Cynthia Rushton

Cynthia Rushton
Goes by: Cyn
Gender: Female
Height: Average

Blood status: Halfblood
Raised in: Mixed
Home: Unlisted in Residential Areas.

Boggart: A floating piece of leathery, aged parchment with red stains around the edges and a stitch down the middle.

Patronus: Unknown
Cynthia is smart, and quick on her feet -- with an outgoing, confident personality. She’s good at making friends, but not so great at keeping them all the time, as sometimes things she wants to say come out a little more snappish or mean than she intends. It takes a little while to get to know her, to the point where suffering her occasional slip-ups seem worth it. She has good intentions, usually, but we all know what they say about those and the road to hell….

In addition to being confident, Cynthia can be a little pushy -- demanding to get her way. She’s inquisitive, and loves to know how and why things work the way they do, and will often go to extreme ends for experiments and experiences. She’s also very dramatic, most often seen when things don’t go her way.
Cynthia is the third of five children, the exact middle of a quintet born to a Muggle and a Squib. Her parents were both British-Korean; while her father’s family had fled Korea during the 1800s and changed their names to be more palatable to the English-speaking tongue, her mother’s parents immigrated in the 1960s and kept their traditional names. They met in university and the rest, they say, is history.

Despite her parents' lack of magic, the family grew up in Cynthia’s matriarchal grandmother’s village. Her grandmother was very much not a Squib, and Cynthia’s childhood memories include fond ones of watching her wash the dishes without lifting a finger, go for flights on her broomstick, and change her head to the heads of all sorts of creatures.

The last one was an illusion, of course, but the sight always filled Cynthia with glee. She and her siblings lived a fairly normal life -- though she could see her mum flinch every time a family member carelessly called her a Squib, and the way her dad always looked nervous when people discussed magic. She was determined to be magical for their sakes, if nothing else -- while going to a Muggle school, and learning about more magical things at home.

But the magical things she learned about at home were never enough to quell the constant chant of but why? Why, why, why? that filled her head at every turn. She often snuck into her grandmother’s study, and took it upon herself to read through the old woman’s scrolls -- all the ones she could find, anyway.

One night, when she was ten and had been doing this for the better part of a year, she fell asleep halfway through the pile -- and the motion tore the scroll she was holding into two jagged-edge pieces of parchment. It wasn’t repairable with normal methods; the scotch tape she tried to use burst into flame the moment it touched the parchment --  but her grandmother fixed it easily and, almost more importantly, didn’t scold too much when she saw how stricken Cynthia looked.

As it turned out, the burning tape was the first pre-Hogwarts manifestation of Cynthia’s magic. Her letter summoning her to school arrived that summer, and she was beyond overjoyed at the happiness in her parents’ eyes.

And, she must admit, maybe just a little smug over the jealousy in her siblings’.

Over the years, Cynthia has discovered that in addition to enjoying reading about magic, she also very much enjoys writing about… well, perhaps not magic. Perhaps more about the people who perform magic, and what exactly makes them tick.