PLAYER INFORMATION
Name: EJ

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Full Name: Jackson Theodore Shea
Nickname(s): Jackie, Jacks, Jack, Cracker-Jack, JT, Dumbass, Hey Kid, etc.
Hometown: Vicksburg, Mississippi
Age and birthday: 16, September, 21 1994
House and Year: Junior, Beauregard
Electives & Schedule: Schedule.
Wand: 13 and ¾ Madrona, Dragon Heartstring Core. Flexible.
Boggart: A swimming pool.
Patronus: A Butterfly, small and mighty. His patronus represents him not by its size, however, but rather by its meaning. A butterfly is a figure of a carefree attitude, which he has in a lot of abundance, and also a sign of transformation. Seeing as he is proving to be quite good as transfiguration, his patronus is rather apt. Even if it is also embarrassing.
Animagus Form: N/A
Religious Affiliation: Southern Baptist
Extracurricular activities: School Choir, School Band, Cooking Club, Magical Technology Club, and he wants a Muggle Life club- a place to educate wizards and witches that are unfamiliar with muggle life styles, and one that isn’t dedicated to sports.

Family/Relationships
Parents: Clayton Shea [Father], Melissa Shea [Mother, deceased]
Siblings: None
Extended Family: Paul and Elma Shea [Parental Grandparents], Elton Shea [Uncle], Marie Shea [Aunt, Elton’s wife], Lindsey Shea [Cousin], Nolan Shea [Cousin]; Albert and Tina Simmons [Maternal Grandparents], Micah Simmons [Uncle], Theresa Simmons [Micah’s wife], Zachery Simmons [Uncle], Jessica Simmons [Zach’s wife], Shaun Simmons [cousin, Zach’s son], Margert Simmons [cousin, Zach’s Daughter]; Monica Bradley [Soon to be step-mother], William Bradley [Soon to be step-brother]
Familiar: Curls, a barn owl
Sexuality: Bi-Curious, but most likely straight.
Significant Others: None

Appearance
PB: Robert Sheehan [Image 1] [Image 2]

Detailed Description: Jackson is slim, but tall. He is already five feet, ten inches in height, with a mope of dark, curly hair on his head that seems to add a few inches to him. When not dressed in the proper uniform (which he hates, particularly the tie) he can be found in skinny jeans, tee-shirts and hoodies of some sort. He also has an assortment of rubber bracelets, and a rainbow beaded one that he won at the Mississippi State Fair one year. His eyes are gray, with hints of blue in them, and very expressive. In fact, he’s face is extremely expressive in general. Most of the time, his thoughts are easy to read just based on the looks he gives people in conversations.

He has no tattoos, though he is interested in getting them eventually; nor does he have any piercings. He never dresses up unless he forced to on pain of death. Physically, he is well built, but not ripped with muscle. Meaning he doesn’t look like he would be completely useless in a fight, just mostly. All in all, he looks a bit like an average joe.

Personality
Likes: DJing, rap, P. Diddy, Kanye West, Snopp Dogg, 30 Seconds to Mars, music in general, drums, guitar, bass, singing, remixing music, making music videos to his remixes, creating mashups, indie flicks, Milk Duds, his dad being single, magic, magic creatures, NOLA, Sci-Fi books, Sci-Fi movies, Star Wars, Star Trek, comic books, x-men, terminator, the idea of sex, dirt bikes, motor cross, skateboards, roller coasters, summer vacation, his mother, yellow roses, dance clubs, beer, and D&D.

Dislikes: The Bradelys, his father getting remarried, reading books for school, math, playing football, watching baseball, hiding the truth about where he goes to school from his friends and family, not having a girlfriend, curly hair (particularly his own), Batman (he is not a superhero, just some weird rich dude in underwear and tights), the Spiderman movies (Toby Maguire, say what?), crazy chicks that get all up in your grill for no reason, mosquitoes, snakes, and swimming pools (or all bodies of water outside tubs.)
Quirks: ++ Jack doesn’t know how to swim, mostly because he’s scared to death of large bodies of water, but he doesn’t tell people why. They just know that he turns into a total baby when he gets near pools.

++ Jack dances in place when he gets really bored with whatever he’s doing. This includes times when he is supposed to be mixing potions, or really anything that requires him to sit still for any particular length of time.

++ He pokes out of center of his Reese’s peanut butter cups and eats that part, and plays with the outer rims before he eventually eats them. He figures candy is supposed to be fun, not just tasty.

++ He can name all the states and capitals, but only if he sings the Animaniac’s State Capitol’s song first. This was how his dad taught it to him when he was in grade school back home. Likewise, he can name all the countries in the world, because of Wakko’s Nations of the World song.

++ He talks to his gummy bears before biting off their heads, making little voices for them as they plead for him not to eat them. Sometimes he even convinces himself to spare their gummy bear lives.

Secrets: ++ His mother died when he was six years old. A drunk driver hit her car in a head-on-collision while she was driving to work one morning. He doesn’t talk about it, really, in part because it has been just him and his dad for so long. But he does have a picture of her in his wallet he carries with him everywhere.

++ When he was four, Jackson fell into the deep end of the YMCA pool and nearly drowned. The experience was so traumatic that he’s never gotten over his fear of water. Now he doesn’t even like to get into pools even when he can touch the bottom. He realizes it is sort of stupid, but he’s really not ready to tackle it. Besides, he figures there isn’t that much reason for him to ever need to be in a pool. Sprinklers work just fine if he wants to play in water.

++ He can’t tell his friends back home where he goes to school, because they are all muggles. He has even been asked to not tell his family, and soon to be step-family. This really bothers him, because the friends he made at school mostly don’t seem to care. He figures it is because a lot of them aren’t muggle born, or just didn’t keep in touch with their friends. Personally, he feels a bit like he is a freak because of the secret.
++ He rather hates his soon to be step-family, and how close his father is to them. Being gone most of the year, he feels like William is a bit of a replacement child. He doesn’t like, even more, that his father kept his relationship secret. For him it feels a bit like he was betrayed.
What’s in your characters pockets? You always need a pack of gum on hand.
Strengths: Music: both playing/singing and general knowledge of bands/groups/songs/people, muggle knowledge, creativeness, resourcefulness, his sense of humor, being laidback, long fuse for his temper, friendly, being nonjudgmental, willingness to give second chances, disbelieving in first impressions, seeing the good in people, willing to forgive and forget, knowing when to take things seriously.
Weaknesses: Defense against the dark arts (he just can’t get a handle on it), herbology (his thumb is not green, he seems to kill more plants than he grows), willing to give too many chances to people, he has a hard time turning his back on friends even when he knows it is wrong/won’t end well/toxic, can be smart mouthy to the wrong people, terrible at setting proper priorities.
Strongest subject in school: Music, Transfiguration (if we want none electives)
Weakest subject in school: Defense Against the Dark Arts,
One thing he/she can't live without: His Macbook

Detailed personality: Jackson wouldn’t think of himself as particularly mischievous, though he does like to play the odd prank or two. Rather, if you asked him to describe himself, he would probably claim that he was boring, and there wasn’t really anything interesting about it. He thinks that people view him a strange person, not quite like them, and a touch out of step with the world. But he also is pretty okay with that. He has plans and dreams, and whatever their opinions are, he doesn’t much care. He’ll walk to his own beat just fine.

To this end, Jackie doesn’t seem to pay too much attention to what people think about his sense of style (or lack thereof, rather). He can sometimes be too involved with what is going on in his head to pay attention to conversation, and he only laughs when people give him weird looks for singing and dancing along to music played over the radios in stores. His father says that his carefree, happy personality is something he got from his mother; and Jack likes to think it was a gift she left him with. As such he tries to smile and laugh as much as he can. Being all too aware that life can be short, he takes to heart the philosophy- live everyday as if it was your last.

But for all his happiness in life, there are things he is unhappy about too. He isn’t all too fond of his father’s fiancée, a woman he met and courted while Jackson away in the ninth grade. Jackson didn’t even meet the woman and her son until this past Christmas, having it sprung on him that she was going to be his step-mom, and the wedding was set for his summer break. He feels as if his dad is not just replacing his mother, but him as well. It isn’t that he doesn’t want his father to be happy, but there is a definite loss of kinship. Suddenly Jackson found that he had to share his room with someone that looked at him as if he is the guest in the house. And his step-mother to be keeps rearranging things every time he goes back to school! He’s frustrated, and resentful that they all seem to have inside jokes, and bonding, and all this other stuff while he’s stuck at some magic school. He even feels a bit like his father thinks he is some sort of freak because of the way he doesn’t want anyone to know Jackson is a wizard- especially his soon to be stepfamily.

Outside of his family, though, Jackson always tries to look on the bright side of things. It doesn’t always work, but he figures someone has to do it. He is non-confrontational, enough so that if pushed hard enough he’ll give in to his friends even if he doesn’t agree or want to. He likes pretend, sometimes, that High School life can be quite zen if you just let it. He also gives people endless second chances, always forgiving and forgetting when they slight him.

But the most important thing about his personality is his passion for music. If one were to give him the option to go to a school dedicated to studying music, but only on the condition he gave up magic? He’d be hard pressed to say no. His father has long encouraged this love and joy of music, going so far as to start a ‘band’ (it consisted of just the two of them) with him in grade school. Together they learned to play guitar and bass. Eventually Jackson picked up the drums, though he wasn’t much of a fan. He was decent enough, though, that he could use a drum machine to play at making his own beats. He even learned to pick out simple melodies on the piano, though he’s not a brilliant pianist by any means. His true passion and talent, really, comes from write/mixing/remixing/DJing. He doesn’t really know why, but he doesn’t expect he’ll ever become huge as a part of a band. And he’s good at it. Youtube told him so. So why turn his back on it, right?

Personal History:
Jackson Theodore Shea was born at Mercy Hospital, in Vicksburg Mississippi during its last days , of operation. His parents were much like any normal kid’s parents, his mother worked for the Army Corps of Engineers as an archeologist, and his father was employed with ERDC (once simply called Waterways before it was merged into the Corps). His parents were from Jackson, originally, but his maternal grandparents moved to Vicksburg when he was born, so they could be closer to their grandchildren. Melissa’s brother, Zachary, and his wife lived in the city with their two children, so it made a bit of logical sense to Simmons’ to move to the river city.

For the first few year of his life the happy family often went for walks at the National Park, which outlined a portion of the old civil-war battlefields. It was a time when Melissa told the best stores, as far as he could remember. She would set him on the canons, and together they would stare out over the union lines to where the Confederate troops would have been, and when he tried hard enough? Sometimes Jacks thought he could hear the canons roar, and the shouts of soldiers. His favorite part of the whole park, though, was the Union tunnel, which was now below the park’s road instead of another rolling hill. He would run through it, screaming as loud as he could until his voice cracked and the echoes died. This was their time together, his and his mother’s.

When he was four, however, Jackson experienced the first real traumatic experience of his life. While at the local YMCA with his grandmother, he was knocked into the deep end of the pool by some rough housing teens. Struggling to swim, he eventually sank beneath the water before a lifeguard noticed what had happened, and dove in after him. Despite being okay, he never really recovered from the event. Instead he developed a lifelong fear of pools, and large bodies of water.

But when Jackson was six everything changed. He started school at the local magnet school, Bowmar Elementary, in kindergarten. Though his cousins had both started the school a few years before him, it was strange to be going into an old, cold building and not running into his grandparents’ home. A week before Thanksgiving, though, his mother had dropped him off at school before heading to work. He’d waved at her from the school steps until she’d disappeared, before reluctantly going to auditorium to wait for his teacher. By now he’d already figured out that there was something very different about him, compared to his fellow schoolmates. Things that he really wanted to happen strangely had a way of happening. That day, he remembered that he really wanted it to rain- that way his mother wouldn’t drive to Louisiana to look at an Indian burial site someone had found, and end up staying gone the whole night. So it was little surprise to him when it had started to rain (even if it wasn’t really his doing, he figured it had to have been him at the time.)

But despite the rain, it wasn’t his mother who came to pick him up that afternoon. Instead, his grandfather parked his car, opting to walk in instead of waiting in the long line of cars. Jackson remembered the look on the elderly man’s face as he walked up to him, that infinite sadness in the man’s eyes. He knew then, the way a child always knows, that something really bad had happened. But he walked with him silently and climbed into the backseat of the car. The following months seemed to drag on endlessly. Thanksgiving was quite, and Christmas wasn’t the same- Santa even forgot to get momma a gift. Looking back, Jackson supposed a part of him hadn’t been ready to understand what had really happened until much later in his life.

By March of the following year, Clayton had decided that for the good of Jackie and himself that he needed to find them some way of getting over the death of Melissa. A drunk driver might have claimed her life, but he did not want it to claim both of theirs as well. After all, Melissa wouldn’t have approved of that. He had always known of Jackson’s fascination with music, so he signed them both up for guitar lessons at a local music shop. Eventually those lessons became owning their own guitars, and other instruments. They would practice and ‘jam out’ with some oldies in the garage when nothing else needed their attention. If they weren’t playing music, though, they were discussing the ins and outs of classic video games, challenging each other to death matches in Halo, or engaging in some rather serious D&D sessions.

Yes, life was not the same without his mother, but it wasn’t terrible either. Jackson and Clayton formed an unbreakable bond, each taking care of the other one in their own way. But the summer before Jackson turned twelve there was an unexpected knock on his door. A representative of the magical community had come to tell the two that Jackson wasn’t just any boy, he was a wizard. For a while Jackson thought it was pretty cool, being an avid fan of Dungeons and Dragons. In his mind he thought the school was going to whisk him away, and train him to fight dragons, and steal their treasure.

Reality? It was a lot less exciting. But it was intriguing none the less. His father pinched the money together to get him a computer to take to school, one with a web camera so they could talk not just one the phone, but over the computer as well. Their bond was still close, despite the distance put between them- four hours was a long way for a boy that had rarely traveled anywhere that didn’t take less than forty minutes. Jackson kept up his music, not only playing with his guitar, but also using new programs to remix songs on his computer. The more he practiced at it, too, the better he got.

When he entered ninth grade, Jackie was sorted into Beauregard. At first he didn’t really know what to think of it all, despite the first three years of school at Crescent City Institute, he still felt sorely out of his element. It was fun to be cheered for as he joined the groups of other Beauregard students; it felt a bit like truly belonging to a group even if people kept talking about things he had absolutely no clue about. But this was the year his rock solid home life was shaken, to the core.

The first such moment was when his friends from back home told him that they thought he was looking down on them since he went away to boarding school each year, but would never talk about what he was learning. They also thought an owl was a pretty strange pet to have suddenly acquired three years ago. They had been pulling away slowly since he’d started school, but that year they flat out said they didn’t want to hang out with him anymore. He kept a few, but his closest ones were gone. His father said it was just part of growing up, and that people’s feelings changed. It was a bit like he was trying to say something about himself, but Jackson never picked up on the cue. Instead he moped about the house all summer, while sometimes hanging out with his cousins.

For Jackson, the hardest thing that year wasn’t so much losing his friends, as the realization that every time he left for school, something in the house changed by the time he came back. A lot of things that had been considered sacred, having belonged to his mother, were boxed up and given away or put in the attic. Pictures began to come off walls, books were donated to schools, and the furniture began to change. Mostly startling was the way the house seemed to gain things that didn’t belong to them as well. Once he even found a bra in the laundry room, which Jackson was fairly certain never belonged to his mother. And the rules all changed, he wasn’t supposed to just pop in by floo unannounced any more, and he was supposed to be more careful of what he talked about, and keep his ‘magic stuff’ put away if he was leaving it at home.

While it was all very curious, boarding on extremely neurotic, it wasn’t until the Christmas of his sophomore year that everything became completely clear. Instead of having Christmas at his grandparents, as always, his dad asked that they spent Christmas day at the house. What he didn’t tell him was that they were going to be having guest.

Monica Bradley seemed like a nice enough woman at first. She’d lost her husband to cancer five years before, and worked with Jackson’s father at ERDC. They been friends before her loss, and it was sometime after that, that they’d thought it was more than a common bond over loss that they shared. Eventually it had grown to love, or so she claimed as she explained from the couch by the Christmas tree. Her son, and Clayton had bonded as well, it seemed. As a group they’d gone about life as a sort of family for the last year, but had somehow neglected to tell Jackson about the development.

His father claimed it had been because he wanted to tell Jackson, when he thought Jackson was ready. When Jackie didn’t react to the removal of Melissa’s things, he thought it was time. And even then, he had wanted to wait until the boy was home from school. But the more his father explained why he’d waited, the less Jackson believed it. The cap of the whole conversation wasn’t even that his father had been dating the woman in secret. It was, to his astonishment, that they were getting married. William seemed thrilled, even though Clayton would never replace his dad.

Jackson kept his feelings to himself, though, frowning intently at the Christmas tree instead. He congratulated them, played nice over break, and secretly hated Monica and William in private. He hated it more, he realized, that no one else in the family seemed to see what was all wrong with the picture! His aunts and uncles, grandparents, everyone seemed so happy for Clayton. They invited William into their lives, and kissed Monica’s cheeks like they were Melissa’s. Resentful, he returned back to school with a bit of a huff.

In an effort to express his discontent, without actually vocalizing his unhappiness with the situation, Jackie found a friend to let him spend spring break with, and had altogether avoided going home since Christmas. His conversations with his dad tended to end abruptly whenever Monica or William came up, and he suddenly became overly busy with school, which was another secret his dad wanted him to keep. He didn’t want Jackson to tell the Bradelys about his ‘magic school’, and being a ‘wizard’; as far as they were concerned, just attended a boarding school in Louisiana.

All in all, he was not looking forward to summer break at all.



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