Ferdinand is a Good Kid. The kind who slips right under the radar, because he doesn’t really care about accolades, success, doesn’t attract teenage drama, and is mostly happy to live his life out quietly among his friends in a really cool setting. This looks like a lack of direction at times, but he figures that's okay, because isn't high school a time to explore? He's just taking that to mean a mash of every subject that he thinks sounds cool so he doesn't miss a chance anywhere. Ferdie tends to kind of sink to the background, and he's passive a good deal of the time. He avoids the hell out of confrontation. It's not because he can't deal with it, because once confrontations are actually in his face, he's generally more than capable of handling himself well, without backing down. He's just laid-back enough to not want it. If he could have a life where he could sit back and be free to do what he wanted, Ferdinand might not get much done. He doesn't really have a lot of ambitions, and he definitely doesn't linger under any delusion that he's Special or Brave or even very valuable. It's easier just to sink back into the corner.

A lot of that comes from spending a large portion of his life being told what to do. His home was a very restricted, sheltered place. It wasn't bad. He knows that. It's just that it left him with a lot of uncertainty, and anxiety. Ferdie still struggles with that sometimes, though it's become much better now that he has some agency and drive of his own. There will still be times, though, when he looks up and is filled with doubt that he's doing the right thing, or that he deserves to be at this school at all. But Ferdie doesn't like those thoughts in himself, and so, like he does to everything he fights, he stubbornly grits his teeth and tries to get over it.

Taking the initiative to actually fill his day with things he liked helped that. Having the confidence to trust that he'll be good at any of it is difficult, so Ferdie started in on the smallest things first. Ferdie likes details as compared to bigger projects, and notices and concentrates on them easily. He's an extremely astute observer of both humans and patterns. He likes getting swept up in projects that allow him to calm down and focus on one minute thing at a time. He'd probably feel like he was hiding if he spent all his days on projects, though. Ferdie isn't content with just focusing on schoolwork or any one academic project, so he joins classes and clubs that teach him skills he didn't have before. He likes pushing himself to be braver, to get out of his comfort zone. He knows what lies in there, and it's nothing good. It's very important for him that he overcome the parts of himself he finds weak.

Which is difficult, because Ferdie, at his heart, thinks he's very weak. It's a big fear that came up in the nightmare mines, to the six other students there with him. The fact that they know how much he hates his own passivity bothers him, but there's nothing much he can do. This will probably rear its ugly head during his term as Head Boy. He hates the idea that his upbringing made him so passive that now he doesn't know how to change it or stand up for himself, and at worse, thinks this could mean a lifetime under his parents. He's petrified of going back to his parents and being dependent on them for life. It's the worst thing that could happen, but he knows it's only a few failed classes away.

Ferdie is combating this the only way he knows how; by taking those fears, ignoring them completely, and standing up even when every nerve is screaming to run in the other direction. That's how he confronts fear and anxiety in himself. It works best when he knows a situation is dire. Ferdie is actually quite an asset in a crisis. He keeps calm because he'd be too disgusted with himself if he didn't, and usually there are other people or factors to concentrate on. Ferdie gets out of his head when he can think about those. He overthinks, but he can stop that by acting instead. When the stakes are high enough, there is a resolve of steel in Ferdie that will cause him to shove aside all careful hesitation and make all sorts of brave, possibly stupid, perhaps unpopular decisions. He found that last year, and he was relieved that it came so easily. He's not giving it up now.

Really, though, he should not have been entirely surprised. Ferdie, despite appearances, is very much a quiet rebel. It's hard to see sometimes, because before this year, he never went outside the lines in any big way. He values his independence more than anything, though, and is quick to turn away anyone who tries to bully or threaten him into their way of thinking or acting. It likely can't be done. This is coming out more and more with his parents, the people he feels most obliged to rebel against. This urge, though, fights against his general steady good sense. Quiet rebel or not, he has the awareness to not rock the boat so far he falls out and is highly unlikely to engage in many actual risky behaviors. It's more a matter of him being very motivated to only do things that he's decided to do, and that he thinks are good ideas. Peer pressure and coercion don't work well on him. Reasoning and well thought out arguments do. He will be an annoying teacher or parent, someday.

While Ferdie isn't exactly a bastion of popularity like at all, he's not an introverted person by nature. He likes talking to people. Being with his peers is one of the reasons he came to boarding school at all. It's one of those things that are still kind of frightening, but he's had to get over quickly. He's not overly friendly, but he's markedly kind. He leans on sarcasm and jokes a little too hard, because sometimes dry, passive-aggressive comments feel like the safest way to avoid standing down entirely without getting hit. He's kind of sarcastic even when there isn't an imminent threat, but it's in a good humored way most of the time. He's also patient enough to actually sit down with people and try to talk his way around problems. He doesn't have much of an ego, and isn't really one to get stubborn during arguments. A true Ribbonfin, he values cooperation and collaboration over being bull-headed and while ultimately might not change his opinion, he definitely considers everyone else's. It probably goes back to childhood again. (doesn't everything?) He's been told what to do for so long, that he doesn't really want to tell anyone else what to think.

That's part of why being a leader has been strange for Ferdie. It doesn't come naturally. He's not hugely charismatic, and he doesn't carry a lot of gravitas. At first, as a prefect, it was a real struggle enforcing rules. He learned how, in his own way. He was happy to fall into a good-cop kind of role and take a backseat to more energetic prefects, becoming an unofficial counselor more than anything. However, when people take that as him not having backbone, or think that they can get away with breaking rules under his nose, Ferdie is swift to correct them. His quiet confidence exudes a little more than he thinks. That, coupled with his problem-solving capability and emphasis on cooperation should (he hopes) help him survive his Head Boy term.

The Eileen Nielsen Saga
You’ve probably heard of Eileen Nielsen, even if you aren’t aware of her much less famous son. In her early days, Eileen was a journalist for the New York Oracle. Her career high was covering the reverberations MACUSA felt from the Voldemort Saga, and she won awards for several pieces. Her work was known for its peerless accuracy and keen insight. No one knew how she did it; but it seemed that she had a touch of the Sight; always able to predict the way one politician or another would act days before they did. Until, of course, a few years later it was uncovered that she, much like Rita Skeeter on the other end of the ocean, had been using quasi-illegal means to source her stories. She wasn’t an Animagus. Her Bugs were of the electronic variety, when rifling through drawers wasn’t quite enough. Of course, Eileen was fired in disgrace right away, and the only way she avoided criminal charges were the hefty settlements she’s still paying. No one would hire her except a crappy gossip website, and she still had too much dignity for that, so she put down her pen. She issued a public apology and flew out of the public eye.

Her husband stuck by her. His name was Theodore Ayers, an author of historical fiction novels, which she always joked she might as well be,now. They moved to a suburb of Chicago, and concentrated on writing his books. (Which were now kind of popular after the whole Eileen Scandal; everyone wanted to see if he could predict things too. He couldn’t.) They also focused on raising their son, Ferdinand. The blessing of all this was that he was too young to properly understand what was going on, and he wouldn’t suffer for his mother’s mistakes.

Early Life
Well. In a perfect world. Ferdinand grew up in a quiet apartment with his parents, neatly tucked away from people who might still be angry at Eileen. Because of Theodore and the fact that they only had one child, they could still afford to send Ferdinand to good schools. Ferdie started at a private wizarding grammar school, The McGiliguddy Institute in Chicago. They lived nearby in a suburb. Mercifully, Ferdinand was spared a lot of his mom's infamy, since she used her maiden name for journalism. His teachers knew, of course, but they were usually good about keeping quiet. Which is what the Ayers family was paying them for, of course. They’d discussed sending Ferdinand to Ilvermorny when the time came, but they didn't want to let him that far out of their sight. His mother’s rather checkered past turned out to be an excuse for a great deal of sheltering. He wasn’t allowed to bring friends home, ever. Eileen discouraged Ferdinand from discussing who his parents were, under the guise of 'it isn't polite,’ and rarely agreed to meet the parents of his friends he did have.

Ferdinand, as he would do again, went quietly the opposite way. He spent his early school years making friends he didn't tell his parents about. He thought they'd probably let him keep them,but there was always that distant memory of the days he'd spent all alone in his apartment, trying to stave off the boredom that came with not having anyone to talk to even remotely close to his own age. People thought he was strange, inevitably, for not letting them come over; that he had to go straight home from school every day. But he was also friendly, and easy to be friends with. So his cloistered life came to be a joke Ferdinand was in on. He also cheated his mother's system by enrolling in as many extracurriculars as he could possibly squeeze into his roster. He became an incredibly well rounded student mostly as a subtle act of rebellion. Figures.

The McGilliguddy Institute is only a K-8 school that is designed to ship kids out to Ilvermorny for their secondary education. So Eileen and Theodore struggled figuring out where he would go after. Ilvermorny itself was out of the question. They were both alumni, and too many kids and teachers would recognize their situation, miles away from home. The trouble was, Ferdinand was digging in his heels and insisting on not going to another Chicago area day school. He wanted to go to Ilvermorny. He knew it probably wasn't possible. But he researched other schools far, far away and came up with Gooseberry. His parents made the compromise because he wasn't insisting on Ilvermorny. It gave him some freedom, but they could correspond with the teachers enough to be getting on with. It was scary for Eileen, but it had to work.

Gooseberry
He loved Gooseberry. Ferdinand felt for the first time that he was independent and could breathe. The slightly frantic notes of his personality dwindled down, and he concentrated on school. He liked the details of magic, he discovered. Not producing, but digging deep into meaning and secrets that were right in front of your face. Ferdinand was always good at noticing the corners of things. That's why he liked Hermeticism and later, Divination. There are always a lot of corners and details to discover. He likes Divination methods based on nature and weather. He hasn't really made many (especially any big-deal) predictions. Yet.

The best part of school,though, was having people actually around to talk with and befriend. He'd never had anything like that. He didn't take advantage. Ferdinand was always respectful and studious, but also willing to have fun. With limits. He joined a variety of extra curriculars, as per habit, but it wasn't a coping mechanism or an escape anymore. He doesn't talk about who his mother is. It's less because he really thinks anyone would hold it against him, and is more out of habit.

His hard work and easy-going (yet responsible!) attitude meant Ferdie got a prefect badge sophomore year.That was a bizarre experience, at first. While he has always been a little lenient when it comes to the actual rules, as soon as actions were hurting or offending anyone else, Ferdie stepped in with a firm hand. He found himself mostly appreciating the parts of the job that took negotiation and peacemaking. He was better at calming emotional people down than being a hard enforcer of rules. Even as a prefect, he was quick to let his more forceful co-prefect, Rosy Stoker, take the lead, with him coming up at her shoulder and reinforcing everything she said, but perhaps sometimes more kindly. They were always a good team.

Year One/Summer
His successes at school meant he got braver at home. For the first time, in the winter of his junior year, Ferdinand Ayers stayed at Gooseberry over winter break. It was underwhelming, but it was a step in the right direction. It increased fights with his mother, but he never really told anyone. School was always his refuge. And even there, he found it slowly easier to be brave. Even prefecting got more natural, and he stared down the barrels of high school experiences like kissing games and dances alike. Somehow, he always emerged perhaps scarred, but successful.

He reached the apex of this bravery on the day after his birthday. He was supposed to go home the next morning. Instead, Ferdie found himself shuffled through a nightmare version of the school he loved, trying to rescue classmates. It only ended when he walked through old mines with a handful of other students, guiding them by "hunches" he kept having. They found and delivered something precious, and were told that everything would turn back to normal. Ferdie's counting on it. He discovered in himself that night a steel that he won't be able to hide again easily. It helped him through until the very end, when he was reassured everything would be all right. Ferdie knew it would, this time. He'd make it that way.

Over the summer, things went back to normal. He worked a lot at a day camp for magical kids in the Chicagoland area. He didn't come home on time. His mother, overprotective as always, tried to enforce curfew where curfew could not be enforced. He wasn't doing anything bad; Ferdie's still the world's worst rebel and was just working at a second job at a small movie theater in Chicago. There were a lot of yelling matches anyway, and Eileen almost forbade him from going back to Gooseberry. Ferdie lay down in no uncertain terms that if she tried, he'd leave. For good. His mother was appalled and wanted to know what this school was turning her son into.

That answer was head boy. He received his badge at the end of the summer, and only had half a heart attack. He knows it won't be easy. But he's learned how straight his backbone can stand. He doesn't know exactly how he's earned his title, but now that he has it, he's going to work for it every day with the same impassioned drive he found in himself on the most frightening night of his life. He owes his school that much.