Name: Alberta Ashdown

Age: 54
Gender: Female

Marked? Not on your life

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Appearance

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Skills and Talents

Overall Role: Second in command, duellist

Talents
Defence, defence, defence. If you need something not dead, or not blown up, then Bertha’s your woman. Otherwise, she’s generally a pretty excellent duellist, pretty much non-verbal across the board.

Weaknesses
Bertha has one priority: get everybody back as alive as possible. If this means failing a mission, so be it. She also has an extreme dislike for using anything that could be considered dark magic, and will not, on principle, use unforgivables. That doesn’t mean she is any less ruthless, however.

Favourite Spells

• Protego – hers is a particularly powerful one that works like an all-purpose force-field. She can also use it to directly counter enemies, bouncing their spells back in their face
• Apparition – not technically a spell, but Bertha will teleport around a battlefield like nobody’s business.
• Petrificus Totalis – an oldie, but a goodie
• Animo – basically gives physical objects sentience and a desire to kill fight Bertha’s enemies.
• Animo Apis – summons bees. Yes, bees. Try duelling with a hundred of the things trying to gouge your eyes out.

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Biography

Views: so sickeningly liberal and bleeding-heart you might as well get the violins out now. Bertha does not brook prejudice of any kind and will call it out if she sees it.

History
Bertha actually had time to grow up in a world that wasn’t being taken over by ultra-powerful wizarding bigots. She is technically pure-blood, but doesn’t have much wizarding heritage, in that her mother was half-blood and her father muggle-born.

She attended Hogwarts as normal (Hufflepuff), where she was pretty accomplished across the board, particularly at Defence Against the Dark Arts, and becoming captain of the Hogwarts duelling club. Following Hogwarts, she had a fairly successful few years as a competitive duellist, frequently winning tournaments.
In her golden years, she married muggle-born Sam Ashdown: they had been in the same year and class together. When she fell pregnant, that was the end of her duelling days – for a bit. Once the baby (named Lawrence) was born, she kicked back into her career with a stint as an auror, right up to the fall of the Ministry: as a member of the Order of the Phoenix since almost its inception, she wouldn’t have been too popular sticking around. At that point (1991), she immediately packed that in, in order to go teach Defence Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts, the last refuge from Voldemort’s influence.

When Sam was killed during Order activity, Bertha retreated from combat for about six months: when she returned to the Order, she found them exhausted and weary. Correctly seeing no future for the Order, she joined the Ashes, whose leader she presumably knew, and, when Hogwarts fell, joined the Ashes full-time.

The Second Wizarding War has taken everything from Bertha, including her husband (killed in battle), her parents (murdered), and her son, about whom she does not speak.

Wand
Oak, fourteen inches, unicorn hair, unyielding

Patronus
A motherflipping rhino.

Name: Larry Dale (Lawrence Ashdown)

Age: 29
Gender: Male

Marked? tbc

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Appearance

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Skills and Talents

Overall Role
Communications, intel, espionage, tech, revolutionary extraordinaire. Currently not a member of the Ashes, but is travelling alone, broadcasting news about what the Death Eaters are doing and information about how to keep safe/fight back.

Talents

• Slipperiness. Larry is a hard man to kill, not least because he's so good at escaping
• Standard all-purpose defensive charms for not being discovered
• Magical and muggle tech
• Booby traps and (Ministry-proof) portkeys
• Fast magic, including a range of standard curses as well as some legit dark magic designed for distracting and incapacitating rather than actually killing
• Basically immune to the Imperius Curse (now)

Weaknesses

• Larry is a coward. He is determined only from positions of security, and, when threatened, will pretty much do anything to survive.
• Untrained. His education and career have actually been not focussed on magic, so everything he knows, he knows from experience or developed himself, resulting in flaws in technique and huge gaps in his knowledge.
• Weak magic. He's not well-trained, so his spells aren't really very powerful.
• Duelling. He has never been in a legit duel in his life. He's thrown a few spells and run away, but he's never had to genuinely take anybody on.
• People. He hasn't directly worked with people in a loooong time.

Favourite Spells

Standard-issue spells:

• Bombarda - if in need of an opportunity to escape, blow stuff up
• Confundus charm - if in need of an opportunity to escape, make the enemy stupid
• Flagrante curse - part of his standard arsenal of booby traps
• Homenum Revelio - when scoping out a new location, this is pretty vital
• Standard area-fortifying charms

Larry's own inventions/discoveries:

• Undetectable portkeys - apparently, when muggle technology like a micro chip is turned into a portkey, the Ministry can't detect it. Probably not common knowledge.
• Diffindo Corpus (dark) - like diffindo (the cutting/severing charm), but intended to be used on, well, people. It's dark magic, akin to Sectumsempra, but aims for area of impact rather than depth of damage. Larry tries to aim for arteries, eyes, and other areas of the body that would slow somebody down
• Fumos corporealis (dark) - what's better than having a smokescreen when trying to make a getaway? Try a smokescreen that has a physical form (and likes grabbing people by the throat). Yeah, that'll probably help do the trick.

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Biography

Views
Larry loves muggle-culture to the point of being patronising. In a different climate, you’d call it cultural appropriation.

History
Lawrence, as was, was born to Sam and Bertha Ashdown in 1979, two loving parents who were perhaps just ever-so-slightly busy with trying to bring down Lord Voldemort with the Order/Auror Office respectively. Either way, while they all cherished the time they spent together, there was precious little of it.

Lawrence went to Hogwarts as normal for technically pure-blooded kids (Ravenclaw), where he proceeded to develop a great fondness for the hands-off subjects, like, particularly, Muggle Studies, History of Magic, Potions, and Arithmancy, which he took to NEWT level. Perhaps in a bid to promote active respect for muggles, Lawrence was made prefect for Ravenclaw in his fifth year, which was an odd choice by all accounts, because, although not necessarily disliked, Lawrence was something of a willing outcast, judgemental of others and uninterested by them in the same token.

When Lawrence left Hogwarts, he rushed immediately to the politics of the Ministry of Magic, seeking, naively, to end the increasing persecution of muggles through democratic processes. He was taken under the wing of the political leader of the pro-muggle movement, Alder Curie, who spotted his keen mind and creativity: together, they managed to sort-of unify the pro-muggle movement in the face of all opposition, with Alder making waves in the Ministry itself, and Lawrence discovering his gift for PR, acting as Alder’s spin-doctor and writing particularly biting articles in whatever newspaper would dare print them.

Then, things went a bit wrong (1989). The pro-muggle movement had always expected ‘difficulties’ (like, assassination attempts), but, when Alder Curie himself was assassinated, they decided, largely, to disband. Lawrence, naively, was undeterred and led what was left of the movement himself. Shortly after that, they got him.

Instead of killing him, the Ministry, like Alder, saw in him a kind of passion and creativity they wanted to persuade people that muggles were, indeed, the scum of the earth – and having a high-profile ‘convert’ was, of course, a plus. Having hit him with the Imperius Curse (1990), they set him to work as a journalist for The Daily Prophet to begin with, becoming an official government spokesperson after five years of being under the influence.

The curse lasted a staggering seven years. The Death Eaters he was used to soliciting with had perhaps even forgotten he was only cursed, so, when he finally threw off the curse, he quietly slipped away into the night.

After a few weeks unsure what to do with himself, in between avoiding the Death Eaters’ pursuit, he began to travel the country and broadcast with a radio that he essentially built himself from an old muggle wireless and some magical assistance. He still broadcasts a regular show under the pseudonym Larry Dale, alerting people opposed to Voldemort of any news he has uncovered and urging them to not give up hope.

Wand
Oak, nine inches, augurey feather, bendy

Patronus
A fluffy bit of silvery rubbishness, if he's lucky.