CHARACTER INFORMATIONCharacter name: Orville Oddsworth
Previous and/or Current Character(s) if applicable: Jackson Ross, et al.
Character age: 35 (Jan 3, 1905)
Character education: Summer of 1922, Interned at Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, with the Muggle-Worthy Excuse Committee, but was not offered a position upon graduating.
Hogwarts 1923 Graduate, Ravenclaw
1923-25, Amateur quidditch player, tried out three times for Wigtown Wanderers and once for Falmouth Falcons. Failed to go pro each time.
1926-30, Gringotts security guard while taking night classes via correspondence with Hapsburg School of the Magical Arts.
1930-present, Amateur biographer and self-professed tour guide
Strength and weaknesses:His strength? His remarkable sense of persistence and never giving up in the face of adversity.
His weakness? There’s a lot of damn adversity.
Physical description: Really, that depends on the time of day. In the morning, if it’s just after a shave, Orville can look properly young. But towards tea time, or even supper, he might have looked like he’s aged years when all he’s done is grown some hair on his chin. It’s earned him the nickname ‘Old Man’ from his two younger brothers. To add salt to the wound, Orville has recently begun having to wear spectacles at certain times, and is very self-conscious of this.
Personality: There is a word for Orville Oddsworth. Blunt. Orville has no time for witty banter (because he has too often found himself at the butt of jokes) or or ice breakers (he will never care for what the weather is this time of the year). The weather is always the same. Why do people continue to be surprised when it’s snowing in winter or raining in England?
Hopes and dreams. Why are you teaching at Hogwarts?: Teaching at Hogwarts is not Orville’s first choice, but then again, when does he get what he actually wants? He saw a classified for the position in the Daily Prophet, and figured it couldn’t be that bad. Beats dying in a war.
I mean, for the children. To teach them lessons in life and in history. Right.
Biography: I suppose it all started with my name.
Orville. You can’t even make a proper nickname out of that. Believe me, I have tried. Orv. Or. There was a spell in my school days where I tried to get everyone to call me Ollie. But when you have a ghost of an uncle in the castle, who insists on using your full name every time he sees you, it can make nicknames difficult to catch on.
He’s another story entirely, but suffice it to say that when you die trying to crossbreed a unicorn and a thestral, you and your family become the laughing stock of the entire academic world. Or at least, the Ravenclaws. They like to pretend they are one and the same, but when was the last time any of those dullards had an original idea in their tiny heads?
Hogwarts was a long seven years for me.
After school, I had high hopes. As co-captain of my house’s quidditch team, I thought maybe sports was in my future. I joined an amateur quidditch league and supported myself with odd jobs on the side that I could fit in around practice and our game schedule. I was showing progress, they said. Don’t feel bad if a quaffle gets past you, because it had to get past everyone else, they said. When I reached what I felt was the peak of my skills, I went out for a couple open tryouts. The Wigtown Wanderers had been my favorite team since I was a kid, so I knew competition would be tough. The first time there were too many keepers going out for the same position, and they told me to come back. Next time, I asked if I could switch to chaser, or beater. Third time I wouldn’t let go of the quaffle because I didn’t want anyone else to be picked instead of me, and apparently that was the wrong strategy.
I don’t play quidditch anymore.
Since athletics had proven to be a dead end, I turned back again to academics. I got hired as a security guard at Gringotts and did some mail correspondence classes. I took a little bit of everything. Did you know you can take a dragon taming course through the mail?
I decided to concentrate on history, because I was not about to tempt fate like Uncle Theodore.
Besides, if you can’t learn from
your someone else’s mistakes, what’s the point in making them?
So now I spend time doing just this. Writing down people’s stories and trying like hell to make them look good. My books are tucked away in personal libraries, because I’m hired by the kind of people who don’t warrant a biographer on their own, but are pretentious enough to think they should have one anyways. Sometimes I can make it work, make them still interesting. No one likes telling the nitty, gritty things about their lives, so most of the biographies that I pen could hardly qualify for that genre. The popular view on it is it’s not a lie if I don’t know about it. Still, those customers are better than others. In my professional opinion, the worst is when their lives are so dull, I want to end my own. No amount of stretching the truth from me is going to fix that. And people tend not to pay you when you fall asleep in the middle of their stories.
So I suppose that's what's brought me back here, right where I started.
And then there was that whole war thing breaking out in Europe. That was not helpful, either.
SAMPLE ROLEPLAY(Please respond to to this in third person past tense. Do not write the other characters' reactions. Only your own.) The water by the lakeshore rippled, dark under the overcast sky, and thick with moss growth. Ripples grew into small waves, spreading in concentric circles that sloshed against the rocks and sent a small family of mice living in a rotted out log above the waterline scurrying for cover.
And then the lake exploded.
A fountain erupted, splattering muddy water and assorted bits of lake bottom. Something very, very large thrashed and roiled, tentacles slapping wildly at the surface.
Elizabeth despised the squid, and more importantly, she disapproved of it. It was disorderly. Truth be told, she was the sort of woman who disapproved of a great many things, the disorderly ones most particularly. A tall, severe woman in her forties who never smiled, Elizabeth was so parsimonious with praise that it was said that if good will could be saved up she'd be sitting on a pile of it like dragon over a horde. The school's Headmistress was very good at disapproval.
Brown water flowed in a tent around her upraised wand, blocked by an invisible umbrella.
“He has a cold again!” Pythagorea Proud, the school’s much-harried Deputy Headmistress fussed, as she shook a spatter of mud off of her arm. She hadn’t been as quick with her wand work.
“He won’t take his medicine. We’ve been trying all morning. Someone is going to have to deal with him!”Arms folded, the tip of Elizabeth’s pointed black and very sensible shoe tapped against the rocky bank. She glanced over at their newest Professor, her expression thoughtful. “You’ll do,” she offered flatly, her tone leaving little room for argument. This was going to prove to be a very different sort of interview...
Roleplay Response:“Me?”
He must have misheard.
Orville had hardly been on the grounds for what couldn’t have been more than five minutes, and things were already going the way that they normally did for him. Just once, he would have loved to take a proper tea, agree to the terms of employment, sign whatever waivers this place needed, and be done with it.
Instead he was standing in the mud making...did squid have eyes?...what could be construed as eye-contact with an animal he had very much avoided during his time here at school. At the time, that had been more because of the stigma associated with his uncle and animals, but now that he had a closer look at the creature, he could think of several other reasons.
At least ten, tentacled reasons, as a matter of fact.
“Does...it like stories?”
It was the first thing that had come to his mind. The man had several copies of various biographies in his bag, in case the Headmistress had needed proof of his previous employments. But Orville had not signed up for
this. His gaze went back to the squid, before heaving a sigh. He couldn't move back in with his mother after all this time.
Not again.
