era aleksander kastrati

personality

[attr="class","profileboxscroll"]Era, in brief: a loner with a rebellious streak and an unfortunate tendency to attract instant dislike from authority figures, but nonetheless deeply honorable and intensely, eternally loyal to her few friends.

Zonjushë Kastrati, as she prefers to be called by anyone who won't just use her first name and have done with it, does not trust others very easily. She's got good reason for it: she has learned from experience that there are plenty of people who think she's ridiculously naïve for being determined to be reliably honest and trustworthy, from whence follows the inevitable conclusion that they themselves do not merit trust. It is difficult to befriend her, because she holds people at a distance until she feels confident that she has their measure, and only lets those few who pass her "tests" get any closer than vague acquaintanceship. In fact, if she could live without relying on anyone else for anything, she would be quite happy.

Era has never gotten on very well with authority, and (perhaps relatedly, perhaps not) authority does not often like her very much either. She has an even harder time trusting teachers than her fellow students, and is unlikely ever to warm up to those whose teaching style is authoritarian in nature: she hates to be ordered around or to be controlled, making her inherently a "difficult" student for a professor too interested in ensuring their students "know their place." Era knows her place, all right, and it's not at the bottom of the heap. The result of all this is that she makes an easy scapegoat for other sorts of troublemakers; she could never be rightly called a prankster, and she certainly wouldn't do anything to hurt her fellow-students, but she often takes the fall for others' misdeeds as well as her own because she just makes such an attractive target.

Those who do get to know the "real" Era have a friend for life. Once she trusts someone, she does so implicitly, and will always, stubbornly, be there for them. It is safe to trust her, in turn, since she considers any promise to carry the same weight as an Unbreakable Vow. She loves her friends dearly and outright enjoys spending time with them, a rare thing since she makes it very clear that she would far rather be alone than in the company of people she doesn't trust.

In her free time, when she isn't hanging out with her friends, Era can usually be found somewhere secluded, and more often than not up off the ground. She likes heights--any heights, really; it matters little whether she's studying in a tree, perched on the peak of a roof, or flying around on a broomstick. One of her goals is to become an Animagus in order to get an extra means of finding solitude; her preference would be to become a bird, but anything that would give her a chance to get away from people would suit her fine.

history

[attr="class","profileboxscroll"]Era's story begins with her parents, first of all, so let us become acquainted with them. First her father, Aleksandër Kastrati: a wizard who graduated from Durmstrang some years ago. He's pretty bright, speaks at least three languages, and generally means well but has a habit of accidentally "biting off more than he can chew" in his personal life. A few iterations of that left him equipped with a decent capacity to solve problems on the fly and a surprising level of skill with regard to untransfiguration, antidotes, and defensive magic, although he still manages to get himself into difficult situations on a fairly regular basis. When he was about twenty or so, he met a lovely Muggle girl around his own age by the name of Shpresa Prifti, who would become Era's mother. Shpresa had some kind of a gift for noticing that which was overlooked, including the sorts of magical things most Muggles ignored; she figured out that there was something odd about Aleksandër (and began forming reasonable hypotheses about what that something might be) long before he admitted that he was a wizard. They married after a courtship of about a year or two, and Era was born a year and a half later.

Only two days after giving birth, Shpresa was found mysteriously dead in a forest a few miles away from their home. No one ever quite figured out what happened to her, though her husband had his suspicions. As a result, Era was raised by a single father, whom she called Babi from the time she could speak, with regular help from her grandparents. She grew up hearing plenty of family stories about her Nënë, with the result that she often felt as if she had known her after all.

Owing to Babi's frequently traveling for various reasons in those days (often for his work, and sometimes also for "other reasons" that he never did adequately explain to his daughter), Era spent a lot of her early childhood at her maternal grandparents' house. Theirs was the closest to their home, so it was easy enough for her to come visit. Her grandparents, Gjysh Kostandin and Gjyshe Afërdita to her, were always happy to see her. Gjyshe often had tasty sweets to share with the child, and both often supplied interesting stories about things they had seen or done--stories that sometimes came complete with pictures or souvenirs. It was in general a very pleasant thing for her; she loved her father, and missed him when he left, but she also loved her grandparents and enjoyed getting to spend time with them. And Babi always came back sooner or later.

When Era was about five or six, her magic started to show, which confused and worried her Muggle grandparents. As discreetly and gracefully as he could, her father had Era start to spend more time with his own parents, since they knew what they were dealing with. She still saw plenty of her mother's parents, though, since they lived much closer to the school where she was starting the Low Cycle that year.

About that school. In addition to the strangeness that proceeded from her newly growing magic, Era showed signs of clashing with her teachers from early on. She had strong opinions about many things, even so young, and when those opinions differed from her teachers', things got rather heated very quickly. Although she was quite eager to learn, she was pegged as a troublemaker from early on, and her gift for being in the middle of the most bizarre situations didn't help that at all. One could really say that she took after her father in that regard, and it only got worse as she got older.

The spring when Era was ten, her father revealed, much to her surprise, that at some point when she was young he had fathered another child. Up to that point, Era had been running on the rather reasonable assumption that she was an only child, and the idea that she had a younger half-sibling took her a little while to adjust to. Babi explained the matter gently, but by the end of it Era was aware that her sibling was in trouble for the same reason that Era herself hadn't been aware of the child's existence, and that her father felt obligated to do something to protect his child. Once she had accepted the idea, Era discovered that she already cared what happened to this child she had never met, and expressed interest in both learning more and ensuring that her sibling was safe.

Around a year passed, during which Babi spent an awful lot of time writing letters, sending them by owl, and receiving missives by the same means. Early in the summer of that next year, Zora arrived.

Era's first impression of her sibling was of a scared little girl who looked remarkably uncomfortable to be wearing a dress that was even fancier than that of the moderately battered doll she clung to as if it were keeping her from drowning. Having been warned ahead of time that Zora didn't speak Albanian yet, Era nonetheless found herself trying to be as friendly as she could through the language barrier, because she thought she could imagine what it must be like to be little and alone in the middle of an unfamiliar train station crowded with strangers you couldn't even talk to because nobody would understand anything you said. It couldn't have been a pleasant situation, but Era's attempts at friendliness, combined with Babi's being able to speak to Zora, really did seem to help.

Over the next few months, Era discovered the joys of being a big sister for the first time. For a while, their father had to translate for them to be able to understand each other, but that hardly impeded Era's eagerness to share their home and their hometown as she knew it with their new family member, and as Zora began to pick up the language, it got easier for them to speak to one another directly. Pretty soon, the siblings were also fast friends.

For reasons mostly involving her father's worry that Era would get herself expelled from Durmstrang if she were to go there, or else get herself killed trying to be more noble than was actually safe, she was instead enrolled at Beauxbatons, with the result that she had one more year of Muggle school to go before she would leave to study magic. That fall, she gamely dove into the fray one more time, not really expecting it to go very well but determined to do her best one more time anyway. It wasn't exactly great, as she had expected, but she survived, and at the end of every day she got to go home to her family, so on the balance it turned out pretty well.

That winter, Era met Zora's mother for the first time. She was initially suspicious of this strange woman, but after watching Babi and Zora interacting with her for a while, Era figured that anyone who made her loved ones that happy couldn't be so bad, and began warming up to the woman she politely addressed as "Zonja Zhupan." It was a pretty uneventful thing, really, just a few days that marked the first of many visits and the slow integration of another member into their family.

The time seemed to fly by pretty quickly, and before Era knew it, she was getting ready for her magical education to begin. Despite her nervousness about being away from her home and family for the first time ever, she was excited all the same.

The best way to describe the first day she arrived at Beauxbatons was "overwhelming." So many new things to see, new people to meet, new places to explore! One way or another, she made it through the day, and was sorted rather quickly into House Rosier. Despite being quite overcome by it all, Era was hopeful that things would turn out pretty well, especially since being surrounded by other young witches and wizards meant that her magic--a significant source of conflict with her classmates back home--would not be an issue in the same way. The fact that several of her eccentricities were shared by other members of her House helped, too.

So it began: her study of magic. Began pretty well, in fact. She struck up acquaintanceships with various classmates, some of which she thought might have the potential to turn into real friendships. The material that they studied was itself also pretty wonderful, though Era was so excessively reserved around her teachers that she once overheard two of them speculating about whether something was wrong with her. Eventually she began warming up to some of them (for values of "them" that cover both teachers and fellow students), though not all, and at any rate she settled into a routine, finding it reasonably comfortable. She wrote to Babi and Zora every week, and enjoyed the letters she got in return.

And then, in late January, what appeared to be a perfectly normal letter from her father turned out to contain horrifying news. Zora had been badly wounded in a werewolf attack. Era's initial response was panic, but with the help of some friends she managed to make arrangements with the school for an emergency visit home.

Upon her arrival back home, Era was informed to her great relief that Zora was going to survive. However, the child was now a werewolf, and injured severely enough on top of that to be temporarily confined to bed--which was not the not-quite-ten-year-old's natural habitat. (Era had turned thirteen the previous November. Zora would be ten in less than a month.) The older sister promptly volunteered to keep Zora company in the hopes that it would stop the child from getting too bored (especially since Znj. Zhupan, who was visiting at the time, had quietly raised the possibility that Zora might try to run off and make her injuries worse in the process). She brought books on interesting subjects that would keep them both well engaged, though she couldn't have predicted exactly how interesting some of those books would get.

It wasn't really anyone's fault, as such, that Zora's exposure to Albanian history and culture had previously been a little limited, but everyone--including the individual in question, so obviously that it broke Era's heart just a little--was startled by Zora's reaction to some details that came up in one of Era's books on the subject. On her first read-through of this particular book, Era hadn't paid that much attention to the passing mention of sworn virgins--women who took on men's roles in society--but to Zora, the concept was obviously a revelation. The conversation that ensued ended up pulling in both their parents, culminating in the revelation that Znj. Zhupan had been sitting on a confusing prophecy holding that Zora's name ought to be "Astrit" for ten years. By the end of it, they had all agreed that Era had a little brother named Astrit.

After that highly eventful little interlude, Era returned to school to finish out the year. Fortunately, the rest of the year was relatively boring, which is to say that nobody she knew was at significant risk of dying of anything in particular and nobody else started claiming that random events had been foretold years before. Definitely the good kind of boring. She stayed in touch with her father and brother, too, by which means she learned that Astrit's mother was going to have to be their permanent houseguest now because apparently her return to where she'd come from was blocked. That was the strangest and most worrying thing, though; otherwise things seemed to be going pretty well.

Summer, including Era's trip home, came and went without too much trouble, as did her second year of school. Her third year, however, things took a bit of an interesting turn. That year, she started a couple of new classes: Divination, Arithmancy, and Magical Creatures. Arithmancy was an absolute disaster; she quickly proved to have no talent for it at all, and still less interest. She had more luck in the class on magical creatures, which was considerably more interesting. The really odd one, though, was her Divination class.

It turned out that Era did have some kind of talent for divination--and not just regular divination the way they were taught in the class. It seemed that she must have opened something up inside herself by trying it, because she made at least one actual prophecy that year--not one of much consequence, and she herself never even found out all the details, but it was a certain sign that she was capable of something. When her father found out, he told her that he thought her mother would probably have been a Seer if she'd been a witch, so Era must be taking after her. Still, inherited or not, the ability was a very strange and sometimes disorienting one to have, especially the part where she woke up, confused, from a trance that she hadn't been aware she was going into, with people staring at her and claiming that she had said something really odd.

For her fourth year, Era did not take Arithmancy. She was a little nervous about Divination--what if she accidentally opened up secrets that really shouldn't be talked about?--but continued with it anyway, supposing that now that her gift was out of the proverbial bag it was unlikely to go back in and she might as well figure out how to control it and make it useful insofar as that was possible.

Her fifth year at Beauxbatons is just beginning. She knows she won't be allowed to compete in the Triwizard Tournament, since she's a month too young, but signed up to be part of the group going to visit Hogwarts for the tournament anyway, primarily because she knows people there...

rp sample

[attr="class","profileboxscroll"](Nationverse, from Memories Remain)
Albania was a tiny country, famed for few things and among the poorest in Europe. That was annoying at the best of times, but at a time like this it drove Era up the wall. Not because her economy, like everyone's, had taken a hit that she couldn't really afford, though that was unpleasant, but because it limited how much she could help her friends. She owed them more than she could pay, even if the debt was only in her heart.

Mihai was the one she visited most often. Part of that was geographic closeness; it wasn't that hard to go visit someone who lived only a few countries over, especially in the Balkan Peninsula where countries are tiny, whereas getting as far as, say, Beijing, or even Tehran, would be a major event in itself just because of the sheer distance involved. Another part of it, though, was that she genuinely liked Mihai on a personal level that was not even all that dependent on their formal relations; she liked his company, enjoyed being around him, and so of course she would want to spend some time helping him. What's more, Romania was a Balkan country too, and Era didn't have to worry--as she did with far larger countries, like Russia--that he might be offended at the prospect that such an unimportant nation wanted to help. So she went to see him, and while there was a limit to what she could offer as far as official aid went, she could do as much personally helping him out as any one person could normally do for a friend.

The first time Era came to check on Mihai, he was unconscious and she had a difficult time talking her way into his hospital room. Apparently the hospital was by that time using the same protocol for him as for all the other victims of nuclear explosions who had ended up there one way or another, which had a rather stringent set of restrictions associated for the safety of both patients and visitors. Era wasn't certain whether all of them were even necessary in this case, but she wasn't the expert here. Eventually, after losing her temper a few times, outing herself as a lesbian and as physiologically incapable of reproducing (during the course of the latter explanation, she even half-sarcastically claimed to be a homunculus engineered to be unable to contaminate the gene pool of natural humans), and agreeing to wear a lead-lined coat over her clothes anyway, she was allowed to see her friend. Gah, some days she really hated how people treated her because she was female.

And then she saw Mihai, for the first time since the blasts, and all of a sudden her annoyance didn't seem nearly so important.

He looked awful. Era had known to expect that, of course. She had seen her friends injured before, and she'd seen pictures of what kind of damage a bomb like the one that had hit Cluj did to people caught in the blast. The combination of the two, though, still managed to catch her by surprise with how horrible it was. Era stared at the half of Mihai's face that was visible, and shuddered at the thought that what was under the bandages was most likely not the other half of his face. That was probably just gone, destroyed completely and healing only slowly if at all. Ruined faces and bodies were awful, but she had thought she could handle such things. It turned out, though, that it was worse when the face so harmed was one she knew well.

She had to get past it, though. "MIHAI LUPESCU, YOU WAKE UP RIGHT NOW!" Era bellowed in her most authoritative voice. There was no response; after a few seconds, she grinned wryly and sat down in the chair next to the Romanian's bed. "Yeah, I didn't really expect that to work," she admitted. "Seemed like it was worth a try, though. We've all missed you, and we're all looking forward to seeing you again when you wake up." She meant herself, mostly, though everyone she'd mentioned the matter to had agreed.

"The doctors say you can probably hear me," she said conversationally, "though I don't know if you're listening. Knowing you, probably not. Still, you make an excellent captive audience in this state, so you're going to sit here while I talk for a while."

She told him what was going on. How the confused and frightened world had come together, at least a little, to help those who had been hurt. How the story had come out, in bits and pieces, of what had actually happened. "Turns out that the guy who decided to shoot at you was named Alex. He seems to have died in the return fire or something like that, so unfortunately you can't participate in killing him, but I brought you a very different Alex who might make you feel a bit better." She pulled a coin out of her purse and dropped it on Mihai's shoulder: a fifty-lek piece. "You've helped me out often enough. It seems only fair to give you what I can now that you need it so badly."

That was the first of several visits. Sometimes Era found somewhere in the rebuilding efforts to work for a while before leaving; other times, all she could do was sit with Mihai and tell him about the state of the world. She still had no idea whether he was listening to her, but she talked anyway.

He woke up, eventually, and Era didn't stop visiting. If anything, she came by more often now, and for longer stretches of time; Mihai was more interesting to talk to while awake, and higher-maintenance such that she could actually do helpful things for him directly. She was glad to have a concrete way to prove she cared.

For the past couple of days, Era had been staying with Mihai, because someone had to and she had decided that now was her turn. It was lunchtime, Era's favorite meal, and as the one who could actually move around well enough to cook she was in charge of deciding what they ate. It might be the case that she had made a point, as unobtrusively as possible, of giving Mihai the larger share since his health was so much worse. You've got to keep up your strength to heal, my friend...

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