Desmond Voorhees - House Domina instructor

Male, age 44

Hair - milky white; Eyes - black-brown; Skintone - deep tan

Preferred Clothing - Enjoys unusual clothing finds from past centuries, and some that have never been seen on Humans (at least, on Earth). Mostly colored in red and brown to accent his pale hair and compliment his skin.

Specialities - Divination and Ritual Magic, hard subjects at best, and at least in the case of Divination almost impossible to learn all of. Desmond appears to have done so. He knows every in and out for any scrying device, potion, spell and rune. He also enjoys casting spells which take a long time to perform. And by 'long' that means 'sometimes he's casting it while he's teaching during the year, and by Winter it might be finished'.

Weaknesses - Desmond is unfailingly arrogant, but he is fair to students. He knows most of them will never achieve his level of knowledge in his chosen subjects. So when he does find a student who excells at either Divination or Rituals he 'takes them under his wing' and others might see it as 'teachers pet' syndrome. He's not afraid to pick favorites among the students. Then again, he's stuck with a family that would rival some movie-style witch hunters... Maybe it's best he stays with the students.

Wand - a thick beechwood wand. The length is just shy of ten and one-quarter inches long. The core consists of centaur tail hair. This wand allows him to perform both his rituals (the beech is handy in mundane situations for furniture - and is considered 'sturdy' for spell casting) and divination (centaurs are notorious for their fortelling and visionary work).

Familiar - none yet, see below?

Unusual Aspects - Desmond is unusual. But not inhuman unusual like some of the staff and students. Why he wasn't chosen to work at Hogwarts or another of the famous schools is a mystery, perhaps one which relates to his family. They are after all... witch hunters...

Desmond enjoyed the solitude that Winter break brought, even though there were some children left in the House and several other professors remained there for whatever purposes they had. It was quiet, not like the rest of the year. And he more liked the cool snowy breezes that came through the high open windows here and there, depositing some snow on the stone floor before a house elf came and mopped it up.

As always, he was working on something - a long spell that he'd begun sometime in August, and now in December it was almost complete. But he had to keep putting up the sigils, tracing energies in faint glowing lines in the air here and there. They were subtle, but covered a wide path through the place. Even outside, he had to go out and sit on the roof - which was okay, because as all Wizards were, he was able to fly either with or without a broom.

Zora knew he was casting something, but allowed it, because she knew better than to think he'd be one to destroy anything or even cause much mischief. He wasn't that kind of guy - in fact quite the opposite. If something wasn't about him it wasn't worth doing, right? For all the ways he was so self-posessed, it at least meant he wouldn't do harm to others or the surroundings. Plus, he knew she thought he was 'hot' - he did enjoy the term that muggles used, it applied to him.

Yes he really was that vain...

But he was also lonely. His family had all but destroyed him in his childhood, when he still had rich black hair and had begun to discover his magical talents. He foresaw things, he had prophetic dreams, he guessed right every time... He creeped them out. All his dreams that were prophetic always came true. When he said 'stop don't walk there' something always happened right where they'd be walking.

Grandpa Mitchell knew what this meant. He probably knew many other secrets of the Voorhees clan, but died before Desmond could pull them from the aged and bitter man's voice. When Desmond was eleven, he got that fateful invitation to join Hogwarts. Elated, as he knew he would have gotten one, he tried to ask his mother to take him to this place, Diagon Alley.

He was beaten senseless. It took him days to collect himself, and a week to scrape enough spare change from the house to get himself to the stores he knew had the right things for his destiny. He sequestered the books and cauldron away, and never parted with his new wand if he could possibly afford it. This was in the early seventies, when people were expected to be flamboyant and colorful. His family were not like that. Sedate, almost the opposite of any popular families on the block, Desmond managed to convince them that he was headed off to his proper school, and went to Hogwarts instead.

When he had been gone for some months, they finally placed missing child advertisements out, and he made it home in time for the holidays over winter.

And was beaten senseless.

He doggedly tried to explain to them why he had to do this, why it was best for him - but even his soft-hearted aunt Christina didn't want to hear of him going back to a school where witchery (what they called it) was taught. This went on for some time, he would literally sneak away to Hogwarts for a month and then have to return to his home, cast a spell he'd learned (and gotten into trouble for it until the magical authorities learned of his situation - and his family), and went back.

When Grandpa Mitchell died, Desmond was thirteen and in third year at Hogwarts. When his father Darian became the head of the Voorhees clan, Desmond was brought front and center in the house's wide living room. Extended relatives from other cities and even several other countries were there, for this event. He had no idea what to expect, he expected to be beaten again and was ready for that.

Instead, they changed their song. Applying sweet words and false voices, his family assured him that he would be able to go back to the school any time he wanted. Learn where everything was, how to get there and everything.

Because they wanted to burn it down. That, he didn't learn at this meeting. That was after dinner and he'd been sent to bed, he listened in with another little charm he'd picked up along the last year in school. His family, the Voorhees clan, were witch hunters. They'd made a good living at it in the early sixteen hundreds through the late eighteenth, until the modern era. Things got harder for them then, with television and radio and all the new technologies available. People did fly. People could talk at a distance. Images danced on screens and people attended movie shows with film reels about the war and modern events around the world.

It was a different society then. But there were still witches. And now, Desmond was one of them. So they were about to use him as a kind of lure, perhaps a tracking device, which would allow them to find this unplottable castle out there, and at last be rid of an entire generation of little demonic witches.

Never mind that demons and witchcraft hardly had anything to do with one another... Never mind that religion and craft were as far apart as day and night. There was even a very pretty chapel in the school, where Desmond prayed for his family to learn their ways were wrong.

But they didn't. What they did do was wait until very very late in the night, sneaking into Desmond's room, and tried planting a little electronic device into his satchel. They almost stole his wand to examine it, but it glowed brightly when they came too near it, and they didn't want to wake him up.

He was awake, of course, painfully aware of this betrayal and deception. He'd known they would do something, now he knew just what.

The situation righted itself when, later in the week, he headed 'back to Hogwarts'. Instead he went to the Ministry of Magic and had them deal with it. So far as his clan knew, Hogwarts might be located deep in the London Underground, a sewer by Brisbane, off the coast of Wales, thirteen miles straight up, or slightly behind the back yard fencepost.

But even though they knew he had won that round, this didn't stop. Until Desmond was of legal age to do anything about it, sixteen, when he disowned himself from the group and took only his name with him. He resided in Hogsmeade for the duration of his last year and a half at school, working in one or more of the shops to keep a roof over his head.

He was a hard worker, but he was very, very lonely then. However, as he had been since around fourteen, he was also devistatingly attractive and intelligent. His hair grew a white streak in it no later than his seventeenth summer, and was completely white by the time he was twenty. With his aptitude in spell casting and divination, he spent time with the Ministry catching small time criminals and making sure that his distant family remained just that: distant.

Desmond didn't have a proper relationship with a girl until he was nearly twenty one. A fetching young witch from the neighboring village, they lasted a few weeks and then he grew bored with her. As a playboy in modern society he'd have really done well had he returned to London. But instead, he preferred to remain in smaller villages and towns, solving mysteries and having pretty lasses be thankful for him.

And this lasted until he was forty. One day he was just fed up with it. His family, now including a twenty year old nephew and niece that had fully taken on the role of 'evil hunters', had almost caught up with him.

Then he met Zora Domina. Perhaps she'd been looking for him for a while, because she looked immeasurably relieved when she did locate him. For some reason, Desmond had never once even dreamed about her or her House. He'd heard things from the Ministry of course (who by then wanted him to become an Auror - but he really didn't feel like becoming the witches' witch hunter) about how she broke from Hogwarts some years ago. But that was the last they'd heard about it.

She was preceeded by a strange walking machine, something that had been crafted by a witch and was embued with half a dozen different mages' auras. It squealed to a halt, and stood there with one strange metal eyestalk and a bright shiny glass lens unblinking, looking at him. Then Zora showed up in a poof of pink and orange magic.

"We have a classroom waiting for you, didn't you know that? What kind of diviner are you?" Zora chided him with a grin. He went for it immediately, he'd never considered settling down and teaching for a living, He moved in, got comfortable, and knew without a doubt that even if the walls and isolation of this weird little keep didn't keep his family out - the dragons would.

***

But that didn't explain everything... He was still lonely and with the dragons he knew why. All this time he'd never had so much as a frog as a pet, let alone a familiar to aid him in spells. So all this time, from late summer into early winter, he had cast a spell looking. Searching, anywhere. What would be the best match for him, to aid him in his work?

It was night before he knew it, and in Winter here he really shouldn't be out like that. Out on the roof, when it was starting to snow... But it was still very pretty out here. For once he concentrated on something other than himself, and suddenly saw what looked like fireflies dancing in a weird pattern nearby. He jumped from the roof, and didn't notice that his floating glowing runes had now vanished.

Flashes of something bright distracted him, he picked up a shattered bit of glass, and on impulse looked into it. He saw... himself, only - there were walls, fences, barbed wire, laser grids, every possible impediment in the way. His heart started to thump, then sank. He knew perfectly well what that meant. He knew himself.

But there was still a brightness, a dancing light before him. Maybe there were Willowisps here, who would seduce him and drown him out in the woods. But it was winter, and they weren't known to come out until late spring. So... What was this creature coming toward him?

His wings were limply splayed to his sides but occasionally they blew up as though in a wind. A close pattern of them coalesced into a face with many eyes.

"I'm right here," Desmond said, "it's okay." The creature's ears perked up and it was clear that they were sewn shut and would remain so, they were scarred that way. Several of its eyes blinked, and it picked up the pace. And fell into a plume of snow several feet away. Desmond stifled a chuckle, and went to help it up.

"I know you, I think we had a dream together once. Saksama, that was your name. Is it?"

Saksama nodded once, bright glow-balls swaying as though they were lighter than air. Desmond noticed that the farther he was from the creature, the lower the lights bobbed. He resolved to remain near.