--SEE REVISED PROFILE BELOW THIS POST. THIS IS AN OLD PROFILE AND A FIRST DRAFT. THANKS.--

Name: Saul Falkenau

Age: 36

Bloodline: Muggle-born

Physical Appearance: Saul is 6'0'' with black hair, scruffy facial hair and a pale complexion. He dresses in fairly plain, black robes when teaching but favors Muggle garb when on his own time. He's most comfortable (and most often seen) in blue jeans and a button-down shirt and sneakers when not on duty and wears his leather jacket religiously when formality allows it. He always wears steel-wire framed glasses, and is in fact blind as a bat without them. Saul isn't bad looking, although a few wrinkles have formed around his mouth and eyes. He's actually only in his mid thirties but looks to be about 44 or so. He keeps in rather good shape by walking everywhere he can, though perceptive students will find him sneaking a cigarette when he thinks no one is looking.

Personality: Saul seems rather sanguine at first glance, but his professionalism masks a passionate personality and a very empathetic streak. His work as a youth in socialist circles has left Saul very politically involved and he will gladly expound (at great length) on the implications of magical society on Keynesian economics and Marxist social theory. A graduate of Hogwarts himself, Saul remembers that many people view Muggle Studies as a joke, but will quickly remind his students that it is a foolish wizard indeed who pretends that they can live above and separate from Muggles entirely.

Character Background: Saul was born in the mid 1970's to Maria and Aloysius Falkenau, who were themselves the children of German refugees to the UK after the Second World War. Saul still speaks fluent German but also has picked up French, Russian and Spanish in addition to English, which he speaks with just a trace of a Teutonic accent. He first manifested magical powers at the age of twelve when he starting talking to a rose in his mother's garden and, to his parents' astonishment, the roses answered back. He attended Hogwarts and graduated with excellent marks. He did a short stint in the Ministry after graduation but left in protest over the policies of the Ministry during the second rising of You-Know-Who. Unsatisfied with both the censored nature of the Prophet and the manic tone of the Quibbler, Saul writes and publishes exclusively for Muggle social journals. After his departure from the Ministry, Saul traveled Europe and took classes at Moscow State University using a magically forged MBA from Oxford, where he became a socialist. He returned only very recently to Hogwarts upon hearing of the vacancy of the Muggle Studies post and is excited to set up shop and teach his students the danger of "Arcano-chauvinism"
Special Request (available at Intermediate**)

Desired House: Saul graduated as a Gryffindor.

Roleplay Sample: (300+ words please, written in third person)
"Headmistress, please, I don't think it's that much of an exception to make!"
The tenor voice rang hollowly in the cavern-like atmosphere of the Great Hall as the tall man in Muggle clothes trailed after the (apparently bemused) Heamistress. He was clutching a large stack of books under one arm, with familiar Wizarding treatises mixed in with Das Capital and The Clash of Civilizations. The headmistress, however, clearly had more important business to attend to and offered the harried looking man just a smile before gliding away.
Saul sighed and shook his head. Why, if this was to be a hall of learning, couldn't he subscribe to differing viewpoints in his post? Was an Owl Post delivery of the Socialist Worker really that much to ask for? Well, alright, there was the International Statute of Secrecy, but Saul would be careful! Honest!
"Arcano-chauvinism has done more damage to our society than the Three Unforgivable Curses ever could", Saul mused to no one in particular. The professor strolled out into the sunshine and started walking down towards the lake, his traditional ramble. The bright sun notwithstanding, the autumn air blew chilly and dry off the fiery leaves of the Forbidden Forest and Saul zipped up his weather-beaten leather jacket over his undershirt. Glancing around furtively, Saul stepped casually behind a tree and pulled out a pack of Marlboros and a matchbook. He relished the tobacco, reminding himself to pace the rest since he couldn't make it back to London for some weeks yet. Perhaps next time he went, he would stop at a news-stand.
Saul spun around at the advance of several students, hurriedly stubbing the cigarette out on the ash tree's bark. When he was honest with himself, he knew that he did enjoy a smoke outside, but Saul suffered from acute socialist-guilt for smoking a brand so associated with American exploitative capitalism. The students, a boy and a girl, Ravenclaw fourth years from the look of it, looked curiosly at him as he tried (and failed miserably) to look casual. The two smiled at him, wondering where they'd seen the curious looking twenty-something before. Like most students, they never took Muggle Studies. "Well, that's alright," Saul thought. "I'll net them into my class before they graduate. Someone's got to teach these kids about the other 90% of humanity". Saul walked back to his quarters, taking great pride in his mission as a purveyor of knowledge. His self-satisfaction waned somewhat upon realizing that he had left his cigarettes back under the tree, and he cursed in several languages. It's not easy being red.

REVISED AUGUST 9, 2009

THIS IS AN OUTDATED PROFILE: PLEASE SEE BELOW FOR THE CURRENT EDITION

Name: Saul Falkenau

Age: 36

Bloodline: Muggle-born

Physical Appearance: Saul is 6'0'' with black hair, scruffy facial hair and a pale complexion. He dresses in fairly plain, black robes when teaching but favors Muggle garb when on his own time. He's most comfortable (and most often seen) in blue jeans and a button-down shirt and sneakers when not on duty and wears his leather jacket religiously when formality allows it. He always wears steel-wire framed glasses, and is in fact blind as a bat without them. Saul isn't bad looking, although a few wrinkles have formed around his mouth and eyes. He's actually only in his mid thirties but looks to be about 44 or so. It isn't often that you would see Saul without his shirt on, but those few who would follow the Muggle Studies professor into the lake would get a shock: Saul's back and torso are bedecked with scars from badly or hastily healed wounds, souvenirs from a troubled life. He keeps in rather good shape by walking everywhere he can, though perceptive students will find him sneaking a cigarette when he thinks no one is looking.

Personality: Saul seems a bit sanguine at first glance, but his professionalism masks a passionate personality and a very empathetic streak. His work as a youth in socialist circles has left Saul very politically involved and he will gladly expound (at great length) on the implications of magical society on Keynesian economics and Marxist social theory. A graduate of Hogwarts himself, Saul remembers that many people view Muggle Studies as a joke, but will quickly remind his students that it is a foolish wizard indeed who pretends that they can live above and separate from Muggles entirely.

Beyond his politics and his work, however, Saul is a deeply compassionate man who finds himself troubled frequently. There was a time (in his 'youth', as Saul would put it) when Saul Falkenau trotted the globe with a rather cavalier attitude, and that old spark still shines from time to time. But it has been dimmed by years of seeing the darker corners of the world. Saul's dislike of Aurors owes to more than his radical politics and memories of intra-Ministry rivalry. Saul can't stand people who believe themselves to be heroes. There aren't heroes, frankly, Saul would say. There are just those who haven't learned their own cowardice. Saul has learned his, and that's the bleakness that dances behind his glasses when he solemnly sips his Slavic alcohol. The melancholy gaze of a man old before his time.

Character Background: Saul was born in the early 1970's to Maria and Aloysius Falkenau, who were themselves the children of German refugees to the UK after the Second World War. Saul still speaks fluent German but also has picked up French, Russian and Spanish in addition to English, which he speaks with just a trace of a Teutonic accent. He first manifested magical powers at the age of twelve when he starting talking to a rose in his mother's garden and, to his parents' astonishment, the roses answered back. He attended Hogwarts and graduated with excellent marks. He did a short stint in the Ministry after graduation but left in protest over the policies of the Ministry during the second rising of You-Know-Who.

Saul's fellowship and work at Moscow State University cemented his socialist views and honed his already keen mind to a razor edge that was eager to make its mark. And it did exactly that.

It started, Saul will say to a very few people over a very specific liquor, with guns. There was a lot that he had going for him. The Russian government's distaste for cracking down on organized crime. A talent for languages. A radical streak that kind of enjoyed, he's ashamed to admit, seeing a Somalian bloke in a t-shirt rattle off an AK-47 at a pack of Islamist fundies or American imperialists. And, finally, forged or legit Apparition licenses from a number of countries around the globe. He was a fixer. A connector. A middleman and an organizer. The money was good, but the travel was better.

And then he started leaving behind the Muggle World and moving back into the underworld of the wizarding peoples. There are things, you know, that people want to find. Bits of magic lost or forgotten or intentionally hidden, that only perhaps a few people remember. There's a cave in Chechnya, you know. It has a sundial buried in a pit of sand and its been guarded by a family's sons for generations and it scares the bejesus out of anyone who finds out why it was buried in the first place. Saul learned about it from a Tartar ex-Spetsnaz in a Novosibirsk vodka-hole. Why sons, you ask? You want to know what happens to women if they go in that cave?

Saul knows. You don't want to.

He knows about forgotten annexes beneath the Vatican and penthouses rented to nonentities and London and huts built on clouds under Victoria Falls. Does this sound glamorous to you? Like something from a movie or a Dan Brown novel? Saul thought so too.

He still won't tell people why he got out of the game and went back to Scotland to teach. He just mutters about Siberia and fingers the old rosary that his Sudeten German Catholic mother, God rest her soul, gave him on his 18th birthday. Oh yeah, he's started practicing again. He doesn't advertise it much.

Wonder why? Guilty conscience?

--REVISED AS OF OCTOBER 11th, 2009--

Name: Saul Falkenau

Age: 36

Bloodline: Muggle-born

Physical Appearance: Saul is 6'0'' with black hair, scruffy facial hair and a pale complexion. He dresses in fairly plain, black robes when teaching but favors Muggle garb when on his own time. He's most comfortable (and most often seen) in blue jeans and a button-down shirt and sneakers when not on duty and wears his leather jacket religiously when formality allows it. He always wears steel-wire framed glasses, and is in fact blind as a bat without them. Saul isn't bad looking, although a few wrinkles have formed around his mouth and eyes. He's actually only in his mid thirties but looks to be about 44 or so. It isn't often that you would see Saul without his shirt on, but those few who would follow the Muggle Studies professor into the lake would get a shock: Saul's back and torso are bedecked with scars from badly or hastily healed wounds, souvenirs from a troubled life.

And in a way, each of those scars tells a story. Take the round one, about the size of a 50 Eurocent piece, just below the collarbone on his back. The white one with jagged edges that always stands out when Saul gets tan in the summertime. It came from a hollow-point round from an old Webley revolver, one sweltering night in Cape Town. Saul was lucky to have lived; there were no Healers around that he knew, so it was Muggle medicine at its South African finest (which, to be frank, is not very fine). Or examine, if you would, the long crescent shaped one along his abdomen. Memories of Petra, in Jordan, come back to Saul when he looks at that scar in the mirror, old ghosts of pre-Islamic crypts and magical traps. Those were the days, huh? Too plain? Too mundane? Try the long, even row of identical circular marks that run down the back of his right forearm. Muggles don't need the Cruciatus Curse for torturing folks; they just need a burning Camel Lite and an easily bribed Burmese police force.

Saul's in remarkably good shape, considering that he smokes like a chimney. This is largely achieved by his occasional visits to St. Mungo's for a dose of the latest Anti-Cancer Charms, but also by a rejection of the usual labor saving magic that characterizes many wizards. Saul to this day tends to walk places to retrieve objects, lifts heavy loads himself and jogs to his seminars instead of using magical transport. These little steps have kept him trim, if not Olympian by any stretch.

Personality: Saul seems a bit sanguine at first glance, but his professionalism masks a passionate personality and a very empathetic streak. His work as a youth in socialist circles has left Saul very politically involved and he will gladly expound (at great length) on the implications of magical society on Keynesian economics and Marxist social theory. A graduate of Hogwarts himself, Saul remembers that many people view Muggle Studies as a joke, but will quickly remind his students that it is a foolish wizard indeed who pretends that they can live above and separate from Muggles entirely.

Beyond his politics and his work, however, Saul is a deeply compassionate man who finds himself troubled frequently. There was a time (in his 'youth', as Saul would put it) when Saul Falkenau trotted the globe with a rather cavalier attitude, and that old spark still shines from time to time. But it has been dimmed by years of seeing the darker corners of the world. Saul's dislike of Aurors owes to more than his radical politics and memories of intra-Ministry rivalry. Saul can't stand people who believe themselves to be heroes. There aren't heroes, frankly, Saul would say. There are just those who haven't learned their own cowardice. Saul has learned his, and that's the bleakness that dances behind his glasses when he solemnly sips his Slavic alcohol. The melancholy gaze of a man old before his time.

Character Background: Saul was born in the early 1970's to Maria and Aloysius Falkenau, who were themselves the children of German refugees to the UK after the Second World War. Saul still speaks fluent German but also has picked up French, Russian and Spanish in addition to English, which he speaks with just a trace of a Teutonic accent. He first manifested magical powers at the age of twelve when he starting talking to a rose in his mother's garden and, to his parents' astonishment, the roses answered back. He attended Hogwarts and graduated with excellent marks. He did a short stint in the Ministry after graduation but left in protest over the policies of the Ministry during the second rising of You-Know-Who.

Saul's fellowship and work at Moscow State University cemented his socialist views and honed his already keen mind to a razor edge that was eager to make its mark. And it did exactly that.

It started, Saul will say to a very few people over a very specific liquor, with guns. There was a lot that he had going for him. The Russian government's distaste for cracking down on organized crime. A talent for languages. A radical streak that kind of enjoyed, he's ashamed to admit, seeing a Somalian bloke in a t-shirt rattle off an AK-47 at a pack of Islamist fundies or American imperialists. And, finally, forged or legit Apparition licenses from a number of countries around the globe. He was a fixer. A connector. A middleman and an organizer. The money was good, but the travel was better.

And then he started leaving behind the Muggle World and moving back into the underworld of the wizarding peoples. There are things, always, that people want to find. Bits of magic lost or forgotten or intentionally hidden, that only perhaps a few people remember. There's a cave in Chechnya, you know. It has a sundial buried in a pit of sand and its been guarded by a family's sons for generations and it scares the bejesus out of anyone who finds out why it was buried in the first place. Saul learned about it from a Tartar ex-Spetsnaz in a Novosibirsk vodka-hole. Why sons, you ask? You want to know what happens to women if they go in that cave? Saul isn't so sure that you do, actually.

He knows about forgotten annexes beneath the Vatican and penthouses rented to nonentities and London and huts built on clouds under Victoria Falls. Does this sound glamorous to you? Like something from a Steven Spielberg movie or a Dan Brown novel? Saul thought so too.

He still won't tell people why he got out of the game and went back to Scotland to teach. He just mutters about plans gone wrong and old tundra and fingers the old rosary that his Sudeten German Catholic mother, God rest her soul, gave him on his 18th birthday. Oh yeah, he's started practicing again. He doesn't advertise it much.

Wonder why? Guilty conscience?