lancaster, alistair vincent

[PADFOOT]

classified file

ALISTAIR VINCENT LANCASTER

Full name: Alistair Vincent Lancaster
Nicknames: Vince, Vinny to those who are closest to him
Age: 34
Date of birth: December 21st
Current residence: London, England

Physical:
the basics:
Height: 5’10”
Weight: 175lbs
Hair: black, short
Build: slender, tall

Family:
Harper Mildred Lancaster (), mother, founder of multiple charity groups
Atticus Kent Lancaster, father, owner of the Daily Prophet, current editor in chief
Unmarried.
No Children.

Education:
Hogwarts, Hufflepuff Alumni

Occupation:
Daily Prophet, Senior Editor, 4 years
Daily Prophet, Junior Editor, 6 years
Daily Prophet, Senior Reporter on national news, 3 years
Daily Prophet, Reporter of national news, 4 years

Notes:
writer, author of five books under a pseudonym, extremely interested in muggle novels and music cultures


Loyal. Brilliant. Opinionated. Sarcastic. Reserved.

Those would be the five words mostly likely chosen to sum up the personality of Mr. Alistair Vincent Lancaster; a man who grew up in a world he wanted no part of. Going by his middle name, Vincent is not your typical high-society figurehead, as much as his parents would like for him to be. Rather, he goes along with his parents to ridiculous fundraisers, parties, and social gatherings, more on family obligation than anything else. Though he knows the ins and outs of the stuffy lifestyle, it’s never exactly been what he wanted; but rather what he found himself stuck with. His loyalty to his family is something he feels is required of him, being the only child and the last heir to the families’ fortune and their business, the Daily Prophet.

Throughout his days in school, Vincent found himself trying to branch out in the people he spoke to and the friends he kept; but his parents were more particular and pushed for him to be around peers of a similar “status” as their own. After a while he learned it was easier to keep certain friendships private from his parents, what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them after all. However, as the years went by, Vince learned more and more that he simply couldn’t agree with his parents’ line of thinking – and eventually it started some very heated debates between him and his father. When he feels strongly about something, he’s absolutely not afraid to let it be known, he’s been an advocate for certain causes over the years and is always searching for the truth, rather than allowing politics cover it up with lies (much to his parents dismay).

When it comes to his attitude, well that’s a tricky one; he’s a rather reserved and quiet individual, preferring to sit back and take note of a situation, assessing it from all angles, before ever making a remark. However, once he does speak up you’ll find quick wit and generally a lot of sarcasm; as well as a man armed with facts to dispute any claims made against something he believes to be true and right. Though it make take a bit to draw him out on a subject, once you’ve got him talking, he won’t give up until he’s at the very least made you consider his point of view, if not having changed your mind about the subject entirely.

While he spends his days more or less running the Daily Prophet for the most part, doing as he had always been expected to do, there are so many things that would make him feel more fulfilled. He loves the idea of traveling, of seeing the world from another perspective, but unfortunately such a thing is not going to be likely to happen as his parents force a new set of dress robes or a tux at him every week or two for another event and there is no time for vacations when you’re being fast-tracked through to running the family business; when he would rather be anywhere else in the world. His true passions are left unpursued due to a sense of family responsibility.

Along with his dreams of one day getting to travel the world, he also often finds himself daydreaming about the day a suit and tie doesn’t have to be every day attire; a time when he could freely do as he pleased, without worrying about hearing his parents scolding him for tarnishing the family name. He’s a fan of music of all kinds, especially orchestral and symphony music and he writes fiction novels under a pseudonym, and has a slight fascination with muggle music and novels (something he would never admit to his parents). Due to his parents’ personalities, he keeps most people at an arm’s reach, not wanting to drag them into the life he was forced to live with.

There has only been one person over the years who he really let in, someone he found he both had a fascination and fixation with. She was the only person he had ever really been able to open up to, the only person who saw the real him, behind the façade he wears for his family.

history


It was a snowy December night, only days before Christmas, when the Lancaster’s first and only child came into the world – a son they would name Alistair Vincent Lancaster. The couple had planned ahead, if they had a son, they didn’t want any other children – if they had a daughter, they would continue to try until they had a son to carry on the family name; lucky for them, Vincent came along, sadly for Vincent this meant a rather lonely childhood without any siblings to share it with. Through the earliest years of his life, his parents were workaholics who probably shouldn’t have even had a child in the first place – he grew up wandering his parents’ estate, being raised more or less by a nanny and the rotating housekeepers that worked for his parents.

It was during these early years that he first found a love for reading, which eventually evolved into a love for writing as well – the nanny who he had been closest with growing up, a woman named Avery, taught him to read, taught him the basics of writing and introduced him to what would turn out a lifelong passion. As he grew older, he started to read the papers that were delivered by owl every morning, any books lying around the house and really anything he could get his hands on – it was the one thing that could keep him entertained through the endless hours with nothing for a kid to do.

When he was eight, he became much more adventurous, tired of being cooped up in his parents’ house all the time with hardly anyone to talk to and nothing to do – so he started to wander about the grounds, eventually wandering into the woods at the edge of the property. Vincent wandered through the woods for about an hour and eventually wound up coming out into a small village, with other children out and about, flying brooms, playing all sorts of games and looking like they were having a blast – it was there that he made his first real friends, and started to wonder what else there was outside the world of his parents’ house.

During the next couple of years, whenever he was able, Vincent would get up, make up his bed, shower and get dressed in the dress shirts and pants his parents always had him wearing – packing a backpack with a change of clothes, a pair of jeans and a collared t-shirt he had traded a kid for one afternoon – and he would head off towards the woods. Once he reached the small wizarding village, he would get changed and spend the rest of the day with his new found friends, until the sun started to set and he knew his parents would be returning from work. Before they could get home he would be showered and changed back into his expected attire – and that began the feeling of living a double life that would never go away.

At first, he had tried to be sneaky, finding out how his parents would feel about him spending time with these other kids – but when he had mentioned that he had seen another kid, an older one, running through the woods, they had scoffed, telling him it was a community of mudbloods and traitors living back there and that he was better off not associating himself with them. While he was too young to entirely get the gravity of what they were saying to him, he made the conscious decision to keep his friends private. However, his parents did seem to take notice of the fact that he needed interaction with other children his age – so they enrolled him in flying lessons, as well as what felt like classes on formal living, where he and 9 other boys his age were taught how to be socially acceptable young men.

While he had not expected it, he did make friends with the other boys attending these lessons, they bonded over a common frustration with their parents. Some, like his parents, had a lack of ability to act like a parent, others, acted too much like parents – but all of them had more or less forced these lessons on the boys who fought them at first, but eventually learned it was easier to go along with it all. The summer the boys were all accepted into Hogwarts, they were dressed in their first Tuxedos and attending their first social functions as distinguished young men – something that would become a trend in the future, no matter how much Vincent would come to hate it.

Once he had attended that first function, a dinner to congratulate all the upper class families on their children being accepted to Hogwarts, it was the start of his parents’ involvement in his life for what seemed like the first time. Suddenly, he was expected for more than family dinners and larger family gatherings; now they expected him to dress up and join them at any and every event where their presence was required. During only the month between getting his Hogwarts acceptance letter and leaving on the Hogwarts Express he attended four different events – all of which amounted to the same group of upper class witches and wizards, gathering to talk and drink all night long.

The Hogwarts Express was like a first taste of freedom – something he would forever be yearning for after that day. He was disappointed to find out weeks earlier that none of the kids in the wizarding village he had found near his home had turned eleven that year, he would be going to school alone – or at least, without any of the real friends he had. Instead, he ended up spending the train ride and much of his first year with the same group of kids he had been enrolled in lessons with over the previous few years – at least it was familiar faces and these were the kids his parents had told him to stick close to after all.

When the time came for him to be sorted, he was sorted into Hufflepuff – the only one in his entire group of friends to be sorted into a house other than Gryffindor or Slytherin. However, once he met some of his housemates, it became apparent to him that he was in the right place. His years in Hogwarts were relatively uneventful - he had very few real friends over the years, especially after the first time he tried to invite friends over who were not of the same social standing as his family – his parents wouldn’t even consider it.

At the age of fifteen, he finally started to see just how messed up his parents view on the world really was; they stood for everything the world was working so hard to put an end to. Social injustices, inequality, people acting like they are better than other people all because they are what is considered “pure blood” – it all started to make him sick and he didn’t want to be a part of it. During his teenage years he rebelled against his parents – he ended up in screaming matches with his father a few times, leaving the house to simply walk until he could calm his mind once again.

There were a couple of times in those years when he got completely drunk at important events (or at least ones that were important to his family) where he had ended up either making a fool of himself, or arguing, debating and in some cases yelling, with well-known witches and wizards. However, after one incident of that, where his father lost it, using a spell on him that knocked him off his feet and another that knocked him out cold (next thing he knew he had a killer hangover and was magically locked in his room), he sort of gave up on the rebelling phase, realizing there was nothing he could do to change his parents way of thinking.

It was in Hogwarts that he allowed himself the chance to seek out knowledge on the things his parents would rather remain ignorant about. Thankfully, his parents never paid that close of attention to him, otherwise he would never have gotten away with taking Muggle Studies classes over the years. These classes opened up his world to novels that he could have never imagined, only further advancing his love for reading – and starting his passion for writing as well. It also introduced him to a second passion – music. It was during those years in Hogwarts that he developed a bit of a fixation on muggle’s taste in books and music – it wasn’t so terribly different from their own – and some of it was even more imaginative.

Instead of continuing to fight his parents directly, over the years Vincent learned it was easier to simply stand up for what he felt was right. In the end, by the time he was seventeen, he had never really considered what he might want to do as a career – instead, he had simply accepted the fact that he was going to work his way up through the paper and end up running it like his father did. At least this would give him a place for his voice to be heard, or at least he hoped it would. His father started him off at the bottom – a basic news reporter – which lasted for about four years before his father bumped him up to Senior Reporter on National News.

Though he was only the Senior Reporter for three years before his father aggressively promoted him to Junior Editor of the paper, he continued to write for the paper – but mostly opinion pieces that his father would allow him to slip in here and there without much to say about it. It was around this time that he first met one of the new reporters on international affairs – a woman with little journalism experience but a lot of potential by the name of Ophelia Vane. Where most would simply hear out his opinion, or take his criticisms, simply because he was the owners son, she had apparently found it impossible to hold her tongue on that particular issue – making a snappy comment, which earned her a look of horror from the nearby Senior editor.

Rather than lashing out and trying to put her down – as his father might have done – Vincent couldn’t help but laugh lightly, before going into a debate that lasted them nearly an hour. From that point on, the two became extremely good friends, and eventually more than that. It started off with late nights, hiding out on the floor behind his desk in his office, talking all night, working together, while everyone else worked away in the room just beyond their private little oasis. His father would invite her to invents to provide news coverage – and throughout his life he had never had a good enough excuse to get out of a single event, but at least with Fee there, he had someone he could really talk to; as they judged and joked about the snotty high society world they were sitting in the middle of.

Eventually, this became a relationship – the first real relationship Vincent had ever been in. During his time in school he had dated here and there, but since finishing Hogwarts, his social life seemed to be run by his parents. He didn’t have time to see any of his real friends between being requested to work long hours and being required to attend dinners with important people, as well as those ridiculous parties his parents were so fond of – and eventually he more or less lost contact with all of his friends from school. When he met Ophelia – and she was the first person to treat him like an individual, his own person, not just the boss’s son – he had become fascinated with her – and extremely envious of her carefree lifestyle, her years traveling and living with people of other cultures; and eventually she managed to draw him out – the real him.

In the decade between being in school and meeting Fee, Vincent hadn’t had much of a life outside the Daily Prophet and the things his parents forced him to do. He had however, channeled all his frustration into writing five different fiction novels novels, two published in the wizarding world and three published in the muggle world – all under a pseudonym – none of it was something his parents would have approved of; if they ever found out they would probably kill him and he knew that. When he met Ophelia, she became the first person in over a decade to get him to really be himself – and even more she embraced it, encouraged it – it was no wonder he fell for her.

Unfortunately, it all came to a crashing halt after four of the best years of his life. There were issues at the paper – inconsistent reporting, censorship like he had never seen before. Sometimes, he thought reporters were simply seeming careless and he would ask them for a more detailed rewrite – and they would say it had already been approved by his father; something he couldn’t override, even as the Senior Editor at this point. Eventually, it became a problem for Ophelia and she couldn’t stand it anymore – her work was being changed before the final print, after Vincent had already sent it to be published. She felt strongly about it – and eventually she quit her role at the Prophet, though his father had already told him that her time left there would be limited and he had made sure to let her know before his father could fire her.

In the end, the tension, his reluctance to try and argue with his father, something he knew was a lost cause, turned into tension between the two of them. It started off small, but escalated quicker than he could have ever expected – and soon enough the two were at each others throats, saying things that neither of them probably imagined they would ever be saying. It was over before he knew it – and then the two stopped talking all together for a while. Since then they have run into each other from time to time, it always ending in smart remarks, being extremely short with each other and on some occasions, him simply trying to act like he hadn’t seen her at all.

These days, Vincent is finding himself more frustrated than ever with the issues happening at the Daily Prophet – but knowing he doesn’t have much choice but to put up with it. It was becoming increasingly hard for him to sit around and watch so many stories go untold – or at least the whole truth going untold. Unfortunately, the way he was raised, he knew his parents really only expected two things of him; to be a respectful figurehead and to prepare and take over the family business, as had the last five Lancaster men before him – and he couldn’t seem to steer away from that, no matter how many dreams it left unfulfilled – it made him feel oddly wrong, guilty, like he was betraying the people responsible for his being here.

After all, there was a reason he had given in to his parents, went to these ridiculous events and pretended to be someone he wasn’t – it was expected of him. So currently he finds himself torn between a want to do the right thing and the obligation to keep up appearances for his parents’ sake. He also finds himself more alone than he’s been in years – and finds himself missing those long nights talking with the one person who had truly known him; but being far too stubborn and proud to admit it unless she did first.






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