong places, but mostly she's okay. She also secretly feeds the cats in Zach's shop to make sure they stick around and are happy to be there, but don't tell him that.
Jules
![[Image: TrSGeWR.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/TrSGeWR.jpg)