FULL NAME: Claudia Xuliana Vega Saavedra. It's pronounced KLOW-dee-ya and shoo-lee-AH-nah, thanks.
NICKNAMES: Oh, she's not too fussy. Claude, Cloudy, Vega, Saavedra, she'll answer to whatever.
AGE/DOB: 17 / May 2 / Taurus
YEAR: Senior
BLOOD STATUS: Halfblood. Muggle father, witch mother. She prefers to think of herself as "bicultural."
GENDER/PRONOUNS: Female, she/her.
SEXUALITY: Claudia has a habit of falling for the most inconvenient or unavailable person in any given room.
HOMETOWN: Baton Rouge, LA or Barebone, KY, depending on the parent.
APPEARANCE:Claudia checks herself out in every reflective surface. It's not purely out of vanity (she doesn't think it's out of vanity at
all), but anxiety. She could have a cowlick she doesn't know about! Or a patch of dry skin! Or a
booger. After all the thought she puts into every outfit to make sure it doesn't outshine her personality, she would have to shrivel up and
die if someone else pointed out a simple, easily-fixed-but-not-forgotten flaw in her facade.
Claudia would consider her style
classic, which also shares a lot of traits with
going to a job interview. She likes matching blazers and skirts, opaque tights and practical low heels, and simple embellishments or accessories. Or what she thinks are simple embellishments. Having picked up most of her style knowledge from either magazines or her grandmothers, Claudia tends to be a little heavy-handed with her accessorizing, and she has no qualms with smashing together several statement pieces when she should really consider paring it back to just the one.
When it comes time to get sweaty, Claudia does actually try to pare it back. There's no jewelry or impractical shoes, her long hair is swept back and there's nothing she doesn't mind getting covered in gunk on her, but there's still something a little extra: a hairband with too many rhinestones or an athletic top with a pretentious wizathleisure brand name. She's really trying, though, and would be gutted if anyone told her just how far from casual she looks.
HEIGHT: 5' even
BUILD: Toned, rectangular. Try as she might, she'll never have a defined waist.
PB: Danna Paola
INSPO: (OPTIONAL) Pinboards/Moodboards/Playlists/Etc
Claudia Vega is too smart to be this fucking dumb. As a child, she was always considered precocious and mature, a cute little five-year-old shaking hands and thank you for your support in her upcoming presidential bid. And, like most smart and savvy kids, it was a real blow to the ego when being able to read and write the alphabet stopped being a core part of the curriculum.
All her life, Claudia has craved validation. When expectations change, she adapts to it by working harder, breaking her back to make these grades look easy. Hard work is the only method Claudia knows, and anything short of that might as well be cheating. As tempting as shortcuts and handouts may be, Claudia romanticizes the idea of hard work and pulling oneself up by their bootstraps—even if Claudia has no bootstraps that need pulling. If something isn't earned the hard way, it doesn't feel like she's earned it at all. Which is why she has a tendency to make things more difficult for herself. Be it consciously or unconsciously, Claudia will give herself extra obstacles in any given task in order to prove to herself that she really deserves this praise.
And sometimes these obstacles are also really fucking dumb. Asking for extra credit and loading up on Honors classes is one thing—at least there's a clear audience there—but Claudia will give herself extra criteria and rules and get wrapped around the axle over assignments and favors no one even asked for. She needs to be at
least one full chapter ahead on the reading so she can remain the teacher's pet, and she
has to bake a cupcake for her friend's birthday because it won't feel as personal if she doesn't! It's not that hard to figure out that Claudia loves to suffer, and, in fact, wouldn't even know who she was if she wasn't tearing her hair out from stress. It helps soothe the savage beast that is impostor syndrome, even if it also leads to very regular bouts of burnout.
Claudia has a remarkable lack of emotional intelligence. She certainly has a lot of emotions, and while she's not particularly afraid of them, she thinks she can bend them to her will and make them follow her schedule. She doesn't have
time to cry right now, or visit Dr. Quirke and try to ~heal~, she has midterms to study for! The policy of hard work and no shortcuts doesn't apply to emotional firestorms, and Claudia will follow whatever whim her big, dumb heart thinks will fix this. Usually, that means something impulsive, something cathartic and quick, like a sudden change. More than once she's chopped off her hair or gone skinny dipping in the name of an emotional bandaid, and there have been exactly zero repercussions to burying the inciting wound. Whoo! All better! Back to work!
If Claudia has even the smallest inkling that this is an unhealthy coping mechanism, she sure as hell doesn't show it. When a friend of hers shows signs of being down in the dumps, Claudia tries to mother them in the exact same misguided way she tries to heal herself. You need a change! she'll insist, already mixing up the blotchy hair dye. You need catharsis! Or a carbo load! She is a generally good-hearted person, and she has a lot of love to give, but she's clumsy and awkward about it and doesn't know what to do, so she shoves her weird solutions down the throats of those she loves the most.
With everything Claudia does to keep her life tightly controlled, even she was surprised by how she took to sports. Especially messy and dangerous games, like Quidditch and Quodpot. She asked if she could join athletic teams when she was seven ("Sports have great optics!" she said, with no actual knowledge of what optics even are), and quickly found that they exhilarated and challenged her in ways always lacking in schoolwork. Quick-thinking had never been her strong point, leading to a lot of dumb panic decisions in the real world, but there were dozens of split-second choices to be made in every match. And sometimes the wrong decision meant falling from your broom, or breaking a bone you never thought even could be broken.
Which brings us to the most important point of all: Claudia Vega loves a spiral. She's never felt more alive than when a bludger is headed straight for her face, literally or metaphorically. When she's freefalling, it's the only time she's ever felt, well,
free. Everyone's too busy watching the spectacle to pay attention to all the little details, like what shoes she's wearing or her exact GPA. It's too bad Claudia's too fucking dumb to figure out how to achieve that in a healthy way.
FUN FACTS:
♥ Will often try to make (or bake) something for her friends' birthdays, and it's almost always very poorly made. Try her cupcakes if you love food poisoning.
♥ Has never had a TV dinner, and secretly wants to try.
♥ She ran for Student Council Treasurer last year and lost to her accidental rival, Elijah Rainwater.
♥ With a no-maj father and magical mother, Claudia is comfortable in both worlds, but she has some glaringly big blind spots. Oh! Yes! Those famous hotel panini presses! She uses those all the time.
LANGUAGES: English and Spanish (both Castilian and Mexican/Central American Spanish, though the lines get a little blurry with the vocabulary). She can also stumble her way through a conversation in Galician, but she doesn't know any Galician speakers who would rather suffer through that when she speaks perfectly good Spanish.
HOBBIES: Running, Quodpot, Quidditch, baking (badly), overloading her schedule, extra credit projects, stress eating, stress cleaning, stress crying, stressing, planning her future, practicing her facial expressions in the mirror every morning
SKILLS:
LONG-DISTANCE RUNNING: Claudia tries to run at least a couple miles a day, and she would love to train for a marathon... when she has the time. It's the only downtime she has most days, and even then she's constantly monitoring her speed and competing against herself. The funny thing is, if Claudia actually applied some of the lessons she's learned from long-distance running to her everyday life then she'd be a hell of a lot better off, and yet...
FLYING: If asked, Claudia would say flying relaxes her because it takes her away from the noise and people on the ground. The truth is, flying exhilarates Claudia, and every near collision and shaky stunt is the closest she'll feel to happiness.
BROOMSPORTS: Not just a subset of flying, especially since Claudia's biggest contribution is something she's spent a lot of time practicing at ground level. She's a crack shot, and when her brother would fight with their parents, they would spend hours out back or at the nearest park, throwing balls at increasingly small and hard to see targets.
DATA-CRUNCHING: Give Claudia columns and columns of tiny, tedious numbers and she'll figure out how to spit out the relevant information. She's basically a magical spreadsheet wizard, except instead of using Excel she knows a number of spells that are useful for sorting and sifting through all the noise. Her Hermeticism skills are particularly useful here; when she doesn't know an existing data processing spell, she can usually mash together pieces of two or three others and make it work.
FAMILY:MOTHER: Branca Saavedra.
Witch. Magimedical Researcher. Barebone, KY.Very dry, very serious, very weird woman. Spent years undercover at Muggle hospitals and medical facilities, and is currently considered one of the foremost (magical) experts in the field of Muggle medicine.
FATHER: César Vega.
Muggle. Medical Researcher. Baton Rouge, LA.A legitimately self-made man, César came to the US as an undocumented immigrant at the age of 5 and now he's a prominent researcher in the field of hematology. Bitterly jealous and resentful, César throws a lot of money around to keep up with his colleagues while raging against people with more privileged pasts—including his children. He gets snide when the topic of magic comes up, as he considers this yet another privilege he's been shut out of.
BROTHER: Mateo Vega.
Barely two years older than Claudia, they used to be very close. He ran away from home when she was 14 and they haven't spoken since. He's fine, she's just angry.
BACKGROUND:Branca was 12 weeks pregnant with her first child before she told her partner she was a witch. When he asked how she could possibly keep something like this from him for so long, she answered, quite simply, that he hadn't needed to know until then. Branca would later admit this had been a mistake; she should have waited until she knew the child wasn't a squib before she spilled. She didn't want anything to jeopardize her work, after all.
Claudia came along less than two years later, and the inevitable dissolution of Branca and César's relationship soon after. Branca was reaching a logical stopping point in her undercover research in Muggle medicine and had a job offer in her (magical) hometown at a (magical) research hospital, while César refused to leave his hard-earned position at a (non-magical) research hospital. They were both too smart and tired of each other to think the idea of "staying together for the kids" deserved any kind of merit, and were both foolish enough to think they could manage an amicable split.
It was easy enough to pretend there was no bad blood between the two parties when the kids were young. Joint custody, split right down the middle, was a sensible arrangement, and with magical travel it was no trouble to shuffle Mateo and Claudia from Louisiana to Kentucky. Until it came time for school. Branca didn't have much interest in the more emotional aspects of motherhood, but she wanted the kids to have a good foundation in magical education, and César's resentment reared its ugly head. He wanted his kids to know they
didn't need magic to be successful, well-rounded individuals, and that
not having magic was nothing to be
ashamed of. As custody arrangements shifted to accommodate the kids' schooling, the tentative truce between Branca and César began to crumble.
Claudia was too young to remember when there was peace between her parents, and too wide-eyed and trusting to realize it had nothing to do with her. César would throw money around whenever he had a spare cent, a tangible replacement for affection that he could use to show off his success, and he would rage any time his spoiled children considered following his example and suggested using money (or
magic) to solve some minor problem. Claudia stood before her dad and drank it all in; shortcuts bad, privilege bad, handouts bad, and, if you listened long enough, magic wasn't just bad, it was
unfair.
It was a lot to handle. Branca and César were hard on the kids, academically and superficially, and expectations were hard to manage. But Claudia had no reason to believe her parents would ask her to do anything she
couldn't manage, so she just had to keep trying. Mateo, on the other hand, would balk. When Branca asked the kids about their grades (were they
really trying their hardest, or were they just coasting while they could?), he would fight back, while Claudia would smile and promise to work harder. Mateo was just being
dramatic, everything was perfectly fine!
Mateo was the one who taught her how to fly and throw a ball. After each and every tiff he had with their parents, he would drag his little sister outside for target practice, on the ground or in the air. But while Mateo had no interest in actual organized sports, where there was just one more authority figure there to tell him how disappointing he was, Claudia craved more adult direction. She wanted to be on proper teams where even
more authority figures could tell her what she needed to do to stop being such a disappointment, and occasionally heap praise on her when she succeeded.
"Just tell them it'll be good optics for when you're president some day," Mateo told her when she tried to figure out how to get her parents to agree that wasting time on non-educational non-muggle activities was a good move. He was being cynical, but the seven-year-old Claudia Vega had never been anything less than genuine in her life. It was the first half-truth she'd ever told. But it's not like she could tell her parents she liked how flying made her feel alive, and every moment spent on the ground felt like sleepwalking in comparison.
It was hard to stop Claudia once she got the go-ahead. The same fervor with which she attacked her schoolwork took her far in QueeWee and Quiddle League, where moms in cashmere sweaters yelled at coaches to play little ones who barely gave a flying fuck about the sport. The praise and positive attention she got from coaches and teammates propelled her to new (metaphorical and literal) heights, even while she struggled to keep up with the mounting time commitments. The more involved she got in sports, the more her parents shoved more academic extracurriculars down her throat, and Claudia smiled and swore she could
handle it all.
They were supposed to go to Vercoer for high school. With a residence in Baton Rouge and stellar grades, it was no problem to get Mateo and Claudia on the (wink wink) pre-approved list for the school. Mateo had been looking forward to boarding school for years, while Claudia was anxious about a change to her tightly controlled schedule, and about losing her parental buffer while he was away. For the two years when it was mostly her, bouncing between Baton Rouge and Barebone, Claudia buried her anxiety in schoolwork and practice. The busier she was, the less time she had to think and find new things to feel bad about.
Claudia's turn came at last. Her freshman year at Vercoer and she was ready to surpass a whole
new set of expectations and make a fresh batch of adults fall head over heels for her. But during that time, Mateo had grown even more resentful of home, and Vercoer's growing expectations were doing him no favors. Claudia still thought he was being dramatic, and now that she was at the same school as him and away from their parents they started fighting with each other. It was a shitshow.
Still, she never expected him to run away from home. It was the first week of summer vacation and they were back in Baton Rouge when Mateo and César got in one of their patented blowout fights, and he grabbed his bags and took off. César and Claudia both assumed he went to his mother's house in Barebone. He didn't. That was the last time Claudia saw her brother.
Oh, he's fine. He ran off to his girlfriend's house and wound up staying with his best friend for senior year, finishing out his high school career at Ilvermorny. Claudia was just hurt. She felt blindsided and abandoned. Her best friend and closest ally had left her after a year of turmoil between them, and she wasn't feeling very generous. First he'd abandoned her for school, and now he was abandoning her
at school?
Mateo tried to call her a few days later. She blocked his number. He sent her a letter and she hid it away. He tried to contact her in every way except coming home, and that was the only way Claudia was prepared to accept. More letters came in and they piled up, unopened. Until Mateo's birthday, when Claudia snapped. A combination of guilt and anger led her to chopping off her hair and tossing the letters in a fire, along with her Vercoer uniforms. She wasn't going back. She needed a change, and with Peckenpaugh as the only school willing to accept new students so close to the deadline, that was the kind of change she was going to get.
WAND: Rosewood, dryad hair, 9" long, with an intricately carved handle made from mahogany. Surprisingly brittle.
FAMILIAR: Estrella, a
pygmy owl who's only really good for delivering small letters. Even some birthday cards get to be a little heavy for her, but maybe Claudia should stop sending such bulky birthday cards.
CAREER GOALS: It's Complicated(TM). Claudia has said since she was a little girl that she's
going to be MACUSA president some day. What she really wants is to do something that will help people, like Healing, but she's also very much aware that using her parents' (and grandparents') connections with various medical institutions would be a shortcut, and not an avenue that's open to a lot of people, which goes against her every principle. Maybe she'll find a way to do
both.
PART-TIME JOB: God. Who has time for that? (She thought she did last year, actually, but after three weeks at the Gastrognome she broke down crying in the library and made Mr. Zahidi just
so uncomfortable.)
CLASSES: CHARMS (H): When it comes to rote memorization of swishing, flicking, and perfect pronunciation, Claudia excels at this class, but if she doesn't get it right away, it's very easy for her to get wound up and keep making the exact same mistakes only louder this time.
POTIONS (H): She took Honors Potions fully knowing Mr. Berzelius was just going to troll her. Still, she's very precise, and she knows a
lot about lab safety. It's just that she's not very good at troubleshooting, and if she screws up the timing on just one thing that things start to fall apart like a domino effect.
TRANSFIG (H): God, look at those beautiful formulas. Claudia fucking loves formulas. You wanna see her Transfig spreadsheets? She's got
lots of spreadsheets for how to keep track of which formulas to use for each kind of Transfiguration.
HERBOLOGY: Claudia pretends she doesn't mind when her nails get dirty in class, but giving herself an obstacle like "I fucking hate dirt" is exactly the kind of pointless obstacle she craves.
HERMETICISM (H, TA): One of Claudia's favorite things to do in this class is try to figure out what each element of a spell does, and how it interacts with other spell elements. She experiments plenty with data processing spells when she doesn't know the proper spell for it, and she likes to dream about someday being known for inventing a revolutionary charm. Ms. Altizer is the only person in school who might be able to help Claudia figure out how to calm the fuck down, but she also likes the amount of enthusiasm she brings to her role so it's a careful balance to strike.
HOME MAG-EC: There's nothing that makes Claudia feel more useless and spoiled than not knowing that hotel rooms have muggle panini presses.
WIZ LIT: This is the most self-indulgently relaxing class Claudia takes. She gets so far ahead on the reading that she'll use the class to finish her other work sometimes.
PRE-HEALER STUDIES: It's in her blood. Claudia gets nervous when Healer Greatheart throws the book out the window because it means she can't be more prepared than the rest of the class, but she still busts her butt in it.
ARITHMANCY: Hey, hey, hey, do you guys wanna see her spreadsheets? Look at her spreadsheets. Claudia is
very enthusiastic and prepared for this class, and she needs to be told to shut up and put her hand down sometimes.
EXTRA-CURRICULARS: Quidpot, Quodditch, Arithletes, Creative Writing/Book Club (she prefers book club discussions, but she'll still go to the creative writing weeks because she likes feeling bad about herself)
SORTING?: There's nothing Claudia loves more than suffering, and the Sorting Path knows what that means. She's intense and serious and hard on herself, and when she reaches her breaking point, the mistakes she makes are BIG. It might not be the
healthiest thing in the world, but Claudia's passion for hard work and distaste for shortcuts made the Fall Door an easy choice.
NAME: Alex
EMAIL: hey dude shut up at gmail
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HERMETICISM TA
Date: 2019-11-29 10:25 pm (UTC)POSITION: Hermeticism TA
WHY THIS SPOT?: Claudia loves tearing apart spells to figure out how the different elements work together, rigging up spells when she doesn't know the "proper" way to do something and just experimenting for future use. What does this flick do, and what will happen if you alter it, or change the order? Can you accomplish the same thing with different wording, and what can be done to make it nonverbal? Claudia will always encourage students to experiment with changing up their favorite spells in the same ways and find what works for them. Take one element from it and apply it to another spell, see what happens! Oh, just don't experiment on yourself. Or your pet! OR YOUR SISTER WHAT ARE YOU FRESHMEN DOING???
IDEAS?: