profile: senior year

[peanutbuttercup]

i backed my car into a cop car the other day
well he just drove off, sometimes
life's okay

GENERAL

NAME: Reece Godfrey Downing.
NICKNAMES: Some call him Reece's Pieces.
AGE/DOB: 17 / December 29 1996 (Double Capricorn.)
BLOOD STATUS: Half-blood.
GENDER/PRONOUNS: Male. He/him.
SEXUALITY: Heterosexual.
HOMETOWN: Manhattan, NYC, New York.

Before transferring to Gooseberry, he attended Covenstead, a K-12 school located in the Upper East Side. It's a day school and primarily serves the children of MACUSA employees. Instead of a house system, it boasts several magnet schools with highly specialized and focused curriculum, starting in grade 9. Their school of healing is particularly prestigious.

CONCEPT: Azurcrest's least Grotto-friendly prefect in a decade.

PHYSICAL

APPEARANCE: Reece always look exactly as chaotic as his mind is: his uniformed's never on quite right, his hair's firmly in the territory of unruly, and he usually has a pencil or his wand tucked behind his ear. This year he's also gained a pair of very unfashionable reading glasses that often end up stuffed haphazardly in one of his pockets when he's not using them.

HEIGHT: 6'0" and finally done growing, thank god.

PB: Robert Sheehan.

PERSONALITY

LIKES: Knick knacks. Muggle coins (ask him about his collection). Anything small and interesting-looking, really. He's a magpie at heart. Legos. Puns. Dad jokes. His dad has a truly questionable sense of humor and it rubbed off on him bad. Astrology (#justcapricornthings).

DISLIKES: Being under pressure. Hard deadlines. Silence. Allergies. His parents used to joke he was allergic to outside. Not so funny now he's at a CAMP SCHOOL. Most kinds of food (he's a super picky eater). Being made fun of for being a super picky eater. Really, don't.

PERSONALITY:

Although he's introverted and a little shy when it comes to starting conversations, other people are very important to Reece. His friends have a friend for life, and his acquaintances have a friend even if they don't know it yet. Good-tempered and with a strong sense of humor, Reece is always willing to spend time with a classmate who's down in the dumps if it means cheering them up a little bit.

This is his approach to everything he does in life, really: if he sees a problem and thinks he might be able to fix it or even improve the situation a little bit, he'll take that action. He grew up in a family that prioritized teamwork and compassion, and even more than he hates seeing other people unhappy, he hates seeing them be cruel to one another.

So as a prefect, he's big on the Golden Rule. He'd also prefer it if his classmates didn't do anything explicitly dangerous. A very cautious person himself, he doesn't understand taking unnecessary risks. He'd much rather stay inside than get sunburned, and isn't the kind of person you're going to catch wandering around after curfew. Although he has a natural curiosity, it's very academic; if he can google the answer to something instead of going out in the world and experiencing it, that's preferable to him.

His mind works so quickly and he's always got so many consectutive trains of thought going that his focus is not always the best, and he often finds himself distracted during class. He's not the greatest at time management and will often work on his own personal projects when he should be doing his homework, causing him to finish the school assignments last-minute. His lightning-fast thought process hampers him in other ways, too: he struggles a little with social anxiety, and can think up a million different ways for a conversation to go badly before he's even initiated it. He gets flustered easily when he feels like he's flubbing a conversation, which often makes him flub it even worse.

In general, he struggles with big-picture thinking. He has a very mechanical and active mind, but he's much more focused on figuring out why things work the way they do rather than figuring out how everything interacts in the grand scheme of things. That's why he's so drawn to clockwork toys and contraptions; every problem has a definite source, and it's usually one you can fix with your hands.

But this approach to problem-solving will come in handy for him as he mediates arguments between his classmates, too. People are just another kind of puzzle; sometimes big conflict arises from small problems with easy fixes. His level-headed thinking, fairness and willingness to listen to both sides of a story make him a natural choice for an impartial mediator.

Going into his senior year at Gooseberry, his prefecting style has gotten a little stricter. He was happy to just warn his classmates off making bad choices when it was all fun and games, but now that they've actually been in danger and he was helpless to do anything about it, he's all about prevention. Going into the woods seems like a phenomenally bad idea to him, and anyone who doesn't show proper caution when attending parties is going to get a strong, Rafael Ramirez-inspired talking to.

SKILLS

LANGUAGES SPOKEN: Fluent English; conversational Spanish. His Spanish has improved over the summer after spending August living in Mexico with Cristiane and Ricardo.

PATRONUS: Antelope jackrabbit; can cast. Info here.

SKILLS:

Tinkering. Reece has been constructing gadgets and gizmos since before he was reliably using magic. His childhood involved a lot of Lego-and-Tinkertoy Rube Goldberg machines. Now that he's a little older, his engineering projects have been getting more complex. He's probably going to make some kind of handy gadget as his senior project, but he's also vaguely considering making some kind of toy instead, which is also a hobby of his.

Artificing. To imbue his little devices with magic, naturally. He's particularly adept at making things behave like bugs and animals, and his long-standing project of clockwork insects has achieved a mild kind of intelligence as of this year. The jailbreak attempts are becoming more frequent.

Sketching. He wouldn't consider himself an artist, but he's very good at technical drawings. Machines and buildings come to him much more naturally than faces and figures, but he can do some animals reliably.

Sculpture. Again, he wouldn't consider this to be an artistic pursuit unless someone else pointed out to him that it is, but he's very good at making animals and people out of scrap metal. He's made his own chess set and a host of little animals.

Muggle tech. His family is very integrated into the nomaj world and he understands computers and other muggle technologies. He can take apart and reassemble a radio in an hour flat, and improve it with charms and enchantments to boot.

Conflict resolution. Guess who took a three-week seminar, bitches.

(Knife-throwing). He hasn't learned this yet, but Roxie's gonna teach him this year. NEW AND IMPROVED REECE IS WEAPONIZED.

HISTORY

FAMILY MEMBERS:

Andrea Webster-Downing, mother. Chief of Staff to Carolyn Sweeney, the MACUSA rep from New York.
Shaun Downing, father. Nomaj journalist.
Sadie Downing, aunt. MACUSA employee.

Aaron Downing, brother. Covenstead alum. Intern to the MACUSA rep from [Maryland?].
Cristiane Ramirez, sister. Gooseberry alum (Azurcrest). Actress.

Ricardo Ramirez, brother-in-law. Gooseberry alum (Coppertale). Actor.
Rafael Ramirez, brother-in-law-ish. Gooseberry alum (Coppertale).

HISTORY:

Reece’s family is all mixed up in terms of magical heritage: his dad’s a muggle, his dad’s sister is a muggleborn witch, and his mother’s family has a similar make-up, her parents being a wizard and a muggle woman. So Reece grew up in a melting pot of magical and non-magical culture; the social isolation that muggleborns or purebloods grew up with is a totally foreign concept to him. And, surprisingly, the family lives pretty harmoniously, given all their differences - that’s one of the reasons why he’s always kind of felt like the Statute of Secrecy is a dated thing.

Even though magical heritage isn’t a contested point among family members, that’s not to say Reece grew up in a house free of conflict. His parents have always encouraged their kids to speak their minds, and Reece feels like his older siblings took this too much to heart. They’re both pathologically overconfident, and have been for as long as Reece can remember. His father and his aunt are about as different as two siblings can be, and even though they love each other, they were constantly at one another’s throats. And it’s his mother’s entire job, basically, to put up with strong personalities all day, so she knows how to bite back. So the typical tableau at the Downing house was five people yelling their feelings at the top of their lungs and Reece – well, not doing that.

He’s not entirely sure why the family’s confrontational gene skipped him, but he’s always been the quiet one. He managed to fly under his parents’ radar trouble-wise, too, because Aaron and Cristiane were – not problem children, exactly, but constantly trying to outdo one another. It didn’t matter if Reece had irreparably clogged the bathroom sink up with some weird kind of magical oobleck, because Aaron’s speech and debate final and Cristiane’s school play were scheduled for the same day, and the resulting meltdown was impossible to ignore.

Still, for all the theatrics and shouting, there was a lot of affection among the family too (more than Reece has ever been comfortable with, honestly. He’s not really a hugger). His Aunt Sadie regularly helped him with his homework once he was school-aged and recognized his aptitude for charms, and encouraged his experiments. And for all Cristiane’s relationship with Aaron was troubled, she absolutely adored Reece and doted on him, both at home and at school.

So it was a little tough on him when she decided she wanted to go to Gooseberry for high school instead of finishing out her education at Covenstead like Aaron was. Most of Reece’s school friends were actually, primarily, Cris’s school friends, and once Cris was gone they weren’t as interested in hanging out with someone two years younger than them. And even though Aaron was still at Covenstead for at least the first year Cris was gone, he wasn’t interested in hanging out with his little brother (Reece has always kind of felt like a footnote to Aaron – they’re not at odds with each other like Aaron and Cris are, but Aaron’s never really paid him any mind). About two months into the first schoolyear Cris was gone, Reece had made up his mind that he also wanted to go to Gooseberry.

Luckily for him, even though his grades at Covenstead were a little bit uneven, he had a few teachers who liked him a lot, and were willing to write letters of recommendation for him. He was accepted, and came to join Cris at the school when she was a junior. For the two years they attended the same school, they grew even closer – Reece even joined LARP when she did, even though he doesn’t have her flair for the dramatic. And being closer with each other and far away from their family just drove the wedge between them and their older brother in even deeper. Neither of them talk to Aaron much anymore.

In his sophomore year, Reece was made a prefect and bonded with the older Azurcrest prefects, particularly Cecil Honeychurch and Quinn Cunningham. He took his job as a prefect very seriously, although as a sophomore he was happy to clean up the little messes while the older prefects handled major rule infractions.

Reece went into his junior year without his older sister, who had graduated the previous spring. He floundered socially for awhile, but eventually found his footing among the other prefects and his housemates. He finally managed to start talking to his long-time crush Roxie Barringer and befriended her in earnest. Over spring break, his sister and her boyfriend got married. When he got back to school, he and Roxie started dating, to his constant surprise.

All things told, his junior year was shaping up to be his best one at Gooseberry yet. And it might've been, if it weren't for the forest entities. While his classmates were kidnapped and struggled against ghosts to save their friends, Reece was soundly asleep. He missed the whole thing, and that maybe disturbed him more than the ghosts would've. He felt totally helpless to protect his friends, which he does not care for at all. Going into his senior year, he is going to be much more authoritarian and anti-Grotto-parties in a bid to keep everyone safe.

SCHOOL

YEAR: Senior (Grade 12)
HOUSE: Azurcrest.
SORTING: It would be easy to assume that Reece only ended up in Azurcrest because of his older sister. Quiet, low-energy, and introverted, he seems out of place among his peers in Azurcrest sometimes. But friendship and interpersonal connections are the most important things to him. When he was split between Ribbonfin and Azurcrest, it was the Jay's appreciation for his slightly corny sense of humor and pragmatic but optimistic outlook on life that won him over.
WAND: Dogwood, thunderbird feather, 14 1/4 inches, flexible. Dogwood wands are "quirky and mischievous; they have playful natures and insist upon partners who can provide them with scope for excitement and fun". Thunderbird feathers are associated with an adventurous spirit, just like their corresponding Ilvermorny house (although Reece thinks he probably would've been a Horned Serpent). Reece's wand, like many dogwood wands, has a tendency to crackle and sputter audibly when he casts spells.
FAMILIAR: A barred owl named Gráinne O'Malley (affectionately called Grace). This bird is exceedingly stupid and gets lost a lot. Please return her to the Owlery if found.

CLASSES: Core: charms, hermeticism, history of magic, potions, transfiguration. Elective: artificing, defense against the dark arts, magizoology.
ADVANCED STUDY: N/A.
SENIOR PROJECT: Oops! He still doesn't know. Better get on that, kiddo.
ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: How well Reece does in any given class is unfortunately dependent on how interesting he finds that subject. Luckily, he's genuinely interested in a lot of subjects Gooseberry has to offer. Charms, hermeticism, transfiguration and artificing are all favorites of his and even if he isn't always attentive in class, he makes the required grades. But he doesn't struggle in his other classes so much as he just doesn't try, which can be frustrating for his instructors and classmates alike. As of his senior year, he is also paying much more attention to defense against the dark arts, a subject he's only scraped passing grades in in the past.

EXTRACURRICULARS:

LARP

Fencing & Duelling

Crafting club.

Prefect. He's also a prefect, and now the seniormost prefect in Azurcrest house thanks to the high turnover rate of his prefecting partners. And this year it's no more Mr. Nice Reece.

OOC

NAME: JJ
EMAIL: oronsomestar@gmail.com
CDJ: juliajoy / timespace
OTHER PREFERRED CONTACT: Dropbox!
TIME ZONE: Pacific.