Paging [@Undine]! My first char is done!
[hider=Mel Nielsen]
[center][color=DF9FF7][h1]Melody Rae Nielsen[/h1][/color]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/Y2tuMYY.png?1[/img]

[i][color=DF9FF7]”Aren’t they lovely, the figments of the mind?”[/color]
[b]~Mel[/b][/i][/center]

[hr][hr]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Nicknames[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]Melody was, in childhood, known as Mellie to her friends. In high school she tried to go by “Rae” to be “cool” and doesn’t let anyone call her that anymore. If you’re a friend of hers, you can call her “Mel”; otherwise it has to be “Melody”. She makes exceptions for her music students, however; many of the younger ones have taken to calling her “Auntie Mel” or “Aunt Mellie”.  [/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Age[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]Twenty-Three[/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Gender[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]Female[/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Sexual Orientation[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]Heterosexual[/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Occupation[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]Composer[/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Appearance[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]Mel seems to have inherited an equal smattering of traits from both parents: her mother’s blue-gray eyes and curly dark brown hair, which she usually pulls into a bun, and her father’s golden complexion and general bone structure. She’s rather short, about 5’1, another trait that she inherited from her mother. She usually has a fairly distracted expression on her face, her eyes unfocused and staring off into the distance; usually she can be found distractedly tapping the table or desk with a pencil or pen and mumbling under her breath.

Fashion-wise, Mel tends to go simple and comfortable. She favors pale colors and generally conservative styles. Her go-to outfits are button-up shirts and long skirts. She generally hates any look that draws attention to her, such as the monstrous glasses that she got when she was in high school and still trying to “stand out” (but she never can remember to trade them out when she goes to the eye doctor.) She wears very little makeup, usually only when there’s some formal event she needs to go to.[/indent]

[hr][center]
[i]"Nothing like a bit of dissonance in the morning to make us want to tear out our eardrums, eh?"[/i][/center]
[hr]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Personality[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]Scatterbrained, Distant, Quiet, Fidgety.

Mel is the stereotypical composer. Always distracted by her work (and from her work), without great time-management skills. She’s often seen frantically rushing around the set looking for her in-progress score; she’ll often set things down without knowing and then entirely forget about them, until she suddenly has an epiphany and needs to write it down in her notes.

When it comes to interacting with people, Mel prefers to not. She’s a kind soul but she very much dislikes interacting with people in a casual sense. She does fine in a professional sense, in that she’s able to interact with fellow composers and musicians in the workplace and keep her orchestra (fairly) happy, healthy, and sane, even during concert season. But when it comes to being an actual friend… well, she has issues.

The one bit of human interaction that she actually does enjoy is her music classes. She offers private lessons for clarinet and has quite a few students, typically elementary and middle schoolers who want to learn but are intimidated by other instructors they’ve tried.[/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Likes[/u][/b][/color]
[indent][list][*]Perfect fifths
[*]Clarinet
[*]Romance novels
[*]Her clarinet students
[*]Fruit smoothies
[*]Watching people from afar
[*]Gustav Holst’s compositions
[/list][/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Dislikes[/u][/b][/color]
[indent][list][*]Forced social interaction
[*]Deadlines
[*]Students who destroy their music 
[*]Dissonance
[*]Working with people who aren’t her students
[*]JS Bach. See Dislike 4.[/list][/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Fears[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]Ironically, she fears being feared. She doesn’t ever want anyone to distrust her or be afraid of her.
Breaking her clarinet. It happened to her once before, in middle school, and it was the most horrible thing she ever experienced.[/indent]

[hr]
[center][i]"Once more, with FEELING!"[/i][/center]
[hr]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Strengths[/u][/b][/color]
[indent][list][*]good with children
[*]good mediator
[*]A good team leader
[*]Open and honest[/list][/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Weaknesses[/u][/b][/color]
[indent][list][*]Underestimating her own capabilities
[*]Emotional sensitivity
[*]Social anxiety
[*]Is likely to crack under stress[/list][/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]History[/u][/b][/color]
[indent][hider=Wall of Text Warning]Mel has always been “destined” for music. Born and raised in Philadelphia, her parents met in middle school band; a shared love of the clarinet brought them together and they raised their only daughter with a healthy dose of it in her life. Even in kindergarten she played on a scaled-down version of a clarinet. Music has kind of been her life ever since she was little.

She’s been fortunate to have a pretty uneventful life, if an intense one. She was always pushed by both parents into being the best at whatever activity she was involved in at the time: At school she was expected to get straight A’s; she did, even being allowed to skip sixth grade on account of how rapidly she was learning. This, in addition to her favored wardrobe (comfort, rather than fashionability) led to petty mistreatment at the hands of her classmates. She didn’t take it well; for her eighth and ninth grade years she switched to a homeschooling program. Before tenth grade she decided to try to go back to the public school. She cut her hair, got new glasses, changed her wardrobe to be more fashionable. For a while it worked well. She got into the popular crowd and felt good and confident.

And then came the friend incident.

She’d gotten into the cool group, gotten to be pretty popular. That was when she got her acceptance letter to the Juilliard School. Her dream. Unthinkingly she told all of her “friends” about it, within two minutes shattering the cool-girl reputation she’d built up over the last year. Her friends were… nonplussed to say the least. “Wait, what? Where are you going?” “Oh, isn’t that the one super-nerdy school?” “God, Rae, we thought you were actually cool. Not some closet band [i]geek[/i].”

She vowed to take the lesson to heart. Unfortunately, it might have been the wrong lesson. "Trust no one except for music; music will never break your heart.”

She threw herself into her studies. Having graduated high school at the age of almost-seventeen, she was done with her master’s degree in musical composition by the age of 21, having overloaded her schedule somewhat to allow herself to finish school early.

All throughout college she worked as a composer for middle-and high-school-level concert bands, earning a fairly decent reputation. She had one fairly ambitious work, the one she did for her master’s thesis. An orchestral suite vaguely inspired by her idol, Gustav Holst, but on an even grander scale. Entitled simply, “Galaxia”. She thought she’d overestimated herself, but apparently it was an enormous success. The Philadelphia Orchestra picked up her piece and played it on her 22nd birthday. Then the London Symphony picked it up too, shooting her to stardom—whatever stardom can be associated with contemporary orchestral composers.

She was asked if her piece could be used in an up-and-coming sci-fi film. She agreed. Not a week later she was asked if she could come on-set to look over the script and the storyboards and write a score specifically for the movie. 

She didn’t want to uproot from her home, but…this was the music career she’d been looking for. So she went. She spent much of the time there listening to the orchestra’s renditions of her work, and they weren’t satisfactory: she asked to take over conducting, since it was *her* music, after all.

Six months later, when the music was finally as perfect as she could get it and she could find no fault in the final recording, she prepared to leave to go back to Philadelphia. Her orchestra, as she came to think of them, would have none of it. The conductor that she’d replaced just grinned at her and told her that he’d been looking to retire anyway, and he might as well leave the orchestra in her hands. He jokingly told her that “Composers always make the best conductors and I never was a composer. I didn’t stand a chance.”

So she stayed. She kept up her composing work and her own clarinet practice when she wasn’t conducting. She needed something else to fill the time. Well, word got around the orchestra that she was a pretty good clarinetist, and before long one of the orchestra members brought along a young cousin of his, a scared little girl who had managed to be frightened by all of her previous private instructors. He asked if Mel wouldn’t mind trying to teach the girl, because she really needed a challenge.

Before too long, the girl brought her friends, who told their other friends, and now Mel also teaches private clarinet lessons to a group of students from ages 6-13.

About two months ago, a talent agent for this movie approached her after one of her orchestra’s performances and asked if she would be able to write and conduct a score, completely from scratch, for an enormous cinematic production.

Of course she said yes.[/hider][/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Favorite memory[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]Mel has a lot of favorite memories. One of them is from when she was six or seven and got to play a clarinet sonata as the soloist with her local high school’s band. Another is when she opened the gold-leafed envelope from Juilliard. Or when she went to the orchestra on her birthday and wound up almost fainting when she realized they were playing her symphony. Or just a few months ago, when she took all of her students to a state music festival and their ensemble wound up taking first place.[/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Least favorite memory[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]When she was in seventh grade, a group of kids cornered her when she was walking home from school. They systematically destroyed her clarinet, by jumping on it, banging it against the brick wall, etc, and breaking all of her reeds by smashing them into the ground. She collected all of the pieces of it, and has all the keys on a necklace that she used to wear every day and still keeps for memorabilia’s sake[/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Why did you decide to work for this movie?[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]You’ve got to be kidding. A blockbuster movie for a twenty-three-year-old composer? Resume fodder, anyone? Also, she’s getting bored with just the standard, already-written pieces and needs to get her creative juices flowing[/indent]
[hr]
[center][i]"See, sweetie? Don’t cry. It’s just a loose screw. Totally fixable. Clarinets don’t like to be broken, you see, and neither do clarinetists. Never let a little thing like a loose screw get you down, sweetheart, alright?"[/i][/center]
[hr]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Birthday[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]September 1 1992[/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Astrological Sign[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]Virgo[/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Social Media[/u][/b][/color]
[indent]Twitter: @MelodyDreamer
Alternate Twitter: @HSOMel
Facebook: Mel Nielsen
Instagram: MelodyClarinet
Tumblr: Elusive_Clarinetist[/indent]

[color=DF9FF7][b][u]Miscellaneous[/u][/b][/color] 
I’m fine with any plot, but Mel would have the most fun scoring for Never Have I Ever. Suspense is a lovely thing to write into music. Or “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” from ClocktowerEchos’s suggestions. Lots of mournful flute/clarinet/oboe/violin passages in there. Or Endymion from Clock’s suggestions, because again, suspense and adventure and angst.
[hr]
[center][i]"Music is the way the universe lets us know what it’s thinking.”[/i][/center][/hider]