Altair

[Altair]

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character name: Altair

Previous and/or Current Character(s) if applicable: Nicholas C. Viggano, Zak Weiland, Samael Gray, Cain Dunn etc.

Character age: 42(!!!)

Curriculum vitae:
Education:
1926-1929: Gokstad Academy
1929-1933: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Ravenclaw
1933-1937: Privately tutored by Francis Turin
1938-1943: Divination and Astronomy studies, Mímirsbrunnr Academy

Honours (Hogwarts):
1929-1930: Quidditch Chaser
1930-1933: Quidditch Captain/Chaser
1931-1932: Spellbound Writer & Editor
1931-1932: Prefect
1932-1933: Head Boy
1932-1933: Advance Guard

Work Experience:
1933-: Member of the Order for the Return of All Rights, Political Party, UK
Supra Mortalitas
1936-1937: Co-professor of the Art of Dueling, with Francis Turin, Hogwarts School
1938-1939, 1949-1954: Duelling referee, Hogwarts School
1939-1940: Professor in Theory of the Dark Arts, Beauxbatons
1941-1942: Professor in Conjuring and Summoning, Hogwarts School
1943-1945: Merlin's Order of Defence, Captain
1947-present: Owner of Muspell, book finder, collector and seller
1949-1951: Alchemy professor, Hogwarts School
1952-1954: Librarian, Hogwarts School


Strength and weaknesses (details please):
Personality: Altair would always find that, in his own eyes, his weaknesses tended to shadow over that of his strengths, that the nights would fall heavy and the darkness press into him and ripple through him.

The years had turned him into a hard man, or perhaps he'd been born with a certain hardness and the world had just failed to soften him up. The truth was that he'd been a curious, yet careful boy. That circumstances had shaped him, or enforced the things that were already inside of him, strengthened some of the seeds that had been planted in him from when he'd been very young.

He'd care too much, yet never enough.

And his mind had always been heavy. Heavy in the sense that there were too many things passing through it at any moment. Heavy because it tended to distract him, that no matter how small the matter it would start searching for the bigger meanings, to stray and expand. It was not easy to focus on shallow matters when everything that happened could be blown up, could be translated into huge, existential questions on who he really was and why it really mattered.

He'd always been hard on his students, and perhaps he had always failed at seeing them, in search for something in them that was reflecting all the things he found in himself.

Yet, he'd never been as hard on them as he was on himself.

Perhaps his greatest weakness (in the school setting) was that he'd teach and keep teaching, but not necessarily for the sake of his students. He'd keep teaching in search for something that he'd likely never find.

Magically: Altair always had an affinity for Divination and C/S, while his weakness resided in Charms, which he considered too plain, pre-set and boring. He struggled focusing on the things that did not naturally peak his interest and for this reason he would often lose himself in details, failing to see the bigger picture and then stubbornly refuse that it mattered when it was pointed out to him.

As a professor, his strength resided in a genuine interest in explaining things and expanding on his students' answers. However, he had a slightly disturbing lack of interest in those that simply weren't able to follow - tending to leave people to deal with their own problems - and what could be interpreted as a general lack of empathy (which, in truth, was likely more a tactics of running from his own, quite intense, ability to feel).

Every now and then, however, they'd see a flash of true emotion, and in truth a lot of his weaknesses were to be found in his own fear of admitting that he was, in fact, human, and that, as a human, he tended to fail.


Physical description: 6'2, very slender ("skeletal"), dark brown hair and bright blue eyes. In clothing he's had a tendency to mix the elegant with the rough, though how much control he has of these kinds of fashionable things nowadays is hard to say.

Altair tended to look either like he was in complete control of everything or like he had no control at all (though the former was more usually the case when in public).


Personality (nice, rude, funny etc. Paragraph please.):
Altair's personality could be described as moody at best. He had a rich inner life, a mind that appeared never to rest and a terrible habit of handing out undeserved judgement. He was that pessimist that desperately wanted to be an optimist, but made all the wrong turns on the way to getting there.

In essence, Altair was a man of contradictions - he could be incredibly rude, but given the right circumstances he could be kind, understanding and willing to share (sharing knowledge was one of his great passions, after all). As a former Ravenclaw, there was never any doubt that he had his mind on his side, though at the same time he could be incredibly blind to the things resting right in front of his nose and, when they were pointed out to him, too stubborn to accept it.

Most of the time Altair would come accross as crass, arrogant, sarcastic and impassive. Experience told that more students would be afraid of him than not. As a person, Altair could be hard to get to know, being private and secretive about all things personal.

His lifelong goal was to expand the base of the common knowledge, to broaden people's horizons in thread with the teachings of the Order, and to explore his own limitations. He was always bitter that he did not inherit his mother's power of the Seer, though he had his ways of stretching as far as humanly(?) possible in order to get the things he wanted.


Hopes and dreams. Why are you teaching at Hogwarts?:
There was no easy way to explain why Altair wanted to return to Hogwarts, for the answer would be ambiguous at best. The last position he'd held at the Castle was that of Librarian, and before that he'd had a bumpy ride (to put it mildly) teaching such things as The Art of Duelling, Conjuring and Summoning, and Alchemy. His last appearance as a professor, as a guest in teaching a combined lesson of C/S and Divination, had landed him a visit to the Headmistress' office and broken his relationship to some of the teachers at the school that he disliked the least.

However, this quite summed up the character that belonged to the name of Altair.

Cladis and Ella and Anneka had seen him right, had registered the danger that he'd pulled around himself, around the students, branding their minds with his own dripping blood - nightmares in broad daylight, a summoning that should have kept him away from this specific position yet was the exact thing to draw him back in.

He needed to be here, in part for the sake of his own safety. In part because he was increasingly aware of the fact that floating around like a free radical, if he ever managed to reach his goals, without direction or purpose in life, would finally be the death of him.

(He could conquer the world, but he could not conquer himself.)


Biography:

Disclaimer: This bio contains elements that have previously passed through several rounds of Special Requests, most of them related to participation in site plots over the 30 past IC years of this site.


1. PAST

7. september 1951, the Hogwarts Castle

Ignorance was humanity's greatest gift.

Swift like a bird and light as a feather, it was a bullet that needed no aim, momentarily and inevitably drawn by the absolute gravity of the human mind. They thought they knew violence, yet they'd missed the war, the real blood dripping off of everyone's hands when they were left no choice but to do as they were told. Born into the absolute void, they had constructed the world from their chosen pleasantries, and the Social Reconstruction Committee helped them do it.

Meanwhile, humanity killed the world around them.

Turning off the light. Or rather - leaving it constantly on, so they could keep gazing upon their perfected versions of the self in the mirror, to gather in collective narcissism while keeping the fear of that unexplored darkness alive for other purposes entirely. Not that he'd needed the war to come to a point like this - he'd been the one in the background pulling the strings, always. The only blood that had ever dripped off of his hands was, technically, his own.

(-- some would have said that made him all the more guilty.)

That was how it had become, ultimately, his enemy, how the world had worked toward taking away his freedom, once again, by sucking him into the Committee. Ruled by the one person who was, perhaps, the one man in the world able of controlling him and restraining him from raging freely, in the attempt of taming powers that were meant to be out of control.

In all chaos there is calculation, they said.

No, said Altair - in all calculation, there's chaos.

(Penetrating onto a scale that was miniscule enough, the Natural Laws that appeared to rule the world, would apply no more.)

And so Francis, lost in the recesses of his own madness, was once again latching onto the treacherous belief that he was doing the world good, on mission to healing a society broken by war, on mission to heal his own ruined self (- and in search for this sort of closure they were inescapably alike). People were fools not to bite onto the bait fully, for there was truly well meaning behind (in all the radiant warmth of Ella Galanis), though his recent presence had a natural repelling effect - danger sense, as it appeared, still rang loud in the wizard mind.

For in the moment that Vega had started to call himself Altair, he had floated off from them all, a free radical in violent opposition to the world around him, reactive to himself and anything that was unfortunate enough to float too closely to him.

(He did not blame them for being unable to separate him from the equation. They were, after all, for the most part unbearably, humanly, stupid.)

Forcing him into these roles were what turned him truly explosive, as expressed by the invisible flames engulfing him and locking him into his own void space, inside the combination of aether and fire would he always find his home, no matter how it scorched him, no matter it had killed him. He would not let them tame him, would not let them push him to the ground, but rather tear himself apart in absolute mission to break down the walls between black and white to engulf them all in absolute stellar illumination.

And so he opened his eyes back up, more ready now, though only a fool would have entered this without feeling the frigid touch of fear, spreading over his being in greedy tendrils, unsatiable.

(Yet, he had never truly been the Vega, but an Eir, grasping hungrily for his mother's gift in blatant disrespect of the Old Norse healer - in power of life, in power of death.)

Following its movements carefully, as silence settled in, a long dragged-out, unnatural quiet that gathered at the hollow and left a feeling of something thick and viscous, sticking to him, uncomfortably as though telling of what was to come. Behind him, the glowing presence of the invited, bearing no wish reveal its presence and thus remaining invisible but for the occassional flicker of burning air, equally quiet, equally attentive - there was no need for asking why, it was all layed out bare for the two of them, Altair caught in the middle, in all his inescapable mortality. Feeling his body betray him as his head raised somewhat, straightening subconsciously in reaction to the feeling of vulnerability, as though the one mere inch that separated his height from that of Cladis could somehow be used to return the threat.

(Even he forgot, sometimes, that these spirit beings weren't truly accustomed to bodies, that they did not encompass these physical qualities that humans found themselves so helplessly lost in.)

Slightly unsettled by the fact that his own means of intimidation, that the display of blatant power in his doubled presence was passing absolutely unnoticed, absolutely ignored, heightening his consciousness that the thing inside of Cladis body was, indeed, here for the purpose of seeing him. (Taking him? Stealing him? Ensnaring him?)

Feeling his breath turning uneven with the combined physical-spiritual presence, he thought he could smell the stench of rot from the Other's breath. (Though it was impossible to tell whether this was purely a fragment of his imagination mingling and merging with his other sensuous experiences - as with so many other things, reality and fantasy appeared to him overwhelmingly blurred at the lines.)

"Jeg har --"

-- retracting into the spirit of the once innocent little boy, and fighting the urge to close his eyes in the attempt to slip away, he knew it was this sort of spirit, recognised the claws gripping deeply into his human flesh to grab hold of his every desire and use it - he'd been here before.

"-- hva du begjærer."

Eyes opening wide in immediate reaction to the danger, in immediate response to the offer (the bait, which he longed to stretch for, to lock his fingers around - you shall never See it said, even as it awakened inside of him), though it was not one hand he felt upon his shoulders, but two, the actions of the one before him mirrored by the one behind him. While one gripped far into the yearnings of his very existence, the other had already set his soul on fire.

Protection.

It would have succeeded, had he not been prepared, had he not always been prepared - but he dipped his hands in the black water and he slept under intricate incantation lest the ragged remainders of his soul would disappear from him forever.

(-- your emotions, your memories, your senses --)

Crisp fingers against bone and flesh and sinew.

Snapping out of it (though not in control of himself, not for that one moment), looking for weakness, weakness -- there --

In pure destructiveness, it believed for itself to be at advantage simply because it was dead, simply because the body that it had grabbed for its own could be shredded like the skin of a snake.

It just so turned out, that Altair had his own sort of advantage.

-- he was alive.

(And unified, their dimensions built a bridge, made them stronger --)

Shooting a bloodied palm forward, it connected sharply with the forehead of the the body that used to belong to Cladis. And as though unnaturally lightweight, in effect to the thing in possession of it - dangly, corpse like - it arched backwards at an unnatural angle, before slamming violently against the floor.

He remained, hopelessly alone, as both spirits left him to spiral and flurry through their otherworldly portal leaving behind nothing but what appeared to him the faint smell of burned wood, undoubtedly within the sensuous range of the students, and working to pull him sharply back into physical presence. Forced to fend for himself among the unpleasant mass of unwelcome people (this was neither the time, nor the place, for clarification) he stretched his arm out to point, finger painted in vivid red, to the entrance door.

With nothing to feed, it had resumed to dripping sloppily to the floor.

"Get out," he snarled, aggressively, in clear rejection of any form of argument, not the slightest pleased with how this had turned out.

(-- this wasn't supposed to happen.)


2. PRESENT

And which present would that be?


3. FUTURE

It was bizarre.

He felt as though he had his arm outstretched, and inbetween what should have been his languid, skeletal fingers, his own eye stared back at him, cold and blue and human.

Yet it was not his fingers, and it was not his arm; if it had been they would have burned, for his skin was ablaze in a shattered flame of red and orange, washing cold against his heap of entangled existence. He figured the form kept together this way only because human was a label he could never escape, no matter how far away from the known and into the otherworld, or into other worlds, he dipped.

When he moved, the black rippled beneath him, where his feet would have been, faking a physical existence for his phantom body. The left side of his face, or where there should have been one, was warm and running wet.

In front of him was mass darkness. In the midst of it, two white-hot stars staring back.

"Give me what you promised," he mouthed and his voice sounded in deep echo, like something coming from the outside and spreading though the air like waves of frigid ocean water. It was an animalesque growl, nightmarish, entering back into him like a parasite, edging its way, bite by bite, into the soft fabrics of his brain.

He did not need to See to know that the Other was regarding him with amused interest.

Pay up.

For a long moment they remained like this, floating somewhere inbetween time and space, two massive black holes in the still darkness.

Something shimmering came floating from the inside of a phantom mouth, gleaming merrily as it found its way beside his own staring eye. Two senses was a high prize but nonetheless one that he had agreed to - a greedy demand, cruel, to cripple the Alchemist of his sense of taste. Though tactical, with no doubt.

The shadows behind him - his shadows - shifted.

Then it moved - extending one of its white stars for him. The red hot of his right hand reached out to grab around it as the Other mirrored his action, caging the blue in a frame of black tendrils. They remained locked like this for a while, as though neither wanted to let go of their own eye before the other. Until --

He felt something brushing against a phantom ear, a presence far too close upon him based on his pre-made calculations. And it released a hollow whisper, lingering strangely on the surface of his Hearing.

"Someone took a bite of you already, --" it said. "-- little man."

There was a chill down his neck and he froze, as something passed through him to grab him by the space of his heart - it pierced through him like knives before gravitation shifted around him --

Cold.

-- as though he'd been plunged into a pool from the inside out he was breathing water, turning to ice in his lungs. At the same time his insides caught fire, invisible claws tearing at him to create fresh wounds over old scars and he couldn't breathe, strangled inside realisation he had made a wrong step.

The shadows behind him had gone wild.

And somewhere far, far away, the fragile mortality of the man called Altair had started shaking uncontrollably, the bleeding they had already stopped flowing freely once again.

---

For a more complete view of Altair's story, please see his former biography (a few more chapters are in the making).


SAMPLE ROLEPLAY
(Please respond to to this in third person past tense. Do not write the other characters' reactions. Only your own.)

It was the largest office in Hogwarts and, perhaps to students and newcomers, the most intimidating. The shelves were filled with various odds and ends, with a place of honor for the Sorting Hat, and the walls held all the portraits of past Headmasters and Headmistresses.

In the middle of the room sat a large desk. Everything was in order, for the current occupant had always despised a messy desk. It was the sign of a messy mind, and she had always favored neatness.

A clock sat on the desk, which currently showed the time to be 2:05. The meeting was supposed to begin at 2:00 precisely.

Along with order, Anneka valued punctuality. She was a very busy woman these days. Even during the summer, she had a number of matters to attend to. Interviewing and hiring staff was only of those matters. The newest potential member of her staff wasn't making a good impression.

She paced the room, black heels clicking against the stone floor. When the door finally opened, Anneka turned, her expression reminiscent of a Russian winter. "You are late."

Explain yourself was what her face said.


Roleplay Response:

Here we go again.

He'd walked these stairs before, had walked through these halls so many times, entered this door --

Though his steps were steady and fast - he was late - he came to a sudden halt in front of the door of the Headmistress, his hand stopping in mid-air as he reached for a polished handle. His insides gripped by a need to stop and feel out what was going on at the other side of the door before making his move.

And his heart felt heavy, the shoadows of his surroundings draping over him like a cape - out of the corner of his eye (or mind?) he registered movement, but he was used to that. Nothing ever appeared to rest around him and more often than not it would keep him awake at night.

He closed his fingers around the handle, and entered.

"You are late."

He was taller than her, but it did not quite seem so, as he placed himself to stand in front of her, feet somewhat apart, meeting her Russian winter with a gaze of frigid blue, to mirror his mother's Norwegian heritage.

Up on the wall, the old portrait of Elizabeth Birch-Hurst was looking down at him.

But he only held Anneka's eyes for a moment, as though feeling out the situation, and then he did something he only very rarely did - he looked down, respectfully.

He was at a disadvantage here.

He'd overstepped boundaries and bended rules.

(In truth he'd done that since his years as a student, but he'd had a way with words and he'd mostly been able to bend others to his will - as Quidditch Captain, as Head Boy. He was used to making up his own rules in secret, turned away from their prying eyes he'd built a world of his own.)

"It won't happen again."

His words held several meanings and perhaps she'd catch them all.

He'd been back and forth to Hogwarts a number of times and she knew him well. Knew that he might stay for one or two years and then be off again to his own endevours somewhere else. Knew that break would not last, that he'd return again at a later point to seek another way to enter into the school's service.

There was a pattern and he'd come to terms with it being one that he'd likely not be able to break.

He was here for the sake of himself.

Though through his absolute selfishness he always wanted back because they were his kindred spirits.

It was not quite hope and it was not quite dreams. In a sense these were things that had blurred with reality in his mind for a (un)reasonable length of time already and the shadows that lurked inside his own had remained steady. There was still something safe, something familiar about the Castle, about its personalities, about the open eyes of youth.

The opportunity of broadening horizons, inside of the young as well as in himself.

And then, perhaps he hadn't quite given up the hope yet, given up the dream --

-- that he could have a meaning, an influence on the minds of the growing, of the young. That he could place a solid kick to their mentalities and challenge perspectives, forcing them to think and re-think and think again.

(Inside him it still blazed, the will to make things right, and to help people understand that there were more than one path to reaching the same goal.)