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Player Information

Name: Amy

Messenger handles: amymaenad

E-mail: amy44_au@yahoo.com

Time Zone: +10

Was Your Character Held?: No

How Often Should You Post?: At least once a month

Are you over 18 years old?: Yes


Character Information

Name: James Potter

Age: 19

Fandom: Harry Potter

Point In Fandom Taken From: 1979 – late in the first war against Voldemort, but before the birth of his infamous son.

Employee or Patient? Employee – orderly

Personality: James is bright, talented and brave and to be perfectly frank – he knows it. Though nowhere near as cheerfully obnoxious as he was at the age of fifteen, he nevertheless has an arrogant streak. He can be impatient with those less quick and confident than himself and he retains a youthful belief in his own invulnerability. Duels, races and drinking contests all rate highly with him as entertainment and he is convinced that there is nothing he can’t do. In short, he can be utterly infuriating.

On the other hand, he is also honest and utterly steadfast in his loyalty. James Potter keeps his promises, and never doubts that others will keep promises made to him. Though he does love to fight he doesn’t relish killing and will always attempt to avoid it. He’d risk his life for a friend without hesitation and for an enemy with… well, only a small one, and perhaps a bit of expressive profanity.

As a rule he is direct and friendly, stoical and cheerful. His refreshingly normal and happy childhood has gifted him with a certain stability that may be said to be lacking in the backgrounds of his friends, and he is unfailingly generous with what is his – although often he scarcely seems to notice that he is distributing largesse – and those who receive it might easily mistake his kindness for condescension.

In the current, and decidedly peculiar, circumstances, he is likely to be largely sympathetic to patients and well-intentioned staff alike – after all, his story sounds completely barmy, especially to Muggles (non-magical people), and yet is completely true. It stands to reason that other people’s stories are going to sound utterly barmy to him.

Brief History: James is nothing if not a child of privilege. His mother was a daughter of the notoriously wealthy and quasi-aristocratic House of Black and his father was of an ancient line that had dwelt in Godric’s Hollow for centuries, and both brought considerable wealth to their union. They had James when his mother was near forty, when she was absolutely convinced that she was unable to have children, and in their surprised pleasure they spoiled him rotten. He always had the best toys, the best clothes and as many sweets as he wanted.

But he was never isolated. Godric’s Hollow was home to many wizard and Muggle families, and James’s parents never prevented him from associating with the children of either. He played his first games of Quidditch against the neighbours and he learned cricket from the kids from the Muggle part of the village – to this day he keeps track of who’s got The Ashes, and if he’d turned out, as wizarding children occasionally did, a non-magical Squib he maintains he’d have made a brilliant fast bowler. In the long run he grew up opinionated and superior, but neither selfish nor bigoted.

At Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry James was, irritatingly, the kid who was good at everything. There was never any thought of him not being Sorted into Gryffindor house. All his life he’d heard stories of his father’s escapades there, and from the moment the precious family Invisibility Cloak had been laid in his arms – or rather stuffed hastily in his trunk when his mother wasn’t looking – he’d been ready to carry on the family legacy; he’d been half certain he’d walk out if the Sorting Hat sent him somewhere else. He discovered he had a quick memory and could sail through exams with only half as much study as everybody else. Transfiguration was easy and nothing else was much harder. From his second year on he was a Chaser for the Gryffindor Quidditch team and by his fourth year people were crediting him with winning the Quidditch Cup. This was quite remarkable – school games were generally so short that the Chasers couldn’t make enough of an impact to outdo the Seekers – but he did have a knack for scoring goals.

To say that all this went to his head would be an understatement of epic proportions. For a while, between hormones and the heady thrill of his own brilliance, he looked set to become the world’s most annoying human being. He and his friends wreaked havoc of various kinds, learnt and applied every hex they could find and, somehow, found the time to learn to become Animagi. It was the war with the viciously anti-Muggle Lord Voldemort that settled James down, as much as anything; it seemed to grow bigger as he did.

The nastier Slytherins with whom he’d been trading hexes since his first year began to look more and more like Death-Eaters-in-training. Reports of dead or missing wizards became more and more frequent. And though he never thought of Muggle-born Lily Evans as a ‘Mudblood’ at some point it became chillingly clear to him that he was in love with a girl who would be dead if Voldemort had his way. Sometime around the very end of his fifth year he began to grow more thoughtful and less likely to pick fights for the fun of it – except with his long-time rival Snape, whom he could never abide and who he was sure was well on his way to joining the wrong side of the war effort. Clearly his change of heart impressed the Headmaster, as he received a Head Boy badge along with his booklist before he started his seventh year. He took his duties seriously, insofar as they meant keeping an eye out for Dark Magic and preventing bullying, but he was generally inclined to look the other way if he saw first years sneaking down to the kitchen at midnight.

For the rest, the best you could say about James, even at his worst, is that he is a loyal friend. He and his distant cousin Sirius Black were inseparable from the moment they arrived at Hogwarts. Or, to be more accurate, from the moment they boarded the Hogwarts Express a few hours earlier. Until Sirius ran away from home to live with the Potters they were apart only during the summer holidays. James came to stay with Sirius exactly once: there was an … incident involving sneaking out to play football with some Muggle boys. As it seemed entirely likely to her that James would attempt something just as foolish again, and the Black family temper was notorious, his mother forbade him to go back. On the other hand, Sirius, as well as James’s other friends, were always welcome at Godric’s Hollow.

The name of Black was synonymous with many things – wealth, power, prestige – but not with longevity, and while the Potters were a hardier breed his parents had had an odd sort of marriage: his father was more than twenty years his mother’s senior. So James’s parents were always a quiet, greying couple who in the background of his childhood. They might easily have been mistaken for a pair of doting grandparents: he adored them, but they could never keep up with him. When the Dragonpox epidemic in the winter of ’77 carried them both off, James was essentially left on his own. Oh he had relatives – plenty of them, on his mother’s side, but by that time he had firmly established himself as a blood-traitor, and most of them would have nothing to do with him nor he with them. His father had been the only child of an only child; that side of his family tree was always curiously blank.

With no blood relations to speak of, James instead embraced a family of his own making: a close circle of friends, and Lily Evans – now Lily Potter. He loved her from the time he was fourteen, when he began to appreciate that she was brave and clever – and fun, when she wasn’t disapproving of something – and, frankly, beautiful. Of course, it wasn’t until he was seventeen that he learned to express that love in a way that didn’t make her want to hex him. From there they had a whirlwind courtship and married immediately after finishing school.

But while James’s personal life was going along quite well, the war decidedly wasn’t: James had joined the Order of the Phoenix, an unofficial militia and spy network run by the Headmaster of Hogwarts, right out of school, and by 1979 they were suffering as badly from the attentions of the Death Eaters as the Aurors and Hitwizards who operated under the Ministry of Magic. Giants, Inferi and other assorted monsters rampaged all over Britain, and Death Eaters frequently brought down bridges and blew up buildings; keeping the whole thing secret from Muggles was almost as big a problem as keeping the death toll down. James was always in the thick of it, one of the very few who had managed to survive (if barely) direct confrontations with Lord Voldemort himself.

Thus at about 4am on a warm July morning he was found, not in bed with his wife, but in the smouldering wreckage of the village of Tinworth. There had been an assault on the village by Voldemort’s ever-growing undead army, and the Order had gone in to help. They’d been victorious, too, more or less – if you didn’t count a few casualties and fairly extensive damage to property – but no one had sighted the Death Eaters who must have commanded the attack. The Ministry had blanketed the whole area in Anti-Disapparition charms in the hope of containing the enemy – thus obliging the combatants to file through a hastily connected Floo port in order to get home. James had watched Lily’s red hair disappear into the fireplace ahead of him, then stepped in himself – and though he was tired, aching and stained with soot and blood had enunciated ‘Godric’s Hollow’ as clearly as ever … which made his arrival in an American mental institution some five years before his birth doubly surprising.

List of Abilities/Powers: James is an Animagus, meaning that he can transform at will into a stag. It is remotely possible that this might come in handy at some point. Otherwise, with his wand he is a Transfiguration expert and a highly skilled duellist – and not too shabby at most other forms of magic either. Without his wand he is unlikely to be able to accomplish much magically – but on the other hand, being a wizard in a high-stress situation, his magical instincts are perfectly intact. Odd occurrences may surround him: he may literally bounce back from a fall that would have broken another man’s leg, or sharp objects brandished near him might turn to paper. Of course, as none of this is under his direct control it is highly unpredictable – and as likely to fail him as not. He is also quick witted, and reasonably good with his fists: sometimes a punch in the nose is the last thing a wizard in the midst of a duel would expect.

PB: Sean Rogerson

 

Writing Sample (A minimum of 100 words. Must be in third-person format)

It had been a long night, and it was all Mundungus Fletcher’s fault.

Well, not really – unless he was a much better actor than anyone suspected he hadn’t raised the Inferi – but Dung did have the worst timing known to wizards since Uric the Oddball decided to use a Time-Turner instead of a diary. The silly git had managed to raise the alarm just as Lily and James sat down to dinner.

Not that James could blame him for that either this time: all right, he might have cried wolf once or twice in the past, but this time there had been an honest-to-goodness case of the undead lurching up the main road of a little Cornish village inhabited by both wizard and Muggle families. And that meant dinner was destined to become breakfast – reheated and unfortunately dried out.

You didn’t mess about with Inferi – even the Aurors, who could sometimes be a bit snotty about the Order’s involvement in official business, just shut up and looked grateful when reinforcements arrived. It wasn’t just the bloody undead, although they were bad enough, it was the panic they caused. Everyone knew that you fought Inferi with fire, which meant that the minute they showed up you had a dozen or so witches and wizards in the streets casting Incendio at anything that moved – which was a bit of a problem, when half the roofs were thatched. You had to divert half your forces to putting out things that really shouldn’t be on fire if you didn’t want to roast to death, and another quarter to evacuating the village and stopping the Muggles from hollering about ‘zombies’.

James had been part of the quarter of the crew that was left: burning up the lumbering, cursed corpses and trying not to look closely enough to see if it was anyone he knew. There were worse horrors in this war, but not too many: he thought, though he wasn’t sure, that he’d seen the ridiculous moustache of Hogwarts’ old Muggle Studies teacher. In the end it had taken almost nine hours to get the place cleaned up, and he was covered in sweat, soot – and blood, from a bite he’d sustained during the fight. On top of that, he’d Summoned a shotgun out of the hands of some Muggle bloke just before he’d put a bullet between his eyes – and had to tell him that he had no bloody idea who ‘Romero’ was, but he was quite certain that being bitten by an Inferius didn’t turn you into one.

At the end of this nine-hour nightmare the Auror in charge had announced that they’d blanketed the entire town in Anti-Disapparition charms to cut off the Death Eater’s retreat – because it stood to reason there had to be at least one of them about – and everybody had to go home by Floo port. And that was why, reasonable summons or not, James was blaming Mundungus Fletcher. Dung had buggered off hours ago and no had not only doubt had a nice dinner in a pub somewhere, but was definitely not queuing up in front of a half-shattered fireplace trying to work out if he had a bit of a dead person’s intestines in his ear. James had already thought up three different hexes to use on him for that.

“Padfoot,” he said reasonably, because his best friend had slotted into the queue behind him, “have I got intestines in my ear?”

He felt a puff of breath on his neck as Sirius leaned forward to check. “No … I think it’s spleen, mate.”

“… Right. That’s all right then,” James said, with an expressive grimace, and Summoned the gunk into his hand. “For a minute there I was worried. Merlin – this smells like someone decided to roast four-month-old meat.”

Sirius chuckled.

“I expect our dinner will smell a bit like that, by the time we get back to it,” Lily said, up ahead. “I for one am not touching anything until I’ve bathed for at least a week. You don’t want to see your hair, love. I don’t want to see your hair. But I suppose I did promise ‘till death do us part’.”

“Oi!” James retorted, with a slight grin; the queue had shortened considerably, and he’d got his revenge on Dung neatly planned out; it did wonders for his mood. “My hair’s brilliant – and this is the first time it’s stayed flat since … Well, it’s the first bloody time, is what it is.” Admittedly he’d be happy if it never did again – since it seemed as though it was Inferi guts that did the trick.

Lily snickered affectionately – there was, after all, no denying that this was a first for the irrepressible Potter hair – and ducked into the fireplace. “See you at home, love – Godric’s Hollow!”

“Are you coming back with us?” James called back to Sirius as he followed after her. He thought he heard him reply ‘might do’, just as he said, “Godric’s Hollow!” but he couldn’t be sure: the world was spinning and the green flames of the Floo were dazzling him, and then he was … not … home.

Clearly not home. He’d fallen onto a tiled floor in a room much larger than any in his little cottage, lit the Muggle way – with bright burning bulbs on the ceiling. And there seemed to be no fireplace in sight – how could he possibly have been misdirected to a place without a Floo port?

James clambered awkwardly to his feet, grimacing at his bruises, and immediately put his hand into his pocket for his wand.

That was the worst part of all: it wasn’t there.

Apparently the long bloody night wasn’t over yet – and it was still all Mundungus Fletcher’s fault.