Accepted ~ Mai/Elle
Your Nickname: Ash / Satyr
Have you read and do you agree to the Code of Conduct?: Yes
How did you find us and decide to write with us? Friend
If you have written other characters here: No
If Yes, list them all:
Is this a Primary or Secondary Character?: Primary
Full Character Name: Philomenes Oisien Nereus Kecklepenny-Mykonos called "Phil".
Character Birthday & Age: January 3rd, 1984; 27.
City & Country of Birth: Edinburgh, Scotland
Blood Purity: Halfblood
Ethnicity: Scottish/Greek/...Veela?
Alma Mater: Hogwarts; Ravenclaw Alumni
Cover Job (If any): 'Book Store' Proprietor
Type of Criminal: Black Market Smuggling/Thievery
Have they committed any previous crimes?: Yes
If yes, what were they and were they convicted?:
In his sixth year at Hogwarts, Phil had itchy hands for the dark objects tucked in the dusty corners of Knockturn Alley occult shops. He tried stealing a monkey's paw, but the paw had other plans. It grasped him by the wrist like a vice the moment he got it out the door, and he promptly screeched like a bird.
It was obvious he didn't learn. When he was sixteen, he stole a golden ring from an amulet shop. Phil slipped away with it clean...until he tried to wear it. It had been a cursed trinket belonging to some dead rotten pharaoh or other, and it burnt Phil's ring finger off at the knuckle.
Suspected, Never Convicted:
-The robberies of many unsavory shops, dealing with various 'oddities and antiquities'.
Fifteen shops within Knockturn Alley's main drag were robbed between '05-'08. Master Kecklepenny was presumed a suspect, but substantial evidence was never raised against him -- perhaps because the shopkeeps themselves had less-than-pristine criminal records.
Convicted:
-Arrested by muggle police for being drunk in public in Aberdeen, Scotland during March of '06. He was supposed to be held overnight until his da brought bail in the morning. Instead, our inebriated hero magically broke his locks and staged the worst jailbreak the dinky town of Aberdeen had ever seen (read: 12).
-Misuse of magic, March of '06. Please see above.
-Misuse of Magic, October of '06. Hexed a muggle man for repeatedly spilling his drinks, so the story goes.
-Misuse of Magic, February '07. Cast invisibility charms on a set of heirloom tomes in a London muggle library.
-After this, his magic is hard to track by the Ministry. It is worth noting that the wand of the late Aloysius Hingleworth, Phil’s great-uncle, has been going off at the sites of various petty crimes around northern Scotland. Curiouser and curiouser.
What crimes might you commit in the future? Discuss all possible: Larceny, poaching, smuggling, thievery, and being generally unpleasant.
Are you currently under pursuit by the Ministry of Magic?: No
Wand: 11 inches // Birch // Veela hair core // Inflexible.
Physical Description:
Phil’s mother was half-veela, though one could never guess. Phil’s father was mooned over by half the witches in Edinburgh, and that definitely isn’t noticeable. Really, Cuchulainn and Alastrina Kecklepenny have no idea what happened with their little Phil, just that he was a bloody mess from the moment he ripped his mum open to the day he graduated Hogwarts.
There’s a lot of indications about Phil that say he could have been handsome. But every last one of those traits comes up more than a bit…lacking. His milky skin and pale hair aren’t glowing or enchanting, like his mother’s. The whole effect renders him very washed out, as if he doesn’t get outside enough (which is true) or that he was run through a washing machine with too much bleach as a child.
Every summer, his cheeks and nose are pinched red by swathes of sunburn, when he isn’t careful. He reviles the stray freckles that pop up whenever his skin catches a flicker of sunlight (thanks to his heavily spotted Scottish da). Phil often wears absurdly wide-brimmed hats, to keep the sun off his face and neck. He could almost be mistaken for an albino, if not for the tint of his freckles, hair, and eyes.
Phil’s hair is rumpled with waves, an eternal bedhead from lack of care. It’s colored pale blonde, but a few wisps of silver that catch the light nicely. It used to be much, much longer but he recently sold most of his hair to a shoddy wand maker to pay rent.
The only strong traits from his mother would have been lovely on a girl, but not on a grown man. Phil’s eyes look too large for his face and are colored like dishwater. They’re hemmed by long white lashes that are completely wasted on a boy. He’s gangly, slender, and sylph-limbed -- because of this, can’t fight to save his life and has a hard time opening pickle jars. His lips are thin, wide, and cracked. He has his father’s sharp nose. Philomenes looks more like an ugly eighteen year old girl than a twenty-six year old man.
Dark bags ring his pale eyes, rarely sleeping with help of sugary coffee and adrenaline spells. He hates sleeping quite a bit, because he’s plagued by nightmares of sand, scarabs, and having his organs put in clay jars. He blames the cursed Egyptian ring that took his finger so many years ago. His two front teeth were smashed out of his mouth by a muggle in a Dublin bar a few years back. He was too embarrassed to get them magically mended, so the huge gap remains.
His hands and feet are large, spindly creatures, outfitted with unnaturally long digits. The skin there is marred by old bites, burns, and claw marks. The cursed ring’s burn ate away both his ring and index fingers on his right hand by he got to St. Mungo's.
A the words 'nemo gratis mendax' are tattooed around his right wrist like a bracelet, in black spidery script. Shortly after The Ring Incident, he had FIAT tattooed across the the knuckles of his right hand, and NOX tattooed across his left with the missing ring finger leaving a scorched gap. Shirtless, there are dark bruised hashes of track scars in the crooks of his elbows and at his wrists.
Phil has a constant reek of flowery cigarette smoke and lavender oil about him.
Personality Description:
The Veela Charm works in mysterious ways in Philomenes. Whether his mother’s traits skipped over him or his pesky Y chromosome dampened the effects, he’s not really sure. Nor does he care. He doesn’t daze men with his…lovely wiles (not that he’s noticed, anyway), so much as he has weird grace and charisma about him.
When he’s not drunk off his arse, Phil can be a bit of a smooth operator – his laugh and voice have an airy, musical quality that makes some suggestion of his lineage. It’s never done him any good at getting into bed with someone, but its power has worked wonders with sealing black market trades.
He’s got as much moxie as a ringmaster when he's lucid. The kind of person who’s whole living fixes around his words. All snake oil and doubletalk, and between his enchanting voice, gap-toothed smile, and big harmless eyes, most people eat up his lies like cake. If you call him on it though, there’s the risk of igniting his veela temper. He’s got anger like a dead wheat field – one spark, and he’s up in flames.
Insomnia makes his nerves frayed as old rope. He goes about treating this with firewhiskey and tranquilizing spells. Hence, Philomenes has what people call his ‘on’ and ‘off’ days. ‘On’ days, he’s wired on adrenaline and shivers with jitters. ‘Off’ days, he’s often drunk or under a heavy haze of calming magic.
When he gets upset, Phil can’t keep control of his voice’s volume. When pressed to far, it becomes louder and shriller until he’s screeching like…well, a PMSing veela. This is very annoying and headache inducing.
Phil has always been quick with hexes. If there’s a good chance the target won’t try to kill him, expect him to be firing off curses at the slightest provocation. He’s nothing to sneeze at, either. Spending all day surrounded by books, rare and illegal alike, has given him access to a host of bizarre, nasty spells.
For all his nerdery, Philomenes is a bit of a hedonist. He likes hookahs, booze, slaggy women, and obscenely rich cake. His patronus is a jackal.
History:
Cuchulainn Kecklepenny was what every housewitch in Edinburgh would’ve called a ‘good man’. Whatever the hell that meant. The only flaw they could see was that the man didn’t have a woman, all caught up in his books and treatise writing.
For you see, Cuchulainn was a classic knowledge hungry Ravenclaw. His focus was Arcane Muggle Practices of Pre-Sixteenth Century Society and Ancient Magics. His studies sent him to the Caribbean to study voodoo culture, druids in his native Scotland, and fatefully to Greece while continuing his research on early Mediterranean Divination rituals, specifically the Oracle of Delphi.
A wealthy fisherman in the town had a daughter, and she was the most lovely woman Cuchulainn had ever seen. Alastrina Mykonos was hardly the typical Greek beauty, all pale-skinned and silver-blonde. She was the rare product of a Muggle – the fisherman – and a veela who had deigned to save him when his boat crashed amid the stones on an isolated stretch of Trojan coast. And Cuchulainn, well – he couldn’t resist. He dropped his research to about the business of winning her hand.
In time, he did. He loved Alastrina, and she loved him. They married in Thebes and got terrible sunburns during the reception. She loved him, and said she’d follow him anywhere. She didn’t think he’d take that so literally, though.
Alastrina regretted those words when Cuchulainn spirited her away from sunny southern Greece to brooding, chilly Scotland for a ‘holiday’. She would have left him once he declared they were staying in Edinburgh if he hadn’t gotten her up the chuff just the week before they left. To this day, she insists he did it on purpose. Somehow.
Little Philomenes was the glue of their marriage for many years, but the bond cracked soon enough.
Phil’s parents divorced when he was six. Alastrina went back to Greece, Cuchulainn holed up in the huge oak library he called a house and perfumed himself with firewhiskey. They were civil, talking via pensive and flooing their boy between Greece and Scotland from time to time. As Phil got older, his father stopped accompanying him to Delphi. On his 11th birthday, Alastrina sent him a single gift: a strand of veela hair. His grandmother’s.
For most of his Hogwarts career, Philomenes was a model Ravenclaw. Studious, intellectual, witty. A good disguise, more than anything. He started stealing from his fellow students that first year, then from his father, then from Hogsmeade shops. The kleptomania only worsened as he aged.
Those first few years were also the time he displayed his father’s hunger for learning. He devoured the library at Kecklepenny Manor, and then worked on eating up the Hogwarts Library too. Little Phil was obsessed with the Restricted Section – this was where his insomnia started, perhaps, staying up all night reading dangerous books by wandlight.
Philomenes was successful in all his studies, but he excelled most in Transmogrification and DADA. Defense Against the Dark Arts inspired him to do some outside research, then “research”.
He fell into Knockturn Alley like a child in a candystore – except he was a 6th year with bad teeth perusing shrunken heads instead of candy. He rented a room at the Black Chimera instead of spending holidays with Daddy. He volunteered at Borgin & Burkes, accepting payment in the form of knowledge and the occasional stolen artifact. He was fired when he tried stealing a cursed ring – it burnt two of his fingers off at the knuckle.
He stole a fistful of rare blossoms from the Hogwarts hothouse his seventh year, trying to win over an unsavory apothecary into hiring him. And he was hired, just…not for what he’d originally hoped. Phil became the apothecary’s thieving errand boy, snatching reagents from Hogwarts and other magical shops, and being sent on wild goose chases across England for rare flora.
Even with his many odd jobs, Phil managed to graduate with outstanding grades (and a spotty behavioral record)…thanks to his newfound dependence on adrenaline spells and acuity potions. He visited his father for the first time in three years that summer, and steadily stole a huge portion of Cuchulainn’s most ancient and dangerous books over those months. Philomenes hasn’t spoken to him since.
As the apothecary aged, he depended more and more on Philomenes to procure his rarest reagents. No longer having school to eat up time, Phil gladly took assignments that dragged him all across Europe hunting down illegal plants and endangered beasties. Before he knew it, his enthusiasm and intellect (and naiveté) got him smuggling contracts with other unsavory Knockturn Alley proprietors.
These days, Philomenes is living in a small flat above a cursed garment shop. It’s cheap because most people don’t like sleeping with screaming dresses downstairs, but it’s not like Phil sleeps anyway. He runs a small antique bookshop out of his flat.
Writing Sample:
Philomenes always found it strange that Madame Flint liked muggle musicals.
Phil himself thought they were trash, but the flood of Drought of Peace and firewhiskey swimming in his head loosened him up to the idea.
He’d seen the one Madame Flint was humming the opening score to with a Mudblood girlfriend back in his fifth year. Mathilde, or something like that, a freckle faced cow of a girl who’d dragged him to Les Miserables in London for his birthday. He’d dropped her a week afterwards, he remembered that much. Maybe Flint was a Mudblood too.
A Mudblood who paid him, though. So Philomenes sang.
A voice like his made a room cold – his mother’s, his grandmother’s. Soft and quiet, it carried a different volume all its own.
“Oh there, out in the darkness, a fugitive running…” he crooned, “fallen from grace, fallen from grace…”
Weaved through the amber bottles, ghosted across the knobbly hands of ginger root strung from the ceiling, slipped right into Apothecary Flint’s hairy old ears.
A breathy castrato, flickering around the highest C notes, crooning Javert’s declaration to the stars about the dusty apothecary. The hag’s head swiveled up like a dog scenting rabbit, and she gawped at her apprentice.
“Is…is that you, boy?”
A hazy smile curled across Phil’s lips, and he sang on. The thick brogue that choked his words had evaporated into mist, only clinging to the syllables in faint suggestions of sound.
“God as my witness, I never shall leave ‘til we came face to face!”
“Phil—“
“He knows his way in the darkness! But my – my way is the path of the righteous!”
And then, “Philomenes…” Softer, almost a sigh.
“And…and if you fall! As Lucifer fell! If – if you – BOLLOCKS!“
His half-solid glue knees swayed beneath him, sock feet slipping on the crate. His skinny body crashed to the floorboards like a thrown handful of twigs, back of his head knocking so hard his teeth rattled. The sudden shift and whirl of vertigo turning a twister in his skull pitched his stomach right up into his throat. Dry heaves and nothing else– lucky he’d only had cigarettes for breakfast this morning. Hazy grey eyes stared at the ceiling, sealed off and slatted as it was by lashes and lids.
Philomenes distantly heard Madame Flint stumping over to him, spitting swears. Whatever softness had lurked in her voice was long gone.
“…witless as a dragon turd, you are! Guzzling on my droughts, I see!”
“Hoi, I wasn’…jus’…” Phil slurred.
“Shut your face, I can smell the hellebore on your stinking breath from here. Think ye can suck potions from me like a mama cat then, aye? Well, the tit’s run dry!”
“Soz, Flinty, really sorry…can’t sleep, y’know how I is…am…”
His tongue felt like slug, flopping around wet and useless in his mouth. He was probably drooling a little. Nothing like a bash on the head to get your tranquilizers working.
There might have been more to it – probably was. But Phil had mercifully drifted off to sleep. Or he was unconscious.
Both were good with Phil.
Sum up your character in one paragraph:
Philomenes is a quarter-veela who's lost his charm (if he had any too begin with) -- well, at least in the physical sense. He has his sudden insights of intellect and rare (very rare) beauty, but these are muddled by the magical wreck he's made of his nervous system. Everything about Phil's shoddy situation could have been prevented. He had comfort, beauty, money -- and he tossed it all over his shoulder for thievery, leaky roofs, and sleepless nights.
Perhaps one day he'll wake up and declare the whole thing an sociological experiment analyzing the mind of the common London wizard criminal. If he ever sleeps, that is. There's no 'waking up' with insomnia.
Philomenes Kecklepenny - Criminal