---» OOC INFORMATION «---Name: Sam
Age: 20
Contact Info: AIM, MSN, YIM--PM me to get these, let's stick with that for the moment.
---» IC INFORMATION «---Full Name: Aloysius Castor Codalion
Nickname: Cas
Gender: male
Blood Type: pure
Sexual Orientation: gay (closeted, of course)
Birthdate: 09/12/58
Age: just 17 (depending on site time)
Hometown: outside of Canterbury, in Kent
Year: seventh
House: Slytherin
Wand: Yew, Ashwinder, 10''
Patronus: hyena
Boggart: inferius
---» APPEARANCE:Cas looks like a girl. Really, that's the feedback he gets most often. He's utterly hopeless, at the same time, when it comes to keeping his physical appearance in order and his body under his own command, so he looks like a girl puppet, loosely connected by strings. His health has always been shaky at best (he's also a massive hypochondriac, so who knows how much is real there), and he's on the unattractively sickly side of thin. He tends to hide behind his hair when he doesn't give in to his parents' exhortation that he ought really to present himself decently, comb it back, etc.
He moves, as previously mentioned, much like a puppet with its strings half cut, but he has a strange sort of grace when he's really trying, which, thanks to a certain arrogance, he sometimes does. His clumsiness is chiefly due to a recent growth-spurt, which has left him stranded somewhere north of 5'10''.
The specifics: he has dark brown hair, dark eyes, and pale skin, like most of his family. Unlike most, he's also rather kind-looking, or at least not offensively haughty.
Until you hear him speak, of course...
He has a tendency to gesticulate, to move his fingers awkwardly, lacing them together, twitching them back and forth, etc. It's a mannerism looked at askance as rather fey. He always has a dripping nose, and carries a handkerchief to remedy it.
---» PERSONALITY:Cas quite literally cares for no one but himself, but in an almost benign way; he's not ideological--his only ideology is that of Personality. A grand personality, thinks he, will solve all ills, which ideas never can. Unfortunately, he doesn't like himself very much. It bears mentioning that he's found himself tormented, through the years, but certain proclivities to which he doesn't really want to give name, even privately. His parents say it's his 'inclination toward Greek art,' and have warned him that he ought to find a suitable wife, for reasons of Continuing the Family Name.
He's shy in an arrogant, aloof way. He's quite convinced he's better than most people, but has no good reason to believe this, nor does he like to think about it very much. His fits of self-aggrandizement are broken up often by equally paroxysmal fits of self-loathing and jealousy. He spends his time wishing, in other words, to be someone he could admire as much as he tries to admire himself. He's also prone to obsessive admiration, jealousy, and--yes--attraction toward other boys he sees as somehow elevated to Godlike status--a common-enough phenomenon in teenage culture.
He's a clever boy--clever more than smart, cunning more than incisively intelligent, and level-headed and thoughtful enough to seem brilliant. Cas is also good with words when he does speak--and when he does, it's usually in long, angry, sardonic rants.
He's a very angry person, though you couldn't tell from looking at him.
Actually, I'd like to clear something up--the difference between Cas internally and Cas externally. Internally, he's a complete mess. This sometimes shows up externally; he looks withdrawn or thoughtful and spends more time alone than most. At the same time, when he's in a social situation, he is performative, even charming, and covers up any sadness with wit and dry humor.
Cas is not the most stable person you'll ever meet, but he is, at least, interesting. Untrustworthy, self-hating, depressive, hysterical, hypochondriacal, pretentious, and occasionally malicious--but collected enough to keep most of it inside, and, in fact, to make himself into a bit of a joke.
He doesn't have many friends, per se.
The few people he grudgingly respects tend to want nothing to do with him--and he can't, in his own, half-hearted way, really blame them.
At the same time, he doesn't really have any enemies. When he behaves himself he's almost preturnaturally charming, but these occasions are few and far between. Most often he's considered the house eccentric: unquestionably Slytherin, of impeccable blood and breeding, but also unquestionably... off.
Since he has so little to lose, having resolved to live a life of quite misery and self-denial, who knows what sorts of things he might explore? He is, for instance, rather too prone to making heroes out of the nearest available person of social grace and charisma.
---» HISTORY:Cas grew up a mild and unspoken disappointment to his family, Purebloods to whom appearance meant a great deal and proper allegiance still more. Effeminate to begin with, not that that was in itself too much cause for concern, he failed to manifest any magic whatsoever until the age of ten, and that was only a spray of fluorescent sparks when he was playing with his mother's wand. As it's turned out, he isn't totally lacking in magical power, though he's nowhere near his parents in terms of raw strength--no, what's concerning is his lack of interest in it. He's best at some of the nastier hexes (which are at least rewarding to practice), though they drain him more than most, and not at all bad at Potions, but loses interest and focus when faced with much else.
He likes to read books on Da Vinci, as well as more classical treatises on alchemy and potions, and spent a lot of his time cloistered in his room drawing machines of war when he was a child (why? Oh, to be gratuitously strange, no doubt).
That mystery aside, he has very little interest in... anything at all. No interest in most books, apart from a select few, which he rereads obsessively. No interest in Quidditch. No interest, his parents have carefully marked, in girls. He prefers to spend his time alone, but doing what, even he doesn't know half the time.
Oddly, he always got on well in the company of adults, thinking--quite rightly--that children have something evil about them. It didn't help that he was teased for his discomportment and general oddness when he was younger.
Socially presentable in a weird, faintly disturbing sort of way and extremely haughty, he isn't for everyone. He isn't even for most. His parents view him as an object of concern, and while they'd never lavish anything but the utmost affection and attention on him, they're rather at a loss as to what to do with him. He's magically weak, physically weak, and will probably cause some sort of scandal sooner than produce any heirs; he's also their only son. While arranged marriages are antiquated, and the last this his parents want to resort to, they're afraid it may be their only recourse.
He went off to Hogwarts without any great incident. Continued in the same fashion, sinking carefully into the background, though occasionally he bursts out with a rather acidic correction. He's always tended to know all the weird or esoteric facts and none of the useful ones, so he'll, say, correct a professor on the proper pronunciation of an obscure 13th-century goblin's name, but fail to recall what war he was famous for starting. Needless to say, this trait, and his wand-happy tendency to hex anyone who teased him during his first few years (he's slackened off that since a nasty incident in Fourth Year), haven't endeared him to most of the student body.
Oh, he's gotten less awkward over the years. From the shy, completely expressionless First Year he was when he arrived, he's become a (shy) not terribly cloistered, somewhat witty fixture to at least some of Hogwarts social life. Around fifth year some of the less appealing nicknames fell away. Peeves still calls him Cassiekins, but other teasing has worn a bit thin.
In Sixth Year he finally shed a few more antisocial mannerisms, like his tendency to insult anyone within earshot, in favor of slightly subtler and more oblique verbal viciousness. He also focused finely down on Potions, by far his best subject, and let his marks in wand magic, never very high, sink to barely acceptable. His parents were not pleased, but allowed that potions were a decent area of concentration for a Codalion, even if dueling had always been more of a forte in the family.
At length, Cas emerged in Seventh Year, slightly more confident, or at least arrogant, than he'd been in years past; slightly meaner, but subtler in his cruelty; still very angry; and prone to showing nearly none of it behind his habitual self-mocking façade.
---» ROLEPLAYING SAMPLE:SITUATION: 3((similar name, not the same character... similar, though...

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