Accepted - Niobe
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Full Character Name: Jonas Trevelyan
Character Birthday & Age: November 23, 1972; 37 years old
City & Country of Birth: Truro, Cornwall, UK
Pureblood, Halfblood or Muggleborn?: Muggleborn
Alma Mater: Hogwarts (Gryffindor)
Job: Former Auror, current Private Investigator
Wand: Cedar with a phoenix feather core, 11 inches, smooth and pliable.
Physical Description: In his mid-thirties, Jonas maintains some of the gawky awkwardness of his youth. He stands at a lean 5’10”, with sharp blue eyes and bright red hair that render him immediately recognizable in a crowd. His narrow, expressive face lends animation to his speech, though Jonas has schooled himself not to give anything away while on guard, and his pale pink skin sunburns easily under too much sun. Although he has lived in England for years, he still retains some hints of his original Cornish accent.
Even a decade after the end of the final war against Voldemort, Jonas is still pained by an old injury. His right leg was savaged in a Death Eater attack soon after the start of Voldemort’s second rise. Though it has mostly healed, Jonas has a difficult time running or climbing, and cold weather makes the pain flare.
Personality Description: Jonas Trevelyan was once a young and idealistic Auror who thought himself perfectly capable of taking on all the world all at once. He was headstrong and sharp-tongued, perfectly confident in his own abilities, but a near-deadly confrontation with his own mortality during You-Know-Who’s last rise brought him down to earth. Since then, Jonas has matured and become significantly more levelheaded, and is much more willing to do what is necessary to earn a paycheck rather than to stand up for what he thinks is right.
Though he may come across as cool or withdrawn at first, Jonas is more defined by his wry sense of humour. Very little flusters or intimidates him, and he is well versed at seeing the humour in any situation that he comes across. Unfortunately, his dry appreciation for the world around him can turn into sarcasm when he is thrown off balance or is feeling cornered; he has gotten into trouble before when he’s mouthed off when he shouldn’t have.
Jonas’s training as an Auror and as a private investigator has given him an eye for details and a knack for finding patterns. He is well practiced at divorcing his own personal feelings from the facts and is able to view almost any situation from a completely objective viewpoint. However, he has a difficult time stepping out of this mindset when the situation does not call for it. He has occasionally caught himself calmly and logically explaining to his five-year-old son why having a biscuit before bedtime is not necessarily a good idea, and objective analysis does not lend itself to good interpersonal relationships. As gifted as Jonas may be at finding patterns, he often misses them completely when it comes to human relationships.
Above all else, Jonas is extremely tenacious. He is patient (and stubborn) enough to tail a suspect for days, or to dig through hundreds of pages of records in order to find one particular bit of information. When he decides to do something, not even an act of the divine can make him change his mind. His single-mindedness may serve him well in his chosen profession, but it creates problems in other parts of his life when he stubbornly sticks to an ill-advised plan even after realizing that it is causing unnecessary complications. To make matters worse, he has a strong sense of personal pride and is not very aware of what he doesn’t know. Jonas tends to be overconfident about both his actual skill set (except when it comes to doing magic) and his ability to figure things out on the fly. Asking him if he knows how to do something will often get a shrug and an affirmative, with his inward assumption being somewhere along the lines of “How hard could it be?”
His Achilles’ heel is his magic. During the height of Voldemort’s second rise, Jonas abandoned his life as a wizard and went to live as a Muggle. Though he has since taken up his wand again, his skills are significantly weaker than they were when he was a young Auror fresh out of Hogwarts. He stubbornly goes about tasks in the Muggle manner, even when doing so takes ten times as long. If asked, Jonas would deny that he has any sort of aversion to using magic, but in truth, he has lost much of his confidence in his magical abilities and does not feel that he could rely on his own spells in a pinch.
History: Jonas was born to George and Eva Trevelyan in Truro, the county seat of Cornwall. The Trevelyan family were Muggles through and through; George worked for the railway and Eva inherited a spinning shop from her parents. Their first two children were perfectly normal, but the summer after Jonas turned ten, a very nice, very short gentleman in a funny robe showed up at their doorstep and explained that their youngest son had a different life ahead of him. His parents were apprehensive at first, but as they found out more about the opportunities at Hogwarts, they finally agreed to let Jonas attend.
Jonas took to the wizarding life like a fish to water. He was sorted into Gryffindor, and though he didn’t know anything about magic before attending, he had caught up to most of the other students in his year by the time his first summer rolled around. All of the magical subjects were fascinating to him. Jonas had a knack for transfiguration and defensive magic, but he did well enough on all of his exams to be accepted into Auror training once he graduated, along with his best mate from school, another Gryffindor in his year named Tait Aldridge.
As a Muggle-born student, Jonas never really knew about the first war against You-Know-Who. The evil wizard had been vanquished before he even attended Hogwarts, and although he saw the effects of the war on some of his classmates’ families, the true horror of living in such a dark time did not really hit home until Voldemort rose to power again in the late 1990s. At the time, Jonas was working for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Even though he was young, he had already proven himself as a gifted Auror – but none of his training could prepare him for the battles that were to come. Soon after Voldemort was revealed to the world once again, he was gravely injured in a battle against a group of Death Eaters and nearly died.
Though he was taken to St. Mungo’s to recover, the healers determined that the damage to Jonas’s leg, caused by dark magic, could not be fully healed. To make matters worse, soon after he was released from the hospital, the war against Voldemort took a turn for the worse. The Minister of Magic was killed in an attack and Ministry policy seemed to change almost overnight. Suddenly, accusations were flying and Muggle-born wizards were being brought in for questioning about the origin of their magical abilities.
Jonas did the only thing he could do – he left the wizarding world. He disappeared overnight and returned home to Cornwall, where he swore off his magic and went back to life as a Muggle. By the time Harry Potter finally defeated Voldemort for a second time, Jonas was firmly entrenched in the Muggle world. With his experience as an Auror, he had begun working for a private detective based out of Exeter. While on an extremely boring case, he met a young woman named Anna Nguyen who was studying law at the University of Exeter, and the two fell in love and were married.
Though Jonas expected married life with Anna to be picturesque, it eventually became anything but. Early on, it was a whirlwind: getting to know her parents, sharing cultural experiences, planning an unexpected life together. But once the pair had two young children, Jonas’s work as a private detective meant often-late hours and sometimes-infrequent pay, which caused friction in the household. On top of that, Jonas never told his wife about his past as a wizard. He wanted to protect her, but his secret drove a wedge between the two of them. Anna never understood why her husband wouldn’t talk about his past or about the accident that had injured his leg. As the years wore on and he eventually discovered that the right side had won the war, Jonas began to reawaken his ties to the magical world. Eventually in late 2007, with the gap between them widening due to his secret keeping and ever-growing issues with money, he and Anna mutually agreed to a divorce.
Much as he had abandoned his magic after his first major trauma in his youth, Jonas withdrew from the life he had built for himself as a Muggle after his divorce. He began to cultivate his contacts among wizards once more. Although he still sees his children once a month, he has dropped contact with most of his old friends and his family. He is currently working as a private detective out of his office in Charing Cross, near Diagon Alley. His eldest daughter, Gwenna, is approaching her eleventh birthday and Jonas isn’t sure what he dreads more – that he will finally have to explain to his ex-wife about Hogwarts when their daughter receives her letter or that he will remain a mistake as the only wizard in the family.
What is your occupation? How do you go about it?
How did you get your current occupation?
How does your past and abilities justify your current skills?:
Jonas is a private investigator. Though he is a wizard, he follows through on most of his jobs the old fashioned way – tenacity, legwork, and digging up connections. Truth be told, Jonas’s time away from the wizarding world left many of his talents as a wizard atrophied. He shies away from casting spells, and instead tries to solve problems the old fashioned way.
Jonas became a private investigator after “retiring” as an Auror. When the Ministry of Magic turned against Muggle-born wizards, he abandoned his magic and went to live in the Muggle world. Since he had few skills that translated to non-magical life, Jonas decided to stay in law enforcement. His lack of references meant that he would have a hard time getting a job as a policeman, so instead, he apprenticed himself to a private investigator. He gained his own license and has been working in that career ever since.
Writing Sample:
The job wasn’t something he would have chosen to taken if times were better, but rent was due in a little over a week, and Jonas had emptied his bank account a few weeks before when the kids had come to visit. It had been Arthur’s fifth birthday, and so Jonas had taken the boy and his sister out in London for a fun-filled day that they, and their father’s wallet, were not likely to forget anytime in the near future.
And so here he was, staring up at a flat in the pouring rain and wishing he were anywhere else. Well, Jonas thought dryly as he started forward, turning up his collar against the weather, not exactly anywhere else. There were plenty of worse places he could be, even in the rain. In the shoes of his query, for instance, wherever she may be. The elderly witch who had hired him had been quite insistent that he discover if her granddaughter had taken to consorting with Muggles. She intended to write the girl out of her will if she had. Jonas, who had spent quite a bit of his life consorting with Muggles, wasn’t exactly sure that his employer would have taken him on if she’d known his thoughts on the matter, but she was shaky enough of hand and generous enough with her offer that he’d accepted the job immediately. It wasn’t often these days that someone offered to pay you per diem up front.
As far as he could tell, the fact that the grandmother was even suspicious should be enough of an answer for her. There weren’t many wizards these days who were as pure as they claimed, even if he’d heard rumors of pure-blooded associations becoming active again. The fact that the girl in question lived in a flat and not a proper wizarding house, with gargoyles and winding staircases and a boggart in every forgotten wardrobe, was already doubly damning in his eyes. But the grandmother had wanted proof, and proof she would get.
He limped up to the front door of the building. The rain always made his old injury worse; it ached furiously, and he bit his tongue as he walked to keep his mind off of it. There had to be a joke about this one, he thought as he gratefully took shelter under the overhang, ducking out of the rain. The private dick in the rain, with one bad leg and a stick in his pocket. Hopefully he’d come up with a punchline by the end of the day.
The residents’ list was clearly posted for anyone and his mother to see. Scanning it, Jonas quickly found the name of the girl he was supposed to be investigating. He tried the door; it was locked. He hesitated and freed his wand from his pocket. A simple Alohomora would be enough to get him inside, but using the spell made him nervous. The last time he’d tried it, nothing had happened. He might as well be a Squib – although the thought of a Muggle-born wizard being a Squib made him smile at the irony.
Jonas sighed, tucking the wand back into his pocket. He quickly buzzed another of the names on the list.
“Yeah?” an annoyed voice came back a few moments later.
“Uh, hello there. Look, I’ve a delivery for the blokes in…” Jonas scanned the steps, spotted a damp, slightly crushed package that has been tucked behind a potted plant. “5C, and they’re not answering when I ring. You mind buzzing me up?” he asked hopefully, summoning up every ounce of every jovial and entirely not suspicious deliveryman he’d ever met.
There was a pause. “The Joneses moved out a month ago,” the voice replied, sounding irritated. “Coming up won’t do you any good.”
“Yeah, yeah, mate,” Jonas agreed in what he hoped was a good-natured tone. “Except we’ve been trying to deliver this one for more than a month, and me boss said he’d have my head if I didn’t get me foot in the door this time. Not to mention it’s raining dogs out here, and I don’t fancy spending more time in it than I have to. So just let a fellow try, won’t you?” he asked, letting a note of pleading creep into his voice. “I won’t be long. I promise you.”
There was no response. Jonas crossed his fingers. A moment later, there was a loud buzz and he heard the lock click. Leting out a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding, Jonas tentatively tried the door. It swung open.
Tipping his hat to the speaker, the wizard smiled crookedly and started inside. Next, to find the girl’s proper flat.
Sum up your character in one paragraph: Jonas Trevelyan was once a Muggle-born Auror. During the terror caused by Voldemort’s second reign, he abandoned his magic and went to live as a Muggle. Though he has since rejoined the wizarding world, he struggles with his magic as he never did in his youth. Jonas is hard-working, tenacious, and more than a little prideful. He will never admit when he is wrong, and he is determined to carve out a niche for himself as a private investigator, handling tasks that the Department of Magical Law Enforcement wouldn’t normally deal with.
Jonas Trevelyan: Auror