YEAR 1 PROFILE

[stclair]

GENERAL

NAME: Micah Vincent St. Clair (Pronounced MY-kah, not MEE-kah.)
NICKNAMES: He often signs things as MVSC. Please don't call him Mike. (That means you, Dad.)
AGE/DOB/ZODIAC: 15 / May 30, 1998 / Gemini
BLOOD STATUS: Half-blood
GENDER/PRONOUNS: Male, he/him
SEXUALITY: Micah claims to be against "labels" or "boxes," although your mileage may vary on whether or not this is just a tactic to seem less blatantly obnoxious when trying to get cute girls to appear in his movies. Or cute boys. I mean, he is not shy about getting people of every gender into his movies. (In all seriousness, he's bi, just 15 years old and pretentious.)
HOMETOWN: Revelstoke, Nevada, United States. Revelstoke is a wizard-only town hidden somewhere in the Great Basin Desert, with a population of less than 1000. It's extremely isolated and not very modern—they only got access to electricity about ten years ago, and Internet more recently than that. Both of these things have been a godsend to Micah.

CONCEPT: Irrepressible and irreverent aspiring director whose ideas are all sleazy horror B-movies.

PHYSICAL

APPEARANCE: Micah needs a haircut. His dark brown hair is always several inches too long, and tends to hang in his face in a way that would be rebellious and cool if it wasn't so limp and stringy. At 15, he's finally growing into his (sadly dainty rather than studly) looks, although he still looks like a skinny pale white boy whose sole certifiably handsome asset might be his bright blue eyes. Quidditch jock heartthrob, he is not. Micah doesn't put any particular thought into his school uniform, although he's ripped holes in several sets from all the tree-climbing and sneaking through the woods he does while trying to find the perfect framing shot.

HEIGHT: 5'8"

PB: Vincent Kartheiser

PERSONALITY

LIKES: movies, photography, people watching, writing screenplays, monsters, fake blood and gore, the Quidditch team, speed, feeling the wind in his hair, motorcycles, tinkering with old cameras

DISLIKES: quiet, the library, having to sit still, being told a movie (any movie) is shitty, when the battery runs out on his camcorder or laptop, serious conversations, pitying looks, sleeping

PERSONALITY:

Micah is an aspiring film director who is obsessed with making movies. He always has a million projects going at once, whether he's outlining his "latest" screenplay (he has hundreds of unfinished screenplays), doodling scene blocking in class, or just has a camera up and filming during any important moment. He's incredibly ambitious and wants to learn how to do everything when it comes to filmmaking, although he prefers to be behind the camera rather than in front of it.

This point is worth emphasizing. Everything he does is for a movie. Everything. Micah seems to be always focused on getting the "perfect shot" and looking through a lens rather than just living in the moment. If you talk to him, he'll go off at the slightest provocation about how this reminds him of a movie or what this means in the context of a story, even about totally mundane real life events. It's extremely difficult to get him to put the camera down or pay attention to anything else.

Which isn't to say that Micah doesn't care about anything else, but his attention skips around a lot. It has to be FUN, or he doesn't care. That said, some of the things Micah finds fun are: his classes, working on challenging projects, getting hit by Bludgers, having cute people be mad at him when he flirts with them. He's busy, proactive and able to find entertainment in almost everything, but will lose interest quickly and switch to a new project every week. He never seems to treat anything with serious importance, not even movies, really. Micah keeps everything very surface level.

That shallowness becomes quickly apparent to anyone who spends more than ten minutes talking to him. He's a total bullshitter who spouts convoluted "it's actually a metaphor" justifications for why his movie plots always revolve around blood-spurting gore and scantily-clad girls. Micah is far less clever and insightful than he wants to appear with all his "budding genius director" pretensions. Still, even when you directly call him on his bullshit, Micah is hard to unbalance. He can be infuriatingly shameless and unapologetic about his interests, and even sometimes seems to enjoy being yelled at.

Micah's a perpetually amusing person—good for a conversation, but terrible if you want empathy or sympathy. He's extremely awkward when it comes to emotions, whether it's others or his own. When someone's upset, he usually copes by trying to distract them or cracking jokes to try to make them laugh. He's generally good-hearted, but his sense of humour can be incredibly insensitive. If laughter doesn't work, he'll try to escape sad or upset people by making them mad at him (since at least mad is better than sad, right???).

This trait is new as of two years ago: Micah hates it when he thinks anyone feels sorry for him. He'd honestly rather be disliked than pitied. It's not necessarily that he doesn't want to seem weak, but he's uncomfortable with still being seen as the grieving little kid whose brother just died. He wants to move on. Micah St. Clair, future famous wizard film director, is FUN and NOT VERY SERIOUS. His behavior makes him easy to befriend, but hard to get close to. He never wants to talk about himself, only his hobbies.

HISTORY

FAMILY MEMBERS:

Everett St. Clair, father. Half-blood. Quodpot game commentator, works out of Las Vegas. Everett wishes Micah cared more about sports, but has stopped pushing him about it in the last couple of years. He's earnest, straightforward and inclined to bone-cracking hugs; and has little in common with Micah, who's more artistic, prickly and gets cerebral and convoluted about his interests. Everett's often concerned about how everyone's feeling, and is literally the only one in the family who ever wants to talk about that. His father doesn't really get Micah, and vice versa, but they've been making the awkward effort to bond over Quidditch.

Miranda St. Clair (nee ???), mother. Half-blood. Translator for magical books. Micah's a lot more like his mom; she has his sense of humour and irreverence, and that same hard avoidance of talking about feelings. The death of her eldest son hit her particularly hard, and she only managed to claw her way out of grief in the past year by throwing herself into work. She and Micah get each other. Miranda is his biggest supporter when it comes to his movie dreams, and makes a point of picking up a new DVD or gadget for him every time she Apparates out of Revelstoke.

Caleb St. Clair, older brother (by 4 years). Squib. Deceased, in a motorcycle accident two years ago. Micah loved his brother more than anything, and no longer talks about him.

HISTORY:

A big family wasn't in the cards for Everett and Miranda St. Clair. Their eldest, Caleb, was an exceptionally difficult birth, and the complications resulted a few miscarriages, spread out over four years, before they managed to have their second son, Micah. Growing up, the boys were used to their mother referring to them both as her "miracle children." Caleb and Micah could not have been raised in a more loving family environment, which was perhaps their only comfort when they were stuck in a remote wizarding town with nothing to do.

Still, Revelstoke wasn't the worst place to grow up. All of the kids your age had to be your friend or else no one was ever getting a Quodpot game off the ground, and it was safe enough that their parents rarely got upset with Caleb for keeping his younger brother out past sunset to look at the stars. Caleb would pore over dusty astronomy books and Micah would invent stories about the people who lived on the stars and planets they looked at, and they'd act out exploring these alien worlds by playing in the desert.

Despite their age difference, Caleb was unquestionably Micah's best friend. It was a typical "doting older brother" and "adoring little brother" relationship, and remained so even as other differences cropped up over the years. Micah was always an awkward, scrawny kid; imaginative and clever but easy to side-track. Caleb was the golden boy, tall and strong and handsome, known for his kindness and patience. Dad had always wanted a Quodpot player for a son, so it was a shocking disappointment when athletic Caleb definitively turned out to be a Squib, and skinny Micah awoke to his magical abilities.

If growing up in Revelstoke had been trying for a young magical boy, it was infinitely worse for a Squib. Not because of family, although in some ways it made it worse that Caleb's mother, father and little brother loved him so much and were so protective of him. Leaving Micah, who so adored him, was unimaginable. Some relief came when the wizard town finally joined modern society and found a way to get a wired connection to the Internet, and the St. Clair brothers eagerly consumed all the Muggle material they could. Caleb fell in love with rocket ships and airplanes and automobiles, and Micah discovered movies.

It was a passion which would have very little time to develop. Soon enough, Micah left for Ilvermorny, and the closest he could get to knowing anything about movies was by pestering his Muggleborn classmates to recount to him the plots of their favourite films. He might've been an odd pick for Horned Serpent house, but when it came to Muggle movies, Micah was an obsessive scholar. Every summer was spent watching as many movies online as he could (totally indiscriminately, which probably accounts for Micah's current shitty taste in movies), and when his mother found a cheap digital video camera for Micah to use, well. There was no going back. Healer, Auror, dragon breeder? No, Micah St. Clair was going to be a famous film director.

And oh right, he was a wizard too. Boarding school wasn't a terrible experience, even if there weren't any DVD players in the castle. Micah enjoyed magic classes and being away from home, and even took up Quodpot for his father's sake, although he was never very passionate about it. (He liked intramural Quidditch too, and was willing to try any club to keep himself busy.) Back home, Caleb was indulging in his love of Muggle vehicles by buying a motorcycle, which he'd take for long trips away from Revelstoke. In hindsight, Micah sees how suffocated Caleb must've felt at home, as a restless teenager and a Squib in a small town of almost entirely wizards, without even his lively little brother around to keep the melancholy at bay.

In the middle of Micah's third year at Ilvermorny, Caleb was in a motorcycle accident and died. A simple road accident, which any wizard would've survived. There are more details to that, but none Micah cares to dwell on. Micah was given permission to miss class for two weeks and go home for the funeral. He suspects he could've been excused for longer, but after even one week, Micah was desperate to leave home again. He doesn't really recall what the next few months were like, only that he seemed to pass through his classes and exams like an observer than an active participant. Like the cameraman, rather than the actor.

The first time Micah remembers waking up from that fog was when the brochure for Gooseberry High was passed around. Not because he was an academic genius or had a secret passion for camping, but just the idea of going somewhere completely new triggered something in him. Somewhere where his classmates didn't let all their conversations lapse into awkward silence, where the teachers didn't speak gently to him even when he was being an inattentive flake, where he no longer had to walk into Transfiguration class and think, every time, "this is where I was when they called me to the headmaster's office to tell me." He applied, bundling compassionately worded teacher's recommendations with his good but unremarkable grades, along with a burned DVD of some of his short films, and a very enthusiastic cover letter.

Gooseberry was just what Micah needed. The unexpected letter telling them he'd been accepted to a new school even shook his mother out of her own fog ("Micah, when did you even apply?"), and during freshman year, Micah did his best to send his parents regular updates on how cool everything was. They have horses! Kayaking! Camping! Sorry, Dad, there's no Quodpot, but Micah's going to try out for their Quidditch team! (He only made reserve in sophomore year.) And to all his new classmates, well, there were no preconceptions. No history. Micah could be anyone he wanted to be.

Micah St. Clair was going to be FUN. The LIFE OF THE PARTY. And a world-famous WIZARD FILM DIRECTOR.

SCHOOL

YEAR: Sophomore
HOUSE: Azurcrest
SORTING: Micah had watched in fascination for a few moments, just trying to figure out how the cave drawing magic worked. Like a cartoon projected on the wall, and maybe if you found a way to attach a script and package it up, you could have a movie distribution going. He started excitedly muttering to himself about that idea instead of the matter at hand, i.e. his Sorting, and then it was Ebonhide and Azurcrest trying the hardest for him. Azurcrest won out. He might be obsessive, but seriousness and introspection aren't Micah's strong points, and he's always down for fun.
WAND: Ancient kauri wood, dragon scale core, 13 inches and inflexible. This old wand is a heirloom passed down the St. Clair line, and was originally meant to go to Micah's older brother. Even after all these years, Micah has yet to fully bond with the wand, but he wouldn't give it up for the world.
FAMILIAR: None.

CLASSES: (core) Charms, Hermeticism, Potions, Transfiguration; (electives) Aesthetic Magic, Artificing, Astronomy, Defense Against the Dark Arts. He really wants to get into Occlumency next year, although he's honestly more interested in the Legilimency aspect.
SENIOR PROJECT: Micah wants to make film a mainstream wizard art form. He's been studying the history of cinematography and working on magic-friendly methods of film and film editing, but it's pretty clunky compared to handheld muggle recording devices. Obviously, he's working on the screenplay to his movie masterpiece, but he's also been experimenting with "down converting" VHS tapes in hopes of introducing wizards to muggle cinema on a massive scale. It's an ambitious but scattered project. Micah hasn't hammered down the specifics yet.
ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: Micah is surprisingly good student, although his grades are somewhat scattershot, with mostly B's, some C's and a couple of A's. He enjoys classes and can get very into his assignments, especially when they're challenging, and it helps that he's figured out which classes he enjoys most for his sophomore year. His favourites are Aesthetic Magic and Artificing, both of which he's commandeered as time to work on his growing film oeuvre. Like most, he has the toughest time in Hermeticism, which can get a bit too abstract for him. Astronomy is hard to grasp for the same reason, but he loves it because he's a night owl.

EXTRACURRICULARS:
In order of most to least dedicated attendance:

• Quidditch; he became a reserve for the Azurcrest Quidditch team this year, with a preference for playing Seeker or Keeper. Maybe odd choices, since Micah isn't known for his patience, but he likes watching and being observant.
  
• Drama, although he'd so much rather work backstage or in a directorial capacity (which Mrs. Acuña just refuses to allow so long as he's a sophomore).
  
• Gaming; he can play a mean match of Mario Kart. Also, hello haunted DVD player and questionable movie collection.
  
• Duelling, where he is admittedly not that great of a duellist or fencer, but he loves filming his classmates' duels. One day it's going to make great fight scene material.
  
• Event Committee; which tends to turn into Micah treating every dance like a movie set he's dressing. Right, OK, it's supposed to be "fun," but if you use these sheer white curtains, you can hide inside them and kind of look like a spooky ghost.
  

OOC

NAME: Marin
EMAIL: righthandmarin [at] gmail
CDJ: baisemain
OTHER PREFERRED CONTACT: N/A
TIME ZONE: MST