Basic Info
Name: Nikolas Alexander Ivanson
Age: ~85
Occupation: Engineer, warrior, traveler

Appearance
Height: 5’10’’
Weight: 140-150 lbs
Build: Slender Athletic
Short Description: In spite of his age, Nikolas looks as if he is still in his mid 20s, and he has the energy to match. He has a soft face, pale skin, and a stubbly chin. His hair is short, thick, and dark brown. His eyes are a striking electric blue color.

History
Nikolas grew up in the time before the world began to burn off. He was the son of a blacksmith, and grew to love metalwork, weapons, and tinkering. When he was 15, he became the apprentice to an engineer, and took upon the study of lightning. Then, the forests began to die out, drying up and becoming so brittle that they would fall apart.

Like many others, Nikolas saw this as just a phase, and ignored it in favor of his studies. Then, one day when he was in his mid 20s, there was a great forest fire and the electrical battery prototype that Nikolas had been constructing exploded, nearly killing him. When he awoke, his fingers carried the tingle of electricity, and any living creature he touched ran the risk of dying.

Because of this, Nikolas hid himself away in exile. For years he watched the world decay around him while he remained young and spry. Feeling as if he had been cursed by some sort of higher power, Nikolas vowed to right the wrongs that his ignorance had helped to bring. He came out of exile with the sole intention of repairing the land.

Personality
Nikolas is friendly and cheerful. Anything that bothers him he bottles up and tries to ignore. He is not one to show his emotions readily to anyone, and he takes a great deal of time to really warm up to people. He is a natural leader and teacher, but his overwhelming compassion for others has led to great disappointments in the past.

Equipment
Clothing: Nikolas travels in a set of light leather and cloth armor and a deep red hooded cloak to keep him warm at night. He is not one for heavier sets of plated armor unless the situation specifically calls for such a thing. Nikolas prefers to remain light on his feet.
Weapons: In spite of the large library of weapons that he has collected, Nikolas usually chooses to travel with just his claymore and bow.
Other: Nikolas never goes anywhere without his light staff. The large bulb on top is powered by his electricity, but he is free to change the brightness with dials on the side. At it’s highest setting, the staff can illuminate an extremely wide area and also potentially blind foes.

To carry everything, Nikolas has a leather backpack and several pouches around his belt. Most of the things he takes with him are small trinkets. Nikolas is a collector, and often can’t help himself. He is almost always carrying a book or novel on him, and will read to occupy his spare time. As a traveler, he also carries basic survival gear with him and any food he has is scavenged for along the way.

Powers/Abilities

Electric touch
Thanks to the explosion that gave him his extended lifespan, Nikolas has the ability to electrocute any living thing he touches. Unfortunately, this also does damage to him, and he cannot control how electricity flows through his fingertips. This is an inconsistent ability that could prick someone or kill them without warning. In the end, this isn’t so much of an ability as it is a curse. Nikolas currently has no control over this.

Expanded Lifespan
Also a result of the explosion, Nikolas has retained his youth for longer than normal. It is unknown how much his lifespan has been extended for.

Engineer
Nikolas is an accomplished and genius-level engineer. He works with great speed and dexterity and has been studying the design of automatons, and has a prototype in his workshop that runs off of the most basic steam engine. The only setback to this ability is the fact that Nikolas spent so much time studying electricity that is a bit of a novice at the construction of steam engines. He is learning.

Fighter - Claymore
Although not an expert, Nikolas can wield his claymore well enough to hold his own against most opponents. He has limited experience, however, and still has much learning to go.

Marksman - Basic Bow
On his travels, Nikolas has needed to use a bow in order to find food. From fishing to small game hunting. Over time, he has become increasingly accurate, and can hold his own well enough with bow combat.

Events
(to be added)

Basic Info
Name: Liliya.
Age: Twenty two.
Inspiration: Fallout Four Settler.

Appearance
Height: Five foot seven.
Weight: One hundred and five pounds.
Build: Willowy, if malnourished.
Short Description: Liliya is leggier than most in the colony, with a look about her suggesting she may have been several inches taller had the diet of her people contained a higher nutritional content, possessed of thick, even bushy eyebrows, full lips, a slightly upturned nose and striking sea green eyes. She is noticeably too thin for her height, though not any more so than most of the other colonists eking out a living in the wastes, with high cheekbones and a strong jaw overemphasized by her spare figure. Possessed of a naturally pale skin tone befitting her auburn hair, the near constant pallor cast by the cloud cover has produced a pallid, near reticulant complexion which serves only to further her somewhat unhealthy appearance.

History
The eldest of three children, if only by a few minutes, born to a rare couple who actually cared for one another beyond the desire for the occasional, casual distraction and a warm body to aid in passing the frigid nights slightly more comfortably found all too commonly among the colonists who call the wastes home. An idyllic moment frozen in time, serene against the backdrop of the falling sky just beyond the little spot on which the burgeoning family had made a home for themselves, or so they say. Life went on like this for several years, and the twins, a boy and a girl, grew as children do, with never quite enough to eat but never so little as to risk starvation. After a time another was born, a boy, and for two more years their happy little family held together in relative harmony despite the acid rain, boiling heat and scathing cold. As the years passed the joyous mother developed a cough, nothing at first, then everything all at once. A simple illness, easily treated in the time before, now fatal, and with the death of her mother the wistful bliss faded away like smoke and ashes caught in the breeze.

Liliya and Mykola, her twin brother, would come to remember little of their mother and Olexiy, the youngest, nothing at all. Those that knew their father would tell the children of the dreamer he had been before and during his time with their mother, of the places he wished to visit one day and the wonders he would show the people of the colony. He was a reader, perhaps even a philosopher by the standards of the wastes, and had always claimed that just beyond the edges of their little part of the world there were places unaffected by the changes which had irreparably damaged their region. In these places trees grew tall and lush with foliage, and people lived as they had before. The rain which fell there was fresh and cool, petrichor a scent not only something the old, grey, and blind could recall but a common, in some places near daily occurrence. The colonists would laugh his fanciful claims away, some rather insultingly, even the most gracious remarks their mother Larysa could manage always coming out at best sounding chiding and insincere. Wastelanders as a whole tend not to believe in some mystical better place, and their colony after all had water, some food, and most valuable of all, relative peace. Still, he believed.

After Larysa’s death, he stopped believing. He had in his spare time taught the children of the colony to read, and they were the only ones who didn’t ridicule his fanciful notions of the beauty that was the world outside the wastes. After her death, he never again touched the books that had been his life. He stopped reading to the children just as he stopped in life, seemingly frozen in an endless rut thereafter. He had never become hostile or cruel as many who have lost their loved ones do, but he never again smiled, laughed, joked. The wonder of the world that could have been vanished along with Larysa. This was the man Liliya, Mykola, and Olexiy would come to remember as their father, only hearing the rest eight years after their mother’s death when their father, too, fell ill and shortly thereafter went to join their mother. With little in the way of skill or position Liliya and Mykola took up the mantle of caring for Olexiy, and after learning of their father’s once pastime of reading to the children of the colony and in turn teaching them to read renewed the practice, having themselves continued to read all the while, the only escape from the drudgery of their little lives offered them.

As a child Liliya had dreamed of seeing a world like that in the fantasy book she had read a thousand times, where children rode in mechanized cubes called, “lifts,” and played tag across vast buildings of brick and stone which towered into the sky and had more than a single floor contained within them upon which to walk, even though the ground might be forty feet below the level upon which you stood. A world in which something called a steam engine propelled things called trains, hollow metal boxes that moved horizontally rather than vertically as did lifts from what she could gather, and you could run from an elevated place and jump down onto the tops of these things and ride to faraway places until you came to where you wanted to be and jumped back down to solid earth. A world in which vast wooden things called, “ships,” carried many people across a body of water so vast you couldn’t see the other side called, “seas,” and heroic figures did battle with swords and cannon against evildoers who tried to take their boats by force. Supposedly the water was salt and not fit for drinking, but it didn’t matter to her. She would even have settled for a world in which there were actually places you might happen to want to go beyond where you slept, where you cooked, and where you gathered water.

As time passed, however, these dreams faded from the forefront of Liliya’s mind. A local boy, the son of a man with position and relative wealth in the colony, had taken an interest in her and, though not overly fond of him, she had taken the advice of Mykola and what few friends she had in the colony and started to spend more and more time with him. He hadn’t grown on her yet even after seven years, but the extra bits of food had done wonders to keep Olexiy fit and healthy, he would grow be the tallest in the colony at this rate and had already been offered an apprenticeship with a tinsmith, and the fanciful tales of youth were increasingly relegated to the time she spent reading with the children of the colony. The life of a wastelander had never quite felt right to her, however, the complacency to live day to day without purpose beyond simple survival commonplace among colonists never having taken hold over her. She yearned for something more, something different, perhaps not the worlds of fantasy from her youth, but something greater than just scraping by while the world devoured itself and everyone in it right in front of her eyes. Of course, there isn’t anything out there to find, nothing more than warlords, slavery and a slow, painful death in the sand. In this world there are no happy endings.

Personality
A born introvert, Liliya is slow to make friends, and often seems distant to those she has made. Despite this she is zealously loyal to those who few who have gained her trust, even displaying the occasional moment of friendly cheer in their company, though it should be expected that she will often need time to be alone, even while in the company of close friends. Anxious by nature, and quick to question the motives of those she doesn’t trust completely she can come off as hostile at inappropriate times, and she is keenly aware and rather sensitive of this aspect of her personality. Despite this, she is rather hopeful for the world that is and that could be, never having quite lost the curiosity and wanderlust of youth, and is willing to risk everything to see the world change, grow, and become something altogether different, -- whatever that might happen to look like.

Equipment
Clothing: As with many in the colonies who don’t fill some sort of specialist, high demand role Liliya wears the one or two ragged sets of clothing someone of her status can afford to upkeep. Whether they were denim, leather, or wool in the beginning everything anymore mostly looks like a patchwork quilt of the three materials and more, shaped and crudely fashioned to be worn over legs and hips, torso and arms, the colors faded and stained from bits of off color lizard blood, the ruddy mud from gathering water at the stream, and anything else that happens to get on them, never quite coming out without the quality soaps and chemical abrasives of the days before the world burned away. Liliya never knew that world, of course, and the stains and shoddy quality of her dress rarely catch her attention, or that of her fellow colonists. Notably she owns what was once a burgundy leather jacket and a wide brimmed charcoal wool hat, both now patchwork as with the rest of her attire, though in noticeably better repair than the rest, as well as a thick woolen shawl patterned with what were once geometric patterns for the frigid nights left to her by her father, all understandably oversized for her person despite her attempts to refit them.

Other: As a colonist, Liliya’s most treasured possessions were a torn and battered book of poetry and spoken verse meant for children, a political treatise rendered irrelevant by the end of civilization, and a fictional novel about youthful adventurers in a fantastical world, the third of six in its series, left to her father by her maternal grandmother, and then to her and her brothers. She knows each by heart, and used to read to the children in the colony from them, though their ownership now lies with her brothers, keeping only the memories with her. Existing reading material is rare in the colony, the majority long since burned as fuel for a fire by the colonists or abandoned as excess weight somewhere along the way, and she would be the last to deprive her brothers and the colony of any such remaining writings.

Events

Basic Info
Name: Aaron
Age: ~26-27

Appearance
Height: 6’2’’
Weight: 175 lbs
Build: Stocky Muscular
Short Description: Aaron is rough around the edges. He has a short, scruffy beard, messy black hair, and dark brown eyes. His hands are calloused and he has a bit of a slump to his gait — perhaps from years of carrying things on his shoulders.

History
Aaron’s mother just needed a meal when he was conceived. Needless to say, the man who exchanged his food for her services didn’t stick around, and he left her in the wasteland amid thieves and warlords. She gave birth to Aaron alone in a shack while black acidic rain fell from the sky. Then — while broken, exhausted, and dehydrated — she walked to the nearest colony with her infant son bundled in her arms. There, the people of Tinleaf were kind and gave her the rest she needed to get better.

Even though she never fully recovered from her fatigue, Aaron’s mother managed to raise him well enough. She brought him up as a quiet and humble man who felt like he owed something to the people of Tinleaf. The more he grew, the more Aaron went out of his way to help the colony in any way he could.

In many ways, this would become his prison. Aaron was happy to help, but always felt stifled by the self-imposed obligation. He never learned to read or write, and often looked to the mountains in the distance, daydreaming of what might lay beyond them. Time and time again, Aaron thought of leaving, but the thought of his mother always brought him back. Over the years, Aaron learned to keep his head down and work — it would help his mind stray away from thoughts of adventure.

Personality
Aaron is a quiet and humble man. He will almost always drop everything he is doing if it means helping another person. In many ways Aaron has ingrained instinct to assist, even to a fault. He hardly speaks, for fear of sounding undereducated, but he is constantly observing the world around him.

Equipment
Clothing: Aaron dresses in just a simple cream colored tunic, a pair of dark slacks, and some boots.
Other: Aside from the clothes on his back, Aaron doesn’t carry much. He has no need for books or journals, and trinkets rarely interest him. The only thing he has is a watch he was given by his mother. It no longer works, but his mother claims it belonged to her father, Aaron’s grandfather.

Events
(to be added)

Basic Info
Name: Yevgen.
Age: Twenty four.
Inspiration: Chopin Nocturne in B-flat minor, Op. 9, No. 1

Appearance
Height: Five foot eleven.
Weight: One hundred and thirty one pounds.
Build: Scrappy, Lean, Stark.
Short Description: Yevgen has never been one to go unnoticed, and though he is of average height and build among the colonists of Tinleaf often draws looks wherever he goes. Mixed looks, to be sure, but people always notice him. Hair mottled with patches of golden blonde, fiery red and near raven black in no seemingly apparent order falls in ringlets to his neck and in waves about his throat and jawline. His eyes that of pale, cold electricity, noticeably uneven in placement upon his face and the near white blue color of one stricken with malaria, though possessed him from birth. Angular jaw and cheek bones made readily apparent by the sunken nature of what should be the fleshier parts of his face, a forehead too large for the rest of his features, and the pallor in hue all too common among wastelanders afford him an altogether unapproachable appearance not at all in keeping with his rather friendly and outgoing personality.

History
Life tends to be but a collection of happenstance events played out at random along an endless line. Finding the music in life is a matter of identifying the patterns among the cacophony, such is history. It all seems clear now, but at the time nothing was any more straight forward than a single note, played without purpose to be followed by another, and then another, drops in a stream heading toward unknown purpose. It isn’t until someone stops to reflect that they notice something beautifully cheerful, or stunningly haunting had gradually come into being. Yevgen, his younger brother Miron, and his father Yosyp are rare among the colonists in that their family isn’t from anywhere near Tinleaf, not originally. Their grandmother Halyna and grandfather, Valeriy were artists, musicians, employed with a traveling orchestra who found themselves preforming in what was at the time a backwater no cultured person of the old world would purposely visit. A fellow musician in their outfit was from Tinleaf, or what the colony was before there were colonies that is, and were it not for this engagement to have occurred simultaneously with a great forest fire which barred their progress along the road Yevgen would never have been born.

The old world and those who called it home refused to accept the changes occurring before their eyes. The world had been as it was then for a very long time, after all, and a few strange weather patterns were nothing to be alarmed about. This too would pass, and life as usual would carry on into eternity. Empires would rise and fall, children would be born, bear their own children and then die, the crops would be sown, bud, flower, and be harvested, as it had always been. It was well past the time for action before anyone knew what to do to remedy the ails of the world, or that anything needed to be done in the first place. Some fled, tried desperately to return home wherever home was to them, others wallowed, turned to the bottle, the pipe, or put a barrel down their throat. Halyna, Valeriy and a few other musicians went to what was to become Tinleaf. There their lives continued as the world slowly burned away, they integrated into what had become the colony, had children, and survived as best they could, until the day acid like tar first fell from the skies above and took Valeriy, along with many others in the colony down into the earth along with it.

Yusyp and his mother struggled by as best they could. The concept of pay for musical talent rendered laughable with the death of cattle and wheat Halyna adjusted to the life of a survivor, a wastelander, patching clothes from bits of leather and discarded cloth and catching what rare reptilian lifeforms she could to keep her and her young child alive. Things were hard, but they got by. Yusyp grew and as he did came to an appreciation for Gilly, a card game centered around gambling, and the dream tea some produced from snake venom and the occasional off colored mushroom which sprouted near the stream, spending his young adult life into the modern day as the town layabout, running card games and spending the profits on what dream tea he could manage to afford. Yevgen’s mother was one of the usual frequenters of his Gilly table, and his odd appearance is credited by most to her use of dream tea during her pregnancy, though she vehemently denied any such allegations until her early death from drinking too much of the stuff and falling ill. The elders say the tea rots the stomach.

Miron’s mother was quite the same story, though she has survived to the modern day. Neither ever truly had a relationship with Yusyp, most assume they became pregnant only after having gotten into debt to him with their gambling, or ever kept it together enough to raise their children, the task of which fell primarily upon their grandmother, though where this gave Miron a bitter disposition from early childhood Yevgen never seemed at all dispossessed. Never cried much as a baby, or so Halyna claimed, and was always a happy child. Throughout his life he always came easily to friends, and despite his off appearance had always managed to have people who cared about him around. After her death near a decade ago, she was old and grey and had lived to become a town elder in her time, Yevgen always struggled to keep steady work unlike Miron who was apprenticed at a young age in some bet made between a local crafter and Yusyp over Gilly, and between the mundane tasks of a colonist and what little occupation preforming menial labor he could come into has floated around.

A decade of running Gilly games alongside his father, brewing dream tea, and turning bits of blood, plant matter, and all manner of odd things into ink to either paint upon stones and what solid surfaces he could find to tattooing it upon the flesh of those so inclined after his father, who had once been quite the artist, gave up on the practice as the tea drove his hands increasingly to unsteadiness and shakes has shown Yevgen much of how bad things can be for people. Always drawn to the arts, music and song Yevgen has never given up on the dream of finding the instruments which his grandparents played so long ago, and learning the songs which his grandmother hummed to him as a child.

Personality
Yevgen never quite fit as a colonist, though not for the reasons one might expect of an off looking son of a degenerate gambler. An inexplicably honest happiness pervades from his person seemingly at all times, a genuine smile apparently plastered upon his face from what most can tell despite it all. Friendly, caring, kind, -- all aspects found exceedingly rarely in the wastes, and all of which fit him to a tee. Nothing gets the guy down for long. Just as often as the collective people of Tinleaf find this behavior refreshing, however, they find it crude and rather insulting. Many of his fellow wastelanders are of the strong belief that he is either loony or feeble minded, and are not shy about letting him know as such. Still he laughs, jokes, sings, dances even, and bringing a smile to anyone’s face, even for a little while, means the world to him. Those who know him well however notice a still, quiet sadness deep within his core. Perhaps he feels that this sadness might abate should he make the world a better, happier place.

Equipment
Clothing: Yevgen spends half of his days with his shirt off. This is not actually advisable in the wastes given biting sand storms, acid rain, and the fact that a stray cut on a sharp stone can easily become infected and lead to amputation, death, or amputation and then death, but the warnings of the colony elders haven’t slowed him down yet. He is never without his shemagh, once of grey wool and embroidered in geometric patterns though now faded, stained and muddied, though he generally wears it as a scarf rather than as a head covering, and when actually wearing a shirt owns only a patchwork sweater that was either red or grey at one time and is now a pale, ruddy phantom motley of the two.
Other: Yevgen carries a steel tuning fork for a wooden, stringed instrument he has never seen, but which was owned by the paternal grandfather he never had the chance to meet. Some day he would love to find the instrument this fork was meant to tune and play with it until he could cause something resembling music to pour forth from its wooden bones, but as the elders say no such instruments survive to the modern day. He also owns a poorly crafted set of tin tokens meant to replicate playing cards meant for Gilly, and an old world set of tattoo needles his father won off a fellow colonist in a card game.

Events
(To be added as the RP goes on)