Hogwarts School: A Harry Potter RPG

CHARACTER INFORMATION

Character Name: Inari Märchen
Gender: Male
Age: 33 (July 23, 1918)
Blood Status: Halfblood | German and Japanese descent

Education: 
Durmstrang, 1936

Residence:

-Birthplace: Shimoda, Shizuoka, Japan
-Childhood/Home: Stuttgart, Germany
-School: Durmstrang
-Age 23-29: Nagasaki, Nagasaki Japan
-29-present: Knockturn Alley

Occupation

Smuggler and Con Artist Single Father

Do you plan to have a connection to a particular existing place (for example: the Ministry, Shrieking Shack) or to take over an existing shop in need of new management?

No? Might make a shop later ay

Requested Magic Levels:

• Charms: 9
• Divination: 11
• Transfiguration: 7
• Summoning: 5

Do you wish to be approved as a group with any other characters? If so who and for what IC reason?
Nope.

Please list any other characters you already have at the site:
Ars and the gang~

Biography: (300 words minimum.)

The father was a man of refined tastes, a well-traveled vagabond with an insatiable and unpalatable hunger for what he considered to be “curiosities”. Under the pretense of becoming cultured, he pillaged, a savage with a mind as sharp and hard as diamond, but twice as cold. The afternoon he disembarked at Shimoda port was auspicious, marked by a series of sun showers. The local grandmothers told tales to their children about how the odd weather marked a fox’s wedding, and turned the young one’s heads away from the strange visitors to their world.

To say he didn’t love would be false—he did, irrevocably, love. He adored the locals and all their strange customs, eating fish raw with their hands and trading goods by the sea. He admired the way the mountains and the ocean met—the way nothing was flat, and the world was cozy. He relished the exoticism, this intense feeling that he and he alone was unique—a visitor to a strange world. He even cherished the idea of her, savored her flesh and the way she fit into his mind—the dainty, exquisite ribbon on this perfect package, but he did not love her. Not as a person, a human, her own soul.
From her he took his son, an unexpected souvenir.

The first-born child, a tangible, breathing memory.

The day she brought the baby to the docks, she’d sat in her parents’ house listening to the summer cicada’s cacophonous roar. Her life was a burning novel, and he hadn’t read the first page of it. The air around her threated to drown her as she stared blankly down at her newborn son—this monster that belonged in neither world. All she wished upon him was repentance for her own mistakes—a life full of glory and prosperity. Although he was hers, and belonged in Shizuoka, she gave him away—to mystery. To divinity. To a father who didn’t understand her plea, but could, perhaps, provide Inari the fortune he needed.

The boy grew to be a Machiavelli, raised in the shadow of an absent father whose form he could barely mimic. From an early age, his hubris blossomed, and his morality faltered. Where other children found fault in him, he found strength. He (at least looked) foreign, but he used strangeness as a weapon. He had no parents, but he had a hefty allowance and caretakers to harass. He had few friends early on, but had keen ears and a penchant for learning secrets.

By graduation, he was a grifter, a master in blackmail and subtle arts. Manipulation as naturally as charisma, and he slowly crafted a business from it. At first it was light, nondescript work. Arrangements. Rumors. Alibis and lies in the right ears. After leaving school, he got his first taste of the gold in blood, and acquired his father’s taste for excellence.

Five years.

The intricacy of a reputation required time, and numerous patrons. It came together like a song, like a gilded masterpiece traced in tears. Success was the only nature Inari possessed, and ruthlessness his only remarkable asset. It took a board of pawns to crown himself amongst his peers—a merchant prince of the underworld, but he did so like few others, with his hands entirely clean. The fox spun lies, which tightened fists, loosened lips, and made the nobility beg…

Curiosity wasn’t what caused Inari to return to his birthplace, nor was the unequivocal need to understand and uncover the lost relationship with his mother. Moreover, the idea came to him as a grotesque sort of right to the other part of his identity. To be “half” was not enough, especially when he’d never really known what Japan meant, as it only meant to him what it had to his father—a vague idealization of a real place. With nothing but his pride guiding him, he went there, and although he felt all the same half-hearted and asinine things his father had, perhaps they resonated a bit more with him, as he stayed. Japan was a place he could profit at least—in Nagasaki. For three years his crew ran the underside of the port—a rough group of Dutch dragon smugglers and miscreant muscle from Osaka. Trade fascinated him, as the possession of material goods always had, especially when it was cursed, illegal or in some other way nefarious.

For a young bachelor with no home, no country, and no mother, it was paradise.

The day Azumi brought their baby to the docks, it was spring, and rain fell in heavenly kisses from a clear sky. The moment he saw Kaguya, Inari knew that she was a part of him—some fragment of himself he’d never intended to give away. Never again would he be whole, or completely free to bask in his self-obsession. Still, he wanted desperately to believe this was a mistake—that this insane woman he’d had the misfortune of encountering had simply plucked her from a bamboo shoot, or stolen her from the moon.

It did not occur to him how cyclic this was—far too much so for a mundane human life.

This retribution was magical, and at the time he had been too vain to see it. With a mind clouded by his own ruination, he did not even hear her was she first declared Kaguya’s name, or for her demands of him. A single word formed on his tongue like a knife, held out sheepishly in self-defense.

“Uso.”

A lie.

He meant “liar” but despite his immersion he never really could catch on to his mother’s language, nor was he humble enough to make a determined effort to do so. In the future, someday, not in the present but perhaps upon his deathbed, it would not be unlikely for him to finally regret that single moment—the one opportunity he had to deviate from his fate, and his outright denial of it. If he had been capable of loving his daughter then, the future might have been different from them, but he crushed his dreams before their realization with a single word.

Why he brought Azumi and Kaguya back to Europe plagued him. There was no one reason, but rather a multitude of realities which played off each other, but were impossible for either of the newlyweds to pinpoint. Azumi herself was not his mother, despite the similarities, and refused to either give up Kaguya or raise her alone—to the point of breaking the windows of Inari’s apartment, and nearly killing one of the guards. Inari was not his father, and although he felt no love for them, his own experience had not left him unscathed, so he played puppeteer for his family. The seven months the three of them lived together were graced only by cold indifference, and plagued by the violence that seeps from miscommunication and distrust. Never once Inari blame his wife for running from him, as he was the one who’d chased her out. There was not enough of him to share, as he’d never had the capacity to even love himself as much as he imagined.

As a flower uprooted and untended in a distant world, Azumi wilted. With no help, support, or even a divorce to free her of Inari’s will, her only light was Kaguya. Yet, malice and regret were no substance for her soul, and she perished, leaving behind only a letter in the cold hands of a man that might have saved her.

At the funeral, he learned guilt, but resigned himself to never feel it again. Emotions were a disturbing change to him, but as he watched this girl (his daughter?) mourn her mother, as he felt her tug desperately to him, and as he held her, sobbing against his shoulder he felt something. It was truly bizarre, how she could still harbor any affection for him—how she could so easily accept while he could not. How could he put her mother in the ground, and be tasked with comforting her. It was all surreal.

With Kaguya in tow (owning a human, as it turned out, was much more difficult than securing the transport of even the most dangerous of items, as it had no “off” function, or easy method of storage, or guide), Inari moved his gang to Britain at the behest of S. Märchen. A newly minted entrepreneur and businessman, he’s set up an “antiques” shop which peddles cursed goods in the front of house, and expensive “favors” out the back. In particular, he’s interested in certain rarities pertaining to the history of the Märchen family.

In the present however, raising a daughter is no work for a devil.


Roleplay: 
You come across one of these posts on the site. Please select one & reply as your character:

Option One -
Amelia Nixon was many things, but she was never a pushover reporter that people could just usher away with a busy shuffle past. She was dedicated and eager to cut to the very middle of the current political tensions because she was Amelia Nixon and her articles would most certainly become front page material.

“Sir, please! It’s for the Prophet, how do you feel-“

Another one brushed passed her, the shuffling busy masses making their way through Diagon Alley for the lunchtime rush. This had been the best possible time to get people, but none of them were giving her anything to go with.

Only momentarily discouraged, the short red headed lady took a seat on a nearby bench. Her quill resting in her left hand and her notepad ready in the opposite hand. Amelia pouted, tapping the quill against her leg as she scanned the waves of people for somebody - anybody - who looked like they had something to say.

She had been dreaming of her name in bold print, Amelia Nixon: The Source of Today’s Tomorrow. She had been dreaming of the larger office and the secretaries that would fetch her the morning coffee and fetch her anything she needed. The VIP interviews and the most exclusive press passes. But all Amelia had was a page seventeen piece on the rising number of frogs in London.

Hardened by a day of no success, the reporter stood up and started to trod off down the alley. A loose stone on the cobble path caught her heel, sending the distraught girl toppling down to the ground.

“Merlin’s fog watch, my heel is broken! Help!” she yelled as she tried desperately to recover her shoe frantically in the middle of the Diagon Alley moving crowds.

Roleplay Response:

A father’s hand enclosed around his daughter’s signified something, but Inari couldn’t fathom what it meant to him, and couldn’t begin to grasp a simple gesture’s meaning to Kaguya. Protection. Love. Duty. Whatever it meant to hold his offspring, to tug her out of foot traffic and ensure she wasn’t lost or stolen was completely and utterly lost on him. Quality time was, at best, inconvenient, but on days like these he cursed his dead wife’s name, as she hadn’t stayed alive long enough to simply see this mistake come to fruition. Now he had to take care of her, and although he nodded along as she excitedly (desperately) tried to draw just a fragment of his attention, his mind was purely on business.

(At nine he could finally drop Kaguya back off at home, and Vince—a one-eyed, ex-mobster with an affinity for fist fights and tea parties—could distract her while he was out. Collecting debts and securing trades was all tedious business, especially when it wasn’t gold changing hands.)

“Yea, yea.” he replied as they paused on a street corner, and she happily quipped about how he’d entirely forgotten to buy them lunch. (Silly daddy.) For a moment he let her hand go to light a cigarette, and as he blew smoke into the darkening sky. It never occurred to him that someday she might run—he was a sword and she was an edge, they were one and the same, so it made no sense to love her anymore than he loved himself.

What d’ya want?” Perhaps it was just the nature of women, of girls, to be content with simple things, but these easy concessions made her admit a noxious, infectious glee. It irked him and amused him in equal measure, as he only saw her as his own reflection, and never her mother’s. Foolish thing she was.  Kaguya would be vulpine, if he had his say, and never commit the atrocities of her feminine predecessors. (Choosing monsters over men, to start.)

“Merlin’s fog watch, my heel is broken! Help!”

If he hadn’t seen this moronic woman trying to grasp for her shoe he might have completely disregarded her plea, but as it was, he could already feel the interest radiating off his daughter. His sharp tongue might have reminded her they lived in no fairy tale, and that the shoe woman was not Cinderella, but as the pair approached he knew Kaguya would think less of him for taking no action, as, for some horrible and baffling reason, she seemed to think he was a hero when he was only the worst sort of demon.

With a flick of his wrist, he discarded an entire half of his cigarette to the pavement and offered his newly freed hand to Amelia.

“Is it now?”

 What an absolute actress. If Kaguya had any intention of adopting this idiotic damsel as her step-mom she was out of her mind.

“Can you get up, or—“

He didn’t really have time for the or, and it seethed from his tone.


OTHER

How did you find us? MEMES.

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OOC NOTE: Permission to power play Kaguya and S. throughout the app/rp granted by Annie and Ash! <3