Nergüi

Nergüi is a label rather than a name, the only thing written on her clothing when she was picked up by Glaswegian social services two years ago. The services of experts and a trawl of the Internet showed it to be a Mongolian term meaning "no name", but since she didn't respond to anything else either, it stuck.

The girl is physically capable of speech, in her native tongue, and has heard enough English to absorb a sense of what people are getting at, but she tends to make sounds rather than words, and has only recently begun to piece together a Romanised form of an alphabet, with a number of letters (X/K/H, for example) being interchangeable in her mind. She ran away from Glasgow into the Highlands a fortnight after she was taken in, and managed to survive by foraging and sleeping the colder winter nights in barns where no one found her.

She found an abandoned Golden Eagle chick about eighteen months ago, and managed to save and nuture it, as much through latent and spontaneous magics as animal husbandry. Her proximity to Hogwarts again caused the authorities to write off occasional 'blips on the radar', and she scavenged her way through two winters before she stumbled across Marla's campsite. The little girl rapidly imprinted on the young woman, and accompanied her to the castle. A record check and Ministry scan showed she was magical, and so, with what seems to be her twelfth year looming, Marla has take her down to London, to get some school supplies.

Nergüi is driven to do something, make something of her life, and has an occasionally dangerously direct approach to matter. She is Slytherin for her ambition, not any talent for deception, although the fact that most people believe her to be incapable of speech might constitute a perpetual masquerade. She has had to have a number of homemade blades removed from her clothing by Marla, and still has a tendency to literally cling to and hide behind the young Ukrainian. She is beginning to see that the whole of Britain is not terrible, but the (unexplored) circumstances in which the rest of her family vanished clearly still gnaw at her, and she has been known to wake up screaming in the middle of the night.