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Tweak says, "Its ROSE damn it"

Caleb Croaker is a better wizard than you (inthepursuitof) wrote,
@ 2015-12-22 19:18:00

OOC INFORMATION

Name: Jillian
Email/AIM: alinneaelindor@yahoo.com/principledpuff
CDJ:

acejillian
Timezone: PST
How did you find out about us? Followed my nose...

THE BASICS

Full Name: Caleb Brynach Croaker
Age and Birthday: April 9th, 1956 (24) Aries Ravenclaws will have lightning-fast mental reflexes. Aries is an intellectual sign, but it is also an impatient sign; Ravenclaws who were born under this sign are likely to tolerate no dull wits or stupidity, whether they see this lack of mental competence in themselves (in which case they will berate themselves for not understanding, or give up quickly in frustration without really trying to overcome their difficulty in learning) or in others (in which case they will lash out at the offender with acidic comments and haughty, cutting looks). These Ravenclaws will want to be at the head of the class, dominating other students in their chosen intellectual field, and may be almost as competitive as Slytherins. However, the true aim of every Ravenclaw is knowledge, knowledge, and more knowledge. While a Slytherin might see losing a magical duel or being bested by another student in a DADA class as humiliating, the Ravenclaw will probably just take delight in competition for its own sake, and see defeat as a learning experience.
House and Graduation Year: Ravenclaw '74.
Current Location: Caerphilly, Wales, in a flat with Kenton Abercrombie.
Blood Status: Muggleborn
Sexual Orientation: Ornithology interests him greatly.
Marital Status: Singleton
Family:

Father Andrew Croaker: Muggle, Co-owner of The Promised Land pub in Cardiff, retired Pharmacist
Mother Taffline Croaker (nee Terfel): Muggle (deceased, 1961), Clerk at Croaker Beauty and Drug
Step-Mother Delia Croaker (formerly Howell, nee Pendry): Muggle, Co-owner of The Promised Land pub in Cardiff
Step-Brother Simon Howell: Muggle, Research Astronomer at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh

GAME INVOLVEMENT

Current Job: Unspeakable, Time and Space Division. Current responsibilities include Optics research and universe-mapping.

Political Group: N/A

Political Knowledge: Nope, nada.

Skills: N/A

Politics: Caleb doesn't claim a political affiliation primarily because he doesn't want to encourage people to discuss politics with him, but also because his feelings are nominally represented by multiple parties. Having grown up a child of small-business owners, he favours the Gillyweed's low regulation, low taxation economic policy. Being a Muggleborn means it would be completely against his self-interest to not agree with the Justinian's civil policy. He also wouldn't be working for the government if he didn't believe that they were currently generally in the right, so add Wrackspurt to the list. Hell, he even sees the value of trying to preserve some aspects of Wizardry from Muggle intrusion because disco SUCKS. That's the thing with political parties; they speak to a generality rather than a specific, so you can see yourself in every side and none at all.

Still, the Death Eaters can piss off through the Veil or be stuck under the Birdcage for all of eternity if you want to get personal. Sure, the Order of the Phoenix isn’t much better when it comes to collateral damage, but the Order didn’t attack him after a 15 hour day and try to rip out his heart. So, if he had to eeny-meeny-miney-mo that shite, he wouldn’t lose much sleep over his choice.

Past War Involvement: August 4th, 1979. Caleb was coming out of the lift with Mafalda when they, among others, were ambushed by Death Eaters. Caleb put up a valiant effort in his duel with the cloaked coward (including attempting to create a vacuum inside of a Bubble-head charm), but ended up being felled by nearly having his heart ripped out by a curse. He was in hospital for a good week while they reconnected, then tried to get the pace of it back to rights, but he's still warned against over-exertion and sports lest it jump the track again. If anything, it's only further spurred him to learn more Dark Arts for the inevitable next time.

War Effort: Was an occasional rider on the Civil Air Patrol, but has since had to quit because of heart trouble.

DETAILS

20 Word Sentence Describing Your Character: Caleb Croaker is far closer to the stars than the gutter would have you believe.

Personal History:
When Andrew Croaker moved from Cambridge to the University of Cardiff, it was to get away from a relationship at work that had gone sour enough to blackball him from continuing his graduate research at the famed university. Yet, his determination to remain celibate lasted only two weeks: he found himself head-over-heels for Taffy Terfel, the file clerk for the University of Cardiff administration building and declared spinster. They were married after a long engagement and Andrew started his own small pharmacy in Penarth. It took three years before they were able to pay off the business loan they'd taken out to establish the pharmacy, another two before Andrew felt confident enough in their finances to purchase a house, and a final two years before Andrew gave the financial approval for procreation.

Caleb was born in hospital in Cardiff on April 9th, 1957. It had been a challenging pregnancy for Taffy, who was 38 when she delivered (almost unheard of in that age), but Caleb was healthy as a horse. His parents were on the stricter side but they had to be; with Andrew and Taffy spending all of their hours in the little pharmacy, Caleb spent a lot of his youth among poisons and choking hazards. However, it was better than not having him there. Caleb was a charmer and liked strangers and soon enough every elderly woman in a 20 mile radius was coming to Croaker Drug to come visit with the baby (and later, the toddler) while they waited for their prescription to be filled. And if they watched him while Taffy went to pick up lunch, all the better.

One day in 1960, Taffy didn't come back to the store with lunch. She had been mowed down by a car while on her bicycle. Caleb only remembers her from pictures.

Things moved much faster with Delia. They were both members of the Cardiff Chamber of Commerce and, with the death of his wife and her divorce from Rhys Howell, both were looking for stability and structure for their boys. Simon was 2 years Caleb's senior but both boys took to each other so well that their parents came to the conclusion of marriage much sooner then they might have otherwise. Andrew sold the house that he'd bought with Taffy and moved into the flat above The Promised Land, the pub that Delia had inherited from her father and had run for much of her adult life.

From the very outset, Caleb and Simon shared a healthy, happy relationship that revolved around competition. Games, sports, who could clean their room fastest - but most of all, school. Caleb and Simon were two smart boys who battled each other for the quickest math skills and the fastest reading rate under the watchful (and goading) gaze of Andrew. When Caleb closed the gap some by skipping third grade, Simon won the All Wales Science Fair (Intermediate Category). The two were insatiable to outdo the other and prove themselves the better of the other, but the best of friends. It was an important relationship because Caleb was different, and not just because he was a year younger than his classmates or was already slogging through geometry. For all that he was an excellent student and a fair athlete to boot, there was an incompatibility that he couldn't shake. Reality didn't always quite work the way it was supposed to: owls flying in the day time with packages, buses that slipped between cars, the occasional translucent gray figure in a window he drove by, etc. For someone who prided himself on knowing the order of all the elements and their atomic weights, and for someone whose family was built on knowledge and pragmatism, it made him self-conscious, unsettled, and not prone to friend-making.

As such, when Caleb got his letter to Hogwarts, he couldn't believe it. He'd spent years telling himself that the things he saw weren't real, that the strange things that happened were just his imagination overriding the laws of physics. He completely denied it (worried about the looney bin) up until the social worker came to take him and his father to London to pick up his school supplies and (in one of the greatest moments of his life) his wand. Caleb returned completely shocked by the reality of his situation and terrified. School abroad. A whole other world his family wouldn't be able to touch. Worst of all, Simon and his paths were now irreconcilably diverged. There would be no Summer Rocket Camp or playing on the school rugby team or competing on University Challenge; what good was it to go learn something new if he couldn't try and be better at it than Simon? Who was going to drive him to strive to be better? Ultimately though, he couldn’t turn away from this chance at seeing how the world REALLY worked, not even for Simon.

Caleb went to Hogwarts and was directed towards Ravenclaw, a house he found he was well suited for. He was completely unprepared for his first year - hardly anything he had spent the last decade learning was applicable and that was a disadvantage he wasn't used to. The first three months he wasn't sleeping for his homesickness and generally, he was so frustrated and discombobulated he was acting a complete arsehole. Things may have continued to progress in this fashion had it not been for two things. The first was his visit home at Christmas. Caleb and Simon were talking about the classes they were taking and mainly about the problems the each were having when they realized that while their worlds were splitting apart, there was one subject common to both of them: Astronomy. When Christmas break was over, both Caleb and Simon threw themselves into the subject; the race was on again. The second came when Kenton Abercrombie discovered his Doctor Who novels and Caleb discovered the Spock to his Kirk. Not only did Caleb find in Kent a fast friend and fellow Sci-Fi enthusiast, but he found his Hogwarts Competition.

The real Caleb showed up to the next 6.5 years of school as, with Caleb's determination renewed, he rose up the ranks of his year. As he topped his year in Astronomy (and later, Arithmancy) and ranked in the top 10% in History, Transfiguration and Potions, so did his confidence and ego return. Competitive, outgoing, wisecracking Caleb, in turns annoying and brilliant, battled his fellow students for dominance in every subject. His ego accelerated when he and Kent made the Quidditch team (Beater, 1970-74), then again when he scored all O's on his OWLs. With Simon planning to work at the Royal Observatory once he got out of his Cambridge, Caleb started laying the groundwork to transition into the Wizard equivalent - the Unspeakables. He never considered a single other avenue of employment and unsure of what might get him into the Department of Mysteries, along with his top marks (including the current time record for completing the Arithmancy NEWT with a perfect score) he submitted a treatise on his failed attempts to coat his telescope lens with different substances to increase long distance visibility in the higher wavelengths.

Life after Hogwarts was fairly good. He moved out with Kent to a flat in Caerphilly to better take advantage of their finances. Working at the Department of Mysteries was as great a decision as he thought it would be - even if he couldn’t really talk about his work with Simon, he certainly could debate Simon’s work with him. It was long hours, but they weren’t ever boring and if he went out and drank and flirted too much on the weekend, surely it was out of consideration for Kent and his rather reclusive tendencies. Besides, the title of Unspeakable came with a certain level of respect that, in these increasingly racist times, helps buoy him when people were being unconscionable little pricks.

It wasn’t enough to stop the Death Eaters, however, from nearly ripping out his heart last August. It’s certainly taken him down a peg; for the first time since he came to Hogwarts and to the Wizarding World, that feeling (if mild) of being out of place has returned. The difference between now and then is that now, Caleb is willing to fight for his position in a world he knows he belongs in.

OTHER STUFF

Canon Information: Not much, but here
Quote: "If there's anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot now." - Zaphod Beeblebrox
PB: Chris Pine

SAMPLES

First Person:

Why is it that smoking is sexy? It shouldn’t be - it’s a stick in a mouth and puff like the goddamn Hogwarts Express - but it is. It really is. All old glamour and hello stranger. Congratulations advertisement people - I have been successfully brainwashed.

On second thought, maybe I just like looking at lips. Maybe that is the whole point. Cora-kid, can I borrow you and some ice lollies for an experiment?