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Messages - Zak Weiland

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Elsewhere Accepted / Völund brooms
« on: 05/01/2024 at 23:13 »
SHOPKEEPER PERMIT
You must have applied as an Elsewhere character before completing this permit.


Shop name: Völund brooms
Shop Type: A brand and repair shop for Quidditch brooms
Location: Diagon Alley
Subforum? Yes please!

Short Description (50 words max): A brand and repair shop for Quidditch brooms. Get your custom-made broom now! Or stop by and have coffee with Zak!


Long Description (200 words min):

Background
The idea for Völund brooms appeared in reaction to the standardisation of brooms and the norm of speed as the idealised Quidditch quality. Coming from a background as a professional Keeper, Weiland was unhappy with the branding of Keeper as a "boring" position with lackluster recruitment, blaming this in part on Quidditch ideals and broom builds that, indeed, made Keeper a harder-than-necessary position to play.

Resultingly, Weiland started requesting broom builds as customised for his player style. This included experimenting with heavier woods for increased stability, and with flexible woods that were better at handling the high risk of impact from high-speed Quaffles and Bludgers.

After a Quidditch accident that rendered Weiland immovable from the waist down, he wanted to bestow these ideas on the rest of the community and started researching how to make his vision into a business model. As such, Weiland's ambition was to build room for an increased diversity in players and their brooms.


The business
The shop provides broom and equipment in three main categories being beginner, intermediate, and customised/professional brooms, with increasing focus on fitting the broom to position play and an individual's wishes and player style.

Beginner and intermediate brooms are divided into three categories being (a) high-impact Keeper's and Beater's builds with focus on stability and resilience, (b) Seeker's and Chaser's builds that are speedier and lighter, focusing more on avoiding getting hit than being able to take a hit, as well as (c) combination builds typical for example for children/youth on school teams whose positions tend to shift around a lot. The shop provides advice in the case where the customer is unsure how to tackle specific game-related challenges and there should be plenty of room for variation inside the groups, in particular on the intermediate level.

Professional brooms have alternatives beyond what is offered for intermediate brooms. Most professional brooms are customised through one or two processes: (1) profiling of the player through interview and observation and (2) any special aesthetics and effects, though normally only within the rules of what is allowed for Quidditch games.

(The shop also has a borrow-option, provided that the borrower fills out a firm with a rating that helps Völund refine and develop their brooms. This option is not always available and may be reserved for certain positions and/or levels.)

The shop also imports and sells other broom brands and Quidditch eqiupment.

Völund is run by the trio of Weiland, a skilled broommaker, and a magical engineer (these positions will be up for grabs if the permit goes through). There will also be a need for 1-2 people at the counter. Depending on how the business goes, Völund might start looking for someone to take care of economy/admin stuff, with the hope of expanding the broommaker- and repair sections with larger broommaker- and repair teams (new broommakers will normally start of as trainees in the repair section and the teams otherwise tend to overlap).

All brooms from Völund are marked with the logo: One golden and one silver wing.


Layout
The shop can roughly be divided in three sections.

In the middle is the shop area, where brooms are available on display and for try-outs (no, NOT inside the shop!). On the left is the repairshop, together with a couple of small offices.

On the right, the shop has been furnished as a small café area containing two round tables, each surrounded by a triad of bright red chairs. The area is self-served (Weiland insists that serving should be free) and known for its horrendous coffee. While initially meant as a waiting area, and while some of the stricter staff may shoo people away who are not customers, Weiland happily welcomes anyone who just want to use the place to hang out.

The walls of the coffee area is decorated with the shirts of Weiland's legacy - first the crimson of his old Gryffindor shirt, then the black-and-white shirt from his first taste of professional Quidditch, as second Keeper to Montrose Magpies, then the bright yellow-and-black of the Wimbourne Wasps, as he was bought in as their primary Keeper. Finally, the dark navy of Scotland's national team.


What purpose will this shop serve other than selling things and being the home of your character? Why would people want to RP there just for fun?

To my memory, there has never been a broom shop on the forum, although there has been plenty enthusiasm around Quidditch. As a long-term OOC fan of the IC Quidditch games, I want to help inspire creativity in writing things Quidditch related!

The purpose of the shop is manifold:

1) Inspire fun writing for all things Quidditch related
2) Inspire growing a community of Quidditch enthusiasts and professionals
3) Challenge ideas connected to the IC and OOC popularisation of some Quidditch positions over others
4) Challenge the perception of speed as the most desireable Quidditch attribute
5) Providing jobs, and hiring students to help during summer months, thus contributing to the community
6) Somewhere to drink coffee in cool surroundings
7) Help Zak's need for constant socialisation

Zak's daughter is currently going to Hogwarts. She will be helping in the shop during summer.


(The name Völund is the Old Norse variation of Weiland's name, which is usually spelled Wayland in the English language, referencing the mythological smith that was hamstrung by the king and imprisoned on an island. However, Völund/Wayland forged himself a pair of wings and flew away. This was my symbolic backdrop for making Zak's character when he was a student, and has been a leading star for his plotline.)

2
Archived Applications / Fish Weiland
« on: 06/12/2015 at 14:09 »

Application for Hogwarts School




→ CHARACTER INFORMATION.

Name: Fish Weiland

Birthday: Fall 1934

Hometown: Edinburgh

Bloodline: Halfblood

Magical Strength (pick one): Charms

Magical Weakness (pick one): Divination

Year (pick two): 1st, 2nd


Biography:
"Nope, nope, nope, nope."

Those were the words coming from his mouth as he stood there, gazing at the Hogwarts express, his mom wrapped around him like a scarf. Her plump, yet fragile little figure appeared to be waving in the wind, and the tears would have fooled everyone.

He wished they hadn't been real.

Now she was making a fool out of them both. It was not what he needed right now.

It was the wrong strategy for making him friends.

He tried to push, attempted to straighten out his arms to remove her from his immediate personal space, but the more he fought her, the stronger she got. This was where he was going to die, strangled by his mother's embrace and drowning in her tears.

His mother, Amanda, had wanted to hold him back a year. She did not want to see her dear little boy disappearing to school, to get torn apart by these wolves that were the teenage community of the wizarding world. She remembered that time of her life as the most difficult she'd been though, involving all kinds of humiliations and heart aches. She could not, however, see that her efforts to keep her little
Fish safe was working against their purpose.

"But you have no father figure!"

It was the sort of nonsense that she would blurt out that, however true, made no real difference. His father, like some fathers did, had disappeared at some point in his and his mother's life. Fish had been so small he could not really remember, so he did not put that much thought into the fact, although Amanda would cry her eyes out feeling bad for not having brought him up with a proper father. No, announcing that he did not have any functional father did nothing for him in the current situation. Other than to humiliate him furter.

He stared at the people walking past, noted the way that they would pretend to look in the other direction. He was taller than his mother (who really
was tiny, meaning he'd likely never become tall either), and could therefore peak over her curly head. He wished he couldn't though, because that meant that everybody could see him.

His father was/had been (it was hard to know, considering noone knew where he was) a wizard, and mother was something like half a witch (although they'd lived in muggle society, and done muggle things, except from the times when he'd caught her 'cheating' by magic), making also him half a wizard.

"I don't want you to die in the war," she continued.

"I'm
not going to die!" he answered, crass and visibly annoyed - war had nothing to do with anything! She had now gone on to imagining all the worst things possible, putting himside of crazy scenarios.

"Oh, my little Fish..."

He rolled his eyes.

His ridiculous first name was directly related to his last name, which his father had left him. The combination was, in turn, a result of Amanda Whythe's ridiculous fears.

Weiland, you see, was, by his mother, interpreted as a variation of the name
Wayland, the name of some mythological smith figure who got his knee caps removed by the king, who held him imprisoned on an island. In the original story, the smith kills the king's two sons and ends up sprouting (or forging?) a pair of wings, hence escaping by flying away. Amanda, however, found the name to be so heavily loaded, both in the fact that Wayland is imprisoned and hurt, and in the solution where the main person has to go the extent of killing in order to get his revenge and arrange his escape, that she decided it was necessary to create an alternative escape route.

That was how he ended up getting named
Fish.

It's kind of cute too! was her argument when he brought it up, which was, honestly, quite often.

"Let me go!"

He wanted to go on that train, and far, far away, so he can make friends and be himself without having his mom on top of him (although she would surely send him weekly packages by owl, full of sweets and stuffed animals, and loads of other humiliating stuff meant for babies). Fish was really just a normal boy. A normal boy of the active, outspoken kind, rarely afraid of jumping into new adventures (
craving new adventures, all things considered). He did not know it yet, but he would, soon, love and get involved in the wizarding sport of Quidditch. He liked being among people, while books were considered to be more on boring side, althoug not completely out of reach.

He was just about to start a whole new adventure.

If his mother would just let him go.



→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.
Note: This section is optional, and is up to you to complete.

House Request: Go sort.

Personality: Outspoken and unafraid. Active, likes to be in the middle of things, social. Fond of team activities, like Quidditch.

Appearance: Brown hair, with a flash of red. Blue eyes. Average height and weight.


→ SAMPLE ROLEPLAY.
Please reply to one of the Sample Roleplays below.

People were weird, that was one of the first things that he'd noted when he entered Hogwarts. That wasn't new though - people had been weird already before he started school. The point was that Hogwarts hadn't changed much of his original opinions. The funny part was, perhaps, the way in which these witches and wizards found themselves to be so different from muggles.

Fish's conlusion? They were not.

Take, for example, the person crawling around the flowerbed.

Just a minute before, Fish had heard the boy should something like blasted rat, which had Fish assuming the boy had lost some kind of pet. Pets were things that most people thought fun and even cute, no matter how wizard or muggle they were. Rats were even, to a certain extent, an accepted pet in both worlds. Fish's pet, on the other hand, was a snail called Snail. Why did he have a snail for a pet? Well, he'd much like a rat, but his mother was convinced that rodents carried all kinds of diseases. Also, they needed something that was cheap, and so the garden snail came about. Snail's greatest talent was making slimy trails. Fish sometimes released him (her?) on his mother's windows.

Normality point two: The boy that Fish was watching was now wiping his nose on his robes, making his own slimy trail. Then, Fish was discovered.

"Can I help you with something? It is not polite to stare."

"Not really," he replied - he didn't need help. He was just sitting around. "Do you need help with something?" The boy certainly looked like he needed it.


→ ABOUT YOU.

Please list any characters you have on the site (current and previous): Altair & legacy.

How did you find us?: I a dream.

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