Name: Catherine RolaAge: 20
Gender: Female.
Race/Ethnicity: Her great-great-great-etc. grandfather was the world's Spanish equivalent. However, after many generations she has essentially whited out to basically have lost all her Spanish heritage, excluding her name. She is this world's equivalent of American/European in every way possible, and is as pale as a ghost.
Burden: Unfortunately, at the time of the hailstone's landing, she happened to be almost crushed by one. Thankfully, she did manage to leave the area rather quickly, but not fast enough. She is almost lost, but not quite, at 62% burdened. Her eyes have almost permanently stuck to the black hue, though whether this is caused by the excessive burden or Catherine's own constant anger is uncertain. They only lighten back into their normal color during moments of happiness. The left side of her face and body down to her leg are covered in the dark color, due to having brushed the hailstone with her left hand during her close encounter with it.
Faction: She heavily supports The Unburdened, but mostly sticks to herself as her extremely-burdened state tends to make even other burdened ones ostracize her. Other than that, she's basically unaffiliated, though she has a rather low opinion of DERB.
Appearance: If she were fully human, one could describe Catherine as rather pretty. She had golden blonde hair and a slender face with a smattering of freckles. Her hair was rather short and tomboyish, not even long enough for a ponytail yet extremely unkempt, in an almost bed-head fashion. Her body is long and thin, if a little on the lanky side, as she reaches almost 6 ft. and only weighs roughly 120 pounds. Her eyes used to be a strangely fierce hazel color, and she always had a countenance of determination, regardless of the situation.
Now, she is strangely split. Her short hair didn't change at all in style, however the blackening effect from the burdening darkened her hair, but only on the side affected. Almost straight down the middle her hair now is half blonde and half charred black. Her fierce hazel eyes now look constantly angry, and almost like she's about to go for your throat at any moment.
This is, of course, without the burden because it's unsurprisingly difficult to find pictures of someone with what appears to be oil in their veins. Also, her hair is half-blond half-black instead of what I assume is dark brown.
Personality: Seeing as before the hailstorm she was a whopping 4 years old, she had little time to develop a personality, though she tended to do a lot of roughhousing and got into trouble a lot for beating up the other kids when they so much as gave her a sideways glance. The burdening helped as much as throwing oil onto a fire.
Now, she's a world-hating cynic that generally sees every person she meets as "someone to dislike until proven otherwise." She's heavily sarcastic, quick to voice her own opinion, beligerent, irreverant, abrasive, and just plain rude a lot of the time. She's also extremely quick to fly off the cuff, and usually responds to anger with violence, which tends to get in her trouble more often than not. Oddly enough, however, she has a strong sense of morals, which she manages to cling to entirely by being incredibly willful. She will never kill someone that wasn't trying to kill her first (punching them in the face isn't killing them, however) and never steals from people that need it. She's also incredibly brash, and is generally the first to jump at a situation if it calls for action, regardless of how well thought-out the plan is.
Synopsis: When she was only 4 years old, she was surpised when, during her vacation to a larger city, she looked up and the sun was blotted out by a large object falling towards her much more slowly than she thought it should've at the time. Thankfully, she managed to have the good sense to fucking book it and managed to avoid getting crushed, her left hand brushing it as she got away. The next morning on her way home when shit hit the fan she found herself horribly sick as well, as the blackness grew over her body. As the world went to shit, her parents were thrown out of their hometown that was taken over by DERB due to Catherine's burdening and her parents' unwillingness to give her up. As such, they lived mostly by themselves as nomads, who stayed alive by scavenging from towns, making sure not to get too close to the hailstones, and selling whatever loot they got for food.
Her parents eventually died due to the disease, since they were always the ones that insisted on going farther into the city than Catherine, and not letting her follow them. They were killed by a group of Lost, and Catherine managed to escape. At the time, she wasn't quite as burdened and therefor managed to keep her sanity, but after that she started taking more risks as well, but mostly because she had to in order to find anything since the outer parts of the cities were getting looted too much.
Strengths: Catherine can be best described as a bruiser. She is almost unnaturally strong despite her slender build. Not quite able to tear car doors off their hinges and throw them at someone a mile away, but perfectly able of knocking someone out with one punch, if she's particularly mad. Also, her excessive burdening has given her the ability to harden her left hand in a way, turning it into a bony spike by straightening her fingers out and locking them in such a way she is able to pierce right through people with some force. And she certainly has the force to do so. She can even unharden her hands inside of someone, and has at least once literally ripped someone's heart out of their chest. (It turns out, ripping someone's heart out of their chest is a great way to scare their friends off.) She also shows rather remarkable athleticism otherwise, and can be quite sneaky if she needs to be.
Vices/Weaknesses: Aside from being excessively tempermental, her strange left hand is oddly jittery. This isn't normally a problem, it just means she has to drink with her right hand, conveniently her dominant one, otherwise she'll spill everywhere. But it does make it almost entirely impossible for her to aim any kind of rifle well at all, and many smaller tasks that need good hand-eye coordination are rather difficult. She also reads at a first-grade level at best, since when the world went to shit there wasn't a large demand for elementary schools.
It should also be noted that if she panics too hard, due to either an extremely dangerous situation or something traumatic happening, she tends to go completely nuts. She doesn't "hulk out" and go on a rampage so much as completely detaches from reality, as the burdening takes over her weakened psyche. She can recover, but when she does depends on the situation, and while she's like this she tends to do a lot of the stuff you'd expect a crazy person to do, such as mumble to herself, attack her friends, and occasionally pretend she's a lemon. (She eventually got bored of pretending to be a lemon.)
Equipment: She wears a blue sports hoodie, with a darker blue bandana across her face, which has the effect of hiding her burdening pretty decently to someone that doesn't look too closely as long as her hood is up. She couples this with a pair of baggy cargo jeans and an old pair of sneakers that still manage to hold together despite all the time they've been worn. She keeps an old revolver at her side, as one of the few firearms she can use due to the inability to aim with her left hand, as well as spare ammo in a pocket. She also wears a rather large hiking backpack, which almost always carries some spare essentials, namely some bullets, water, and food, though she tends not to use her gun much. Mostly, the backpack is there to hold the stuff she scavenges.
Quirks: As brash and depressing and angry as she is, she doesn't spend her entire life wallowing in misery. A good joke tends to cheer her up, and she actually has a tendency to laugh much, much more than the joke warrents, usually having a hard time stopping. She also snorts.
Theme Song: Downward Sprial - Nine Inch NailsOther Things: One thing rather strange to note is that while she is very quick to fly off the handle now, and even as a young child before the burdening was rather rambuctious, when she gets angry now and violently knocks someone's teeth out, she's actually being incredibly patient. Due to her burdening, she basically wants to murder the life out of anyone that looks at her funny, and it takes considerable effort on her part to just be "Extremely abrasive" rather than "outright murderous." Were someone else less willful at her stage of burdening, they'd've snapped a while ago.
She also really likes bacon.
Name: Dave ThrontonAge: 22
Gender: Quite the man.
Race/Ethnicity: White, with a small bit of the Obit-equivalent of Native American.
Burden: 48%. To his convenience, the large majority of noticeable black veins appear on his back and upper leg, making it hard to
not hide them unless he decided to go streaking. His "powers" are that he emits minor pheromones, which are explained down in the "strengths" section, and that he is almost entirely incapable of feeling intense emotion, due to his brain getting a bit of the burden right on the prefrontal lobe. Note that he isn't a lobotomite, just that it is very difficult to panic or anger him, or for him to emote beyond a chuckle.
Faction: He's much too selfish to care about any faction, and is generally disinterested in the going-ons with DERB, Avant Garde, and the Unburdened.
Appearance: A young man with parted, medium length hair and a certain rugged attractiveness to his face, Dave looks like quite the charmer. He also has the most standard of frames and rather toned musculature, standing at 6'. He has a pair of soft, hazel eyes and generally wears a leather jacket with several white chevrons running up the sleeve, and a gray undershit, with a rather generic pair of dark jeans and boots.
Just change the accentuating color from blue to gray. Dave doesn't even like blue.
Personality: Dave is... rather strange. He's inherently extremely selfish, and almost every action he does is motivated by this. However, inbetween robbery sprees he's perfectly amiable to people he meets and is generally a very nice person. Until he can betray them for profit, anyway, which he will invariably do at the drop of a hat. He doesn't really care about anything, but whether this sociopathy was caused by the burden or is innate is rather unclear. Despite this, however, he almost never resorts to straight murder or rape, as even he has a few lines he won't cross. Aside from this, he has a tendency to be extremely smarmy and not stop making jokes, which annoys some people and endears others to him, which he usually uses in his favor.
Synopsis: N/A because MYSTERY.
I'm kidding. Dave, surprisingly as aloof as he is, isn't trying to be mysterious. His past life before the hail lasted... not very long at all, really, as he only managed a few years in Elementary school before the Monolith and all of its cousins decided to land on Obit for vacation. His parents died soon after the fall, getting taken over by a bunch of Lost and Dave was only saved by the grace of a random stranger. Dave had always been a good liar, being the type to break a lamp in his house and blame it on his sister, if he had a sister. (He usually instead defaulted to blaming whichever parent wasn't scolding him when something broke, causing quite a bit of marital strife with his late parents.) This proved to be an invaluable skill, as he managed to, even at such an early age, convince several DERB to let him in with his random benefactor into one of the earlier SZ's.
Here, he managed to eke out a living after said random benefactor stopped being a benefactor once Dave's burdening become known mostly by either picking pockets or taking random odd jobs around the town. Eventually, he had to leave the SZ once he had picked everyone's pockets at least once before they started to notice a pattern between Dave showing up and their savings suddenly vanishing. He wandered from one town to the next and found himself making a slightly more honest living by scavenging and only stealing from other scavengers rather than just every civillian he came across.
Strengths: Dave is the quintessential "rogue" if there ever was one. He's able to charm the pants off of the world's richest businessmen and can pick a pocket or a lock more easily than he can get an actual job. It should be noted however that his persuasion isn't entirely his own ability. While he is naturally a great schmooze, he also naturally excretes pheromones due to his burdening. They're not overly powerful, they're just a minor help and are about as effective as a particularly nice-smelling deodorant, so most of it is actually his own natural ability. He is also extraordinarily difficult to panic, so despite not being a tactical genius by any means, he's still able to think through most situations.
Vices/Weaknesses: Unfortunately, however, most rogues tend to have some sort of combat ability. Dave, however, while having a decent amount of muscle from living the rough life is about as good in a fight as a wet noodle. The burdening left him with low-grade Osteoporosis, making his bones rather easily broken, and that's not getting into the fact that he's just easy to bruise and slow to heal in general. His reflexes are also, to put in eloquently, shit. His aim with a revolver is, at best, mediocre, but he can get lucky, especially since he has 6 shots and usually only needs one to hit. He's basically just frail, and usually tries to sneak, talk, or steal his way out of situations rather than fight. Also, while not panicking is generally a great thing, he has a tendency to downplay major emergencies and not have the urgency that he should have for various tasks. If his friend's leg was blown off, he'd probably react by saying, "Gee, that looks like it hurts. Want a bandaid?"
Equipment: Aside from his clothes, he carts around a wheelbarrow with a tent and whatever supplies he may need at the time, as well as a hiking backpack for when carrying around the wheelbarrow is impossible. He also has a revolver, but the action is slightly busted so he has to manually cock the hammer back after each shot as the trigger doesn't pull it back. He'd rather get it replaced, if he could.
Quirks: Dave is actually bisexual, though he, as well as most of the post-hail world, tends to not find that very interesting since people stopped giving a shit about sexuality once people started getting eaten by their loved ones.
Theme Song: Darude - Sandstorm.
I'm just shitting you again, he doesn't have one.
Other Things: Despite not having much of a formal education, he has a ridiculous grasp of the English language (or whatever they speak on Obit) due to reading basically any book he came across, even post-hail. Even textbooks, so he's surprisingly well-educated. Not that knowing calculus or what happened during the War of 1447 or whatever helps even in the slightest.
