Bianca Alia Rivera

* Blackthorn, Phoenix Feather core, 11.5 inches, slightly springy [former, destroyed]

## Relationships

### Family Members

* Martín Rivera (father) †
* Stella Ricci de Luca (mother)
* Marco Rivera (brother)

## Affiliation

### Job

Head of Department for Magical Law Enforcement

## Links

### Application

[1]

Bianca Rivera is a Chilean witch who is currently employed in the Magical Interpol Recapture unit in the British Ministry of Magic. She is a skilled occlumens and legilimens and is not known for her open-book nature.

## Personality

End Justifies The Means - She will not stop until she’s succeeded in her mission. Ever. She is determined, highly skilled, and keeps her ultimate goal as a constant fixture in her mind. And she doesn’t much care how she gets results -- collateral damage will never exceed the cost of refusing to act.

Heart of Stone - She doesn’t form emotional attachments easily, or much at all. It gets messy, and personal, and does very little to help accomplish her task. Her emotions, however many of those she has left, are her business and no one else’s. A good confidant is hard to find. Besides, you don’t need to be part of the world in order to protect it.

Hard Won Lessons - Things used to be different. She dreamt of excitement and adventure, becoming the knight-errant to look for a person or two who needed saving. She thought good would always triumph in the world, and that good deeds would translate into good fortune -- turns out she was wrong.

Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things - She gravitates towards the rejects of society, those who have been failed by the very laws and institutions that were meant to protect them. There is nothing she wants more than to save those who cannot save themselves -- to leave a situation better than she found it. But without revealing any of her own vulnerabilities or emotions. No, never those.

Bulletproof - So it would seem based on her behavior, at least. She is unafraid to be bold and take risks, particularly when the payoff is high. She will often act quickly (at times impulsively), without regard for her personal safety as long as the job gets done. She’s survived so much at this point -- what’s one more Dark wizard, one more curse?

Draw Inside The Lines - Whenever possible. She’s rejected the Ministry as being the *only* institution that can help people, but she would prefer to maintain their lawful authority as much as the situation allows. She prefers not to fight dirty. But there are times when the law is limited, and being restrained by it does more harm than good. So she will break the law as necessary when it has failed to protect.

I Stand Alone - Others have their skill-sets, and the right complement to her own abilities can make for an effective team. But only temporary, only for the immediate job. She doesn’t want to risk an emotional attachment, or anybody who may cause her to second-guess her hard-won philosophy. She stands firm on her beliefs, and above all she passes through danger alone.

## Relationships

ANASTASIA MARIE KARKAROFF : They work well together. They have the same dedication to their work, even if they're unknowingly part of different factions.

LEONARDO ADRIAN MEDINA ALMEDA : Not many people stuck around after the incident, so it's rare for someone to know who she was then and who she is now. That just means Bianca appreciates Leo all the more for it.

POET ASTROPHEL DMELLO : One of her mentors, once upon a time, and the reason she found Heliopath. So really he did more for her than he'll ever realize.

FELIX CICERO TELLER : Sometimes they have in-depth conversations about existential philosophical topics. Sometimes those end up with them in bed. Pretty standard stuff.

JACK PÁDRAIG O'CONNOR : There was a grave oversight of justice when the Ministry ignored his sister's case for 18 years. Bianca is determined to find her, at any cost.

## History

Life always seemed...straightforward. Bianca’s family was nothing remarkable -- her father was a police officer, doing the best he could to provide for his family and keep his community safe. Her mother had traveled all the way from Italy to Chile looking for something new, something different, only to fall into the same predictable routine so many fall prey to after having kids and struggling to pay bills. Her older brother Marco never lingered long around his family, always out playing a match of football or roaming the streets with his friends. The age difference was just significant enough that he never had much to do with his little sister.

Bianca was always determined to strike her own path. Her parents worked long hours in order to receive little pay, so she found herself alone from a young age. But that suited her just fine -- plenty of room to grow into her own person. One would think, far from the influence of her family, that she would develop interests that held little in common with her parents. But quite the opposite -- she never saw a more admirable way to live than her father, protecting the vulnerable and serving his community. He was her hero.

Things changed after she received her letter to Castelobruxo. Now she was truly on her own, a young girl in a new country and a new world. But Bianca had never shied away from danger, never been raised with any healthy dose of caution. Instead she seized the challenge head on, pretended to understand these strange new things until she did, and never acted like she belonged to the magical world any less than everybody else. Because truly, if you believe something, it’s only a matter of time until everybody else believes it too.

So really, nothing changed at all. There were only new words to describe what had always been. She wasn’t “normal” after all, she was a witch and a Muggleborn and her parents were the ones without magic. And she didn’t want to be a police officer, she dreamed of being an Auror and catching Dark wizards for the good of society. Bianca met every challenge at Castelobruxo head-on: there was no obstacle she couldn’t overcome, and no student that she would be afraid of. There were some who tried to bully her for being Muggleborn -- but Bianca never needed to resort to violence. That was why the professors were there, after all, to teach and enforce discipline. She never saw any need to work outside the system.

Life seemed so simple. There were good forces in the world, and evil ones -- and with enough strength of will and determination, the good could overcome the evil. These beliefs were only reinforced when, even in Latin America, stories of British society and Harry Potter trickled around the world. And of course she would hear about it -- she’d subscribed to Spanish language magical news, and French, and Portuguese, and Italian, and English. It was the only way to find out where she was needed most.

That’s why she didn’t even hesitate when, after graduation, she sent her parents a cursory letter that she had decided to move to the United Kingdom. It seemed only natural the next Voldemort would emerge from the ashes, and she wanted to be ready. And for a while, life seemed straightforward. She completed her Auror training, and was sent out into the field with the rest to track down and capture law-breakers. It’s hard to imagine anyone ever reaches a state where they’ve gotten everything they wanted in life, where they could be...happy. But it’s the only way to describe what these years were like.

Then came the accident. No, accident isn’t the right word. This was a fight for her life. Because people hold grudges, and Dark wizards and witches especially so. And this was one witch who had been caught and sentenced to Azkaban, and never forgot the name of the Auror who had done this to her. Neither did her family. It was supposed to be a routine mission, an alarm raised in a less-than-reputable neighborhood of London. Bianca hadn’t even bothered to recruit a partner for the mission, because why would she? She worked well alone -- highly talented for her age, with an impressive arrest rate and no signs of slowing down in her ascent to the top. The ambush came suddenly, from behind. She caught a whisper of the curse that was meant to bind her, but could only isolate it and not repel it completely. The entire left side of her body felt like it was on fire, slowly engulfing her as she collapsed in the street and struggled to breathe. The situation seemed hopeless -- wand distingitrated into practically nothing, body fighting to save itself from a curse that had seized her, and the slow creeping knowledge that she was going to die.

She doesn’t remember what happened next. Why those wizards stopped short of finishing her off. How the curse had been broken, leaving no trace except for ugly scars where it had latched onto her. When she had been taken to St. Mungo’s and the careful attention of the Healers. She only had one thing -- the nightmare of remembering how her entire world had shattered in an instant, slid from one moment of peace to an adrenaline-filled certainty that death was a second away.

Bianca lost her nerve -- and began to shake at the thought of returning to the field. But such things happened to Aurors at times after traumatic events, and she was simply transferred to Magical Interpol, to a task force no less important but radically different. The Statute of Secrecy was of the utmost importance, after all, but didn’t require the same life-or-death instincts as catching Dark wizards. Maybe, with enough time and patience, she could have returned to what she had been before the incident. Her nerves were frayed, but her hope for the future hadn’t quite disappeared.

But the universe began to reveal its ultimate truth -- good things don’t always happen to good people, and sometimes there is simply no explanation for it. Working behind a desk gave her a new perspective, one she hadn’t seen from the field. The inefficiency of the Ministry, at times the corruption. The way some crimes went unanswered, or covered-up. It began to shake her resolute faith that there was never a need to draw outside the lines.

The most important events in her life changed her in a moment. So it had been with the ambush. So it was with her family. Her father had been called to respond to a robbery in Santiago, but it went horribly wrong. The boys panicked, a cashier was shot, and a mask slipped. Marco stared his father down, eyes wide with fear. Her father put away his gun -- Marco raised his. Their father didn’t make it -- Marco wasn’t seen again. Sometimes there simply is no explanation for these things -- sometimes troubled youths slip through the system, and the families of police officers are left to puzzle over the aftermath alone. It was a weak thing to say to her mother, but something broke inside Bianca and she had nothing more to offer. Her father had been her hero, the shining beacon in her life of everything that was good and right. She’d never wanted anything more to be like him -- and in some twisted way, her wish was almost granted. She felt...empty. Betrayed. Like everything she had always known had been turned upside down on its head.

She took months to reflect. No, her original purpose couldn’t change. There were still people who needed saving, but sometimes the system couldn’t protect them -- or you. Sometimes it just wasn’t enough, and even after giving your best it still couldn’t make enough of a difference where it mattered. She’d seen the Ministry fail in its mission to protect. She’d seen the Muggle system fail her brother, who had shown unnerving patterns of escalation, and her father, who had never done anything but believe in it wholeheartedly. She knew, after years of inactivity, that she was ready to re-enter the field. But only to hunt down the worst of the worst, the irredeemable folks who could only do more harm than good. And this time, she was going to do things her way, the only way she knew how after surviving what she had and reexamining her beliefs from the foundation up. Cold, clean, and certain.

Bianca has a cold fury for those who would target innocents -- especially her fellow Muggleborns. She still holds her original goal, still believes good can conquer evil. But victory must be achieved at any cost, because every day that dark forces remain in the world is another day they can take victims and do evil. And Bianca still values life and freedom above all, and the protection of those who can’t protect themselves -- even if she seems to have a heart of stone. That’s why she joined Heliopath -- because they have shown that they are willing to do what they must, and eradicate the Purifiers by any means necessary. Bianca works now to locate and recapture Azkaban escapees, over a year after the breakout, and she seeks to do her small part in the search for justice and a more fair world.

At the start of 2026, Bianca was promoted to be head of the department for Magical Law Enforcement, after years of hard work and dedication, making her one of the youngest department heads in the history of the British Ministry of Magic.