Harry Dresden

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Contents

The Mun

The Character

  • Name: Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden
  • Age/Birthdate: 34 / October 31, 1973
  • Canon: The Dresden Files (Bookverse)
  • Canon Entry Point: After Small Favor.
  • Journal: http://w_for_wizard.livejournal.com/

Defining Abilities and Attributes

Harry is tall. Very tall. Fucking tall, and lanky to boot. His dark brown hair's slightly curly, usually messy, and he's often got several days' growth of stubble. Rarely seen without his black leather duster and staff. Wears a black leather glove on his left hand to cover the extensive burn scars on it. Also has a shield bracelet, a whole lot of rings that pack a nasty punch, and a Colt .44 that packs an even nastier one. Generally considered to be one of the more powerful wizards in the world, if we're talking brute strength. His strengths lie in fire, wind, and blasts of pure force, as well as tracking spells.

Personality

Harry has a chronic and probably terminal case of White Knight Syndrome. He's pretty much incapable of turning away an innocent person in distress, especially women and children, and he will do incredibly stupid things to keep them safe. He deals with people with a heavy dose of sarcasm and usually a stunning lack of tact or... sense of self-preservation. That's the sort of thing that gains a person a whole lot of enemies, but he makes up for it by being both generally competent and doggedly determined to do the right thing, whatever it takes, and one or the other has served to keep him alive and in one piece thusfar.

It's easy to mistake Harry for a big dumb detective, a magical thug who gets by with a whole lot of power and a lot of big, dramatic gestures. However, he's very intelligent and very quick on his feet, and while he's walked straight into traps time after time, the fact that he's come out of every one alive speaks to his ability to stay one step ahead of such master manipulators as the White Court and the Queens of Faerie.

When he decides something needs doing, especially if it's someone who needs protecting or an injustice that should be punished, he pursues it stubbornly until the job is done and everything set to rights. However, to do so, he often has to tread a little closer to the darker sides of his nature than he'd like, and those parts of his nature have a lot more shadows and claws to them than he'd like to admit to anyone else.

Background

Harry Dresden was born on Halloween, 1973. His mother died in childbirth, and his father, a stage magician, named him after Harry Houdini, Harry Blackstone Sr., and David Copperfield. Harry expected to become his father's assistant when he got older - he never got the chance, because his father died of a brain aneurysm when he was six. Harry became a ward of the state, until he started to show signs of magical abilities and soon after was adopted by Justin DuMorne, a former Warden of the White Council.

DuMorne trained Harry and a girl named Elaine, Harry's first love, in the use of magic until soon after Harry's sixteenth birthday, when DuMorne attempted to enthrall him and set a demon on him, and Harry was forced to kill both him and the enthralled Elaine in order to save himself. He was put on trial before the White Council for breaking the First Law of Magic, and only avoided being executed because Ebenezar McCoy stepped forward to mentor him and keep an eye on him for the White Council.

After leaving Ebenezar, Harry travelled the country for a few years before he hit Chicago, and started working for a P.I. at Ragged Angel Investigations before he opened his own detective business. Before long, he was approached by a Lieutenant Karrin Murphy, head of the Special Investigations division of the Chicago Police Department, and they worked out an arrangement where the department hired him whenever a case came up that was just a little too weird to work out on their own.

Things started to get complicated for him when a case involving magical murders came up. That particular case got him tangled up with local mob boss Gentleman Johnny Marcone, got Murphy to arrest him on suspicion that he was the murderer, and led him to a ring of sex-fueled magical drug dealers. Later that year, he got to take down a band of werewolf FBI agents, and the year after that, when his girlfriend was turned into a semi-vampire, he started a war with the Red Court. Yeah, complicated doesn't begin to cover it.

Since then, he's found himself indebted to the Queen of the Winter Sidhe and diffused a veritable faerie apocalypse (in typical somewhat explosive Harry Dresden style), come up against fallen angels while rescuing the Shroud of Turin and gotten one of them stuck in his head, found a half-brother he didn't know he had, necromanced a polka-powered T-Rex to stop a dark god from rising, become a Warden and regional commander of the White Council, gained a shiny new apprentice... oh, and somewhere in there, he got a dog. What? It's important. It would be nice to say that his life is never dull, but really, it's more like he has a week or two of absolute terror and near-death experiences in between long stretches of dull.

Now that the war with the Red Court's arrived at a sort of cease-fire... well, it's more or less Harry's life that he finds himself smack dab in the middle of a brand new and unfamiliar war. What would life be without complicated politics and a healthy dose mortal peril?

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