Anderson Thackery

Anderson Thackery is a student at Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, specializing in both Pyromancy (under the Physical Discipline) and Traveling. He is part of Rebecca Proctor's efforts among her students to curb the spread of magikin and the destabilization of magic, and serves as a sort of unofficial second-in-command to Odette Caplan.

History
Anderson William Thackery was born on April 10th, 1996, to Kieran Thackery and an unknown mother in the borough of Queens, New York City. Kieran raised Anderson until the time that he was six years old, and then suddenly vanished without a trace. Anderson merely came home one day to find a social worker from Child Protective Services to fetch him. Unable to find his closest relatives, Kieran being a private man about his own affairs, the boy was admitted (read: abandoned) into the country’s abysmal foster care system. Anderson would spend the remainder of his childhood and then his teen years being passed from house to house, family to family, without a single one of them choosing to adopt him. Some families he only spent a few months with, others a year at the very most. His search for the mythical ‘forever family’ continued with each new home, but over the years his hope dwindled to nothing. Nobody wanted him, so it seemed. 

During his time transitioning between homes, Anderson exhibited many behaviors that would evolve into depression, resentment, and anger. He isolated himself from foster parents and siblings for hours and days on end, sneaking around at night for food and water. He developed an aversion to organized religion and those that operate under the assumptions that ‘God’ would make everything better. He was beaten and abused, mostly for refusing to allow others to suffer the same fate. And once he was capable of reading, he fell between the pages of Fillory and Further. A set of First Edition books, signed by the infamous Christopher Plover, set aside for him by his father, were one of the few things that traveled with Anderson wherever he went. From his first reading of The World in the Walls, he was completely enraptured by the fictional world within those pages. His love of Fillory would inevitably change his life forever. 

The summer before his freshman year of high school, Anderson moved to yet another new family: the Levinsons. They were an older, reasonably wealthy family in the Upper East Side. Until this point, Anders had mostly lived with families ranging from the lowest of the low to comfortably middle class. He’d never seen a home quite like this one, and never felt as welcomed as he had by Daniel and Caroline Levinson. They doted upon him from the moment he came into their lives, but he was growing into quite the rebellious sort. So many years of his torments bubbling beneath the surface had manifested into a solitary teenager, who wore dark clothing, enjoyed dark and gritty music, and saw authority figures as the greatest evil of all. Despite the difficulties he posed, the Levinson’s poured their hearts and souls into trying to sway Anders to their side. They celebrated his birthdays, holidays, gave him his own room, and made sure he didn’t want for much. But he preferred to stay in his room, playing guitar, reading his books, and binging video games on his computer. He’d finally found a family that cared about him, and couldn’t have cared less himself. 

He was set to attend the Dalton School, a private coeducational college preparatory school, at the insistence of his new foster parents. Amongst Anderson’s tumultuous history of social behavior were signs of genius-level intellect, of such a significant sort that it made up for some of his other shortcomings when it came to the prestigious school’s requirements. On his first day of classes, Anders arrived at the campus and eschewed the traditional uniform. Instead, he wore a pair of tattered jeans, a Nirvana t-shirt, and a bag laden with pop culture memorabilia: a set of limited edition Fillory and Further enamel pins (a set of the seven Questing Creatures as constellations, which glowed in the dark!), a Slytherin patch he’d sewn on himself, among other things. Needless to say, this made him stand out, which wasn’t appreciated by some of his new classmates. A group of boys surrounded him, grabbing at his bag, one of them pinning his arms back while another hit him. And then, all of the sudden, everything stopped. The trio of bullies froze in place, the ringleader staring Anderson right in the eyes. A realization slowly washed over them both, one that caused said bully to wet himself in front of the very large audience that had gathered: somehow, Anderson had done this. The spell ended a few moments later, but the damage was done. Everyone began to disperse when the teachers came around, all except for a girl who couldn’t keep her eyes off of the strange new kid that had just done something incredible. Her name was Alexandra Kent. 

Alexandra introduced Anderson to the world that had always existed, living just beneath the surface of their own. A world of endless possibilities, impossible feats, and wonders beyond imagining. A world of real, honest-to-god magic. Anderson fell in love with magic, and as some sort of by product, began to fall for Alexandra as well. She was way out of his league: beautiful, wealthy, classy, and smart as hell. She was the kind of girl that had never given him a second glance, but their common interest and ability for the magical arts had drawn them together. As his tutelage began, so did their relationship, and everything went well for awhile. Eventually, their hunger for new spells grew, and their search led them deeper down the rabbit hole and into their first encounter with Hedge Witches. The sanctuary of Battery Park took the fledgling pair under their wing, and Anderson felt more at home among these complete strangers than any of the ones he’d lived in over the course of his life. With magic in his life, people around him who were as passionate about it as he was, and a girlfriend who shared his ambitious desire to learn it all, he felt complete. Magic was the one thing that made Anderson Thackery whole again. 

Alas, their little fairytale wasn’t to last. Anderson quickly excelled at magic, outstripping his peers through a combination of dedication, hard work, and an incredible amount of natural talent. Alexandra went from praising his every accomplishment to displaying disdain, even jealousy, about his progress. She accused him of sabotaging her own efforts, trying to make her look bad, and all manner of vile little things. She manipulated him into slowing his own progress for her gain, and it wasn’t the last time she twisted his arm to get what she wanted. Being part of a Hedge meant finding more spells to fill out the local spellbinder. The reputation for Hedge Witches being extremely desperate was one well earned, and Anderson learned firsthand just how far a few salacious deeds could get you in the eyes of someone who had magic to offer. Alexandra thought herself above such things, but with a batting of eyelashes and a soft word in his ear, she coerced Anderson to doing her bidding. For her, and for the betterment of Battery Park. 

When Tiberius Callum rose to power as leader of the Battery Park Hedge, he looked favorably upon Anderson and Alexandra, those who had done much to contribute to the Hedge. Because of them, Battery Park gained access to the Mirror Network setup across the city. It kept them independent from Uptown, and the other Hedges that vied for control. It allowed them to keep their allegiance to themselves when things grew more and more political by the day. They became part of the leader’s inner circle, and for four years the two of them were an integral part of the Battery Park sanctuary, until Anderson and Alexandra graduated from high school, and the rest of their lives quickly came into question. 

Anderson was accepted into prestigious Princeton University, which meant an out of state move. His last hopes of being adopted into a family passed over the summer, when he became an adult and subsequently finished his lifelong stint as a foster child. No parents, no other family members he had any idea of, all Anderson had in his life was his Hedge, and his girlfriend. They both meant everything to him, for both of them were integral to his life, and both of them filled it with magic both figurative and literal. But tense times had come to the Hedge, politics and struggle. And Alexandra refused to abandon them in their time of need, especially when the opportunity for her further advancement lay with them. And so, Anderson made a compromise of sorts: establish the Mirror Network line with other Hedges all the way up to Jersey, as close as they could get, and he would pull triple duty as a Hedge Witch for Battery Park, a student at Princeton, and keep his job in the city that brought both money and a handful of spells into the fold. 

Life was extremely busy for Anderson over the next two years. He was a full time student at an amazing school, had a job as a server that made an okay amount of money and consumed a huge chunk of his time, duties to the Hedge and keeping up with his magical studies, and a very needy girlfriend to take care of. He received a mysterious phone call out of the blue, the man on the other end claiming to be his cousin. As it turned out, both his cousin (Aiden Thackery) and his uncle (Eldin Thackery), had both been contacted in relation to something or another inquiring about their relationship. This was the first time either of them had ever heard about Anderson’s existence, though Eldin admitted that he had heard his brother had a son before mysteriously disappearing. A small glimmer of hope that his family would know where his father had when died, and was replaced by a strange feeling that he couldn’t entirely identify. He had family, real family… and yet felt no connection to them or inclination to care. They wanted to meet him, in the city, and reconnect with their long lost blood. 

The meeting was sufficiently awkward for all parties, but it was apparent from appearances alone that the three of them were related. Eldin and Aiden were drastically different from each other, and the both of them were even more different than Anderson himself. But they were undoubtedly his family, and Eldin had a few stories squirreled away to tell about Kieran, at least until he realized that hearing about the father that abandoned him wasn’t high on Anderson’s list of priorities. They never did find out who put them in contact with each other, but Anderson left that meeting with mixed feelings about what he’d found. He’d occasionally receive texts from Aiden, asking how he was doing or if he needed anything, and even offered him some of Kieran’s old things that had ended up delivered to his apartment around the same time as the phone call. However they had found each other, nobody seemed too keen to forge that connection any stronger, least of all Aiden who was attending Brakebills at the time (which was still an unknown quantity to Anderson, since knowledge about the school wasn’t passed around freely to those that didn’t know about its existence). 

During the summer before his junior year, Anderson received an intriguing e-mail about an internship opportunity. He was majoring in Ancient History, and was incredibly interested in old world civilizations such as Sumeria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. He imagined himself as an archaeologist or researcher, who would make a name for himself by making some great discovery or establishing a hitherto unseen connection that explained some answer to an esoteric question. The e-mail provided an address, a local office building that after a quick Google search provided everything Anderson needed to know. It absolutely seemed legitimate, and he was excited about the possibilities. He arrived at the chosen place, and was redirected to an elevator heading up to the fifth floor. The doors shut on the office space behind him, and when they opened… before him lay something else entirely. A sea of green grass, a hedge maze hosting vast topiary animals that shifted in the breeze. No! They moved on their own, an elephant trumpeting its leafy horn. And just beyond was a large building, and a sign that read clear as day: BRAKEBILLS COLLEGE FOR MAGICAL PEDAGOGY. He briefly entertained the notion of being drugged, or maybe having a strange dream, until his newly acquainted cousin came out to meet him, and brought him with no explanation into a room. 

It was crammed to capacity, many with similar looks of bewilderment. A woman stood at the head of the room, watching the assembled with bright eyes as the last few stragglers entered from a random assortment of doors. She only introduced herself as ‘the Dean’, before administering to them an exam with no questions. The test booklet, opened to the first page cautiously, was utterly gibberish at first. As Anderson’s eyes followed the questions, they shifted and changed, usually the moment he thought he grabbed the answer from his brain. The questions covered a wide range of topics, including questions that asked what was the circumference of the moon during the second Tuesday of March, what year denoted the Fall of Babylon, what flavor of ice cream tasted the best when melted, and how many staircases were there in New York City. It felt as if the test ended as soon as it began, and one by one the students were either summoned by the mysterious Dean, or by another important looking person through the opposite door. 

Anderson suffered an even greater shock when he learned the purpose of all these strange happenings. Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy was a very real institution, and he had passed the entrance exam with flying colors. If he so chose, he would begin when the term started in the Fall, putting his degree at Princeton on an indefinite hold. One he overcame an overwhelming feeling of disbelief, he accepted on the spot, took the pamphlet provided with the rest of the admissions information, and heading along his merry way. On his exit from the Dean’s office, completely insignificant and unnoticed to either of them at the time, he gently brushed shoulders with a young woman of red hair, bright eyes, and a sort of meekness about her. She disappeared behind the Dean’s door, and Anderson returned to his life for the rest of the summer months.

On September 5th, 2016, Anderson Thackery began his first year at Brakebills. He had appeared on the campus the night before under unique circumstances, and was seen leaving the infirmary on the first day of classes, still hooked up to an IV and his school bag slung over his shoulder. He remained fairly under the radar, making few friends outside of Tobias Markham (a Physical Kid one year his senior) and Lola Gordon, a fellow first year whom head had some kind of thing with, but not something he'd ever had labeled as a relationship. And after something big drove them apart, he eventually started gaining a reputation around school as a bit of a man-whore. Sleeping with just about anyone who was willing to go for a round between the sheets, and flaunting what the good Lord gave him... And until his third year, that was pretty much all that was important about Anderson. That was, until the day of The Event, when everything changed...