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Hannibal's 'Humanitarian'

The best sort of person to be is a 'useful' person

Created on 2007-01-13 12:42:23 (#12029917), last updated 2007-01-17

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Basic Info

Name:	Victor Alan Smedley
Birthdate:	1956-09-03
Location:	London, United Kingdom
Website:	Fiery Inception

Bio

The Basics

Character Name: Victor Alan Smedley
PB: Chris Barrie

D.O.B: 03 September 1956
Wand: Oak with phoenix feather 9 inches
House in School: Slytherin
Bloodline: Half-Blood
Political View: Politically, Victor is a complete non-sequitur. It didn't matter to him a bit who won the war as long as he could continue being a reporter and continue to 'uncover the truth' as he has so glorified his profession to be. In truth Victor knows no loyalty or allegiance and will work for whomever and say whatever as long as he believes it is he who is making the decisions. Despite what he may profess or say Victor still holds an innate disdain for Muggles, and delights in 'landing' Muggle women. Though there is little difference in the challenge, however, Victor's inflated ego gives him a particular boost when he feels he has the advantage.

Appearance

Height: 5'11"
Weight: 170 lbs
Build: Slim
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Mid-brown, short and curly
Dress style: Smart and formal. Victor is never seen to be wearing anything that is not the latest style by a popular designer. However his vanity can sometimes overstep the capacity of his salary and much of his wardrobe is simply plain, ordinary clothes, carefully transfigured to resemble more-expensive fashions

Discerning Marks: Unusually flared nostrils, hair slightly grey around the temples

Psychology

Introvert/Extrovert: Extrovert
Boggart is: Himself, poor, homeless, dishevelled, and touched in the head. Victor cares first and foremost about how he is perceived, and to be in what he considers that 'nightmare state' is a fate he feels may be worse than death.
Patronus: Victor cannot produce a Patronus

Personality

Conscientiousness:
Victor is neat and tidy but only as far as his own appearances are concerned. He is only careful and attentive when others are looking however. He litters in private, donates to charity only on rare occasions, and will generally allow his house to become quite untidy before doing anything about it, unless, of course, he is going to have company. More than organised for his own sake he attempts to be as many things to as many people as he can.

Agreeableness:
Victor is not a very agreeable person. While gregarious and outgoing, he becomes quite defensive and even irate when given requests or orders, yet at the same time victor is easily swayed. His desire to be well thought of by his superiors and important members of the community means that for the promise of merely praise or prestige he can be bent into doing anything. Something that a shrewd individual can quickly pick up about him and learn to exploit in short order.

Extroversion
Victor is always being seen somewhere. More a sensation of media than a media sensation, Victor has enough connections to be several pairs of eyes and ears all over the Wizarding social scene. Victor's confidence meanwhile is linked to his feelings of control, the more in control or superior he feels to those around him the more he can relax. He is a very 'take charge' person in that respect, but only as long as he feels any and all opposition to his 'leadership' can be easily and quickly dealt with.

Neuroticism
While Victor considers the potential social consequences of his actions he thinks little about his actions beyond how they may make him look to others. He is by and large ruled by his desire to please certain people, and this affects all of his judgements. His morality, principles and opinions are up for sale. Yet this is not an intentional behaviour. At this point victor firmly believes in the worldview the Prophet puts out, and He can forcefully and logically argue for it. But, had the tables been turned he would be just as staunch a follower of Voldemort's regime as well.

Openness
Victor is inherently suspicious of everything he cannot mentally grasp or somehow control, as such new or unfamiliar items or trends are an anathema to him. Though he likes variety, it is a variety of experiences and items with which he is intimately familiar. Unfamiliar foods, people, places, pastimes, and commodities are regarded with suspicion by Victor. He will dine at only a small selection of restaurants, frequents only a few Muggle clubs, and often performs the same activities on the same times week in and week out. The only exception being for his elderly father.

General Strengths
Victor is highly intelligent and articulate. Goal oriented, he possesses the natural ambition of all Slytherins and will plan meticulously towards desired outcomes. His strong desire to please has given him a phenomenal ability to appraise and judge people, making him a favoured speech writer for the prophet's management at functions and dinners. Despite being composed near-entirely of the lust for recognition and prestige Victor manages to conceal his less-savoury tastes beneath layers of warmth and charm which may or may not be genuine. Even he is not really sure anymore, but what he does know is what he likes and what he likes fuels the furnace that is the man he's been for the past 26 years.

General Weaknesses
Victor is easily led by anyone willing to play to his egotism, which makes him fair game for someone with an agenda. When he feels he has the upper hand Victor becomes tremendously overconfident and has disastrously underestimated certain people, a case in point being an incident several years ago when a gang of Muggle youths tried to mug him. Sneering down his nose at them, and paying no attention to who was behind him victor was severely injured and spent two weeks in St. Mungos. Victor's first loyalty is to his appearances and those people whom he feels he can benefit from, though he acts this way without thinking it still does affect him, and losing touch people whom he does care about (such as his ex-wife) leaves marks on him, though few people get to see them.

Sexuality

Sexuality: Straight. For his entire life Victor has been a heterosexual, though, this is largely because it was what was socially acceptable at his coming of age, and his sexual behaviours have always been in line with perceptions of virility and masculinity, however baseless they may be. Victor may indeed be capable of having and enjoying an intimate relationship with another man and just not know it.

Family

Parents? Hubert Smedley, Alice Smedley (Deceased)
Siblings? None
Partner? Samantha Tanner (divorced, no children)
Family dynamics--do they get along? Opposite sides of the war? Accept their child's magical talent? Pressure for 'pure blood' marriage?
Like most children Victor always has a soft spot for his parents. His father, now in his nineties is no exception to this. Perhaps the one redeeming feature of Victor Smedley is the care with which he tends to his widowered father. Victor has taken great pains to ensure that his father's savings are well invested and provides money for a live-in maid to take care of him. Any time he has a day off or a spare Saturday Victor can be seen with his father pottering around in the garden or escorting him to a Quidditch match.

His ex-wife on the other hand is a different story. Victor had always treated other people like assets to be used when needed and then disposed of. Something which Samantha Tanner had not realised, blinded by his obvious charms, by the time she realised he was less than perfect, and less than honest they had been married close to four years. After a bitter divorce Samantha moved away from London and now has little to nothing to do with her ex husband.

Lifestyle

Occupation: Daily Prophet reporter
Residence: A spacious loft apartment in inner-city London
Financial Status: Comfortable. By no means as wealthy as some of the more-famous purebloods. Victor nevertheless leads a comfortable existence. His generous salary allows him to taste of the finer things in life (wine, clothes, furniture) and he has decorated his apartment according to the latest styles, all stainless steel and glass. Victor has also invested a fair amount of time and money in a car. Which he likes to drive around town when going to Muggle restaurants and nightclubs.

History

The Early Years
Victor Alan Smedley was born in Caerphilly, wales in 1956, to two Halfblood parents. His mother, Alice Smedley was an amateur duelist, who worked as a seamstress among the local wizarding community. Adept at mending and transfiguration it was a skill she would pass on to her son. Victor's father, Hubert was a herbologist and horticulturalist. His Muggle business holding a secret greenhouse out the back for his wizardly clients. Ultimately, upon his retirement the business passed to Victor, but, having little skill and few interests in the area Victor is merely the owner of Smedley's Greenery and not its proprieter.

Young Wizard
At Hogwarts Victor found his mother's talent for transfiguration had passed on to him, many afternoons spent in his father's greenhouses taught him much about magical plants and herbs and he found passing herbology to be a simple affair, but it did nothing to grab him. Even his talents with charms and transfiguration, were not the outlet that victor's mind craved. It would be well into his second year at Hogwarts before a young Victor Smedley found his calling.

The Right to Write
Victor stressed a lot through his first two years at Hogwarts until being brought before Professor Binns over his writing style. Though the spectral Professor was outraged at the flamboyant and emotive writing style Victor had used in his most-recent essay, when Victors' Essay was then passed on to Horace Slughorn, who suggested--after assuring Professor Binns that he would deal with the 'problem'--that Victor may have a talent for writing. Thus primed, Victor's essays became ever-more subjective, infuriating the monotone professor Binns even more as the years progressed.
Graduating in 1973, Victor left Hogwarts just before Voldemort began to really capture the attention of the Wizarding public, and just as the marauders were going through Hogwarts. Not really knowing or being close to anyone prominent during his school years, Victor's main focus had been on utilising people best-able to help him survive the academic challenges. Though as he matured his focus and foresight would broaden and lengthen.

The First Prophet
After graduating, Victor applied for a job at the Prophet, managing to snare a job as an office clerk. For two years victor worked very hard for little pay and zero opportunities. Though he managed to demonstrate his skill with the camera when one of the photographers was injured on the job, he was quickly shuffled back to his regular duties. This proved to be the last straw for Victor, and despite all his reservations he applied for a job elsewhere.

Workaday Weekly
Victor managed to find a job working on the celebrity pages at Witch Weekly, while at first he found it degrading to be selling his craft so Victor's columns proved to be popular with the Magazine's readership. Still coveting the front page of the Daily prophet, Victor kept his head down and managed to provide an up-beat and positive outlook through the latter part of Voldemort's first rise, his 'Smedley's Scuttlebut' column a small, but happy footnote in an era gripped by fear.
While Rita Skeeter was the rising star of this period Victor was the popular man about Witch Weekley's offices. When friends at the prophet managed to procure him an interview Victor found it was a sad day to be leaving the place that had helped to make his career. But, Victor proved he had a Slytherin's ambition at his core, and he soldiered on to bigger and better things.

Second-Fiddle Prophet
Victor's second tour at the prophet was much more exciting, though he was not given the kinds of stories he craved victor found himself travelling. Covering events all over the Wizarding world, he found himself in Germany, Spain, Iceland, Egypt, even as far afield as Australia. Victor got to cover a number of international events, major and minor, but mostly minor. Content to make a name for himself dealing with second-hand stories and the occasional overseas trip, victor earned a reuptation at the prophet as a quiet achiever. While still upset at playing second fiddle to the likes of Rita Skeeter, Victor nevertheless used his position as a lever and threw himself into his writing with his usual grace and aplomb.

Third time Charmer
Through the early nineties victor rose from his worldwide legwork and managed to land one or two front-page stories, but his big break came after Rita's sudden retirement at the start of summer in 1995. Victor was the first person chosen to take on the jobs that had, until then, been marked for Rita. With the return of Voldemort and the looming war, Victor was hard-pressed to suppress his journalistic delight at the thought of the era which he would help put to paper (in his eyes at least).
Now, Victor has set his ambitions even higher, hoping to nab the position of editor in chief providing he can impress upon the current editor, Joseph Truckle, the depth of his yet to exist management and diplomatic abilities.

Present Outlook:
With the final defeat of Voldemort, the climate has changed, and what was once easy to sensationalise and inflate is now proving difficult. Victor is still living in the world of 18 months previous adjusting to the fact that the future may be dull and boring by comparison. Thus, his sights have settled upon something bigger and better than before: the position of Editor-in-chief of the daily prophet. Wrangling after the position, he maintains a good relationship with the current editor, not just to get his pick of the stories but also to make sure he is at the top of the list when the time comes for the paper's current editor to retire.

Victor maintains a wealth of connections throughout the Wizarding world, and suitably influenced he can prove to be either a troublesome enemy or a powerful ally, though he has run afoul of the Prophet's management on several occasions over subjectively slanted stories aimed at hurting the reputations of certain people he is not above using his job as a weapon.

Players Info

Name/Nickname: Trollax Kinora
D.O.B.:20/01/1984
Gender: Male
Yahoo IM: N/A
AIM: Tr0llax
Email: trollax [at] gmail [dot] com

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