Tom Marvolo Riddle

1. Player Information
Name (or internet handle): Allison
Current characters in Bete Noire: Conrad Achenleck, Rip van Winkle
Past characters in Bete Noire: Severus Snape, Moist von Lipwig, Sam Vimes, Alexander Anderson

2. Character Information
Name: Tom Marvolo Riddle, known otherwise as Lord Voldemort
Dreamwidth Username: gotmynose
Fandom: Harry Potter
Image: Image here!
Reserve: Reserve here!

3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: Tom Riddle is about 26 or 27, tall and very handsome with dark hair and a shrewd, intelligent gaze. Often possessing a fake smile, he occasionally hisses out words rather than speaking them, and lately his eyes have begun to take on a narrowed, snake-like quality.
History: History link here!
Personality: Tom Riddle is defined primarily by his never-ending lust and desire for power and control over others. Having grown up with nothing - no past, no family, and very few possessions of his own - Tom seeks out riches, fame, notoriety, and above all, control over the entire wizarding world and even over death itself. Every action he performs throughout his life can be attributed back to his obsession with becoming the greatest wizard ever to live; he alone has gone farther and done more terrible things than any Dark wizard in the history of magic.

A disturbed and frightening child from the very beginning of his life, Tom has absolutely no love, empathy, or affection for anyone or anything: his affinity towards snakes (due to his ability to speak Parselmouth) is the closest he can manage to anything resembling care for another living thing. He is sadistic and ruthless, and finds great joy in the torture and killing of innocent people; even before entering Hogwarts at age eleven, Tom is shown to have callous disregard for the other children at the orphanage, stealing from them and endangering their lives.

Despite this, Tom is an incredible actor, and uses both his charm and his good looks to his advantage, able to captivate nearly any audience by faking care and sincerity. His near-supernatural level of charm allows him to manipulate many weak-minded people who can't see through his ruse, and oftentimes he is able to either use or recruit dozens of people through his lies and deceit. He is absolutely unscrupulous and has no limits to the lengths he will go to secure something he wants: a skill that was put to great use during his employment at Borgin and Burkes where he was able to charm valuable objects away from their reluctant owners using his boundless intelligence and flattery.

At Hogwarts, Tom was widely known to be a polite and fiercely intelligent, hardworking student and was able to fool most people about his true dark nature. At Hogwarts, Tom won a number of awards and gained a reputation and a following among his fellow Slytherins, who became the basis for his first collection of Death Eaters. His loathing for the Muggle world and the unhappiness he suffered in the orphanage is evidenced by how desperate he appeared when his work with the Chamber of Secrets threatened to close the school entirely. After graduating Hogwarts, Tom never returned to the Muggle world at all, and instead enclosed himself utterly within the magical one.

His greatest weakness - the one that would eventually lead to his near defeat and eventual death, both at the hands of Harry Potter - is his inability to understand love even in its simplest form. He can manage a mockery of it in order to fool others, but possibly due to his having been conceived under nonconsensual pretenses via the effects of a Love Potion, Tom has never experienced love nor given love back in return. As such, his complete lack of understanding of love's own kind of magic is the greatest weapon wielded against him.

Tom constantly underestimates those he considers beneath him; those weak or powerless in terms of magic. To Tom, possessing magic is possessing power is possessing importance, and those without importance are beneath contempt. Having grown to hate Muggles and Muggleborns from an early age - especially given in the context of having a Muggle father who abandoned him as a baby - Tom does not consider those who have little magic to offer worthy of living. He desperately hides the circumstances of his own birth even from his most loyal followers, concerned that the pureblood radicalism he espouses would be turned against him. He is one of the few known Slytherins with clear Muggle parentage: the other being Severus Snape in later years.

Giving into this pureblood mania of the belief that nothing good or important or worthy can come from those without magic or without a magical family, Tom also subscribes to the belief that human witches and wizards are more important than, say, goblins, house elves, or other sentient beings who possess their own magic. Much of this is likely due to Tom's enormous ego that he is the most powerful wizard in existence and, as he himself is human, humans must therefore be the vessel in which the most powerful magic resides. Nevertheless, this racism has not stopped him from later employing people like Fenrir Greyback, or the greater collection of giants: this is because Tom recognizes the inherent value of using those who feel marginalized by greater wizarding society, and seeks to collect the strong, outer fringes of the magical world in order to further his own goals. However, he stops short at allowing them full rights and access to the higher ranks of his organization that the human witches and wizards are privy to.

Tom keeps no friends but enjoys the privacy and importance of an inner circle of followers, and loves to play the Chessmaster even against his own flock. Constantly paranoid of spies and traitors in his midst, he has never given full trust to any other person in his lifetime, but occasionally allows others to believe they keep his confidence. He will never follow anyone else's initiative, preferring to lead whatever organization he is inside, or else he will consider the group a threat and either leave or disband it. He freely tortures people who have displeased him, including his own followers who ultimately obey him for a collection of reasons: a desire for power, similar hatred of Muggles and Muggleborns, a chance to be rewarded, or most importantly, fear.

Of the many weapons and instruments he uses to complete his goals, Tom's main way of achieving success is to keep to the shadows and sow discord within the ranks of the wizarding world, preferring them to destroy themselves rather come out himself as a centralized target. Wisely keeping to the shadows and never quite presenting himself in a showy manner, Tom is able to more effectively reach out and control people who may not realize who exactly is holding the strings.

Despite being an incredibly adept student in a circle of admirers that included both teachers and his fellow students, Tom has never felt wholly a part of the wizarding world due to his Muggle upbringing, and many times has felt lacking, unwanted, and not a legitimate citizen (due to having no money, no prior association with the wizarding world and being forced to return to the orphanage for the summer holiday). This lends to his overachiever attitude and a mad desire to be the best and most powerful wizard in existence, so that he will never be forced to feel helpless or lost or out-of-sorts again.

In the time he is taken from for this application, Tom's main objective is to discover and implement a failsafe to protect himself from dying. Above all things, Tom fears death the most and currently is obsessed with the idea of Horcruxes: randomly chosen objects infused with pieces of a wizard's shattered soul, to ensure said wizard's resurrection should he be killed. The very idea of Horcruxes is taboo within the Wizarding world, as in order to create one, a wizard must murder another person to split his soul. This, however, is not deterrent enough for the power-hungry and murderous Tom, who had already killed a Hogwarts student (indirectly), his father, and his paternal grandparents.

Egomaniacal and extraordinarily proud, Tom can't stand the idea of placing parts of his extremely important and valuable soul in mundane, unexpected objects: yet another weakness of his is giving his Horcruxes homes of sentimental or symbolic value. By now, Tom has already successfully created and hidden at least three Horcruxes: a diary from the murder of Moaning Myrtle, a ring from the murder of his father, and a locket from the murder of a Muggle tramp. Ordinarily cool and calm when angry, when things do not go as expected Tom can explode in anger, but usually only when he feels his own life threatened.

Sexual Preferences/Orientation:
Tom's only true attraction is to power and control, and those who can offer it. If he feels it will benefit him, he will make a move to entice another person of any gender, but because he feels no love, he thinks of sex as merely yet another act of dominance over others. Likely he is asexual, and considers sex to be simply another path towards getting what he wants; something he personally takes no emotional pleasure in and does not use as a first attempt, but does not find wholly disgusting. In bed, he is sadistic and controlling and refuses to submit under any circumstance.

Voldemort always tops, baby.

Powers: Self-described as the most powerful wizard alive, Tom in his earlier years is still beginning to test the waters of how far Dark magic can stretch. Upon graduating Hogwarts, he is an extraordinarily accomplished wizard, able to perform most standard magic spells in the Harry Potter universe (with one of the key exceptions being the ability to cast a Patronus, a good spell that keeps dark creatures called Dementors away by the magic-user's focusing on a happy memory), as well as rarer, more distinctive magic which shall be listed here:

He is a Parselmouth, which is a very rare ability that allows him to speak to snakes. Even by this young age, Tom had already performed at least one and likely all three Unforgivable Curses - curses having to do with mind-control, torture, and death - and displayed that he knew how to perform the horrifying magic involved with creating a Horcrux, which he had begun to create before even leaving school in order to protect himself from death. As such, Tom is able to split his soul and hide bits of it in ordinary (but sentimental) objects through the act of murdering another. At this point in time, he has at least three Horcruxes as explained in the personality section.

Tom would grow into becoming an accomplished - and perhaps the greatest - user of Legilimens, or the ability to read another's thoughts. Less practiced in the sister art of Occlumens (the ability to shield one's thoughts from a Legilimens), Tom nevertheless used his ability to read the weaker minds of wizards and Muggles alike and torment them through gained knowledge. Much of this sort of magic was instinctual for him, but he developed and honed it later in life.

Reason for playing: For the evuls.

Bete Noire is the perfect place for Voldemort as a young man. It is a place that encourages sin and vice and he has those in spades. Under the influence of the city, Tom has the potential to grow into just as horrifying and manipulative a man as he would eventually in his own universe. Coming in with no followers and no reputation gives him a chance to start his circle of "friends" anew, and he would immediately begin to win over allies in an attempt to further his own lust for power - a sentiment that may very well drive him to try and take over Bete Noire itself.

Plus it's fun to take in villains when they're just starting out. The potential for everything to go wrong and blow up in their faces coupled with their initial vulnerability and ability to charm others (as opposed to late-in-life Voldemort's policy of scorched earth/kill everyone/I'm worse than Hitler) makes them more appealing to play than someone who everyone needs to take only one look at before going,

"Jesus christ there is no way that person is not evil."

5. Samples
First-Person:

Hello. My name is Tom Riddle, and I am being led to understand that this is the city of Bete Noire. Is this correct?

I wonder, could I trouble one of you to answer a few of the smaller, less important questions concerning the magic that enabled me to travel here? I've read nothing that would indicate this city to be even possible, but, obviously, I was mistaken. And I would hate to overstep a boundary or make a mistake that could be simply corrected with the right sort of knowledge. Knowledge which I am sure the citizens of Bete Noire must have in vast quantities.

Thank you for your assistance.

Third-Person: Tom Riddle rarely felt shock and surprise on the level he experienced in his first few seconds in Bete Noire. It wasn't a feeling he liked at all: surprise meant that he had been ill-prepared, and there was no excuse not to be prepared for every eventuality when you were as intelligent as he felt himself to be.

The unexpected shock at finding himself at a wholly unrecognizable city soon dispersed, and a quiet sort of outrage took its place. Someone had obviously brought him here: he would never have been his own instrument of displacement. Not when he had worked tirelessly to keep such boundless control over his magic. Someone else was clearly responsible, and he would find out who they were, and make it clear to them why this sort of act was intolerable.

Anger at the sudden act of being ripped away from his important work was soon replaced by the uncertainty and fear of being once again alone and friendless in a city where he knew no one, had very little money, and had no way of being able to tell what to do or who to seek out to give himself the advantage, that edge on life he craved. He was by himself in a filthy street with no idea of how he arrived, and the absurdity of it all - after clawing up from the worst ranks of Muggle life only to be set back in very nearly the same position as where he'd begun - rankled him.

But it wouldn't do to show his fierce unhappiness to others. Putting on a mask of calm intelligence with a tinge of idealist curiosity, Tom Riddle put himself to the task of reclaiming his status, and opened his diary.

Third-Person #2:

Bete Noire, Tom mused, was not as horrific as he'd initially thought.

He knelt down next to the pretty young woman he'd killed, and gently pushed her shoulder to turn her on her back, watching her empty eyes with satisfaction. She wasn't anyone important - at least, not to Tom - and her new mink coat was filthy from the dank dumpster he had pushed her into when he had cornered her in this alleyway. Were this in magical England, he would have had to be far more careful and meticulous in his murders, but here there appeared to be no force prepared to deal with Dark magic. Pity, really. A city full of Muggles would soon fall.

But that could all come later. For now, he began to strip the dead woman of her belongings, pocketing both cash and jewelry. It burned him inside to think of himself performing murder for such a low, common reason as robbery, but he needed food if he was to survive long enough to find all the tricks this city had to offer. The pale beauty was still warm as he pulled off the last of her rings and set his wand to her body, transforming it into a pile of rubbish to be hidden away. Despite there being no magical police that he could discern, it wouldn't do to cause too much needless attention where it could be avoided.

And leaving the hidden, dead body of his first Bete Noire victim behind him, Tom walked out of the alley a little richer than when he went in.