WAND →
Stas' wand is a 9½" wand made from brittle-grained Russian pine, with the core of augurey feather. Though the wand was not made specifically for himself, it might as well have been: an artisan wandmaker of Irish Pavee descent came to his village when he was just barely younger than ten. He had gone, as had all the other children, to see his wares and play with the wands (much to the poor man's chagrin). He grew immediately attached to the wand, though after being told of its value and the rarity of its core, he knew better than to want for it. He considered it a great surprise, one well-kept, when the wand was presented to him two months later on his eleventh birthday, a gift given to him by the entirety of his family. It is most adept at the delicate spellwork in his chosen trade, but requires some finagling to make it work properly. As such, he tends to have to cross-language his spells, between the traditional latin spellforms with the native Russian and baltic languages that he has picked up over the years.
AMORTENTIA →
The very first time he smelled a love potion, he was eight years old and walking through a market bazaar in Turkey with his dedushka and babushka. He smelled home in a single waft, something that, after the fact, he attributed to his own homesickness, but after smelling it again for a Potions instruction and sensing several of the same scents: the smoked meats, the jellies, the tea, all of it, he's come to associate it as a general feeling of security, rather than a longing for a specific place. His amortentia is, quite actually, a safety net.
BOGGART →
Though he's been fortunate to only have encountered a boggart once, in very much contained circumstances, Stas' basic fear is of the dark. His boggart realizes in the guise of an encroaching blackness, slowly feeling as though it's sucking the life out of the room.
ERISED →
Stas' reflection in the Mirror of Erised would be mostly unchanged -- in effect, it would be an almost exact duplication, with the sole exception being that he would have a smile on his face.
QUIDDITCH →
Stas' decision not to play Quidditch is more of practicality than for reason of talent. He is, all things considered, fairly adept on a broomstick. Not quite talented enough to be a seeker, not quite strong enough to be a beater, not quite daring enough to be a keeper, but when pressed to play, he makes an adequate chaser. His biggest flaw is not having any will to win -- if he could get past that, he might make a half-decent player. For now, though, he tends to help with the hedging of bets on the sidelines, known for a streak of accurate predictions in called games a few years back.
PETS →
For his first few years at Durmstrang, Stas owned a small canary that he refused to bring to school on the grounds that somebody would harm the poor bird. It passed away when he was fourteen, and has since not owned another pet, though he's been known to make friends with the worms in the greenhouses.
STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES →
As one might expect, Stas' strengths lie within his core competency courses: herbology, divination (and its off-shoots), as well as potions. He excels at theoretical courses, and practical courses not requiring heavy wandwork (ancient runes & studies, history courses, etc). He was never particularly good at charms or transfiguration, due to the complex nature of the spellwork required. Dueling and defensive magic, as an extension, are not his prime subjects. The nature of his wand plays a part in this, as it's more of the improvisational style than learned skill. He's fought his way out of a couple brawls with a unique cast, but those days are few and far between.
Family, more than anything, was the defining factor of Stas’ — pronounced Stash — childhood. It was never just his mother, his father, and his elder sisters, but aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, grandparents, great-grandparents, pets, and close family friends. Beyond that, as well, he would attend family functions of the local butcher, the church minister, or the man who cut his father’s hair. Everybody, in one way or another, was part of the Timoshenko family tree, by blood or marriage or respect. Stanislav himself was of Russian Jewish heritage on his mother’s side, with Portuguese and Belarusan from his father. Both of his parents, in spite of being wizards, preferred to live their lives alongside muggles, believing it built character and responsible actions. He led a simple life — one that was both surrounded by magic and yet completely removed from it. The bulk of his small town, located on the Black Sea, was primarily of Ruska Roma heritage, a culture with a style magic all their own. It took several years to cultivate good standing with the townspeople, but by the time Stas was old enough to make his own interactions, the Timoshenko’s had ingrained themselves in the community, and, some more than others, were willing to satisfy his curiosities.
From a young age, he felt himself drawn to the card games of the tarot, saving up his kopeks to purchase a deck of his own, a nearly-pristine St. Petersburg deck. He could never explain the feeling he received when holding the cards, but there was a strong connection between owner and paper, and rarely did he allow them out of his grasp. While he did not divine until he grew older, he would play tarokk and perform simple feats of legerdemain to impress the children he attended school with. His parents were hardly impressed by the trickery, preferring the ‘harder’ schools of magic, but as his older siblings went off to school and graduated with the goals of being healers, aurors, and professors, he found himself more and more drawn to a less typical lifestyle. The boy was nine when he made his first pull, faced with three cards: the Fool, the Hermit, and the Tower. Though he knew the context of the cards, the meanings behind them, and the lessons he was expected to gain, he remained fixated by the cards for days.
He couldn’t explain his obsession, but there was something about the reading that struck him as off. As many times as he reshuffled and redrew, the same three would always find their way into his palms. Spring turned into summer, and he had just turned twelve — his parents were anticipating a letter of enrolment to their own alma mater, located high in the Siberian arctic, but none came for him. They began to lose hope, as he had not yet performed a typical bit of magic: his card tricks were purely muggle in origin, and they believed his card reading to be superfluous, barely magic. This attitude rubbed off on the young, impressionable boy to the point that he, too, believed he could be a squib among a family of wizards. And then he saw the lion.
At first, he fully expected it to be a figment of his imagination. For days, he ignored it, but it lingered in his peripheral vision, and watched over him as he slept. The roar became something of a comfort to the boy, a constant sound in the silence of his world. It was only on the third day that he opted to approach it, curious to see if it was real or simply an intruder of the mind. To his surprise, it changed into an acceptance letter to an institution neither of his parents thought possible for a family such as theirs: Durmstrang. They had no money to speak of, no prestige. Even his older siblings, professional as they acted, were mere blips on the map of society. Neither of his parents believed that Stas, of all their children, would be the one to amount to greatness.
If not for the scholarship program, he might not have been able to attend. The lack of money was a sore spot for the boy — his mother was a tailor of the highest calibre, and his uniform matched perfectly to the standard product, and he held himself with a certain timid grace that hardly gave away his station, but the rumours spiralled as soon as he began. He was the outcast of the group of boys, the different one, the one not worth noting. It took Stas three weeks to perform his first spell, rudimentary at best, but from there the learning curve began significantly less steep. He excelled at his classes not requiring wandwork: herbology, potions, and theory, but by the end of his first year, he was holding his own with casting spells. As a direct correlation, a bulk of the teasing seemed to stop, though it would persist from some parties well into his teens.
Upon passing his core competencies, he advances soundly into the second tier with the bulk of his classmen. His area of focus became divination and xylomancy, the two standard courses taught in his desired subject. It was neither the most lucrative, nor the most broad, of choices, but it allowed him to focus in on interests, and as such, developed a close relationship with the professor of Divination and Conjuring. Together, they began working on wider areas of interest: what she did not know, she found experts and located texts for him to study from. He became adept in arithmancy (the divination of numbers), lapadomancy (the divination of fire), oneiromancy (the divination of dreams), and lithomancy (the divination of stones), and grasped a basic education in several others.
He became more reclusive in his middle years, in part due to the feeling of inadequacy he felt around his classmates, and also due to the odd nature of his studies. Oftentimes, he could be found staring into pools of water, or bending down in the snow to analyze a person’s footfall. The years following his secondary testing proved much better for him, managing to come out of his shell and embrace the classmates he’d gotten to know over the years. While he does not consider himself the strongest, nor smartest, nor most popular, he’s comfortable in the position he’s carved for himself. He attributes the bulk of his newfound confidence in his stellar aptitude at picking the winners of Quidditch matches.
Despite focusing in on one particular area of study to begin with, Stas began expanding his research areas for independent study, coming back into contact with the herbology and potions professors, using the skills centralized in those subjects to cater to his own purposes: he would cull his own herbs and leaves to create specialized tea blends with inherent properties for talleomancy, and with the potions master, he began exploring more macabre subject matters: frogs, snakes, livers, and entrails. It unlocked a side of himself he’d never realized before, though he never quite let go of the trickster boy he’d been as a child. More comfortable with his classmates, he even began making jokes — however off-colour and sinister, and began considering some of them genuine friends.
Now in his final year of classes — despite possessing the right number of accolades to graduate well ahead of time — he understands that he needs to hone back in on his primary focus, but something keeps drawing his attention away. His second sight feels clouded, almost misleading, like he can no longer trust himself in his own prophecies. Though he cannot explain the feeling and is unwilling to share the knowledge with his friends, it unsettles him to the point that he is unsure of his own future. What had once been so straightforward, so obvious, no longer seems as such. Stanislav knows, perhaps better than anybody, how unstable the future can be, but after twenty years of making an effort at understanding it, he has begun to feel as if the future has finally decided to cut him out of its tapestry.
