Your Nickname: Nuri
Have you read and do you agree to the Code of Conduct?: Yes
Are you over thirteen? Yes
Is this a Primary or Secondary Character?: Primary





Physical Description:
He was handsome. Once.

You might still consider Peter to be quite a handsome wizard, even if there is an ambience about him that harkens to a different era. His eyes have taken in a bit of the South African sky: so blue that they surprise anyone who might consider his tan face, his rakish blonde hair. At 6’1’’, he looks like something that might have stepped right out of an outdated, politically-incorrect advertisement for safari attire. He detests wearing robes.

His speech is cultured and effeminate. Peter’s accent is neither here nor there - educated and British but often telling of his childhood. A misdirected vowel, the odd foreign swear word, and a propensity to sagely murmur “Insha’Allah” (if God wills) when making future plans. His mannerisms are polite, boyish. He is light on his feet but heavy on the shoulders, as if though carrying a tome on each side. He is physically strong but lean.

If you allow yourself to be charmed by his archaic and vaguely effete manners, Peter can be quite the fetching sight.

Personality Description:

Confused. Lately, Peter is confused. He discovers new things all the time: new inventions, new politics, new people or relations. Everything happens faster than he would prefer but he has been surprisingly receptive to this sudden intake of perplexing information.

Peter is a walking contradiction of morals, outwardly. “Oh, no. I don’t partake in alcohol. It’s hell on your health.” The wizard may comment while considering a purchase of contraband Gillyweed. He doesn't dwell for very long on these things. He does not extend his sharp wit and intuition into the inner workings of his personal psyche. Peter focuses on absorbing and processing information outside of himself, which has helped facilitate his reintroduction into society. This has also been helped along by his innate sense of childlike wander.

Generally speaking, Peter isn’t religious although he culturally identifies as Muslim. He is more comfortable on Edgware Road than Baker Street, and has never grown used to seeing quite so many people of his own skin colour in one city. He enjoys new music, and the muggle invention of the MP3 player. He keeps a gramophone for vinyl records in the Library to play when he works. He loves to dance old dances: fox trots and waltzes and swing.

Peter is witty and relatively courteous around people he doesn't know - unless they speak French or Arabic, at which point he bridges the barriers of polite society and instantly becomes simpatico.

He enjoys good conversation and could listen to people speak all day. Their voices, accents, multiple combinations of unique intonation. Sometimes, he eavesdrops. While Peter grew up mostly by himself, he has never felt so lonely as he does London city today. He works diligently enough at the Ministry Library but goes out on most evenings to luxuriate in the city's great social din.


History:

Edith and Gerhard Thackeray were professors at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry. These British halfbloods, in their late 30s, came to live in South Africa in 1914 to escape the complications of World War I - in which their German, Dutch and British families had come into socio-political conflict. Gerhard's (neutral) Dutch relations managed to help the wizard acquire a piece of land on the coast: southwest of Cape Town and essentially at the foot of Table Mountain.

They grew a small crop of magical herbs and also ran a small shop in Cape Malay, a Malayan community area within Cape Town itself. The shop opened three times a week for wizarding folk.

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

Edith gave birth to a beautiful blonde baby boy in 1916. They named him Peter. By then, the Thackerays - who were not quite Dutch nor particularly aligned with the British colonial force - were already building themselves a lifestyle that was consolidated by the customs of families around their shop.

When Peter turned five, his mother and father converted to to the faith of Islam. Cape Malay, named afters the origin of its inhabitants from the Malayan and Indonesian isles, is also known to some as Cape Muslim. Edith and Gerhard did not change their names or their son’s name. They adopted the religion by performing its five daily prayers and dressing similarly to their neighbours in town. They also sent their son for lessons in Arabic in an attempt to familiarise him with the religion's cultural context.

Beyond that, Peter was not so greatly affected by Islam as his parents were. Until the age of eight his playmates were primarily the sons and daughters of colonial Governors or Civil Workers, although he spent most of his childhood alone.

After all, the Thackerays still lived outside of town. Peter’s memories of South Africa are not faces and names: they are vistas. The interminable coastline and a ceaseless blue sea that drifted forever into what he knew, in theory, was the Latin American continent before plunging into nothing at all: Antarctica. Places a boy can only dream of when sat idly on rocky hills, staring at a sky that he would never again live underneath.

ESSAOUIRA, MARRAKECH

In 1924, Edith and Gerhard up and moved north. To Essaouira, specifically, in the French protectorate of Morocco. It seemed that Gerhard  had not done very well in growing crops. However, through his little shop in Cape Malay he had become an expert importer and exporter of goods. The family of three found themselves living just outside of the town of Essaouira, a port municipality popular with merchant wizards who came to barter with Marrakech traders. Once again Peter would grow up on a coast and at a distance from the hubbub of communal life - a little older now, this didn't stop him from wandering into town in his free time.

By the time he was ten, his parents had already made the decision of taking their son’s education into their own hands. Edith was the focal point of her son's early tutelage. As Peter grew to approach adolescence, he would find tutors for himself. Wizards and witches in Essaouira who loved his charmed grin, his eager disposition. There was something magnetic about Peter even from a young age. He was shaping up to become a gifted wizard with an open mind. He loved freely and openly. His manners were impeccable. More than anything, he dreamed of distant lands and the clamour of foreign crowds.

Edith and Gerhard left for Saudi Arabia to perform their Hajj in 1934. Meanwhile, Peter would take it upon himself to make a different sort of pilgrimage by leaving for the great city of Istanbul.

ISTANBUL, TURKEY

In the 1930s, it was not Istanbul but Ankara that happened to be the capital of Turkey. Even so the city was something to behold, especially in the eyes of Peter Thackeray, who had never lived in anything resembling urbanity in the way that Ataturk’s Istanbul did. He saw, for the first time, muggle automobiles in innumerable flocks. He saw palaces and ruins and libraries and concert halls and unfamiliar magics and dissonant theater and gilded structures. It was love, the first and greatest love of his life. The country was a wrecked marriage of modernity and tradition.

In spite of never having had a formal education, Peter was a natural academic. He gravitated towards Mosques and Wizarding Libraries: places of learning. It would take a decade of study - alone as well as under the tutelage of surly, elderly scholars - before he could attain a position in the Blue Mosque. In this decade Peter managed to stay true to his parent’s flighty ways. He travelled, first in post-war Europe and then elsewhere. Germany, Denmark, Britain. He had an exceptionally heated affair with an older man while holidaying in Cairo for three weeks; and then a more tepid liaison with a Malayan witch while staying in Medan, Indonesia for two months. He investigated and wandered through the many ruins of Turkey itself.

But always his heart went back to Istanbul.

There exists, inside the Blue Mosque of that old city, a vast and secret library. It is supervised independently of Turkey’s Ministry of Magic (a government that was rebuilding itself from the ground up as a result of Ataturk’s great changes) and was well known to be a sanctuary for wizards seeking knowledge. At 28 years old, Peter was one of many Librarians at this sacred establishment. He was a very good Librarian although he spent as much time working as he did sitting in cafes, roaming markets, romancing travellers and trying on various Panama hats.

It was in his habit, you see, to traverse the ruins in colder months: not for their historical value but for the novelty of clambering, exploring that which had once been so well-known and was now fresh once more. New. Mysterious. Time travelling without the danger of it. He had been exploring alone when he stumbled into the ruins that would bring his life to an utter halt.

The Ozkonak Underground City was colossal underneath its above-ground structures. Much of it goes untouched by human eyes even to this day, even if muggles would have you believe that the city was in fact much smaller. In 1948, the wards that protected the deeper passageways from inquisitive magical eyes were not in place. Ozkonak would not even be officially discovered by muggle communities until 1972.

There is a danger to travelling alone that Peter, an only child and whimsical soul, never grasped. He disappeared into the Ozkonak tunnels at daybreak - and there he stayed, lost. The wizard had wandered too deep into the underground passageways. Hours passed. Nearly a day until finally he paused for rest at the end of a narrow shaft.

This is where he met It. The Grey Wolf  originates in old Turkic mythology: a legend of a She-Wolf who gave birth to rulers and half-wolves. To some, a child of Öğöt, God of Time. At best she was considered an ancient allusion to the existence of Werewolves. The Grey Wolf that Peter saw that night, beneath Turkey, was not a Werewolf.

The creature was immense. Its fur, more silver than grey, bristled and filled up the expanse of the tunnels. Spectral eyes glowed green - somehow intelligent and calm. Calmer than him. Its manner resampled a Sphinx more than it did a wolf. But Peter… Oh, Peter. Peter saw only the wolf. Educated as he was he had never come across something that posed so direct a danger on his life. Perhaps if he had paid better attention he might have noticed that the danger was minimal.

At least it was until he tried to hex her.

The Grey Wolf had growled, had snapped her jaws. She had undulated her great, gleaming tail. In a language that he did not understand, that best resembled Aramaic than any modern tongue, the Grey Wolf had laid a curse on Peter Thackeray. It was a curse that would last for as long as she lived.

Not that Peter knew anything about that. Why, how could he? He did not breathe, or see, or smell, or think. He was completely frozen in time and obscured from mortal eyes, deep beneath the conventional tunnels of an underground city.

In June of 2009, halfway across the continent in an ancient Persian ruin, the Grey Wolf sighed her last breath. Her story is a different one altogether. Irrelevant to us except for those few seconds in Peter's unusual life, and for that precise moment of her death.

In this moment, every curse she had ever cast and every child she had ever reared, disintegrated all at once.  Peter Thackeray could suddenly think and see and breathe. For him, the decades above had not registered. For him, a wolf had been in the tunnel in one instant and then gone in another. He was discovered a day later by a troupe of wizarding archeologists who were bewildered to find the tan, blonde wizard wandering helplessly in what is now a magically warded site.

PRESENT DAY

Peter  now resides in London and in the house of his now deceased parents, who had left for him a sizeable inheritance in the family Gringotts vault. The alien, modern Istanbul to which he woke was no longer home: much like a man who wakes to a wife he no longer understands. After many intensive interviews by Ministry personnel and an assisted adjustment period of six months, he was mercifully employed by the Ministry as a Librarian in its archives and periodicals unit. He is still learning a great deal about the 61 years that have come to past in his absence, while acclimatising to the disorienting notion of a home country he has never inhabited.


Describe your job duties and how you go about them:
Ministry Librarian.

Peter mostly organises archives/periodicals and wrangles with the Ministry's many sentient books. He will extract tomes when they are requested, and recommend further reading. As much of Peter's experience comes from his time in Istanbul, he is considered to be a specialist for documents and literature dating before his disappearance - i.e. pre-1940s. He uses his personal time to catch up on the last 60 years of wizarding history.

Peter may be lent to other departments as a scribe or reference  if necessary, particularly the Department of International Magical Cooperation

Elaborate on your expertise in your field:

Peter Thackeray studied in the libraries of various universities and mosques of Istanbul:  Marmara University, Boğaziçi University, Bodrum Mosque, Topkapi Palace and the Blue Mosque itself. From the years 1934 to 1944, he read and worked as a Novice Librarian. He acquired no official certification but has been officially verified by various persons who still remember him from the time of Ataturk's reign.

He was appointed an official Librarian at the Blue Mosque in 1945 and laboured there satisfactorily until his disappearance in 1948.


Sum up your character in one paragraph:
Peter Thackeray is a relic of sorts. Born in 1916 South Africa, the wizard lived a fulfilling life over the course of 32 years. He lived in Marrakech and then in Istanbul, where he eventually became a noted Librarian at the Blue Mosque. In 1948, due to an unfortunate run-in with a mythical Turkic creature, Peter was frozen in time. He did not wake until 2009. Now a Ministry Librarian in London, he is beginning to piece together a new life for himself. Peter is a charming and eye-catching individual. He is fascinated by this new world, and eager to make your acquaintance.