Maalik Szadn Darksteel

Out of Character (tell us just just a bit about you outside RP)

Name: Sub


In Character

Name: Maalik Szadn Darksteel
Age: 52
Gender: Male
Blood Rank: Goblin-Human hybrid
House: N/A
School: N/A
Career: Magical Crime Lord, though is more commonly known by his cover job: the founder and CEO of Darksteel Inc., a wizarding Employment Agency

Parents: Szadn and Nadine Darksteel
Grandparents: Rajnish and Kayla “Darksteel”; Samuel and Madhur Winters
Notable Ancestor: Rakesh, first Ancient Runes teacher of Hogwarts (Hogwarts Founders RPG reference)
Siblings: TBA (open for potential plottage)
Aunts & Uncles: TBA (open for potential plottage)
Nieces & Nephews: TBA (open for potential plottage)
Cousins: TBA (open for potential plottage)
Children: 1 son, deliberately miscarried; Kex (son, age 24)
Grandkids: None yet


Skin color: Fleshy, metallic gray
Hair Color: Brown, with hints of silver
Hair length: Long
Eye color: Amber-brown, turning orange-bronze in the right light
Size: 4’ 10”
Build: slightly stocky body; lanky but muscular limbs. Seems fit for a Goblin/Wizard hybrid.
Picture:

[Robert Carlyle as Rumplestiltskin]


Crushes: None at this time
Mates/Spouse: Olivia Miller; Soraya
Status: Involved, but by no means bound



Personality: Despite Maalik’s diminutive size for a man, the first thing people notice is that he has enough pride and confidence to add about two feet to his overall demeanor. Short stature jokes are brushed off easily at first glance... but rest assured he will be biding his time for the first opportunity to return the favor. It may not be now, or tomorrow, or even next week; but he will strike back from behind the shadows. In the shadows is where he’s always felt he belonged.

Maalik has a fickle code of conduct. On the one hand, he is excellent at keeping secrets. However, everything can be purchased for the right price... even said secrets he may have been entrusted to keep. Any deal he goes into is shrewdly calculated to maximize the best possible outcomes in his favor. Not doing so would be seen as a severe lapse in judgment in his eyes. Every interaction is a transaction - a game of give and get achieved by the means of cunning and wit. It is individuals like Maalik that lend themselves to the reason why wizards have such a narrow stereotype of Goblin society.

Just as Maalik isn’t the most trustworthy ally, he also trusts very few people. He will feign openness when it suits him to do so. Strong security measures and enchantments await those who violate the man’s privacy and are not ordained by law to go snooping. Do not expect him to let you borrow anything of his, other than money in the form of financial loans. If Maalik does offer such an opportunity it is never given lightly... and will only be given that single time if the borrower fails him.

Towards family he is a bit ambivalent. Maalik loves the luxurious lifestyle, but at the same time he is almost infuriatingly frugal about money. His alchemical prowess usually results in him transmuting various substances into gold, which he then sells to Gringotts Bank for profit. The transmutation process is a long and tiring one to the frustration of kin who desire his attention and affections.

Overall: expect to find a potentially powerful ally in Maalik, but beware of hidden traps. As a relative, anticipate the niceties but be mindful that he is not the most generous man to walk the Earth. Maalik would say that his goal in life is to help those in need. What he doesn’t say is that help from him always comes at some sort of price...



Your Story Please? True to form in the ways of his ancestors, Maalik was given the opportunity to choose one particular side of magical learning: the ancient, Goblin ways, or Human magicks complete with the accessories that go with the craft. Maalik of course chose Goblin magic, but that didn’t stop his human relatives from informally teaching him what they knew, and setting him up with a wand. During the summers of his later years of instruction, Maalik gained employment as a Gringotts employee-in-training. It was at this job that Maalik met and fell in love with Olivia Miller, a witch who arrived with weekly deposits of some sort. It wasn’t Maalik’s job to ask where the money came from. Shared smiles at the teller’s station quickly grew into lunch dates. Lunch dates were quickly replaced by dinner dates and drinks – several of them well out of Olivia’s way considering she lived on the opposite side of town.

They married when Maalik turned 21. Although he was little more than a low-ranking manager of accounts and Olivia’s occupation was similarly disenchanting, they went on an extravagant, extended honeymoon. Maalik evaded Olivia’s questions on where he had gotten the money. When she wanted to cut the honeymoon short and go back home Maalik found some new and interesting event to delay their departure, staying longer. Not more than a few days after they finally returned home, Olivia saw in the evening paper that an investigation into a bank heist was still in progress. Maalik claimed ignorance, of course. After all: he and Olivia were on their honeymoon long before the investigation even began...

But Olivia still suspected something was up with her new husband. That suspicion grew shortly after Maalik’s return to work: he had been fired by his supervisor, a Goblin known simply as Stark, and refused to tell her why. Instead, he poured himself into finding another source of income. Unfortunately, the stereotypists of the wizarding world made it difficult to acquire anything other than a banking or metalsmithing occupation. Maalik didn’t want any of that. He wanted to rise above the limits set forth by half his heritage.

Maalik read books and newspapers. There had to be a way to provide a service beyond the stereotypical Goblinized occupations that would bring him prestige and power. Broommaker CEOs certainly had a wealth of influence, which made him consider going into self-employed business. But... what sort of business? Then, it hit him: what had he been looking for, for the greater part of three years? A job! What the magical world needed was a connected and resourceful agency skilled at finding and matching employees to their qualified, desired jobs. Completely independent from the Ministry and guaranteed to find the client a source of gainful employment within a relatively swift amount of time... yes. That would work.

But this wasn’t all that Maalik was up to. Always having been a trickster at heart, he also made a few shoddy deals with people to collect the means and resources needed to build and maintain his eventual employment agency. The basement of the building would be reserved for more confidential types of “business”, as well as an escape tunnel system one may traverse either via railcart or on foot. Maalik and his wife, Olivia, would live in what was designated the Penthouse, at the top of the building. For a time Olivia set aside her suspicions, believing that what she had suspected would not be in the realm of such a good man attempting to do good things for his fellow countrymen. At the first official executive committee meeting for the employment agency, dubbed Darksteel Inc., Olivia announced with great pride that she was pregnant with her and Maalik’s first child.

During the pregnancy, Maalik did his best to keep his underground activities on a tight leash of secrecy. While he’d never been a father before, he did know that stress on the mother meant stress on the baby. What the part-Goblin didn’t plan on was for Olivia to go snooping after one of his lies didn’t add up. She found the secret basement and a wealth of records she could very well take to the magical authorities – there was enough there to put Maalik away for many decades of his young life. To make things worse, Olivia also discovered that Maalik was having an affair right under her nose. Undecided as to what to do yet completely distraught over this fiasco, Olivia began drinking. The baby growing within her had been conceived through lies and false reassurances. She couldn’t live with the thought of it, and didn’t want the child to grow up in a situation that was quickly deteriorating beyond hope. Olivia drank to the point of needing hospitalization.

When Maalik found out what had happened, he rushed to the hospital. Healers told him that the amount of alcohol consumed by Olivia was such that the baby within her died. Maalik ordered the Healers to leave them be while he and Olivia talked. An argument ensued. In a fit of rage at the loss of their baby and Olivia’s desire for a divorce, Maalik performed a piece of dark magic to slowly and inevitably kill her over the course of three days, regardless of what any Healer tried to do to save her. Maalik then arranged and attended her funeral, but did not show much emotion at the event. Some questioned him about this lack of expression. Maalik brushed it off as “still being in shock”. His affair with a lovely, half-Goblin woman, Soraya, continued behind closed doors for five years.

On the sixth year, Maalik made a formal announcement that he wished for Soraya to become his fiancé. Maalik himself had grown financially and influentially powerful, and was fifteen to twenty years Soraya’s senior. Soraya was quick to accept the proposal. What the public didn’t know was that this proposal was staged: Soraya was pregnant with Maalik’s child, and threatened to go public with their affair – implicating him as the culprit in Olivia’s murder – if he did not agree to marry her. However, via a stipulation put in there by Soraya, their relationship was to be left wide open. She knew Maalik’s tendency to stray, and didn’t want to be bound to him if he would not ethically bind himself to her in return. During the harsh winter of the following year Soraya gave birth to a baby boy, whom they named Kex. Maalik was barely twenty-eight at the time.

Life continued on for Maalik and Soraya without incident. Soraya is something of a trophy wife to Maalik, not to mention far more accepting of his underground operations, and in return Maalik lavishes what fortunes he can reluctantly part with upon both wife and son... though he is still accused of being irritatingly frugal with his budget.



Magic Specialty Alchemy, Potions, Ancient Runes, and Enchanting
Favorite Spell: N/A



Weakness:
Callous
Arrogant
Opportunist
Suspicious of others
Loves having a luxurious lifestyle
Painfully frugal / a miser toward others

Strengths:
Charismatic
Metal transmutation
Persuasively charming
Good sense for business
Knowledgeable about magical law
Only cares what other people think of him when those thoughts could land him in trouble
Multilingual – (Gobbledegook, English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Arabic, Chinese)

Favorite Color: Burgundy
Theme song: Gimme by Alice Cooper; When You’re Evil by Voltaire