I couldn't stay away.... >>
CHARACTER INFORMATIONCharacter name: Wesley Wallace Winsday
Previous and/or Current Character(s) if applicable: Arianrhod Medraut & Co.
Character age: 28
Character education:Gryffindor, Hogwarts School (1922-1929)
Magical artifact acquisition team, historian (1930-1935)
Self-employed, antiquities dealer (1936-1940)
Strength and weaknesses (details please):His strengths are perhaps his weaknesses, at least in terms of teaching. Enthusiastic, yes, but his curiosity has gotten him into too much trouble on a regular basis and it's probably safe to say he would lead his students into such experiences as well. Good for them, he might say, but a little adventure has the potential of becoming quite dangerous.
Magically, it's no question that his hexes are stronger than anything else he can whip up and he has incredibly accurate aim. Defensive spells are an entirely different matter; in some situations he's better off just ducking.
Physical description: With a crop of dark, shaggy hair and bright blue eyes, he stands at about five feet and ten inches, usually with an impish sort of grin on his face. A native of the Loch Ness area, his Scottish brogue is a defining feature. Most days, he can be found wearing leather boots and trousers with a button-down shirt -- suspenders optional. As a professor, I wouldn't expect that to change, except perhaps to wear a plain black robe over his regular ensemble. He never goes anywhere without a small, leather pouch on his belt, which holds a few vials of his asthma potion, just in case.
Personality: With an indomitable sense of enthusiasm for exploration and general tomfoolery, he is perhaps a sort of Peter Pan -- the man who never grew up. He is quite serious when absolutely necessary, but he rarely ever finds it necessary. Absentminded and a little eccentric in certain aspects, he is surprisingly agile and incredibly focused although he often trips over his own two feet, usually because he's been distracted by something shiny. For all his somewhat erratic stream of consciousness, however, Wesley is incredibly brilliant and knowledgeable about the wizarding world, though his modern Muggle knowledge is... lacking at best. He also has strong humane morals; he employs a free house elf, Mella, believing that sentient beings have the right to freedom and choice.
Hopes and dreams. Why are you teaching at Hogwarts?:He may be brilliant, but he's not a business mind by any stretch of the imagination. His shop is failing, and while he loves the work, the upkeep and day to day running is costing him too much. It's time to move on. Hogwarts was never the best part of his childhood, but it's a job and it's steady and he's fed and housed. He's never minded children, and with his slightly childish mentality might even enjoy being the leader of a group of wild, exploring youth. It's an excuse to do everything he always wanted to try but couldn't have gotten away with -- and get paid for it.
Oh, and kids learn things. Everyone wins.
Biography: April, 1918
Snowdonia, Wales
"Where're we goin' Da?"
Seven years old and scrawnier than a stork on stilts, he still had difficulty keeping up with the broad steps of the man beside him, and if it hadn't been for the hand holding fast to his, Wesley might have fallen behind. His father, dark haired like his boy and sharp eyed, was scanning the trees for signs -- birds, howls, trees snapped in half.
Scorch marks.
"There," Wallace Winsday murmured, and Wesley crouched down to look at the strange crackling burn etched into the enormous tree. Blue eyes widened with excitement, and he grinned suddenly, ear to ear.
"Da!" He whispered. "Are you taking me to see them?"
"Don't make a sound," his father smiled secretively, and held on tightly to Wesley's arm before apparating away, leave just the echo of a pop in their wake. They appeared, with little Wesley breathless, on the edge of a cliff side overlooking an enormous valley with a loch shimmering in the distance. Mist rose from the mountains and the dragonologist and his son watched as it billowed gently down from the peak closest to them.
"Look carefully," Wallace pointed, still quiet, as if just the echo of his voice might be irritating to the trees. "Into the mist -- can you see?" And Wesley squinted, and strained and looked and looked and finally there was something that maybe appeared....
He gasped. "That's..."
A creature, magnificent and terrifying, lifted out of the fog and let out a plume of flame, wings beating, lime belly gleaming and slashing its tail for balance. And while Wesley was hundreds and hundreds of feet away, he couldn't imagine anything more incredible in the whole world.
"A Common Welsh Green," the dragonologist nodded, smiling. "What do you think?"
Welsey could barely think at all, he was so enthralled, but he wrapped his thin little arms around his father's leg and squeezed it tight in a hug.
***
July, 1925
Orkney Islands
He'd never known anything but this life -- the traveling, the camping, the rare stops in villages along their unplanned route. They traveled with a group of men employed by the Ministry to track and control dragon populations in Scotland and northern Wales and England. His mother Brigit had vanished when he was quite young, and Da never mentioned her nor where she had gone; Wesley assumed her to be dead and he simply didn't ask. It didn't matter much, for it was always he and his Da, and the men he knew as Uncle George, Uncle Ross, Uncle Peter....
Going home from Hogwarts for the summer holidays meant a tent (albeit one of the large, wizarding variety and three months of trekking over wilderness and through mountains, tracking dragons and sometimes herding them to the less populated areas. Wesley being only fourteen stayed in camp, but when Da came back sooty and exhausted, there would be sandwiches waiting and a boiling kettle for tea, and he'd hear all about the shenanigans and close calls of the day. And while he understood that what his father did was dangerous, the danger never really occurred to him.
He saw the black drape now over the conjured stretcher and it wasn't sinking in, the human-shaped lumps beneath were an illusion, detached from reality and he stared, mesmerized as Uncle Ross (or was it Uncle Orville?) explained quietly what had happened. Scottish dragons were known for their tempers, so it wasn't unprecedented, and everyone knew how Wallace Winsday could be....
Stupid, but brave. Very, very brave.
In the end, it was decided that this was no life for the dragonologist's son, out in the wild without a father. And so the Uncles sent him to live in a boy's home, at least for the summer, and then he returned to Hogwarts for a brand new cycle.
And he hated it. But mostly, he hated that his father had been so very brave.
***
February 1929
Hogsmeade, Valentine's Day
She was pretty, he'd give her that. Red hair, all soft curls and softer lips and she looked like a duchess in that pretty green dress she'd put on for the occasion.
"Blair Briarlocke?" His friends laughed, for they'd seen how Wesley lapped up the attentions of less wholesome young ladies, even if nothing ever came of it. His friends were only jealous, after all. They didn't have the same sort of constancy in their lives, someone there who cared for him and was always there, no matter the weather. He'd fallen in love with that feeling, fallen in love.... It was foolish, he knew it, but it had been nice for two years, so why not make it fifty?
He was down on one knee and he'd pulled out the ring and he was telling her he loved her and wouldn't she please say yes? And of course, she did, and then they were engaged.
She was perfect, and once more, he had his forever.
***
September, 1931
16 Ashwinder Lane, Hogsmeade
"Darling, you ought to say something. You're gaping as wide as a fish."
He didn't doubt it, not with the news she'd just laid on him, and his twenty-year old self felt as if a heart attack were imminent. Monsters, curses, rivals in the artifact acquisition community -- he'd faced them all down by now and yet nothing (nothing!) seemed as terrifying as this.
"Wesley..."
"I... ah... bloody..."
"Wesley, your
tongue. Honestly, they say babies can hear you speaking from the outside. I'd rather not have such language around--"
Baby. Baby baby baby. Baby. She kept saying that word and he was beginning to think he'd stepped into an alternative reality. Baby meant she was.... she was....
P-p-p-p-p-pre...g..nant.
Right.
"Bl-- I mean, oh. I mean, wow. I mean... great."
"Wesley?"
"No, no that's.... great. Amazing..." He was beginning to smile. Beam. Laugh.
She was pregnant, and he was going to be a father, and this all was really forever.
***
April, 1931
St. Mungo's Hospital
She was small.
Too small, and she fit in the palm of his hand, barely even breathing, not moving. Alive, but....
He refused to cry, refused to let the aching show, not even to this tiny infant he called his daughter, his little.... Ava, they'd decided to call it, if it was a girl. And it was. She was.
"Mam's upstairs," he murmured gently, and the tremor in his voice was quickly stamped away. "Something happened, and they're trying to fix her...." A glance to the door; they'd whisked her away, she'd been unconscious.... and they had left a solitary healer to explain that there was nothing that they could do except let him hold her, because she was too early for life to fully take hold.
He didn't even know what to do with her, except hug her to his chest while the little heartbeat slowed and the breaths became invisible. He rocked a little, like he'd seen mothers do in the park, and once he kissed the baby's forehead, just because she ought to know what that was like.
She slipped away in his arms, and when it was all over, he just handed the body back to the healer and walked out to go and find his wife.
But she was already gone.
At the joint funeral the next week, he watched two caskets -- one larger, one smaller -- lower into a single grave. He stayed long enough to throw the customary handful of dirt into the hole, and then he left.
And then he cried, finally, because it had become all too clear that forever was a long way off.
***
May 1933
A bar near Galway, Ireland
"She's a bird wit' legs, tha' one," Fox commented, spat-covered shoes finding a resting place on the table and taking a gander at some of the girls at the bar counter. "Blonde, and would ye look at them--"
"C'mon, some of us are concentrating Foxworthy," Swan flicked a cigarette butt in the redheaded man's lap, her perfectly polished nails clicking on the table through a piece of old parchment. "Drool over your birds somewhere else."
"
You quit poking holes in a three-hundred year old document," Wesley muttered, but it was all good natured. "And pass the whiskey."
"Next round's on you, Hound," Swan replied, plunking the bottle in front of their historian. "You also owe me six cigarettes and seven butterbeers." A wry little grin. "But who's counting?"
Wesley only grinned.
"So where is this thing we're lookin' fer, then?" Fox yawned. "And will explosives be necessary? I'm not hiring the bloke we got last time."
"No, no. It's an easy one," Wesley said. "Cliffs of Moher. We'll find it by next week if we don't get blown off the cliffs. I have a good idea of where the cave is. Few mile radius."
"Better than last time," Swan observed. "Twenty square miles until we got that goddamn spear..."
"I had a better
map this time. The sixteen-hundreds are considerably more cartographically inclined as opposed to the seven-hundreds."
"Fair enough."
"I'm tired o' this," Fox yawned dramatically. "I'm goin' to go see if one of them fine dames needs an escort."
"I'd knock loudly before entering the room tonight," muttered Swan, and Wesley snorted, then lost himself in work again.
***
August, 1935
New Mexican desert
"HEADS DOWN!"
Swan's strong voice rang out and Wesley ducked instinctively as a storm of red streaks whizzed over his head. "Damn..." Sending a streak of blue in the direction of their attackers, he slipped behind a boulder and took cover beside Fox. "How the bloody hell did they know we'd be--" A shower of dirt came down as a spell hit the boulder with explosive force. "--here?!"
"Dunno," the Irishman shot back, and reached around to send a stunning curse out. "But there's seven o' them an' three o' us and in case ye hadn' caugh' on, they've cast anti-apparation spells."
Rival hunters were ruthless towards each other; some more so than others. And he'd been on both sides of justice, the aggressor as often as the defendant. It just tended to be less pleasant when you were on the receiving end.
"Either way, we need to get out of here," Wesley growled. Their brooms were within reach.... "Accio broom!"
The first was blasted by an Incendio mid-summon; he swore. Fine. He'd get them himself. "Cover me," he told Fox, and he launched himself out from behind the boulder.
Two things happened at once; and after that he knew very little. One curse, directly over the right side of his chest, and a Stupefy from the side, and when he hit the ground he found in the last few moments of consciousness that he couldn't seem to draw a breath.
***
December, 1935
St. Mungo's Hospital
Asthma, they called it, and there was no way to cure the constant wheeze, or so they said. It was the curse that did it -- only so much they could have done, he was lucky to be alive. Any further left and it would have stopped his heart.
Lucky. He laughed bitterly (and then coughed). Who counted themselves lucky to have lain prone and severely asthmatic in a bed at the same hospital where his wife and daughter....?
The bitter cold air only made his lungs constrict further, and he found it difficult to swallow the potion dose they'd given him, potions he would rely on for the rest of his life. For what life? They'd stripped him of his escape... what would he do now except exist? He couldn't return to the field. Not now, not ever.
In the end, he spent Christmas alone, in the hollowed-out shell of a trinket shop registered to one Blair Avalon Briarlocke.
And then he moved in. Boxes from years of travels accumulated. He put the contents on the empty shop shelves. And before long, Briarlocke Antiquities was opening for business.
It wasn't a life quite yet, but it was close enough.
SAMPLE ROLEPLAYShe was the sort of woman he felt less than sure of himself around -- cold and stony, and he doubted manly charms worked on her tough hide. Just as well. Angel would likely give him a well-earned smack.
(Mmm. She was pretty when she was riled up. Actually, she was pretty all the time. Even with feathers in her hair, and toothpaste around her mouth, and when she was flustered, and when she laughed, and whe--)
He was too distracted to react, and while the Headmistress had summoned the power of a rather neat little shield charm, Wesley was entirely covered in mud. He sputtered for a few minutes, peering at the Giant Squid through the spectacles he'd donned specifically for the interview (he looked smarter, more... professor-like), wiping the mud away with his fingers like the wipers on those funny Muggle vehicles. The irony of the situation was more striking than he'd admit. He and the Squid... well, they went way back, and it was a complicated history that they shared. The mud bath was well deserved.
"He's in a... rare mood, ah?" He muttered, wicking the last of the mud from his robe sleeves, not bothering with his hair; it was muddy brown anyhow so it couldn't be that bad of a mess.
“He has a cold again!”A cold?! The Squid got colds, then.... interesting. He tried to catch a glimpse of the old creature, but a glob of mud from his hair fell over his glasses again.
"Someone is going to have to deal with him!""Might I suggest a large creature veternarian?" He spoke up helpfully, taking off the glasses altogether and slicking back his ruined hair. "I know one. Nice bloke, bit thick, but that's only after a troll clubbed him in th--"
“You’ll do.”He blinked at the Headmistress and for a moment there was silence.
"I don't think he'll take too kindly to me--"
He caught her look.
"--
but I can certainly try."
Giving medicine to a grumpy, ancient Giant Squid who likely still held a massive grudge against him. Well this was... different. He grunted, thinking quickly.
"Right, I'll need a broomstick. And rope -- long piece, strong. And fish guts. Or something similar."
