Questionnaire:
Do you want to start in training, or post-training?
- Either or is fine.
Do you want several, smaller squads, or 1-2 larger squads?
- Smaller squads can make it easier to not have conversations get lost or buried.

Name: Alexander Black

Sex: Male

Age: 21. Just old enough to drink.

Appearance:
Messy black hair, and wearing his favorite collared blue vest, he could usually be found studying up on history and such. He's serious about getting his degree. He stands at 6 feet exactly, and weighs around 170 LBS

Personality: Curious, likes to explore, and tries to be friendly.

Background: Alex always loved exploring. Ever since he could take his first steps, he'd always run as far as he could, looking for new places to find. Over the years, Alex used all that running around to his advantage, as he ran Track in high school. He wasn't the best, but he was still pretty damn good. Unfortunately, Alex would come down with a strange illness, and have to leave the team. During this strange illness, Alex would suffer night terrors, and whenever his friends tried to visit, he'd soon see them flee from his house in terror within just a few moments. When asking his friends why, they couldn't really say, only that they would suddenly become terrified.

After 3 weeks, Alex would spontaneously recover, and find himself back in school like nothing had happened. Minus the homework. Alex would graduate, and move on to college, where he would study history and archeology. Yet during this time he had been informed that he had "Linked". Alex was aware of this phenomenon, and began to experiment with his powers. He learned that by concentrating malicious intent, he could strike fear into people. After a while however, he grew bored of his powers, as they had little practical use for him. Everything was relatively normal for him. Until one day, he received a letter in the mail.

Affinity link: Fear. Alex can cause others to become frozen with fear, run, or cower with fear. This can come in forms such as touch, a black smokescreen he can shoot from his hands, showing monstrous versions of their worst fears, or through direct eye contact for a short period of time.

Other:

Name: Finn Flanagan

Sex: Male

Age: 18 (Old enough to drink in the UK =P Although Espara doesn't seem like the kinda place they ask for ID)

Appearance: Not having quite outgrown the gangliness of childhood, Finn cuts an awkward figure, despite his height of 5'9. Combined with an overabundance of freckles and a mop of red hair that could really do with a trim, he really does look more like an overgrown kid than a soldier of Espara. Even after training, he failed to put on any real muscle, and as such sometimes struggles with large, unwieldy weapons, and other tasks requiring considerable strength.

Never being one to shy away from a fight, Finn bares the marks of a childhood spent mouthing off and getting into scraps - namely a slightly crooked nose, a very crooked left thumb, and milleu of tiny white scars scattered over his body. He has a couple of larger scars as well - his right arm is splattered with fairly fresh burn scars, although nothing so severe as to affect mobility, and his left shoulder bares a large scar which looks to be from a bullet, and it still aches sometimes if he''s very tired or slept in an awkward position.

Personality: Despite his age, Finn is by no means naive or sensitive - in fact he is quite the opposite, having developed a thick skin due to his troubled upbringing. He is aware of how cruel people can be, and any insult sent his away he will return with something even more scathing as, for him, no topic is off limits. Whilst a bit of a prankster, and always up for a good laugh, he struggles to get truly close to people, often shying away from vulnerability in all its forms, meaning he's good at forming surface level friendships, but never anything deeper.

Despite his acceptance of the ugliness of human nature, Finn struggles to accept things outside of his realm of experience, and he's somewhat set in his ways. Everything from just extravagant displays of wealth, to the sometimes dangerous and bizarre manifestations of affinity links, will spark a deep mistrust in Finn. He likes to stick with what he knows because he's good at what he know, after all, it's kept him alive this long.

Background: What some would refer to as a 'common street rat', and others simply a 'nuisance', Finn grew up living hand to mouth on the streets of Espara. As is to be expected when 1/10th of your population is pressed into military service, there're more orphans running about than there are kind souls willing to take them in, and as such, at the age of five Finn found himself kicked out of the orphanage where he was abandoned at just a few weeks old for being 'too boistrous'.

It was tough at first, often unbearably so, but Finn managed to escape this part of his life mostly unscathed, and even made a few friends along the way. When he was sixteen, however, things started looking up when he became friends with the daughter of an innkeeper. The innkeeper, a kindly old man who had lost his wife to the military, hated to see one of his daughter's friends living in difficult circumstances, so he gave Finn a job as a stable boy, allowing him to earn his keep alongside a small allowance. It all ended though when the innkeeper's daughter's affinity manifested in the most destructive way possible, tearing down half the inn, and leaving Finn and the innkeeper alone to rebuild after she had to leave for military service. Finn promised to stay and help the innkeeper rebuild, whatever it took, as he had been so kind to him. Unfortunately though, not two months later, Finn's affinity manifested, meaning he was unable to fulfill this promise.

Affinity Link: Wound Replacement - Finn is capable of transferring injuries between himself and another with contact - this could mean taking an injury from a teammate who has sustained numerous injuries and is unable to carry on, sharing the burden between them, or transferring his own injuries to an enemy. Sustained contact from five seconds up to a minute is required depending on the severity of the injury, and he can't transfer things like poisons or illnesses. Under extreme duress (as in, is about to die) he can transfer severe injuries quickly, although this is extremely tiring, and an act that in and of itself would be almost as debilitating as the injury sustained.

Other:
-Finn is a pretty good pickpocket, and can be sneaky when he wants to be.

-Before Esparan military training his style of fighting was the wrong side of scrappy, tending to involve more teeth and nails than fists, and it took/will take a lot to get rid of those habits.

Questionnaire:
Do you want to start in training, or post-training?
No preference
Do you want several, smaller squads, or 1-2 larger squads?
Several smaller squads

Name: Charles Pickman

Sex: Male

Age: 20

Appearance: Charles stands at about 5’ 4”, though it is hard to tell as he usually has a slouched demeanor, and such a slender build one would think he is nothing but skin and bone. He has pale skin and hair as dark as night. At first glance, the most notable feature would be the myriad of seemingly unnatural scars that virtually covers his body and are at various stages of healing. Less noticeable in the day and in lit rooms is his veins which illuminates a dim yellow.


Personality: Due to being uninterested in socializing, he has seemingly become somewhat apathetic and awkward at judging others moods or intentions. Secretly, he hides the fact that he generally cares for others and hates to personally injure another if he can avoid it.

Background: Charles Pickman lived a fairly solitary life. With no siblings and living near the forest, he elected to explore the woodlands at every available opportunity. During one of his early trips he encountered a family of deer in one of the clearings, while this would normally be uneventful, one of the fawns was interested in Charles when it sensed some berries he had, and Charles being a compassionate person offered it to the fawn. Over the following months he and the deer (which he nicknamed Spots due to its birthmark of a black ring over its eye) became more trusting of each other and the closest thing to a friend for Charles. Eventually, Charles would rarely go a day without seeing Spots.

Then there came the day Charles found Spots dead, ripped apart and partially devoured but enough left to recognize the rotting carcass. His heart broke leaving him in mental anguish as he lost his only friend. In retrospect, it seems quite peculiar his affinity would reveal itself at this moment, but Charles barely noticed as his mental pain became more and more physical and was shocked when he realized the corpse moved seemingly of its own volition. That was when his already vulnerable mind shattered further.

Charles does not remember much between that moment and when the letter came. Ever since, Charles never ventured to make another friend for fear of further heartbreak and that moment still occasionally haunts him in his dreams and even less frequently in his awaken moments. To this day, they say that spot where the abomination existed briefly, is a spot where living animals feared to tread, where plants refused to grow. A spot reserved for death.

Affinity Link: Reanimation. Charles is capable of animating and taking control of dead or decaying organic material. By simply touching a carcass, it can be revived and mobile (albeit, still rotting) within seconds or he can do it over a longer period at a distance if direct contact is not possible. This comes at the cost of part of his own life and concentration. Animating a corpse creates a visible bond between Charles and the reanimated in the from of a scar on his body violently erupting and bleeding his yellow blood into the corpses own veins, reanimating it, before clotting. Then Charles will have to mentally stimulate the joints of the corpse, like he would his own, in order for it to accomplish whatever task its wretched existence is for. As a result, he is only capable of animating a handful depending on the overall size of the individual corpses in question and if he were to ever lose concentration for any reason, such as from a suitable injury, the animations would collapse almost immediately (though larger specimens have been noted to remain standing, but unresponsive, for a longer period) and each corpse would only be an extension of Charles’ will, incapable of independent action.

Through some practice, Charles developed the ability to deconstruct and reconstitute tissue and fiber to a limited degree which with further training would theoretically enable him to combine two or more corpses into a larger abomination.

Charles prefers to animate corpses conservatively as he fears excessive use could kill him although he is capable of absorbing the life of any living material (including plants) by direct contact which could theoretically allow him to animate more corpses at a time although he is still restrained to the mental limit of only controlling a few at a time. This process will manifest visibly as color draining from the victim, and in the case of animals, the skin bursting open with blood oozing out and mingling with Charles’ own and creating another corpse for reanimation. This process is relatively long (the duration depending on the size and constitution of the victim) and direct contact must be maintained throughout for a continued effect. This is a process he has to be willing to do, he is capable of direct contact with others without any effect and Charles prefers not to. While he has become desensitized to animating, absorbing the life of an animal or person still distresses him and in a combat encounter he would prefer to avoid close contact when possible.

Other: The bond Charles shares with his abominations allows him to sense what his corpses would sense should they still possess the required faculties. He could for example, reanimate a condor and command it to give Charles a view from a higher angle.

Suffers from underlying insanity, while capable of sane and rational thought, if he suffers enough stress he might become erratic in his manner for a brief period.

Secretive of his past. Other characters would probably not know of his history prior to training IC.