Anthonius Josephus 1685-???

Little Joseph Myrton, later known as Anthonius Josephus, was born in Salem Massachusetts in 1685, the grandchild of an old acquaintance of Carmena's. Although Joseph displayed no overt signs of magical power in his youth (no magical transportation or sudden changes in appearance or whatnot), vaguely odd things tended to happen when he was around: animals might act oddly and he'd say strange things.
("Mother, what's a telegraph?"
"Ah... I've no idea, Joseph. Where did you hear the word?"
(shrug)
"Right. Joseph, please go do your chores."
"Yes mother. Then I suppose I shouldn't ask what "Hershey's" is either?")

Unfortunately, in 1692 the building tensions in the east erupted into the witch-trials. The Myrtons were simple folk with no real standing in town and didn't really have any major enemies, but were pretty nervous anyway. They had friends who were tried and if the livestock acting a little funny when Joseph walked by also meant they walked a little funny when the Myrtons walked by, and when Joseph used funny words or talked about weird things, people assumed his parents must have taught him. The Myrtons made a major show of currying the good will of their neighbors and sweated it out.

In July, when the murmurs started getting ugly, who shows up on their doorstep one night but Carmena Mercatorus ("Goodwife Mercatorus! God bless! What are you doing in town?") and a pretty young woman who Mercatorus introduces as "her goddaughter." While Goodwife Mercatorus talks to the grandmother and parents about the news she's missed while she was gone, the goddaughter "entertains" Joseph. (Aka: "A pleasure to meet you, Joseph.... What do you do for amusement?... really?... would you like to play a guessing game? Guess what I'm thinking.... really... I had the funniest dream last night. Do you ever have funny dreams?...")

Eventually Goodwife Mercatorus explains that Joseph has a gift and since things are a little... tense... in Salem right now, perhaps Joseph could come with her to the town where she's living now. She has other children and their families moving there too, on the coast. They would all be welcome to come.

The Myrtons aren't thrilled about this idea ("Gift? How do you figure that?" "But Salem is our home! And you can't expect Grandmother Myrton to make that kind of trip!"), but Goodwife Mercatorus and Goodwife Black say essentially "Hey, just think about it. It really doesn't sound safe here, you know? We'll be travelling and we'll come back in about a week, if you'd like to go with us." A few days later the Myrtons figure it's worth a try and start arranging to sell their land to their neighbors, which arouses suspicion ("Why would you want to leave?") and by the time Carmena and Sylvia come around again, they basically just manage to keep the grandmother from being arrested. The Myrtons are sneaked out of town to the camp where a few other families are waiting, and their names disappear from the town records.

The Myrtons travel around New England for about a month in the surprisingly comfortable camp. There are 3 other Salem families and a few from other towns (including *gasp* a negro boy). After 2 more stops the lots of them go to their new colony, which is half-erected and quickly "finished" before the cold weather sets in.

Of course the town is a bit odd. The buildings are remarkably strong, the fields remarkably fertile, there's an Indian village not a stone's throw away, and there's seems to be some kind of castle across the way where Goodwife Mercatorus and Black's friends and family lives, only you can only see it out of the corner of your eye across the way. Not to mention the fact that the make-up of the town itself is a little hodge-podge. But, since the biggest contingent of folk are from Salem, they end up calling themselves "New Salem."

Come winter the kids all come up to live in the castle, including Jospeh, who is pretty thrilled to discover that he's a wizard and promptly decides that "Joseph Myrton" doesn't sound wizardly enough, so changes it to "Antonius Josephus." ("Ahhh... that's wonderful, Jo- Antonius. Maybe we'll wait to mention this to your parents?") Joseph is taught magic alongside the two boys who have been there the longest, and the eleven or so other children who were brought in by Carmena and Sylvia, including Theodore Cyrus ("You're a Negro." "Well, yes. You're a wizard." "Well, yes, but so are you." "Oh, right." "I can cross my eyes." "You cannot!" "Can too!").

In December, who appears on their doorstep with Christopher, but "Nava Saphronia," an untrained witch from New York. In the manner of most 17th century school-teachers, Mistress Saphronia immeadiately strikes terror into them and says "Thou *shalt* learn the 3 Rs" and so they do. The next year, Mistress Saphronia starts bringing in the muggle Salem folk and his classmates' brothers and sisters, which seems to be a vaguely big deal, but to Anthonius it just means he gets a lot of new classmates for half the day and they "can't use magic during those classes." Everyone does anyway.

The rest of the time he's studying wizardly things. Since he's only eight it isn't very complex things, but it's *faaaaascinating*, especially since it's so new.

After about a year or so of this, it comes to his teachers' attention that Anthonius has an apptitude for divination, which they are woefully uneqipped to teacher properly. After a lot of lip chewing and debating among themselves, they decide to go with Carmena's idea of asking the Nipmuc for help, since they have some divination traditions themselves. ("It's that or us trying to fake it.")

Carmena talks to her connections among the Nipmuc and says "Hey, we have this child who sees visions of the future. What do you think we should do." And her friends say "Really? Well, why don't you bring him to our next village meeting." Anthonius is kinda freaked by this, but- since it's Carmena asking (who is really pretty non-threatening) and hey, he's a wizard, right?- he agrees and spends about two weeks with her taking a crash course on Nipmuc language with the help of some language spells (and anti-headache potions) then comes to the meeting with her. He makes a pretty good show of himself at the meeting and the shaman says "It's seriously out of the ordinary, but what's the harm? Okay, I'll see what I can do." and Anthonius ends up taking an independent study for an indefinite period of time where he spends all day with the Nipmuc twice a week. It's not exactly standard practice, but-hey, it works, okay?

Most of what Anthonius is learning in his training is "Yeah, yeah, you see lots of stuff, but what relavant and how to focus on it enough to figure out how to use it usefully." Basically teaching Anthonius the practicalities of making prophicies. So you can't just say "Someday we're going to have iron birds," you have to put it in reference to something else so like "When we have iron birds, people will sit inside them and read flimsy looking books." Only hopefully more useful than that. Anthonius starts to keep records of his visions and experiments with different mediums to help him focus (fires, mirrors, crystal balls, etc).

After awhile, Anthonius goes to shaman and says "Yipe! This one was actually here! I saw people I know!" And the shaman says, sounding very deep and wizardly "Way to go, what did you see?" and Anthonius says "Well, everything was being washed away." And, sounding even more deep and wizardly, "Oh crap. Well, that's the point of prophecy, isn't it? You see anything useful so we can figure out *when* it'll be?" "Um, no." "Well, who did you see that you knew?" "Joe Schmo and Mandy Patinkin" "Well, how old were they?" "Hey, you're right. Um. Adults. Young. Maybe Mistress Saphronia's age." etc. Use all the good wizardly/shamanly tricks for figuring out "when the moon is full and in the western part of the sky and Joe is wearing a foppy wig" etc, "there will be a big ol flood, so beware *beware* BEWARE!" (insert hysterical laughter)

Anthonius grows up, starts to teach as well as study, and eventually just studies with the Nipmuc shaman (who doesn't seem to believe in the idea of "graduating") and teaches at Hogwarts. Anthonius writes his dissertation on comparitive divination and recieves professorship in 1715. In 1718, his predication about the flood comes true, and because he was keeping good records of his prophecies, he managed to give some forwarning, minimizing damages. Yay!

In 1725, the census says that everyone in New Salem is either wizard families or squibs. (Or at least posing as squibs and no one really wants to argue, since the whole wizard thing has really been an open secret for rather awhile). So there's a real big semi-centennial celebration during festival that year and the town is officially renamed "New Hogsmeade" and the bans against public use of magic are repealed.

The same year the faculty get together and realize "you know, between our students growing up and having kids themselves and the folk immigrating to our lovely colony here... we have 60 students! That's rather a few. Don't you think it's time that we actually organized the education process a bit. I mean, it worked great for 15 wizards and a Nava's mixed-classes, but this is getting a bit awkward." Lots of grumbling and head bobbing and eventually they decide to model themselves after the original Hogwarts, since that's been a rather effective system. They decide to name it after the "four founders" (rather to Carmena's noisy protestations until Sylvia elbows her and orders her to shut up and be honored) and ask for volunteers to head up the houses. As one of the faculty who have been around longest, and as one of the faculty who can live on campus without much problem, Anthonius agrees to head up Carmena house and, mainly to appease Carmena who's looking very weirded out, says "we don't really have any badgers in America. Professor Meratorus did that lovely ingraving of a beaver on her first monogram, let's use that." Most folk there have never *seen* a badger and don't really know the difference and say "Um. Sure." They randomly assign him 15 students and say "good luck."

Later that year Sylvia Black dies, rather to Anthonius' dismay. ("She wasn't that old!") That leaves Carmena as the last of the original founders, and Anthonius starts to basically hang over her shoulder half the time, much to her bemusement and irritation. ("Gee, Anthonius. I haven't seen you in.. what?... an hour? Shoo- you have work to do.") No one but him is really surprised when she passes away next year. Anthonius ends up having to go to two different funerals (the wizard one and the Nipmuc one) and basically decides "ack! Too much happening in too short a period of time! Need a break!" and starts planning a sabbatical to go "do further research" in Europe.

In 1727, Anthonis starts his European tour, which he intends to take about a year. He goes to England to Hogwarts to research divination, but gets antsy after about six months and decides to go to the other wizard schools too. Ends up a)spending *three* years on sabbatical (egad) and spends more of it studying theater than divination. When he comes back, half his wardrobe is in the latest fashion of the parisian wizards, he's traded in his single scrying ball for three little ones and has basically has rediscovered his lust for life. Happy Anthonius.

He basically shows back up in Spring of 1730 in a swirl of cloaks and a big ol grin and says "Hi! Guess who's back?" "Josephus? Where have you been?" "Oh, here, there..." And finds out that since he's been gone they a)organized Hydroquidditch, b)formalized the organization of the houses. So he no longer has 15 random students, but now has 18 do-gooders. Unbeknownst to him at this point is that one of those do-gooders has raised a pheonix egg in his absense (they weren't really properly supervised in his absense since they kept assigning subs, expecting he was going to show up "any day now").

More importantly, the counsil has now prohibited wizards to own slaves (yay!) In celebration of Cyrus' vistory, Anthonius' return, and the "new" housing system (well, it was two years ago, but we were *waiting* for you, dammit), the portrait was painted which now hangs in the main hall across from the picture of the four founders.

Stuff happens. Anthonius tries to start the first of his improv groups (an inter-house activity since it probably drew largely from Slyvia House), which was a dismal failure. ("I am *not* explaining to the nurse how this happened!") General getting back into teaching. Anthonius discovers the phoenix, goes "Sigh. Kids. Well, it's a bit late to do anything about it."

In about 1732 or so, the student who raised the pheonix leaves birdie at school when he goes off to work in Spain, tells it he'll come back. He means "to visit occasionally"; it thinks "to stay forever, cuz this is just a quick vacation." Student goes to work in Spain, gets Muggle connections, relocates to a shipping firm in Italy, marries beautiful Muggle daughter-of-important-person, and, naturally, forgets most of his schoolfriends including the bird.

Bird is tres unhappy. Bird thinks something has happened to student, that he is shipwrecked or in prison or otherwise has lost his liberty. Tony builds porta-raft for bird to carry while it flies and float on when it's tired. Bird flies off to find student, using its loyalty-dar.

After many days and nights of travel across strange seas, bird finds student. Students says, as you so succintly put it, "Eep, wife and kids will kill me, no no can't stay here." Phoenix is shooed off in horror. Phoenix wanders across Europe sobbing as it slowly makes its way home.

Tony can't believe his eyes when he sees the bird back alone. He does his best to cheer it up, makes it herbal tea and reads philosophy to it and discusses the importance of the Loss of Innocence in the grand scheme of things. Bird eventually latches on to Tony, in a disaffected sort of Intellectual Wonk way. They live happily ever after eating strange flowers and philosophizing.

More attempts at wizard improv. Serious damage done to the west castle. Wizard improv shut down again. Eventually Anthonius starts to get a bit sick of teaching. Anthonius begins his experiments with invisibility that he dabbled with a bit on his European tour. After a few months he gets rather good at it. That fall, having entirely faded from view, Anthonius left the castle entirely (leaving instructions with Wonkus Intellectullus the Phoenix to follow after a day, of course, and set off walking towards the west in search of new adventures.