MCKINNON, MARLENE

[marlene]

Player's Name: Mel
Other Characters: None
Contacts: PM/CBox/or email/msn at [e-mail]
Random Fact: I can play around 11 different musical instruments

Name: Marlene Alana McKinnon
Alias: Marls, Leen, Mar, McKinnon.
Age: Sixteen
Birthday: 21st of May
Gender: Female
Blood: Three-quarters, although considered Half blood
Sexual Preference: Bisexual, although more hetero
Wand: Ten and a half inches long, ash wood, phoenix tail feather core. Rigid, particularly good for transfiguration.
Pet: Honey, a caramel colored cat. She also shares the family owl, Athena
Special Ability: None

Year: Sixth
House: Gryffindor

Best Subject: Transfiguration
Worst Subject: Astronomy
Quidditch: No
Patronus: Yes, it takes the shape of a brown vixen (female fox)

Hair: Light brown, slightly longer than her shoulders, slightly thick and usually slightly wavy
Eyes: Light green with flecks of visible gray
Height: Five feet seven inches
Weight: 126 lbs.

Marlene isn't one of those girls you can comprehend in about one conversation. She has many layers to her personality, all one atop another and most unknown to many. The closer people are with Marlene the more they realize how much of a complex individual she is, and few ever really get to bottom of all those layers and see her for the person she is and not the mask she wears. Ever since her brother publicly declared that he had no relations whatsoever with her, Marlene started to harden her heart. It felt to her as though her brother had died, and he had of sorts. Not physically of course, but mentally, which was far worst in Marlene's mind. She slowly started pushing people away, never letting them get to her, and became what she is today. Which is why most people only see her for the image she projects. An image of a headstrong, independent woman who only relies on herself to get through life. She would decline help from anyone she feels it be unnecessary from, and keep going at it until she gets it right. She isn't a feminist by any stretch, but she is also more likely to decline help from a guy than from a girl. She's quite stubborn in that way, as well as many other ways. She'll stick with her ideas and opinions, no matter if proven wrong, and refuses to let others change her way of seeing things.

Marlene is also a very reckless kind of person. She'll throw herself into whatever situation arises and do what she can. Some call this pure courageousness, since she appears to be completely unafraid of anything. That couldn't be more far from the truth of course. Marlene is afraid of many things, but what really makes her courageous is her ability to ignore her fears and keep going through life without letting these fears stop her. Call it bravery, call it stupidity, call it what you will, Marlene doesn't much care for names and titles. She'll simply live her life do as she sees fit. Although this way of living has gotten her in quite the trouble in the past. Together with her recklessness she will stop at nothing to get what she wants. And when she gets stuck having to try, try again, Marlene isn't altogether patient with it. She is somewhat short-tempered, and will tend to anger easily in situations of the sort, or if anyone throws an insult her way. She will never stand for insults or ignorance, and will resort to using her wand if need be. She truly isn't a witch to be messed with.

Underneath it all though, Marlene simply wishes to feel proud of herself, and have someone be proud of her. She's not the vulnerable type, insisting that tears are for the weak, and would rather be killed than admit to feeling remorse or sadness. Sure, most girls say that although not admitted, every girl dreams of her prince charming sweeping them off their feet on their white horse, but Marlene doesn't believe nor feel that way. No guy has gotten near enough to her to have her heart, and she is determined to keep it that way. She can become quite caring at times, although those occasions aren't quite common occurrence. Very few have gotten close enough to her for her to care very much, but those who have have never left and have obtained a total protection from her. No one messes with the people she cares about, or they will have to go through her.

Sixteen years ago on May twenty first, Marlene Alana McKinnon was born. She was the second child to her parents, following her older brother, with only a one year difference between the two. She was born in a perfectly normal manner, no oddities or special stories to tell there. Her mother's water broke as she was setting breakfast on the table, and her father took no time to bring her to the car and drive her to the hospital. Marlene was then born just like any other child was.

Marlene was born and raised on in portree on the island of Skye in Scotland. It's was a small community, and there weren't many kids her age around. This caused her to spend the first part of her childhood with her brother as her only companion. They spent a lot of time outdoors, usually with Marlene following him around. They would sometimes play hide and seek, and Marlene would end up hiding for hours upon hours because her brother had gone off to do something, leaving her to think he was really looking. She had tried playing with some dolls her mother gave her, but Marlene never seemed to really get an interest in them. Why would she when she could follow her brother around and roll around in the mud? Her mother was never quite ecstatic about that one though. So for her younger years, she had to make my own diversions around the community. Many of the games she played included thinking of herself as a witch trekking across the world saving goblins and the like -- her father worked with the goblins in the ministry, and often told the children stories about his work days.

Having an older brother meant many things. For one, there was always someone there to laugh at her for one reason or another. Two, she always had someone there to protect her for any reason. And three, she learned the ways of a prankster at a very young age. She didn't think it was very bad, but her parents were pretty exasperated by the girl more than once. She started out by jumping out at people as they walked by, but that grew pretty old pretty fast. Her father used to bring firecrackers home, and she would take them and sneak them under the table at summer picnics with the extended family. Her mother had been furious. She turned about three shades of red when she figured out that Marlene was laughing about the firecrackers taking on the shape of a rabbits and hopping out from under the table to explode in people's faces. She did other things too, like take things from her brother and leave them in the yards of their neighbors. Her father didn't like that one bit, but he didn't ever really punish her as much as her mother did. He understood after a while that no matter how much he grounded his daughter, it wouldn’t have much effect.

Marlene was fairly active as a child. She could only ever do things for a certain amount of time before she had to find new things to entertain her. Part of the reason was because he mother was getting wise to her antics and putting a stop to things before she really got to pull them off, and then another reason was that she was a bit bored with it. She had somewhat of a short attention span. Not to mean that she didn't listen, and that she didn't pay attention when things mattered, but when she'd done something once she felt that she'd accomplished it and that it was time to move on. Repetition was boring to her, and she would rather try something new, that way she could say she'd done it all. It wasn't until she was eight that things really changed for her. Her brother had first done magic when he was about seven years old, but hers did not happen until she was eight. Her first sign of magic occurred when she was sitting around in the backyard alone, playing around with a snail. The poor thing seemed to be moving much too slow, and she couldn't help but think if only it was bigger it would get somewhere. A little concentration on her part and that's exactly what happened. The snail grew to be about half her size. She was fascinated by the growing snail that she simply stared at it. It wasn't until her mother came out of the house and saw it that all hell broke loose. She used her wand to shrink the snail and went on to question her daughter for an hour on what happened. Her father was there as well, and only smiled at the end of the story, whereas her mother sighed with annoyance. The event only made little Marlene more curious for life and she started running around even more, trying to make something grow or blow up for the following years.

That all more or less ended when her brother got his letter to Hogwarts. Their father was going back to London to work, and their mother apparently didn't like the idea of being left with Marlene to care for -- probably tired of trying to prevent her from getting dirty, ruining her clothes, and coming home with a hand on her shoulder because a neighbour was tired of her invading their property. So the year her brother went to Hogwarts Marlene and her mother moved to London to be with her father. Her father really agreed to the move was because he and his wife had been fighting a lot around that time. Distance can be hard on a couple, even one with a family binding them together. Marlene's mother was used to a certain lifestyle, and by marrying down she had sort of lost a lot of that, mostly she didn't have a vast sum of money to spend. Her one consolation was having a daughter to mold, though that was mostly a lost cause from the beginning.

For the year before she got her own letter to Hogwarts, Marlene found herself constantly clashing with her mother. She didn't know what it was about living in London that made her mother think she suddenly needed to act like a proper lady. She was so used to doing as she pleased on the island that she experienced a fair amount of trouble adjusting, and it didn't help that her parents were fighting even more. Some nights her father wouldn't come home from the office. About two months after she received her letter to Hogwarts her parents announced they were separating. Her father moved into his own flat, but rather than returning to the island, her mother kept the other flat and just sort of pretended things weren't any different. The eleven-year old was relieved to be going to Hogwarts with her brother. She wanted something different at that point, as well as to be as far away from her mother as possible. Her excitement was a bit subdued due to the slow breakdown of her family, but it wasn't all that hard to push all that aside and concentrate on Hogwarts.

Once there, at the mystical castle of dreams and magic - as she called it - Marlene was sorted into Gryffindor, the same house as her father, which went to show how much more like him she was than anyone cares to admit. She was rather glad to end up there, because she knew she would never have made it in Ravenclaw as her mother had once done. She was a headstrong, independent girl, and a bit rash at times, which are some of the same qualities most Gryffindors have. The brunette did have a fun time with the sorting hat though at her sorting. Her brother had been sorted into Slytherin the previous year, something that had come as a surprise to a lot of people. Her sorting with the hat had gone something like this:
"Hmm..McKinnon eh? I remember sorting your brother like it was yesterday..."

"I'm nothing like my brother."

"Nothing? Well I beg differ. You both share a deep ambition to prove yourselves worthy, and you are both willing to do whatever it takes to achieve your dreams."

"I would never consider doing half the things he would!"

"Well I suppose there some truth in that. My my, you're a quick tempered one. And quite stubborn too."

"Can I get sorted or not?"

"Well I suppose I have no choice. A stubbornness and temper like yours wouldn't fit well with Ravenclaw nor Hufflepuff."

"Well this ought to finish soon."

"A sarcastic one too. Unlike your brother though I see a terribly courageous recklessness. He was far from having that. Well then it ought to be...GRYFFINDOR!"

"It didn't take the girl long to make a niche for herself in Gryffindor. She figured out immediately that she wasn't going to get along with half the girls there -- they had very different aspects of fun. For instance, none of them seem very interested in quidditch, which was something Marlene had learned to appreciate after she learned how to fly a broom. Being the outgoing girl she was, she had quickly written them off. They all seemed rather shy, and many already knew one another because they had grown up together. Another disadvantage about growing up on a small island. But Marlene didn't really mope about it -- considering how she ran around the island 'wild', then it's all pretty obvious that she would end up hanging out with the boys. And that's really what she was for most of my time at Hogwarts -- just another one of the guys. She didn't always like dressing up, though her mother would try and send dresses and the like for Christmas and her birthday every year. Marlene liked being outdoors. She liked playing quidditch. She wasn't afraid of getting dirty, or ruining a perfectly good shirt. In short, she wasn’t exactly the lady her mother wanted her to be, though she was a total tomboy either. You couldn't say it was easy for her to get the guys to see me as such though. It was after she tackled someone to get her wand back that she seemed to have earned a little bit of respect, or the boys just got used to her being around. Marlene has never taken no for an answer, and she always ignored them when they told her to go away. That doesn't mean she didn't eventually make friends with some female students. She did, although not in the sense where she hung out with a huge group of girls and gossiped all day. To this day she does still hang out with two or three girls though, after she caught on that the boys weren't seeing her like before anymore, and she had become a girl rather than a friend.

A lot of Marlene's time in Hogwarts felt like something of a blur. She just didn't pay attention to events going on outside Hogwarts' halls. It was bad enough dealing that she had to deal with her parents fighting over who got to see the kids when -- their mother always seemed to win those arguments, although their father did start visiting Hogwarts to take them out every once in a while. Not that those trips turned out so well. When Marlene's brother got sorted into Slytherin his whole mentality seemed to change overnight. He suddenly viewed muggles as disgusting creatures, and hated anything that had any relation to muggles. Marlene slowly started hating him, no matter how much she had admired and looked up to him before. His dislike only grew over the years, and when she got to Hogwrats and was sorted in Gryffindor it was as though he disowned her completely as his sister. Even out of school he decided to stay living with their mother when she decided to move in with their father.

I have read and agreed to the rules of this site. I hereby recognize that my disobedience of these terms will result in punishment at the sole discretion of the admins.

Signed: Mel

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*Marlene is a JKR canon character c: