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Margaret Raelynn Phillips hails from Chicago, Illinois, as daughter of a humble little coffee shop owner and a frequenting customer of hers. Serenity was the owner of a humble little coffee shop in the heart of the city and Darius was a frequenting customer who, aside from craving the bitterness of Serenity’s trademark coffee, liked spending his hours talking with Serenity about anything and everything. They shared a love for literature and, whenever they weren’t talking about the classics while Serenity fixed up everyone’s orders, they spent their time at the local library reading and comparing different pieces from different eras.
Darius's family adored Serenity like they’d never adored another of his partners. She was like the missing piece of the puzzle that was his life. Hence, it was to exactly nobody’s surprise when they got together, or even when they got engaged about two years later. They got married just under a year after their engagement, and their firstborn child Deron was born just nine months later. Their second and final child, Margot, was born about four years later. Unfortunately, unlike her brother, Margot couldn’t make lasting memories with her father. Just before her first birthday, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of gallbladder cancer.
Even though Darius had a steady job and Serenity’s chain of coffee shops was thriving, it wasn’t enough for all the expenses that came with his chemotherapy and other treatments. Not willing to put his family in tremendous debt, Darius braved through his final months. He passed away about seven months later in the company of his wife and parents. From there on out, life was substantially harder for the Phillips trio. Serenity used the money from Darius's life insurance to pay off all of their debt, but it wasn’t enough to provide them with a stable lifestyle. They were all surviving off the help Darius's family could provide and the paychecks they were getting from Serenity’s coffee shop. Consequently, they went from living in a nice neighborhood to living in the small flat above one of the coffee shops.
One by one, Serenity could no longer afford to have three of her four shops open when she also had to raise her children; she eventually had to close them all down until she only had her first, where she met Darius. This led to financial hardships that ended up defining Margot’s life. There on out, Margot did lead a more difficult life. It was just her and her mother, and occasionally her brother whenever he wasn’t insisting on staying with their grandparents. The county she lived in was also predominantly white, and when she went to school, it created a cultural difference that Margot struggled to understand. It isn’t to say she faced a lot of racial hardships, but she couldn’t quite put a finger on why she looked so different from most of her classmates. This created a number of insecurities that she didn’t really get over until she was at Hogwarts.
Since she was young, Margot has tried to prove she’s stronger than she really is. She embraced a personality that for many seemed fiery, though her mother really knew better. She was easy to get along with, but was known to be fierce and unyielding when it came to protecting the friends she had. In spite of this, it wasn’t uncommon to see her in the heart of the school. She was the life and soul of the student body, and her classmates often knew her as the girl who went out of her way to make other kids feel welcomed and appreciated. A part of her was very apprehensive of the people she met, a quality that has stuck with her and has made her very wary of other people’s intentions with her.
Margot was always an early developer. Before the average mark, she was already crawling, walking, talking, reading, etc. She was always ahead of the rest of her grade. She enjoyed it, actually, having this advantage and being able to read more than everyone else. She, by extent, knew more. Ever since she was a little girl, especially in the face of adversity, she could find comfort in the books she read. Likewise, Margot was the kind of girl to watch a love of documentaries and movies, most notably historical ones that had an actual impact on her development. It’s nothing that really stood out to her mother as odd - she was the daughter of a historian, may she rest in peace, and it was just a trait and interest that lived on from her own mother.
Furthermore, Margot’s first manifestation of magic came when she was ten years old. She was being tormented relentlessly by a couple of classmates, and her brother was trying to protect her, though to no avail. It wasn't after a girl in her class got physical that her magic manifested. Her rage and embarrassment had peaked, and her magic gave the girl a very intense wedgie. Was she labelled a freak afterwards? She was. Was it worth it? Oh yes, it fucking was. The incident did lasting damage to her reputation, though, and where she was once favored by a lot of her classmates, she was turned on and bullied extensively. She was the ‘voodoo psycho bitch’. At some point, somewhere between the physical attacks and stalking from protective older siblings, Serenity realized it was in her daughter’s best interests to remove her from the equation and transfer her out.
At the age of eleven, an opportunity arose for Margaret Phillips. Darius was a British national and she was his daughter, which made her entitled to an education both at Ilvermorny and Hogwarts. The latter seemed all too happy to cordially invite her to attend, and once the shock of Margot’s magic subsided, Serenity seemed willing to let her go in search of better opportunities. There on out, Margot became a model student. She’d always felt like the odd girl out, but at Hogwarts, she finally felt like she belonged somewhere. She figures, even today, it was the dormant magic inside her.
Upon arrival at Hogwarts, she was sorted into Gryffindor House, where she soon met the likes of one Prince Richard of Wales. At first, she hated him. He was everything she grew to hate: rich, annoying, arrogant and entitled. Second year wasn't too unlike her first; she argued constantly with him. It was usually on the stupidest of things, too. Nonetheless, hatred eventually turned into tolerance, which in turn became an awkward friendship that became their current dynamic: he’s her bitch, and he loves being her bitch. In the years that followed, she made friends with other students, like Nile, Thor and Ronald McDonald. It wasn’t easy, but by her graduation, she felt a lot more comfortable in herself and what she could do.
In the summer before her fifth year, Margot was able to clinch a part-time job during the summer that allowed her to indulge in all her interests, but she refrained from doing so and began to wisely save all that income for the future. During this summer, she connected with her estranged paternal uncle and moved in with him, which helped save tremendously on travel expenses back and forth from the United States, where her mother and brother still live. Communication grew scarce to the point she’d only hear from them once a month in every letter they sent, and vice versa. Following her graduation, Margot successfully acquired British citizenship with the intent to stay, but her mother fell ill and it forced her to move back to Chicago while she nursed her back to health.
Sadly, her mother never recovered and passed away when she was just nineteen years old. It became a struggle for her thereon after, and she fell into a deep depression. Without her brother’s help, she probably would’ve lost herself completely. Bit by bit, she got back onto her feet, helping her brother run the coffee shop they’d inherited from their mother. However, it was obvious she missed England and all her friends in it. At some point down the road, once things had settled and the pain had dulled into an ache every time she remembered her mother, her brother was the one to encourage her to pursue her dreams back in England. It was clear that’s where her heart was. When her uncle reached out and invited her over, Margot couldn’t help but agree and move out.
Right now, her biggest hope is to rediscover her love for life and who she is as a person.
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Margot doesn't really know who she is or who she should be. Although there's still hints of the cynical teen she was a few years ago, the callousness with which she treated others has dulled out. She still prefers solitude over the company of other people, and can sometimes judge people harshly, but has learned to give others the time of day before she withdraws into herself. It used to be her defense mechanism, and it just can't be it anymore. So... who is she? What does she like? What does she not like? She's still trying to understand herself, really.
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