InsaneJournal

Basics

• Name: Elphias Zephaniah Doge
• Birthdate: 4th July 1881
• Citizenship: British, dear boy, whatever else could he be?
• Current residence: Upper Flagley, Yorkshire, in a charming thatched cottage that's slightly too large for a widower on his own.
• Blood status: Half, though Elphy would say "muddled"; Elphias's paternal grandmother was muggleborn, and both maternal great-grandfathers too.

Physical

• Height/weight: 6'1 / 175lbs
• Hair/eyes: Once lustrously black; alas now almost entirely grey / brown
• Manner of speech: His has been described as a "fruity" voice; mostly received pronunciation, with lingering burrs of a northern accent. Generally unstintingly polite, and prone to such doddering Englishisms as "I say", "jolly good" and "how do you do".
• Manner of dress: Conservative, in the main. When wearing robes, they tend to be very simple. He has a penchant for old-fashioned muggle suits, and seems to be stuck in the 1950s. Every now and then, however, he'll come across some item - usually upon his travels - that he will decide is absolutely "dashing" and take to wearing it constantly for a while. He wore brightly-coloured cummerbunds for two years in the early '70s, for instance, and paisley ties for all of 1975. His latest acquisition is a rather old and sagging tweed fedora that he bought in a flea market in Brixton for twenty pence.
• Physical description: Once upon a time Elphias was rather devilishly handsome, despite the faint scars of his childhood bout of dragonpox. His glory days are over, but considering he's nearing his hundredth birthday, he thinks he's aged rather well, actually. He still stands tall and straight, and though much of the muscle of his prime has got bored and wandered off, he's still a trim if slightly saggy figure. The weathering and wrinkles of an active life have quite eclipsed the old dragonpox scars on his face; the wrinkles are particularly ferocious across his forehead, above his always stern and still black eyebrows. His hair, which he keeps short and neat, averages at grey, with the few remaining black hairs balanced out by the encroaching white. Elphias wears a full beard and moustache, also kept trimmed very short, because, "Who wants to look at this jowly nonsense? Not me!" His mouth is thin-lipped and a little crooked in a manner that can give an impression of menace, but his general expression is so genial that it's rarely noticed. He has glasses for long distances, but despite having had them for years, still tends to lose them and leave them in unexpected places.
• First impression: What a dear old gent!

• PB: Sean Connery (Indy / Hunt for Red October era - i.e. not bald YET *G*)
- icons (please note: stupid hat)
- this or that or the other
- or this or this but maybe not this.

Personal

• General personality: It may be true that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but Elphias has had nearly a hundred years to learn, so he knows quite a few already. The base that the Sorting Hat recognised - the strong sense of right-and-wrong behind Elphias's impeccable manners and balanced out by his compassion, the daring of his dreams and the seed of his abiding loyalty - has not just been built upon in the intervening years, it remains at the core of who he is, broadened and deepened. He doesn't just mouth the platitudes, he's downright chivalrous; he may not be a shoulder to cry on, but in a hundred tiny, subtle ways he gives support and comfort; a hundred years of imagining what might be beyond the horizon hasn't diminished his store of possibilities; and his fealty unshakeable once won.

But from the moment that hat hit his head, Elphias has been growing and developing, and he expresses a hope that he will never stop doing so. He considers this one of the most important things he ever learnt - the desire and instinct to learn, expand and adapt - and he learnt it from Albus Dumbledore. He's always been aware that he wasn't the quickest or cleverest wizard in Britain, and sitting next to Albus just made it even more obvious. There was nothing he could do about that, but he could learn as much as he could, trying to piece things together, and try alternative approaches if one made no sense. Albus encouraged and assisted him in this all the way, and that, even more than Albus initially befriending a dragonpox-ravaged eleven-year-old, was what won Elphias's utter and lifelong devotion.

Central to Elphias's personality then is patience and perseverence, but also creativity and imagination. This manifests not just in his efforts to see all angles and consider all possibilities, but less pragmatically, in an optimistic bent, a real skill for tale-telling (though it's mostly only the young with whom Elphy indulges this out loud) and a definite streak of wanderlust. Oh sure, in his long and varied life, Elphias has learned that the best outcomes, the pure visions, the wonderful ideas rarely come to full and unimpinged realisation, but that does not alter their beauty, desirability, or the requirement that they be considered and pushed towards. Elphias is a man who dreams of roses, but plans for nettles.

So he's a cheerful man. In fact, he is if not cheerful then generally genial and relaxed about just about everything. It takes a lot to get Elphias ruffled - even when delivering rebukes for rudeness or other minor offenses, he's polite. He tends to believe that people want to be better, and the real, fiery, curse-throwing Doge wrath is reserved for those who have demonstrated - or been identified as such, mostly by Albus - that they are unremittingly evil. He presents easily and constantly as a friendly, somewhat absent-minded, but entirely harmless old darling who couldn't possibly be involved in anything as complex as a conspiracy because, well, he's just too dithery.

• Strengths and weaknesses: It's not just an attitude thing; Elphias really isn't as bright as all that. He's pretty damn good with languages - speaks about four with smatterings of others - but very bad with maths and logic. But a long and adventurous life has given Elphias a wealth of experience, and a flexible approach to applying it. Even if his suggestions usually start with "I remember one time when I was in Novgorod..." there is often some useful insight buried in the nostalgia. He won't push these suggestions, however; so used is Elphy to being far from the smartest wizard in the room, that if his notions are turned down, or even ignored, he'll assume other people know best and turn to something new. (This knowledge that he's second-best also means Elphy can't take a compliment. He deflects them all.) He's very good at adapting on the fly, and getting his assigned tasks done, but absolutely hopeless at being in charge - his certainty that he's mucking things up rather gets in the way of giving orders. Once he's committed to something, he's absolutely committed and won't hear a word against it. He mistrusts glibness, values honesty, and can be rather too polite sometimes, especially to women - but in his view, Bellatrix Lestrange and her ilk have forfeited any right to the term 'lady'.
• Mental health: Not just balanced, but steady, resilient and of an optimistic bent.

Relationships

• Relatives:
Father - Micajah Doge
Mother - Letitia Doge (nee Smith)
Siblings - Sophonsiba (older, now living in America), Violetta (younger, died of dragonpox as an infant)
• Relationship with family: Elphias was always very fond of his parents, though their relationship was rather more English than close. From his Hogwarts graduation, Elphias was considered a man by them, and accordingly made his independent way in the world. When he was in England, he tried to make it home for Sunday lunch every week, and when abroad, to write at least once a fortnight to his mother. After Micajah's death, Elphias took to visiting his mother every day (Sophonsiba was living with her husband and children in Boston and couldn't help) but the old dear soon followed her husband. Elphy and Sophie exchange owls two or three times a year.
• Sexuality: Quite straight; though his friendship with Albus introduced him to notions he had never previously considered, all his youthful experiments in that direction convinced him that while it was quite all right for those as were that way inclined, he preferred the ladies.
• Significant other: At present, none. Elphias has been married twice. His first marriage, to Italian witch Maria-Annunziata, lasted five years. She divorced him when they discovered his childhood illness had left him unable to father children. Later, he married Albanian-born Tulia, and the pair were married for some twenty-eight years before she died, relatively peacefully, of a long-term illness.
• Children: None, which saddens him a great deal some days.

Educational

• School: Hogwarts
• Years: 1892-1899
• House: Gryffindor
• Achievements: Being Albus Dumbledore's friend. It wasn't hard work, but Elphy's proud of it. He also won the school Gobstones tournament in seventh year, and didn't shut up about it until 1901.
• NEWTS: He got them in Transfiguration, Charms, DADA, Runes, History and Astronomy. Runes was an O, and that's the only result he still remembers. Who cares, after all this time?

Occupational

• Occupation: Semi-retired, semi-freelance. Consults occasionally with Gringotts, the Department of Magical Transportation and various international concerns regarding areas in which his experience is particularly valued - such as magical travel, communication and trade practices, and certain runic applications in eastern Europe.
• Previous jobs, if any: Oh heavens, do you have five minutes to go through them all? Elphias has, at various times in his life, held retail positions in a number of fields; clerked for mercantile, political and legal offices; been navigation, technical or general hand aboard magic carpets for both passenger and freight services; assisted in parties for both tomb-breaking and monster-trapping; been a farmhand, a labourer and an animal wrangler; tended bar, waited tables and even been a tutor/babysitter; and on one memorable occasion, adapted the works of Shakespeare to the varying needs of a small band of travelling players in the Baltic states.

The War

• How is your character involved in the war? When Albus Dumbledore draws breath to pick a fight, Elphias Doge is at his shoulder, ready to rumble (Henry V-style, at least). Elphy was one of the first members of the Order of the Phoenix, and will - barring tragic misfortune - be there to the last.
• Will your character die during the next year? Canon says no, but who listens to canon anymore? I'm not averse, if it becomes appropriate, but I think the old devil has sticking power.

Overall History

• Family/childhood:
Micajah Doge (Hufflepuff graduate and junior partner in an accountancy firm based in Hogsmeade) and Letitia Smith (Gryffindor graduate and secretary until her marriage) were, frankly, just plain boring. They were so entirely average in their lives, their marriage, their home and their relations that it scarcely bears mentioning. The first note-worthy interruption in the perfect normalcy of the Doge family occurred the summer that thirteen-year-old Sophonsiba came home early from a weekend with a friend's family, because her playmate had developed dragonpox.

Elphias and Violetta were sent to stay with their grandparents, but the minimal contact they'd have with Sophie had been enough; all three Doge children came down with the disease. Sophonsiba's was actually a light dose, but Elphias and Violetta weren't so lucky; he came out of danger phase with barely a fortnight to go before he was due to take the Hogwarts Express. Six-year-old Violetta seemed to be pulling through as well, but then complications set in, and despite everything that could be done, she died.

• School/work:
Having spent much of the last fortnight before school in St Mungos worrying about his sister, Elphias hadn't thought much about his own brush with the disease and the lingering traces of it still left upon him. Hadn't thought about it, that was, until he took a solitary trainride and sat down at a table in the Great Hall where even his new Gryffindor housemates edged away from him. Elphy was feeling about as lonely as it was possible to feel in a hall crowded with people, for approximately half a minute. Then another new sorting sat down firmly in the space beside him and introduced himself. "They're being ridiculous," he added. "Everyone knows that at the stage where the scars turn green, dragonpox is well past being contagious."

Elphias has been willing to spill blood for Albus Dumbledore ever since, and on a couple of occasions during their early years at school, did (or at least caused bruising). But Albus explained that he really didn't care about things that people said, so Elphias tried not to care as well. There were other friends, eventually, but Albus and Elphias were inseperable best friends - and there were disagreements, but mostly minor and soon mended, and even they became rarer as the boys matured together. Though Albus was clearly - and more and more obviously as they progressed through school - far more intelligent, they studied together more often than not, adding further to Elphias's perceived debt to his best friend; Albus claimed that working with Elphias helped him achieve a fuller and deeper understanding of the material, but Elphias suspected he was just being polite.

After graduation, the boys had planned to make a Grand Tour of all the places in Europe they most wanted to visit; the al-Hambra in Granada, Frederick III's bastions of knowledge in Saxony, the Cathar centres in Languedoc, Alexandria, Constantinople - they even hoped to be able to make it to Baghdad. Upon the eve of their departure, as they sat in the Leaky Cauldron swapping increasingly unlikely predictions of their adventures over mugs of butterbeer, a message arrived informing Albus of his mother's death. Elphias wanted to cancel everything, but after the funeral, Albus insisted that Elphias take the tour. And so, with heavy heart and sending Albus frequent letters and postcards, Elphias did. It was one of the strangest times in his life, for he was young and on the grandest adventure of his life, and yet he was tied to home and almost embarrassed to be enjoying himself so much.

He returned home, a little more than a year later, just in time for Ariana Dumbledore's funeral. He felt worse than ever, even more so when Albus was withdrawn and declined to speak about his family, or the events of the year that Elphias had missed. After a year of working (clerking in his father's office) and saving, Elphias went travelling again. He enjoyed it more, this time, and in his letters to and from Albus - which were frequent throughout his time abroad - found some manner of restoration of their relationship.

For the next twenty years, Elphias lived in quasi-nomadic style, working in various places throughout Europe and the Near East. He was young, willing, personable and flexible (which especially came in handy while the wizarding world was dodging around WW1) and even if he'd moved on without having planned in advance (which he did do occasionally) he usually had no trouble making acquaintances and finding some manner of gainful employment. As the years passed, and he'd worked a lot in travel, transport and other fields that used lots of transient workers, he developed something of a network of contacts scattered across the land that made moving about and finding interesting work even easier.

He met Maria-Annunziata (Nuncietta) while in Calabria in 1921 as part of a clean-up crew for a magical accident there. The courtship was rather whirlwind, and early in 1922 he brought her back to England to marry her, with Albus serving as his best man, of course. The friendship really blossomed again, almost back to the closeness of its schooltime heyday, despite the fact that Nuncietta didn't like Albus much. The married pair settled in Italy, with Elphias taking his first permanent job in years as a junior international liaison to the Italian Ministry. Homelife was... very Italian, and the argument that ended the marriage was far from the first. It was, however, the most severe; Nuncietta, increasingly desperate for children, couldn't live with the news from Elphias's medical check that the dragonpox had left him sterile.

She went back to her family; he went back to England and then, after a few months getting drunk with Albus, back on his travels. He spent an extended stint knocking about Russia, where communism was rather more hilarious for the wizarding population than for the muggle one, and noticed, when he came back west again, that Europe was a darkening place. The spectre haunting it was not communism, but rather Grindelwald. (If he'd been telling Albus the things he was seeing and hearing in person, he might have noticed a reaction, but letters are a wonderful place to hide.)

As matters became official and more serious, Elphias was enlisted by his country's Ministry as an informant and occasional agent, his history, connections and skills making him rather perfect for the role. To people other than his wife and Albus, Elphy only ever tells the amusing stories from this period; those about the near escapes, the dangerous incidents, and especially how close he came to capture when he was smuggled out of Budapest by Tulia's family (how he first met her) are never told. He does occasionally make passing reference to the fact that he missed Albus's famous duel with Grindelwald because he was busy trying to find Tulia amidst all the refugees so he could propose to her.

Elphias's second wedding was tiny, with Albus reprising his role of best man. The newlyweds returned to England, where Elphias declared he'd had enough of travelling and Albus declared himself highly sceptical. Sure enough, Elphy's involvement in the establishing of the post-Grindelwald concert of European wizarding had him hopping all over the continent, but he always returned to the home in Upper Flagley that Tulia kept for him. Eventually his work shifted to mostly Britain-based efforts in communications, trade and transport - he did a lot of work in, for and with the relevant departments of the Ministry during the '50s and '60s.

• Recent history:
When Albus confided his concerns regarding the now-grown and more disturbing than ever Tom Riddle, Elphias said only, "What do you need me to do?" His passion for this fight stems not only from his loyalty to Dumbledore, but his personal experiences; Tulia had lost several of her family to Grindelwald, and risked everything to fight him, and he knows he owes it to her to fight Voldemort with everything he has. If she hadn't died in 1974, she'd be right beside him.

Since that day he's maintained his occasional piece of work, and definitely his contacts in the UK and abroad, at Albus's request. His involvement with the Ministry and with external information sources has proved useful on numerous occasions for the Order, though Elphias frets that it keeps him too busy to do as much as he could within the organisation. He's run his patrols, and taught his classes, and done his best to be there when the young ones needed him. The deaths have been terrible, each one worse than the last, but Elphias tries to keep facing forward, to keep his spirits up and his resolve strong.

As things became darker in the last months, he's been taking more business excuses to be abroad, trying to recruit assistance from his European contacts. Still one of the public-faced Order members (yes, he has an ID card) Elphias made it back to the UK scant days before the borders were closed.