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Archived Applications / James Cook | Domestic/Politics
« on: 17/08/2012 at 12:27 »CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: James Moriarty Cook.
Gender: Male.
Age: 26.
Education:
Hogwarts (Ravenclaw, 1959-1965)
Residence:
A dingy little flat in Southwark, London
Applying to be: (select one, see here)
Columnist
Photographer if there aren’t any more spaces/you need photographers
*OOC access to graphics editing programs (e.g. GIMP, Photoshop, Microsoft Paint) and some graphics editing knowledge highly recommended.
**If Bureau Chief, fill out the section at the very bottom at the application. Please also note that these applications will take longer to process.
Department of choice: (select one)
Domestic/Politics
Why did you request that particular department?
James has always been fascinated by politics, leading to his awkward and failed attempt to sneak around the Order during the party that they threw last year. While he doesn’t like to talk to people and interview them, because he’ll make a fool of himself, his bumbling methods have often seem more guarded people dropping their guards and giving him information that they wouldn’t have given others. He also hates fashion and fails miserably at sports, so there really isn’t anything else for him to do.
Requested Magic Levels: (see here on how to do this)
- Charms: 11i]
- Transfiguration: 9.
- Divination: 5.
- Summoning: 7.
Please list any other characters you already have at the site:
Scott Cooper, Maverick Steele, etc.
Biography: (300 words minimum.)
They say that the Irish are lucky.
James Cook is painfully aware of the fact that this is not true – and if it is, it certainly does not apply to him.
It’s a cold autumn day when Dermott Cook gets married to Briana O’Grady on a nice sandy beach in Italy. Both are twenty two years old, young, and completely in love. Both, not that it matters, are Irish. (How do you think they got lucky enough to get married in Italy?)
It’s decided that London is the place to be right now, so it’s off to London they go, with a strict ban of any singing of the song ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, a ban which at certain points are flouted.
The luck of the Irish allows Dermott to get a job as a banker with a prominent British bank. It’s the luck of the Irish that Briana has a cousin renting a house at a ridiculously cheap price and will give it to her for less. . It’s also the luck of the Irish that Briana gets pregnant just a week after they start trying.
It is not of any type of luck, however, that gives the baby a name – rather it is an unfortunate surname on the father’s part and an unfortunate penchant for Australia on his mother’s. And since it is likely that she will never convince Dermott to move to Down Under, Briana convinces him instead to name their son after its ‘founder’. Dermott, not particularly having liked history, is not aware of the significance and therefore agrees.
(For good measure they throw in Moriarty as a middle name, so that young if James is not marked for being eaten by cannibals, he can always be marked for perpetually losing to Sherlock Holmes.)
If Murphy’s Law was written for a person, it would be written for James M. Cook. On the first day of school, for example, Jim’s English teacher decides that a passage on Captain Cook will do nicely for reading, and Jim is invited to do it. Most part of his school life consists hereafter of listening to questions about ‘how are the kangaroos’ or ‘gone sailing anywhere lately’.
Or take the day where mathematics saw it prudent to discuss addition in terms of Sherlock and Moriarty. “Sir,” says Dave Parker, “What’s Moriarty’s first name?” upon hearing the answer, Dave shakes his head at Jim. “Your parents never gave you a chance, did they?”
The next day, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ is added to the list.
Bad luck follows Jim like a plague, everywhere he goes. It gets him leg broken as soon as it’s healed again. (It turns out that banana peels to get slipped on in real life.) It dictates that he should have no friends for fear of getting themselves into trouble, as he seems very prone to doing so. It calls him a jinx and an outcast.
But it is not bad luck that lands him in the principal’s office for the explosion of 100 bowls of gruel in the kitchen. Nor is it why he is nearly expelled for a causing a boy to spew slugs. A nice man explains to the family that Jim is in fact a wizard.
The young parents are extremely excited, and pack Jim off to his first year at Hogwarts full of hopes and expectations of card tricks and rabbits from hats. The moment it touches his head the Sorting Hat screams ‘Ravenclaw’ and Jim is quite disturbed at belonging to a house named after a bird’s foot.
After seven years of education where ‘James Cook’ ends up only noteworthy as a top student, nothing more, Jim graduates with decent scores, excelling in DADA and History of Magic. He is a bright young man, and everyone expects him to get a job in the Ministry. Strangely enough, he deems it fit to bury himself in Muggle books for a good few years, getting a PhD from Oxford in, of all things, history.
Seven years have passed when he returns to wizarding England at last. There’s nothing for him to do but to stumble across a writing desk and a pot of ink. "This is what I want to do," he says decisively, and falls flat on his face across the threshold.
They say that the Irish are lucky.
James Cook is an exception.
Roleplay:
Reply as your character to the following:
Jim hated Mondays.
He had always hated Mondays, really; that cursed beginning of the week, that day where it still should have been the weekend and yet there was work to be done - deadlines to be made - stupid lunch meetings to attend. Even when ‘lunch meetings’ had been just plain lunch; ‘work’, homework, he had despised the start of classes and - all at once - the next five un-fun days before the weekend started up again.
Now, cloudy October morning, Jim hated Mondays more than ever.
His desk filled with the wide-open arms of the Sunday Prophet, he scribbled furiously over sections with a bright red ink.
All the new graduates with their impeccable NEWTs and superb teacher recommendations had come in last month, only too eager to start preaching the truth - their truth - to the whole of Wizarding Britain.
Jim’s train of thought was bitter, but he smiled wanly, for he had once been one of those recruits themselves.
Most of their dreams should have been been smashed in the first week, from the first time people like Jim had told them to fetch the group some coffee. Day after day, hour after hour, that was what they now said to their youngest colleagues, as their older counterparts had told him years before: At some point everyone has to fetch us our drinks.
Almost every year, the new recruits sat down and took it - and fetched the group some coffee - and maybe it was just the age or the nostalgia, but Jim was fairly certain that they deserved it all.
They did not deserve to publish half-coherent drafts with way too many adverbs and completely unmodulated opinions.
Jim threw down the quill in disgust, ink splattering onto his button-down shirt as though it were blood.
Smartly, he piled up bits of paper, and then, still angry, face marred by an unhappy Monday, deposited the pile in front of his door before reaching out to grab at the first person he saw.
“What happened to this paper?”
Roleplay Response:
Weather: I’m inside a bloody building with no bloody windows
Time: I’m inside a bloody building with no bloody clock
Observations: I hate buildings.
James Cook really should have enjoyed his work more.
Writing, after all, was something that he was passionate about (he thought so, anyway) and he was pretty darned good at it. It stood to reason that if one had zero social aptitude and common sense, then one must at least be good at something, and Jim’s something was writing. But writing did not help one in getting a decent apartment that didn’t rattle every time the bloody train passed by, writing did not help one in earning enough money to eat lunch at a posh restaurant once in a while, and writing certainly did not help one get around in the right social circles.
Although the last one was probably due to Jim’s woeful inadequacies in the social circles. Jim was pretty sure that until he had come along, history had never seen a man who was capable of spilling a glass of wine over a hot girl, slapping her while trying to mop it up, tripping over the banquet table and pulling all the food onto the floor in the process. Now that had been an experience to suppress. Unfortunately, Jim wasn’t very good at suppressing memories.
The worst thing about today was that it was Monday, which meant another meaningless slog through a meaningless week of a meaningless life. Jim mumbled incoherent things to himself as he shuffled the papers on his desk in an attempt to look like he was doing something important. Important people always shuffled papers, even though there was really no point in shuffling papers: all you were really doing was mixing them up when they had been perfectly fine in the first place.
Still, it looked like was doing something important. And doing something important was important when you had a boss like the cynical one he had. Whose name was also Jim.
Jim got confused sometimes.
“What happened to this paper?”
A hand had grabbed the scruff of his collar out of nowhere and Jim gave a feeble yelp as he was yanked out of his chair, the lovingly unarranged papers now scattered in complete disarray on his desk. He turned around to see his boss staring down at him with wild eyes, his shirt splattered with what seemed suspiciously like blood but what Jim knew was probably something uninteresting like red ink.
What was one supposed to say at a question like that? A man with sufficient courage or smart-alec-ness would have said ‘you happened’, and probably be rewarded with an encouraging grin of grudging respect. Jim, however, was not courageous, and he was certainly not smart. He was just a normal…Alec.
“Um…” think, you dunderhead.
“I don’t know. Is anything wrong with the paper? I think it’s perfectly fine the way it is, you know. Maybe we should get some more windows in this office. Or clocks.”
You call that thinking?
Jim didn’t think so.
OTHER
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