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Benjamin Gerard Gillis Jr.______________________________________________________________________________________
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INTRODUCTION------------------------------------------------------------
FULL NAME: Benjamin Gerard Gillis Jr.
NICKNAMES: Ben/ Benny
AGE: 11
ALLEGIANCE: Neutral
HOGWARTS HOUSE: Slytherin/Gryffindor
CLASSES: Defense Against the Dark Arts, Potions, Transfiguration, Care of Magical Creatures
WAND: Carved Maple, Dragon Heartstring, 13 inches, slightly pliable
PLAY BY: Nolan Gould
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APPEARANCE
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HAIR COLOUR: Sandy Brown
EYE COLOUR: Mahogany
COMPARATIVE HEIGHT: Slightly shorter than average
BODY BUILD: thin
GENERAL APPEARANCE: In comparison to the general population of 11 year-old boys, Benjamin Gillis Jr. is basically standard issue. Two feet, two elbows and two eyes and has recently started his first awkward growth spurt…. sometimes his bones ache from it. Ben has a head of thick brown curls and a face that has yet to shed the majority of its baby fat. As far as fashion is concerned, Ben believes putting on clothes is just an added redundancy that eats up his valuable time and as a result, will usually wear whatever he can find. Why his parents insist on him wearing pants he’ll never know…. Generally, he walks, talks, and most importantly, acts his age in all facets of his life.
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PERSONALITY
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TRAITS: Aloof, easily distracted, charismatic, un-filtered, loyal, entertaining, persistent, kind, extraordinarily creative although not exactly “book smart”
LIKES & DISLIKES: The world in its entirety is attention grabbing. In fact, Ben has a fair amount of trouble maintaining his focus on any one thing. The ocean, bikes, fire, bugs, wild animals, vegetation, dirt and mud in that order, pizza, dragons (or any monster really), soda, sleeping, more fire, dust bunnies, boxes, running, climbing, laughing ….. exedra, exedra… As far as dislikes are concerned, Ben, again, has several. Most of which have to do with some form of rules or regulations but mainly, Ben hates school. Sitting in class is everything Ben hates all rolled into one. Rules everywhere about how loud you are allowed to talk, no food in class, no changing seats, no looking around, no sleeping, no throwing paper, no chewing gum, no jokes, no laughing when the teacher says “duty”, no pet squirrels that you caught on the way to school, no fireworks, no taking your shirt off when it gets too hot… it’s Ben’s own adolescent hell on earth
GOALS: Ben someday wants to construct his own planet maid entirely out of Turkey and mashed potatoes… he’ll call it Tercury… no girls allowed.
HABITS & QUIRKS: Most of the time he chews with his mouth open.
BOGGART: Confinement and Restraint. Ben’s boggart lashes shadowy ropes, tightly around his body and forces him to remain idle… seemingly forever (Greatest Fear)[/b]
PATRONUS: Ben and his family, along with his best friend Kevin spent a whole weekend at the Lakes once. Ben spent all day swimming and exploring and didn’t come in off the lake until the sun had set and the sky was a deep purple. Even then, Ben spent the night under the infinite stars roasting marshmallows with his family and telling terrifying but absolutely unrealistic ghost stories. He would wake up to the smell of his mother grilling sausages and his father heating water over the fire for his morning coffee. Kevin was often still asleep so Ben and his brother would do the polite thing and wake him up gently… by cradle tossing his sleeping bag into the lake. Ben’s dad always ended up pushing them both into the water shortly after anyways so Kevin was never too upset. Out there, in nature with his family… going where he wants and doing as he pleases… actively emulating his inner infatuation with the strange and unexplored… being with his family and just… existing together… that’s where Ben feels most comfortable. Ben is not yet able to produce a patronus but as far as memories go, this is his favorite.
DEMENTOR: Ben felt the icy chill of emptiness crash over him like the storm tossed sea on a rocky shore. The Dementor was barreling down on him, reaching its scabbed, talon like hands towards his face as if trying to grasp Ben’s very soul. Before he could take any action at all, suddenly he was 7 years old again and curled up under a shadowy horse bridge in a desolate area of no-man’s-land. He had run away from home because his mom wouldn’t let him do something…. Or maybe she made him do something that he didn’t want to do… Ben couldn’t even remember. He was lost, hungry, scared and cold. He could hear his mother crying and felt the pain she was feeling. He saw her tears and felt her terror… terror of not knowing what had happened to her son and whether or not she had seen him for the last time. Ben saw his dad frantically searching for him… anxiously asking neighbors and strangers if they had seen the brown haired boy in the worn out picture he kept in his wallet. He could hear is older brother comforting his babey sister who seemed hysterical. He felt her tears and felt his own very real tears on his face as the Demontor closed in on its pray. He saw his family reaching out for him and he himself, desperately reaching back… wanting to feel the comfort of his mother and fathers embrace but not being able to move out from under the bridge. He felt as though he would never be happy again.
VERITASERUM: Ben has little to no secrets in his life. In fact, his filter-less mind-to-mouth information flow is what gets him in trouble most of the time. He does have a tendency to conjure up extravagant stories to include the time he started a fire in the shed and told his parents it was because he was a wizard and could cast fire spells with his mind. They grounded him for an indefinite amount of time. Also, he blames most of his mischievous works on his little sister who is not of an age yet to defend herself.
MIRROR OF ERISED: Ben had a dream once that he was half robot and half gorilla and just did everything that he normally does throughout his everyday life… just better because he was half robot, half gorilla. So ever since then, he has just kind of been working towards that.
PERSONALITY: To say that Ben’s imagination is “over active” would simply be an understatement. The intensity and speed at which Ben’s imagination operates needs a whole new, most likely made up word… and the person to create that word, along with a new language to go with it, would probably be Ben. He is consistently living in a world of fiction and rarely takes rest stops along the road that “normal” people travel. Despite his aloofness and his affiliation with the extraordinary, Ben is a relatively intelligent boy. He gets low marks in school and isn’t particularly “book smart” but he is very creative and resourceful. He is unnaturally brave for his age and doesn’t seem to have a single anxious bone in his body. Ben says what he thinks and unknowingly enjoys studying human behavior. He is gradually learning how to use words and behavior in a social setting to manipulate the conversation or work his way out of trouble. Additionally, in the spirit of trouble, Ben seems to cause a lot of it. Besides making things as awkward as humanly possible between his teenage older brother and girls or friends or anyone really that he cares about impressing or systematically packing embarrassing things in his father’s briefcase so that when he gets to work and opens it in front of his co-workers, they would all be confused as to why he would need to bring a bag of rice and extra underwear into the office, Ben has accumulated quite a record of accomplishments. Additionally, Ben has always felt as though he possessed powers and is somehow magical. Not because of his imagination but because strange things always happen around him with no logical explanation. Once, he had hoped so hard that it would snow so that he wouldn’t have to go to school the next day and sure enough, from the ceiling of his bedroom, icy flakes of pure white snow started falling on his bed… in the middle of summer… indoors! Before he knew it, he was playing in snow and packing snowballs. He raced out to show his father what had happen only to return to a soaked bed and comforter from where the snow had quickly melted due to the heat and was scolded for playing with water toys in the house.
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FAMILY & POSSESSIONS
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FATHER: Benjamin Gillis Sr. owns and operates a muggle hardware store called “Gillis and Son’s Hardware.” He had originally wanted to call it “It’s hard to ware out our hardware: a Hardware Store” but his wife succeeded in talking him out of it and going with something more traditional. Ben Sr’s father had managed a hardware store for his entire adult life up until his death and had always brought his children into work with him. These nostalgic memories inspired Ben to open his own shop with the intent being to give his own children the same inspiring memories his father had provided. Ben Sr. is a very loving and providing father and is proud, albeit confused, that his middle child is going to Hogwarts.
MOTHER: Ben’s mother, Dara, grew up on a horse ranch and has 13 brothers and sisters. Of the parental tandem, she is by far the more level headed and often is the only thing between good order and discipline and complete chaos within the Gillis household. Dara and Ben Sr. met in college and were married shortly thereafter. If you asked her, she will say that it was love at first sight… if you asked Ben, he would jokingly say that he only married her for her looks but in reality, he is the one who desperately wanted her to marry him. Dara sometimes substitute teaches at her kids school but most of the time she takes care of the household while Ben Sr. is at the Hardware Store.
SIBLINGS: Ben has an older brother Jim who is named after their grandfather. Jim is 14 and has just started muggle high school and by association, has adopted all of the traditional anxieties that come with it. Although he can be socially awkward, Jim is a very gifted athlete and has recently started competitive wrestling, which has not been very conducive for Ben’s usual mischievous ways. Luckily, Ben is still faster than his aggressive older brother. Ben also has a sister named Emily. Emily is now 5 years old and Ben has been influencing her to follow in his trouble-making footsteps.
OTHER: Ben has a very large extended family. His father has only one sister and his mother has 13 siblings; 8 brothers and 5 sisters, all of whom love stopping by for visits and reunions. Ben loves going to his grandparent’s horse ranch in the country where he can explore with his cousins and ride four-wheelers and play with the animals. Additionally, Ben has a more reserved best friend named Kevin who spends most of his time attached to Ben, providing sound, but ignored words of wisdom.
BLOOD STATUS: Muggle Born
SPECIES: Half Gorilla, half robot hopefully someday soon…
SOCIAL STATUS: Middle to Upper class in accordance with muggle standards.[/b]
PET/S: After little to no deliberation, Ben decided on a particularly large, red toad and named him el hefe.
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CHARACTER HISTORY
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EARLY YEARS: Ben was born into a seemingly normal non-magic family who had every intention on raising him the way any traditional family of the time would. He would go to school, get good grades, be well behaved, graduate high school, go to college, and then manage his father’s hardware store or become a Doctor, depending on which parent you asked. He would get married and have children of his own and they would be raised the same way, continuing the cycle of modern family customs. What Ben and Dara Gillis absolutely, 100 percent never expected to happen to their baby boy was that he would end up being a wizard. Ben had lived his short, 11 year stint on earth in relative normality only to be told that he was a member of quite possibly, the most secret of secret societies on earth and was a wizard… a magical being.
HOGWARTS YEARS: Ben has the highest of high expectations for his future at Hogwarts. Someone wise once said “I’m a wizard!” “I can set things on fire with my mind!” and that person was Ben himself, trying to convince his parents of his magical abilities. Ben thinks they probably feel pretty stupid now…
ADULTHOOD: Ben never wants to grow up.
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OUT OF CHARACTER
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ALSO KNOWN AS: T-rex, T-bone, T-Payne, T-dog… virtually the letter T followed by any other noun….. and maybe even some verbs…RP EXPERIENCE: I have been on HP forum based RPGs since 2009… tis a great creative outlet and the Harry Potter universe farggin rocks my socks so…. I do have to say that I am really bad with coding and that I have never mastered the art of making a kick ass signature… please don’t judge me based on these thingsHOW YOU FOUND US: I googled “Best Harry Potter Forum based RPG” and this site was at the top of some lists… Congrats Guys!MAIN CHARACTER: I guess it’s Ben Gillis… for now…CHARACTER PURPOSE: Can I say “to be determined”? I don’t really know what to put here...RP SAMPLE: Ben didn’t know such a feeling existed. Eleven years he has spent on this planet. Eleven years of accumulative knowledge consisting of movies, video games, comic books, and the very small amount he was privy too in school, and never had he been exposed to something like this. In his fictional adventures, Ben had played Swashbuckling Buccaneers, flying robots, futuristic robots, futuristic flying robots, sometimes giant, sometimes regular sized. He has pretended to be dragons, sea krakens, trolls, space aliens, mythical knights, mummies and werewolves along with thousands of other different types of “fictional” beings. He spent his entire life in a constant state of motion, always running from place to place, never having enough time, always needing five more minutes, but what he was feeling at this moment, on this day, stopped him dead in his tracks. Ben didn’t want to move… he was scared to even murmur a sound, fearing that the slightest of disturbances would make this dream dreadfully melt back into the mundane reality he was used too, much like every other dream he had ever had.
But today it was all too real. Ben stood in an archway on the brim of a street that winded through a series of the most incredible things he had ever seen. He was openly gazing at a place known as Diagon Alley and was being exposed for the first time to the world he would now become a part of. His mother and father were with him and seemed to be as equally dazed but more so in disbelief rather than excitement like Ben was feeling. A massive tidal wave of exhilaration washed over Ben and it took everything he had in him not to sprint full speed into this magical world while yelling enthusiastically until he looses his voice. He decided instead, against all instinct, to walk slowly and deliberately in order to fully process the astonishing sights he was seeing. There were shops selling extravagantly colored robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments that Ben had never seen before. There were windows stacked with barrels of bat spleens and eel’s eyes, tottering piles of aged, leather bound books and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon and maps of places Ben never knew existed. There were stores advertising second hand broomsticks, quills, and all kinds of owls and other animals, there were joke shops and even a place to get ice cream… Ben never imagined that an ice cream parlor would be the last place he would want to visit in a shopping district. As Ben tried to the best of his abilities to see as much as possible with the seemingly insufficient, two eyes he was born with, His mother was trying to make sense of the instructional letter they were sent via a large brown barn owl only two days prior. “This list says that 1st year students need to purchase a wand” she said out loud, but more to herself in an attempt to apprehend the oddity of it. Sure enough, Ben saw a store ahead on the right that read, in peeling gold letters over the door: Olivanders: Makers of Fine Wands since 382 B.C.. Strategically placed in the dusty window of the shop was a solitary wand laying on a faded purple cushion. Ben could no longer resist his natural boyhood instinct. He broke into full sprint towards the extraordinary store to the fading sound of his parents calling him back some distance behind him. He burst into the shop to the sound of a bell ringing overhead and mentally proclaimed that bursting into this world would be exactly how he handled his situation from now on.Last edited by Benjamin Gillis on Mon Sep 29, 2014 3:50 pm; edited 1 time in total
by Benjamin Gillis Sun Sep 28, 2014 6:12 pm
