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Quinn P. McGriffin
Status:
Half-blood
Nationality:
Irish
Residence:
Belfast, Ireland
Function:
First year, Slytherin
Wand:
26,8 cm cherry wood and unicorn hair
Severe and tense, even twitchy at times, Quinn takes her every action and every decision very seriously. Sometimes this is to the point of absurdity, as, for example, she will agonize over the consequences of choosing chocolate ice cream over vanilla or strawberry. This makes her methodical and careful overall, but heavily indecisive, and she often resorts to scratching out probability estimates on scraps of paper to help her decision-making. Whenever she can anticipate it, she tries to do that sort of thing in advance, so that when the actual situation arises she doesn’t have to take the time. To her consternation, this doesn’t always work out.

Born to a pair of extremely… passionate people, her muggle father and pureblood witch mother moved eternally through a cycle of passionate love for each other, boredom and frustration with each other, passionate love for someone else, boredom and frustration with them, and then back to each other. This cycle left little room to care for their child, and Quinn spent the majority of her first 11 years being ferried between a stately manor house and a rather more shabby muggle apartment by the McGriffin family’s long-suffering house elf, Winnie. To get the girl further out of their hair, the McGriffins decided to put her in primary school, but of course they couldn’t agree on whether to have her go to somewhere magical or mundane, so she ended up with a mishmash of tutors and knowledge from both worlds, a compromise suggested by the family’s equally long-suffering marriage counselor.

One particularly dreary afternoon when she was 10, the elder McGriffins were engaged in one of their legendary rows, and young Quinn found herself in the kitchen nook of the apartment, very definitely not hiding from her parents. She was thinking about the future, about Hogwarts, and growing up. Her 11th birthday was not far off... “What do you want to be when you grow up?” was a question she had occasionally been asked at dinner parties and the like by well-meaning adults, but she realized that she had never actually given it the sort of thought an important question like that deserved. All she knew was that she didn’t want to end up like her Uncle Riley, who spent his every day inspecting cauldron bottoms, and liked it. He wanted nothing more from his life than to determine the quality of a small percentage of Britain’s cauldrons, and she couldn’t understand how someone could settle for a life that was so small. And then there were her parents, who were so wrapped up in themselves and each other that they had no time for anyone or anything else. Small again, in their own way.

After a good bit of research in the family’s history books and the newspapers and magazines scattered haphazardly around the kitchen table, she finally decided that when she grew up, she was going to take over the world. Or try to, anyway. It was the sort of goal which made her the exact opposite of her Uncle Riley, and she most definitely approved of that. It was a big goal. Really big. The world was a big place, and to rule over the whole thing would take some doing. It would give her something to focus on, if things got bad at school. She always worked better with a clear goal in mind. And besides, when she ruled the world, she could make all sorts of things better, like throwing her parents in a jail cell together until they learned how to calm themselves down.

More recently, she read in a muggle book that even when they know it will be difficult, people are usually far too optimistic about goals like that. With this in mind, and a bit more research, she extended her deadline for world domination from “by the time I graduate from Hogwarts” to “by my 50th birthday”. Surely that would be enough time, she reasoned, if the average set by Alexander the Great, Queen Victoria and Merlin was anything to go by.