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profile: junior year
i never really gave up on breaking
out of this two-star town
i got the green light, i got a little fight
i'm gonna turn this thing around
out of this two-star town
i got the green light, i got a little fight
i'm gonna turn this thing around
GENERAL
NAME: Todd Inoue Skynner.
NICKNAMES: Hazel called him Toddy the Tiger once and he's been trying to make that happen.
AGE/DOB: 17 / October 24 1998.
BLOOD STATUS: Muggleborn.
GENDER/PRONOUNS: Male. He/him.
SEXUALITY: He wouldn't call himself bisexual quite yet, but boy howdy has he sure made out with some dudes.
HOMETOWN: Henderson, NV.
CONCEPT: Inexperienced idiot attempts to rebrand himself as a ladies' man, fails.
PHYSICAL
APPEARANCE: Todd is much more vain than he'd like to let on (people have probably started to clue into this fact after all his public meltdowns last year). He takes pride in his appearance and keeps his hair tidy. Only a few pieces of his wardrobe are nice or new, and the rest are hand-me-downs from cousins, but he takes very good care of his nice things. He's best known for wearing his baseball caps backwards and always wearing a gigantic, dumb-looking backpack that he very clearly thinks is much cooler than it really is.
HEIGHT: 5'9".
PB: Ryan Potter.
PERSONALITY
LIKES: his car (he bought it himself), rainstorms, staying up late, talking to strangers, group projects, expanding his horizons, exploring new places, saying he likes spicy food, baseball hats, his big dumb backpack, girls that are mean to him.
DISLIKES: long plane rides and airports, having to ask for help, 9AM classes, spicy food, conformity, nosy people, having more than 10 pages of reading to do for homework, popular music, any strong smells. (As a sidebar, while he doesn't generally hold grudges, he's got a little bit of a social justice streak in him when it comes to nomaj/muggleborn issues, and it's a hot button issue for him. If you've ever said something negative about nomajs or even something well-meaning but inept, he remembers.)
PERSONALITY:
Even though he'd be loathe to admit it, Todd is a thoroughly typical teenage boy. He has all the insecurities and aspirations of your average 16-year-old: he wants his friends to think he's cool, he has lofty goals for when he's a grown-up, and he thinks he's totally invincible. That is, of course, untrue. And unfortunately for him, he's not very cool. His self-confidence has been obliterated on two separate occasions by his questionable crushes in the last year. He's very easy to fluster. And he's not half as clever as he thinks he is.
Todd's greatest asset and simultaneously his fatal flaw is that he's very, very good at getting what he wants. This was a precocious and slightly cute quality when he was a child and spent his summer afternoons hatching up schemes to earn himself some pocket change, but has now manifested into a kind of single-minded ambition. He’s very task-oriented and if he gets fixated on an idea he can lose track of everything else he should be keeping track of. Unfortunately becoming focused on something like this doesn’t always lead to follow through; he’s had a million ideas and abandoned 99% of them within a few weeks.
Both a control freak and lacking any kind of organizational skills, he can be a frustrating person to work with in class or live with (sorry roommates). He’s the kind of person who never cleans his room and leaves his stuff all over the place and just insists that he knows where everything is and he doesn’t need to put it in drawers. Similarly, essays and projects live in his head until the very second they go on paper. He doesn’t do rough drafts and he doesn’t do planning, but he always wants to be in charge anyway. He does much, much better as a leader than he does as a team player.
He has ADHD (predominately hyperactive/impulsive type), which went undiagnosed until he started attending Gooseberry. Thanks for being involved in your students’ lives, Gooseberry! This manifests mostly in lack of a brain-to-mouth filter, leaping before looking, fidgeting, and talking over people in class (especially in classes that he excels in, because if he knows a right answer it’s coming out of his mouth). He gets bored easily, and his restlessness runs deeper than zoning out in class. He gets bored with his life if he’s not making some kind of forward progress; he’s got things to do and places to go and standing still is his kryptonite.
Although he’s very social and likes to surround himself with a lot of friends, he’s really very self-reliant, and almost independent to a fault. He doesn’t like asking for help, because he only trusts himself with the most important tasks in his life. He has a little bit of a suspicious when it comes to other people and actually earning his genuine trust is a long process.
His independence largely stems from his desire to escape his family; although they’re solidly upper middle class, he’d really rather not be financially dependent on them. Since he discovered he was as wizard, he’s done pretty much anything necessary to start saving up money. A lot of selling store-bought lemonade on street corners at a huge markup and overcharging old people for relatively simple errands. As he’s grown older he’s turned his sights to business enterprises, and spends a lot of his time cozying up to classmates who are working on senior projects that he thinks might eventually be marketable.
Although he’s not as discerning as he should be about how he makes money, he's not a bad person, really. He's definitely out for himself (and his friends), and is motivated more by the prospect of becoming successful and self-sufficient than, you know, doing good in the world. But he doesn’t revel in assholery, and doesn’t think of himself as mean or a bad friend to those he only knows casually. If he coincidentally does some good on his climb to the top, that's just icing on the cake.
+ Communicative and open
+ Driven
+ Friendly and extroverted
+ Independent
= Hyperactive/impulsive
= Self-centered
- Inflexible
- Unscrupulous
- Blunt
- Demanding
- Easily flustered and insecure
SKILLS
LANGUAGES SPOKEN: English. Some middle school French. His maternal grandparents speak Japanese, but he's never studied it. He can understand it better than he can speak it.
PATRONUS: Coyote; cannot cast. Info here.
SKILLS:
HISTORY
FAMILY MEMBERS:
Martin Skynner, father, nomaj. He collects model trains and jigsaw puzzles.
Lori Inoue, mother, nomaj. She hates gossips and asked the landscaper to put extra-tall hedges in their yard so their neighbors can't peak in.
Kimberly Inoue Skynner, older sister, nomaj. She drives his car when he's not home and he charges her by the week.
HISTORY:
If you asked Todd, he’d say he was from the most boring place in the entire world.
This isn’t just a matter of geography, although the Las Vegas suburb is decidedly dull. His family also takes a lot of the credit. The Skynners are a nice, well-to-do, totally normal nomaj family. Their house is big and always clean. His father is a civil engineer, which is maybe the most boring kind of engineer you can be. His mother is a 911 dispatcher who never shares on-the-job stories with him. His older sister Kimberly is a thoroughly typical American teenager who has boyfriend drama weekly.
Even before he knew he was a wizard, this all bored Todd thoroughly.
His first accidental acts of magic went unnoticed by his family because he was an enterprising and wild kid; most things could be written off as coincidences, and things like The Great Playground Toad Debacle of 2006 were deemed pranks. Todd knew something was up, though, because nobody in the world is that lucky. He began bragging to the neighborhood kids about all the strange, fantastic things he had pulled off – and it just so happened that one of them came from a wizarding family, and knew exactly what was going on.
Todd had always been vaguely aware of the Holcombs, because they were considered a somewhat strange family for being both secretive and simultaneously so active in the community. He’d never thought much of them beyond that, but once their middle child Cash let him in on the big secret of magic, the two became inseparable.
The combination of knowing there was a bigger, more exciting magical world out there and knowing that he was meant to be part of it gave Todd a new kind of confidence and a burning desire to get out of his hometown. Because he felt like he could get away with anything, he became something of a troublemaker, and dragged Cash down with him. The two of them spent their weekends alternating time between coming up with haphazard plans to earn pocket money and generally being menaces.
By the time he started at a wizarding school in the sixth grade, Todd had become known as something of a problem child both to the Skynners and to the Holcombs, who have never much liked him. Even though he was a borderline miscreant in nomaj circles, he quickly began to excel at school. Not so much academically (although Cash helped him keep his grades up), but definitely socially. His teachers tended to either want to help him excel because he was a muggleborn, or expect him to lag behind for the same reason.
He leaned hard into those stereotypical expectations, and begged help from the nurturing teachers while working hard on his own to impress the other teachers. And because he wanted to spend as little time as possible at his house, he participated in just about every after-school activity he could manage, and always volunteered to spend extra time helping with anything needed. By his second year at the school, he was organizing several of the clubs and had been elected class president.
The authority suited him well, and honestly he would’ve been content to stay a big fish in a little pond. But after Cash came out as transgender, getting out of their insular, narrow-minded little hometown seemed much more urgent than it previously had. Never one to sit around on his hands not solving his problems, Todd began looking into boarding schools they might apply to, so they could be even further away from home for most of the schoolyear. They eventually settled on Gooseberry, since it seemed progressive and elite.
They were, thankfully, both accepted to the school. (Todd did, in fact, throw a brick at the Holcomb’s house shortly before they left for high school, but he tells the story way differently than Cash does. There was a lot of context.)
Todd was a little put out that he didn’t make prefect despite being on his very best behavior for freshman year, and became slightly more unscrupulous when it came to following school rules. But for the most part, sophomore year was a success; he did well in all his classes, convinced the teachers to add club presidents to the mix, and bought his Very Own Car with money he earned himself (said car did break down and leave him stranded in the middle of Death Valley over spring break, but he is quick to remind people that he eventually fixed it). Even the supernatural shake-up at the end of the year didn't hit him too hard: he was one of the last people rescued, and only encountered one ghost, who thought he was a literal prince. So that was cool.
His nomaj parents have decided to let him return to school even after being visited by MACUSA reps, largely because they never know what's going on in the magic world and don't really care as long as Todd is doing well. Going into junior year, Todd faces two major hang-ups: Cash is being promoted to prefect, and Ursula made event committee president over him. He's not happy about either of these things, but he's doing his best to deal.
SCHOOL
YEAR: Junior (Grade 11)
HOUSE: Coppertale.
SORTING: He's a chatty and argumentative one, and he almost ran overtime. He thoroughly argued down every emblem as they made their cases for him; the fox pushed back the hardest and kept up the longest, and that was how he made his decision. He left the cave with a brisk "okay, but this ISN'T OVER" and has been occasionally caught since then trying to sneak back in to continue his ongoing debate with the fox.
WAND: Flame box elder & jackalope antler, 13", swishy.
FAMILIAR: An owl named Furby.
CLASSES: Charms, Hermeticism, History of Magic, Transfiguration, Potions, Astronomy, Defense Against the Dark Arts.
ADVANCED STUDY: Animagus Studies (coyote). Transfiguration is one of the subjects where Todd most excels, so he'd make the technical requirements for joining the class. He motivation is largely "hey, it'll be cool", with a healthy side-dose of "Cash is doing it too", but his natural skill in the class where Cash will struggle with it will be a point of contention for them over their junior year.
SENIOR PROJECT: The official party line is "Ask Cash".
ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE: Solidly decent, but not as academically focused as most of his classmates. His favorite class is transfiguration, even though his personality is not particularly suited to the detail-oriented and finicky work. But he's totally enamored by it; before he knew magic was real, his idea of what it should be was closest to what transfiguration is. You can make anything!!! His weakest class is probably potions - he struggles with following instructions and paying attention, much as he might in transfiguration if it didn't interest him. But he's always zoning out in potions class and has caused many a mishap. His least favorite class is History of Magic, but he pulls pretty decent grades cause he can turn out an essay like nobody's business.
EXTRACURRICULARS: Event committee, archery, drama (stage crew), and mascot for the Coppertale cheer team.
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