RAMSDEN, letha ailie
Feb 16, 2014 16:02:08 GMT -5
Ainsley Rickett, Astraia Yaxley, and 1 more like this
Post by ELLIE on Feb 16, 2014 16:02:08 GMT -5
[presto]
SIXTEEN
FEMALE
GRYFFINDOR
HALFBLOOD
HETEROSEXUAL
CAITLIN STASEY
LETHA AILIE RAMSDEN
 Letha Ramsden is the perfect surface Gryffindor. Impulsive to the point of recklessness, always the first in line to try out some daredevil stunt, Letha can be forever counted on to be the life and soul of a party. She walks into a room, you're going to know about it. Hedonistic, gorgeous, indolent, Letha believes fully in living for the moment, and the concept of her actions having consequences is one totally foreign to her. She does what she wants when she wants and just skates around the fallout, ignoring it completely. Self-centered, really, doesn't begin to cover it. The other thing Letha is? Performative as fuck. She fully and completely plays up to the obnoxious Gryffindor daring, using her insolence and reputation for recklessness to hide the supremely Slytherin mind whirring beneath her surface. Incredibly bright, Letha uses her mind only to manipulate the people and circumstances around her to bring her the best possible outcome. With a true gift for understanding what makes people tick, Letha has been quietly pulling strings on people to make her own life easier since she was old enough to do so. Hiding this raw, selfish intelligence behind a lazy attitude, you can guarantee that if you've pulled a fast one on Letha at any point, she's going to be plotting the best way to get back at you even as she laughs and flirts with you. This dual nature has its roots in her childhood. The eldest daughter of two extremely driven parents, Letha was competing with their work for their attention from the day she was born. Since a younger brother, Christopher, joined her in the nursery less than a year later, Letha grew up well aware that attention was something you had to take, and you could not expect it to be given. Willing to pull stupid stunts to gain interest from her parents, Letha was a frightfully naughty child who'd throw tantrums in public and scream herself blue in the face to get what she wanted, whether it was attention or toys. Despite her lack of healthy relationship with her parents, she did have the luck to get on well with Chris. They were partners in crime from the moment they could both walk and talk, always with their heads together to come up with new, better ways to irritate their parents. They ran away from home together on eight separate occasions before they were ten (they were always caught within hours, obviously, but it drove their parents mad since despite everything they adored their children) and would scream themselves hoarse sticking up for each other when they were being punished. The number of fights they got into at Muggle primary school was ridiculous - Chris was a small kid and got picked on by his classmates, and Letha would roll up on the playground like a tiger to deal with them, practically spitting fire (she actually did spit fire one time, her first sign of magic, and the two kids were promptly moved to a new school). Vicious, never one to back down from a fight, it didn't take long for Letha and Chris' peers at their new school to realise that it was better not to antagonise either Ramsden sibling, and their fearlessness and total disrespect for authority earned them the slightly terrified respect of their classmates, and eventually popularity as the other kids realised that being in the good books of both of them was definitely better than not being. When Letha was nine, her parents seemed to be unable to cope with the idea that their parenting skills had left them with two such awful children, and produced another two in quick succession as if to attempt to prove themselves capable of bringing up nice children. Letha had little interest in the two brothers that arrived - the first was Peter, and two years later Henry followed - but she and Christopher were always soft with them in a way they were never soft with anybody else. It was unsurprising, therefore, that Mr and Mrs Ramsden were enormously relieved when Letha went off to Hogwarts. Alone at school, Chris got into far less trouble, and deprived of her constant back-up, Letha drew the fast conclusion that she needed to tone down her rudeness. She did so with aplomb. She was granted a stroke of luck upon her arrival at Hogwarts - she was the longest hatstall of the year, the Sorting Hat spending a solid five minutes attempting to sift out her respective Gryffindor and Slytherin qualities and decide which set was the most powerful within her. Eventually her overwhelming delight at being the centre of attention won out, and the Hat put her in Gryffindor. Letha sailed off and in a way reorganised herself once at the table. She pulled her cheekiness to the older students in and instead pushed her wit and fearlessness to the fore, saving her funny backchat for the teachers who'd end up saddled with her. This combination of reckless bravery - she was always the first in line to try somebody's stupid idea - and her total disrespect for the adult authority figures in the school earned her quick popularity much the way it had in primary school. Letha wasn't stupid enough by any means to get into fights at Hogwarts - most of these kids were a lot more talented at magic than her - so she learnt to cover up irritation and smile sweetly at whoever dealt out insults, saving up memories of names and faces to get back at later. If the Sorting Hat had spent a moment longer digging around into this manipulative and vindictive nature, it almost certainly would have put her in Slytherin. Her time at Hogwarts has so far been enormous fun for Letha. She's pretty, popular, brave, and clever, and is the kind of student most people seems to know of. She gets almost twice as many detentions for rule-breaking or rudeness as anybody around her, but her ability to volte-face and charm a teacher she suddenly feels like she ought to be nice for is staggering, and as unpredictable as her methods of taking revenge. Letha is ultimately a creature of whim - she does things mostly because it occurs to her on the spot that it might be fun to do, and puts very little forethought into anything other than levelling the score with somebody who's crossed her. She's not a terrible person all the way through, however much it might seem that way. She has little respect for anybody, but once you earn that respect you've got a friend for life. A couple of the teachers at Hogwarts have managed that, and in their classes Letha is a delight, engaged and attentive and a totally different kettle of fish than in those subjects where she doesn't like the professor, at which point she is disruptive and insolent, always playing the fool or deliberately pretending to misunderstand the topic of the lesson to get laughs. All of Letha's posturing and manipulating up until this year has just been a warm-up act. She's got one new goal and she is pursuing it with her characteristic single-minded determination, smashing up everything in her path to achieve it. She discovered last summer that her father is having an affair, you see, with nobody other than Letha's godmother. She walked in on them when she was supposed to be out at the cinema with Christopher. Being Letha, her brain started calculating instantly. Letha has only marginal interest in her father, but although she and her mother fight all the time Letha would kill for her. You'd think they loathed each other from the way they carried on whenever they're stuck together, but Letha has noticed her mother's resilience and intelligence over the years, and respects it hugely. She recognised instantly that she could turn this situation inside out with the right moves. The first thing she did was warn her father that she knew, and he's been trying to bribe her to stay quiet ever since with a vastly inflated allowance and a constant flow of pretty gifts. Letha in truth has no intention of telling her mother about the affair, since she knows it would break her heart, but she's never going to tell her father that. But the money isn't Letha's only ambition. She knows she cannot break her father without also breaking her mother, so she's going after the other culprit in the whole thing: her father's university friend and Letha's own godmother, Lea. Of course, Letha's not going to enter outright warfare - she's not stupid, she knows Lea has a lot more resources and connections at her disposal than Letha herself. What Lea does have that Letha can take? A younger brother. Letha knows full well that her godmother loves that brother almost as much as she herself loves Christopher, and so Letha is simply going to steal him. It will have the added benefit of enraging her father, if and when he finds out, since her godmother's brother is also at least twenty years Letha's senior, and what Letha has often heard her father refer to as "a wastrel". Letha has crafted a plan of intense subtlety, and put the first mechanisms of it into motion at the beginning of this summer. By the time the plan enters its endgame, Letha will be unstoppable. And Merlin is she looking forward to it. She might be a complicated creature, but her favourite taste is a simple one: destruction. ELLIE 20 GMT+0 |
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