Hogwarts School: A Harry Potter RPG

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Finnian Theodore Blair

Gender: Male

Age: 24

Education: 
St. Benedict's Catholic School: 1921-1927
Salem Institute: 1927-1934

Residence:
South London

Applying to be:
Columnist

Department of choice: (select one)
Foreign - American Correspondent

Why did you request that particular department?
Finnian is American by birth, separated from his homeland by circumstances surrounding the Time Warp. He was a writer in New York City before he moved to London, but decided upon moving that the freelance life was never going to be lucrative enough for him to make a living. Working for the newspaper seemed a logical step, and felt even more logical to write about things and places he knew. Becoming a columnist for the Foreign department seemed natural, considering he is in in fact foreign himself.

Requested Magic Levels: (see here on how to do this)

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

Please list any other characters you already have at the site:
DELuxe, Cammie Chaucer, Cassy E-Luxe, Nem E-Luxe, Lucy Chaucer

Biography:

As a child he'd been a dreamer.

Roamed the streets without a care, played down by the docks and on the shore. He hunting clams and playacting at swordfights with bits of driftwood with the other uptown Seattle boys. His demeanor lent itself to storytelling, a faraway glint in his eye as he gazed over Puget Sound, wind in his hair.

He'd gotten more than one slap on the wrist by the nuns in elementary school for it, but that only made the daydreams more vivid: grand adventures punctuated by the ebb and flow of tides and expanded by the imaginations of other boys made Villainy in their image, billowing dark creatures with white caps and round, pale faces.

Finnian was happy to leave Sister Constance and all her disciples behind the day he left for Boston, good riddance.

Good always won in the end, he knew so.

As a student he'd been a dreamer.

He wasn't sure when the transformation took place: perhaps the first day he donned maroon and held a wand-- his own wand-- in his hands, walked through a resplendent show of fall color in the autumn. Seattle was his place but this place was suddenly better, saturated with magic, an open door to a world he'd never known possible.

And he soaked up knowledge like a sponge, clambering for anything and everything he could find on this fantastical world. History was tangible, alchemy possible, and he could work real charms himself and make his textbook fly up into the air and back down into his arms.

There was a girl called Sequoia who told him to call her Flynn instead, so he did, and they were friends after that. She sometimes climbed the drainpipe down onto his balcony and into his room, and they'd stay up all night with crisps and chocolate frogs, sometimes with homework and sometimes without. If Finnian had a best friend ever in his life, surely it was her.

He was a Catholic boy by upbringing but she blurred lines between which rules should be followed and which ones were baloney, and his collar was sufficiently loosened by the time he graduated.

Sister Constance would have been horrified.

And as a graduate he was, still, a dreamer.

He'd left for New York City almost immediately after graduation, determined to make his living as a writer living in a high-rise building above glittering lights and glamorous street scenes. To Flynn he wrote letters, To Flynn from Finn, and sometimes he got letters back.

Writing didn't pay bills but waiting tables did, almost. The days didn't become hungry until time slipped away from the world as a whole-- the Time Warp, the newspapers called it-- and those glittering lights and glamorous streets became darker and dirtier, more dangerous, and he didn't have a home in Seattle to return to for a hot meal or a warm embrace.

It took him six months to realize he'd lost everything, and another two to own up to doing something about it: there was nothing left in New York for him, unless he were to count the tables which needed to be waited, and he didn't count those.

What he had left had elected of her own accord to cross the Atlantic, and one day Finnian Flooed there with a carpetbag of belongings and never went back.

London was a city too, dark as New York was dark, and still dirty; but it was home because he said it was, and made better for a familiar face or two and no tables to wait.

As a starving writer he'd been told by others to write what he knew, but what he knew was whittled down to memories of the halcyon days of childhood and family, framed by the idyll of schooldays and finally the iciness of the penniless days, apartment dripping and quiet. There was a career just beyond his fingertips, he could feel it, if he could only figure how to write what he knew.

It was a friend suggested it, the Prophet. Finn lived in a less-drippy flat in London with a roommate, and Flynn had become less and less herself.

Eroded from the golden days Finnian found himself sprawling in adulthood and scrabbling for footholds, clutching at whatever grazed his fingertips.

He was twenty-four and very tired, and he was a realist.

There was no time for dreaming.

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:

It was barely midmorning and Finnian was already two-and-a-half cups of coffee strong. He'd sweetened it with milk and sugar, so it wasn't really as if it were all coffee he'd drunk. Not purely, at least.

Though he doubted what they served in the break rooms was purely coffee at all, anyhow. It was acid if not watered down sufficiently.

At the very least, he was awake.

He was returning to his desk with his mug clutched in one hand, intent on finishing the piece he was working: the American Ministry were cracking down on shoddy broomstick sales, which had caused quite a few completely avoidable wrecks in the past months.

Not an interesting topic by any means, but he'd take what he could get. Foreign news was harder and harder to come by in a country with closed borders, even regarding a country as large as the United States.

Finn sighed into his coffee, a few steps from his desk, taking a drawn sip as he gazed over the heads to his lonely typewriter, a leaf of parchment sticking pathetically out of it, half-finished.

He'd been just about to swallow when someone grabbed him, and Finnian spluttered.

Luckily he managed a swallow, just in time.

"Jim?!" He batted the hand from his collar and straightened, checking himself down for spilled coffee. "Paper? Which-"

He looked down at the paper, scrutinizing for half a second, and then back up to his colleague's face.

"Due respect, sir, but I believe those are the draft copies of yesterday's edition."

He was just a columnist, he didn't deal in what got printed. He wrote his articles and moved on.

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