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Mar. 11th, 2017 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
birdbrainy
GENERAL
NAME: Nathaniel David Bird
NICKNAMES: Nate, mostly. Some people mistakenly think his name is just Nathan, which also works for him.
AGE/DOB/ZODIAC: 18 / January 17, 1996 / Capricorn
BLOOD STATUS: Halfblood, but he didn’t actually realize his father was telling the truth about his being a wizard for, like, a while.
GENDER/PRONOUNS: Male, he/him
SEXUALITY: Heterosexual.
HOMETOWN: Hammett, ID. He grew up on a 750+ acre dairy farm about an hour outside of Boise.
CONCEPT: Tightly wound country boy with a lot to prove.
PHYSICAL
APPEARANCE:
In uniform: Rolled up sleeves, always trying to lose the tie because he’s not really a fan of the House color being plum, never ever ever wears the vest, and tries to avoid the cloak as much as possible. If he’s out on prefect duty on a cold night, he’ll just use a warming spell, or shiver and shake the whole time and swear he can handle it.
Out of uniform: Camo. So much camo. He’s not above wearing clashing camo patterns either. What’s it matter, you shouldn’t be able to see him anyways. Otherwise, he dresses like he just rolled in the men’s clothing section of the Boise Cabela’s. So many t-shirts with aggressive patriotism and Ted Nugent quotes, or faded, fraying hats with the Buckmark logo. Plus a healthy dose of anything Carhartt, Realtree, Mossy Oak – pants, shirts, jacket, sweatshirts, hats, socks even.
HEIGHT: 5’7”. He’s little’un.
PB: Josh Hutcherson
PERSONALITY
LIKES: Kodiak Wintergreen. Oly. Hunting. Fresh air. Puzzles. The fact that his House mascot is a goddamn bear.
DISLIKES: Complainers. Unsolvable problems. Failure. Looking like an idiot. Dressing up. The fact that his goddamn House color is plum.
PERSONALITY:
It’s easy to overlook Nathaniel at first blush. He’s small, he’s quiet, he’s perfectly polite and nonconfrontational, and after first meeting him most people hear his name and go, “Wait, who?” Which is mostly fine with Nate. By the second meeting, he’s usually gathered enough information to have a better idea of how to act. By then he’s warmed up, like an old TV set or a car on a cold day. And once he’s warmed up, he laughs easily and often, he joins in the conversation (a little bit), maybe tosses in a few jokes, because he is actually a nice kid, and he is actually sweet and polite, and says “yes, ma’am” and “right away, sir” without a hint of irony. He just mostly likes to blend in.
Like a true hunter, Nate knows how to melt into the background, and in most social situations, he’s more than just a little bit happy to let others take center stage. This is absolutely perfectly at odds with his desire to stand head and shoulders above the rest academically and be lauded as a goddamn genius, but it all comes down to the exact same thing: He doesn’t want to look stupid.
In fact, most of what Nate does is motivated by the desire to just not look dumb. He sits back and watches what everyone else does so he’ll know how to act, he’s an easy target for peer pressure (see: his mediocre academic performance before heading off to Ilvermorny), he studies probably three times more than is strictly necessary, all so no one ever thinks of him and offhandedly goes, “Yeah, he’s kind of an idiot."
It helps that Nate is also really freaking smart. He has a mind for puzzles, he can recall facts and figures with relative ease, and he loves to break things down and figure out how they work. In Muggle life, this means taking apart engines and old TVs. In Magic life, this means taking apart spells and magic brooms. Because he wants to know. He has to know. God forbid there be anything in this world he doesn’t understand. What if he doesn't know something and then it turns out he's the only one who doesn't know? Then he looks like a moron. Which, again, is his greatest fear.
And that refrain (“What if this makes me look like an idiot??”) eats away at him constantly. Nathaniel puts a lot of pressure on himself to do something just right, because he knows he’s capable. He knows if he just tries hard enough, he could be the top student in the class. He can do something memorable with his senior project. He can do anything he wants as long as he tries.
Though sometimes he tries too hard, puts too much pressure on himself, and his general mental health takes a bit of a beating for it. What starts out as a general level of anxiety over forgetting to do something or not studying enough will blow up into this wonderfully hormonal obsessive-compulsive mess. Not the stupid OCD trope – he doesn’t care if he uses different color pens to write his notes, he doesn’t need to flip the light switch six times before he can sit down, but there are little things he does to keep himself at a general level of pretty much okay. Things like skipping over cracks on the pavement, tapping his right shoulder (oh so casually) if his left shoulder gets bumped, and checking for his homework, his books, and anything else he needs at least four times and in the exact same order before leaving his cabin every morning. And those things just get intensified when he’s anxious. When he’s chewed his nails down to the nub and stopped sleeping, that’s when you’ll see him opening the door with both hands, jumping over cracks in the pavement (or going back and actually stepping on specific cracks), and snapping at anyone who touches him because you’ll screw up his perfect balance for Christ’s sake.
IN OTHER WORDS: Observant; polite; hardworking; tightly wound; intelligent; easily manipulated; kinda shy.
HISTORY
FAMILY MEMBERS:
Mom – Angela (Lagerquist) Mercer – Muggle – Often finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to explain to his mother how Jesus and Magic can coexist.
Stepdad – Clinton Mercer – Muggle – Dairy farmer. Despite being his stepdad, Nate often calls him Dad and refers to him and his mom as his parents.
Dad – Samuel Bird – wizard - Nate has sporadic contact with him, though they've grown closer since it was confirmed that, oh, hey, he was telling the truth about being a wizard.
HISTORY:
The Department of Backstory
Nathaniel's parents split up less than a year after he was born. The actual divorce took a few years to go through, but what had started out as happily ever after for the two fresh-faced farm kids went decidedly sour when Nate was a scant few months old. That's when Nate's father was in a car accident. A really bad accident. An accident that should have been fatal.
But, as Sam Bird said when he came to in a haze of Good Hospital Drugs, "Of course I'm fine, I'm a wizard, aren't I?" Which was a weird thing to say, because he'd never mentioned this to his wife before.
They laughed it off, because Sam was clearly high as a damn kite, thanked God that he was alive, and tried to move on from this Really Scary Event.
But it wasn't just that. There was brain damage, and it had a profound effect on his personality. He grew darker, angrier, more confrontational and less reliable, and he persisted in this delusion that he was a wizard. If he could only get to New York, he knew a guy there who could get him a new wand and then he'd show her, he said.
Too bad. Angela Bird never gave him a chance to show her. By the end of Nate's first year, his father had moved to Boise. By the time Nate was three, the divorce papers were signed, and his mother was engaged to Clint Mercer.
Happily ever after, take two.
This is Where a Country Music Quote Would Probably Work
Clint, Angela, and Nate moved out to the Mercer Family Farm, just a few miles out of town, and their life was practically perfect in every way. Except that the old, creaky farmhouse they had moved into was clearly haunted. Clint swore that the rhythmic scraping she heard on the side of the house every night after midnight was just their old goat trying to scratch between his horns, and those cold spots in the living room and bathroom were because of bad construction, but weird things kept happening. Nate kept coming up with new toys she never gave him, that Clint said had been hidden in the closet for decades, and sometimes she could swear she heard the piano playing in the middle of the night.
Despite Clint’s assurances, Angela remained convinced that the house was haunted. And it kind of was. Just by her son. Doing magic. Though she didn't figure that out for a little bit yet.
Here I’ll put something relevant to this, too. Like about school.
Nate was a curious kid. Destructively curious. He loved anything with moving parts, or made loud noises, or went really super fast, and he wanted to find out how it all worked. The first thing he dismantled in an attempt to discover its secrets was the remote control. That was fine, that was an easy fix.
The second thing was the DVD player. That wasn’t an easy fix.
Clint decided he should try and channel the kid’s energy into something a little more useful, like learning how a car engine worked. So he took him out to the garage, showed him the Model T he had been slowly but steadily rebuilding for six or seven years now, and started to teach him the names and the functions of each and every moving part, every loud noisemaker, all the things that made it go really super fast. Not only was Nate fascinated by the engine, he absorbed everything his stepfather was saying like a damn sponge. He was an eager student, and a hell of a fast learner.
And yet, when it came time for school, Nathaniel was a decidedly average student. He picked up core concepts remarkably quick, and his homework usually showed that he knew what the teacher was saying, but his test scores were lower than they should be. The teachers hardly noticed; he was a well-behaved kid and he was learning, they didn’t have the time or the resources to make sure he was fulfilling his potential.
Which is too bad, because Nate was holding back. Way back. One of the things he had learned early on was that it wasn’t cool to be smart. 100% on one test got you a quick arm punch and, “Whatever, nerd.” 100% on three or more tests meant you studied. And only loser nerds studied. Knowing there weren’t a whole lot of options for other friends in the school, he chose to be an underachiever rather than Nerdy Natey.
Until the Ilvermorny letter came.
Ilvermorny
So. Dad was telling the truth about that. Whoops.
Nate called his dad when the letter came, and for the first time ever he was actually allowed to talk to his son about magic. He told him about Ilvermorny, and he told him, somewhat passive-aggressively, that he was starting out a step below most other kids like him. When Sam was a kid, he had gone to a magic primary school in Washington before going to Ilvermorny, and there would be plenty of kids who had done the same and already knew a little bit of magic. So he was going to have to work hard to prove he was just as smart as them.
Nate didn’t them one better and proved he was smarter.
That wasn’t his strategy starting out at Ilvermorny, it was just kind of what happened. The teachers at Ilvermorny wouldn’t politely overlook the kid in the back of the class not raising his hand or making eye contact, and the other kids seemed to actually approve when he volunteered the right information. Being smart wasn't exactly against the rules here.
And all of a sudden, Nate got really good at school. He found he kind of liked being at the top of the class (or close to it). When other kids went, “Ugh, yeah, I can’t beat Nate’s stupid scores, but maybe I can still get a good grade,” he felt a surge of pride. Well shit, he should have started doing good in school ages ago.
Gooseberry High
The teachers at Ilvermorny barely even gave Nate an option for high school. If he continued at Ilvermorny, he would probably still do fine, but he’d be a big fish in a little pond. Nathaniel needed a challenge. As he entered eighth grade at Ilvermorny, his Head of House pulled him into the office and told him about Gooseberry High, an alternative school that provided scholarships for particularly gifted students. Nate hesitated – he was at or near the top of all his classes at Ilvermorny, but an alternative school sounded like...not his jam. Where he was from, "alternative" was usually a thinly veiled insult. He wasn’t sure. He said he’d have to think about it.
Oh wait, no, it wasn’t up to him. The school had already sent an information packet to his parents, and all three of them had pretty much accepted on his behalf.
So for his freshman year of high school, Nate was off to yet another unfamiliar school, in a slightly more familiar part of the country, where now he was going to have to prove himself all over again. Nate grew more focused on school, determined to keep his status as one of the smart kids. He studied incessantly, spent an inordinate amount of time cooped up in the library, and behaved like a perfect goddamn angel.
In his sophomore year, they made him a prefect. Nate hadn’t expected that, but it was another feather to put in his cap, another thing to prove to himself that he was succeeding at the more challenging school and he could do this. He might not have had the leg up of a magical education from kindergarten on, but he was still going to be the best.
His junior year, Nate’s work ethic and determination started to work against him. He didn’t sleep much. When he wasn’t actively doing something, he was thinking about all the studying and practicing he should be doing, the homework he had to bust out after getting back from prefect duties, the senior project he couldn’t settle on (and he really wanted to settle on something before his senior year so he could work on it over the summer). Over the course of the year, Nate’s quality of work went way up, then started to go way down.
Which just freaked him out even more. As he struggled to maintain his grade point average, the teachers noticed and tried to talk to him. It wasn’t like this was the first time a kid got too hard on himself at a gifted school. But Nate refused to talk to anybody, and would occasionally disappear into the forest or down by the lake for hours at a time, where he could have a nice, private breakdown, and no one could ever tell anyone he wasn’t doing just fine.
So, clearly, he dealt with that in a healthy way and he'll never be too hard on himself ever again.
Nathaniel's parents split up less than a year after he was born. The actual divorce took a few years to go through, but what had started out as happily ever after for the two fresh-faced farm kids went decidedly sour when Nate was a scant few months old. That's when Nate's father was in a car accident. A really bad accident. An accident that should have been fatal.
But, as Sam Bird said when he came to in a haze of Good Hospital Drugs, "Of course I'm fine, I'm a wizard, aren't I?" Which was a weird thing to say, because he'd never mentioned this to his wife before.
They laughed it off, because Sam was clearly high as a damn kite, thanked God that he was alive, and tried to move on from this Really Scary Event.
But it wasn't just that. There was brain damage, and it had a profound effect on his personality. He grew darker, angrier, more confrontational and less reliable, and he persisted in this delusion that he was a wizard. If he could only get to New York, he knew a guy there who could get him a new wand and then he'd show her, he said.
Too bad. Angela Bird never gave him a chance to show her. By the end of Nate's first year, his father had moved to Boise. By the time Nate was three, the divorce papers were signed, and his mother was engaged to Clint Mercer.
Happily ever after, take two.
This is Where a Country Music Quote Would Probably Work
Clint, Angela, and Nate moved out to the Mercer Family Farm, just a few miles out of town, and their life was practically perfect in every way. Except that the old, creaky farmhouse they had moved into was clearly haunted. Clint swore that the rhythmic scraping she heard on the side of the house every night after midnight was just their old goat trying to scratch between his horns, and those cold spots in the living room and bathroom were because of bad construction, but weird things kept happening. Nate kept coming up with new toys she never gave him, that Clint said had been hidden in the closet for decades, and sometimes she could swear she heard the piano playing in the middle of the night.
Despite Clint’s assurances, Angela remained convinced that the house was haunted. And it kind of was. Just by her son. Doing magic. Though she didn't figure that out for a little bit yet.
Here I’ll put something relevant to this, too. Like about school.
Nate was a curious kid. Destructively curious. He loved anything with moving parts, or made loud noises, or went really super fast, and he wanted to find out how it all worked. The first thing he dismantled in an attempt to discover its secrets was the remote control. That was fine, that was an easy fix.
The second thing was the DVD player. That wasn’t an easy fix.
Clint decided he should try and channel the kid’s energy into something a little more useful, like learning how a car engine worked. So he took him out to the garage, showed him the Model T he had been slowly but steadily rebuilding for six or seven years now, and started to teach him the names and the functions of each and every moving part, every loud noisemaker, all the things that made it go really super fast. Not only was Nate fascinated by the engine, he absorbed everything his stepfather was saying like a damn sponge. He was an eager student, and a hell of a fast learner.
And yet, when it came time for school, Nathaniel was a decidedly average student. He picked up core concepts remarkably quick, and his homework usually showed that he knew what the teacher was saying, but his test scores were lower than they should be. The teachers hardly noticed; he was a well-behaved kid and he was learning, they didn’t have the time or the resources to make sure he was fulfilling his potential.
Which is too bad, because Nate was holding back. Way back. One of the things he had learned early on was that it wasn’t cool to be smart. 100% on one test got you a quick arm punch and, “Whatever, nerd.” 100% on three or more tests meant you studied. And only loser nerds studied. Knowing there weren’t a whole lot of options for other friends in the school, he chose to be an underachiever rather than Nerdy Natey.
Until the Ilvermorny letter came.
Ilvermorny
So. Dad was telling the truth about that. Whoops.
Nate called his dad when the letter came, and for the first time ever he was actually allowed to talk to his son about magic. He told him about Ilvermorny, and he told him, somewhat passive-aggressively, that he was starting out a step below most other kids like him. When Sam was a kid, he had gone to a magic primary school in Washington before going to Ilvermorny, and there would be plenty of kids who had done the same and already knew a little bit of magic. So he was going to have to work hard to prove he was just as smart as them.
Nate didn’t them one better and proved he was smarter.
That wasn’t his strategy starting out at Ilvermorny, it was just kind of what happened. The teachers at Ilvermorny wouldn’t politely overlook the kid in the back of the class not raising his hand or making eye contact, and the other kids seemed to actually approve when he volunteered the right information. Being smart wasn't exactly against the rules here.
And all of a sudden, Nate got really good at school. He found he kind of liked being at the top of the class (or close to it). When other kids went, “Ugh, yeah, I can’t beat Nate’s stupid scores, but maybe I can still get a good grade,” he felt a surge of pride. Well shit, he should have started doing good in school ages ago.
Gooseberry High
The teachers at Ilvermorny barely even gave Nate an option for high school. If he continued at Ilvermorny, he would probably still do fine, but he’d be a big fish in a little pond. Nathaniel needed a challenge. As he entered eighth grade at Ilvermorny, his Head of House pulled him into the office and told him about Gooseberry High, an alternative school that provided scholarships for particularly gifted students. Nate hesitated – he was at or near the top of all his classes at Ilvermorny, but an alternative school sounded like...not his jam. Where he was from, "alternative" was usually a thinly veiled insult. He wasn’t sure. He said he’d have to think about it.
Oh wait, no, it wasn’t up to him. The school had already sent an information packet to his parents, and all three of them had pretty much accepted on his behalf.
So for his freshman year of high school, Nate was off to yet another unfamiliar school, in a slightly more familiar part of the country, where now he was going to have to prove himself all over again. Nate grew more focused on school, determined to keep his status as one of the smart kids. He studied incessantly, spent an inordinate amount of time cooped up in the library, and behaved like a perfect goddamn angel.
In his sophomore year, they made him a prefect. Nate hadn’t expected that, but it was another feather to put in his cap, another thing to prove to himself that he was succeeding at the more challenging school and he could do this. He might not have had the leg up of a magical education from kindergarten on, but he was still going to be the best.
His junior year, Nate’s work ethic and determination started to work against him. He didn’t sleep much. When he wasn’t actively doing something, he was thinking about all the studying and practicing he should be doing, the homework he had to bust out after getting back from prefect duties, the senior project he couldn’t settle on (and he really wanted to settle on something before his senior year so he could work on it over the summer). Over the course of the year, Nate’s quality of work went way up, then started to go way down.
Which just freaked him out even more. As he struggled to maintain his grade point average, the teachers noticed and tried to talk to him. It wasn’t like this was the first time a kid got too hard on himself at a gifted school. But Nate refused to talk to anybody, and would occasionally disappear into the forest or down by the lake for hours at a time, where he could have a nice, private breakdown, and no one could ever tell anyone he wasn’t doing just fine.
So, clearly, he dealt with that in a healthy way and he'll never be too hard on himself ever again.
SCHOOL
YEAR: Senior.
HOUSE: Ebonhide. At Ilvermorny he was a Horned Serpent.
SORTING: His Sorting didn’t take very long. Ebonhide claimed him almost from the very start, but Ribbonfin and Azurcrest tossed in a couple token arguments, like, “You seem like a very nice boy, there are lots of very nice people in Ribbonfin!” But, really, Ebonhide was always the House for him. Ebonhide is the home of people who don’t necessarily see the problem in studying your homemade flash cards until the sun comes up, aren’t going to tease him for wanting to learn advanced things, and understand the need to get something just right. It would probably actually do Nate some good to have someone tell him, “Honestly, that’s about as good as it needs to be,” but those are not words in his own vocabulary.
WAND: Redwood, 9 inches, Unicorn hair core.
FAMILIAR: A little barn owl named Priscilla, Priss for short, Miss Priss for less short.
CLASSES:
Core - Charms, Herbology, Hermeticism, Outdoor Education, Transfiguration, Potions
Elective - Artificing, Magizoology
Advanced Program – Animagus Study (raccoon)
SENIOR PROJECT: To put it in the simplest terms, he's working on magic cell phones. To break it down a little more, he wants to set up portable devices that can transmit audio over long distances to any other device of its kind. So, kind of like the journals, but with audio instead of text and also not weirdly tied to this school. And kind of like magic mirrors, but not paired up with one other device specifically. As it stands right now, he has a handful of boxes that can transmit fuzzy, kind of garbled sound across the campus. They're not very useful. And he's panicking about the fact that he only has half the year left to get something he feels okay about turning in.
ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: He’s very bright and enthusiastic, but sometimes his work gets sloppy because he’s trying to rush it. He doesn’t like being sloppy, and if he had his way he would take all the time in the world to write an intelligent, nuanced, well-researched-and-properly-referenced essay, but Nate has a lot on his plate. Every once in a while, that Potions essay gets pushed off until the night before and he has to slap something together.
Favorite classes: Hermeticism and Artificing
Least favorite classes: Potions. There are so many things for him to obsess over getting just right.
EXTRACURRICULARS: Outdoor Exploration, Archery, Boating, Dueling and Fencing.
