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Fear of a Name, Only Increases The Fear Of The Thing Itself
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Character Name: Maria Anya Mischa
Character Age: 16 (Birthday: October 29)
School: Durmstrang
House: Bergen
Job/Year: Student, 6th Year
Wand: 11 inches, Pine and Dragon Heartstring, inflexible
Gender: Female
Sexuality: Bisexual


Play-By:
Hair Shade: Light red
Hair Style: Long and slightly wavy
Eye Color: Blue
Build: Slender
Dressing Style: Whatever works. Frequently heavy clothes, since it's cold at Durmstrang, but she's more than happy to get out of them.


Likes:

• Rainy nights
  
• Strange new things
  
• Strange old things
  
• Flying
  
• Ghosts
  
• Learning new things

Dislikes:

• Winter
  
• Routine
  
• Obsession with tradition
  
• Hiking, and similar lengthy walking exercises
  
• Poltergeists
  
• Ignorance

Strengths:

• Fast learner
  
• Adaptable (at least when climate changes aren't involved)
  
• Intelligent
  
• Strategist
  
• Ancient Runes and Dark Arts classes, by far her strongest subjects.
  
• Flying

Weaknesses:

• Frequently gets sick, especially when at school. She blames the cold for this.
  
• Charms. By far her weakest subject.
  
• Gets bored of routine fast
  
• Physically weak
  
• Fond of unpopular people, things, and opinions
  
• Reckless

Overall Personality: Maria is a perfectly normal, outgoing person who loves people and-ahaha, no. None of those are true. She's attracted to the weird, the unexplained, and the unfamiliar. Unsolved mysteries, ghost stories, legends, you name it, she's interested. She can be a bit difficult to get along with, because while most people (or at least many people) will stay in the light where it's safest, she'll be the first to go running off into the dark because she doesn't know what's hidden just out of sight yet. Does that make her reckless? Absolutely. Is that a desirable personality trait in the eyes of someone who isn't equally reckless? No, not really.
She's friendly enough in person, if a bit averse to striking up conversations on her own, but she's eccentric and completely shameless about that fact. Anyone outside of the environment Durmstrang has created, where the prevailing attitude is that the best way to understand how to defend against the dark arts is to understand the dark arts in and out, would be appalled at how well she took to the subject. Maria tends to just blow these people off as simple-minded. She doesn't have much patience with routine, and would much rather try something new than stick to what's familiar. If there isn't a new mystery to investigate, she'll usually settle for the unpopular, because hey, it's something different. And that's how she came to be one of the few students at Durmstrang who is completely okay with suddenly letting muggle-borns in, despite being a pureblood herself.


Father: Pavel Mischa (deceased)
Mother: Sonia Mischa (nee Brencis) (deceased)
Siblings: None
Others: Marlon Eltshan (great uncle, 68), Sanja Megiddo (ancestor, ghost, over 1200), Pallas (owl, 6)
Birth Place: Bucharest, Romania
Current Residence: When not at school, she lives at her family's mansion in Romania. Rumors that it is haunted are exaggerated, but not untrue.
Overall History: There is a story occasionally told in the Romania's wizarding community, of an old village at the edges of the Bulgarian Empire, back in the ninth century. A small village it was, with residents numbering only around eighty, yet most of them had many secrets they kept from each other. For instance, in this village of muggles there was one family of a witch and a wizard, along with their teenage daughter, a rare, true Seer. The story goes that one day, a powerful wizard came to the village, seeking someone who possessed the Sight, and soon discovered the daughter. He besieged the town, killing a couple of its residents each night and slowly driving the daughter to expose herself for what she was. In doing so, the rest of the townspeople turned against her, and begged the wizard to take her away. And so he did, and forced the daughter into his service. He tried to exploit the girl's Sight for his own gain, but without much knowledge of how prophecy actually worked, quickly became dissatisfied with the results. Though he planned to discard her, the life she now lived had awakened a burning rage in the girl's heart, and it was instead she who disposed of him. She dismembered his corpse, buried the pieces under the cellar of the wizard's mansion, and tried to return to her old life. Although she returned to her old town, and settled back with her old family, nothing would ever go back to normal. She practiced her magic, but could no longer keep it a secret. She bore a child, but could never love another enough to marry. She became a pariah to her old home, and in time the fire her old wizard master had awakened in her heart ignited once again. After sending her family away with her daughter, she set the village aflame in the dead of night, burning the remaining villagers where they slept. And when the light of dawn began to peek over the horizon, she cast herself into the fire as its final victim.

But of course, this story would have no relevance to anyone in the present day, would it?

Speaking of the present day, the Mischa family are an old pureblooded line. They've lived in many locations across Europe over the years, from Russia, to Scandinavia, to the Balkans, and finally in Romania. Pavel and Sonia Mischa, present day inheritors of the name, lived in Bucharest for much of their life, before moving to an old mansion deep in the woods outside of the city. Rumors claimed that the mansion, which supposedly dated back to the ninth century, was haunted, but the seller claimed that a woman who had recently had the place fixed up denied them. But they found the truth soon after moving in, when their eight-year-old daughter, Maria, started complaining about a racket keeping her up at night. Though her parents dismissed it at first, the noise continued every night until they heard it too, and managed to track the source to a poltergeist inhabiting the mansion. For over two years they tried to have the troublemaking spirit out, to no avail. So it was an incredible relief to Maria when she was accepted at Durmstrang, less because it meant that she had the same magical talent as her parents and more because it would mean she would finally get a decent night's sleep.

But let's talk about Maria a bit more, beyond her chronic noise troubles. She discovered her talent at a very early age, when she ended up on top of a building while being chased by a dog. She also demonstrated herself to be quite intelligent, picking up skills quickly as she aged and even learning to read before her fourth birthday. The fact that she loved learning new things helped considerably. Physically, though, she was always a bit worse off. She was weaker than other kids her age, even kids of wizarding families, and got sick frequently. Eventually, her parents decided that the atmosphere of the city and all its muggles wasn't helping, and moved out to an old, isolated mansion a mile out. Her health didn't improve much, but, with all that lost sleep, of course it wouldn't. And neither did the frigid climate of Scandinavia when she first arrived at Durmstrang.

Despite her less than perfect health, she took well to the school. She was sorted into Bergen house, and immediately took an interest to what she considered to be the 'stranger' subjects. Herbology, with its flora ranging from ordinary magical herbs to several varieties of carnivorous plant, Potions, where one mistake in a complicated recipe could make something poisonous or even explosive, and Dark Arts, the study of all manner of strange and dangerous curses, quickly became her favorite subjects, while the would-be-more-interesting-if-it-covered-more-fun-material History of Magic and Charms became her least. She also took to flying like it was second nature. It was easier than walking or running any great distance, at least.

Her first year at Durmstrang passed without much consequence. No failed classes, no great incidents, very little trouble. She made a few friends, but not too many. When she went back home to Romania, her life more or less went back to the way it was before she went to school, with one major exception. A year of magical education, and of talking to others who had dealt with such troublesome spirits before, had given her the confidence to not let the poltergeist still infesting her home cause her any more trouble. It had gone beyond just making noise to actively causing trouble for the Mischa family, but Maria was soon able to simply ignore it. So her school life continued, nine months of school, three months of home life where the unwelcome pest became more and more insignificant. She picked up Divination and Ancient Runes when electives became available, the latter of which becoming her favorite subject after Dark Arts. Life was good, right?

No, not really.

Her home life started to go down hill during her fourth year. It started during second term, when she got a letter from her great uncle, Marlon Eltshan, informing her that her parents were very ill and that he had moved in in order to take care of them. By the time the year had ended and she returned home, they only had a few weeks left in them.

She didn't grieve for long, but it was during this time that a certain bothersome spirit tried to prey on her weakness. For the first time in three years, she reacted to it, threatening to find a way to curse it into nonexistence. For once, the poltergeist backed off, but a couple weeks later, when Maria had started to recover, it came back, noticeably less determined to cause trouble than before. It simply lingered, hiding just of sight and goading Maria to look for it. She tried to blow it off at first, but soon started to become curious, and followed the spirit. The poltergeist baited her into the cellar and, as though it had simply been another trick all along, Maria stepped into the room and promptly fell into a hole in the earthen floor that hadn't been there before. The spirit disappeared without a word while Maria, after pulling herself out of the hole, noticed that she had stepped on something that most definitely wasn't dirt. She had stepped on a human skull.

Now, this is the point where a normal person might scream, or otherwise freak out about the fact that they had just found a dead body under their house. This is also the point where it should once again be noted that Maria is not normal. She called to the walls, to the stale air, to the ancient and forgotten wine casks, in hopes that the spirit would hear, asking if it was theirs. "No," came the response. "My bones are long gone, scattered into dust. But the one who this belonged to was the one who drove me to by death." The spirit, exposing herself to not actually be a poltergeist by mentioning her death, materialized in front of Maria. For the first time, she got a good look at the spirit who had caused her family no end of trouble for the last several years, and slowly began to realize that she was looking into the face of a relative. It just didn't quite occur to her how many generations separated them, at least until the ghost, who identified herself by the name Sanja Megiddo, told her the story. It was a story of a gift called the Sight, the wizard who wanted it for hisself without understanding it, of the hatred of a small town, and an ending in fire.

So of course, when she returned to Durmstrang she told everyone that she had discovered a dead body under her house and that it was haunted by the ghost of an ancestor from the days of the Bulgarian Empire? Once again, no, not really. But it did mean that for her fifth year she was no longer dreading the day when she would have to return home. Sanja was a veritable font of strange stories, gathered from over a millennium of haunting and tending to the mansion Maria would come to inherit. Already fond of the strange, the mysterious, and the unusual, these stories only fueled her desire for discovery. She willingly threw herself into her studies as school started, and even managed to come to terms with her once-dreaded History of Magic. At the same time though, she became increasingly bored with the familiar, and began to suffer in areas that reflected that. But that didn't matter much to her.

Soon after the year ended and Maria returned home, she heard the news that starting next year, Durmstrang would be allowing in muggle-born students. Without her parents to tell her what she, as a member of a very long-standing pureblood family, should think, she immediately latched onto the novelty. Even so, she asked Sanja her thoughts, to which the ghost laughed off the idea of "blood purity", asking if Maria really thought that all the great and ancient wizarding families existed since the dawn of man. Maria pondered this question, and when she came up with the answer that no, they couldn't have, a newer and greater mystery lodged itself in her mind.

Just where had magic come from in the first place?


Alias:
Age:
Code: in rules

[center][size=5]MARIA anya MISCHA
[/size]

[IMG] Place your beautiful image here [/IMG]

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Fear of a Name, Only Increases The Fear Of The Thing Itself
----------------------------------------------------------------[/center]
[b]Character Name:[/b] Maria Anya Mischa
[b]Character Age:[/b] 16 (Birthday: October 29)
[b]School:[/b] Durmstrang
[b]House:[/b] Bergen
[b]Job/Year:[/b] Student, 6th Year
[b]Wand:[/b] 11 inches, Pine and Dragon Heartstring, inflexible
[b]Gender:[/b] Female
[b]Sexuality:[/b] Bisexual

[center]----------------------------------------------------------------
He can run faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo
----------------------------------------------------------------[/center]
[b]Play-By:[/b]
[b]Hair Shade:[/b] Light red
[b]Hair Style:[/b] Long and slightly wavy
[b]Eye Color:[/b] Blue
[b]Build:[/b] Slender
[b]Dressing Style:[/b]  Whatever works.  Frequently heavy clothes, since it's cold at Durmstrang, but she's more than happy to get out of them.

[center]----------------------------------------------------------------
Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.
----------------------------------------------------------------[/center]
[b]Likes:[/b] [ul][li]Rainy nights
[/li][li]Strange new things
[/li][li]Strange old things
[/li][li]Flying
[/li][li]Ghosts
[/li][li]Learning new things[/li][/ul]
[b]Dislikes:[/b] [ul][li]Winter
[/li][li]Routine
[/li][li]Obsession with tradition
[/li][li]Hiking, and similar lengthy walking exercises
[/li][li]Poltergeists
[/li][li]Ignorance[/li][/ul]
[b]Strengths:[/b] [ul][li]Fast learner
[/li][li]Adaptable (at least when climate changes aren't involved)
[/li][li]Intelligent
[/li][li]Strategist
[/li][li]Ancient Runes and Dark Arts classes, by far her strongest subjects.
[/li][li]Flying[/li][/ul]
[b]Weaknesses:[/b] [ul][li]Frequently gets sick, especially when at school.  She blames the cold for this.
[/li][li]Charms.  By far her weakest subject.
[/li][li]Gets bored of routine fast
[/li][li]Physically weak
[/li][li]Fond of unpopular people, things, and opinions
[/li][li]Reckless[/li][/ul]
[b]Overall Personality:[/b] Maria is a perfectly normal, outgoing person who loves people and-ahaha, no.  None of those are true.  She's attracted to the weird, the unexplained, and the unfamiliar.  Unsolved mysteries, ghost stories, legends, you name it, she's interested.  She can be a bit difficult to get along with, because while most people (or at least many people) will stay in the light where it's safest, she'll be the first to go running off into the dark because she doesn't know what's hidden just out of sight yet.  Does that make her reckless?  Absolutely.  Is that a desirable personality trait in the eyes of someone who isn't equally reckless?  No, not really.
She's friendly enough in person, if a bit averse to striking up conversations on her own, but she's eccentric and completely shameless about that fact.  Anyone outside of the environment Durmstrang has created, where the prevailing attitude is that the best way to understand how to defend against the dark arts is to understand the dark arts in and out, would be appalled at how well she took to the subject.  Maria tends to just blow these people off as simple-minded.  She doesn't have much patience with routine, and would much rather try something new than stick to what's familiar.  If there isn't a new mystery to investigate, she'll usually settle for the unpopular, because hey, it's something different.  And that's how she came to be one of the few students at Durmstrang who is completely okay with suddenly letting muggle-borns in, despite being a pureblood herself.

[center]----------------------------------------------------------------
Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.
----------------------------------------------------------------[/center]
[b]Father:[/b] Pavel Mischa (deceased)
[b]Mother:[/b] Sonia Mischa (nee Brencis) (deceased)
[b]Siblings:[/b] None
[b]Others:[/b] Marlon Eltshan (great uncle, 68), Sanja Megiddo (ancestor, ghost, over 1200), Pallas (owl, 6)
[b]Birth Place:[/b] Bucharest, Romania
[b]Current Residence:[/b] When not at school, she lives at her family's mansion in Romania.  Rumors that it is haunted are exaggerated, but not untrue.
[b]Overall History:[/b] There is a story occasionally told in the Romania's wizarding community, of an old village at the edges of the Bulgarian Empire, back in the ninth century.  A small village it was, with residents numbering only around eighty, yet most of them had many secrets they kept from each other.  For instance, in this village of muggles there was one family of a witch and a wizard, along with their teenage daughter, a rare, true Seer.  The story goes that one day, a powerful wizard came to the village, seeking someone who possessed the Sight, and soon discovered the daughter.  He besieged the town, killing a couple of its residents each night and slowly driving the daughter to expose herself for what she was.  In doing so, the rest of the townspeople turned against her, and begged the wizard to take her away.  And so he did, and forced the daughter into his service.  He tried to exploit the girl's Sight for his own gain, but without much knowledge of how prophecy actually worked, quickly became dissatisfied with the results.  Though he planned to discard her, the life she now lived had awakened a burning rage in the girl's heart, and it was instead she who disposed of him.  She dismembered his corpse, buried the pieces under the cellar of the wizard's mansion, and tried to return to her old life.  Although she returned to her old town, and settled back with her old family, nothing would ever go back to normal.  She practiced her magic, but could no longer keep it a secret.  She bore a child, but could never love another enough to marry.  She became a pariah to her old home, and in time the fire her old wizard master had awakened in her heart ignited once again.  After sending her family away with her daughter, she set the village aflame in the dead of night, burning the remaining villagers where they slept.  And when the light of dawn began to peek over the horizon, she cast herself into the fire as its final victim.

But of course, this story would have no relevance to anyone in the present day, would it?

Speaking of the present day, the Mischa family are an old pureblooded line.  They've lived in many locations across Europe over the years, from Russia, to Scandinavia, to the Balkans, and finally in Romania.  Pavel and Sonia Mischa, present day inheritors of the name, lived in Bucharest for much of their life, before moving to an old mansion deep in the woods outside of the city.  Rumors claimed that the mansion, which supposedly dated back to the ninth century, was haunted, but the seller claimed that a woman who had recently had the place fixed up denied them.  But they found the truth soon after moving in, when their eight-year-old daughter, Maria, started complaining about a racket keeping her up at night.  Though her parents dismissed it at first, the noise continued every night until they heard it too, and managed to track the source to a poltergeist inhabiting the mansion.  For over two years they tried to have the troublemaking spirit out, to no avail.  So it was an incredible relief to Maria when she was accepted at Durmstrang, less because it meant that she had the same magical talent as her parents and more because it would mean she would finally get a decent night's sleep.

But let's talk about Maria a bit more, beyond her chronic noise troubles.  She discovered her talent at a very early age, when she ended up on top of a building while being chased by a dog.  She also demonstrated herself to be quite intelligent, picking up skills quickly as she aged and even learning to read before her fourth birthday.  The fact that she loved learning new things helped considerably.  Physically, though, she was always a bit worse off.  She was weaker than other kids her age, even kids of wizarding families, and got sick frequently.  Eventually, her parents decided that the atmosphere of the city and all its muggles wasn't helping, and moved out to an old, isolated mansion a mile out.  Her health didn't improve much, but, with all that lost sleep, of course it wouldn't.  And neither did the frigid climate of Scandinavia when she first arrived at Durmstrang.

Despite her less than perfect health, she took well to the school.  She was sorted into Bergen house, and immediately took an interest to what she considered to be the 'stranger' subjects.  Herbology, with its flora ranging from ordinary magical herbs to several varieties of carnivorous plant, Potions, where one mistake in a complicated recipe could make something poisonous or even explosive, and Dark Arts, the study of all manner of strange and dangerous curses, quickly became her favorite subjects, while the would-be-more-interesting-if-it-covered-more-fun-material History of Magic and Charms became her least.  She also took to flying like it was second nature.  It was easier than walking or running any great distance, at least.

Her first year at Durmstrang passed without much consequence.  No failed classes, no great incidents, very little trouble.  She made a few friends, but not too many.  When she went back home to Romania, her life more or less went back to the way it was before she went to school, with one major exception.  A year of magical education, and of talking to others who had dealt with such troublesome spirits before, had given her the confidence to not let the poltergeist still infesting her home cause her any more trouble.  It had gone beyond just making noise to actively causing trouble for the Mischa family, but Maria was soon able to simply ignore it.  So her school life continued, nine months of school, three months of home life where the unwelcome pest became more and more insignificant.  She picked up Divination and Ancient Runes when electives became available, the latter of which becoming her favorite subject after Dark Arts.  Life was good, right?

No, not really.

Her home life started to go down hill during her fourth year.  It started during second term, when she got a letter from her great uncle, Marlon Eltshan, informing her that her parents were very ill and that he had moved in in order to take care of them.  By the time the year had ended and she returned home, they only had a few weeks left in them.

She didn't grieve for long, but it was during this time that a certain bothersome spirit tried to prey on her weakness.  For the first time in three years, she reacted to it, threatening to find a way to curse it into nonexistence.  For once, the poltergeist backed off, but a couple weeks later, when Maria had started to recover, it came back, noticeably less determined to cause trouble than before.  It simply lingered, hiding just of sight and goading Maria to look for it.  She tried to blow it off at first, but soon started to become curious, and followed the spirit.  The poltergeist baited her into the cellar and, as though it had simply been another trick all along, Maria stepped into the room and promptly fell into a hole in the earthen floor that hadn't been there before.  The spirit disappeared without a word while Maria, after pulling herself out of the hole, noticed that she had stepped on something that most definitely wasn't dirt.  She had stepped on a human skull.

Now, this is the point where a normal person might scream, or otherwise freak out about the fact that they had just found a dead body under their house.  This is also the point where it should once again be noted that Maria is not normal.  She called to the walls, to the stale air, to the ancient and forgotten wine casks, in hopes that the spirit would hear, asking if it was theirs.  "No," came the response.  "My bones are long gone, scattered into dust.  But the one who this belonged to was the one who drove me to by death."  The spirit, exposing herself to not actually be a poltergeist by mentioning her death, materialized in front of Maria.  For the first time, she got a good look at the spirit who had caused her family no end of trouble for the last several years, and slowly began to realize that she was looking into the face of a relative.  It just didn't quite occur to her how many generations separated them, at least until the ghost, who identified herself by the name Sanja Megiddo, told her the story.  It was a story of a gift called the Sight, the wizard who wanted it for hisself without understanding it, of the hatred of a small town, and an ending in fire.

So of course, when she returned to Durmstrang she told everyone that she had discovered a dead body under her house and that it was haunted by the ghost of an ancestor from the days of the Bulgarian Empire?  Once again, no, not really.  But it did mean that for her fifth year she was no longer dreading the day when she would have to return home.  Sanja was a veritable font of strange stories, gathered from over a millennium of haunting and tending to the mansion Maria would come to inherit.  Already fond of the strange, the mysterious, and the unusual, these stories only fueled her desire for discovery.  She willingly threw herself into her studies as school started, and even managed to come to terms with her once-dreaded History of Magic.  At the same time though, she became increasingly bored with the familiar, and began to suffer in areas that reflected that.  But that didn't matter much to her.

Soon after the year ended and Maria returned home, she heard the news that starting next year, Durmstrang would be allowing in muggle-born students.  Without her parents to tell her what she, as a member of a very long-standing pureblood family, should think, she immediately latched onto the novelty.  Even so, she asked Sanja her thoughts, to which the ghost laughed off the idea of "blood purity", asking if Maria really thought that all the great and ancient wizarding families existed since the dawn of man.  Maria pondered this question, and when she came up with the answer that no, they couldn't have, a newer and greater mystery lodged itself in her mind.

Just where had magic come from in the first place?

[center]----------------------------------------------------------------
Curiosity is not a sin.... But we should exercise caution with our curiosity... yes, indeed.
----------------------------------------------------------------[/center]
[b]Alias:[/b]
[b]Age:[/b]
[b]Code:[/b] in rules