Hogwarts School: A Harry Potter RPG

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Asa Sawyer Asher

Gender: Male

Age: 14

Bloodline: Unknown

Parents/Guardians:  Able and Sarah Asher, deceased.

Residence: Transient and Asher House, around Hogsmeade.

Do you plan to have a connection to a particular existing place? No.

Do you wish to be approved as a group with any other characters? If so who and for what IC reason?   No.

Please list any other characters you already have at the site:  N/A

Biography:
He fell asleep like this:

Flying.

Flying was not, precisely, the correct word for it.  Falling did no better.  There was no word for the motion—half-slowness, half-speeding; feet tumbling over knees tumbling over hips tumbling over shoulders tumbling over head—until there was no motion to speak of.

His head hit the pavement hard.  He recalled that it was not the first time for such a collision.

Three seconds passed.

There were lights in the sky.  They undulated and swirled like grown women, and then there was nothing at all.

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He woke up like this:

A cool, damp cloth pressed to the corner of his mouth.  As if it had been pulled through water, his hand slowly dragged to the same spot.  It did not come away clean; though diluted, a slippery stain of drool rolled beneath his fingertips.

“There, there,” said a voice.  It was attached to a round woman in white with a flattened hat.  Her hand lightly took up his, placed it at his side, patted the pudgy tops of his own with the pudgy palm of hers.  “Easy goes, you poor dear.”

His eyes swam away from the sight of her to paddle around the room.  It would have been white, were the lights not so dim and the tiles not so stained.

“Where is my mother?” He said this to the wall more than the woman, but it was the woman who replied.

“There, there,” she said, and the wall looked sorry.  “You poor dear.”

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He was spoken about like this:

“Only nine.”

“His name is Asa.  Or the paperwork he came in with said so.  Such a young thing.”

“What a shame.”

“Threw himself off a bridge, that one.  Only nine, the poor dear.”

“His parents are deceased.  Lord knows how long.  He seems to have kept up well enough with himself, for one so troubled.”

“The poor dear.”

They spoke in whispers, on the other side of the curtain, when they thought that Asa, only nine, the poor dear, was sleeping.

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He became a lunatic like this:

This much, in truth, was a matter of simple math.

Asa had thrown himself off a bridge; the doctor had pronounced this as a reaction to the presumed recent death of his parents.  As a result of this oversight of the boy’s better judgment, the nine-year-old was often confused, his mind muddled and unable to recall precise and accurate information about his condition prior to being admitted to the hospital (the good samaritan that had brought the youth in had no information as such, either, other than to leave with them the satchel with which the boy had been found; this contained a partial identification card, a few past-date chocolate bars, a tin pony, and nothing of real substance).  When Asa was able to recall information, what he presented was troubling: his parents were not dead because he had just been with them before the accident, because there was, he insisted, an accident, though, when pressed, he could not recall what sort or why it had happened.  His parents were important and special, and he was important and special, and all of them (he insisted, with absolute conviction) could do magic, though when presented with a stack of playing cards by a well-intentioned nurse, the youth grew irritable because they were not the right kind and because the pictures on them did not move (this, he swore, was typical of playing cards) and ripped, one by one, the cards to small pieces until a sedative was administered and the cards were wrestled away.

This was typical of the boy’s behavior, or at least when he was not in one of his confused, despondent states—those persisted even though his head injury seem to have been cured, and even though they had cut back largely on his sedative dosage, once the fractures in his legs had healed.

The math went like so:
Lunatic act (throwing one’s self off a bridge at only nine years of age) plus lunatic rantings (of un-dead parents and magic tricks) plus lunatic behavior (bouts of rage followed by bouts of depression followed by bouts of mania) equal Lunatic Asa, aged only nine, the poor dear.

Once he was cleared of physical aliments, he became a lunatic ward of the state, and was, as such, sent to the lunatic ward.

It was called Babbit Hills Lunatic Asylum.

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He thought of Babbit Hills Lunatic Asylum like this:

It must have been similar to being a horse on a farm, being a lunatic at Babbit Hills, thought Asa.

Similarly to horses on a farm, the lunatics (Asa among them) woke in the morning in a group—each of them being assigned two to a stall where they slept on beds stuffed with hay—and were herded into the halls where they were allowed wandered largely as they wanted.  Unlike horses, who had the benefit of grass beneath their hooves, Asa and the other lunatics (all his age, as Babbit Hills had a children’s ward) had only hard stone beneath their slippers.  Like horses, they were whipped when they were bad (Asa seldom was, for he had learned quickly), they were given baths monthly, and they were given medicine when they were ill—which was always, because they were lunatics.  The lunatics ate oats twice daily like horses and at night they were put to bed, all at once, in their herd.

It was comforting to think of Babbit Hills Lunatic Asylum as a house for horses instead of lunatics, because Asa felt more like the former than the later in his new home.  It made more sense to him, too, for there was nothing hilly about Babbit Hills—situated in London, it was merely a building made of bricks on a street made of pavement.

During the grazing hours, Asa would tell himself stories in his head of when he was a little boy.  He had his own horses and his own parents, none of which were lunatics and all of whom kept their clothes on and kept their teeth from falling out of their heads (unlike many of the lunatics at Babbit Hills).  He told himself they had a lovely manner in the country, in the hills like Babbit Hills was named for, and that they went riding often all over those hills.  Asa used his boy-hooves to fold and unfold his identification card (the only item he had that was his own; he kept it tucked in the breast pocket of his pajamas) while he rocked in the rocking chair in the hall-pasture.  He read their names and thought of their faces and of their horses:

Able Asher.  His father.  He had dark, curly hair just like Asa, milky white skin and he rode a large, bay stallion.

Sarah Asher.  His mother.  Her hair was fair but her skin was olive, and his dark, almond eyes had come from her, he knew.  She rode a dun mare.

Asa couldn’t recall what his own horse looked like.

“But what does my horse look like?”  His question was for himself but a nun, billowing in black, answered in passing.

“Smoke and mirrors and the Devil’s lies, child.  You have no horse.”

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He became friends with one of the Janes and then didn’t like this:

There were many Janes in the Children’s Ward of Babbit Hills Lunatic Asylum, but one of them became Asa’s friend because she asked one simple question:

“Do you want to play?”

Asa did, and he and Jane with the matted blonde hair and muddled green eyes became friends.

They played in their imagination, because there was very little by way of things to play with at Babbit Hills.

When it was Asa’s turn to play imagination, they rode horses up and down the halls, or sat and rocked and talked about magic—the real kind, insisted Asa, and not the card trick kind.  Jane never cracked him over the knuckles nor sent him to his stall like the nurses or the nuns when he spoke about the not-card kind.


When it was Jane’s turn, they hid from the Barron.  The Barron was Jane’s friend who lived in her head and he was a bad man.  They concocted elaborate stories in which the mustache-twirling Barron would be after the two of them and they would escape, or try to—occasionally, the Barron showed up in Jane’s green eyes, making them mean, and then Asa had to hide in earnest.  Even as he grew from nine to ten, from ten to eleven, from eleven to twelve to thirteen, Asa never minded the same way the nuns and nurses minded about the Barron.

One day, the nurses came with a doctor.  The doctor came for Jane with the matted blonde hair.  He came to take the Barron away.  When Jane came back from the doctor, she had angry red circles on either side of her green eyes, at the temples.  The Barron was gone.  So was Jane.

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He came to escape very much accidentally like this:

One day, the doctor came back.  He came for Asa’s horses and for the part of him that was sad for Jane and the Barron.  He came with a machine that made loud clicking sounds and crackling, hissing sounds and he wanted to apply it to Asa, who was applied to a cold metal table in a cold, stained tile room.

Asa closed his eyes.  He imagined horses and hills and his parents.  The machine made angry sounds; it made him twitch.

For one second, with all his might and all his magic, Asa wished that he was home.

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He came to realize that he was not a lunatic like this:

He opened his eyes to grass and sun and green and yellow.  Immediately, he shot up his hand to shield his eyes.

Beyond the sleeve of his pajamas, just on the crest of the hill, were horses—one bay, one dun.

His was chestnut.

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He carved out his living like this:

From the earth.

The house was, he decided, too full of sorrow.  It was a comfortable sort of sorrow, by all accounts—he had been right in some ways (the luxe shelves were lined with books with pictures of cauldrons and magical spells and words he couldn’t read, and in the front garden, potato-headed gnomes nipped at his ankles when he smelled the overgrown roses) but he had been wrong in others (his parents, smiling from frames on every wall, every end table, were woefully absent from the house and, he supposed, live, apparent in the four years of dust that pooled at the feet of their photographs)—but it was sorrow all the same.

Like the lunatics of Babbit Hills, he returned to the stall only to sleep at night and woke up in the morning to wander the hills.


Roleplay:

Godric Park.

Overhead, the sky was a crisp blue, for once clear of the ever-pervasive spongy clouds and rain. The sun was a lemony-yellow presence, high in the Eastern sky, and in front of it zipped three broomsticks in a straight line, or something very like one. One... two..... three... the boys passed, their shouts of excitement echoing as they chased the snitch, a tiny shimmer reflecting the sunlight.

Far below was another, much smaller broomstick.

It trugged along the ground, hugging close to it like a sluggish choo choo train and occasionally shuttering in protest. This was because said stick was currently being occupied by a very small girl who was tugging upward on the front of it with all her might, trying to coax it into doing what it had been expressly designed NOT to do.

"John, I said wait up!" The tiny girl squealed, giving the broomstick another tug.

Begrudgingly, it drifted upward a foot, and then sank, depositing the troublesome girl safely on the ground. Janey Hurst was not pleased. In a huff, she hopped off the toy safety broom, grabbing it firmly and thrusting it handle first into the turf.

Her brother was such a beast. He NEVER let her play! She folded her arms, seething blue eyes fixing on another figure nearby.  "You!" She barked, much more sharply than she meant to.

"...Do you want to play?"

Roleplay Response:
It was his birthday, and he supposed he should have something special.

As such, before he had left his house that morning, he had put on nice clothes.  He supposed they were nice, anyway—or at least, that they had once been.  Though it all had a bit of a dust-grey tint about it and though he had to shake out more than one spider from the cuff of the jacket, when he reviewed himself in the tarnished hall mirror, he surmised that he looked sharp.  His father, from the photographs lining either side of the mirror and from his hazy recollection, had always looked sharp, and this suit had belonged to his father.

Before the claws of that thought could sink in, Asa Asher shoved off.

By now, the route was familiar, and the too-big shoes on his feet beat onto the path—the grass had begun to wear away in spots, revealing sienna soil now pleasantly baking in the mid-spring sun.  The scent that rose up from it was ripe and organic, and, though he had been home for a span of months now, his senses still leapt at a smell that was difference from watered-down antiseptic and unchanged waste buckets.  It was a short walk, all things considered, from the house that was his now, he supposed, to the small village in the shadow of a large castle (in the corner of his mind and from the chatter on street corners he knew it was called Hogwarts).

Before he reached the town proper, he veered to the side—he had grown a bit feral in almost five years, and still took things slowly.

It wasn’t until he was knee-deep in brambles that the thought occurred to him he may have been slightly overdressed for blackberry picking, but, as it was his birthday, he didn’t mind.  With rapidly purpling lips, he began to clear the patch.

There was a shout.  An automatic reaction, Asa froze, shoulders going stiff, his head lowering just slightly.  Shouting, he knew, was something to shy away from.

The one who shouted, however, did not shy away from him.

Do you want to play?

The question played again in his mind, in a different voice.  Slowly, his head turned, dark curls following the motion, and fitted his eyes on a young girl.

Her eyes were blue, but the sentiment was the same as the one which had come the muddled green ones so long ago.

“Yes,” he said simply, his voice rolling out slowly and low, rough from years of little use. Because something distant told him that this was not enough of an answer, he rose to his knees, eyebrows knitting together as he thought of what should follow.

Inspiration came among the blackberries and sun.

“Would you like to play Imagination?”

OTHER
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