Professor Merry Wendolin

## Academic and Professional Career

Merry’s academic career was always overshadowed by one person, her mother. Merry B. Wendolin Senior, an exceptional witch and a former Auror with an excellent record, was extremely strict and demanded nothing but excellence from young Merry. Her father passed away early in Merry’s life. The reason for his death is unknown.

Despite making exceptional marks in school and following in her mother’s footsteps to become an Auror, Merry could never live up to the her mother’s expectations. During Auror training Merry was particularly skilled at stealth and even learned to cast the difficult strength charm on herself, allowing her to greatly increase her physical power, but her mother never seemed satisfied, always pushing Merry to do better.

An unknown event shook Merry’s relationship with her mother and her mother ended up in Azkaban, estranged to Merry. The exact nature of this event is unknown.

Merry turned out to be an exemplary Auror with an exceptionally high mission success rate. She got engaged to be married to another rising young Auror, Henry. But life would take a tragic turn. Henry would be murdered and Merry wounded badly trying to defend him. Having difficulty healing both physically and emotionally, Merry resigned from the Ministry and took a position teaching at Hogwarts. Although she was once an excellent duelist her injury has hampered her skills greatly. Casting magic now causes severe anxiety, which is why she rarely uses magic for everyday tasks. However, she can certainly be counted on in a pinch and even her stunted skills are quite impressive.

As a teacher Merry expects nothing less than excellence, much like her mother. Intelligence and hard work are a must, and praise is rare but sincere. Professor Wendolin does not tolerate foolishness, nor foolish questions. However, what she lacks in intellectual patience she more than makes up for in emotional support. She may strictly scold a student for lazy thinking but then quite readily encourage the same student to try harder next time.  A combination which, although not making her the most popular teacher at Hogarts, does make her the most effective.

Merry is widely considered one of the more intelligent professors, being a linguistical expert fluent in multiple languages, both ancient and modern. She is also the fastest reader among the Professors, being able to read at an astounding rate even at an early age, and  can absorb complex materials rapidly making her excellent at research.

Ironically, despite teaching Arithmancy she herself struggles with math, a weakness which, strangely enough, may also contribute to her effective teaching results.

During Argon’s attack Merry was severely injured helping another Professor use leylines to defend Hogwarts. She also damaged her enchanted corset, an item she used to change her appearance to an idealized version of herself. Because of this damage she was unable to remove the scars caused by her wounds and was forced to revert back to her normal physical appearance, an appearance she was using the enchanted artifact to avoid. To her great surprise, the professors and students accepted her non-ideal form even with the scars. The love and care shown by her Hogwarts family made her wonder if she needed to ever fix her corset at all.

However, she would have precious little time to contemplate such matters, as Professor Honeypot requested assistance in finding her fiancée, Professor Wryn. It took some time but finally they discovered the DeathEater camp where he was being held. Merry scouted the camp, listening intently to the DeathEaters to determine how many guarded Wryn. Using her exceptional stealth abilities, she even crept close enough to hear several of their names as they conversed in the camp.  Eventually Merry and her companion attacked the camp and rescued Wryn, but with the Death Eaters in full pursuit. In danger of being overrun, Merry told the others to escape as she turned to fight. She defended herself admirably but she was out numbered and began to falter. Wanting to help, the others turned just in time to see a disintegration curse cast and a body explode into ever disappearing pieces. In the darkness and confusion they fought back to find nothing but Merry’s wand. Assuming she was dead, they took her wand and quickly made their escape to mourn later.

Unbeknownst to her friends, Merry had been able to reflect the spell back at the caster, who was promptly destroyed by her own spell. But the resulting blast knocked Merry in the air and she dropped her wand. In the darkness she lay still, knowing her friends would die trying to save her. She saw them get safely away from the few remaining Dark Wizards.

Having been able to get a good look at the witch who had cast the spell, she used a talent she had kept secret for so long: she shape shifted and became Maggie Dermonette the DeathEater. She located the Dark Witch’s wand and began the perilous journey home. Eventually, she made her way back to Hogwarts, but not before she overheard Dark Wizards speaking of the rise of a new Evil, the Council of Sin. Being ever independent, she returned to Hogwarts to let her friends know she was safe, retrieved her wand, packed some things, and set upon a plan to infiltrate this new threat.

## Personal Life

Merry is an exceptional singer.

Merry has a not-so-secret obsession with Muggle magazines.

Merry has spent a large part of her life researching and acquiring exotic magical artifacts. Being very self sufficient, she often travels by herself attempting to locate lost legendary items. Indeed, she  certainly isn’t a typical ‘book only’ Ravenclaw. She is very protective of these items and rarely even speaks of them.

Being one of the more intelligent professors, Merry is known to be a bit arrogant. She understands all subjects (but math) quite readily and has a keen mind capable of solving complex problems. She is quite aware of her exceptional cognitive abilities and can come across as a bit vain.

But this is all a ruse. Secretly Merry struggles immensely with a lack of confidence and deals daily with imposter syndrome; always worried she is not as smart or as talented as others believe her to be.

This lack of confidence involves every aspect of her life, including her physical appearance. But in this area she is uniquely gifted to do something about her supposed deficiencies. For Merry is a metamorphmagus, capable of shifting her appearance at will. She has kept this ability secret from everyone, including her parents. Not wanting an unfair advantage, she even completed her Auror training without the use of her shape-shifting abilities.

Unlike most metamorphmagi, she actually struggles more with changing small cosmetic features than changing large features. She can easily imitate another person’s physical appearance fully, but needs a good deal of concentration to simply change the color of her hair. Because of this, she searched for and eventually acquired a rare piece of enchanted clothing allowing her to change her physical appearance to her idealized form without having to constantly concentrate. She is very self conscious that no one see her in anything but her idealized form, thinking herself to be far less attractive in her natural state, a belief that certainly stems from her deficiencies in confidence rather than any problems physically.