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brokenchinadolly-blog · 6 years ago

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Have you been re-introduced to DOLORES “DOLLY” UMBRIDGE? last we heard, the HALFBLOOD was most familiar with TIMELINE THREE. I don’t recall if they were always a SLYTHERIN, but I’ve heard the SEVENTH YEAR is still DRIVEN, ANALYTICAL, ENGAGING and HIGH-STRUNG, MANIPULATIVE, AND DECEPTIVE, so that’s familiar. at least SHE remembers their way around the castle.

Personality Expanded

[ + ]: Analytical: Every line of every conversation and every action she sees another person take is broken down into its minutiae and studied for hidden intent and insight into the picture of the person. It’s measured against what is already known and applied to planning future interaction and assessing strengths, weaknesses, the likelihood that the other party will become a problem or an asset, and how to handle them if they manifest as one or other—leaving room for if they turn out to be one then the other.

Engaging: There is nobody short of Gilderoy Lockhart that can weave a more dramatic or entertaining tale when they desire then Dolores. The believability could be questioned and increasingly so considering the frequency with which Dolores raises a fuss and turns a small event into a public spectacle, but the added spice of moans, groans, shouted accusations, passionate denials, and the occasional forced tear or fainting spell create impressions that are not soon forgotten all the same.

Dedicated: Once she has set her mind to something there is no dissuading her. She may not be loyal to very many people, but she is unfailingly loyal to herself and her goals and no amount of hardship will make her forget what she is really working toward.

[ - ]: High Strung: All the people she has already wronged or wounded as well as the wounds already done to her, both real and imagined, have made Dolores paranoid. That, her innately nervous nature, her near solitary existence during school breaks, and her own budding propensity to lies she then worries about being found out at, and increasingly warped worldview about dangerous muggles and halfbreeds have joined together to keep Dolores consistently with one foot hanging over the abyss of a breakdown to the point where loud, unexpected noises and the like rattle her regularly.

Deceptive: Dolores’ current life is built on lies, from the pureblood parentage she began to profess, to her attempt to convince each side she harbors sympathy for their cause, and there will only be more lies as she now does something much similar with the visitors from different tiemlines. She lies near every time she breathes and with the same automatic response as well as frequency until even she believes what she says.

Manipulative: This is where the weaknesses and strengths Dolly assesses in friend and enemy alike come into play. The point of knowledge for her is exploitation and exploit she does. She is not above blackmail in the slightest, but it’s such an ugly concept and she prefers to fill her life with beauty, so her preferences are to play on sympathy, good will, charity, sense of duty-- the better natures of people--though she’s quick to move on when this tactic does not work, the person she is trying to move is much lower than her and assumed to have no reliable better nature to appeal to, or her target’s sense of what’s right differs from hers and refuses to be altered. Still before blackmail there is the harsher beauty of the very rewarding art of intimidation to get what you want.

Boggart: Used to be people milling around in clothes like they had just been to her funeral and talking about how she had never accomplished anything worthwhile in her life, but currently re-enacts her mother and brother leaving (albeit a version where they say things far more caustic than they did in real life about how she drove them away, how unloveable she is, and how glad they are to never have to see her again). She would muse that her boggart may have actually shifted again after witnessing that and fretting over how mortifying it would be for anyone to see that those dumb creatures the boggarts think she’s broken up over those stupid muggles she doesn’t miss at all.

Amortentia: Freshly bound books, sugar cookies, and cilantro

How she spent the summer: Interning at the Improper Use of Magic Office, a position her father got her by agreeing to do some private maintenance work for the department head who is hopeless at household spells, but Dolly thinks she got on her own merits. Since she still had the trace on her for much of the summer she was relegated to little more than fetching coffee and organizing files the muggle way, but in her mind and even more prominently in how she would spin the story for others, she was an invaluable asset to the department and the workers there learned to trust her instincts and take her advice until she was practically running the place by time the summer came to an end and the unfortunate incident at the Department of Mysteries occured.

Her Name: She hates her name. Dolores sounds like a sixty-year-old spinster. She used to like Dolly but lately it has seemed infantilizing and it is too much of a reminder of her muggle bitch mother who started the nickname before Dolly could even choose for herself whether she wanted to be anyone’s “sweet faced little china doll.” She would go by her middle name, but she can’t seem to train herself to answer to it, and she wouldn’t want to be mocked as “Plain Jane” either. She finally chose to transition from Dolly to Dolores over the summer, introducing herself as Dolores to her supervisors at the Ministry so they would take her seriously, though her stupid father ruined it the first day--ruined her day twice actually since she had forbade him from talking to her in front of other people. She planned to keep it going once she returned to school, though now everything is confused and it’s hard to know whether insisting on her full name marks her as belonging to this timeline, will make people think she’s from a different timeline, or whether they won’t care either way and it’s the perfect time to slip in one extra change

In Timeline One: Dolores is very similar to timeline three’s, excepting her sorting into Ravenclaw, but has learned to be much more subdued about her anti-muggle opinions and has, in fact, truly become much more moderate while faking it because there are less people who reinforce the idea that muggles and squibs are inferior and undeserving or at least are thought so by all “proper wizards”

In Timeline Two: Timeline two’s Dolly would be horrified by timeline three’s as will “Our” Dolly once she learns about her counterpart, a hufflepuff who is vocal about muggleborn and squib rights to the point of foolishness no matter what hardship or treatment she has to endure. Dolly’s alternate does have the close friend group and significant other “Our” Dolly craves, but they are hardly what she would call suitable people. You see, In timeline two, the increased urgency of the losing war, far more violently anti-muggle public opinion of those in power in mainstream wizard society existing for years, and the recent blood status registration instead of hastening the decline of Dolly’s parents’ marriage or preventing it from happening in the first place, drew Orford and Ellen much closer together. Orford clung to and protected his muggle wife instead of blaming her for his shortcomings and Ellen saw Orford as a knight out of storybook instead of a struggling failure. Dolly was taught family over self, everyone as a part of a loving whole that banded together all the more in adversity. They tried to hide that Ulysses, Dolly’s little brother, could not perform magic as long as they could. Dolly even offered to follow him around, faking spells for him, but when his Hogwarts letter never came, they couldn’t anymore. Dolly’s mother and brother still left when she was fifteen but they were sent away to a secret keeper guarded safe house run by family friends for their own protection. The vastly different home life created a vastly different Dolly who diverged even more during her Hogwarts years in Hufflepuff.

History Facts

Dolores likes sweets to the degree she does because sometimes she experiences a bitter taste flooding her mouth and clinging to her tongue even after she scrapes it against the roof of her mouth and either extremely sweet or almost too spicy to tolerate foods can cover it up--and she’s always had a bit of a sweet tooth naturally. The bitter taste now comes any time she trying to maintain a calm facade while feeling emotional, one day she feels it will linger all the time, though originally it only came every time she felt the urge to use particularly vulgar language. Her father used to wash out her mouth with soap when she was younger. Nobody ever knew when he was doing it either, not even her mother. Soap bubbles he could do wandlessly. A discreet wave of fingers inside his pocket and she would be struggling to not vomit frothy, bitter bubbles. She can never forget that taste. She’d swallow, her stomach would churn, and her father would ask her later if she’d learned her lesson. He didn’t like correcting her, he’d always make that clear, but naughty children must be punished. Naughty daddies who had other secrets too and were mean behind everyone’s back must be punished too—and one day he would be--but that was how the preference for having everything sweet enough to mask the flavor of lye (or coppery blood in her mouth as she bit her tongue to keep from calling after mother when she walked out the door for the last time, not because she wanted to say she made a mistake and beg to be taken with her. Not the way she remembered it now. The stupid muggle bitch had made her so mad and insulted her so gravely by suggesting she may want to go with her in the divorce that Dolores had to bite her tongue to avoid cursing her into oblivion, since she was the more evolved creature and couldn’t strike a dumb animal that way) began.

Dolly loved to garden when she was younger despite the risk of dirtying her clothes, but it certainly isn’t an option anymore ever since her father moved them to a small flat in London. Her cat Vesuvia, before Dolly had to get rid of her, would knock about pots and track through window boxes and make a frightful mess. Plus something so small and limited as a window box makes a room dimmer not more lively for the disappointed heart of someone who grew up used to a full garden to tinker about in. The smell of freshly turned soil also reminds her of her mother who taught her both how to tend a garden and how to sing (and how the two were meant to be mixed), which is every reason to avoid it. She does still sing, however, though her songs of choice are not the upbeat, silly muggle songs her mother raised her on until she spurned them, but lofty opera selections as she imagines herself one day not awing a packed auditorium as a star but entertaining a small but appreciative crowd who didn’t know their Minister of Magic possessed hidden talents.

Dolly never knew she was allergic to cats, through years with Vesuvia and adopting several strays that came and went, until her father revealed to her after she shouted in a moment of anger that he was so useless she might as well have left with her mother for all the good he ever was to her, that he had been charming away her cat allergies her whole life. It was one of the only times Dolly could remember ever hearing him say he loved her--that broken hearted, stunted man who had mistreated and lost everyone who he loved but her. She didn’t say it back. She got rid of Vesuvia the next day. She wouldn’t be beholden to anyone. Besides, cats are too messy and too fussy. She didn’t love them that much.

REACTION:

At first, she didn’t believe the story of those that claimed to remember a different version of history other than the “proper” one. It was some sort of large scale trick or publicity stunt that she didn’t approve of one bit. She could only thank her lucky stars that her father, as much as he failed in other areas, was not part of this mass hysteria. He was still very much himself as was she. Then, once the Ministry statements supported these outlandish claims, and she saw the chaos it was devolving into when she next went into her internship after a few days off, she quickly got over her suspicions and disbelief...and started to think of how she could twist events to further herself.

Her first though was to parlay the amount of workers who didn’t remember who they were into stepping into one of their positions, but those that remained in power at the department just saw her as a girl only just barely over seventeen that still had a year left of school and she saw quickly she would have to come up with an alternate plan. So she offered herself as a spy after convincing her department head one was needed. Who knew what really had happened in the Department of Mysteries or if these newcomers to the timeline had some nefarious purpose? There were official Ministry inquiries but who would share information willingly if they were actually on a sabotage mission to derail the natural world into one of their “dark timelines?” Veritaserum was known not to work on everyone and the Ministry couldn’t use torture so there was no way to trust even information given under interrogation--and they hadn’t even gotten that far, just trusting friendly interview and treating these timeline jumpers like victims. Honestly, Dolores wasn’t sure of she did think the timeline travelers did have ill will or that they had traveled willingly, but weaving a story of paranoia could only help her. She claimed someone as quick thinking and skilled at reading people, gleaning information, and winning trust as she claimed to be could easily get in with those that had been displaced from their timelines, pretend to be one of them--take on whatever personality each person expected of her and stop those that knew conflicting versions from talking to each other about her or come up with some excuse of why she was lying to others but not them--and find out more about not just where they came from but what their true purpose was in crossing over, details that would not be shared with anyone they knew was trying to get information from them. She would only have access to students and school staff, but once should never underestimate what such people could know or accomplish, and think of what would happen if there was evil-doers infiltrating Hogwarts? She would see it didn’t happen. She could report all findings back to the Ministry, her own special position. No need for pay, just the promise of a job once she graduated. The department head agreed to her proposal. Dolores wasn’t sure if it was because she had won him over or if he was just trying to humor her and get her out of his office, but, either way, she was now working for the Ministry while at Hogwarts. The timeline confusion may just be the best thing that ever happened to her.

#backgroundbits #about dolly

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