Mallory O'Conner

**Mallory O'Conner** (b. 29 August) is a witch who teaches Muggle Studies at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

## Appearance

5'10, with light brown skin, blue-green eyes, freckles, springy brown hair, full lips.

## Personality

She used to think she was a liar, unworthy of love but able to trick people into providing it by pretending to care for them, proving in so doing both her unworth and the pretense. But Daisy taught her to be honest, with herself if no one else, and she's realized she does care. She cares enough that she doesn't really regret telling Daisy of her misgivings as Anastasia Burke was turning their group of freedom fighters more into terrorists, even though that conversation, in a way, cost her the Rebellion she spent a quarter of her life in, the witch she followed into it, and now her freedom. Without her anchors, she's adrift. She only hopes the ultimate survivor can survive long enough for life to have meaning again. Teaching, helping others, helps.

## Background

Mallory O'Conner was raised in Brookings, Oregon, by a divorced couple, spending half her year with her con artist father Jack O'Conner, who thought it was appropriate to teach her to be his accomplice, and half the year with her mother Anne, who tried to give her a normal childhood but blamed her both for all the ways Mallory took after her father and for the death of her twin Felix at birth. Neither of her parents could do magic, but both of them knew of it, though they were both vague about their own family backgrounds.

When Mallory was old enough, she began attending Stormwater Academy, a year-round magic boarding school which nominally offered students the ability to visit their families every Sunday afternoon and during the four two-week breaks during the year, but which in practice discouraged it; the school was run and largely populated by wixen from the otherwise obscure American social movement the Covenant, which was opposed to all Muggle-wix contact and focused on creating a unique and modern wix culture entirely divorced from the Muggle world. Mallory didn't take much convincing to stay away from her family, though.

At the Academy, she met Maggie Dunham (Daisy to her friends), a charismatic Transfiguration prodigy with a commitment to honesty and a passion for standing up for what she believed in--everything Mallory wasn't, as she viewed herself. She fell in love. At 15, the girls left school for the redwood forest, to join what leader Anastasia Burke called "the Rebellion for the Rights of Non-Wix Entities" but more frequently was shortened to the Rebellion. Despite their youth, Daisy and Mallory contributed greatly to the Rebellion over the next five years, Daisy rallying the troops for more open operations and protests, Mallory learning more in the woods than she'd ever learned at Stormwater and applying the lessons to help the cause. She learned to heal, as much as she could with only theory for potions and Transfiguration under her belt; she learned spells for magical espionage from Anastasia Burke; she even met the redwood dryads who, it turned out, had raised her mother Anne decades previous, and learned to get in touch with the element of water.

After a while, though, Mallory grew uncomfortable with the direction the Rebellion was taking in its operations. The freedom fighters were becoming terrorists under Anastasia Burke's leadership. She wasn't OK with that, and neither, when she brought her concerns and evidence to Daisy, was Daisy. Fieldwork had changed what Daisy was willing to do, but not to the point of hurting innocents. The next morning, Mallory woke up to a camp where Anastasia Burke and several equally unsavory individuals were dead and Daisy and her things were gone. Later that day, Mallory watched from a wizarding hotel room as Eglantine Larch took credit for the end of the Rebellion, the deaths of Anastasia Burke and several other high-level Rebellion members, and the apprehension of Dark Lady Maggie Dunham, who then publicly confessed to and repudiated the Rebellion's crimes, asked that her surviving associates move on and not seek revenge (she didn't have to say the phrase "especially The Mask" for Mallory to hear it), and submitted to execution.

Hoping Larch would assume she'd fled far from Cascadia and indeed far from Oregon, Mallory traded places with a Covenant witch who was applying for a job as a teacher at Kestrel Isle Day Academy, an unprestigious local school which competed (mostly unsuccessfully) with Stormwater Academy for students. Mallory chose to apply as Geomancy teacher, figuring that divination was something she could fake convincingly, which made it concerning when the principal, Ianthe Beauregard, performed a geomantic reading as part of the job interview. "Felicity Peachblossom" was hired anyway, and hit the books like she hadn't in years to know enough to teach successfully. To her surprise, over the next year, she found herself growing fond both of teaching and of geomancy, which turned out to be considerably less bullshit than she had assumed. She had a knack for geomantic interpretation, Ianthe told her at her year's-end performance review, and that was part of why the principal had hired her even though she had a good idea what sort of role "Felicity Peachblossom" had played in Maggie Dunham's Rebellion. And since Dunham had turned herself in as part of a deal to provide immunity to her associates for their past crimes, and Ianthe had known who "Felicity" was when she hired her, the only crime Eglantine Larch would be able to arrest Mallory for when she showed up at the school later that day would be submitting her tax form to MACUSA under a false identity. And that, Ianthe bullied the court into agreeing, was hardly tax evasion at all when you consider she provided her real magical trace plus the real name she was using professionally. While the court, and Larch, still wanted to throw the book at The Mask for the one crime they could get her on, Ianthe was able to convince all parties that the best resolution was probation and community service, served in exile, under the watchful eye of Ianthe's colleague (of sorts), the Head of Hogwarts.