Your Nickname: JM
Have you read and do you agree to the Code of Conduct?: Yes
Are you over thirteen? Yes
How did you find us and decide to write with us? Other
If you have written other characters here: Yes
If Yes, list them all: Jason MacDonell (Inactive at present)
Is this a Primary or Secondary Character?: Primary

Full Character Name: Silas Bardigan
Character Birthday & Age: September 24, 1979 (31)
City & Country of Birth: Upper Flagley, England, UK
Blood Purity: Halfblood
Alma Mater: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Job/Position: Wandmaker

Wand: Pine and phoenix feather, 11 ˝ inches, bendy

Physical Description:
Silas is 5’10” and has a lithely athletic build; he is clearly fit, but not particularly muscular.  His skin is faintly tan, giving the impression of an indoorsy person who has spent considerable time outdoors.  He has light brown hair which looks perpetually tousled, and icy blue eyes.

Preferring conservative styles of dress, Silas often dresses in shirts and coats which are closely tailored to his torso but have looser sleeves to allow for a full range of complex wandwork.  He wears a variety of richly embroidered fabrics when in his shop or a city, but adopts more demure and hardier earth tones when out obtaining wand wood or cores.  When working in his shop, he often wears a tool belt full of wand-making tools, measurement devices, and notes.

Silas speaks with a distinctly mutilated Yorkshire accent, a product of his extensive time abroad.

Personality Description:
Silas, like many Ravenclaws, comes across slightly eccentric and more than a little detached from the goings-on around him.  He has a naturally curious disposition and loves to learn, and is willing to devote considerable time and effort to things which interest him (wandmaking being the obvious example, but also including magical history, magical creatures, and even dueling to some extent).

Silas is ambitious and strongly desires to be an exceptional wandmaker, which is why the Sorting Hat considered Slytherin, but ultimately more defined by his curiosity, creativity, and intelligence.  He is not the sort of person to seek out wrongs to right, or even attack the root cause once he has identified a problem, but he will also not stand idly by and let blatant injustices happen right under his nose (provided he notices them).

People speaking to Silas tend to find him either completely focused or completely abstracted, with little in between.  He does not multitask particularly well, preferring to give whatever has occupied him his full attention, even if that is not a person speaking to him.  He is pleasant enough in conversation but, while not socially inept, distinctly introverted.

History:
Born in 1979, Silas was the son of a Muggleborn wizard and a half-blood witch.  His elder sister Athena was two years older, and his brother Montgomery three years younger.  Silas’s father was a sales representative for the Cleansweep Broom Company and his mother an employee of the Department of International Magical Cooperation, and the Bardigans spent considerable time abroad while Silas was still a child.  This early introduction to the broader magical community helped shape Silas’s understanding of and interest in other cultures.  As a boy, his favorite bedtime story was “The Tale of the Three Brothers”.

Raised in a wizarding household, Silas, like most wizarding children, considered the majority of wizarding life commonplace.  He knew, for instance, the saying that “the wand chooses the wizard”, and never gave the concept much thought beyond the words.  However, in the summer of 1991, he visited Ollivander’s wand shop in Diagon Alley in preparation for his attendance at Hogwarts.  Silas was spellbound by the air of mystique in the shop, and when Ollivander presented him with the wand that wound up choosing him, the boy was struck by the overwhelming feeling of rightness that merely touching the magical instrument gave him.

Sorted into Ravenclaw after the Sorting Hat briefly weighed that house against Slytherin, Silas demonstrated the typical Ravenclaw penchant for academia, excelling in his subjects and showing a particular interest in magical history.  He was one of the few students who managed to learn a great deal from History of Magic, though it required a good deal of outside reading to supplement Cuthbert Binns’s monotonous teaching style.  He also had something of Ravenclaw quirkiness; while his classmates, though attached to their own wands, considered wands as a whole to be rather mundane, Silas retained his fascination with them.  He began exploring wandlore in his spare time.

When third year came around, Silas opted to add Care of Magical Creatures, Ancient Runes, and Arithmancy to his basic course load.  By this point he was seriously considering learning to become a wandmaker himself, and he felt CoMC would prepare him for encounters with the various magical creatures whose body parts would become the cores of wands.  He pursued Ancient Runes and Arithmancy because he felt they opened different avenues of magical knowledge to him.

During the Triwizard Tournament, Silas supported Cedric Diggory and was among the many Ravenclaws who believed Harry Potter had cheated his way into being selected as a fourth champion.  When Cedric Diggory was murdered and Dumbledore publicly announced the return of Voldemort, Silas’s parents were divided over whether to believe Dumbledore’s account.  Silas himself was skeptical, though he became increasingly less so after Dolores Umbridge was appointed as Defense Against the Dark Arts professor and began interfering at Hogwarts.  By the time Harry Potter’s interview with the Quibbler was published, he had come around to believing in Voldemort’s return.  Although friends with his fellow Ravenclaws, Silas was never overly close with them, and so Terry Boot, Michael Corner, Anthony Goldstein, and Padma Patil never thought to include him in Dumbledore’s Army; oblivious, he had no inkling it existed until it didn’t.

After achieving high marks in all his OWLs (though lower than he would have liked in Defense Against the Dark Arts, for which he nursed a grudge against Umbridge evermore), Silas opted to drop both History of Magic and Care of Magical Creatures as he entered NEWT study; though the disciplines continued to fascinate him, he realized he would gain more from private reading than from Binns and Hagrid.  He also left Astronomy and Potions, but pursued all his other subjects into NEWT level.

Word of Garrick Ollivander’s capture reached Silas over the summer and disturbed him greatly; quite apart from the reality that Ollivander was presumed a prisoner of the Death Eaters, Silas had hoped to start corresponding with Ollivander during his final years, with an eye to becoming his apprentice after Hogwarts.  His sister Athena, now working in the Department of International Magical Cooperation like their mother, offered to find him contacts with foreign wandmakers instead.  The retired Mykew Gregorovitch gave Silas some terse guidance, and a few other foreign wizards offered advice as well.

With the rise of the Death Eaters in the outside world, the Bardigans considered taking Silas and Montgomery out of Hogwarts and fleeing England; Silas, by now seventeen, flatly refused to leave, and his family elected to remain.  Silas attended Albus Dumbledore’s funeral at the end of his sixth year, but over the summer, the Bardigans again debated whether to flee Britain.  Even Silas had come out of his native abstraction enough to pay attention by this point, and they seemed likely to flee when Voldemort’s forces took over the Ministry of Magic and attendance at Hogwarts became compulsory.

Mr. Bardigan was arrested as a Muggleborn and imprisoned in Azkaban, while Mrs. Bardigan and Athena were allowed to keep working and Silas and Montgomery were forced to return to Hogwarts, all protected from immediate reprisals by their status as half-bloods.  In Muggle Studies, Silas mostly kept his head down; he knew his paternal grandparents and seethed quietly at Alecto Carrow’s aspersions on Muggles, but thought no good would come of debating the issue with her.  He also went along with learning the Dark Arts from Amycus Carrow, reluctantly practicing curses on insects.  He drew the line at performing the Cruciatus Curse on students in detention, though the Carrows punished him relatively lightly, since students like Neville Longbottom were being much more assertive with their opposition.

Silas was punished worse after learning the Killing Curse in class; Amycus Carrow had beaten and hexed him until he finally summoned up the anger and force of will to use the Killing Curse on a beetle.  When Carrow said he could be a Dark wizard eventually, Silas angrily rebuffed the accusation; Carrow taunted him that he had a decent Killing Curse, to which Silas snapped, “But I haven’t decided who to use it on, sir.”  Amycus cast the Cruciatus Curse on Silas himself for his cheek, and Silas hated him all the more from then on.

Montgomery, meanwhile, did not follow his older brother’s lead.  A Gryffindor, he was much more inclined to challenge the Carrows, and punished correspondingly more often.  Silas did what he could to patch his brother up afterwards, although his entreaties to keep his head down often fell on deaf ears.

Still out of the D.A. loop, Silas had no idea where students were disappearing to as the year waned, and assumed the Death Eaters had extracted them.  He was flabbergasted when, in the middle of the night on May 1, 1998, Flitwick summoned all the Ravenclaws to the Great Hall and they passed the Carrows bound to the ceiling on the way; Silas resisted the urge to curse Amycus with some difficulty.  At the news that the other teachers had deposed Severus Snape and were preparing to oppose Voldemort, Silas dutifully ordered Montgomery to go home through the Room of Requirement and seriously considered accompanying him, but in the end elected to stay and fight alongside his fellow Ravenclaw seventh years.

Silas put up a decent fight throughout early stages of the Battle of Hogwarts, fighting first along with Terry Boot and Michael Corner, though they were eventually separated.  Retreating up through the castle, Silas came upon Hufflepuff sixth year Moira Wellington protecting two underage Gryffindors who had stayed to fight; Silas and Moira together dueled the Death Eater Augustus Rookwood, briefly holding him at bay before conceding they were outmatched and being forced to flee.  When Percy Weasley came to their rescue, Silas and Moira again teamed up to help him, but Silas was injured in the duel, suffering a broken arm and a curse that grazed his head and left him disoriented.

Carried down to the Great Hall by Moira and Percy, Silas convalesced for a few hours under the ministrations of Madam Pomfrey, though he was well enough to go outside with the rest to see Voldemort bringing Harry’s “corpse”.  In the ensuing chaos, Silas searched for the Carrows in the melee, but had no opportunity to curse either of them.  He briefly fought alongside his own sister, who had come to fight alongside Charlie Weasley and Horace Slughorn, before Bellatrix Lestrange and Voldemort were killed.  He heard both Voldemort and Harry make reference to “the Elder Wand”, although at the time its significance did not fully register.

In the aftermath of the battle and the Death Eaters’ downfall, Mr. Bardigan was released from Azkaban.  Silas agreed to sit his NEWTs, but finally had a chance to write to Ollivander.  He was disappointed when the wandmaker, still frail from his imprisonment in Malfoy Manor, declined to take on an apprentice, and even more disturbed to learn that Gregorovitch was dead.  Nonetheless, he packed up his belongings and set out for mainland Europe with only his Undetectably Extended trunk, his wand, a Cleansweep from his father’s company, and the handful of names with which he had had occasional correspondence.

The Greek wandmaker Aleksy Petrakis declined, but Silas initially had better luck with the Egyptian wandmaker Tamir al-Busiri.  From al-Busiri, Silas learned the basics of wand crafting, and spent endless hours studying the properties of various woods and magical substances.  Raised in Britain where Ollivander wands were the standard, Silas was somewhat surprised to see his master working with cores other than unicorn hair, phoenix feather, and dragon heartstring.  One of the last pieces of information al-Busiri imparted was how to recover phoenix feathers.

In late 1999, Tamir went on a quest to obtain sphinx hair for a wand, leaving Silas to mind the shop.  When he did not return after a few weeks, Silas pursued him, only to find the sphinx gnawing on Tamir’s thighbone.  Though infuriated, Silas recognized that he was not powerful enough to fight the sphinx head-on, and instead challenged it; if he failed her riddle, she could attack, but if he got it right, he could have one of her braids.  He successfully answered the riddle and came away with the braid, but returned to find the Egyptian Ministry of Magic closing down Tamir’s shop and confiscating his store of wands for safekeeping.  Possessing only his scant earnings, the sphinx braid, and a few samples of woods and cores Tamir had allowed him, Silas left Egypt.

Even with a year’s experience, Silas found no luck seeking an apprenticeship with any of his European contacts, but his mother recommended him to the Persian wandmaker Kalpana Mozaffari.  She was willing to take Silas as a student, provided he work diligently at whatever task she set him, and Silas spent the next three years in Iran.  At first she only had him study, but eventually allowed him to start making “test wands” with weak cores.  In his own and his master’s struggles, Silas developed a deeper understanding of the complexity of pairing a wand wood with a wand core.

In addition to wandmaking, Kalpana was an accomplished and skilled witch, and she periodically tested her apprentice in various ways, including transfiguring things for him to untransfigure and teaching him more complex dueling.  Though he lacked a natural flair for either discipline, relentless practice eventually helped Silas become more skilled in both, as well as other odds and ends Kalpana set for him.  Under Kalpana’s tutelage, Silas shrugged off his Ollivanderian conditioning of accepting only the three “supreme cores” for wands; though a demanding master, Kalpana also encouraged her pupil’s creativity and inventiveness, showing him where he had gone wrong each time an invention failed but never discouraging the theory underlying his creations.

In 2002, Silas successfully made the first wand Kalpana considered sufficiently powerful for a wandmaker (sycamore and phoenix feather, 13 inches, reasonably pliable), and she sent the slightly surprised Silas on his way, telling him he could only learn more from practice.  Silas considered returning to Britain, but realized quickly that making one wand with a supreme core would not be nearly enough to even sell in Diagon Alley when Ollivander was nearby, and so he elected to continue his studies through practice.

Following contacts from his mother and sister (Montgomery had graduated Hogwarts, but gone into the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes), Silas flew to India, where he studied various unusual charms with Indian wizards while investigating India’s native flora and fauna for their magical potential, including securing feathers from an Occamy and investigating the properties of mangrove wood.  He made a living making wands, usually selling them fairly cheaply but at a decent enough price to keep himself fed and sheltered.  He insisted on using his broom to travel, despite the amusement of the Asian wizarding community at his refusal to buy a secondhand flying carpet.

From India Silas went to China and Tibet, mostly in pursuit of phoenix feathers, although he also made a study of Chinese wizards’ approach to wandmaking and managed to secure a few dragon heartstrings from Chinese Fireballs; aware of the existence of the Priori Incantatem effect, though he had never seen it, Silas tried to avoid obtaining two feathers from the same phoenix or two heartstrings from the same dragon.  He found a rare re’em in far rural China and obtained a hair from its mane as well.  He considered exploring in Southeast Asia, but left Thailand hastily after narrowly winning a duel with a Thai wizard.  Even Silas’s growing fascination with “unusual” wand cores was not enough to fool him into thinking he was ready to tangle with an Acromantula on Borneo, so instead he traveled to Japan, visiting Mahoutokoro and examining some of the island’s fabled cherry wands.

Not quite confident enough in his broom to fly the entire way from Japan to Hawaii, Silas opted to take a ship instead.  A few hundred miles out, however, he decided to fly the rest of the way, and departed in the middle of the night.  En route, he flew over a pair of fishermen hauling in a struggling mermaid, and came to her rescue, Stunning both fishermen.  After he dived beneath the waves with a Bubblehead Charm to understand her screeching speech, she offered him a reward, and he took three of her golden hairs.  Once he flew the rest of the way to Hawaii, he took a few weeks to experiment with palm wood, eventually succeeded in encasing one of the siren hairs in a palm wand.

MACUSA arranged Silas a portkey to the mainland, where he promptly became embroiled in and nearly lost a duel with an American wizard, escaping only by Apparating away.  Fleeing north, he took some time to study redwoods for their wand properties, and obtained a few samples.  Continuing up the coast, he met Kwakwaka’wakw wizards in southern Canada and encountered a Thunderbird, which allowed him to take a single tail feather.

Continuing down through America, making wands as he went to pay his way, Silas journeyed to Louisiana to study the works of the American wandmaker Violetta Beauvais and her swamp mayhaw wands.  His studies were interrupted not long after when he came upon a Dark wizard torturing a Muggle; in the ensuing duel, Silas just barely dodged several Cruciatus Curses himself, and cast a Killing Curse at his enemy, though it missed.  Ultimately, the Dark wizard was startled by Silas’s own Dark Arts ability, and Silas managed to disarm him and hold him prisoner until the American authorities showed up, modified the Muggle’s memory, and took the wizard into custody.  Although the use of the Killing Curse in self-defense was legal in America, Silas still opted to continue his studies elsewhere.

Silas went to Brazil, presenting himself at Castelobruxo and requesting permission to consult with the school’s famed Herbology and Magizoology professors.  The Headmaster was initially disinterested, but relented when Silas revealed his wandmaking abilities and promised to make any wands necessary.  He studied in Brazil for the better part of a year, including experiments with Brazilwood and a trip to Peru to collect Peruvian Vipertooth heartstrings.  One expedition for Brazilwood saw Silas embroiled in another duel, which was complicated when the annoyed Brazilian wizard charmed various local plants to attack Silas as well; unwilling to set the entire rainforest on fire, Silas opted to flee.  He also nearly became a werewolf, avoiding being bitten only when he jinxed a Colombian werewolf and then caught it up in a net.

Enlivened by his new knowledge and somewhat emboldened in his pursuit of rare cores, Silas eventually took a portkey back to Africa, where he promptly flew to Burkina Faso in search of runespoors.  He nearly died from a puff adder bite; after recovering (somewhat sheepishly) with the assistance of Muggle doctors, he devoted more time to brewing at least basic potions to cure non-magical venoms.  With the assistance of a Beninese Parselmouth (of whom Silas tactfully asked relatively few questions), Silas managed to find a runespoor-populated area and collected various scales from a dead runespoor.

Silas considered returning to Egypt, if only to stock up on phoenix feathers, but ultimately postponed the trip to journey through the rest of Africa.  He studied in South Africa, intrigued by the marriage of British descendants’ wandmaking styles with the native African skill in wandless magic.  While there, he was enlisted for an expedition to Kenya to hunt down and slay a Nundu which had been plaguing several outlying villages.  Over a hundred wizards finally brought the beast down, and in the rush to claim trophies from its body, Silas took a whisker, then later returned to claim a heartstring as well.

Swinging by Egypt at last to collect a few more phoenix feathers, which he did with difficulty, Silas returned briefly to Iran to visit Kalpana; he had written her about his exploits, taking her characteristically terse replies in stride, and she was pleased with his improvements.  Silas then journeyed to Europe, hoping to collect a veela hair for a wand; he managed to find a veela in Bulgaria, but though she charmed him for a few weeks, when he asked her for her hair, she morphed into her winged form and sent him running with fireballs exploding around him.

While in Eastern Europe, Silas began to read both historical records and archived news reports about Gregorovitch, and visited wizards who still had Gregorovitch wands.  When he discovered that Gregorovitch had once claimed to duplicate the qualities of the Elder Wand—and indeed, to have once possessed the wand—Silas finally made the connection with both Voldemort’s last stand at Hogwarts and his own knowledge of magical history and the various appearances of the Deathstick and the Wand of Destiny.  He began to research the wand in more depth, consulting with other wandmakers; though he had no established presence in the wandmaking community, he had enough obvious knowledge that those who had rebuffed him as an apprentice were at least willing to consider him as a conversation partner.  Eventually it became Silas’s secret ambition to create a wand like the Elder Wand.

Shortly before he returned home, Silas visited Norway, intrigued by the possibility of using some part of a Selma as a wand core.  Instead, he became embroiled in a fight against a Norwegian Ridgeback along with three other wizards; initially he received only a rather nasty series of burns for his trouble, but ultimately managed to secure two dragon heartstrings once Norwegian healers patched him up.  Opting for a safer course in the future, he visited Romania to develop contacts with the dragon sanctuary there.

In 2010, having been abroad for twelve years apart from a few holiday visits to his family, Silas finally returned to England.  His mother, now a senior manager in the Department of International Magical Cooperation, again offered to help him secure a post in the Ministry, feeling his time abroad and his smattering of foreign language skills would be invaluable.  Montgomery took a different tack and suggested Silas apply for the recently vacated History of Magic professorship at Hogwarts, knowing of his older brother’s interest in history, which had been bolstered by visiting foreign wizarding cultures in person.  Silas steadfastly refused, instead finally seeking to establish a wand shop.  With no space available in Diagon Alley, he managed to secure small premises in Knockturn Alley with loans from his parents and Gringotts.

Describe your job duties and how you go about them:
Silas is more willing than Ollivander to branch out into different magical cores, and has obtained a handful of exceedingly exotic ones, occasionally at great personal risk.  He also experiments with hardwoods not often found in British wands, such as mangrove and palm.

Elaborate on your expertise in your field:
Silas studied under an Egyptian wandmaker for a year and an Iranian wandmaker for three more before setting off on his own.  He has continued to study wandlore, experiment with various wand/core combinations, and craft wands in the eight years since.  The one major gap in Silas’s wandmaking education is much experience matching wands to their wizards; he has only made, at most, a handful of wands at a time in the past, usually custom-made for individuals, and he lacks the experience of pairing a random wizard with one of a hundred wands in a shop.

Writing Sample:
(Exempt)

Sum up your character in one paragraph:
Silas is a clever and creative wandmaker, determined to become a master of the craft.  Although skillful and talented in a variety of disciplines, he tends not to think of himself that way, or use his talents for much that is unconnected with wandmaking.  He tends to avoid large-scale conflict (either disinterested in it or simply oblivious to it), but will insert himself to help others if problems arise directly in front of him.