Valerie Sinclair

Out of Character (tell us just just a bit about you outside RP)

Name: Sub


In Character

Name: Valerie Sinclair
Age: 17
Gender: Female
Blood Rank: Muggleborn
House: Hufflepuff; Chaser for the House Quidditch team
School: Hogwarts (year 6-7); Salem Institute (years 1-5)
Career: Future: Journalism



Parents: Michael and Allison Sinclair
Grandparents: Victor and Marilyn Sinclair; James and Olivia Dawson
Siblings: David, Jordan, (older) and Kevin (younger)
Aunts & Uncles: Gene, Renee, Hugo, and Adam
Nieces & Nephews: TBA
Cousins: TBA
Children: None yet
Grandkids: None yet




Skin color: Pale tan
Hair Color: Brunette
Hair length: Long
Eye color: Brown
Size: 5’ 6”
Build: Petite
Picture:





Crushes: Former:: Bianca Moretti; Current:: Danielle Zaris, Joleen Mulder, Jaina Alonso, Victoria Cook (more TBA)
Mates/Spouse: None yet
Status: Single




Personality: Valerie Sinclair is an adventurous, artistic, and spiritual girl. She won’t hesitate to boldly color outside the lines just to see what happens, but at the same time she’s uncertain about taking that first jump. Her artsy side involves a lot of papercrafting, decorative paper cuttings, and adhesive charms to build her creative works. Valerie is an orderly individual brought up around chaotically cluttered siblings, and after discovering the art of imperfection she has started to slowly re-learn the aesthetic of tasteful disorganization. If one were to ask Valerie, she would say that her world revolves around the ability to create or rebuild anew. Poetry is but one of many types of “rebuilding” that she enjoys.

Valerie also places high value in the philosophical and the genuine. Her reality is real for her, but she knows another person’s reality has the potential to be completely and utterly different. Some classmates have gone so far as to say they believe she thinks too deeply and should have been sorted into Ravenclaw instead. At times her philosophical views make her question the quality of what is real or genuine, unadultered and authentic. One could say that she is minimally secretive, but she does prefer to work behind the scenes. She also is loyal enough to keep a secret should the occasion come up, and naturally would expect the same level of confidentiality in return.

A close look at the photographs Valerie prefers to use of herself will reveal that she always poses either at an angle or with her back facing the camera and her head turned to look back at the camera. In part it is due to being camera shy, preferring to be behind the lens instead, but the other part is her view on photographs and authenticity. In her opinion the less-than-perfect centering of her image on the photographic page lends a more genuine, natural air to the photo. Straight-on photographs creep her out. Much to her chagrin, most people do just that when she asks for a picture. This has made her resort to randomly snapping pictures or taking pictures more furtively than the average camera-wielder. To say she has a slight obsession with photographs and the history and beliefs about photography would not be an understatement. Photographs feature prominently in scrapbooks she compiles, and has a specific mourning ritual or two, of sorts, involving photographs of the person in question.

Valerie demonstrates that she is a true-blue Hufflepuff in that she works hard, almost regardless of the amount of time needed, to achieve her goals. She is also incredibly loyal to friends and family. Being a muggleborn she finds the whole bias thing to be ridiculous, and will mimic someone with such bigoted ideals in an attempt to point out their superficiality. She is proud to be muggle-born, if being a pureblood means having friends like the extremists and enemies like the very people she gets along with best.

Her temper is a slow one to erupt, putting up with a lot of pressure and internalizing it or venting it out in writing or art. Once the figurative bomb explodes, however, it takes a while for the air to clear. Valerie is not quick to forget a wrongdoing even when she has stated that she has forgiven, and has no qualms in dragging up old wrongs in the middle of a new quarrel. First she gets mad – then, if still left to steam for a generous amount of time, she gets even.




Your Story Please? Valerie Sinclair was born in America to a mixed English, French, and Iroquois heritage, though one would only know this through examining her genealogy as both sides of her family have English names. Being the third child, and the only girl, amongst the four meant that she was undeniably spoiled and treated like a princess... until her kid brother came along. Then the attention began to subside a little. Valerie didn’t mind it too much: it just left her with more opportunities to roughhouse with her older brothers without getting caught and punished. She was very much a little tomboy growing up, climbing trees and playing just about anything and everything with her older brothers. Her collection of dolls grew fields of shelf dust. In Valerie’s childhood words: they were much too pretty to play with, and didn’t want to break them.

At first, she began to take classes at a muggle school. That was only normal for an unsuspecting muggleborn, after all. But weird things happened when she was at school. The pretty but rude girl that Val wanted so badly to befriend had the beads on her necklace changed into spiders, a bullied friend found themselves on the school roof while trying to hide behind a tree in the playground, and the bully in question found his sweater shrinking the longer he wore it, and flailed about trying to get it off his head before tripping and falling face-first in the mud. When a dreaded teacher’s hair turned to snakes not too long after Valerie thought about it, she realized that she could do things many others around her couldn’t. In some ways it scared her, and made her very careful of what she thought. The girl wasn’t out to hurt anybody. She even had a nightmare or two about thinking some terrible thing about a member of her family that came true, just like the accidents at school. On those nights Valerie was inconsolable for the rest of the evening.

Bullies called her a freak. Some people would say she was just plain weird. With two stair-stepped older brothers, it was made a certainty that Valerie wasn’t going to be bullied anytime soon. She begged and begged her parents to sign her up for martial arts lessons with her brothers, but that didn’t happen. They did, however, enroll her into the sport of her choosing. She chose soccer, though her interest was only maintained for a few years, until she hit eleven years old.

At the universal age of eleven, Valerie received a letter inviting her to Salem Institute. A wizarding advocate arrived not long after the letter to explain the preliminary information to Valerie and her parents. Her parents were iffy about this school, never having heard of it before. Only after a great amount of pleading did they give in, and she was off. Five minutes into the ride to school, without her parents nearby, did Valerie begin to miss her family.

Life at Salem was decidedly different than at her old muggle school. The one thing that immediately overwhelmed Valerie was the hype surrounding the history of the place. It wasn’t that she didn’t like history, but that there was so much surrounding the single chunk in time and place that that was all it seemed that people talked about. It was more as if she was a tourist being bombarded with attractions and the like, rather than a student there to learn about the arcane. As Valerie grew older and more into her personality, she began to acquire a distaste for her school. The place seemed fake to her – that there was infinitely more Salem than Institute at the school, and wasn’t learning about much except for the witch trials in Salem. It wasn’t the popular point of view, and Valerie preferred to keep her mouth shut within the school’s vicinity, regardless... especially after she lost a friendship and relationship with Bianca Moretti over it. It was so mundanely trivial in Val’s perspective that it completely blew her mind when they broke up, and took her quite a long time to realize that it was the other Bianca’s loss, not Valerie’s.

After some research, Valerie came home one summer and asked if she could change schools and go to Hogwarts, in the United Kingdom, instead. Her parents immediately refused: in their minds, she was too young to go so far away. Much like her desire to take martial arts, Valerie persevered and kept asking. When she turned sixteen, her parents relented and put her on a plane to England, and from there saw her to King’s Cross Station on September 1. She was sorted into Hufflepuff House.

During a random flight around the Quidditch Pitch, several of her Housemates spotted her as they made their way out into the field for practice. Selene politely asked to see Valerie in tryouts, to which she similarly declined. It was only during the start of her final year that Valerie agreed... after Joleen Mulder “subtly” dragged her down to the pitch for tryouts. It was then that Valerie discovered that she was better at Quidditch than she’d ever been at soccer.



Magic Specialty Herbology / Transfiguration
Favorite Spell: For everyday: Aguamenti; For combat or danger situations: transfiguration hexes




Weakness:
Heightened sense of smell
Cannot stand cluttered messes (except “clutter” and having things off-kilter or a little messy for art’s sake)
Marginally insecure
Holds grudges
Can’t get enough: chocolate (often but not always mixed with something citrus), mint, and pistachios


Strengths:
Creatively quirky
Loyal
Photography
Writing
Patient
Perseverance

Favorite Color: Plum and Teal
Theme song: Anything but Ordinary by Avril Lavigne