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Unfogging the Future

Yes, those with eyes too clouded by the mundane to See as I See…

Created on 2006-07-13 20:17:58 (#10662183), last updated 2006-07-29

3 comments received, 33 comments posted

Basic Account [Gift]

1 Journal Entry, 0 Tags, 0 Memories, 0 Virtual Gifts, 6 Userpics

Basic Info

Name:	Sybill Trelawney
Location:	Cornwall, United Kingdom

Bio

The Basics

Character Name: Sybill Patricia Trelawney
PB: Emma Thompson

Age: 51
Birthday: October 5, 1948
Wand: Hazel and augurey feather, 13 inches, covered with fanciful carvings
House in School: No House; she was entirely home-schooled.
Bloodline: Pureblood

Political View: Sybill doesn’t typically concern herself with ‘mundane’ matters like politics. Let those without a higher calling worry about such things. It isn’t until politics affect her directly that she becomes concerned – and highly offended that such lowly matters should presume to intrude themselves upon her.

Appearance

Height: 5’5”, though she tends to hunch her shoulders, making her appear shorter
Weight: 108 lb. (but add twenty pounds for the jewelry)
Eyes: Grey-blue. She tends to hold them very wide open most of the time, which would make them appear large anyway, and with the help of her magnifying glasses they look enormous.
Hair: Light brown and extremely frizzy.
Build: Very, very thin; spindly and fragile-looking. Not an ounce of extra flesh on those bones. As a rule she is ‘above’ such base human needs as eating – well, beyond what’s strictly necessary for survival.
Dress style: Think ‘gypsy madhouse’. Loose, multicolored skirts and dresses, trailing scarves draped around and over her, a gauzy, spangled shawl around her shoulders, and metric tons of jewelry. She must be stronger than she looks to carry all of that. Chains and beaded necklaces, bangles and bracelets, and rings glittering on every finger. She wears either sandals or old-fashioned low-heeled boots, and ties her mass of hair out of her face with yet another scarf.

Basic Physical Description/Defining Marks: Sybill resembles a large, glittery insect more than anything, with her spindly frame, her magnified eyes and her scads of jewelry. She does not walk so much as glide, having worked hard to cultivate an air of mystery and spookiness in her manner at all times. Melodrama is the name of her game; effusive gestures and overreactions are de rigueur. Under normal circumstances she speaks in a soft, misty voice, often making it necessary to really listen to hear what she’s saying (which is the point). This voice can rise with passion, throb with sorrow, quiver with indignation – no effort is ever made to conceal what she’s feeling at any given time. Oftentimes she’ll make an effort to appear as if she’s making an unsuccessful effort to conceal her feelings… it’s all part of her theatrical nature.

Personality

Oh, she’s got quirks. She is one big bag of quirks. Sybill’s world is completely self-centered; she concerns herself with no one and nothing else unless it directly affects her. Everything is judged solely on how it impacts her and how she perceives it. Criticism only gives her an excuse for martyrdom, which she’s only too happy to exploit. She can be positively rude and nasty when offended (and she is very easily offended) but for the most part she’s a harmless oddity. And her highest priority is making certain everyone remembers just how exceptional she is.

She gets excessively excited about omens of death and ill-fortune and tends to ‘See’ them to the exclusion of anything more positive, largely because people pay far more attention to someone telling them they’re in grave danger than someone telling them a pleasant surprise is coming their way. Plus it affords far more opportunity for the theatricality she adores.

Her position in Hogwarts is everything to her; it’s the only place she can command the sort of attention she feels she is owed while indulging her overblown sense of showmanship. As a teacher, her students must approach her and her gift with respect, or at least behave as if they do. She need not tolerate anything she chooses not to tolerate in her own classroom. And in every class, there are a few students who wholeheartedly buy into her act; those select few are her pride and joy.

Worth noting that she is not above the majority of the wizarding world’s low opinion of non-humans; she thinks very little of referring to Firenze as ‘horse’, ‘nag’ and even ‘Dobbin’ (though she was fairly tipsy at that point). More accurate to say that she has a low opinion of nearly everyone. Nonhumans, like her fellow human beings, are below her notice until they intrude on her personal sphere, and if that intrusion happens to be negative, Merlin help them.

When unhappy or offended, if loud and frequent complaints have no effect on the situation, she turns to the sherry bottle. Being in her cups doesn’t have much impact on her behavior, except to make her (if possible) even louder and more overdramatic. However, it does impede her gliding.

With Dumbledore’s death, Harry Potter and Severus Snape alone in the world know that Sybill was the one to make the prophecy regarding Harry and Voldemort, and only Harry knows of the one predicting Wormtail’s flight back to his master’s side. Sybill herself does not know of either. Which is ironic; she believes wholeheartedly in her gift of Sight but has no inkling of the instances when the existence of that gift has been absolutely confirmed.

The other irony of her life is that evidence suggests she truly does have a Sight beyond mortal, which pops up at unexpected moments, always dancing the line between coincidence and true, minor prophecy. On the first day of class, she knows that Neville will smash not only his first teacup, but his second. She warns Lavender about October the sixteenth. She predicts that, around Easter, one member of the class will leave forever. All of these things come true. Coincidence? She repeatedly saw the Grim in Harry’s teacup, his crystal ball – only her usual melodrama, or was she truly seeing Padfoot in there, and simply misinterpreting? Reading the cards, she draws one that indicates ‘a dark-haired young man, possibly troubled, dislikes the questioner’ – while not five feet away Harry is hiding. Pure chance?

There’s no question that most of what she says and does is pure bunk, no matter how fervently she believes it or how determinedly she tries to sell it. Whatever true Second Sight she may possess has been clouded by her need for presentation and mystique in her craft. If she were ever to give up the melodrama, she might well uncover the gift of a true Seer after all. However, this would require her to admit (and accept) that most all of what she’s presented thus far has been smoke and mirrors, and as she’d rather take poison than even entertain such a notion, it’s unlikely ever to happen.

Psychology

Introvert/Extrovert: Extrovert pretending to be an introvert. Though her self-assigned role demands that she live as a recluse in her tower, she is never happier than when she is the center of attention.
Boggart: Herself, wearing plain robes and sans glitter, standing in the middle of a crowd and ignored by everyone. Ordinary. Commonplace. Merlin forbid.
Patronus: She can’t produce a Patronus; she hasn’t tried in many years.

Sexuality

Asexual, really. As with food, Sybill considers herself ‘above’ physical urges or desires of the body, and has essentially talked herself out of them from an early age. Being home-schooled with her siblings, her interaction with peers while growing up was very minimal anyway, so her self-restraint was never really challenged. (Though she did seem to take a bit of a shine to ‘dear Professor Lupin’ a few years back…) And though I would love to see someone come along to change her mind about that, it’s probably a little late at this point. Plus, well… who’d want her?

Lifestyle

Occupation: Professor of Divination, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Residence: Hogwarts castle (temporarily housed in Coleshill, Oxfordshire, but with every intention of returning)
Financial Status: Well-off. She rarely spends much of her salary, so she’s got quite a bit set aside.

Family

Parents? Alois and Helena (Meier) Trelawney
Siblings? Eldest is Cayce (a boy), then Sybill, then Ursula (girl), and finally Zecharia (boy).

The Trelawney family, while not notorious, has been a pureblood line for many generations. Their sole claim to fame is having produced Cassandra Trelawney, Sybill’s great-great-grandmother, a noted and highly gifted seer. Since Cassandra, there has been a sense of ‘divination is in our blood’ and a noted emphasis on the subject in the hopes that another member of the family would show signs of the Second Sight. But none did, and the family was starting to lose hope… until Sybill came along. Despite her eccentricity (and the disappointment at her having never married) she is her father’s pride and her elder relatives make much of her. Her siblings and cousins are not so fond of her, and most of them secretly hope her ‘Inner Eye’ will tell her it’s inauspicious to attend any family gatherings – but they’re polite to her face, when they see it.

History from student days at Hogwarts to the present time

All Trelawney children are home-schooled by relatives (or hired tutors if absolutely necessary). It’s a tradition that’s lasted as long as anyone can remember, and therefore out of the question to break. As with her older brother’s, Sybill’s Hogwarts letter was answered with a polite refusal, and the Headmaster was too familiar with the family’s stubbornness to bother sending someone to try and persuade them. Therefore Sybill was educated with her three siblings and a handful of cousins. It was soon apparent that her magical abilities were nothing spectacular, average at best (Charms) and pathetic at worst (Potions). Though her parents loved her, they shook their heads over her, and her brother Cayce was constantly having to defend her from their cousins’ teasing.

Her Divination neurosis began at age twelve, with two things. The first was a typical adolescent need to be recognized. The second was three predictions that came true. Not large, dramatic, ‘THE ONE WITH THE POWER TO DEFEAT THE DARK LORD’ predictions, but small, domestic things, mentioned almost offhandedly. Where a lost pet would be found – when the owlet in question wouldn’t even be lost until two days later. When her aunt, who had wanted a baby for years, would finally find herself with child. A warning to beware of fire on a certain date – upon which day a candle was upset and a small fire started, though quickly put out. And with that the whispers started. Perhaps the family had finally produced another Seer. Perhaps Cassandra Trelawney’s blood had finally come through.

Perhaps there was something Sybill was talented at. Something wonderful.

She began studying and practicing hungrily, everything she could get her hands on in the field of Divination. Tasseography, oneiromancy (dreams), astrology and astromancy, augury, scrying, crystal-gazing, palm-reading, runes, cards, fire, shadows – anything that could be read, she tried to read it. Her relatives, excited at the prospect of another Seer in the family, encouraged her, jumping all over anything she said that might be interpreted as a prediction – and exponentially more so if it seemed to come true.

It was also during these years that she began to develop her unique style of dress. The lone portrait of Cassandra Trelawney that hung in the foyer of her father’s home showed the famed Seer in a cream-colored peasant blouse and a long purple and blue skirt, a burgundy scarf tied around her waist with ends trailing, a few cheerful bead necklaces dangling about her neck and bangles on one wrist. And perched on her nose, a pair of large black-framed glasses. When she wasn’t studying, Sybill spent hour upon hour talking with the portrait, and gradually she began to ape her ancestor’s clothing. And gradually, like in many areas of her life, Sybill took it way too far. One scarf became several. A few necklaces became a score. To bangles were added beads and little tinkling bells and chains and rings. And through judicious pestering, she managed to find out where the very glasses in the portrait had been stored since her great-great-grandmother’s death. They were in remarkably good shape for their age, and a local craftsman managed to charm them up good as new. Though Sybill had never needed glasses, she took to wearing them constantly; the headaches they gave her as she strained to see became a part of the ‘burden of her calling’. Within a short while her eyes had adjusted, physically shifted, and after that point she did need the spectacles.

Her cousins laughed at her. Her younger siblings were embarrassed by her. Even Cayce didn’t know what to do with her as her behavior grew stranger and stranger. But her father was bursting with pride, and her aunts and uncles and grandparents who’d shaken their heads over her before now made much of her. The more she flaunted the ‘Seer thing’ the more important she felt in their eyes. And so it seemed clear – as if she’d foreseen it! – that a Seer was what she was always destined to be. Her general mediocrity otherwise had not been a flaw; it was only because a Seer must be utterly consumed by her Craft, so there was room for nothing else in her life. She became lofty, keeping herself apart from everyone; claimed she no longer felt such things as hunger and slowly grew thinner and thinner. She kept working on her image, developing the soft, misty voice that demanded close attention and the gliding walk that made her appear to float over the ground. And she refused to sully her noble calling by paying a bit of attention to what her critics might say. They simply didn’t understand, that was all. How could they? Seers were always persecuted and misunderstood; it was – alas – their fate.

At thirty, she heard that the Divination professor at Hogwarts School had retired. Once again it felt to her like the workings of Destiny. (Everything felt to her like the workings of Destiny at this point.) She sent an owl to Headmaster Dumbledore requesting (one might say demanding) an interview for the vacant position. Finally he consented, and though he began to reject her (reject HER!) he suddenly changed his mind. To this day she’s not sure why. Destiny!

For twenty years she’s lived and worked at Hogwarts, even putting up with the supreme indignation of having to split her classes with a horse– ahem, a centaur. Her feelings of insult on that count have never faded, and she has never ceased her attempts to have Firenze thrown out, but despite being repeatedly denied she also never made good on her threat to leave. When the war shut down the school, she continued to live there. When the fighting came to Hogwarts, though, she fled. There was never a second thought. Sybill Trelawney is a Seer, a rare and precious being, certainly not to be risked in a war. Surely she wouldn’t be expected to do anything but protect herself. So she gathered her teacups and crystals and left, taking a small cottage far out in the countryside. (She was highly indignant that the owner insisted she pay for use of the wretched little shack, but alas, the truly Gifted are always persecuted.)

Now that Hogwarts is reopening and the war is over, it’s time for Sybill’s grand reentrance onto the wizarding scene.

Player's Info

Name/Nickname: Eve
AIM: bakoneko56
Yahoo IM: shinjiru_kokoro56
Email: shinjiru_kokoro56@yahoo.com

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Interests (12):

attention, beads, candles, crystals, drama, ill-fortune, incense, omens, prophecy, sherry, sparkly things, tea leaves

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