Name: Eibhlin "Eilidh" Caitrìona Sutherland
House: Ravenclaw
Bloodline: Halfblood [Muggle Da, Witch Mum]
Year: Sixth
Physical Appearance: With the general exception of a wedding on a plain in Antarctica, Eibhlin stands out wherever she goes. Her white hair, usually pulled back into a ponytail or a chignon, blends almost seamlessly on her shoulders and over her forehead--her skin is pale as a Veela's. Since she cannot tan, she is very grateful for magic's aid in deflecting the sun. She hasn't burned badly in a very long time, and she is under the impression that her innate magic saved her from a few blistering sunburns as it did the typical scrapes, bruises, and bullies. Her otherworldly colouring is mitigated slightly by the generally mundane appearance of her individual features--a heart-shaped, almost Anglo-Saxon face, an upturned nose, medium eyelashes, high cheekbones, and a high-cresting forehead.
Her cheeks and jawline hold a slightly ruddy hue, but over the back of her hands and across her forehead, you can see the faintest touch of fragile blue, the mark of her veins. This is even more obvious over her legs, torso, and upper arms, so she usually wears long sleeves and either trousers or long skirts. A tendency towards dark, saturated colours makes her look like a somehow-dressed ghost.
Eyes striated in blue tourmaline with a faint overlay of a pinkish hue hide behind heavy-rimmed black glasses. When she was young, Muggles would have termed her legally blind because myopia, strabismus and nystagmus plagued her vision so badly that she could only see light and dark some days. Several sessions at St. Mungo's solved a good deal of this; her left eye no longer wandered, and her gaze no longer twitched involuntarily as if she were reading an invisible book. However, Eilidh's still quite shortsighted, and when she's exhausted, her eyes slip back into the familiar and hated pattern of shaking. She has a tendency to swivel her head to compensate, making her eyes stay still in one place relative to her face.
Not only was Eilidh born the only albino in her family for generations, she is short to their tall and musical to their athletic. Her balance and coordination are shabby at best, and she barely skims five feet tall with shoes on. She's fairly flexible and somewhat fast, but she only realises this under duress. All Eibhlin thinks is that she's got clever hands trapped in a clumsy body, and for many years that was all she utilised. Only after a fluke placed her on the Ravenclaw Quidditch team and her leadership prowess rocketed her through the hierarchy to captain did she start reaping the benefits of her characteristic drive.
Between her fifth and sixth year, a daily five-kilometre run shaved off the fifteen pounds of pleasant if slight curves Eilidh once possessed. She's now an angular, jagged ninety-four pounds of corded determination. After having one of her triple-pierced earrings torn out in an intense Quidditch practice, she only wears one pair of earrings, usually simpler studs. She is glad that Ravenclaw's colours are a deep blue, because pastels look hideous on her. Her hair has begun breaking easily in its typical ponytail or bun, so she has begun wearing her hair down more often.
Personality: Eibhlin's most interesting facets to psychologists are probably the least interesting to her. She has an eidetic memory, but she doesn't view this as particularly unusual because she's never been without it. She doesn't care at all if you forget her name, but she hates to have people mispronounce it. Her impulses are generally quite rational, and all come under one compulsion or another. When her IQ was last tested, around the age of eight, it was in a language in which she was not yet fluent, and yet she still registered off the scale. Why would anyone care about these things? To Eilidh, they are dull. She finds psychology to be a rather patchy science unworthy of the name. According to Eilidh, "Dr. Gould is a bit of an eejit when it comes to research, but his concepts are generally on the mark. How on earth could intelligence be innate or measurable? It's like trying to create three dimensions in a plane." Strange dreams do not merit the conclusion of an Electra complex, and a '197' does not sum up your competence and ability to succeed in life. To Eilidh, it's perfectly simple.
Her primary talent is in language, and she speaks the "most important ones" fluently: her parents' Scots-tinted English, her pipes tutor's Gaidhlig, her maternal ancestors' Slovak, and her adopted home's Mandarin. She's in the process of studying Sanskrit, Arabic, and Korean, but can only put together sentences with the vocabulary and syntax of a five-year-old, which makes her very frustrated indeed. Most of the Romance languages come easily to her due to many years of Latin through Muggle elementary school, though she often trips over the similarity in conjugation between Spanish and Italian. Eilidh also considers mathematics and music languages in their own right. She is mildly good at the former, and the latter is a way she could exclusively communicate the rest of her life.
While ambition is still the biggest motivator in Eibhlin's life, frustration is often a big push forward. Embarrassed by shortcomings, mental and physical, Eilidh is ridiculously angry with herself when the physical ones cannot be overcome. By the age of seven, she had developed an innate central focus, a calm state where her senses are heightened and her emotions dulled. This has been sharpened to a pinprick of light which shines on her obsessions, which have been music for ages and becoming an Animagus since she learned about them. Running daily seems to sharpen this focused state. Her skill in Transfiguration, second in her talents only to Ancient Runes, benefits from it. There are only a few circumstances that can break this focus, and most of them relate to her fears of failure and being out of control.
For many years of her life, Eilidh was subject to the caprices of her physical difficulties, mainly her eyesight and sensitivity to light. She was subject to the rapidly changing nature of her family, and had to adjust many times to different family structures. When these structures included her father, she was subject to the various cultures of the countries where they were living. Thus for most of her life, she had to wait for changes to finish happening before she could really feel in control again. Now that things are starting to come unlaced in her life, she detests the feeling that she is riding in the backseat—she would much rather be in control. Failure gives her the same overwhelming anxiety; to Eilidh, the two are very much related. Since she likes things to be done her way and done well, it comes as no shock that she has become quite the perfectionist over the years.
While there is no way one could describe Eilidh as anxious or fearful, this is because she covers up any other trace of neuroticism with fierce compulsiveness. Any paper she turns in is crisp and well-edited. She aligns things with edges of desks, walls, shelves. Every book on the shelves in her room at her mother's house is alphabetised. This sort of thing gets worse when she is confronted with the possibility of failure, one of her biggest fears, though she'll vehemently deny it. She generally tends to shy away from white paper. She says it's because it doesn't provide enough contrast for her eyes, but that makes no sense when you realise that she prefers the off-white of parchment. Maybe it's an unconscious reaction to the colour itself.
Eilidh is narcissistic to the point of introversion, but not particularly elitist. Perhaps this is because of her halfblood roots, perhaps it is because of her mum's sister who was killed in Northern Ireland whilst liaising with the Muggles, perhaps it is because of that summer she spent with her father in Sudan. If she dislikes you, it’s because of your individual personality traits, not because you’re ‘one of those stupid people’ or ‘one of those dark people’ or ‘one of those tall people’. Considering that Eilidh holds little stock by psychology, this is not something she thinks about much. Suffice it to say the only thing she's particularly intolerant of is intolerance.
Music is the one pure language to Eilidh, and she pursues many instruments, from piano to bagpipes to whistles and recorders. Eilidh considers thunderstorms to be sonatas--the allegro rain, the andante thunder, the presto wind. As such, she likes them a lot and has a tendency to sit out in the rain, producing many a head cold. Yay Pepper-up Potion.
Eilidh has a hard time coming to terms with other people’s views and stereotypes. Like many people, she dislikes being labeled, but she will take more kindly to terms relating to her mind rather than her body. A certain Hufflepuff seventh year still has a scar from when he called her ‘wonder bread’ in her second year. She also detests people who attempt to help her, even if she really needs the assistance. The Ravenclaw tends to be a low self-monitor: she acts about the same whether somebody is watching or not. This may stem from the poor self-image she had as a child—then, it didn’t matter whether someone was looking at her or not, she was still ugly. Now, it’s just become a habit that you neither suck up to people nor condescend to them.
Given Eilidh’s generally bookish nature, she didn’t make many friends during her first few years. She tends to base things more on what she can use facts to prove, often ignoring her intuition altogether. These traits combined with her introversion make her a difficult person to approach on occasion. Also, she’s never really learned the mechanics of a deep relationship with someone her own age. All her friends in her childhood were always much older, and her parents and brothers didn’t give her much to go on. This makes her feel horribly insecure when it comes to any sort of deep feelings, especially those of love. Tycho’s only just managing to bring her out of this shell, and she still comes off very much awkward and insecure.
A lot of people can get the vibe that Eilidh is brash and overconfident, but she really tends to be insecure about anything she can’t prove with indisputable fact. When she’s feeling deep emotion, it’s impossible to read from her face or her voice, a stony mask. She hasn’t quite mastered how to hide it in her body language, however. With the recent stress in her life, one will often find her with the spadelike heel of her hand digging into her forehead and her knees drawn up.
Character's History:
On the fourth of November, 1978, Hamish Sutherland and Miroslava Chehachkova met at a party in Bonn. Given the fact that neither of them spoke fluent German but both of them spoke English, they decided to talk in a corner, and somehow it ended up that they had kissed before the night was over. Hamish fell in love with his chestnut-haired Slavic beauty faster than a frog down a well, and they were soon living in the same flat in a middle-class suburb of London.
Hamish worked in the sprawling bureaucracy that was the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and he had absolutely no idea where it was that Miroslava disappeared to every day. Soon, though, she revealed to him four things: she was a pureblood witch, she had somehow finagled naturalisation as a UK citizen, she was working at their Ministry of Magic, and she was six weeks pregnant. Because Hamish needed to appear a moral man in order for his career to progress, the wedding was held at once, with unsurprisingly few members of Miroslava’s family in attendance—they were living in Czechoslovakia, and the stern rule of the magical and Muggle governments there prohibited those few who didn’t mind her marriage to a Muggle from coming.
Things progressed quickly after that—Hamish junior was born, followed four years later by another son, Beathan. Both were Squibs, despite the fact that Hamish had come from a town famous for its high wizarding population. Miroslava tried very hard to show that they were manifesting magical talent, but it never came.
When Beathan was three, his father was promoted to a position as part of the diplomatic corps, and the family of four moved to Beijing. Miroslava’s magic allowed her to flit back to London for work easily. Still, it was obvious that this trip was draining her physically and their marriage emotionally.
Eibhlin was born on a steamy day in late June in the Eastern Hospital of Beijing. Hamish was not in attendance, as he was stuck in Hong Kong. Jubilantly explaining the news over the phone, Miroslava didn’t know the English word for ‘albino’. She had to substitute in the phrase 'snow-child', a close translation from the Slovak, but things came to light soon enough. For seven years they took care of their precocious child as best they could. They gave her large-print books in English, Slovak, and Chinese, and she was reading the fundamentals of all three before the age of two. A devious little thing, she decided that she would only speak Gaelic to her mother, Slovak to her father, and a language she made up to both brothers.
Meanwhile, both Hamish and Miroslava tried very hard to improve Eilidh’s obviously impaired vision. Miroslava charmed hats that Hamish bought to improve her ultraviolet protection. Hamish made sure he could pay for the visits to St. Mungo’s for surgery, though he was always a bit leery about what was actually going on. Things went well for several years, and by the age of six, Eilidh, under the name Song Anli, was sitting middle school classes in one of Beijing’s better-funded schools.
In 1997, everything in Eilidh’s family fell apart. Hamish was promoted to ambassador, and Miroslava got a giant research grant from the Department of Mysteries. The tensions were just running too high, and the couple separated. Hamish junior left to go to university at St. Andrew’s. Beathan stayed with his father in Beijing, and Eilidh went with her mother back to the United Kingdom. They skipped around various flats in London and environs, but never really stayed in one place. Eilidh wreaked havoc on the teachers she was faced with, and Miroslava couldn’t handle the divorce proceedings, the new job responsibilities, and a devastatingly clever and destructive seven-year-old all at once.
Eilidh was finally shunted to live with Hamish’s sister Mairi in Kinlochbervie. The woman taught mathematics at a local university, so Eilidh was mainly instructed by her for two years. After the divorce was finished, though, Miroslava refused to do anything with her former husband’s family, so she turned Eilidh’s world upside down once again.
After several months in Miroslava’s small Dornoch home, being called Nadezhda because even the thought of the name Hamish had chosen made the woman intensely upset, Eilidh moved in with her maternal aunt Drahomira in Northern Ireland. Some tricky business happened in Belfast during that time, though, and Drahomira was caught in the crossfire one day on the way to Eilidh’s school. Hamish finally gained partial custody, and for two years, Eilidh stayed at the embassy in Beijing over the summer. Advanced three grades, she went to Muggle secondary school in Dornoch with her mother.
While her parents—especially Miroslava—were always trying to show that her two older brothers were manifesting magical talent, they didn't even try to show Eilidh's latent talent. With Eilidh's sense of inner focus, it was difficult to displace her calm enough for unexplainable events to occur, so she was the only one unsurprised when the day came that the letter in lime-green ink arrived.
So Eilidh went off to Hogwarts, where she stuck in teachers' memories more than students, as her nose was generally in a book and her head in the sky. She always received top marks, and was rewarded last term with prefect status, though with the current turn of events in her life, she’s rather glad to have dropped that responsibility. In the middle of the first term of Eilidh’s sixth year, her mother collapsed at work and was diagnosed with a malignant tumour in her brain. Eilidh is not entirely sure how she should go about dealing with this, though with the Muggle medicine the woman once scorned, Miroslava seems to be getting better. Coupling that with eleven NEWT courses, being Quidditch captain, and her first serious relationship, Eilidh is under a lot of stress, and she can’t wait to graduate.