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contrariwiseDorcas' birth was a momentous occasion in her parents' lives. They'd always dearly wanted children but just waiting for it to happen didn't seem to do the trick, nor did years of actively trying for a baby. Getting pregnant right when they'd nearly given up hope felt like a miracle, and when their little girl was born ten years into their marriage, they were content to stop at one. While she wasn't a perfect child, they handled the sleepless nights, 3 AM feedings, potty training, bed wetting and toddler tantrums with patience and gratitude (for the most part) and Dorcas grew up safe and cherished, in the reassuring knowledge that her parents would always love and support her.
She grew up in Tinworth, surrounded by wizards and muggles alike, playing with everyone equally, any mentions of magic explained away as childish fancy. Though her parents explained that not everyone had magic, it was years before Dorcas understood that not everyone had such an accepting childhood, that some children had never seen a muggle in their lives. And she didn't quite grasp why her muggle friends couldn't know about magic until an incident at a town festival when she was eight and an excitable little neighbour girl chose a really inopportune moment to publicly display her magic for the first time by leaping from one end of the village commons to the other. A few other children from the wizarding half of the community, delighted, joined in the game. Since the muggles couldn't help seeing, and the obliviators were sent for. It wasn't quite an Ilfracombe Incident, since no one got hurt, but it did make the wizarding families wary for a while. And it opened Dorcas' eyes to the subtle separations between muggle and magical in her hometown and the fact that they couldn't operate smoothly without keeping magic a secret, that it was for everyone's protection.
Despite loving Tinworth and her parents, she was eager to go off to school, eager to learn, to experience and to read all the books in the Hogwarts library. Sorted into Ravenclaw, she did well for a time, earning points for her house for her textbook-precise answers to professors' questions -- so precise that she quickly gained a reputation as a swot and some classmates thought her an annoying showoff. Eventually she realized that it would have taken most of her classmates hours of hard work to memorize the passages she recited without effort. Clues began to come together slowly: her parents, baffled that she didn't care about reading her books more than once. Her own confused reaction to the aftermath of the Tinworth festival, unable to comprehend that people could have things removed from their minds. Dorcas began to realize that her memory wasn't quite normal.
In the meantime, war had begun. Tinworth suffered early casualties, bringing the war to her doorstep almost from the beginning. As a town where muggles and wizards coexisted in relative peace, it couldn't escape unscathed and throughout her school years Dorcas opened the Prophet to many reports of attacks, received more than one owl from her parents assuring her they were safe, but a neighbour or friend wasn't. It was all so obviously wrong that she could scarcely believe it was happening, and she longed to do something to help, something to stop it. But all she could do was read, study, prepare, learning how to rephrase the things she read, to better explain them to her professors, who, wanting true understanding and not just textbook-precise recitations, had begun to mark up her essays.
Spurred by a fascination with memory and a desire to help muggles do what she couldn't, she joined the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes as an Obliviator, eventually moving into the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad. It eased but didn't satisfy her need to act, which
She grew up in Tinworth, surrounded by wizards and muggles alike, playing with everyone equally, any mentions of magic explained away as childish fancy. Though her parents explained that not everyone had magic, it was years before Dorcas understood that not everyone had such an accepting childhood, that some children had never seen a muggle in their lives. And she didn't quite grasp why her muggle friends couldn't know about magic until an incident at a town festival when she was eight and an excitable little neighbour girl chose a really inopportune moment to publicly display her magic for the first time by leaping from one end of the village commons to the other. A few other children from the wizarding half of the community, delighted, joined in the game. Since the muggles couldn't help seeing, and the obliviators were sent for. It wasn't quite an Ilfracombe Incident, since no one got hurt, but it did make the wizarding families wary for a while. And it opened Dorcas' eyes to the subtle separations between muggle and magical in her hometown and the fact that they couldn't operate smoothly without keeping magic a secret, that it was for everyone's protection.
Despite loving Tinworth and her parents, she was eager to go off to school, eager to learn, to experience and to read all the books in the Hogwarts library. Sorted into Ravenclaw, she did well for a time, earning points for her house for her textbook-precise answers to professors' questions -- so precise that she quickly gained a reputation as a swot and some classmates thought her an annoying showoff. Eventually she realized that it would have taken most of her classmates hours of hard work to memorize the passages she recited without effort. Clues began to come together slowly: her parents, baffled that she didn't care about reading her books more than once. Her own confused reaction to the aftermath of the Tinworth festival, unable to comprehend that people could have things removed from their minds. Dorcas began to realize that her memory wasn't quite normal.
In the meantime, war had begun. Tinworth suffered early casualties, bringing the war to her doorstep almost from the beginning. As a town where muggles and wizards coexisted in relative peace, it couldn't escape unscathed and throughout her school years Dorcas opened the Prophet to many reports of attacks, received more than one owl from her parents assuring her they were safe, but a neighbour or friend wasn't. It was all so obviously wrong that she could scarcely believe it was happening, and she longed to do something to help, something to stop it. But all she could do was read, study, prepare, learning how to rephrase the things she read, to better explain them to her professors, who, wanting true understanding and not just textbook-precise recitations, had begun to mark up her essays.
Spurred by a fascination with memory and a desire to help muggles do what she couldn't, she joined the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes as an Obliviator, eventually moving into the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad. It eased but didn't satisfy her need to act, which
