underthehillandunderand

GENERAL

NAME: Basil Underhill
NICKNAMES: Hobbit, Flower Child
AGE/DOB: 15/June 14
BLOOD STATUS: half-blood (half-blood mother, unknown father)
GENDER/PRONOUNS: male, he/him
SEXUALITY: A L L
HOMETOWN: Guntersville, Alabama. Small but popular hot-spot tourist attraction primarily for fishing, hiking, and other outdoor activities. Also notorious for being a major town in what’s considered “Meth Mountain”. Primary population of muggles, with the closest major wizarding presence being in Huntsville.

CONCEPT: Loving country bumpkin who is too into science to be a wizard.

PHYSICAL

APPEARANCE: Serious scarring on left arm from a vicious dog attack. In uniform, looks like he doesn’t even know what an iron is. Probably slept in his shirt last night. Where did his tie go? He doesn’t know. He’s also missing a sock. Outside of a uniform, he doesn’t seem to understand what shoes are. He lives in jeans and t-shirts, no matter the weather. Snow isn’t something one sees too often in Alabama.

HEIGHT: 5’10” and growing like a weed.

PB: Dylan Everett

PERSONALITY

LIKES: The smell of fresh cut grass, paper, and candles. The biggest tree in his moms' yard, especially during a rainstorm. Going out on the lake with his no-maj friends and jumping off Goat Island. Snakes, lizards, and other scaly creatures. Big books of complicated equations and magic that makes his head spin with numbers and facts. His formerly long, luscious hair. Running around barefoot in the Alabama summer without a care in the world about how asphalt is supposed to be "hot." Timetables and organization and tight deadlines. Hearing people laugh.

DISLIKES: Being considered a delinquent or stupid. English and biology classes. Mayonnaise or condiments on his fries. An overcooked steak. His biological mother being brought up or being compared to her. People bringing up the fact he's adopted or that his moms are weird. Being told he's weird. Alabama in general. Snow and humidity. Getting called a flower child because his name is Basil, or Hobbit because his last name is Underhill and people got too into JRR Tolkein, in his opinion. Fantasy books, especially Tolkein's works. Dogs.

PERSONALITY:

Default Basil is a cheerful boy with a fairly laidback attitude towards his personal life but a great drive to make others happy and enjoy themselves. Got homework issues? He’ll help, even if he has no idea of the subject. Need a shoulder to cry on? Here’s two, and a plate of cookies he bought from Wal-Mart. Nervous about asking out that guy (or gal) you like? He’s with you every step of the way. On the reverse side of this personality coin, he tends to be nosy. Too nosy. Up in your business and personal space sort of nosy.

He is also very physically affectionate and emotional. His moms had instilled both of these things in him, and for the most part his time around other, more emotionally stunted boys his age appears to have had little effect on how he expresses himself. Unfortunately (unless you’re someone who doesn’t like to be touched), the opposite is true. He’d been fiercely bullied for this in middle school, by girls and boys who thought he was weird and too feminine. This has caused him to be more uncertain in showing his affection to fellow students or to cry in front of them. On the plus side, he tends to ask if it’s okay to hug someone before he does, having become more respectful of people’s boundaries.

All this “being in tune with your emotions” stuff, ever-present smile and word of encouragement, lack of shoes, and propensity to eat as though he’s trying to fill a black hole in his stomach contributed to this image that Basil is the embodiment of a flower child or unusually tall hobbit. He does little to try and counter this image, though he’s not appreciative of the nicknames that come out of it. Of course, middling grades and special classes outside of school also led to this idea that Basil just doesn’t care, and nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, he is emotional, and he doesn’t shut that side out while he’s coming to decisions or working out a problem, but he is also incredibly analytical, fascinated with taking apart the building blocks of the universe and seeing how everything functions. The boy his no-maj friends see versus the boy in a physics or transfiguration course appear to be two entirely different boys, at least until he starts tearing up from the joy of riddling out a difficult problem or spell.

This desire to learn how everything works is generally applied to his life as well, with mixed results. He’ll try almost anything once, just to see how it’s done. He’ll talk to anyone, if only to learn what makes them tick. Sports? He’s got terrible hand-eye coordination, but he can run and he wants to learn what it’s like to play soccer, so sure. A school where he can mix with people from all sorts of economic classes and countries while fueling his need to learn the science of magic? Sign him the heck up. But it’s important to know that even as he’s driven to learn all he can, he is very genuine in his motivations. He genuinely loves science and math, he genuinely loves his friends. He wants people to be happy and have fun, and he himself has the most fun when he knows everyone else is, even if he can’t be part of the festivities because he’s the one in charge of keeping things going.

So when he gets frustrated and in over his head, and let’s face it, with his personality that happens all the time, don’t be surprised to see a pair of glassy eyes staring off into the middle distance or a clipboard that’s a little too close to his face to be readable. Because of his previously mentioned bullying, he has a harder time opening up when he’s in distress, though if you give him a plate of cookies and tell him that you’re there for him, he’ll begin crying just out of relief before he talks about what’s bothering him. Usually though, he’ll push through his distress with a smile, faking it until he’s figured out the solution to his problem or can make a timely retreat to vent his stress in private.

tl;dr Basil is a social butterfly who prefers to let others have the fun while he keeps things going. He’s incredibly supportive of his friends and family, though past bullying has limited his ability to immediately open up to strangers. He has a tendency to get overwhelmed and tries to fake through his own anxiety until he’s able to find a solution or hide away to vent his feelings. And, underneath it all, he’s driven by the desire to learn how everything works, both in magic and in life.

SKILLS

LANGUAGES SPOKEN: English, conversational Spanish thanks to the chicken farms and plant he’s grown up near

PATRONUS: With the amount of cheer Basil has, he could probably cast a Patronus after some effort, but he’s never even learned those are a thing. If he were to cast one, it’d definitely be a whippet: a small, fast dog who is one part couch potato and one part speed racer. They can be sensitive and prone to stress if not properly socialized and are incredibly sensitive to being touched.

SKILLS: Chemistry and Physics: Going to a no-maj school, he was exposed to these concepts early on and they are right up his ally when it comes to taking things apart and putting them back together to understand. The conceit of both these disciplines are the complex equations one can take apart, pair with other equations, and then piece it all together to get a cohesive answer. This skill can also be applied to his ability to break down complicated spells or potions to figure out how they work (he still finds potions to be boring because it’s mostly just following recipes. He’d be much more happy making his own).
Organizational Skills: This boy grew up helping his moms run a wedding venue. He is no stranger to emotional hiccups and the stress of a tight deadline, or even working with a miniscule to nothing budget. Give him a clipboard and ten minutes, and he’ll churn out a rough timetable and list of supplies needed for the function he’s been given. He’s also partial to not sleeping when it comes to high-stakes affairs, so slipping a bit of a sleeping potion in his water wouldn’t be amiss at times.
Running: Child, please come back. He appears to have infinite stamina, and this, as well as his ever-growing height, appears to be what his bottomless stomach fuels. As someone who depended primarily on bikes or his own two feet to get around, he’s gotten fast. He was actually on his middle school and high school track and field teams, and he’d love to be able to get a running group together in the future.

HISTORY

FAMILY MEMBERS:

Annemarie Underhill, halfblood, occupation unknown: The most impressive thing this woman ever did was disappear for a year when she was sixteen and come home three months pregnant. She is not spoken of in the Underhill household, unless Basil starts asking questions. He knows a little about her, primarily that she loved potions. Maybe this is why he finds the class boring.

Christian “Christi” Underhill, halfblood, wedding venue owner and planner: Annemarie’s older by four years sister and Basil’s Mom. She took Basil as her own son after her little sister flaked out on the premature baby, and she raised him to be who he is, an open-hearted, caring young man. She also believed, as her parents before her, that magic is a tool and doesn’t make them special, and it was her decision to send Basil to a no-maj school and try to teach him magic at home as she learned from her mom. Even though Basil is now taking a different path to life than she expected, she is very proud of him and is one of his biggest supporters.

Danielle “Danni” Richardson, muggle, photographer: Basil’s Momma. She joined Christian in an unofficial marriage despite Grandma Underhill’s initial dislike of the woman. Basil was a toddler at the time, and he was the flower girl for the small ceremony. She loves Basil dearly, having adopted him as her own son even if the paperwork doesn’t even exist thanks to Alabama’s laws on same-sex marriage. She’s the more forgiving of the two parents, preferring to spoil Basil and let him run free than have him stay at home and work.

Grandma Underhill, halfblood, retired: While she had been a strict parent in Christian’s youth, Grandma Underhill has softened up in her old years. Now that her husband has passed, she’s given up the family house for her daughter’s family, preferring a small cottage surrounded by her garden. Basil will visit with her on a near daily basis, talking her ear off about science and boys and the like. Grandma doesn’t always understand what he’s talking about, and she still has her misgivings on her eldest and now her grandson being attracted to their own gender, but she’s made peace with her life. She has her garden, her chickens, and a family that hasn’t shut her out despite her former personality, and that’s all she needs.

HISTORY:

Basil is what happens when you get overly strict parents, imaginative young teenagers, and long, humid summers where nothing much happens but hey, there’s a bunch of strangers that flock to town to fish. Basically, he is a child born out of wedlock after his mother ran away from home with a stranger, only to return home with a black eye and a belly full of baby. Annemarie didn’t stay long, leaving three weeks after he was born prematurely. By this point, his grandfather had gotten hurt working at the chicken plant, and though Grandma Underhill had softened towards her children, she was unwilling to raise a third. So, Christian stepped in, unofficially adopting her sister’s son to raise as her own. And, three years later, she was joined by her lover, Danielle.

Despite this not so fortunate start on life, Basil was raised in an extremely loving family and in the middle of Christian’s ever-growing wedding business. Where most toddlers would be learning how to walk in the privacy of their home, Basil was tottering after grooms and smearing peanut butter on lace tablecloths or chasing down the errant rat insisting on making the old barn its home. By the time he could walk and talk and reason reliably, he was given the all-important task of cheering up nervous or upset wedding participants. And he was a natural at it. Everyone loved Basil, and he loved them. Well, most of them. When he was six, a gentleman decided to bring his pet dog with him. As it turned out, this dog did not like children, but Basil liked him. It ended with a whole lot of blood and Christian muttering frantically about how bad her healing magic was while Danielle drove them both to the hospital. Since then, Basil has not been a fan of dogs, especially German Shepherds.

Basil did not attend a school for witches and wizards growing up. Instead, he attended the local muggle school system to get his learning. Grandma Underhill’s great-great-grandmother had immigrated from Cornwall when she was a toddler, well before she could enter Hogwarts. The woman had been kept out of muggle schools and thus, when she fell in love with a muggle boy, she found her knowledge of the real world incredibly lacking. Ever since then, the Underhill’s magical folk regarded magic as a tool to be used like any other. It didn’t make them special, and there was in fact a lot a witch or wizard could learn from the muggles around them. This attitude persisted into Christian. While her wandwork was fairly skilled, it was all technique passed through the family line, learned from Grandma Underhill and honed when she began renovating the barn at age seventeen. Danielle meanwhile was a muggle, so it was Christian who began to teach Basil wandwork with a stick and a word.

And Basil thrived for a while this way. To him, he was no better than the no-majs at school, and with his cheerful personality, he was always quick to make a friend. But as he got older and he began to learn more of the world around him, Christian and Danielle had a child who would ask them questions they just didn’t know. Questions like how did magic “turn off” gravity to make things float? Did plants made to magically accelerate their growth still use up the nutrients in the soil? If not, what fed them? They were able to fend off his questions until fourth grade. Overwhelmed with Basil’s unceasing curiosity, they contacted one of their witch friends in Huntsville, who told them of a special after-school class they could take him to three days a week. The mothers agreed to tell Basil, who jumped at the chance to learn from someone new. Plus, it was like a Japanese cram school, and Basil was starting to really ramp into his anime phase.

And thus he began classes at Penn Learning Center, rapidly filling the void of knowledge for both himself and his moms. He made friends too, but this had a peculiar effect on his life at muggle school. He’d never been one to do homework (too boring) or his classwork (well, not the way teachers wanted it at least), so his grades were never the best. But Penn Learning Center was touted as a place to go to if you were truly stupid, and now Basil attended there almost as much as he did normal classes. Ergo, to an elementary schooler’s mind, Basil was stupid. It didn’t help manners in the least when Penn, which was really only meant as a supplement for homeschoolers and not one’s only source of magical education, had to build a special curriculum for Basil, effectively isolating him from his fellow magical youths.

And then there was the matter of, well. This was Alabama, and he lived with two women, worked at a wedding venue, and had the tendency to wear his hair long and his shirts floral. This was a town where the T in LGBT was an artifact, and if you weren’t a good ole Southern boy, people would give you the side-eye. When Basil tried to kiss Henry Patil at the sixth grade dance, he began to be bullied for being a girl.

Still, despite all these setbacks, Basil was a cheerful boy whose friends that persisted he loved dearly. Time away from school and the center were spent running all over Sand Mountain, terrorizing chickens or hiking down to the lake to throw stones and improvise fishing rods. He continued to work at the venue, eventually getting put in charge of making sure everyone was where they needed to be. He excelled at it, and he never got serious, typically bouncing from one foot to the next to burn off the excess energy while he talked to people. And he learned. This boy was a sponge for knowledge, especially the sciences and maths, and he would constantly be making experiments to pit magic against the laws of nature to see how they interacted. And it was this fascination that led his teacher at the learning center to contact Gooseberry about a young man who had the makings of a remarkable wizard.

Though his teachers saw his potential, Christian put her foot down immediately. Magic didn’t make anyone special, and she didn’t want Basil to start thinking he was better than his muggle friends and clients. Plus, she didn’t want her baby boy to go away quite so soon, perhaps a little worried that he’d end up running away like his birth mother did. When the learning center contacted Gooseberry and she received a letter, she tore it apart. And Basil started high school with his muggle friends.

That freshman year made all the difference. Guntersville High didn’t take just from its own school system’s elementary and middle schools. It was an aggregate for the county, and that meant new people. That meant the more isolated kids who didn’t get a chance to interact with people who were different from them rubbed shoulders with the ever-friendly Basil who was scared of dogs, weirdly good at chemistry and physics and math, did a woman’s job, and liked boys and girls. In short, Basil was very, very different and more than a little scary. And when he tried to act friendly to Jeremy Finch, county bully, he came home with a school suspension and tears in his eyes. And it didn’t stop.

Christmas break rolled around, and Christian couldn’t stand her boy getting bullied for who he was anymore. She remembered Gooseberry and contacted the learning center to see if it was too late to send Basil there. Fortunately, she was able to get him signed up to begin his sophomore year. And so Basil Underhill finally arrived with smile firmly in place, shoes nowhere to be found, and a drive to learn everything he could while here.

SCHOOL

YEAR: Sophomore
HOUSE: Azurecrest
SORTING: Unsurprisingly, Ebonhide fought especially hard for Basil to join its house. A young wizard interested in studying the laws of nature and how magic affects them? That seems right up Ebonhide’s alley, right? In fact, when Basil turned to Azurecrest, the bear was perhaps the most astonished. Ribbonfin too, had hoped to snare the boy, as he seemed to live to try and uplift others, but still the fish failed too. Coppertale never stood a chance as Basil never considered himself a leader; people just naturally followed him when it came to organizing things. But Azurecrest. Why Azurecrest? Well, what he told everyone later is that he just liked the color blue. But really, the bluejay spoke to him in a way the others couldn’t It knew that Basil’s empathy and his studious nature both stemmed from one place – it was fun. It was fun to make people laugh, it was fun to see how nature and magic worked together or to organize events for others to enjoy, and Azurecrest promised that if he joined their house, he could continue to have fun with a group that accepted him, quirks and all.
WAND: hornbeam with unicorn hair, 12 inches and sturdy
FAMILIAR: a crested gecko name Banana

CLASSES: Hermeticism, History of Magic, Transfiguration, Potions, Artificing, Aesthetic Magic
ADVANCED STUDY: Basil would like to one day take Pre-Healer studies as there doesn’t seem to be a “combine science and magic” class readily available. Obviously, it’s a bit too soon for him now, but he still has the scars from his dog attack and hasn’t grown out of the mindset that magic is a tool to be used practically and only when needed. What better way to use magic than to heal? Or, you know, create new theories of physics.
SENIOR PROJECT: He has no idea yet. Something, something, new laws of nature that include magic maybe.
ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: He loves his classes to no end, with no small surprise his favorite being hermeticism. It is right up his alley, and there lies a lot of potential in him learning to create his own spells in the future. He had hoped to learn more about how magic came to be studied in History of Magic, but that ended up being his least favorite and thus worst class. Potions is a pretty close second, but he at least is able to read about why different plants do what they do.

EXTRACURRICULARS: Extracurricular: Boating, outdoor exploration, event committee

OOC

NAME: Isaiah, he/they
EMAIL: brothfeldt@yahoo.com
CDJ: I have no idea what this is
OTHER PREFERRED CONTACT: discord (PM me), dropbox, or tumblr (galacticcannibalisms)
TIME ZONE: Central