I am so freaking sorry it’s this long, my inner editor is apparently passed out in a ditch somewhere or on a midwinter holiday, one of the two. I’m hoping that if I type the magic words Tibble’s beard of power it will auto-summarise. Fingers crossed. Fingers and toes.T H E B A S I C SName: Fido Epps
Nicks: Fie, Fide, FE, Fepps
C H A R A C T E R D E T A I L SHouse: Any
Year: Fourth, Fifth & Sixth are all tied for first choice.
Bloodline: Halfblood
Magical Strength: Divination
Magical Weakness: Charms & Transfiguration tied. Can he be bad at both? If not then either one. Totally open.
Biography: Parents: Gregory Epps and Sally Seed
Brothers: Georg [25] and Julian [10 months younger than Fido]
Fido (noun)
A coin that is defective having been incorrectly minted. Often prized by collectors.
It’s not what he was named for. It’s just some trivia. Gregory is old school when it comes to the aristocratic classes and consequently a Latin scholar. Though what he was thinking when he named his middle son after a notoriously Hufflepuff trait is anyone’s guess. Shall we blame the wife?
Fidare (verb).
To be faithful, loyal.
Fido, I am faithful.
Reader: Fido, are you faithful?
Fido: …
Fido: In what context?
Let’s pretend we learnt something from that and move on.
It’s August 1945 and Greg Epps is 18 years old. His father is dead. His best friend is dead. His mother is in Azkaban but still somehow managing to dictate his life. He is the lord and master of a whopping great estate in Armagh, Northern Ireland that is more like a haunted ruinous castle than a home. The ministry are on his case, his literal, legal case and the shining gem in this bullocksed up life: he owes a mudblood a lifedebt.
Gregory ended up escaping an Azkaban sentence of his own (some tiny misunderstanding to do with muggles and sport/torture or you know, something) by the skin of his teeth (also a few confundus charms, an obliviate here and there, some missing ministry records and some friends of friends in seriously high places, but whose counting?). In a show of good faith and under the political machinations of his increasingly maddened mother he married into an old but ‘liberal’ wizarding family, liberal here having the euphemistic connotation of decidedly less than pure.
Sally Seed is the halfblood daughter of Dagonet Seed proprietor of
Jack’s Patch the pumpkin purveyors, Diagon Alley, London. Sally was a social climber with aspirations of living a life of wealth and leisure. Greg was just shocked a hot blonde was pursuing him. So at 18 he had a wife and at 19 he had a son. Georg was just shy of 9 when Fido was born and the tail end of 9 at Julian’s birth. The boys were raised in Armagh in that ‘haunted castle’ (though it wasn’t really haunted… or a castle come to that) on a healthy pureblood diet of rules and expectations and more rules and more expectation.
The Epps Matriarch survived Azkaban for 13 years and died a mad and unrecognisable mess. Fido never met her. Greg had become twisted with so many emotions of which guilt, shame, revenge and rage were some of the more toxic that he hadn't dealt with, and could now finally get some closure. He was ready to start a new life and leave the old one far behind. Though with two toddler sons and a twelve year old in Slytherin (very proud moment) it was a bit of an inconvenient time to have a 'new life' revelation. While procreation for the sake of lineage had seemed like a good idea at the time neither Greg nor Sally were remotely enamoured of loud, chubby messy children and very much wanted them seen and not heard, at least until they were of an age where they could hold a reasonably sensible conversation.
They passed them off to the house elves but in practice Dagonet commandeered the boys and effectively raised them without their parents noticing much. He taught them how to carve pumpkins and told them muggle stories about headless horsemen and carriages that turned into pumpkins at the stroke of midnight. As soon as Greg got wind of this, which admittedly took about 6 years and several mid-life crises involving expensive brooms and blond secretaries, he took the boys back and set about undoing all the indoctrination their muggle loving grandfather had corrupted them with. This drove yet another wedge in the relationship between Greg and Sally that had been barely hanging on by a thread since the aforementioned secretaries and she upped and offed to Mexico, bored of living like a princess and ready to enact her childhood plan B of becoming an ecological archaeologist, studying the history and origins of the pumpkin. They're not divorced because it's their view that purebloods 'don't do' divorce but they are continentally separated. Fido gets postcards and letters and odd shaped rocks but he can count the times he's seen his mother in the past 8 years on one hand. He’s technically banned from seeing his grandfather until he comes of age but it’s one more rule he breaks. Fido keeps his visits on the hush though because he goes out of his way to avoid antagonizing his highly-strung father.
Georg’s relationship with their father deteriorated drastically when he started dating a boy and just when Fido and Julian had finally managed to convince their father to reconcile with their older brother (seriously no mean feat, it took them the best part of 3 years, clearly their peace prize got lost with the owl) it came out that Georg’s boyfriend was a muggleborn, which as far as genetic progeniture goes should have been fairly irrelevant information but in practice was the straw that broke the proverbial hippogriff’s back and disinheritance came on Greg’s first breath with banning his younger sons from ever seeing their brother again on his second. More rules. Frequently broken. Actually
frequently frequently broken seeing as Georg and Hugh conveniently live in Hogsmeade with a breakfast bar that’s made out of a surfboard and homebrew pumpkin beer always on tap. I mean, how much cooler can an older brother get? Julian sees them less though also breaks this rule. He’s a Durmstrang boy as Greg felt that a Hogwarts education was clearly somehow responsible for messing up his sons.
Fide’s relationship with his father is, all things considered, surprisingly good. It requires a lot of effort because they disagree on almost everything but as long as no one speaks of anything of any consequence they're actually pretty good mates.
A D D I T I O N A L I N F O R M A T I O NPersonality:1 PART obliviousness & play
2 PARTS honour & balance
3 PARTS forgiveness & rage
4 PARTS the peace keeper
FIDE'S OPINION OF HIMSELF: Likes to think he's a nice enough kind of guy, that he's fairly approachable, that he has hidden depths (possibly so well hidden, even he's not aware of them), that he's a good sport and can take a fair amount of ribbing, that he's reasonably entertaining, that he's a total stud or at least a partial one, that he's a closet genius but clearly no one's noticed this yet! He likes to think he's a bad ass but he's fairly bad at being bad.
HABITS/QUIRKS: eating everything vaguely edible in sight, hitting on indie/rock/hippie/remotely alternative looking chicks, accidentally offending people and then trying to put it right, hiding fears and insecurities behind a wall of crude jokes and machoism, dealing or rather
avoiding dealing with difficult emotions by exhausting himself (usually by hitting inanimate objects, see hobbies), singing out of key in the shower, fog-horn snoring, high startle point (shrieks like a first year girl), can sleep anywhere including very odd places and through anything, stress makes him an insomniac and also break out (teenage problems, sigh). He’s dreadful at both charms & transfiguration and gets them muddled a lot. He turned a chair into roast pigeon when he was trying to float a feather and unfortunately in a charms exam, a goblet into a stack of porn when the brief had been to fill it with pumpkin juice. "Oops" and "I didn't mean it" didn't seem to cut it and he was done for deliberately antagonizing examiners and undermining exam protocol. Also examiners that year seemed to be particularly stingy with their "points for effort". I mean come on, it was good porn! Very glossy.
HOBBIES: boxing, running & drumming. Wooing girls. Dicking around with friends. Eating. You know, the usual.
HE'S LEAST AT EASE WHEN there is any threat of his incredibly precariously balanced dual lives colliding. He absolutely doesn't want his father to know how he behaves at school or among friends and he would be incredibly ashamed for his friends to find out how he acts around is father, the severity and snobbishness and elitism and casual blood prejudice that he knows would seem utterly repugnant. There are very few people he would ever introduce to his father. Probably only pureblood peers who live similarly duplicitous lives trying to balance familial honour against a society that is just plain moving on. He gets really antsy about answering questions about his family life in general and will pass it off with jokes unless really pushed, in which case he will lash out.
FEARS: He’s scared of heights (but shhh, don’t tell anyone), which makes him clearly pants at quidditch, or at least he would be if he dared get on a broom, which he doesn’t but that doesn’t stop him being an avid fan and coming up with some creatively nonsensical excuses to get himself out of playing friendlies or trying out for the team. Shouting instructions, praise and expletives from stand level is more where his strengths lie. Especially the latter.
He’s also scared of deep water. Again obviously he would never admit to this but he can’t swim. Like, at all. Mad as that sounds.
Terrified of disappointing his father into disinheriting him and also of disappointing his big brother into blanking him out of his life. It’s a toss up between which of the two he is more scared of. The former is the far more likely since his brother is a total softy with a very big heart. His father has precedent but is fast running out of sons to disown.
PRIORITIES:
1. Reconciling his father's relationship with his brother
2. Making his father
happy,
proud, HAPPY
3. Keeping his home life and his personal life
very separate
4. Being Happy!
5. Winning the Quidditch Cup
6. Dating at least 3 girls this year
7.
Successfully fermenting pumpkins into a spirit that doesn't taste like pig piss. To not get caught breaking school (meta moment to add: or board) rules.
8. To not accidentally kill anyone's pets (it was an
accident!!) or plants (okay that one was deliberate).
SOME OF HIS BEST BITS: He's got a big laugh and he's free with it. He's generally fairly tolerant and open-minded. He likes to maintain a very mañana, blasé kind of attitude as a front to hide just how ridiculously hard he works to try and stay average in classes. Homework may take a back seat but general study is way up there in the most time consuming aspects of his life (though of course after girls, friends, and food). He's pretty good at FINDing ways around temporary setbacks. He uses intuition or perspective or something like that and he's pretty good at not letting things get him down. He's a fast one for getting over things and moving on.
THINGS YOU NEED TO WATCH OUT FOR: Tons of suppressed maybe
repressed rage, unpredictable in its outbursts but of a yell many expletives kind rather than physical violence (he saves that kind of wrath for a drum kit). He's very short term, vicarious thrills, moving on to the next big thing and all that. Passionate but not particularly stable. You need to be careful also of getting into arguments with him because he stops listening to the "other" side pretty early on in the 'conversation' and it just becomes a shouting match. He’s impatient with other people’s grudges and grievances and insensitive towards any kind of sadness, angst or depression.
Blood Beliefs: It's in ignorance rather than maliciousness that his speech is often filled with a kind of casual blood prejudice like using "muggle" as synonymous to silly or stupid or pointless. Anything that doesn’t work he calls a ‘muggle piece of crap’ and it’s almost always directed at something that’s clearly wizarding in nature like his own wand or a self-inking quill. He's trying to stop as he knows it's derogatory but sometimes it's hard to break habits. He's uses "squib" in much the same context, though for him it's a harsher word with more negative connotations. He has used “mudblood” in the past but has pretty much traumatized himself out of ever saying it again. Tensions would have to be running seriously high. He was angry at his older brother for something, probably to do with their father and called him a ‘mudblood *
Crude word*’. Unfortunately Hugh, Georg’s muggleborn boyfriend was in the room at the time and there was this bloated silence as hearts shattered in a domino effect. The fear and hurt on Hugh’s face became desperate sorrow, betrayal and second hand guilt on the face of Georg and Fie regretted it instantly when he could practically see his brother’s heart breaking through every pore of his face. Guilt, oh the guilt and so much regret. It’s the stuff of his nightmares and many a sleepless night, probably it’s his bogart too.
Fido is woefully and hysterically ignorant of muggles and comes out with some fairly nonsensical clangers and absurd misunderstandings. His entire information base pre-Hogwarts came from the muggle fables and fairy stories that his maternal grandfather managed to convey before Greg banned all contact. From these stories Fide learnt that muggles used enlarged vegetables as some form of transportation and could interchange their heads with pumpkins and he is still under the misapprehension that muggles somehow use donkeys as a measurement of time.
His father has banned him from taking muggle studies but what his father doesn't know can’t hurt, right? Please for the love of Merlin never let him find out! The more Fido learns about muggles the more fascinating and insane he thinks they are. But insane in a good way, insane as in quirky and humorous and rather endearing, which is in itself fairly patronizing.
Appearance: A hulking big guy, all brawn and very
little LOTS! very
lots of brain. In his biceps, right? Actually yeah, lets go with that metaphor. He stores his brain in his biceps, it explains so much. He’s also blonde and a weird kind of pouty scowl seems to be his relaxed default expression but that’s a front that’s hiding teddy bear tendencies. Impeccably dressed, of course. Except when he’s not but that’s so rare it’s jarring, it seems like the weirdest thing ever and you have to stop and stare to work out what’s different. It’s also a sign of the apocalypse, ask any disreputable diviner, so you might want to take that moment to trade in your bunnies for top hats. Just a thought.
Roleplay Response:…she turned down a new corridor. A figure was ahead, and her eyes lit up, an impossibly rosy smile blossoming across her lips.
“Hey!” Astrid called, her voice light and singsong. She trotted to catch the person, her shoes clicking on the stone floor. “Wait up! It’s for the paper!” Her legs aided her admittedly poor running, and Astrid gasped as she came closer. “What do you think about serving frog legs at lunch? Some say it’s a delicacy, but others think it’s plain gross.”
So the last time Fido had walked down this particular specimen of a musty portrait clad corridor he had been sporting a very snazzy rainbow footprint hex curtsey of a particularly artistic team of second years. Trailing a wake of rainbow footprints had done wonders for the corridor if he did think so himself, especially when he had added in a few hops and twirls just to spread the rainbow love that little bit further. Thinking of which he still hadn’t got his own back for that one. Was it morally wrong to plot shoelace shenanigans against second years?
But alas that today was not nearly so fluorescent as he journeyed towards the designated rendezvous, a classroom that was to be the meeting point of the dorkishly named
Society for the Consumption of Fermented Pumpkin Beverages and also Biscuits. Who comes up with these things? It’s insane. So not his idea! Mostly not his idea. Oh Merlin, had it been his idea? Oh well if there were any sprites looking down on them favourably it was bound to be a short lived extracurricular. And hey, there may be biscuits in it.
It was their first meeting and the grey stone walls had to settle for the monochromatic dullness of dusty old men sipping brandy in a cloud of smoke while losing small fortunes at cards. At least that’s the portrait he suspected the coughing and throat clearing to be coming from. The
Hey! certainly hadn’t come from there though nor the tap dance of heels on stone. Greetings on this occasion were apparently to be forgone in favour of a bombardment of questions.
“Hello
Fido,” he said for her with familiarity and a cheeky grin, “so nice of you to stop for a chat,
Fido,” and then in falsetto he camped it up with an: “Oh hi, Astrid, didn’t see you there. But of course I’d love to be featured in your made up articles. Frogs’ legs are just to die for.”
He paused, frowned into the silence of the corridor and then said: “okay, pretend I did those voices the other way around.”
Link in: InsaneJournal (pottergames)
