**Name:** “Larry Dale” (Laurence Darville)
**Age:** 34
**Gender:** Male
**Nationality:** English
**Blood Purity:** Pure-Blood
**Marked?** Oh good lord, yes
**Appearance:**
![enter image description here](http://i60.tinypic.com/10wkwf7.jpg "Larry Dale")
**Personality:** Larry is fiercely intelligent, about which there is no doubt. He is both an ideas man and a pragmatic thinker, one who is not caught up on little details but still pays due attention to them. He is somewhat manic, who is incapable of sitting still: even if he’s not doing anything productive, he will still be larking about in some manner or another. Everything he does has an sense of tongue-in-cheek playfulness, which, in the wrong mood, can manifest itself as pure spite.
He is relentlessly positive, in the worst and most exploitative ways. Every cloud must have a silver lining, even if he must paint it on himself. If a member of the resistance dies, then Larry will present a martyr: if a Death Eater dies, they are the most crucial key to toppling the regime. While, as a journalist, he reports only facts, he is most definitely guilty of the most appalling spin and editorial bias.
Fierce ambition drives him: he works out what he wants and then does whatever it takes to get it. As a politician, he happily trod on people to secure his own position. While he is definitely a risk-taker, though perhaps not as naive as he once was, they are calculated risks, and so does not consider himself a gambler in this regard: if push comes to shove, he saves his own skin, first, and thinks about other things last. He is, in that sense, an appalling egotist, and has come to see himself as something of a political celebrity.
Externally, his period under the thrall of the Ministry offers him no grievance. Underneath, however, he still feels a certain amount of, if not guilt, remorse over that period, and, though he considers himself above such things, has something of a thirst for vengeance.
**Strengths:**
- Stealth and Espionage: Larry has become good at not dying. He has spent the past six years as a lone operative, and has very much learned to take responsibility for his own safety. If anybody is any good at not being noticed, it’s Larry: he also has sources of information to report.
- PR: Not hugely helpful to the Ashes, but Larry is something of a PR prodigy.
- Will-Power: Larry has developed a very strong resistance to the Imperius Curse due to a four-year period of uninterrupted control, which he has also applied to Occlumency.
**Weaknesses:**
- Duelling: While Larry is a competent wizard in many fields, he isn’t a particularly accomplished duellist and historically has tackled combat by simply escaping.
- Teamwork: Larry is not a team player.
**Wand:** 12”, Laburnum, Unicorn Tail Hair
**Bio:** Laurence grew up in a very normal, middle-class wizarding family, and got his acceptance letter to Hogwarts as he predicted. While at Hogwarts, he focussed on the humanities rather than magic itself, taking Muggle Studies, the Study of Ancient Runes, History of Magic to NEWT level, along with Potions, Charms, and Transfiguration, doing rather well across the board and being appointed prefect for Ravenclaw House.
With an unblemished school record, Laurence’s progression into the Ministry was inevitable and smooth. He was a political beast, who was quickly taken under the wing of a career politician (rather than a civil servant), Amarant Garth, with the two of them rejecting the increasing anti-muggle sentiments publicly. Laurence displayed an innate knack for campaign strategy and proved himself as a PR machine. Despite the best efforts of political opponents and the terror threats from Death Eaters, he was not deterred from writing bitingly critical assessments of the political climate and even managed to bully them into the Prophet (as well as any other respectable publication that would take them). Through his skill and, frankly, underhanded machinations, he cemented his position, despite his youth as Garth’s right-hand man, and, together, they unified whatever anti-Fudge and anti-Voldemort sentiment there was into a decent movement. Unfortunately, the movement wasn’t anywhere near strong enough to block Malfoy’s rise to the throne, and, from there, it was all downhill.
The threats against Garth eventually sunk in, and the man bottled it. Lawrence was the only natural successor to Garth’s position as the most overt opponent of the new regime, and took to it with aplomb, if rather less success in the new climate. He remained utterly undiverted from his cause, until, an impressive two years into his tenure, he was diverted in the most thorough way possible.
Instead of simply killing him, the Death Eaters had been watching his campaigning for a few years with irritation and interest, and decided to recruit him instead. Lawrence never found out the name of the person that cast the Imperius Curse on him, but, suffice to say, they did an excellent job of it.
The narrative for the cursed Laurence was that he was a reasonably well-known political convert: the argument had won him over and he now supported the new direction of the Ministry. The fact he had a NEWT in Muggle Studies was also useful, as he was therefore an ‘expert’ in muggle culture and so the propaganda he was generating was thereby justified. In addition, his information about the anti-Death Eater movement was gradually extracted from him and used to shut down the dregs of the opposition.
The curse lasted an extraordinary period of time: for over six years. Inevitably, Laurence began to be able to resist it, and eventually threw it off entirely, and vanished into the night.
Despite this ordeal, Laurence’s political fervour was not quelled, though he vowed not to be quite so naive a second time round. With intricate knowledge of the mechanisms by which the regime could catch opponents, he began broadcasting information by radio: where was safe, who had been killed, what the Death Eaters were doing, and how best to fight back - as well as, for the sake of spite, popular muggle music. He’s been doing this for years now, as a lone operative, under a new name. While there are certain trust issues to be had with a former Ministry mouthpiece, he has been rebuilding his reputation and is the most acclaimed and secure broadcasting operative.