Accepted! ~Elle

Your Nickname: Natasha
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: Yes
If Yes, list them all: Jason Marren
George Carter
Frank Pratt
Julian St. James

Is this a Primary or Secondary Character?: Primary

Full Character Name: Casper Otto Bagman
Character Birthday & Age: 3 December 1977, 31 years old
City & Country of Birth: Bournmouth, Dorset, England, United Kingdom
Blood Purity: Pureblood
Alma Mater: Ravenclaw
Job/Position: Senior Obliviator

Wand: Eight and a quarter inch light maple with a core of Unicorn Tail that he received in Ollivander’s at age eleven. His poor father was nearly hexed for taking him there over his mother’s desire for something more her family style.

Physical Description: At six-two, Casper is nearly as tall as his father, if he stands straight and tilts his head back. Other than height and broad shoulders, the most lasting trait his father gave him are his piercing brown eyes. His mother’s ancestry did the work of Ludo’s more recessive genes, overpowering the English blood with stout Russian-German roots. His skin doesn’t burn as easily as his paternal side, and the dark brown locks, hardened eyebrows and downward curved nose give his face an older look.

Because of his genetics, as he gets older, he finds hair grows in more places (and in more abundance) than he ever expected. If kept short, his hair is wavy, easy to manage, and soft. If allowed to grow out, it curls. Even the hair on his chest is confused. Still, as long as no one plays the odd or even game, he’ll just as soon keep what he has.

As a boy who grew up with a father who expected lavish living, Casper has come to expect nice things for himself. He enjoys dressing up, looking sharp with bright colors, and impressing with the careless casual way his outfit might appear to be. It’s harder to repair first impressions, a lesson his father has painfully taught him, so he’s learned to start off on his best foot. Luckily his easy going smile and imploring eyes help disarm some of his opposition.

Casper has a number of permanent markings that he has come to cherish: memories of more innocent times. In between his eyebrows is an old indent scar, and two others above it, faint reminders of falls off a broom. He didn’t grow up the son of a world-famous Beater and come out clean. His right shoulder is mended skin, a visual reprimand of what spells could do. On his left upper arm, a permanent mark of boyish stupidity at which he allowed himself to be spell-branded his father’s Quidditch number as his wager on a lost bet (the Slytherin versus Ravenclaw match in the 1993-1994 school year, where Ravenclaw lost narrowly).


Personality Description: Casper has three sides he shows of himself. There is the composed, dedicated worker who focuses on his job. Then there is the slightly more relaxed Casper, spending time with friends outside of work, though depending on the situation he doesn’t allow his entire guard down. And then there is the side that very few (at least in recent years) get to see, and he subconsciously reserves it for his closest friends and his wife. His humor can go from sarcastic and socially acceptable to silliness, in the appropriate setting.

Growing up as the first born of Alena Grumman and Ludovic “Ludo” Bagman, Casper had a lot of expectations and perceived obstacles to overcome. Some shadows were too large for the young boy, and he struggled with attempting to fill the broom his father tried to force upon him. At the same time his mother raised her properly bred pureblood son to believe in the ideals of old, the way things were supposed to be, even after the [first] fall of Voldemort.

And so the question of nature versus nurture raged on. It’s hard to shake values instilled, though his father wasn’t all together in agreement with his younger wife’s ambitions and hopes. Seeking a desire to please his mother and gain approval from his father, Casper pushed himself frequently farther than perhaps his young self should have. In his quest for father-son time, he would often watch his father (more carefully than those who did dealings with the chronic gambler), and he picked up a few nasty habits.

Alena and her desire for power and station also fed into a longing in Casper. He sought to appease and please, dazzle and be praised. As he grew older, that morphed itself, and lessons he learned from his father twisted into cunning (and bad gambling decisions at times), and lessons from his mother into crowd-pleasing. Perhaps that is why he works well with laws and finding ways around them for his clients.

At the same time, he feels a need to protect himself, come across as objective as he can, and put himself into his work. Often an overachiever (if only starting out as a means for attention), he has worked hard to put worth back into his father’s name, and he realized early on that honesty was the first step down that long road. Casper likes his goblet half full and occasionally has to be brought back down from his imaginary quidditch field.

His relationship with his family is strained at best. Though he can be irresponsible, superficial and careless, Casper works hard to keep those aspects of himself hidden from his professional life. He finds it hard to open up and trust new people, though people find it easy to trust in him.


History: Alena Grumman was a star-struck, fresh out of Durmstrang kid when she met Ludo Bagman, her wand in one hand and ambition in the other. He had half a dozen fan girls around him, but she knew she was the prettiest, and had the most interesting drawl to her voice. Needless to say, when the night was over, she had drunk all the other floozy girls under the table, and she had Ludo on her arm. He saw it the other way around, but he hadn’t begun to realize how much he underestimated this dark beauty.

The short, but not necessarily sweet, story of the courtship started with that night and ended when Alena got through Ludo’s thick head that he wasn’t leaving her to raise a child while he went off with the Wimbourne Wasps without her. And thus a wedding was hatched.

Together the young couple settled into a small cottage outside of Bournemouth, Dorset, an easy commute to work for both. When Casper came along, he was a distraction for both inexperienced overgrown children. Alena was a well-bred spoiled brat, and she trotted Casper around to her family and friends, to gatherings, parading him in the best toddler outfits she could. And then it was all gone. Ludo, with all his thick headedness and Quidditch popularity, showed that no one was safe when he was picked up and carted off for a trial.

Over the next couple of years Alena moved Casper around, staying at her parents or an apartment here and there. Ludo’s charges were dropped, but she had known he wasn’t really guilty anyway. He might have been pureblooded, but he wasn’t quite as cunning as his wife. It gave the troublesome couple time to miss each other while she stayed with Casper and Ludo stopped in when he wasn’t off training or playing. Alena, bored of his games now, was tired of his boasts and empty promises. She started to realize how gilded he was, and what sort of problems he brought with his fame.

By the time Ludo started as the head of the Department of Magical Games and Sports, the Dark Lord had all but vanished, and the lavish parties became hush get-togethers of a handful of the previous ten or twenty. Casper was old enough to realize something had changed. His mother still taught him the ‘proper way,’ and his father taught him his way, taking him around to learn ‘proper gambling etiquette.’  When he wasn’t absorbing his parents (and their family or friends) influence, he was teaching himself wizards chess or doing tricks on his training broom or had his nose in a book. His mum treated him well enough, but she still craved her own attention, and Ludo… well, he also liked his own attention.

So Casper learned to entertain himself at home, which was easy enough with the spacious surroundings and hilly land. With his high influence, Ludo was able to wall off parts to muggles. It was the perfect haven for curious, rambunctious boys, but not perhaps for trapped and lonely housewives. So what else could Alena do but find her own job? And thus she set up her own tea shop in a local wizarding village, and it became the gossip spot, a place Casper was dragged to when his mum felt he needed a little more womanly influence. Yuk.

His parents argued over where he would go to school. Ludo finally won his battle, and Casper’s letter for Hogwarts came. Alena washed her hands of it, told Ludo to provide for the boy and his school needs, and she would provide for his upbringing. Yet she seemed to only fall back into her business, looking for other investments to put into. She knew her husband’s problem was only growing bigger as his wealth increased, and his lust for winning was never going to fade. Plus the occasional goblin visit left a bad (and vicious) taste in the younger woman.

With his school things in hand, his mother kissed him on the forehead, bade him a good year, and sent him on his way to the train. He knew a number of children (of friends of his parents), and settled in with the boy who would turn out to be his best mate. His parents had worked so hard on his ‘proper upbringing’ that they forgot to keep someone his own age around him.

Casper was sorted quickly into Ravenclaw, and came to find that his classes weren’t as easy as he had hoped. People knew his dad; they expected him to be a clone. What they found was a healthy (maybe cutely chubby) boy who preferred to learn from a book than hop on broom. A bad fall as a child had cured him of long term fun on a broom.

The next year was when he found out his mother was pregnant. Casper shot up a couple inches, but still lounged around more than kept active. He teased and stuck to his mates. Though he didn’t particularly enjoy being in trouble, Casper often got out of it (to the annoyance of his mates, who were stuck with hard labor) by offering tutoring. While the young boy let off his disappointment at the world and the things it had given him, he was able to bounce back and offer someone help. It was how he met Molly, and she annoyed him and pestered, being a pain-in-his-arse halfblood.

Casper could write an essay and pass with flying marks, but he could never draw or act. He couldn’t swirl around in the air, a dancer on a broom, and he wasn’t made for tournament dueling. His arms were used to holding books, after all. It wouldn’t do to sully them with calluses from constant waxing. And so, after the first bit of punishment was finished, he found reason to be in detention again. And then again, because maybe he liked getting in trouble. After a while, though, it was an annoyance that he couldn’t remember how he kept getting snaked back into the same deal.

Aside from all her annoying qualities (and little Casper would say she had a lot of those), she intrigued him as well. Her innocence and naivety was inspiring, and her creative flare made him a little jealous. She had so much to say sometimes, but then other times she would hardly talk to him. Casper was intrigued at the very least; she was completely different then the well-behaved, smartly dressed girls he grew up seeing. Plus it gave him an outlet to forget about things at home. His mum didn’t write as often, focusing more on the pregnancy and her investments, and his father wrote hardly at all either way.

By the end of the second year, he couldn’t remember why he hadn’t liked his tutee from the start. She liked cats, which was weird, but otherwise she seemed all right. He talked with her about made up futures, the complexities of wizard’s chess, and the proper amount of time to let pumpkin juice simmer before it had the perfect amount of flavor. Though she had her own drama, she would listen to his. That summer he kept in touch with her (on top of his three best mates). It wasn’t until his mum intercepted one of the letters, teasing him about getting an owl from a girl and forcing the chubby cheeked boy to blush hot, that he hit his first real brick wall with his mum.

It was the girl’s name that was an issue, and at first he didn’t know what she was referring to. Growing up around a woman who spoke another language had forced Casper to pick up quite a simplistic vocabulary. And she was not happy. Ludo listened with a glass of firewhiskey in one hand, a Quidditch Weekly in the other, agreeing when he thought she wanted to hear it, scoffing when it got too quiet. She forbade her son to continue this farce—he was better than this girl he was writing! Did he want to disappoint his mum? Did he enjoy giving her heart worry? Hadn’t he sworn on Salizar that he would marry a pureblood young woman to appease his dear mum?

He didn’t write her back once that summer, no matter how many letters he tried to start. Just before it came time to go back, his body started to hit the awkward part of growing up, and his voice was higher pitched at times than imaginative Molly. His mates gave him a hard time (at least until they started to experience it as well). He’d shot up over the summer four inches, lost some of his baby fat, and felt even more lost than he had before.

On top of all that stress, and the sudden shunning of Molly, Casper did not like coming back to the ill tidings of the year. He avoided Pratt like dragon pox, using the time between classes that he might have sat in the library or great hall to study to instead get out and about. His legs hurt, his arms ached, his self-esteem was all over the place, and so he took a lot of walks or jogs around the approved property to stretch his growing pains. Whatever puberty was, he didn’t care for it.

Well, until he realized that girls were more than just the opposite sex.

It became harder to ignore Molly; he knew he had hurt her, and continuing to pretend like she didn’t exist wasn’t helping. And then he got stuck with her for a project, and he couldn’t very well blow her off and go back to his mates. All it took was a rather juvenile kick to the shins and a few teary eyed glares to break down his icy demeanor. All his mum had tried to emulate over the summer holidays dissolved, and he tried his best to explain his actions by explaining the prejudice he grew up learning.

But what can thirteen year olds do but fight, make up, get along, fight, make up, get along, and repeat? Still, she had been one of the few girls who hadn’t minded listening to him talk about the finer qualities of wizarding chess for an hour on end. Another best mate that his mum was going to have to deal with. Or not find out about…

And thus he devised a pseudo name: Jane Bagman, a lost cousin. His mum was a little more pleased he was talking with a girl (who’s blood status she thought she was encouraging), and a bit distracted with the new baby to give many other opinions. She even offered to have her over during the holidays, talking about family get-togethers and parties in the backyard, even if she didn’t care for her in-laws as much as she pretended. Casper was smart enough to realize that wasn’t a very bright idea—what if someone started asking the wrong questions?

So he kept Molly as a mate, right under his mum’s nose, and things seemed less chaotic. He had his first girlfriend that year, and his second. The innocence of stammering children trying to be adults was not as adorable then as it is looking back on it. The girls didn’t understand his friendship with Molly, and sometimes Molly didn’t understand his relationship with the girls.

By the next year, he had grown a little taller, his voice had broken in a little more, and he had to deal with the frustration of his mum, complaining about Harry Potter. If anything, he was just as curious as every other magical child, peering around each other to gawk at the short, scrawny boy who had been talked in hushed reverence (or heated under stated anger) for the past so many years. Almost his entire life. It was a feeling Molly didn’t understand, the feeling of pureblooded camaraderie. Even if Harry Potter didn’t understand it either.

One thing was for sure: while Potter attended Hogwarts, excitement was never very far. And even Molly experienced her own odd experiences. He knew there were other Pratt’s at Hogwarts, but it was something entirely different when she figured out relations to those.

By his seventh year, Casper knew his father had an addiction to gambling. The issues with goblins were increasing, his mum had retreated with his little sister, leaving Ludo to his fate. Casper felt a need to protect his father, to somehow help him. Ever proud and always arrogant, Mr. Bagman thought he had everything worked out. With his mum not around as much to bother him, Casper was able to bring Molly along with him to the Quidditch World Cup.

It turned out to be more excitement than he wanted to expose her to. They ended up back at his house, scared, jumpy, and in a place that felt way too quiet. Ludo didn’t make it home for several days… and then it was for a short time; he was going to be coming with the two older teens to Hogwarts. Casper was less than thrilled, but he didn’t have much say in it.

Like most boys who were old enough, he had put his name in the Goblet of Fire. Unlike most, he knew it was for show—he was intelligent, but he lacked other confidence that other boys (like Cedric) had in abundance. When the Triwizard Tournament ended, it would be three years until he saw his father again. With his family broken up, Casper saw little use in keeping Molly hidden. His previous cowardice, fearing his mother’s wrath, was shed in the aftermath of the unexpected year, the tragedy that befell Hogwarts, and the threat that seemed to be at everyone’s fireplace.

What do young adults do, though, but grow a pair and puff out their chests in defiance? Molly and he started to date during their last year at Hogwarts, after finally pulling his head out of the lake and seeing she was better than the handful of girls he had dated all ready. School was challenging and friendships were easily bent and repaired, made and dissolved, but his close mates stayed. Upon graduation, he realized how frail the connections had been, and most moved on to learn how to be adults in the real wizarding world. His best mate and he joined up together at the Ministry, becoming Obliviators-in-Training together.

Perhaps some of the things that helped save him from being carted in to testify before Umbridge was his name, his family, and his use of memory charms. Molly was easy enough to hide; Jane Bagman was an all ready constructed idea he had to work with.

Even Umbridge couldn’t contend with his mum, though, when he finally told her that he planned to marry his halfblood girlfriend. The scar on his shoulder is a lasting reminder of her opinion on his choices. Still, he considers it a price worth paying for honesty. His sister, though a younger version of his mother, was more accepting (though that wasn’t saying much). The wealth he had grown accustomed to, the left over bit from his father and what his mother had gathered with her various business, was quickly taken from him, and he had to learn to live a less than lavish lifestyle.

If Alena had been upset about the marriage, she had been red-faced-furious that Casper had insisted his young bride not take his last name. Growing up with it, though, Casper knew what kind of baggage was attached to it.

Marriage has continued to be a work-in-progress, and something he thinks he’s on the path to perfecting. His father showed up for the small ceremony, and little bit by little bit, Casper has helped pay some of his debts off in the past few years. Where his mother would prefer to see him as little as possible, Lugo takes it upon himself to stop in for short visits. His father attempts to stay off the radar as much as possible, his gambling debts still unpaid. Casper finds himself in more trouble with money after his father had gone than he ever expected to. If a lost wager is what he has to pay for father-son time, he tries to tell himself it’s worth it.

Casper would like to think the craziest things in his life are behind him, and that he has a lot of boring relaxing to do, put a right to his birth name, and balance Molly’s unhealthy love for felines. Whatever happens, he’s a goblet half full type of man, and he likes it over-flowing. 


Describe your job duties and how you go about them:  He is a Senior-Obliviator, working under the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, often working with other departments to help contain larger disasters, more often in muggle areas, through means of memory charms. As he has fourteen years under his belt, they finally made him Senior in November. With that, he helps train Obliviators-in-Training, is a resource for other Obliviators, and collaborates on the plans of action versus being the one who just goes out and does what he’s told.

There are many ethical and legal constraints to the field, and the use of least obliviation is encouraged. On a normal day, he may have a case or two to follow up on, a handful to lightly charm away oddities on muggles, and numerous areas to monitor. Such is the issue with keeping wizarding communities hidden within large muggle cities. At least it keeps his job interesting, and the new duties and responsibilities keep him on his toes.


Elaborate on your expertise in your field: During the summer before his sixth and seventh year, Casper got on at the Ministry, being a useful owl-boy for the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. His personality and willingness to learn (and quick mind) helped him climb quickly in the Obliviators. It also helped that he has a somewhat unhealthy love for his job and memory charms.

Writing Sample:

Sum up your character in one paragraph: Casper tries to make things work, with two jobs, Molly's insane love of cats and other animals, his lavish tastes, and his father's debts. All in all, he enjoys his work, and is still figuring out the balance between work life and personal.