Lila Evangeline St.Martin
Description:	Lila's external appearance while at rest is a quiet, almost fragile one. A great deal of care about what she eats paired with years of strenuous ballet lessons has made her noticeably slimmer than twin sister Alexandra, bringing into sharper relief the delicate, moderately pretty facial structure they share. Very dark eyelashes and eyebrows stand out against a fair complexion, and her equally dark hair hangs halfway down her back, providing the easiest means of telling her and Allie apart. A gold charm bracelet, rarely removed, seems at once about to snap her thin wrist and slip over her small right hand. It is in animation that Lila's looks veer sharply from that formula. Her hazel eyes almost always reflect some sentiment, be it mirth (false or genuine), sadness (see previous parentheses) or derision (almost always deliberate). Her selection of smiles cover an even broader range of feelings, ranging from the patented bright, innocent one given to superiors to the 'you poor, pathetic idiot' one reserved for Allie. Her clothing is tailored, as neat as she can make it, and the ribbons frequently worn in her hair are coordinated to whatever outfit she happens to be wearing. She keeps her nails even and filed at all times and keeps up a series of near-constant situation-appropriate fronts. Only when she is under severe stress for extended periods of time does this second formula begin to show some variety. Her eyes will often seem half-closed, as if she is trying to hide their expression. The smiles, though still communicative, are briefer and smaller. Her facades begin to crack, revealing a kind of harried desperation, and may break for small periods of time characterized by wrinkle-inducing scowls and lashing out at anyone who crosses her in any way. She tries to minimize these and keep the ones she can't avoid as short as possible.
Personality:	Externally, Lila is exactly what, to her reckoning a pureblooded girl of good standing should be. Known for her sharp wit and trademark comeback "That's the way it works when you're somebody worth mentioning" to those she considers beneath her, Lila mixes elements of the snob, the innocent good girl, the family princess, and the amateur classicist into the publicly accessible part of her personality, and can shift gears without any difficulty if a situation abruptly changes. Beneath it is a sturdy, fairly inflexible wall of practicality and wariness that help her make her decisions, especially in regards to when the problems involved with carrying on with something outweigh the advantages. She can and will drop almost anything - regimens of study, friendships, et cetera - if they fall into that category. At the most basic level, Lila is fairly insecure. She refuses to ever acknowledge this trait, but it shows itself through her careful selection of those she trusts, normally referred to as "the few worth associating with", and her behavior towards her twin sister, Allie. Though she loves her and is fully aware that she, not Allie, is the favorite daughter, she has felt somehow driven to push her slightly-older sister down the ladder in any way she can almost all of her life. Allie serves as scapegoat and confidence-booster to her, and though she sometimes feels slightly guilty about it, she has trained herself to shut off almost all "soft" emotions that could impair her judgment. Raised to believe that culture and charm are the foundation of a good life, Lila has expressed her artistic leanings in ballet for the past five years. Though more or less well-versed in other art forms, dance appealed to her early on and was taken up seriously once she proved herself only mediocre at languages, music, and all forms of drawing/painting. Apart from being a great way to keep from putting on as much weight as Allie, she sees in ballet a constant search for brilliance and perfection, two things she searches for in everything.
History:	Born a little after midnight on August 14 at Magnolia Grove, Lila entered the world three and a half minutes after her sister Alexandra. The difference those three and a half minutes made was seen almost immediately; Allie was named for their father's mother, and Lila was given a name her mother thought went well with Allie's. Family lore has it that Lila was the first person to diminish her sister's name from Alexandra to the Allie she is known by to this day. These incidents have contributed to Lila's opinion that she has been competing with Allie literally since the day they were born. For the first three years of her life, Lila was raised less as an individual child than as one member of a litter consisting of herself, her sister, and their cousins and stepcousins. Two major events in Lila's life occurred the year she was four: she and Allie were put into their first classes with a tutor, and Allie was officially displaced as their father's heiress when their brother, Alban St.Martin II, was born. Though she couldn't stop everyone from making much of Alban because he was a boy and a frail baby besides, Lila began, though she didn't think of it as such at the time, systematically making up the less than four minutes Allie had on her by beating her sister at learning everything the tutors taught them. Though never quite the brightest of the cousins, she outpaced her shy, sweet-natured sister by a good bit, earning no end of praise and acclaim from their parents, who gradually began to favor her over their firstborn. When she was six, Lila came to the conclusion that she would never be more than middling good at the selection of "paper arts", as she called them, that she and Allie and the cousins near their age were studying. She took up dancing, and after determining that ballet was the form she wanted to focus on, she threw herself into it wholeheartedly. She practiced daily until leaving for Sonora, though she tried not to let that become common knowledge. The real center of Lila's pre-Sonora life was not her studies or her dancing, however. It took the form of the miniature society of the cousins and other local - a term that one night could mean the Lowcountry and the next could mean the entire Deep South - children she was exposed to as preparation for later life. She discovered that being pretty, smart, and having the ability to be catty worked in her favor, concluding with her becoming part of an exclusive, tight-knit group made up of her stepcousin Gwenhwyfar Carey, Alabama import Clarissa Winsett, her sister Allie, and herself. The group naturally took a hit when Gwen and Rissa, as Allie and Lila were entitled to call them, left for school a year before the twins, Gwen coming to Sonora and Clarissa being, to her dismay, shipped off to a tiny all-girl's school in South Alabama. Lila remains convinced, however, that they could have made it work out if not for the "incident" at the Sonora Alumni Banquet shortly before Christmas. After that, the group fell apart, leaving Lila in the position of having lost her friends and lost her role in the children's society all at one go. In the time between those events and her acceptance to Sonora, Lila managed to put together a new group. Allie and Gwen were no longer included, being replaced with Cassie Whitefield and Emilie Gregory. Clarissa was put on a kind of probation and at the bottom anyway. Lila was the more or less unquestioned dictator until, as she had known it would, the time came for her own departure to school. She was Sorted into Crotalus, a decision by the Sorting Potion that separated her from her sister for the first time in her life, and immediately set about the task of building a new social life from scratch.
Fear:	Imprisonment. Lila is claustrophobic and terrified of punishments, though she can't really explain why. Her most common defense for this to herself is the recurring dream when she was seven in which she was a ghost wandering an abandoned prison complex.
Desire:	At the moment, Lila's greatest ambition is to enter society formally instead of hanging on its fringes as one of the children. Though she may sometimes take flights of whimsy that cause her to think about the big picture, these are rare. Speculation is saved for things like plotting revenge and et cetera.
Other:	Like her sister's, Lila's wand is seven-and-a-quarter inches long, but hers is mahogany with a dragon heartstring core. Her magical talents tend to run towards Potions and Charms, but she tries to downplay them around anyone who might come into contact with her family. If crazy Uncle Julian ever found out she was good at chopping and mixing, she would be spending every millisecond of free time until her wedding holed up in the lab he conned Grandfather St.Martin into building him as assistant to his often bizarre alchemic experiments.

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