Post by Katie Wood on Dec 30, 2011 18:28:38 GMT -5
CHARACTER APPLICATION [ADULT]
KATHERINE LYDIA WOOD
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I WALK A LONELY ROAD
[/color][/font][/center]"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
--Michael Jordan
[/font][/center]--Michael Jordan
THE ONLY ONE I HAVE EVER KNOWN
[/color][/font][/center]Outofcharacter
[/font][/center]Your Name: Cassie
Your Age: 17
Other Characters: *deep breath, and in no particular order...* Aislinn MacElfrish, Rose Weasley, Saoirse Flynn, Elsie James, James Potter, Neil Chilcott, Amelia MacMillan, Noelle Chaucer & Ellen Urquhart.
Becca gave me permission for Katie!
Experience: Enough
Secret Word/Phrase: Make love, not horcruxes
DON’T KNOW WHERE IT GOES
[/color][/font][/center]Incharacterbasics
[/font][/center]FACE CLAIM: Famke Janssen
FULL NAME: Katherine Lydia Wood (nee Bell)
NICKNAMES: Katie, Kits
AGE/DOB: 24th February, 1979. (Aged 43).
JOB: Coach for the Holyhead Harpies.
BLOOD STATUS: Halfblood
SEX: Female
ORIENATION: Straight
BUT IT’S HOME TO ME AND I WALK ALONE
[/color][/font][/center]Incharacterapperance
[/font][/center]EYES: Brown
HAIR: Dark brown
HEIGHT: 5ft 5
BUILD: Slim, toned - typically athletic, really. Her hips and bust have rounded slightly with her advancing age, but her muscle tone is incredible.
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: She has a scar across her right hip bone, a leftover from the Second Wizarding War. She also has scarring on the outside of her left foot, from a particularly nasty Quidditch accident. There's a little one on her finger, from the cursed necklace in her seventh year.
SKIN TONE: Pale - typical English Rose.
I WALK THIS EMPTY STREET
[/color][/font][/center]Personality
[/font][/center]DISLIKES: Wearing jewellery, feeling enclosed, media attention.
LIKES: Quidditch, Oliver, her children, strawberry milkshake & open spaces.
BAD HABITS: Can be overly competitive, fidgets instead of sitting still, pinches Oliver's clean socks when she's run out.
GOOD HABITS: Trusts her children and their judgement implicitly, is dedicated to her job, makes time for her marriage as well as her family and career.
WEAKNESSES: Buying new Quidditch practise kit, Ollie and the kids, not very good (at all) at cooking, or cleaning skills.
STRENGTHS: Flying, coaching, transfiguration (bizarrely)
PERSONALITY: Imagine your typical professional Quidditch player: focused, determined, bloody-minded, analytical. That's Katie in a nutshell, to the undiscerning public. In reality, she's a little more complex than that (who isn't?).
She's a very 'hands off' mother - it's not that she doesn't love her children - she does, honest - its just that she thinks they need freedom, and she wants them to grow up independent and self-assured. She still worries half to death about them though, mostly in the wee small hours of the morning.
Katie's good at repressing her feelings, at hiding how she really feels from the whole world - somehow, she manages to combine this with a quick temper. She feels things deeply, she just doesn't show it. Oliver gets past her defences somehow - she lets him in without realising it: it's probably one of the reasons why their marriage is such a rare success in celebrity circles.
ON THE BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS
[/color][/font][/center]Incharacterextras
[/font]WAND: Almond, Hippogriff tailhair core, 11 inches
BROOMS: ...of course? Currently owns a Starbolt Kosteskaft. (It's Danish, she adores it).
PET(s): Just an owl (called Daft Flappy), unless you count her children's pets.
WHERE THE CITY SLEEPS
[/color][/font][/center]Relationships
[/font][/center]AMORTENTIA: New quaffles, Gryffindor Common Room, and Oliver's aftershave.
MIRROR OF ERISED: Honestly? Her life as it is now, as terribly smug as that sounds. She has a husband who she's known since she was eleven, three beautiful children who she's very proud of and a career that she completely adores. Life doesn't get much better!
VERITASERUM: She never wanted children, to begin with. It was Oliver's dream for a family, not hers.
She nearly didn't go to her first proper 'date' with Oliver: she panicked and ran away. Angelina had to come and find her, force her into a dress and frogmarch her there. She never did thank her.
She worries that she's an atrocious mother, because she's so hands off - it terrifies her that her kids might not have the guidance they need, and will go off the rails and it will be all. her. fault.
She still occasionally has nightmares about the Second Wizarding War.
BOGGART: Voldemort. Or her children dying. Voldemort killing her children would probably be the worst...
DEMENTOR: She has two. The first is when she was placed under the Imperius curse in her seventh year, and accidentally touched the cursed necklace: she's more worried about the potential consequences had she actually managed to get it to it's intended recipient though. The second is when she lost Alex at a Puddlemere game they'd gone to watch - it was the first time she felt her maternal instinct had really kicked in, and that she'd do anything for her kids.
PATRONUS: Winning the Quidditch Cup in her fourth year - it was the first time she truly realised that actually, she'd quite like to do this forever! That in turn led to Puddlemere, and Oliver, and her children, and everything she holds dear today.
AND I’M THE ONLY ONE
[/color][/font][/center]Familyhistory
[/font][/center]FATHER: Darren Bell, aged 73. Worked in the Department of Mysteries, now retired.
MOTHER: Alice Bell, aged 65. Was a herbologist, just retired (two months ago, to be precise).
CHILDREN: Bowman Cornelius Wood, aged 19. Angus Matthew Wood, aged 17. Alexandria Emilia Wood, aged 14.
OTHER IMPORTANT FAMILY: Oliver Wood, husband, aged 46.
HISTORY:A brief history of Katie's time at Hogwarts.
Katie graduated from Hogwarts in 1997 with passable exam results and high prospects of following in her former team captain's footsteps and entering the world of Quidditch. She did not disappoint, and despite the growing turmoil of Voldemort's impending return, landed a spot on Puddlemere United's reserve team just as Oliver Wood received a promotion to the first team. She was working alongside one of her best friends, in a job that she adored: with the exception of recurring nightmares about her experience with the necklace in her seventh year, life was pretty amazing.
It all came crashing down somewhat the next year. The Ministry was taken over; Harry, Rona and Hermione were on the run; and although Katie's halfblood status protected her from the worst of the discrimination, the Quidditch leagues were crippled by both a lack of players and a lack of spectators, and so an indefinite hiatus was imposed. Katie went to work for the Order of the Phoenix, taking part in undercover operations trying to smuggle muggle-borns who were in particular danger out of the country, a definite Resistance movement, as it were. She also helped with the production of Lee Jordan's revolutionary radio show, Potterwatch. Ironically, it was during this period of time when she saw Oliver less, that they actually began seeing each other.
Previously he'd always just been Wood: her mentor, her captain and her friend. When he'd left Hogwarts, she'd been just fifteen, too young to think of him as anything other than her dictatorial, almost fanatically obsessed captain. And whilst they'd easily resumed and improved upon their friendship as they'd trained together over the previous year, it hadn't actually once crossed Katie's mind that maybe, just maybe, she could quite fancy the bloke.
Now though, with her life in potential danger every day at work, she seemed to feel everything more keenly, appreciating just how easy - and also possibly imminent - it as for her to lose everything in one fell swoop. This included Oliver, much to her initial confusion. And so she did what every sensible, rational and self-contained girl would do: buried her head in the sand, worked harder and hoped that no-one would notice. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on your perspective), Oliver didn't notice, taking the same route of self-preservation and doing exactly the same thing. Unluckily (or luckily, again), their friends did notice, and Alicia and Angelina sat down to give poor Katie a stern talking too. She asked him out the next day, and made such a hash of it that Oliver wasn't entirely sure whether she was asking him out or telling him she'd never want to go out with him in a million years. He said yes, anyway.
The beginnings of their relationship were equally inauspicious, dating being mostly off the agenda as cafes and restaurants closed and were boarded up. It was more of a distraction then anything else: it was easier to lose themselves in each other than in their own psyches, more likely to result in sex than insanity. And bit by bit, over the year, they realised that they were in love.
Oliver proposed to her somewhat clumsily as they both returned to fight at the Battle of Hogwarts in 1998 - she thinks his exact words were "Bell, if we get through this, fancy getting hitched?" - although, as he had the ring in his pocket and later explained that he'd been waiting for the right moment, but if he died before then, then there really was no point, she accepted happily, if equally unromantically: "You're on, Wood."
They got through it, and the world became a brighter place. They both stayed on at Hogwarts for a month or so, helping to rebuild and repair what they could, as the Quidditch teams and leagues were reprised and reformed. Oliver chose to resume his place as Keeper for Puddlemere, but Katie was offered a contract on the first team of Holyhead Harpies, something pretty much unheard for someone who hadn't first been on their reserve team. She didn't know if someone had pulled strings (was her fiancé capable of that? She doubted it, and couldn't see who else would want to), or if it was a genuine offer, but she wasn't complaining, and after some deliberation (and some good-natured teasing from Oliver about going to play for a girl's team), she took the job.
She was therefore playing in the now infamous match between Puddlemere United and the Holyhead Harpies. It was the first match she had played against Oliver, ever, and tensions were running high due to former Harpies Chaser Wilma Griffith's recent defection to Puddlemere. The match was reported thus:
'Ministry fears of violence at the match between traditional rivals Holyhead Harpies and Puddlemere United are realised when former Harpy, Chaser Wilda Griffiths, disappears midway during the match. Many Puddlemere and Holyhead supporters had handed in "dummy" wands at the gates and used their real wands during the ensuing riot. After the match, the Daily Prophet reports that Holyhead team captain Gwenog Jones is "helping the Ministry with its enquiries.'as well as
'The Harpies played Puddlemere United at Ilkey Moor. Wands were confiscated at the gates, as crowd trouble was anticpated. Many fans handed over dummy wands, however. Puddlemere's Chaser Wilda Griffiths disappeared midway through the match. A riot broke out and fans of both sides used their wands. Gwenog Jones was held in custody after the game.'
In some ways, Katie and Oliver were very grateful for the fiasco, as it redirected media heat away from their apparently controversial relationship. They successfully managed to keep any rivalry to the Quidditch pitch, at least for the majority of the time. They were in no hurry to get married, particularly: the engagement ring on Katie's finger was enough of a display of commitment to ease fears either might have.
Gwenog was suspended from her role as captain after the debacle of the Puddlemere match, and in a move that shocked everybody - which may have partly been why she did it - she recommended Katie as her successor for captain. Katie spent a week in shock, before ecstatically and enthusiastically taking on the role. She never quite reached the same level of fanaticism as Oliver had in his schooldays: she never scheduled at practise for 4:30am, for example, but at times she got pretty close! Under Katie's leadership, the team (despite the doubts of the tabloids in her ability and her age), crept up the League tables. Katie had the knack of picking a cohesive team that worked together well, rather than a mastermind for strategy, and it was she who welcomed Ginny Potter (then Weasley) on board, a move she knew she wouldn't regret.
Four years later, aged twenty-four, Katie became pregnant, completely by accident. Honestly, it was was miracle the baby survived, as she hadn't realised she was, and carried on practising blocking tackles with the Beaters until she was at least four months pregnant. When she began to show - and finally actually noticed that there was something up - she sat down with Oliver and informed him that it was time he made an honest women of her. After one of the longest engagements of anyone else they knew, they were finally married within two months, and three months later, Katie and Oliver's first child made his way into the world. Quidditch obsessed as ever, Oliver insisted that the child be named after the creator of the Snitch, Bowman Wright, and so the baby boy (who was born at 10:30am on the 16th January 2004, weighing just over eight pounds) was duly christened Bowman Cornelius Wood. To this day, Katie swears that if she hadn't been so hormone-addled and knackered, she wouldn't have inflicted the name on the poor child.
Never an overly-mumsy sort of person, Katie went back to work within three months of Bow's birth, juggling childcare either by taking him with her or leaving him with his grandparents. Three months after that, she was pregnant again, again unplanned although she and Oliver were savvy enough to notice it this time. She eased off on the roughness of her tackles, giving up playing when she was five months pregnant this time, instead of seven months as she had when pregnant with Bow. Angus Matthew Wood was born on the 9th June 2005 at 11:15pm, weighing marginally less than Bow, and christened with a much more ordinary name. From his very first days, he was as different to his brother as possible. Whereas Bowman had screamed and cried for hours on end, Angus was placid and calm, smiling at anything and never fussing.
Again, Katie went back to work pretty sharpish, although in her maternity leave she had spent the majority of her time working out plays and strategies using her two children as stand-ins (well, Bow was a sit-in, and Angus a lie-in, really) for various players. The Harpies continued to soar up the League tables: having been ninth in 1999 when she took over, they were now fourth, and looking to jump to third within the next couple of games. Over the next three years, both her professional and personal life went from strength to strength: she had an adoring - and in turn, adored - husband, two healthy boys and a career that seemed to be exponential in its success, as did Oliver's.
In April 2007, on a rare filthy weekend away in Rome, Katie and Oliver's third and final child was conceived. Alexandria Emilia Wood was born on the 15th January, 2008 at 1am in the morning, after a 'bloody hard labour', to quote Katie herself. She had to check twice that her baby was, in fact, a girl.
To celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, in October 2008, Oliver purchased a vast expanse of land sort-of-close to Stoke on Trent. Although the house on the land was not overly large and somewhat run-down - it was, in fact, an actual cottage, complete with thatched roof - the grounds were beautiful. The family did up the house together: by which I mean, Katie and Oliver did, whilst Bow (aged four) and Angus were given paintbrushes and paint to keep them busy - Bow created havoc, and Angus diligently attempted to paint the skirting boards - and Alex was plonked in her highchair in the middle of the room where she could be kept an eye on.
The move gave the children even more freedom than they had had before, something Oliver and Katie encouraged, letting them have free roam of the forest as they grew older and creating a Quidditch pitch, the only proviso being that whatever they did, they be back for tea.
Katie carried on playing professional Quidditch for another seven years, only giving up at the age of thirty-five: she knew her reflexes and stamina would lessen with age, and wanted to leave at the top of her game, rather than more ignominiously when her performance began to wane. Rather than see her leave the game in the manner of Ginny Potter, the Harpies' manager offered her the position of coach for the team, which she accepted with alacricity: it was the perfect solution, both for her and the team, and meant that she did not feel as if she were hanging up her robes completely. She has now coached the team for eight years, making her one of the longest-serving team members in the club's very long history.
AND I WALK ALONE
[/color][/font][/center]Roleplaysample
[/font][/center]Not applicable.
MY SHADOW IS THE ONLY ONE THAT WALKS BESIDES ME
[/color][/font][/center]Credits
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Sorry it ended up so long!
