let's fight crime with mangoes and limes

status... 1st year at Cardiff University
location... Cathays
hobbies ... foreign languages, shopping, anime, flirting, travel


...history...

Carmela's life was pretty normal for a girl living a train ride away from New York City up until she was fourteen. She was never very close to her older sister, Helena, who was very studious (which Carmela was definitely not), but she always got along well with her little brother, Kit. Her main interests once she hit the age of thirteen were boys and clothes - nothing too odd for a teenager.

Then, when Carmela was fourteen, Kit came home one day and announced to the family that he was a wizard. Not a magician, an honest-to-god wizard, and it was his "job" to basically help save the world. Scratch that - not the world, the universe.

This changed things more than a little. The Rodriguez family had to adjust to knowing Kit was off on life-threatening missions in other galaxies while giving away that anything was weird - not to mention the fact that the dog got really smart and all the pieces of the entertainment system started talking to each other. Out loud. Sometimes in Japanese.

Carmela figured out that the wizardry her brother had done to make the DVD player work meant that their TV could now get satellite channels from other galaxies. Apparently, she found out, all these aliens could talk to each other through satellite chat channels, and they used the same language Kit did for his wizardry - the Speech - to do it.

So she learned the Speech. Not all of it, obviously, but more than enough to be able to get by. It turned out to be extra useful when Kit and his partner Nita went on an "exchange trip" to another planet and three other (alien) wizards, Roshaun, Filif, and Sker'ret, came to stay with Nita's sister, Dairine. Carmela quickly made friends with them - well, with Filif and Sker'ret at least; Roshaun was not the friendliest person in the world. She helped Dairine take them shopping at the local mall, since none of the visitors had ever seen one before, where she gave Filif fashion advice and tried to keep Sker'ret from eating the food court's plastic trays.

She also discovered alien shopping networks, and bought herself all kinds of neat stuff, including her favorite toy: a laser dissociator, Kit called it, which looked like a cross between an eggbeater and a curling iron and also fired lasers. She actually accompanied Kit (sneakily and without his knowledge) and several other wizards on a mission to save the universe from being destroyed by dark matter. She's encountered versions of the Lone Power before, so it's safe to say she isn't exactly on his list of favorite people.

Carmela's family and friends are, above all else, the most important thing to her. Especially her family. As she sees it, nobody has the right to mess with her litte brother (except her). She worries a lot about him and his wizardry partner Nita, who she's also grown close to over the years, but at the same time she's terribly proud of him for taking on such a huge responsibility, and doing it well (not that she'd ever tell him that!). Carmela makes "friends" fairly easily - meaning, she has a lot of people she could call up and hang out with if she wanted to. As far as true friends go, though, ones she's close to that she trusts and cares about, the circle is very limited. She definitely believes in the idea of "quality over quantity" when it comes to her friendships, and if you mess with those people, watch out - she has a very wicked imagination sometimes.

It terrified Carmela when she first heard exactly what Kit's wizard's oath entailed - such as the fact that he could very easily die doing it. In retrospect, too, part of that fear was not understanding exactly where that power came from, or how exactly he was using it. Carmela has always been closer to Kit than to their older sister Helena, though, and when she asked Kit to tell her more about wizardry, he was more than happy to. Once she understood it, it was an easy step to acceptance.

When Carmela started learning more about Kit's wizardry, and finding out that you didn't have to be a wizard to be involved with people who were, it was only natural to her to want to help him out, and, by proxy, his wizarding friends.

Flilf and Sker'ret, too, were a wonderful change from most of the boys Carmela knows. They like Carmela, and not because they think she's pretty or any of that nonsense - neither of them is even humanoid! When they were on Earth she enjoyed teaching them about all of the Earth customs and culture that were so vastly different from their own, and seeing their perspective on all these things she saw as perfectly normal that they'd never even thought of before. It was something of an eye-opening experience for her.

Carmela's original plan -- insofar as she had one, because she'd never put much thought into it before -- was that she would go to NYU when she graduated from high school, since it was so close to home and her parents could definitely afford it. Except then she did some research and found out about Cardiff University, which they could work around to not be drastically more expensive than NYU, and she'd get to live abroad. It took a couple of months of begging and pleading on Carmela's part, but her parents finally agreed to let her go, and so she moved to Wales in mid-August.


...canon info...

In the series Carmela comes from, wizards work freely among us - in our world, the one we all live in now - and we're just not aware of it. Partly this is because most people, when they see something that they can't understand or think is impossible, make up their own reasoning for it to reassure themselves. The other part of it is that a wizard's primary job is to keep the universe running smoothly: in other words, to halt entropy. What that means is that in most circumstances, normal, non-wizarding people won't even be aware that anything was ever wrong. For example, in one of the books, Carmela's brother used a spell to clean pollution out of part of a bay to keep the water clean. It's not something that your average person would even notice, and the ones who did would never think to attribute to something like magic.

Of course, there are situations in which people begin to become aware of unusual things occurring. For example, in Wizards at War, there is a threat from a dark-matter substance spreading through the universe that is slowly breaking it down - and the wizards can't figure out how to stop it. The practical effect that this has on our world is that it basically increases negativity in and between people - something which most people would never think of having eldritch causes.

This isn't the case across all of the universe, obviously. There are planets on which wizards are a perfectly normal part of everyday life. For example, there's a character named Roshaun who is a prince and a wizard on his home planet. Wizardry is tied into the royal line there, and his subjects expect him to use his wizardry to help him rule. They actively place the responsibility of the protection of the planet on him because they know he's a wizard. When characters like Carmela's brother go to those kind of planets, they're free to practice wizardy openly.

The practical upshot of all this is that Carmela's wizardry-influenced adventures are not something she discusses with anyone outside of that group of people under any circumstances. That part of her life is a secret. Also, it can be assumed from canon context that Carmela speaks four languages fluently: English, Spanish, Japanese, and the Speech.

...muse info...

name ... carmela rodriguez
age ... 18
gender ... female
sign ... aries
birthday... april 15
eyes ... brown
hair ... brown
fandom... young wizards
pb... kristin herrera

...mun info...
name ... nako
realj ... nakotaco
ic aim ... laser eggbeater
ooc aim ... supernakotaco
email ... vodkaxsprite@gmail.com
timezone ... central

...design info...
layout by ... thefulcrum
profile code by... xplastique
moodtheme by ... coming soon