Appearance.

PB: D.B. Woodside
Kingsley is tall, taller than most men, around 6’6". With his shaved head and the deep, dark-brown eyes, Kingsley rarely goes unnoticed. His hair is black - where there is hair left: at times Kingsley decides to grow a beard, but it never becomes more than a goatee before he removes it again. He wears his signature golden hoop in his right earlobe. Despite his desk job, he is still relatively muscular and fit, keeping his weight around 190 pounds. He is after all a former top Quidditch player.
Very fond of Muggle suits, Kingsley has wisely chosen to wear robes when he is in London. He prefers them knee-length, with a pair of soft leather boots to go with them. Usually they are quite elaborately embroidered.
Kingsley is always calm and collected, polite and quite a gentleman. His inner turmoil rarely shows. He can, however, be very intimidating if he so chooses. He rarely shows anger, but if one knows him it is possible to recognise the signs. When Kingsley leans back, calmly folding his hands, there is reason to be worried. If he is nervous, he plays with the one golden hoop he is wearing.

Personality.

Calm and confident, Kingsley doesn't have to show exactly how powerful he is. Although he is frowned upon by the British Pure-bloods, his position as the Chairwizard of the International Association of Quidditch gives him some protection. He has always earned his progress in life by being fair and by working diligently to get it, not by pretending being something he is not, so the Pure-blood regime is everything Kingsley resents. Kingsley is the epitome of a Hufflepuff: fair, loyal and hard-working. That, however, doesn't mean he is naive, or that he thinks there are no cunning ways to do things--on the contrary. The rules Kingsley obeys are the ones he sees as fair. He is confident enough to think he is able to judge by himself--which is probably why he rose in the ranks of IAQ. No threats or bribery can sway Kingsley when he has taken a decision. He is at times immensely stubborn--the backside of Hufflepuff traits. Kingsley's relaxed confidence can at times seem intimidating to lesser witches and wizards. Power, intellect, physical and magical strength combined with the calm behaviour make an almost invincible package: a challenge to those who seek power in the wizarding world. If Kingsley has to admit it, he doesn't exactly do anything to make the Pure-bloods feel better. His mere presence is an offence to them, and it pleases Kingsley to no end that the Pure-blood elitists have to be polite to him--unless, of course, they want to have an international scandal on their hands.

Meticulous, logical, smart... Kingsley has many strengths. He is a very good judge of character, and if he finds himself to be wrong, he always gives the witch or wizard in question yet another change. One. Although he can be wrong, Kingsley trusts his own opinion to a degree of being extremely stubborn. If pressured, the more negative traits of a Hufflepuff show up in Kingsley's behaviour: he can be very close-minded if he finds that people disagree with him in something he knows to be right. He usually is right. At a first or even at a second glance Kingsley seems to be the poster boy of perfection. If he let anyone come close enough to actually see behind the façade, things might look different. Kingsley is sociable, magically capable, confident, hard working, intelligent, yes. But his flaws are hidden deep down, because they are... dark. Kingsley fears the instant when he loses control. He is not certain what will happen then.

Kingsley is a humanitarian. "We're all humans," Kingsley says when somebody asks him about his opinions on the political situation in Britain. "Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving." Kingsley believes in fairness, in second chances, and in reconciliation and redemption. He is interested in moulding the wizarding world into a society of equality--for wizards and witches as well as for Goblins, werewolves, House-elves and centaurs. They are all part of the group of sentient beings who create the wizarding society and Kingsley wants fairness for all--an almost Utopian wish. But Kingsley truly doesn't care who people are (unless they're Malfoys), he doesn't care where they were born or what blood-status they have. Their actions are what counts and Kingsley does believe that people can change. He is, however, not naive, and woe for those who think so--if Kingsley's trust is betrayed, one will never gain it again. Being on the windy side of Kingsley's grace is not a nice place. Kingsley believes in second chances, but not in thirds.

Despite his extraordinary skills when it comes to work, his personal life is not really working well. He has a tendency to forget his partner when he is in a relationship; work is simply more important to him. Perhaps because he has never truly been in love, but Kingsley has never had the time to think it through. Quidditch, administration and a bit of under-cover work is just more interesting than having a spouse.

LIKES: Quidditch. Kingsley's a fair beater and handles a broom well. Crime novels. Dogs. Chicken curry. Long walks in Hyde park when it rains. Muggle cinema. The smell of leather. Kew Gardens at sunset. Fish. Kingsley keeps an aquarium populated by black Moors and fantails. The fish are all named after famous Pure-blood supremacists and Kingsley takes a certain morbid pleasure in ritually disposing them in the Muggle toilet when they die.
DISLIKES: Unfairness, inequality and women who wear too much make-up. Malfoys. Any Malfoy.
HABITS: Kona coffee in the morning. Gets up at six, no matter the day, season or year.
VICES: None, unless too much coffee at unreasonable prices counts. Despite his size, Kingsley has a low tolerance for alcohol. He sticks to a decent ale, and not too much of it. The consequences of too much good ale are... interesting.

History.

As the second child of two Muggle parents, Kingsley had a happy childhood, good friends and fun at school. His parents were both connected to the labour union, one a Muggle marine engineer, the other a former steel worker, now a powerful labour union boss. They taught Kingsley to appreciate social conscience and democracy.

Kingsley grew up in Huddersfield in Northern England where he went to a Muggle school until he got his Hogwarts letter. He has an older sister, Catherine, who has no magic whatsoever. Kingsley still has Muggle friends whom he visits once in a while. Both his parents now live in Kenmare, in a house that Kingsley bought for the money he earned during his first season with Kenmare Kestrels.

Kingsley's first year at Hogwarts was in 1965. Kingsley didn't make much of a spectacle of himself there, soon catching the idea of keeping a low profile if one did not have thousands of years of wizarding ancestry, or was good at pretending. Kingsley was not a very good first-year: his magical abilities lay partly dormant until he attended the wizarding school, probably because Kingsley isn't a very emotional man. His calm is a part of his personality, not something he learnt. He was sorted into Hufflepuff, and he is indeed a true one. He doesn't lack courage, so Gryffindor was a possibility too, but the flashy and the flamboyant was and is not Kingsley's style. His intellect could have placed him in Ravenclaw and he is cunning enough to have made it to Slyherin, but his sense of fairness would have made him a poor one. Hufflepuff is where Kingsley belonged: the sense of what's fair is what shaped Kingsley's life, more so since his experiences at Hogwarts underlined the inequalities in wizarding society. Despite the unfairness of the system, Kingsley worked very hard and learnt even more. Of course he rarely earned a decent grade, according to his blood-status, but that did not mean he left school uneducated. Kingsley's talents might have been ignored, but he knew that he surpassed most of the talented students, if not all. Wordless magic, strong duelling skills: Kingsley would have been an excellent Auror, but of course a Muggle-born would never have been allowed into such a position. Quidditch had to do.

Kingsley knew already before he had finished his first year that he wanted to be a Quidditch player, thus, his choice of career was not a hard one. Flying his broom, no one could beat him and even the Pure-bloods knew that they'd be in trouble with the entire Hufflepuff house had Kingsley come to any serious harm. That was when Kingsley realised that the only thing in the British wizarding society that ranked higher than blood-status was Quidditch-status, at least to some degree. Kingsley went to Hogwarts with the Malfoys and the Lestranges and there was definitely no love lost between them, on the contrary. Kingsley's dislike for the Malfoy family was founded, sealed and prepared for eternity during his Hogwarts years.

Kingsley was a fair Quidditch player and kept to his team, or outside practise hours, to his house. Before he finished his last year, the Kenmare Kestrels had offered to line his non-existing Gringotts vault with Galleons. Kingsley accepted and moved with his family to Ireland, away from the poisonous climate in wizarding Britain. It did not, however, mean that Kingsley just brushed off unfair treatment and went on with his life--on the contrary. Using his connections with, amongst others, Arthur and Molly, Kingsley's house was always open to those witches and wizards who needed somewhere to go or money to start over in another country.

Being on an Irish League team provided Kingsley with some protection. He was a good player, popular and admired, and his speciality, a steep, incredibly fast dive towards bottom of the Quidditch pitch earned him the nickname "Thunderbolt". When he stopped playing professionally, Kingsley decided that the trust people seemed to put in him, together with his brilliant administrative skills could just as well take him further and he worked his way towards the top in the International Association of Quidditch. The job, first as a clerk, then as a secretary, then a member of the board, was perfect. Kingsley kept close to the sport he loved and he built a power base, making him almost untouchable by the Pure-blood supremacists--a platform from which he could fight for the sake of a wizarding world for all magical beings alike.

Kingsley's life was close to perfect. In 1989 he met the Holyhead Harpies' chaser Wilda Griffiths, fell in love with her and married her three months later. Then he forgot about her. They divorced five years later, when Kingsley was appointed Chairwizard of the International Association of Quidditch, replacing Hassan Mostafa. Kingsley blamed himself for being an intolerably bad husband. Kingsley had a few sexual encounters after his divorce, but nothing serious. There was so much else he needed to do.

As Chairwizard of the IAQ, Kingsley saw the possibility of getting back to England without having to worry too much about his Muggle-born status. His position would make it more or less unthinkable that he would be in danger, as long as his activities-- the resistance activities--were kept away from any prying Pure-bloods. He decided on IAQ's behalf that the upcoming Quidditch World Cup was a brilliant excuse to send an observer to London, and Kingsley appointed himself. He rented a small, but nice flat in Diagon Alley, packed his suitcases and his three favourite brooms and left Ireland. He celebrated Christmas 1999 in London with his best friend, Gwenog Jones whom he had met after his divorce. The Harpies' player wasn't particularly fond of Kingsley's ex-wife, so they got on swimmingly.

Kingsley now uses his time in London, endearing himself deliberately to any Pure-blood witch or wizard willing to listen. Quidditch seems to be a brilliant ice-breaker, no matter blood or affiliation.