Pete

As Rats

Dalton Spears

Name: Dalton Michael Spears, Jr.

Gender: Male

Race: African-American

Age/DOB: Twenty-eight. 12/23/1991

Appearance:



Dalton Spears is a relatively athletic man in the prime of his life. He stands at six foot even, and possesses notable muscle that is the result of a lifetime of activity, a dedication to the gym, and the kind of brawn that only a man with a blue collar could grow. Having gone without any maintenance since the siege, his coarse hair is already beginning to grow into a modest afro. His formerly neat goatee has gone completely unkempt, transforming into a short, scraggly beard. A portion of his right ear is missing, chipped away by an unlucky sniper in the first days of the conflict. A prominent, fresh scar on his left wrist denotes a botched suicide attempt.

Background: Born the son of Dalton Spears Sr., and Loraine Spears, both police officers working for the city of Roanoke, the dream of police work was always alive in the impressionable Dalton junior. It was an aspiration that, as he grew, made him a pariah to his peers, rebellious and anti-authority. Instead he grew up somewhat sheltered, even as he entered into his teenage years having few friends outside of those who were the children of his parents' coworkers. It was within this circle that he met his high school sweetheart and future wife, Delilah. After graduation, he started pursuing a degree in criminology online, and began his employment with the Roanoke police department, a profession that he would love.

Several years went by, and the happily married couple were blessed with three children. It's been said before that the stress of police work can break a man, and after the first few years the allure of the job faded quickly in a disillusioned Dalton. He began to resent his work, seeing it as a futility as he saw the same faces in the back of his squad-car time and time again. The culmination of this was a routine traffic stop that turned into a gunfight as a passenger with open warrants for violent crimes exited the vehicle and opened fire into the windshield of Spear's Crown Victoria. Using the dash for cover he returned fire, and fatally shot his attacker, though he maintains that a part of him died along with the man that he killed that night. After being investigated and cleared for the shooting, he formally retired, an act that shook and distanced his now retired parents. He took to drinking, entering a period of depression-induced alcoholism that nearly ended his marriage.

When his wife asked him to go to church with her, he laughed at the idea, whiskey on his breath. Neither of them were religious, he hadn't been raised Christian, and his time in law enforcement had taught him to be cynical, skeptical, and pessimistic. Instead, he found himself resuscitated as a man, and took to making service every Sunday. It was there that he saved his marriage, his relationship with his growing children, and met a foreman for a construction company that would help him get his next job. Construction work was rigorous, but it was simple, and there was something in that that Dalton found incredibly enjoyable. You show up, turn your brain off, and work. Dalton Spears, a saved man, earned an honest living here into his late twenties, providing for his children and burying his parents.

When the war broke out, it didn't mean much to him: With the way politics had been going the last ten years, these kind of things were bound to happen, the government had a plan to deal with this, and it would blow over just like any other unrest. He kept thinking that until the day that the siege began. With the short amount of time that the army gave the citizens to evacuate, and the congested freeways and streets that blocked every turn, Delilah could only make it in time to pick up the children. Speaking to him frantically over the phone, the roaring diesel engines of tracked vehicles and shouts of soldiers blockading road after road in the background, she told him that they'd wait for him at the house. He ran the entire way home, abandoning his pick-up truck at the site of a half-constructed Walgreens pharmacy. He was accosted by army checkpoints twice, demanding identification and eating up precious time, before the military presence on the ground, as well as the majority of civilian traffic, all but disappeared. He was only four miles from his family's home when he realized why, the distant pounding of firing artillery batteries punctuated by the shock waves of much closer explosions. Half of the street he lived on had been replaced with a smoldering crater, a sight he saw several times as he sprinted the remaining length back to his family.

Sitting against the wall in a nearby shipping store, he looked up at windows blasted apart by the force of the impacts, and decided to end his own life. Suicide was a cardinal sin, but the realization that God either didn't exist or didn't care was in his mind's forefront as he gripped a shard of glass and slashed open his wrist without the slightest hesitation. He did not, could not, live without his family, and Dalton's last thought before passing out was that he wished he had died with them. In truth he had just barely missed the artery and it was likely the shock of the situation that made him lose consciousness. He was found soon after by another seeking shelter, and is attempting to rebuild himself and what he can of his life amidst the ruins of his home town.

Personality: Dalton, like most anymore, is a deeply troubled man. Though owning a strong survival mindset since his suicide attempt, he suffers from clinical depression to this day. He tries, and mostly succeeds at hiding his suffering, but the man is prone to emotional breakdowns, mood swings, and can seem detached and withdrawn at times. He has lost his faith in humanity, and finds trust difficultly, though once someone is a proven ally, he takes a stewardship upon them and will provide for them to the best of his abilities. From his police days, he remains suspicious of nearly everything, cynical, and a patron of humor so dark that only those on the extremes of the legal scale could appreciate. He is a natural leader and a surprisingly bright man, quick to learn and willing to speak his mind.

As Rats

Welcome everyone. As stated above, if you've got any interest, are making a character, would like to make a comment, or have questions for me, feel free to do so below or to PM me. Neither me nor my co-GM, Scribbles bite! Don't expect this ball to get rolling until sometime around the seventh, at the earliest.

As Rats

"Survival is triumph enough."
- Harry Crews

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Background

December nineteenth, two thousand and eighteen marks the day that the shot heard round the world was fired once more. The date stands proudly as a harbinger of the bloodiest period of American history that the world may ever see. Exhausted and disillusioned from fighting a decades-long war against Islamic extremism, the powers that be failed to recognize the exponentially tumultuous political dilemmas bubbling within their own borders. At first, isolated acts of domestic terrorism targeted both politicians and government buildings, as well as bolder attacks on military leadership and installations. These confined incidents evolved into more organized attacks, and eventually further into open warfare on the streets, reaching a flashpoint on the nineteenth day of December, twenty eighteen, when rebel militiamen stormed capitol buildings throughout the country, and a perfectly orchestrated attack on loyalist forces based out of Fort Stuart, Georgia wreaked havoc before the soldiers stationed there even had a chance to arm and defend themselves. Growing more powerful daily thanks to an influx of recruits, loyalist deserters and caches of pillaged military-grade weaponry and vehicles, the rebels who would come to be known as the Patriot Liberation Front soon began to appear and function as an authentic army, and the civil war raged on as it continues to do so to this day.

It's June eighth, twenty twenty. The country has fallen apart and any semblance of democracy has disappeared behind an iron curtain of grim-faced soldiers, military checkpoints and machine gun nests. Millions have fled the country, and millions more have died in the fighting as combatants or collateral damage. The economy is in shambles, food, water and medicine being meticulously rationed and distributed in accordance with mandates established by a clandestine shadow of American government which rules from faraway, secret bunkers. Both sides have incurred heavy losses, with the majority of the heavy vehicles seized by rebel forces having been destroyed, and loyalist forces expending a majority of the air assets that gave them the precision to avoid most civilian casualties and unmistakeable strategic leverage. As such, the PLF has readopted its guerrilla tactics of insurgency and loyalist forces have returned to the heavy-handed doctrines of conventional warfare. All over the burning country entire city blocks have been shelled to ruin, and great swathes of American wilderness have been burdened with minefields. Roadside bombs are common, gunfire is familiar in most neighborhoods, and civilians count blessings each day they aren't caught in that firefight they heard down the street or that their boarding house wasn't hit in that mortar attack late last night.

This is the world we live in. Our nation has been resown with shell casings and innocent corpses, rebuilt with rubble and derelict gun emplacements, and inherited by buzzards and rats.

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Setting background

Roanoke, Virginia: The Star City of the South. A place once renowned for its natural beauty and humble roots is now just another battlefield. Che Guevara fiercely lectured that encirclement was the worst possible situation for the guerrilla fighter to find himself in, and after a force of routed rebel soldiers were intercepted and forced to make a stand in the town, they would learn the truth to that dead man's words. The city was caught completely off-guard as loyalist forces invaded and occupied as if in an enemy nation. Despite being given only hours of notice, most civilians had a chance to evacuate the town before the fighting began anew, though some had no choice, or no time. Some chose to stay, human vultures who take pleasure or profit from the war. The entire city has been placed under martial law and confined. No one enters, and no one ever leaves. It is a metropolis besieged, with heavily fortified checkpoints posted on most all roads out, and roaming patrols circling the outskirts.

Loyalist forces assume that anyone remaining in the city is either a soldier of the PLF, or a sympathizer, and are on current orders to shoot on sight. Convoys of tanks and armored trucks routinely enter the city on missions to assault suspected enemy positions and eliminate any survivors. Artillery fire thunders through the day and night, though it is promised that collateral damage is being avoided at all costs. It is a cruel game of cat and mouse, where not only the resistance soldiers struggle to survive, but so do those civilians left behind, unable to leave and unable to surrender. For those few it is a grim test of endurance as they scavenge whatever they can in order to survive, hiding wherever possible and fighting when they must: Against the military, against the rebels, against each other, and against nature itself.

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OOC information

As Rats is a survival based story with a heavy emphasis on character development, aspects of a slice of life thread, and occasional action scenes. This is a dark thread, drawing loose inspiration from the indie game "This War of Mine", and I stress that if you are faint of heart, you steer clear: characters will die, violence will be raw and described gruesomely, and decisions will be made that will not only shape the story and change characters forever, but will also be difficult enough to hopefully shake you as a witness. This will not be a happy fairytale, but instead a brutal portrayal of circumstances that victims of real war have been forced to live through.

This story is largely player driven. You will not be spoon-fed roleplay, though it's safe to assume that your characters will be involved in scavenging runs and included in conversations, never left behind to twiddle your thumbs. If you face a situation in which you don't have much to say or post, do what you can: I would rather see you post nothing but paragraph long posts than not post at all. If you become inactive without notification, I'll try to get a hold of you ASAP, and failing that your character will be at the mercy of the thread (and will most likely be met with a prompt and terrible death). I know it sounds harsh, but this is a thread that I am genuinely interested in seeing through. I'm looking for quality writers here, so I encourage all to apply but I want you to give it your all.

The story will be told in three main arcs, spaced six months apart from one another to chronicle the increasingly desperate situation that our survivors find themselves in. Your characters can be pretty much anyone: A citizen of Roanoke, a deserter from either side of the conflict, a bandit, whatever. I'll be running a side-arc for antagonists, so if you're interested in having more than one character to facilitate this, that's fine too.

I'm open to questions, comments, critiques, criticisms, bitches, gripes, complaints, deep-seeded emotional anxieties, or anything for the betterment of the group.

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The cast, and their story thus far

Dalton Michael Spears, Jr.

The tales of our survivors are yet to be told.

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Character Sheet

This is only an outline. Modifications and additional information are highly encouraged so long as you provide the information asked in the original character sheet.

Character Sheet

Name: (Birth name, include nicknames.)
Nickname: (Pre or post war)
Gender: (Does your character have a hee-hee or a hoo-haa)
Race: (Self-explanatory)
Age/DOB: (Characters of all ages are welcome, from children to the elderly. For clarity, please provide DOB in a MM/DD/YYYY format. Keep the story's futuristic setting in mind.)
Appearance: (A description of your character's appearance. Pictures are allowed, descriptions are encouraged. Please no anime portraits.)
Background: (A summary of your character's life to this point. Include pre-war vocation and/or wartime involvement.)
Personality: (A description of your character's thought process, state of mind, habits, intellect, etc.)

Coven: Shattered

Maybe with a brand new character. We'll see!

Coven: Shattered

Being that my tentative character doesn't coincide with Raptorman's plans, I'll be backing out. Best of luck.

Coven: Shattered

To be honest, I'm a bit embarrassed. I was lazy on this one and instead of taking the time to really sort through everything I just cranked out a character that I enjoyed, and thought would work well into the roleplay. I'll address your points one by one.

1) Honestly, I see where you're coming from. When I first looked at the list of accepted characters, I honestly saw nothing more than fantasy names, not something that was dependent on time.. I suppose I can change it but I really didn't put any thought into it to begin with.

2) I didn't do research on his instrument of choice, which was admittedly only intended to flesh out the character and would not serve a huge purpose in the roleplay. This will be corrected. As far as the cigar, I did look into it. Tobacco was first introduced to Europe in the late 1400's, which I understand may be a bit beyond the timeline of this story, but I figured it wouldn't really be hurting anything since the analogy to real-world history is really more of a suggestion to help the setting. And of course by cigar I don't mean some nice, factory produced smoke, but a crude, handrolled type. If you'd like me to, I can remove this entirely.

3) Admittedly, I didn't take the time to read each of the character stories. If I had done so, I would have realized that Raptorman has squarely assumed the role of crypt keeper. I'll PM him and arrange my character's role, because I doubt that he'd have a problem with my character being the gravedigger. If he does, then I'll be back to square one, but whatever.

4) I did read the all of the FAQs before posting, and it was my understanding that magic was inherent, and it wasn't some mystical thing, but it was also something that had to be learned just like math or the alphabet to be fully realized, or even recognized at all. Since my character never received any training, and was never in a situation where he'd even be able to know that he could do this. If I'm still incorrect in this, know that by the time you see this I have re-read it and will make corrections as necessary.

Sorry 'bout that.

Coven: Shattered

Colten Gilles

Twenty-six year old male

Commoner, coven grave digger and crypt keeper
Grave robber, body snatcher, and cat burglar

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Appearance

Before you stands a nervous looking man, restless, paranoid eyes constantly shifting between invisible enemies, smiling that queer kind of smile when it'd be right to frown. His face is sharp enough to remind an onlooker of a rodent, and is a sort of boarding home for dirt: You see, even after washing, the grime never truly seems to leave this odd man's face, instead just drifting to the other cheek, or up to his forehead. Accompanying the nomadic mud is a migratory flock of bruises and black eyes that are as regular as the sunrise. His prematurely greying black hair is slicked to the rear and held too tightly in a short ponytail, and his unimpressively patchy facial hair is tamed to three days of growth.

He is shorter than average and skinny, teetering on the edge of unhealthily so, and adorns himself in a wardrobe of mismatched clothing that does not fit. Interestingly, he tends to dress more akin to the privileged than his native peasantry, and he can typically be found going about his daily tasks while improperly wearing fine jackets and trousers that are just out of fashion, and have long gone without proper washing or care. To dissuade the brisk night air, he dons a patched cloak of poor quality pelts made from raccoon, squirrel, and other varmints. A pair of brown, knee-high leather boots are buckled onto his feet and are, like everything else about the stranger you see, caked with dried mud. The man known throughout the D'Cerf coven as Colten Gilles even smells of freshly turned earth on most days, and you can find the gritty stuff in his hair and on his hands, beneath his nails and on his face: But it's to be expected, you realize, as you watch the grave digger maneuver his rickety wheelbarrow down the narrow dirt path towards the coven's graveyard for the lower castes.

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Interests

Colten keeps to himself for the most part, outside of his duties he can rarely found away from the quarters bestowed to him in the lower dungeons of castle D'Cerf, from which the crypts are easily accessible. He takes his work very seriously, paying impeccable detail to the preparation of funerals, and cares deeply for the remains of the deceased, which is ironic, because within a few days he typically unearths the same bodies in search of jewelry and other rarities, which he obsessively collects in secret. He keeps a small collection of books, and excepting work, can almost always be found with his prized possession, an ornate and hand-engraved fiddle which he plays, admittedly, with a masterful beauty. He enjoys playing his music to commoner children, likely because they are of the few who do not judge him for his occupation.

He has an obsession with and love for the dead, and in private, holds lengthy conversations with corpses before their burial. Having been caught doing so more than once in the past, some speculate whether magic allows him to truly do so, though this rumor is neither confirmed nor denied by the earth mover, instead opting to dodge the question entirely.

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Skills

It should not be forgotten that, regardless of his office in the coven, Mr. Gilles is truly no more than a peasant himself. He is entirely untrained in swordsmanship, and his words, spoken through a poor man's dialect, are crude and far from the moving rhetorics of noblemen. This isn't to say that coming of age amongst the rabble is without its benefits. He is a hard worker, and no stranger to difficulty. The man is a natural sneak, floating through crypts and midnight graveyards like a lantern lit specter. He is an adept pick-pocket, and all but the most masterful locks can be defeated given enough time. His time growing up as the son of a poacher learned him basic bowmanship, hunting fundamentals, and a knowledge of pelting.

He is unversed in most forms of magic, save the most common spells, though his true arcane talent comes in that he does indeed have the power to speak to the dead. Through his own personal experimentation and experience, far from the scientific proof of the phenomenon that surely exists in apothecariums, Colten has found that the soul can linger in and around the body after the spirit has left. Some are as fleeting as the smoke from an extinguished candle, slipping into the void mere seconds after death, while others are stronger, holding their grip for hours, maybe even days afterwards. Others still, for whatever reason, are seemingly trapped, left behind.

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Personality

Gilles is by all accounts a strange man. Numerous incomprehensible habits, introversion, crude and inappropriate behavior stemming from what could be a lack of practice, paranoia, and a jittery sense of nervousness are all qualities that could describe the typically solitary grave digger. He is a greedy, shifty man who, though coveting no life other than the one he lives, takes advantage of the misfortune of others and hoards a surprisingly large collection of valuables. For all of his shortcomings, however, he is a man who possesses a truly good heart. Disregarding the fact that he is avoided by many due to wives' tales regarding his profession or because of his admittedly awkward personality, he does his best to care for the community by sparing no expenses in his profession, comforting grieving families, and he has taking a keen liking to the coven children, who know him only as the funny music man in the fur coat.

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Biography

Raised in a rural village far to the south, Colten Gilles' uneventful birth was that of but another serf. He lived with his mother and father in a modest home with their ever growing family. His father served as a groundskeeper for the nearby castle, ordained by some minor, insignificant nobleman, and his mother served no purpose but the care of her children. On the night of his eighth sibling's birth, his mother passed away in childbirth, which hit his father hard, considering that the man hardly seemed to care for her in her life. With an excuse to turn to the bottle, a series of derelictions caused his father to lose his employ, casting the house into a time of great hardship. Several of his brothers and sisters passed, either from malnutrition or disease, and Colten himself nearly succumbed to an illness that would stunt his growth and leave him with a gauntness that would last a lifetime.

The lord of the castle was an avid hunter, and reserved great expanses of harvestable land for his sport. There had been rumors spread amongst the peasantry of poachers claiming mountains of meat and huge, valuable coats in the lord's forests, and in time his father tried his hand at this, quite successfully for a time, even bringing his eldest son along for a few poaching trips. Colten Gilles was sixteen the day his father hung. His family taken in by foster parents, he roamed the countryside for several years as a member of various musical troupes, pelting companies, and at one point as an apprentice to a traveling taxidermist, never caring to take the time and think of his separated family. By chance, he found himself in castle D'Cerf, where a nobleman was so impressed with a stuffed fox, nothing more than a novelty, that he requested his presence at the funeral of his deathly ill daughter, so as to make her appear more alive.

The girl spoke to Colten for a short time, as he prepared her corpse for display. It was the first time that he heard the dead, but far from the last, and as time went on and he officially assumed the role of the D'Cerf mortician and grave digger, his conversations grew longer and at times he was even able to see the souls, faint outlines and shadows of their former selves. It wasn't until years later, when an old woman asked to be buried with her prized necklace that he began to steal from the dead. In a faint whisper, her last words to him were instructions on where it could be found inside of her home, and then she was gone. He fulfilled her last requests, but when a particularly wealthy and notably greedy nobleman requested to be buried with a large sum of gold, Gilles assumed it would hurt nothing if he took some for himself. It then became almost routine for him to ask the typically weak and malleable souls if they'd like to be buried with any of their jewelry or keepsakes, which, upon learning the location of that pearl or those antique earrings, he would simply burglarize and keep. And in time he had amassed a fortune worth of jewelry kept hidden away in his modest chambers, some of which stolen from the estates of the deceased, some more simply disinterred and robbed from their corpses.

It wasn't hurting anyone, he smiled that crooked smile to himself as he lit his loosely-rolled cigar out of the fireplace, clenching it between his teeth. The dead went to their next lives happy with the knowledge of their last wishes, he thought to himself, raising his bow to the strings of his fiddle. The children's faces beamed up at him in anticipation, lit by the stone inn's hearth. And goodness, if he didn't love the way that gold glittered in his hands.

Coven: Shattered

If this is still rolling, I don't suppose you'd have room for little ol' me?

Iron Stripes [A sci-fi RP of mechanized warfare]

Total bummer, man. I loved what I saw here, but I'm glad that you recognized the problem before we got two pages in.

XCOM Enemy Unknown Season 1: The Coming Storm

I only have access to my phone, not my computer, until the second. I could write on my cell, but the quality will suffer dramatically.