Verine is a potioneer and the Professor of Potions 1-3. After losing much of her family in the Winchester Massacre in 2054, Verine moved full-time to Hogwarts Castle, sinking herself into her teaching work, substitution research, and potions development. She leaves the Grounds infrequently now, only to visit family, friends, and occasionally to get a consult from another Potioneer.
xxx✽BASICS✽xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
NICKNAMES Ver, Rose Whisperer
GENDER Female
SEXUAL ORIENTATION Straight
AGE 55
BIRTHDAY January 21, 2002-- Aquarius
LANGUAGES English, conversational Chinese, basic Irish
+a few phrases in other languages whose countries she visited or just picked up from her husband and August's polyglot studying.
BLOOD STATUS Halfblood
WAND Apple wood and unicorn hair, 13 ½ inches, slightly springy. Slightly curved and tapered at the tip and carved to look like woven rope at the handle.
PATRONUS Pine marten
FACECLAIM Lisa Lambe
HEIGHT 5’7” (170 cm)
WEIGHT 140 lbs (63.5 kg)
xxx✽SCHOOL AND CAREER✽xxxxxxxxxxxx
ATTENDED Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
HOUSE Ravenclaw
CLASS OF 2020
CLUBS Art, Potions
O.W.L. SCORES
Astronomy ~ A
Charms ~ E
Defense Against the Dark Arts ~ A
Herbology ~ O
History of Magic ~ A
Potions ~ O
Transfiguration ~ A
Alchemy ~ O
Divination ~ O
Arithmancy ~ E
Healing ~ E
N.E.W.T. SCORES
Herbology ~ O
Potions ~ O
Alchemy ~ O
Divination ~ O
Arithmancy ~ E
History ~ E
Other Electives
Exam details in my storage guild
Wizarding Law: (yr 3) Verine took some Wizarding Law in honor of her grandfather who had served on the Wizengamot. She decided very quickly and astutely she would rather not.
Wandlore: (yr 4) Verine took a year of Wandlore in honor of her grandmother who had a made a living gathering materials for wands and helping craft them. It was fairly interesting, but she decided to focus on her other electives moving forward.
Mind Magic:(yr 6) Verine was inspired to take Mind Magic for whatever reason. She enjoyed the theory of it, but spending an hour a week getting her mind broken into was not fun and towards the end of the year when she realized she really just was not going to be an accomplished Legilimens, she preferred to skip class. She had an idea to look up or develop a potion alternative to occlumency, which she'll get back to eventually.
Apparation: (yr 7) Basic proficiency. In her school years Apparition was a nightmare. If she thought Flying and the constant visits to the Hospital Wing were annoying, apparition attempts were downright hazardous. For a long time Verine avoided apparating, deciding that Floo was perfectly convenient for everyday life, muggle transportation was quite sufficient, and she was born with working legs and feet for a reason. She has since practiced sufficiently to apparate safely to and from regular places like home, the Winchester Estate she grew up in, and the offices for the Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers.
Wizarding Law: (yr 3) Verine took some Wizarding Law in honor of her grandfather who had served on the Wizengamot. She decided very quickly and astutely she would rather not.
Wandlore: (yr 4) Verine took a year of Wandlore in honor of her grandmother who had a made a living gathering materials for wands and helping craft them. It was fairly interesting, but she decided to focus on her other electives moving forward.
Mind Magic:(yr 6) Verine was inspired to take Mind Magic for whatever reason. She enjoyed the theory of it, but spending an hour a week getting her mind broken into was not fun and towards the end of the year when she realized she really just was not going to be an accomplished Legilimens, she preferred to skip class. She had an idea to look up or develop a potion alternative to occlumency, which she'll get back to eventually.
Apparation: (yr 7) Basic proficiency. In her school years Apparition was a nightmare. If she thought Flying and the constant visits to the Hospital Wing were annoying, apparition attempts were downright hazardous. For a long time Verine avoided apparating, deciding that Floo was perfectly convenient for everyday life, muggle transportation was quite sufficient, and she was born with working legs and feet for a reason. She has since practiced sufficiently to apparate safely to and from regular places like home, the Winchester Estate she grew up in, and the offices for the Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers.
DREAM JOB Magical Researcher
CURRENT OCCUPATION
■ Potions 1-3 Professor (starting Fall 2052)
■ Potioneer (2021 - present)
xxx✽PERSONALITY✽xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
STUDIOUS The methodologies of research and academia were ingrained in Verine from a young age growing up with her grandfather, who was an accomplished historian and former Wizengamut member. She carried his mindset into her Hogwarts experience, focusing particularly on Potions and Divination and anything that helped her get better at either. She thrives in the deep and thorough study of potions, but continued to enjoy diving into topics of other field and connecting them to projects in herbology and potions research. Her work style usually focuses on two or three seaparate projects that she dives very deeply into.
LIVELY Verine lives life day by day with more concern for what she’s doing than when she’s doing it. Parties are fun ways to explore something beyond her interest silos, as long as it's occasional enough to not interrupt her research or precious family time. She enjoys a good joke or prank, as long as said prank doesn't hinder anyone's work. Friendly and enthusiastic, Verine is always happy to befriend a new colleague.
INVENTIVE Verine's signature touch is her penchant for mixing things together-- from soaps and perfumes as a child, to foods and clothing as an adult, to herbs and elixirs as a potioneer, she likes mashing things up as much as she does mastering the original. Her potioneering career has primarily focused on substitution research, coming up with alternative methods or ingredients for brewing potions, understanding properties and techniques for better efficiency.
ORGANIZED For a person who loves mixing everything Verine is surprisingly organized. As a young student, she realized that replicating new mixtures was near impossible if after mixing every bottle was different from what it was labeled no notes were taken. She picked up good organization techniques from her professors and have passed along this encouragement for precise organization and clear documentation to her assistants in turn. Verine has become quite fond of putting things in boxes, literally and metaphorically, if only so it’s easier to note what falls outside the box and has gotten mixed with other things.
FREE-SPIRITED Although she follows up on interests with methodical, careful examination, Verine tends to let her flights of fancy decide what those project obsessions are and when they will be. She operates very much on her own clock, more concerned with getting something done well than doing it on any particular time schedule. Getting things done well is more important to her than getting it done exactly on time. Sometimes though, this means she misses out on family time, or is in the office unpredictably.
✽HOBBIES
■ Attempting fusion-flavored recipes/ potions
■ Gardening (and collecting cacti)
■ Developing potions
✽LIKES
■ Plants, particularly flowers and cacti
■ Academic conferences/ the occasional party or social
■ Art-- Constant, informative, and beautiful. What’s not to like?
■ Simple everyday divinations
■ Babbling Beverage (her favorite potion)
✽DISLIKES
■ Deadlines and inflexible schedules
■ Interruptions
■ Flying and apparition
■ Arguments-- not the same as academic debates. She has few close and long-lasting friends as is, and disagreeing with them or her husband always makes her uncharacteristically sad, nervous, and timid.
■ The news-- for the most part, it changes on a whim so as long as it doesn’t affect her, she could care less.
✽STRENGTHS
■ Thorough and methodological in her exploration of a topic, clearly documented.
■ Openness to continue learning.
✽WEAKNESSES
■ Tunnel visions/ Time management -- When she's focused, it's great, but she also forgets everything around her.
■ Maintaining relationships -- While good at befriending people, she expects people to be quite independent in their learning.
✽DREAMS
■ Achieving work-life balance or work-life melding, if it exists.
■ Inspiring students to better understandings of how potions can fit into their life.
✽FEARS
■ Abandonment-- her parents left her for old tombs and dangerous creatures. While she’s secure her husband wouldn't leave her and usually doesn’t usually think much on it, she’s terrified of the possibility.
■ Being unapproachable -- She has few close and long-lasting friends as is, and fighting with them or her husband always makes her uncharacteristically sad, nervous, and timid.
xxx✽BACKSTORY✽xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
✽EARLY CHILDHOOD Verine's parents, a cursebreaker-auror duo, left most of her raising to her paternal grandparents. Verine was homeschooled by them, a historian and magical materials retailer by trade, with the occasional governor or governess coming from their professional circles to supplement studies. Any flight of fancy was allowed and lessons covered whatever she was fascinated by, but whatever she chose she had to learn well before moving on.
✽SCHOOL YEARS Verine started her first year flitting around, attending a different club each week and constantly getting detention or losing house points for being late or submitting an assignment late. As the years passed, she got somewhat better at time, but was still constantly in detention for being caught out after curfew, usually in the Library or brewing something somewhere she probably shouldn't. She made many acquaintances and enjoyed socializing with others at parties, but aside from her younger cousin, had no one particularly close to her. Instead Verine spent most of her time alone obsessed over her latest project or assignment. Potions and Divination were easily her favorite and best subjects, one appealing to her penchant for careful study and methodology and the other to intuition. She considers one of her greatest accomplishments getting to serve detention every day for a month cleaning and organizing the Potions Storeroom, where she learned not only how it was organized, but about different ways of organizing and storing herbs.
Verine's seventh year was abruptly punctuated with the death of her grandmother in mid-October. Going home to a more empty household during the winter break served only to drive Verine to seclude herself further. Rather than build a program of study around a dream career she didn’t really have, Verine was quite happy to just take NEWTs in the classes she excelled in and enjoyed.
✽POST-GRADUATION With no particular career goal in mind, and at her parents’ suggestion and grandfather’s blessing, Verine spent the year immediately after graduation on a solo adventure around the world. Her path followed mostly wizarding communities and other wizarding schools and with each month-long destination, she found odd jobs to experience and live off of. Stumbling, lost and injured, into a foreign muggle city for the first time in Taiwan, she was rescued by Elmond Li, a part time hotel clerk apathetically applying to colleges. They struck up an odd friendship and six months later when El moved to England for college, Ver took the chance to fly home.
They continued hanging out and fell in love even when their paths diverged: she pulled him out of his shell, and he helped her learn to appreciate the shopkeeping aspects of potioneering alongside the research. Verine hid her magical background from him until he proposed, explaining her potioneering work as being a pharmaceutical researcher's assistant. Elmond seemed accepting of her magical eccentricities, and four years afterward, when both their work had settled, they were married. A year later, they had their daughter, Sonora. Ver's parents stayed over with them that year to help care for the baby and tensions flared over living as a wizarding or a muggle family. Despite the occasional disagreement thereafter, they were able to work out a happy compromise and carefully keep this balance in conversation.
✽POTIONS and PROFESSORSHIP Verine’s career started in basic research on magical properties of various herbs in potions and applied research in alternative brewing methods. She has an academic reputation of taking existing potions and recreating them with different ingredients, making either more potent versions, or easier to produce (either in method or ingredient cost). She occasionally showed up on projects relating to divination, healing and history, but publishes primarily in potions and herbology. Despite loving the research community, Ver always missed being in a school environment.
As Sonora started at Hogwarts, Verine shifted her potioneering work towards more development work. She took Sona and any of her friends who were curious under her wing as summer assistants and grew to really enjoy tutoring and mentoring them. Having someone to restock the sales shelves was mutually useful as well! She was happy to welcome her nephew August to their house over the summer breaks, and happy to have family or family friends arounds as assistants and mentees. After graduation, Sonora got engaged and left home to fly around the world for cursebreaking, leaving Verine and Elmond with at first just August and occasional visits from Vespera and Rion, and then it was just the two of them.
Finally, after 31 years of full-time research, Verine took an opening for the Potions 1-3 professor at Hogwarts, shifting her research to part time for the foreseeable future. Her first few years as a professor were quite hectic as she adjusted her teaching style from tutor-mentality to professor mentality. She got a lot of advice from Ada Whitethorne in crafting developmentally appropriate projects and assignments.
In December 2054, Verine's childhood home was attacked. She managed to get the children out and ran back to help any other survivors. Verine was heartbroken by the loss of not only her parents and grandparents, but her husband in the fire. It was discovered that her parents had died--not to the fire, as expected, but due to stab wounds, presumedly by one Awstin Tittensor. Ver helped Wren and Robin in the aftermath, stayed by Sona's side as she recovered from smoke inhalation. When the school year resumed though, tunnel visioned into teaching, grading, and potions development. After many months of sleeping under her desk to avoid going back to an empty house, Ver was more than happy to leave the cabin to Sona and Jonah and their baby Violet and accept proper lodgings at Hogwarts.
xxx✽RELATIONSHIPS✽xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
FAMILY
■ Husband Zemong Elmond Li, event coordinator (muggle)
■ Grandfather Eliam Winchester, historian (pureblood)
■ Parents Scytharia Winchester, nee O'Neill; auror (muggleborn); Callum Winchester, cursebreaker (pureblood)
■ Daughter Sonora Lane, nee Li, cursebreaker (halfblood); Jonah Lane, magizoologist (halfblood)
■ Grandchild Violet Lane.
■ Nieces and Nephews August Li; Wren, Sparrow, Robin, Phoebe Winchester
■ Pets Charlie Ace Squawk (parrot), Glob XIV (cactus), Whisper (parakeet)
FRIENDS
■ Collaborators Delia Lane, astronomer; Tiffany Stanford, head potioneer; Claire Wilson, herbologist.
■ Ada Whitethorne
■ Former assistants: Orion Lane, pub owner, Vespera Salazar, healer, Sonora, August, Wren, Sparrow.
■ Any friends of family~
■ Potioneers in the UK and abroad.
xxx✽UPDATES✽xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
CREATED 6 September 2018
UPDATED 01 October 2022
UPDATES MADE
■ backstory update
■(recent update)
■(recent update)
ACCEPTED BY 𝓖𝓻𝔂𝒇𝒇𝓲𝒆 01/29/2021
RECENT UPDATES ACCEPTED BY (do not touch this)
CREATED 6 September 2018
UPDATED 01 October 2022
UPDATES MADE
■ backstory update
■(recent update)
■(recent update)
ACCEPTED BY 𝓖𝓻𝔂𝒇𝒇𝓲𝒆 01/29/2021
RECENT UPDATES ACCEPTED BY (do not touch this)