Your Nickname: Dlee
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: Deus Deres - 6th Year Slytherin
Is this a Primary or Secondary Character?: Secondary

Full Character Name: Colm Ruadhán Ó Coigligh
Character Birthday & Age: March 13, 1983
City & Country of Birth: An Cheathrú Rua, Ireland
Blood Purity: Pureblood
Alma Mater: N/A - he did not attend formal school

Job (If any): Herbologist/Criminal
Type of Creature: Werewolf
Are they Registered with the Ministry of Magic?: No

Are they considered a 'Dark' Creature?: Yes
If yes, What crimes have they committed to earn this title:
Colm was only recently turned into a werewolf--all of his convictions were prior to being bitten.

 Convictions

• 1997 | Underage Magic/Theft/Assault on a Ministry Official – Sentenced to Juvenile Detainment*
• 2000 | Breaking and Entering/Theft
• 2002 | Assault  - 1 year in Azkaban
• 2005 | Assault  - 3 years in Azkaban

*released on account of being a pureblood during regime change

Crime without Convictions

• Theft – primarily of valuable objects, with the occasional pickpocket, though he doesn't bother with that much anymore
• Breaking/Entering —both shops and homes
• Assault —usually against fellow criminals or muggles, he's done some very violent things that either haven't been reported, been pinned on someone else, or were against people other people don't care about, etc.
• General Thug-For-Hire Crimes —lots of little dirty work things. Burglary, intimidation, participation in kidnapping
• Murder (2002 and 2008)   – shortly before being convicted of assault, Colm accidentally (mostly) killed his sister's muggle husband. He was arrested the next day for assault (separate incident), and by the time the man's murder was discovered, it was considered to be a muggle crime. She's even more unbalanced than he is, and didn't report his death because she wasn't sure if she was the murderer or not. He's also killed a werewolf, albeit in self-defense. 

Thank you, Thea, for the format to the above

Are you currently under pursuit by the Ministry of Magic for these crimes?: No. They are looking for those responsible for some of the crimes he has committed, but he is not an immediate suspect. He's generally considered to be worthless small-time scum thanks to his prior convictions and family history, he's been questioned about several crimes, but his crimes are disjointed, without any real theme, pattern, or connection, so there aren't really any dots to connect. His little farm plot shack is kept under slightly lax watch.

Wand: 13", Paduak, Basilisk eye
Colm's wand was made by his great-grandfather. It is highly temperamental, known to do unpleasant things in the hands of anyone other than Colm. It's older than he is by a considerable amount of time.

Physical Description:

Colm may have a pretty face for a Quigley, but people rarely make it that far, because everything else about Colm's appearance seems to suggest a dead man walking; the pale, waxy skin riddled in angry, disturbing  scars and stretched thin over a disorganized bag of brittle bones, the sunken eyes and gaunt face, and the haunted, emaciated shadows cast by his stark angles. He's not a pretty person.

His has every type of scar you can find on a living body—rips, tears, illness related, but most notable are the burns. His entire left side is scarred . His left arm is wrapped in them like a parody of a tattoo—raised, puffed and puckered, the skin has faded from angry red to a darker, almost pink color, but the contrast to his pale skin can be a bit disconcerting if you aren't prepared. The scars stretch over his entire lower back, up his shoulders and to the side of his neck, and down his left leg to the knee. The skin around his joints is tight and raw-looking, and he holds his left hand as though it can't quite open all the way. His hands are larger than you might expect for his size, with long, slender and quick fingers.

He looks brittle—and to be fair, he is, thanks to his family sabotaging their genetic code. Doesn't stop him, but most of his bones have been broken, not all of them have healed properly. He walks with a slight limp when he's tired, and if one looks closely, they'll notice that his burned arm is slightly shorter than his right. The wounds were primarily superficial, but they look pretty awful.   Everything about Colm is stretched out and elongated. It's not that he's tall—on the contrary, he's actually smaller than average, as his whole family is—it's just that his angles are sharp, and his skin looks as though it's been stretched over a skeleton. He's nothing but bones and lean muscle pulled to the snapping point over his disjointed angles. 

He has the Quigley family curly red hair and green eyes, almond-shaped like a cat’s, with flecks of hazel-brown, and a tendency to not blink for long periods of time. While you'd expect the color to be bright, instead, it's a morose, moody color, and his eyes often appear sunken because of the circles that have formed under his eyes. He's one of the few in his family to have eyes that both point in the proper direction. He’s got a surprisingly gentle smile, crooked, misleadingly tender and distracted—misleading being the operative word.  He doesn’t really smile all that often unless he's playing a part. His lips are cupid bowed and slightly open most of the time, his cheeks starkly slanted over a hard, serious jaw.

Despite his scrawniness and slight height, the look in his eyes and the scars make for a decently intimidating figure.

Personality Description:
//CURSED
Colm's pureblood scum family was cursed a century and a half ago, and he has the standard bad luck of his family. Things rarely, if ever, go right for him for very long. Brooms fall out of the sky, potions explode, he's sick all the time, etc. The most current manifestation of his family's curses has been a massively distorted, century-strengthened Wakefulness Charm. Think of it as a reverse Sleeping Beauty spell—Colm can barely, if ever, sleep. The curse gets stronger every couple of months as he approaches the age at which most of his family either dies or is gets sentenced to a permanent Mungo's ward, and he's able to sleep less and less, no matter how tired he is. As Colm suffers from increasing magically-induced insomnia, the results are panic attacks, paranoia, delusions and hallucinations. The longer he goes without sleep, the worse it gets. He's in the middle stages of the curse, and in his lucid moments, he's aware that at the rate the curse is progressing, he won't be able to sleep at all by his early thirties, and at that point, total madness and death won't be far off. Because of his distorted genetics (serious inbreeding in his family), and family predisposition for mental imbalance, it probably won't take that long before his irrational moments far outnumber his coherent ones. He's living on borrowed time, he knows it, and he's got nothing to lose.

//UNBALANCED
Colm was one of the few Quigleys whose madness has been a gradual development, and for now he still has about as many lucid times as he does imbalanced ones, but he's fighting a losing battle to hold onto his sanity. During his bad moments, and within those experiences, he often has violent fits and highly irrational periods of behavior. Sometimes he doesn't always seem to realize there are people around him, or believes the people around him are figments of his imagination. Most often he has paranoid delusions, and a massively distorted interpretation of the world and situations around him. He's injured himself during those fits more than he count, and injured others even more. He talks to people that aren't there, talks in disjointed, circular sentences because what he hears and what he says are different things, accuses people of things they've never heard of, and will absolutely turn on anyone who tries to touch him. These episodes aren't always violent, but they usually go that route eventually.  This fragmentation has gotten worse since being bitten.

//UNEDUCATED and CUNNING
To be perfectly clear, Colm is not stupid. He's uneducated, and there is vast difference that often is dismissed between the two.  His family, snobs as they were, weren't big on sending their children away to learn with the riffraff, and so he went without professional schooling. In fact, since his dad disappeared during the war, and his Aunt's even nuttier than the rest of his family, he didn't really get any kind of schooling at all. But while other kids were writing essays on topics on obscure herbs and pretending to pay attention in History of Magic, Colm was learning about people. He may not know how to make anything other than basic, standard potions, but he knows people: how they think, how they act, and how they move, and he knows how to respond accordingly. Colm's a master of social engineering when he's not in a fit. He also knows more about crime than some criminals twice his age, thanks to time in jail with the big boys and a learning curve that started the minute the minute his first infant wail hit air. Colm is cunning and manipulative and his practical skills are off the charts; the best hunters are the ones in a position where if they don't hit, they don't eat—definition of Colm's life. He can pick a lock (or a lock spell), tell you how much a smuggled good is worth and where to sell it without pausing, blend into the wall as unforgettably as possible, and if people think he's too dumb and too crazy to have pulled it off, well, punishments for goons and minions is never as bad as the ones for masterminds. Colm's not much of a planner, he just makes things work.

 On the flipside, he's only barely literate. He's pretty good at basic math, but he can't read anything overly multi-syllabic—the Daily Prophet is beyond him, save for a few words here and there, maybe enough to get the gist of the article, but it would take him awhile, and that seriously hinders his effectiveness.

//AMORAL and CALLOUS
In his lucid moments, Colm is something of an aggressive recluse. He’s not a leader—he’s too independent. But he isn't really a good follower, for much the same reason. He tends to overcompensate for his lack of control of himself by being overly controlled when he's not in the throes of his family curse; he doesn’t relax too often.  He's quiet and brooding, difficult to read and even harder to predict. He detests emotion, avoids it if at all possible, and tends to be mildly derisive of overly-emotional people. He's generally dismissive of other people and their rights in general, he has no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for their impact on others. His relationships—if you can call them that—are strategic and manipulative.

//OTHER
Colm has the most disturbed sense of humor you'll ever encounter. Things just strike him as funny, and he's got a slightly, understandably sideways outlook on life. Becoming a werewolf hasn't changed him much. He's slightly more actively aggressive than he used to be, eats a lot more raw meat, and otherwise isn't all that noticeably different. Becoming a werewolf would be a devastating life blow to most people. To a Quigley, it's just not really a surprise.

History:

Colm Quigley is part of the cursed Quigley family, (Ó Coigligh if you talk to his grandparents). A few centuries back, Éibhear Ó Coigligh was a mediocre potionsmaster and experimental herbologist from Galway with a monumental overdose of arrogance and inflated ego. When one of his creations went horribly, horribly wrong, the result was the major contributor to the most devastating chapter in Irish history-the Potato Blight, leading to the Great Hunger. The witches and wizards who survived were understandably horrified, and they banded together and cast every known curse and jinx, and quite a few that weren't known and have been forgotten, on Éibhear and his descendants. In other words, the Ó Coigligh family is quite literally cursed with perennial bad luck.

Born and bred in the countryside near the Gaeltacht (Irish/Gaeilge-speaking town) of An Cheathrú Rua, Ireland (Carrowroe), Colm’s mum was a poor pureblood Hufflepuff witch from Dublin. She went well against her parents' wishes to marry her second cousin, Beanon Ó Coigligh, who was considered to be from a far lesser family, and subsequently she was more or less cut off. How Beanon managed it is a mystery, but Colm has long suspected there was a love potion involved, because no one in their right mind would marry into the mess of a family. Either that, or there was something even worse in her family she wanted out of. Either way, Colm was born into a broke, unstable home with a half-crazy dad and a miserable mother. He was raised speaking Gaeilge as a first language, and so his English is heavily accented and contains the cadence of the old Irish language.  He has a twin sister with the vast misfortune—standard Quigley line—of being born a seer, and one who, unsurprisingly, seemed to only be able to predict unavoidably bad things that were going to happen. Needless to say, she started out unstable and has remained that way.

He spent his childhood (if it can be called that) in the House of the Ó Coigligh, a disgusting, dilapidated palace of a mansion that only remains in the hands of the impoverished clan because it's as cursed as they are, and the unofficial stance of the Ministry and all those with a marker of one of the Ó Coigligh's is that living there is punishment enough, and it's more trouble than it's worth. The whole family—what's left of it—live there. Since there are fewer than 20 of them left, and the mansion is built to house the massive clan of the past, it often felt empty despite his cousins (and possibly half-siblings or aunts/etc) running around.

The Ó Coigligh mansion was infested with every parasite imaginable, every form of mold and poisonous plants spilling in from the cursed gardens where their ancestor created the potato blight. Colm's earliest memories are of portraits screaming obscenities in dark, filthy hallways. He didn't have much of a childhood when nearly every drawer and closet had a boggart, and the family curse turned what little food was available into something akin to sawdust. He spent a large chunk of his childhood sick as a dog, thanks to the filth, the curse, and a generally weak immune system (again, thanks to his lovely family's habits). When Aisling remembered, she took care of him, and vice versa. And they grew up with various twin systems in place to keep each other safe in the constantly changing, booby-trapped rat-maze of a household.

There was a constant rotation of his few relatives as they came in and out of the mansion. Some of them tried to escape the family and the curse, but were sucked back in for some reason or another—usually an inability to make a living elsewhere. Nearly all of Colm's father's generation wound up in Azkaban for something other, and Colm learned the Dark Arts, how to fence stolen goods, how to break into a worthless mudblood traitor's house undetected, how to get around lock spells, securities, at their knees. The ones that didn't wind up in Azkaban usually wound up in a ward at Mungo's, and the few remaining never left the home. If you've ever read Great Expectations, well, Colm's Great Aunt was the inspiration for Miss Havisham. Most of them are dead now, as the family members rarely make it much past the early thirties.

His powers came young, and with devastating results. When he was almost seven, he lost control and nearly burned a wing of the mansion down. He just wanted the portrait to either shut up or tell him how to get back to the kitchen, and it burst into flames. Unfortunately, thanks to the filth, and the nature of being an Ó Coigligh, the whole wing caught on fire.  One of his half-cousins got him out, and the house's defensive charms eventually put the fire out, but Colm still has the scars since his family refused to take him the muggle-loving hospital set up by the muggle-loving government. It took him years to heal fully, and he still has trouble with his left side. He blacked out almost immediately, which explains why he isn't afraid of his own magic.

Colm doesn't really remember his mom ever really saying anything, she was just always sort of around—blank and automatic. From her comes Colm's tendency towards shallow emotions rather than anything deep, and his hatred and mistrust of emotional people. She didn't do much of anything either, furthering Colm's general suspicion she was under the influence of some kind of spell.   His dad mostly disappeared during the day, and when he was around, he told Colm and Aisling stories of the proud and powerful Ó Coigligh family. He regularly practiced the Dark Arts, and when the twins turned 11, he passed his teachings to them.  He's also responsibly for Colm's perceptive ability. Drunken ramblings of "look at them! Just LOOK at them!" were taken literally from a very young age.

Their great-grandfather is still alive. The curse pulls that on one of them from time to time, leaving one member of a generation living decades past their relatives, presumably to watch as their family collapses into self-destruction. He's the man who gave the twins their wands when they turned 11, made by his own hand. The things are temperamental as hell, and no sane wizard would buy from him if they had any other choice, but it suits the family.

It didn't take him long to start getting into trouble. Bored young boys who aren't in school are just a recipe for trouble, particularly when they grow up in a house of unstable purist scum. At 14, he was already a fairly accomplished thief and duelist, and when tagging along with one of his cousin/uncle's minor exploits, he got into a skirmish with a Ministry official and wound up in the equivalent of juvie, until the Dark Wizard Voldemort took over, and he was released on account of his purity. However, by that point he'd been away from his family long enough to realize he needed to get away from them, and he started spending more time in local disreputable pubs, learning, watching, and planning.

He and Aisling left the day the turned 17. It was Aisling's idea to change their name—her reasoning was if the curse was tied to the name, all they had to do was change it. It didn't work, but Colm keeps the changed name as an ironic insult to his ancestors. When their attempt didn't work, Aisling got married when they were 19. He was a muggle who was drunk and thought she was sweet (she was high on gillyweed) and asked her to marry him. Thinking changing her name might hide her from the family curse, she took him up on it. A week later police found him in a ditch, Aisling found herself with a small flat in Scotland, and no memory of the past few days. She doesn't think she killed him, but she isn't sure and it freaks her out a little.  It was, in fact, Colm, but he doesn't really remember the events. The full gambit of curses hit when they came of age, and it's about that time that Colm started getting a little unstable, as the waves of curses activated. The early fits were responsible for landing him in Azkaban. He gained, as a result of those attacks, a reputation for being bat-shit crazy and incapable of rationality. He's cultivated that reputation carefully as far as the Ministry is concerned. He would rather they think of him as incapable of planning. In jail, he did the same thing he did when he was young. Watch, listen, learn. He's definitely a little crazier since his time in the jail, but he's also smarter.

He was released after a healer diagnosed the presence of the Wakefulness Charm. The healer claimed that with regular sleeping draughts, Colm's instability would be rectified, and he could be a harmless, productive citizen. The healer vastly underestimated the strength of the Ó Coigligh curses, but Colm kept his mouth shut, looked apologetic, and, determined to stay out of jail for awhile, isolated himself as soon as possible with the plan to lay low until the Ministry believed what they wanted to.  The second time he was released, he found (read—forcibly evicted the previous tenant of) a shack near his old home with a sizable plot of land. In an ironic nod, he was attempting to make a living as an herbologist. The curse automatically turns anything he plants into something dangerous, so he just sold whatever came out of the ground to either criminals looking for poisons or apothecaries, potionsmasters and healers looking for ingredients. Sure enough, his luck held, and the Ministry began checking in on him less. When a few months went by without anything disastrous happening, he knew he was in trouble, and sure enough, a full moon came by. Turns out the former tenant lived in the middle of nowhere because he was a werewolf, and instinct brought him back. Colm eventually shoved the creature into an invisible dusk-blooming chokevine, waited for it to do its work, and then buried him in the backyard to use as fertilizer, but the damage was done.

Ironically, his luck has marginally improved since becoming a werewolf. Colm generally suspects a big bad wolf curse beats out some of the lesser jinx-like curses on his family, and that there's only so much room for bad magic on one person.

Sum up your character in one paragraph:

Colm Ruadhán Quigley is a half-mad, violent and moody jinx who speaks Irish more than English and doesn't like you. He can be harsh, quiet , unwelcoming, hard and dangerous for the unwary, with the potential to explode into an extraordinarily destructive nightmare at any minute. He's massively fragmented—strategic, observant, and intimidatingly quiet when he's lucid, psychotically violent, irrational and delusional when he isn't. An aggressive recluse, he commits crimes at seemingly random and is fighting the effects of a century and half old curse on his family.