Eben Sosna

Eben is small for his age, something which is not helped by his height usually being reduced by some form of heavy bookbag balancing precariously on one shoulder. He has brown hair, brown eyes, and glasses. His appearance is usually at least somewhat untidy and he is picky about what fabrics he will wear and how his clothes fit him. He continually tries to keep a pen behind his ear, but constantly finds it either falling or else annoying him until he removes it.

Many people would feel the correct place to begin Eben's biography would be the point at which he was born, including details about when and where, who his parents and siblings are, why his parents gave him a name like Eben (it was because they had met during a community theater production of A Christmas Carol), and other such mundane things. As far as Eben himself is concerned, though, his life didn't really begin until he was about six years old. On that day, he was out and about with his mother, Patrice, and his twin brother Euan when they passed by an old house which was being demolished. Watching with curiosity typical of a young boy at a construction site, Eben glanced aside at a noise nobody else was reacting to and spotted a ghost.

He tried to tell his mother and brother what he saw, but neither of them were able to perceive anything and thought he was just making up an interesting story. He had been praised, after all, by teachers for his creativity and imagination, even if at the same time he was criticized for keeping an untidy desk and not having the best handwriting. Eben, for his part, was confused and hurt when he realized that his mother and brother both genuinely did not believe him about what he had seen. He became determined to prove he was not lying - a goal which, as a six-year-old, he could not figure out any way to follow through on, but which would inform the rest of his early childhood. Once he mastered the reading and typing skills necessary to do so, Eben became preoccupied with tales of the paranormal, looking for any evidence of other people who'd seen things others could not, and who could prove their sightings.

His parents, naturally, noticed this hobby but considered it mostly harmless and let him get on with it. They were sure he would outgrow it eventually, either because he would realize it was all nothing but a bunch of balderdash and publicity stunts or because he'd get to high school, want either a girlfriend or boyfriend, and would need to drop the interest in order to avoid being considered 'that weird undatable guy who believed in Bigfoot and read way too much sci-fi'. Neither of these things, however, came to pass. Over the years, he only rarely ever again saw any evidence of what he would later discover was magic, but those few sightings were enough to convince him he hadn't imagined the ghost when he was younger, and that kept him interested. Then, shortly after his eleventh birthday, a Muggle liaison officer showed up on his family's doorstep to explain to the family that the reason Eben had been able to see a dead person while they had not was because he was a wizard.

None of them were exactly thrilled by this news - including Eben himself. Secret wizards? The government was barely in on it, and the Freemasons and the Illuminati apparently weren't involved at all? And he'd never actually be able to show his family ghosts or cryptozoological specimens to prove to them that they definitely are real and he definitely isn't making them up? Dang it.