MASTERS, pierce damien

[pierce]

Nickname: Raven.
How You Found Us: Lock.
Contact Via: AIM - xoxOneWhiteRose. MSN - [e-mail].

What can be found in a name:
Pierce Damien Masters.
When the day I was born:
17/02/1956
The Angels screamed:
Lorenzo and Marina Masters. No siblings.
And Hell shut its doors:
None.
While creatures retreated:
7/8.
To depths unknown:
Staff.

I hide from them:
His office, the lake, the grounds under a shady tree.
Be who they want to see:
His look is a very distinct one, even on first glance: sandy brown hair, green-hazel eyes. Pierce has a distinctly muscular build with several scars adorning it, and most of the "stories" regarding them are kept within his own mind; he dislikes talking about it. He has a tattoo of a dragon wrapping around his shoulder, and stands at around six foot three. At first glance, he's quite the scary-looking man, with an intense gleam to his eye and a way of holding himself that practically demands either acknowledgment, fear, or both. There's a wild, unpredictable aspect to him even under all the layers of self-control, which is easily recognizable even by the most timid first years.

Whenever he can, he wears regular clothing, as he finds it much more natural than the Hogwarts robes - and when those opportunities make themselves known, he's a jeans-boots-and-t shirt kind of guy. He doesn't smile terribly often without prompting, so he gives off the initial impression of being unfriendly, but when someone cracks a joke or says something witty, there's a relaxing ease about his smile as if he'd been holding his breath. His movements are generally a touch too quick, jerky, precise, and he almost always appears somewhat distracted.
But that leaves no one:

To discover that inside:
Pierce, in general, is of the darker sort, despite his position as a member of staff among the Gryffindor House. He's not exactly the brooding type, but tends to be on the more cynical and sarcastic side of things - and he's horribly pessimistic. Definitely not someone you would go to when in need of some cheering up unless you're following the whole misery-loves-company theory; he'd be far more likely to either dismiss the problem with a roll of his eyes or make some snarky comment that was far from helping. His temper can be fierce and even destructive by nature, which is something he frequently struggles with.

However, there's an entire other side of him. Pierce has a complete and utter passion for his work that not only assisted him becoming as skilled as he is, but additionally made him excellent at teaching it to others. Around his students, he's the perfect battle of strict, witty, funny, instructive, and helpful, and for this he's gained a lot of respect - one of the most important things to him. He has a dangerously high standard for honor which he holds himself and everyone around him to; cowards are not to be tolerated, and if respect is not shown to/around him, he's not easy with consequences. Because of this, he sometimes comes off as unnecessarily harsh, but the results are great; his classroom is the epitome of an ideal learning environment, and he does his best to ensure that both he and his student enjoy it. Underneath the unbridled confidence and devilish grin, Pierce is actually somewhat compassionate.
This soulless being:
Teaching, learning, freedom, alcohol, women, respect, independence, success, thunder storms, large animals, kids, being a wizard, his job.
Is just as lost:
Orders, having to repeat himself, hypocrites, bland food, people who nag, small dogs, elitists, fear, hot nights, failure, being judged.
As everyone else:
Physical strength, animagus (leopard), intelligence, passion, self-sufficiency.
In a world that knows only hate:
Temper, age, past, narrow-mindedness, refusal to accept assistance even when needed.
And causes pain for the soulless like me:
1.) He's an ex-Death Eater.
2.) Was an alcoholic for several months when he was seventeen, and while he hasn't relapsed into the addiction, he also hasn't remained sober.

They left me to die:
None.
On a bed of roses:
None.
Blood seeping through:
It's generally assumed that they're purebloods, but his great grandfather on his mother's side was muggleborn.
The satin sheets of fame:
Upper class.
What a bitter story of love:
February seventeenth, nineteen fifty-six was a bittersweet day for the friends and family of Lorenzo and Marina Masters. The couple was young; he was twenty-three, she twenty-one, and for seven months that they'd known about it, they'd been eagerly anticipating the arrival of twin boys. However, when the day came, unforeseen complications arose to an extent no one could have guessed, and by the time they figured out what was wrong, one twin was dead and the other was turning blue. Pierce was saved, if barely, but there was nothing anyone could do for his identical brother, a fact that his parents did not soon forget.

In utter love with the son they had but distraught over the loss of the other, they had the baby's corpse frozen and kept that way, refusing to bury him. After a week of heated discussion between them, they finally decided they had only one option. No wizard at St. Mungo's could bring their dead child back to life - but maybe there was one who could. Left with only one option, only that one small hope, they took Pierce with them as they crossed over to the dark side, a choice they would live to regret infinitely. They were good people, the type that pulled over on the side of the road to drive an old man to wherever he might need to go, regardless of what he looked like. The possibility of preserving their baby's life was the only thing in the world that could have convinced them to dedicate their lives (and the life of their other son) to the torturing of others, and when it became clear that there was no way out for them but that they still had not brought back Pierce's twin, life took a much more bleak hue.

Pierce was raised in this environment; his first few learned words included those of such vulgar nature that his parents would flinch daily at the sound of his tiny voice speaking them. He was surrounded, constantly, by the coarse way of life that the Death Eaters led, and his basic principles of right and wrong didn't develop for years and years, such was the result of seeing regular beatings of innocent people by the two people he revered the most of anyone in the world, just like any other child - his parents. By his toddler years, he was being taught the basic fundamentals of being a Death Eater, and by the time he turned eleven and it was time for school to start, he was considered one.

Though he'd been born in London, he attended Durmstrang at the insistence of his parents' peers, as there was a considerably larger number of kin at that school than at Hogwarts. Pierce fit in extremely well there, instantly becoming one of the heads of the social system. His quit wit and dripping sarcasm, even in his preteen years, appealed immensely to the upper-classmen. However, there was something different about him than them, he quickly came to realize. The majority of the population at Durmstrang had something distinctly; well, evil about them, evil in a way that he was fascinated to observe.

He was far from one of the "good guys." Pierce was dark to say the least, a pessimist through and through, sometimes cruel and often unfair, but he could never have been classified in the same personality group as his fellow students. Throughout his childhood and teenage years, he'd been assisting his parents and others. By his own hand, he had tortured and wounded people that didn't deserve it, and known what he was doing - the same as many of them had. But while they seemed to enjoy it, even get a perverse sense of pleasure from what they did; Pierce had always looked down at his victim with careful, calculated apathy. There was nothing enjoyable about what he was doing, but rather than allowing it to hurt him instead, he made his actions worthless individually to him; like breathing. Necessary, but not something to bother thinking about.

As he advanced in years at school, even his professors were stunned to silence at his skill in transfiguration. Partially because he'd been forced repeatedly to use those skills in "extra-curricular activities" and partially from sheer ability, his methods by 4th year were advanced enough for him to take the 7th year class, and after that he studied on his own in his free time, developing them rapidly and even assisting different professors as they needed it. While the rest of his grades were only so-so, in that area, at least, he was something of a prodigy, talked about all the time and even transfiguring objects for people for money.

Having been on the younger side of the spectrum, by the time 7th year rolled around, Pierce was still only sixteen, a Death Eater in all but the mark. He had become an animagus, a leopard - the training for which had been brutal and quite possibly the most difficult of anything he'd ever done, mostly because of his extremely young age (he'd started at age fifteen). His body became somewhat covered in scars, some so small you couldn't see them unless his skin hit the light a certain way, and some large, jagged, and a couple inches long. He made all sorts of extra money by tutoring students, anywhere from his year to first year, and was so caught up that when his seventeenth birthday came around, he would not even have noticed if not for the ensuing events.

Birthdays, as a general rule, were not really celebrated among his family and the Death Eaters; they were inconsequential - all except one. The seventeenth year, however, was when the children of the Death Eaters would recite their vows, earning their Mark and forever binding them to their leader. On that morning, he and his parents were woken up early and told to prepare. Having known that the day was coming ever since he was old enough to comprehend what was required of him, he moved to do so, only to be stopped by his parents, who insisted immediately that it was his sixteenth birthday, not his seventeenth.

This was, of course, hard for them to believe, and they brought up the fact that that would mean he would have gone into his seventh year of school at age fifteen. Lorenzo and Marina claimed that that was, in fact, the case, that he'd been accepted to Durmstrang a year early and that the other Death Eaters were a year off in calculation for his age. Though they hesitated, the story was accepted; the couple was among the most trust-worthy of all the camp, and knew better than to lie when Voldemort was the one that would be delivering the punishment. The story was accepted so fully, in fact, that it was never so much as brought to their leader's attention, and even Pierce assumed that he must have made a mistake in his age.

This was where he hit a rough spot - though it was hardly as if the other Death Eaters cared. Entirely fed up with the world, its expectations, and his boredom with it (without school, he was stuck only with his apathy towards his assignments), Pierce turned to alcohol - and enjoyed every moment of it. He became a justified alcoholic, constantly seen with butterbeer or, more often, fire whiskey. Thankfully, he was not one of those crazy drunks that ran around, half-insane and hiccupping; he just became a bit more thoughtful, more brooding, more reckless. It went on for several months until he was finally informed that they were concerned it would begin to mess with his work (the amounts he was ingesting were increasing at a steady rate). Just like that, his supply was cut off, and he was forced to quit his addiction cold-turkey.

He graduated from Durmstrang at age "sixteen," and the months began to go buy a bit too fast. Before he knew it, it was ten months later, only two months before his "seventeenth" birthday, when he would swear himself in - and then a mistake was made. His parents had done something wrong, messed up in an assignment for the first time in their lifetimes, and in front of him, they were punished for it; whipped, beaten, put under the Crucio curse for brief periods of time over and over again, just like the punishment was for any other who screwed up. The difference, however, was that these people were not "any other," they were the only two people in the world he truly cared for, and the other Death Eaters' mistaken assumption that his alliance to the cause was greater than his alliance to his parents cost them dearly.

Utterly disgusted by the entire thing, and by his parents for willingly entering into it, he disappeared from his watch-duty that night and never looked back. Hours later, of course, they realized he was gone and billowed after him, searching, but without the mark of the Death Eaters to trace him with, they could not find him except by normal tracking means. They were expert at that, of course, but they reached a complete stone-wall, a dead end. He'd vanished - or at least, his human form had. A trip to St. Mungo's had revealed that his age was, indeed, seventeen, rapidly nearing eighteen, and his parents were killed for their betrayal, a fact that he had no way of confirming but assumed would happen, anyway.

With only his wand and clothing, he'd disappeared, apparating as far away as humanly possible and then running as far away as inhumanly possible. In his leopard form, he managed to live in the wild well past his eighteenth ("seventeenth") birthday (which he was beginning to question once more), but several months after that when he figured he would either be assumed dead or the search would have been abandoned in false hope, he finally turned back into a human. His first stop was Mungo's to check and see, for curiosity's sake, exactly how old he was, and when it was confirmed that he was eighteen, Pierce headed over to the only place in the world he figured might be safe for him: Hogwarts.

He arrived, prepared to fight and debate his way into the position of Advanced Transfiguration professor. At first, as was expected, the other teachers were horribly skeptical of him, both for his young age, for the fact that he openly admitted to having lived among Death Eaters all his life, and for his lack of social skills - having spent so many months as a wild cat, there was still a sense of wild abandon to him. Pierce was a little too untamed for their tastes, his senses a little too sharp, always seeming somewhat paranoid. However, it just so happened that the position he wanted was available - and not even uppity staff members could deny his raw talent. It was already part-way through the year, but he was accepted to begin instruction immediately as a member of the staff.

A week later, with his lessons prepared and a bit more experience around the kids to smooth off his coarse exterior, he began his "trial period," which was to last until the end of the school year. During that time, he turned nineteen, and he slowly adjusted to his new life - and grew to love it. He became an excellent instructor, able to connect with his students on a level most of the other teachers were too old to manage, and his position held no boundaries for house. Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw accepted him instantly, of course, and within a month or so even the Slytherin students had come to join him, recognizing in him the blatant darkness that they could so well compare to.

It is now his second year teaching at Hogwarts, still as the Advanced Transfiguration professor. Pierce is at the age of twenty, and in many ways still acts it, but at least when pertaining to his job he tends to have an acceptable level of maturity. It's uncertain whether or not the Death Eaters/Voldemort even know he's there, but if they do, they don't dare act on it; Hogwarts is, after all, the one place they would not dare venture to. He lives there year-round, and though he has not relapsed back into being an alcoholic, Pierce has no qualms about going out and getting drunk on a day off; he just resists the urge to keep going with it. While he is still that dark-natured boy of his childhood and has yet to fully lose the effects of living on his own in the wild, he seems to slowly be opening up, at least partially.

Saturdays were, by far, Pierce's favorite day, and for one very obvious reason: freedom from teaching. He had no classes that day, and unless he had an especially high stack of papers that required immediate grading (which he often put off for later, anyway), the day was his to do with what he wished. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy teaching, and in fact to accuse him of such would be a blatant lie; he loved his job, it gave him purpose. However, after a long week of repeating material, dealing with accidents and being surrounded by either people a bit younger or much older than him, having some time to rest - and more importantly, time to himself - was absolutely priceless. It was his day for recuperation, enough to last him another six days.

Today, he was up even earlier than usual. Rain had been pounding down overhead all night, lightning flashing and thunder cracking like it only could during an April shower. While Pierce was certain that there were many students and even fellow faculty members who found it disturbed their slumber quite unpleasantly, he wasn't one of them. In fact, he had slept better that night than any in a long time, with the steady sound of heavy, beating droplets singing him to sleep just as surely as they roused him from it. Refreshed and ready to start the day even at seven-thirty in the morning, he had crept out of bed and immediately gotten ready, with a bit of help, of course, from magic. Wizards and witches all over warned each other to avoid using magic to accomplish every day tasks, claiming that they would become dependent on it and become entirely hopeless when the time should come that magic was unavailable, but Pierce's theory was much simpler: if you got it, you might as well use it.

He considered this as he stepped out of the Great Hall and onto the grounds. A list mist of rain began coating him almost instantly, and he didn't even bother with a spell to protect his (muggle; with everyone else asleep, he saw no reason to adorn himself is frivalous robes) clothing. Though he no longer had the brick of Hogwarts school protecting him from the outside world, he felt no less at peace with it, no less safe. Pierce could attribute this to many things, ranging from the fact that there was still a protective barrier around the school to the fact that he had his wand with him to the fact that, if needed, he could transform into a leopard at will and tear the throat out of whatever enemy dared cross him. Hopefully, he mused, it wouldn't come to that; the idea of grasping someone's esophagus in his fangs was unappealing, even to a cat as large and wild as himself.

Figuring he could get away with a good hour or so of solitude before others started waking up and invading on his private time, Pierce wandered over to a large tree on the grounds that he often sat under. He slid down to a sitting position, his back up against the trunk, and leaned his head against it as well, closing his eyes. If he didn't know better, he'd have let himself fall asleep right there, but as it was, he maintained a minimal level of awareness for his surroundings as he let his mind wander.

[iDorcy]

Couple things, firstly McGonagall teaches Transfiguration, it's canon, you could go with Advanced Transfiguration if you wanted, that would be good but McGonagall teaches Transfiguration years 1-7.
Also what do you mean by 'member of the Gryffindor staff'? This makes no sense to me. McGonagall is Gryffindor head of house and that is the only 'staff' they have, same with any house, they have their house heads and that's it so what does your definition of 'Gryffindor staff' mean?

Apart from those two points it's a really fantastic history and overall great application

[pierce]

Advanced Trig is great, sorry about that! Dunno how I forgot about McGonagall. And really? I thought that the different staff members were assigned to different houses, and seated as such at the front during meals, etc. My bad, though! Fixing!

[iDorcy]

No, houses have lessons together, two houses at a time eg. Slytherin fourth years with Gryffindor fourth years and then next lesson could be Gryffindor fourth years with Hufflepuff fourth years. No division amongst the staff with relation to the houses

[iDorcy]

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