Quentin Trimble

Quentin Brithael Trimble
Nicknames/Aliases: Quent, Trimble

Occupation: Part-time Mindhealer and former author. Quentin views his work as a means to an end, rather than taking it on for the betterment of mankind.

Home: Minister's Staith, wizarding London, England

Finances: Comfortable though not excessive.

Household: Quent currently lives alone.

External
Appearance: He has ruddy hair that is considered brown by some, auburn by others. The state of his hair varies, depending on the level of field work he's been doing. Typically, he's a rather furry individual who grows hair extremely quickly and often looks somewhat fuzzy around the edges because of it. Due to the paleness of his skin, Quent often deliberately cultivates facial hair to minimize sunburn. His skin is spattered with freckles, not only on his face but consistently everywhere on the rest of his body due to his sunbathing habits.

Quentin's eyes are green and are often obscured by glasses when he needs to see things up close (is farsighted). He walks with a slight limp in his right leg due to a calf injury sustained by shrapnel during the second war. Some of it is still embedded, both in his leg and in his skull, as he was in a muggle area at the time and couldn't receive proper medical treatment. If one digs under all of his hair, there is a deep scar just over his right ear. He is Cornish and has a strong accent which he's been unable to shake and is his strongest failing when it comes to language learning. While he speaks rudimentary dialects from the places that he's been, he does so with a Cornish accent that often leads to great confusion and merriment when he tries to have serious conversations with native speakers. Raised the son of a deaf mother, he is fluent in sign language and that often comes out in his movements and mannerisms. He tends to enuciate very clearly (though still with the accent) and be extremely expressive with his hands and mouth. People often register this on a subconscious level and think he looks "really odd" without knowing quite why.

First Impression: This can be very erratic because of Quent's tendency to shift his demeanor.

Internal
Political Views: Quentin is extremely liberal in his political views due to his belief that knowledge should be unrestricted. He is on the left side of the dark political spectrum - while he doesn't encourage the indiscriminate teaching of the Dark Arts, he believes that the opportunity to study them should be placed within reach of those who show promise. He doesn't believe that the Dark Arts are evil or that magic has an assigned morality - in fact, while he would not state it openly, he is quite sure that at some point, Voldemort will try to extinguish these magics altogether. He has a vested interest in their preservation and as such, has been an advocate of storing that information.

Quirks/Habits:
 * He speaks with his hands, often communicating with sign language at the same time as he's speaking without realizing that he's speaking in multiple styles.
 * Often deliberately uses innuendos to disconcert others or manipulate.
 * Looks people in the eyes as much as possible.

Strengths: Highly intelligent. Strong powers of concentration. A legilimens. Highly skilled at the Dark Arts.

Weaknesses: Homophobic but not above using male sexual interest in him to achieve an end. Filled with hubris. Overconfident. Not shy about disclosing his power when he possesses it. Always on the border line of being an enemy of the state. Not good at healing physical wounds.

Fears and Philias: Loves and longs for the desert - always wishing to return to the Middle East. Fears mental and/or physical violation.

Hobbies/Interests:
 * Studying dead languages.
 * Cryptomancy.
 * Reading about the ancient world in wizarding history.
 * Visiting libraries.
 * Enjoys wizarding pureblood social gatherings - teas, piano recitals, &c.

Favourite Belongings:
 * His wand.
 * An autographed copy of The Dream Oracle
 * An old teapot from Mosul, with a crack in the side.

Favourite Places:
 * Nineveh, Iraq
 * The Trimble family home in Cornwall
 * His office
 * The MLE interrogation rooms
 * Azkaban

History
Quentin was raised in Tintagel, the child of two wealthy purebloods who let him want for nothing. He had a happy childhood with two parents who were in love and an older brother, Gareth, that he idolized. He frequently tagged along after Gareth and the two brothers were close, doing things like fishing and camping together with their mutual friends. Much of his childhood was spent under the sun and Quent developed a love for adventures through early scrapes with Gareth. While they experienced minor childhood dangers, Quent's brother was always there to see him through the worst of it. They remained close after Gareth went to Hogwarts and was sorted into Gryffindor, writing to one another every week.

Gareth's letters began to shift slightly when he was thirteen and he began writing of a housemate, Logan, whom he had grown close to. He cautioned Quentin to keep the letters secret from their parents and he did, something that to this day, he feels guilty about. The summer of Gareth's fourteenth year, Logan came to stay with the family for a week and the dynamic of the two brothers changed.

That summer, Gareth died. The three boys went out to the woods, Quent on the back of his brother's broom, and they were practicing stunts. It was a spot where they regularly went camping and Quentin fell asleep as the other two were circling above on their brooms, only to wake up and see the two boys naked on brooms, laughing and acting recklessly. Startled, he cried out, and distracted, Gareth fell off the broom, breaking his neck in the fall. While he and Logan tried to dress his brother, it was obvious to parents and authorities that something had gone wrong beyond simply the death and after questioning of the older boy, the nature of his and Gareth's relationship came out.

The shame was too much for the Trimbles to bear and so quietly, his parents made the decision to erase Gareth. They boxed away all photographs of him and burned his belongings with the exception of his journal, which Quentin had managed to hide away. To this day, there are very few existing photographs of Quentin in his parents' home, not because they weren't taken but because every photograph that had Gareth in it was locked away, out of his reach. Quentin has nothing of his brother but his journal and his memories, neither of which he speaks. He tells people what his parents began to tell them- that he was an only child.

He still loves his brother and in many ways, his affection for and obsession with the Dark Arts is a reflection of that love. He relates the two things in his mind- his belief that Dark Arts should not be suppressed and are not, in themselves, inherently evil comes from the way his brother was shuttered away. The basis for his fascination came in that summer as well, as Quentin tried to find ways to bring his brother back and failed completely. To this day, he studies those things that others forbid with a passion he reserves for few other things.

His parents' relationship slowly began to dim with the death of his brother and although the family still loves one another, the circles of guilt and repression around the events led to changes in the relationship. While Quentin is still very tied to his parents, particularly his mother who he adores, he has an almost pathological need to be independent from them. This need is expressed most often financially as, despite his parents' desire to support him, he has always insisted on living on his own means.

Quentin went to Hogwarts the year after Gareth's death and was sorted into Slytherin, the hat having a brief moment of confusion but finally coming to that conclusion. From the beginning, he displayed a keen interest in all things related to the Dark Arts, so much so that it obviously concerned Albus Dumbledore who tried to change him and ended up pushing him away while simultaneously increasing his interest. Several of Quent's instructors, however, found the boy's desire overwhelming and assisted him. Irma Pince, in particular, was oddly supportive of his studies and often provided him with materials that other students had little access to.

After graduation, Trimble accepted a gift from his father that enabled him to devote himself to further studies of the Dark Arts. He decided to travel to Iraq and Egypt to examine medieval Arabic magic and Islamic alchemy, an area that had been largely ignored by his professors at school. While he didn't divulge much of the information that he obtained, this led to the writing of a textbook of magical theory over that period of years.

At 23, he returned to London to find a publisher for his textbook. While he found one, the book, upon its completion was heavily edited. A modified edition of this edited book was chosen by Dumbledore for teaching at Hogwarts some time later. Still, while Trimble's name is on the book, he's never considered it his due to the heavy amounts of editing done to it. In fact, he's rather embarrassed by it.

During this period, Trimble also went on the lecture circuit to raise money for a trip to India. He spent longer than he intended lecturing and teaching, not only because he determined to pay his father back but also because he met, and became engaged to, a pureblood named Natalie Yarbrough. The engagement ended 6 months after it occurred (and a year and a half after the relationship commenced) because she refused to go to India with him, instead suggesting that he stay in London and take up "something respectable". While they both were in love, Quentin simply wasn't able to give up what he felt to be his life's work for any woman.

He recovered quite happily, however, in Calcutta and Mumbai, spending more time in the former. Throwing himself into his work with a passion there, he wrote another book, The Dark Arts Outsmarted, a clever piece about his adventures in the East that combined practical application with magical theory. While his detractors attempted to argue that the book was just another Lockhart ripoff, the truth is that Quentin rarely inserted himself into his own writing, simply describing his entire journey through the eyes of people around him. The book had an extremely small run, however, and was not reprinted so few wizards have read it. Fewer still own a copy of it. The money from the book was enough to finance a brief stay in Pakistan, then back to traveling through Nepal for a longer period.

He returned to London again in 1997, right before the death of Albus Dumbledore. It shook him but not because of the man's dying. What shook him was that the Ministry confiscated his passport and said that he was going to work for them.

Quentin's initial response to this was to tell them where, exactly, they could put his passport. However, after a furious discussion with his mother, he realized that it hadn't been the most tactful decision he could have made. He wasn't interested in taking a side in the war- he felt that the Death Eaters were too crazy and he'd hated Dumbledore with a passion. What he wanted was for things to remain as they were and neither side seemed to Quent to present that as an option. After some careful thinking, he went back to the Ministry and asked simply to work for Mungo's. Healing was the area of work that he felt least partisan and mindhealing, moreso. He weathered the governmental shift because of his lack of allegiance and as a result, maintains his status as a part-time Mindhealer.

Meta
Journal: noheaven

PB: Paul Thomas Anderson

Player: Gwen