Orla Fallwater

Orla Fallwater
Gender: Female
Height: ?

Blood status: Halfblood
Raised in: Mix of both
Home: Unlisted in Residential Areas

Boggart: ?

Patronus: Unknown
Growing up among the impassive faces of her aunts and mother has meant that Orla can first appear cold and distant. Under a curtain of long hair, her big eyes take in every detail - she loves details - and files them away to ponder over before she falls asleep. This can make her a little intense, especially as she can sometimes seem like she's filled with agitated bees -- Orla might appear calm and collected, but she's secretly bursting to run headlong into adventure and forbidden things.

Her hair helps to hide the fact that, unlike her family at home, she finds it incredibly hard to wrangle her emotions into the mask they want her to project. Fallwater Witches are known for their precision and order; sometimes Orla worries she was cursed as a baby to be the first Fallwater Failure.

Other than her graceful and meticulous wand gestures (practiced long before she ever got a wand), Orla is clumsy, prone to emotional outburst, and even downright giggly sometimes.
Orla grew up at Fallwater Manor, which straddles a wide and languid river in Ireland. It has long housed the graceful and talented Fallwater Witches, and their daughters, for they've always had daughters. Orla was her mother's first and last born; pregnancy didn't suit Mother's temperament. The other young witches were years older, so Orla found herself at the centre of the web of attention. The Fallwater Witches loved a project.

All her days were regimented and scheduled, with a rotation of stern faces and deft hands making sure to draw out Orla's best attributes. "Recreation" time was spent in the forests and floodland around her childhood home, where Orla continued to fall into tangles of nettles or razor-sharp blackberry bushes. She bore it better than her personality might have told she would; she loved the feeling of being physically strong, and took pleasure when she was encouraged to climb trees and jump the freezing waves of the Atlantic. To her it felt like a morsel of freedom, but the aunts knew it was necessary fitness training.

Her father was always available, living on the mainland in Connemara as a primary school teacher. Da was giggly and smiley, but achingly muggleborn. Orla loved him dearly, but time spent with him was mostly anxiety-ridden as she never grew accustomed to the mod-cons of her Da's world.

He always took her fishing in the summer, though, and those times scooping water from the bottom of his ancient paddleboat while he wrongly identified their catches were some of the most peaceful and content times of Orla's life. Soon though, the itch to be back to routine would make her restless -- Orla thinks she will always need to be told what to do, and who to be.