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• Name: Octavius Ancelin Octavius Jack Pepper. Or so claims his in-use birth certificate. Actually, that's a forgery, but though he's never legally changed his middle name, he has used that birth certificate to set up bank accounts and obtain other legal identification in that name.
• Nicknames: He prefers Pepper and really only tolerates Octavius. Jack is an allowable second choice, it being the name he usually uses in the Muggle world.
• Birthdate: November 5 1955
• Citizenship: British
• Current residence:
• Blood status: Halfblood - mother Muggleborn, father fullblood.
• Patronus: Komodo dragon
• Wand: 9", phoenix feather, walnut

WALNUT TREE (the Passion) - (Apr 21 to Apr 30 or Oct 24 to Nov 11) - unrelenting, strange and full of contrasts, often egotistic, aggressive, noble, broad horizon, unexpected reactions, spontaneous, unlimited ambition, no flexibility, difficult and uncommon partner, not always liked but often admired, ingenious strategist, very jealous and passionate, no compromise.

• Height/weight: 6'2, 158lb - tall and lean, like a beanpole.
• Hair/eyes: Both dark. His hair is several inches long and has a tendency to curl over his forehead.
• Manner of speech: Clipped and brisk; Pepper doesn't want to spend more time than he has to actually conversing with other people, so he's honed the art of saying whatever he has to say once, quickly. When he's especially impatient he has a tendency to sharpen his tone or snap at people, or occasionally slow his voice to a rather sarcastic drawl.
• Manner of dress: In all technicality, he dresses quite well. That is, in the closet and drawers his clothes are nice, button down shirts and decent quality sweaters and summer jackets. Once they actually grace his body, though, they somehow spontaneously morph to become looser, hanging off his lanky frame, never quite hanging properly. He wears a silver crucifix around his neck in a small nod to his Catholic heritage.
• Physical description: Tall and angular, the first word that comes to mind when describing Pepper is 'broody'. Dark hair tumbles artlessly down to his face, with just enough kink that it could almost be called curly, and the way it falls only serves to draw more attention to his eyes - though they hardly need the help. They're probably his most notable feature despite being a rather bland brown in colour, more to do with the intensity of his gaze and how very often he graces those he has the misfortune of knowing with glowers and withering stares. His smile, when it appears, is more of a smirk, a play of the lips that suggests he's plotting something dreadful in the depths of his mind. When in public, his posture and body language are undeniably close as he holds himself at arm's length from his peers. This isn't to say that he can't relax though, and when he does he tends towards sprawls, limbs at all angles and bone structure visible and defined.

• General personality:
Bitter and misanthropic, most of the words that could be used to best describe Pepper revolve around "self".

With no one around to force him into action, he has grown up to become extremely self-motivated. Idleness for short periods of time is a welcome relief but it is very much a case of 'nice place to visit, wouldn't want to live there' - he is, ultimately, a man of action who is too aware that the world will give him nothing that he hasn't worked for. He typically rises on awakening and enjoys a morning run before whatever it is he has to do that day, whether that be a legitimate job or working on an order for a client. He procrastinates occasionally, but not often, knowing he has nothing to fall back on but his carefully built reputation. Tied in with this, he is largely self-educated - a jack of all trades, master of none, his only real specialty is the art of forgery (for which he owns three different typewriters and other assorted paraphernalia), and his collection of books betrays his wide interest in subjects. They are mostly non-fiction - he has little time to waste on stories - and many of them are things he will never actually have to know in real life, such as the reading of Egyptian hieroglyphs, while others he has bought specifically because of their use. He prefers things that are written so as to be easy for a layman to understand, though he is stubborn enough to slog through something more difficult to grasp what he can even if much of the detail remains incomprehensible.

The knowledge that he has created his own life out of what cannot be read as anything other than quite a shit hand of cards has only added to his natural self-confidence. One can never quite be sure whether he is an extrovert or introvert - certainly he seems to loathe humanity as a whole and is perfectly happy on his own, but at the same time he will seek out individuals and is capable of playing to a group with droll, cutting humour or the occasional indulgence in a streak of ridiculousness, though even that is generally somewhat dark. On the whole he seems to hold the belief that there are few situations he couldn't get himself back out of, and though he doesn't necessarily need to prove this theory, he rarely lets insecurities or weaknesses show. Even if he were completely clueless he would shore himself up, ready to at least try and figure out the situation rather than giving in entirely to helplessness and confusion. Naturally at times he can come across as more arrogant than confident, and to an extent this is probably even true. In his opinion he has proved (at least to himself) his mettle, while those to whom everything comes easily couldn't last a week in his shoes.

On the other hand it's not uncommon for him to slip into self-centredness; after spending so long with no one looking out for him and him looking out for no one else, it's almost an unavoidable side effect. He will always look out for number one, and the only real silver lining in this is that he is sometimes capable of being long-sighted, realising that something that is difficult in the short term might be better later, and equally that selling people out, whatever the incentive, is going to destroy his reputation and make very few people want to deal with him in future. This, he feels, is undesirable, so once he has made an emotional (or professional) commitment, he is typically loathe to break it except for the absolute highest of incentives, and these come along extremely rarely.

As a criminal he can hardly claim to live according to the law, and is thusly self-governed by his own principles, which perhaps surprisingly are quite strong, and many of them centered in the Catholicism of his childhood. While he firmly believes that such social mores as the sinfulness of birth control are out-dated by the over-population of the planet, and is fairly pragmatic about anything that brings down the number of people drawing on resources (he is, above all, a proponent of the survival of the fittest and has almost eugenics-like views in some cases), he holds children as sacrosanct once they're born, placing them in a group that only the truly miserable lowlifes would target (along with priests, animals, corpses and anyone who has trustingly placed themselves in a position of vulnerability to oneself - he considers domestic abuse and rape to be especially gutless). Nor does he make promises lightly, for he considers a person's word to be an oath before God. Forgery and petty theft for the purpose of survival are minor crimes compared to the breaking of an oath.

And, though he is not entirely a coward, Pepper does have a good sense of self-preservation. He's not afraid to retreat from a bad situation and takes no shame in it afterwards, freely admitting that he turned tail and ran - though he may well point out that he's still alive and free to admit to it! If he is the only one at risk, he will usually choose flight over fight when possible. It is only when innocents, or those few people that he cares about, get involved that he will start to hesitate, showing himself unwilling to blatantly leave others to be killed while he runs. But while he will hold a person's hand as they hang over a cliff and attempt to save them, if he feels himself being dragged over he will let go, however difficult, as even the guilt of leaving someone in a tight spot is not enough to make him sacrifice himself to the same thing if it's not necessary. Ultimately he is of better use alive and able than a pointless martyr.

• School: Hogwarts
• Years: 1967-1972
• House: Slytherin
• Achievements: None.
• NEWTS: None.

• Occupation: Bartender-slash-forger.
• Previous jobs, if any: Many. The need for an income has been a driving force in his life for almost the entirety of his adulthood; in his late teens he did a lot of labouring in warehouses and on construction sites, however as he got older he began to get more jobs in bars as glassie, bouncer or bartender.

• Relatives:
Father - Prescott Octavius Pepper, deceased, fullblood. Octavius didn't know his father growing up, as he was killed when all three children were still quite small. He doesn't know the details as Elena didn't like to talk about it, and has little desire to find out, having no particularly strong emotional connection to the man.
Mother - Elena Pepper, Muggleborn. Very much the matriarch of the family, she ruled with an iron fist (or perhaps a wooden spoon) when the children were young. However, she worked two jobs most of the time to pay the bills and keep them under a proper roof with food on the table, and the three were left to their own devices more often than perhaps in other families. Pepper does not like to admit that when she died in his third year, his thoughts were on what the hell he was going to do as much as they were on the loss of his mother.
Sisters - Teresa (25) and Magdalene (21). He is close to neither sister and rarely sees them. As far as he's concerned they have their own lives now.
• Sexuality:
• Significant other: None, and he likes it like that.
• Children: None that he knows of.

• Family/childhood:
Elena Pepper was pregnant with her third child when her husband was pronounced dead by the on-call Healer at St Mungo's. All of a sudden she was alone in the world, a single mother with a young family in one of the poorest parts of London, and after the first shocks of grief and mourning she rose to the task magnificently. She arranged informal daycare sessions with other families in the neighbourhood, freeing up most of her week to take work where she could - a part time job at a local grocers in the mornings and another in the file room of a legal firm in the afternoons. Unable to leave the role of disciplinarian to Prescott anymore, she grew to fill that position as well, laying out house rules that were applied consistently and strictly, demanding nothing less than the best behaviour from her three children. The consequences of rule-breaking were emotional rather than physical, affection withheld for as long as Elena deemed appropriate for the offense, and somehow, fear of earning displeasure seemed to work as a deterrant.

With their only parent working hard to feed them, this left the three children free to roam the streets during the day quite frequently, though betweentimes Elena tried to make sure they were involved in something... anything. All three of them were enrolled in several schools over the course of time, Octavius more than the girls as his accidental magic tended towards more dramatic displays after the first showing when he was seven and a half. In particular he attended a local Catholic school for two years before one of the nuns tried to punish him for stealing and he got angry. Even then his anger burned cold - so cold, in fact, that the entire room froze over. That evening the nun visited their home to ask his mother not to send him back, ending his longest stint at any one school.

The only boy in the family, Octavius tended to favour his own company over his sisters'; it served the double purpose of pre-emptively defending him from the silent treatment that was punishment in the household, as he was left with ways to amuse himself while he was out of favour. There were plenty of other kids his age in the neighbourhood, though, and while he didn't have any especial best friends, he did have friends to run around with, forming gangs that unconsciously mimicked, in some ways, the higher social order of the area. This was at a time when the Kray twins ran the East End, after all, and while Octavius and the other boys didn't get into anything too bad, no assault or real theft, there was certainly some bad behaviour.

Unlike Teresa before him, he wasn't particularly bothered by the idea of leaving the house for Scotland for three quarters of the year as his first year at Hogwarts drew near. Already he could take or leave the company of others, and though he had a vaguely lingering sense of duty as the "man of the family", he was beginning to find himself too old to cling to his mother's apron strings. Going away to school was an adventure, though. A whole castle, with all sorts of places to explore, an enormous library full of books on an array of fascinating subjects, the forbidden allure of the Restricted Section, and, perhaps even better, other boys his own age that he could make friends with, boys who weren't content to remain dirty and poor and tied down.

• School/work:
Not that he actually managed to make many. Acquaintances, of course - he wasn't on bad terms with his housemates, he just still wasn't particularly close to any of them. Part of this was due to the differences in family backgrounds, no doubt, though he certainly didn't attempt to bow and scrape to make it up to them. Observing them did strike him with a sort of envy though and began to ferment the seed of disgust in his core for the highborn and their sense of privilege and entitlement. He began to think of the worst of them as silly little children, ignorant of the real world, and almost took a sort of pride in his ability to cope with living below the poverty line, something he was sure these rich purebloods couldn't manage for a week.

The rest of his expectations proved to be true, though, and he threw himself into his classes with great zeal. Through a process of elimination he quickly sorted out which subjects he was most interested in, and then focused all of his attention on those, sacrificing marks in other classes to do all the extra reading and double and triple checking his work. In third year he picked up Arithmancy and Ancient Runes, which sounded like the most cerebral options available, and grew to enjoy both of them as well. The glow was rather taken off of the whole thing, though, when not long after the New Year he and his sisters were taken out of class to be given the news that their mother had had an accident. They were now alone in the world. Teresa, as the eldest, would be put in contact with an estate lawyer to deal with what little property Elena had owned, and she would also get a week off of classes to pack up their things. Arrangements would be made for them to get beds at a group home for the summer holidays.

Pepper had been too young when his father died to remember him and had still considered mortality as something affecting other people. It took several weeks to even process what had happened, and in the meantime he behaved rather beastily towards Magdalene when she attempted to seek him out for comfort. He grew increasingly recalcitrant and withdrawn, only widening the social divide between him and his Housemates.

Those first months of grief eventually tempered into a more well developed sense of melodrama, and became slightly prone to histrionics when things got between him and his goals. Actually, especially in his fifth year with the stress of the first set of important exams, he was prone to histrionics about a lot of things. It was not a time when a grouping by personality was good for the students, as several worn out control freaks in one place rubbed each other the wrong way, and Slytherin house was quite often a hotbed of tension.

• Recent history:

• PB: Louis Garrel
• Font: Asphyxiate
• Player: Kei
• Journal: keieeeye
• AIM: the pocket otter
• Email: keisarmy @ insanejournal.com
• Timezone: GMT+12 New Zealand