Realistic or Modern Haven CS [Closed]

[queendilettante]

**Edit: Thank you so much for the interest, everyone, but Haven is now closed to CS applications. If you're reading this in the future - beyond just a few days from the time of edit - and you find yourself interested, please DM me here. Thank you all for your contributions **





Hi friends! This is the Haven CS thread! BBCode is completely optional but face claims are encouraged! Please avoid overly cartoony or stylized face claims.
Here's the CS criteria:

Name:
Gender:
Age:
Sexuality:
Height:
Weight:
Build:
Hair Color:
Eye Color:
Complexion:
Distinctive Physical Features:
General Outfits/Clothing Wear:
Any other general appearance specifics
Personality:
Quirks:
Skills/Equipment:
Bio/Backstory:
Why did Sybille recruit you for the trek across the country? As (at least temporary) residents of the same settlement, everyone’s character already knows Sybille, but how do you know her well enough to have wanted to join her?


**Please also make sure to read the statement by Hard Boiled on the Interest Check page: Realistic or Modern - Haven Interest Check **


And here is some important lore that should help! Please know that there is more lore, but I didn't want to overwhelm everyone at the CS stage haha. If you have any clarifying questions, though, please ask!!

• Outbreak happened on March 11th, 2021. The RP start date is April 29th, 2037.
• The zombies are infected in this RP, not undead or supernatural. Infection is transmitted through bites or bodily fluids reaching the bloodstream in ways akin to rabies. Incubation period for infection is only about 60 seconds.
• Well known stages of infection include:
  • Runners: Recently infected. Very fast, volatile, and sporadic. Known for screaming as they walk around and are viscous with the way they chase and attack prey. This stage lasts between 3 and 6 months.
  • Ghouls: The stage that always follows Runners. Ghouls have begun to have their muscles calcify, being significantly slower, less aware of their surroundings, and more quiet. They can be recognized through a pained gurgling sound they make while not chasing prey or fighting. Ghouls may be slower, but they have a small degree of natural armor and are far harder to break the grasp of. It’s easier to avoid them, but they’re deadlier than Runners if you’re caught. This stage lasts for at least a few years, though few know the specifics.
  • There are a few different branches that follow the Ghoul stage of infection, but I hope this is enough info to begin with.
• There are multiple stages of infection (lore that will be shared prior to the official start of the RP), and immunity is exceedingly rare (though not unheard of).
• Canada was ruthlessly bombed at the start of the outbreak by the United States, leaving much of their population dead and land unlivable.
• The United States bombed most of their own major population centers, but focused especially on western cities, as the plan from the beginning was to quarantine the East first.
• The Reclaimed States of America (RSA) have fully quarantined all land East of the Mississippi River, with nanofiber barbed wire throughout the river and walls erected on the other side to prevent any infected from making it across. There are a few bridges and checkpoints throughout, though, as the RSA has begun “reclamation” efforts for the West. This RP begins in San Francisco, on the West Coast, with the goal of making it to the East.
• A preventative vaccine has been developed and supplied to RSA citizens in the East.
• The Mall is the starting settlement for this RP. It’s a bit heavy on the propaganda of “return to the old American ways!”, but it’s safe and extraordinarily successful so far. Details about the Mall will be provided in more depth later on, but for now, know that there’s a few square miles of space within their walls, there are three outer walled areas in an oblong ring, with the Mall existing in the center, and that there’s a couple thousand people living there, all with different responsibilities and contributions.
• Due to the length of time since the outbreak, guns and working parts are harder to come by. People still use guns, but ammunition is scarce and homemade firearms or melee weapons are definitely preferred methods of weaponry.
• There’s a lot more, but I don’t want to overwhelm everyone! I hope this enough to get the gist of character creation stuff! (:

 

[queendilettante]

Sybille Rayne

Gender: Cis Female (she/her)
Age: 36
Birthday: October 28, 2001
Sexuality: Lesbian
Height: 5’8
Weight: 155lbs
Build: Athletic

Hair Color: Dyed dark pink or purple, depending on what she can get her hands on. She’s naturally a dark brunette.
Eye Color: Icy blue
Complexion: Fair skinned with some old acne scars around the sides of her face. She also has mild wrinkles - mainly around her eyes and cheeks.
Distinctive Physical Features:

• Sybille has a scar across the left side of her upper lip.
• Sybille always has bags under her eyes
• Her eyebrows are a shade darker than her already dark brown natural hair color.
• Sybille has a badly healed scar on her right forearm from the time she tried to stop her dog Santa from biting a stranger.
• Sybille has multiple tattoos. She has a cherry blossom branch on her left thigh, a crow on the back of her right shoulder, a small goldfish on her left pinky reminiscent of her first childhood pet, a smiley face on her outer right ankle, and a cartoon turtle on the back of her right hand that matches one her deceased wife already had on her hip.

Typical Clothing:

• Sybille often wears a leather jacket over either one of her many tank top/jeans combinations or over just a pair of denim overalls.
• She often has her hair pulled back with a grease-stained bandana.
• Sybille wears a watch on her right wrist that used to be her wife’s. It, seemingly miraculously, still works.
• Sybille wears rundown leather combat boots.
• Sybille wouldn’t be caught dead in the sun without sunglasses on if she could help it.

Personality:
Sybille smiles with all but her eyes. She’s a social person who gets along with most of the residents of the Mall. Despite holding a position of power at the settlement, she comes across as down to earth and easy to talk to. She’s worked very hard since arriving at The Mall to build a reliable and friendly reputation, but it’s, at least to an extent, a façade.
Since she watched her wife die nearly 10 years prior, Sybille has been afraid to make any real friends or connections. The closest friend she has is one of The Mall’s doctors, Charlie, but she keeps him at arm’s length like the others. She also has that girl, Hazel, who follows her around like a lost puppy, but she'd never admit to caring for the girl as much as she does.
She suffers frequent nightmares and was already diagnosed with PTSD prior to the start of the apocalypse, but she’s very good at maintaining a pleasant face. She’s still trying to convince herself that she’ll believe her bravado eventually; she’ll at least keep chugging along like a workaholic until it does.

Quirks:

• Sybille frequently has chapped-looking lips from how often she bites them. That and pulling on her formerly pierced earlobe are her two obvious nervous ticks.
• Sybille has a subtle accent - a combination of Brooklyn, New York and French. Whenever she meets someone with either accent, she subconsciously slips into it more.
• Sybille smokes more than she'd care to acknowledge. She's tried and failed to quit over the past 12 years or so, but nicotine withdrawal was almost more dangerous in life or death scenarios than the cancer risk.

Skills/Equipment:

• Sybille is left-handed. She has modified all of her firearms, including the pump action shotgun she’s particularly fond of, to be more easily used as a lefty - though at the detriment to those who need to borrow them for whatever reason.
• While adept with shotguns and most types of pistols and handguns, Sybille lacks real experience with other types of firearms.
• Sybille keeps a utility knife and a dagger on her person, though she’s not exceptional with using them for close combat.
• Sybille grew up working at her father’s mechanic shop in Brooklyn, and those skills enabled her to own her own within Mall walls, Rayney Day Mechanics.
• Sybille’s parents were French immigrants to the US, so she was raised bilingual.
• Despite some difficulty early on in the Apocalypse, Sybille is very good with dogs and her best friend, a 9 year old German Shepherd named Santa, almost never leaves her side.
• She moves clunky with it on, but Sybille can function decently well with a bullet proof vest under her leather jacket if needed.
• She carries an old military backpack around on missions that she stole from the corpse of an RSA soldier that she found on the beach.

Bio/Backstory:
Sybille was born in August of 2001 to French immigrants, Thomas and Lya Rayne, in Brooklyn, New York. Her father owned a body shop that the family lived above, and Sybille quickly took to working on cars with him. Embracing her "tomboy" side (i.e. her "yet-to-realize she's a lesbian" side), Sybille bucked the roles her mother tried to force on her. Even despite her being a natural at the work, quickly catching up to and surpassing her father's skillset, Sybille's mother always resented the missed opportunity for a "girly girl" daughter. Sybille persisted though, both out of spite and her father's encouragement, and continued to excel at working with any kind of machinery she got her hands on. Her father, despite being her first teacher, was a much better salesman than he ever was a mechanic. He pitched Sybille as the young girl "wunderkind" mechanic, and while the shop received uncomfortably strange clientele at first, Sybille's skills eventually outweighed the strange marketing.

Sybille did eventually realize she was gay and struggled with her sexuality in school. She experienced plenty of one-sided crushes, with a particularly bad experience flirting with a straight girl at homecoming one year, but she eventually found her footing. Her future wife, Claire, worked at a restaurant in Jersey, where Sybille liked to go to get out of the city and let herself just drive. The two met while Sybille was drinking coffee well-past closing one night during her Freshman year of college. Claire was a senior at Montclair, and the two immediately hit it off. Like the stereotypical lesbian Sybille was, she proposed within the year. The wedding took a while to plan, what with Claire having just graduated, but the two were married on February 16th, 2021.

They went on their honeymoon - a road trip across the country and back- though it was a shame the world had to end in the middle of it. Sybille and Claire were somewhere outside of Des Moines when the outbreak started, and they remained trapped in the West. For the next six years, the two travelled together from encampment to encampment, Sybille determined to keep both of them alive. An early leg injury hindered Claire's endurance substantially, and so Sybille needed to learn to survive for two. She grew old before her time, but she stayed alive. Even once a bandit raid claimed Claire's life on Christmas Eve of 2027, Sybille persisted. Ghosts would haunt her, but she wouldn't slow down to help them keep up.

Less than an hour following Claire's death, Sybille found a puppy - one of the German Shepherds that an acquaintance at the encampment had bred - alone in the flames. She scooped him up, determined to save at least one life that evening. Training the pup - Santa, as Sybille named him because of the day she found him - proved to be one of the biggest challenges of the apocalypse for her thus far. She hadn't had too much pre-outbreak experience with animals, though she had family dogs growing up, so raising Santa was a learning experience for both of them. If it wasn't for a former dog trainer at the quickly growing Mal to give her tips and assistance, there's no way Santa would have been as combat ready as he was.

Sybille arrived at that Mall on February 16, 2028, intimately aware not just of the first Valentine's Day since her wife died, but also the irony of arriving on their anniversary. It was a lot smaller then, with the Middle Ring only existing as a fenced in area. Still, they accepted Sybille and Santa, and she never left. Sybille opened the first Rayney Day Mechanics in the then-new Middle Ring to fix up old cars, generators, and machinery that the Founders of the settlement were unable to. This proved her invaluable very quickly, and she's been a staple of The Mall - both as a citizen and a cog in its wheel - since. Her renown grew so during her stay, that when the Founders introduced non-Founder representative for Mall bureaucracy in 2035, Sybille was voted in without actually running.

She knows that there's no easy way to leave; she's integral to the entire operation. But still, a vaccine is far too big an opportunity to ignore. What good would it be to outlive her Ghosts if she willingly throws her life away by not seeking an end to the end?

 

[Hard Boiled]

​

Name: Charles Isaiah Harrell
Gender: Male
Age: 43
Sexuality: Bisexual
Height: 5'8" (173 cm)
Weight: 130lbs, a long but steady decrease from his days of fitness in his twenties.
Build: Gaunt
Distinctive Physical Features: Charlie isn't what you'd call a supermodel. Strikingly average mixed British features with gray hair and wrinkles well before his time, the apocalypse seems to have increased his aging twofold. His blue eyes carry an evident weight with them, betraying the idle corner smile he often holds. His cheeks are similarly sunken, creating a distinct divot in his shaggy beard. Though he always advises his patients cut it short for less grabbing area, Charlie has yet to trim his shoulder-length locks - perhaps to preserve the last of the ginger at the end. He does however tie it up occasionally to keep it out of the way.

Formerly lean muscle has long since decayed into skin and bone, along with a number of impairments from his years of malnutrition as a sole survivor. Even now in the frankly repulsive gluttony of The Mall, he struggles to keep himself nourished. Who has time for three meals a day when Little Johnny decides to play tag with an electric fence, or while three guards become fresh amputees from a bandit's I.E.D?
No, Charlie has far too many mouths to feed before his own.

Clothing: Charlie's wardrobe for the past ten years has consisted of the same three pairs of pants, a small collection of shirts, and a fleece-lined desert tan cargo jacket.
His favorite combination is the brown work pants with the blue Pepsi-Cola shirt. He says it brings out his eyes.
He made a Red Cross armband and sash to identify himself when necessary, but not a single person at The Mall doesn't know Doc Charlie.

Personality:
Having spent eight years as a paramedic in L.A., Charlie was no stranger to blood, guts, and bile by the time the world ended.
But of course, EMS doesn't have protocol for undead emergencies...

Charlie sees himself as one of the very few people left alive on the planet that actually knows what he's doing. The worst part is, he might be right. Formal training these days is like gold, formal training with experience is priceless. Charlie knows his value, and often uses it as a bargaining tool. What are you going to do, say no to the only guy who can put you back together when you break?

Sarcastic. Abrasive. Neurotic. Charlie's first lines of defense in a world where any and every attachment could be ripped apart at any point.
He speaks clearly, but only speaks once. If you missed it, tough. He doesn't have time to wait for people to play catch-up, and especially doesn't have time to sit and cry when something sad happens. Compartmentalization is his second middle name, he will get the job done, with or without help.

That said, he'd seen things before the apocalypse that would give the zombies nightmares. If you need him, he'll be there - probably without you asking.
As every single person's General Physician, Charlie also finds himself in the role of psychologist more often than not. His solution-oriented mindset naturally leaves him as an anchor within the Mall for those who wish to talk about more than their cardiovascular health.

Just don't bug him while he's busy.

Quirks: Since his last pair of glasses broke twelve years ago, he's had trouble with all manner of things that require visual precision: reading, shooting, you name it, he's only gotten worse at it.
His blood type is O Negative.
He owned several goldfish and betta fish as a child.
He has a collection of sayings he spews at any chance he can.

Skills/Equipment: Training and experience from nearly a decade of paramedicine, plus sixteen years of apocalypse life. Probably the world’s leading expert on undead trauma.

By this point in the apocalypse, Charlie has become a master of improvisation. His equipment is almost entirely made by hand, besides a stethoscope that he’s somehow kept intact.
He has the entirety of the Mall's dispensary of medical equipment at his disposal, mostly rudimentary tools roughly equivalent to that of the American Civil War (bonesaws, splints, cloth banadges, etc) combined with modern medical knowledge.

Bio/Backstory: Charles was born an only child in Echo Park, Los Angeles, to two unremarkable parents. They fed him, they kissed him goodnight and tucked him in, his dad played catch with him, all that good stuff. He had friends in high school, they all went off to college, he didn't. After eighteen years of doing nothing with his life, his parents told him to either use the God damn tuition money they worked their asses off for, or get a job, so he decided to kill two birds with one stone and go to Paramedic school. He'd always been kinda interested in that stuff, and he figured it at least wouldn't be some stupid desk job.

Turns out, Charlie took to riding in five-foot-tall metal boxes like a duck to water.
A renewed vigor, he spent the foreseeable future fixing necks and cashing checks.

...

Charlie never saw his parents, girlfriend, or cat ever again when the National Guard evacuated Los Angeles. He was promptly relocated to a camp in the San Francisco area, where he lived for a grand total of one month before it completely fell apart and he fled to the city.

After another full year of living, in his own words, "like a fucking rat in a sewer," Charlie finally accepted shelter from the twenty-person community in the Macy's of San Francisco's Bayside Mall that he originally feared would just shoot him. Instead, he decided to take the initiative and use his medical knowledge as a bargaining chip to better his situation.

Currently the head "doctor" at the Mall's emergency department fourteen years later, Charlie knows the ins-and-outs of every Mall Dweller's lives. Hell, he delivered most of their children. Passing along his extensive medical knowledge to others proved invaluable in keeping the Mall functioning to begin with, and it most certainly would not have been able to support the population it does with out him.

Though, recently, he's not been particularly happy with the Mall's quality of life...

Recruitment: Charlie might be the only one Sybille actually had to recruit, instead of volunteering.

 

[Lixy]

​

|| Zuzana Lebedev ||​

B A S I C S

|| Full Name ||
Zuzana Lebedev

|| Nickname(s) ||
Upon her arrival to the US, many Americans struggled with the pronunciation of her name and thus either called her "Susanna", "Suzy", or, most commonly by those who actually knew her, "Zana".
While she was still alive, Zana's grandmother called her Zuzka, but no one uses this for her since her bába's death.

|| Age ||
31

|| Gender + Pronouns ||
Female, she/her

|| Sexuality||
Bisexual
She has had an interest in several people in the past, but no long-lasting relationships

A P P E A R A N C E

|| Height + Weight ||
158cm / 5'1" + ~60kgs / ~156lb

|| Build ||
Slim and flexible. She regularly dances still and has attempted strength training in the past, but this is not her strong suit. She has been known to be obsessive over the health and condition of her body in the past, something she is trying to move past. Unflatteringly, she can be described as flat and thin

|| Eyes + Hair ||
Ruddy-brown dark hair and light brown eyes. She keeps her hair short and manageable when possible. She periodically cuts it with a straight razor, but she always leaves it long enough to pull into a bun, her preferred hairstyle when dancing

|| Complexion ||
She has tanned some in the years since her becoming trapped in the US, but she still remains somewhat pale.

|| Clothing Style ||
Zana has put a lot of time into maintaining her clothing and sewing outfits from whatever fabric she can gather. She's very precious with all her clothes and has a large variety of items that she is proud of. She prefers form-fitting but comfortable and flexible leg-wear that allows her to dance freely, and favours loose and flowing shirts and dresses that flair when she spins and moves. When in more dangerous situations, she reluctantly forgoes these and instead wears her most practical item of clothing - a canvas jacket with many secure pockets that covers her from neck to wrist to mid-thigh. It is weather-proof, highly durable, and a dark mustard yellow that she abhors.


|| Distinctive Marks ||
She has no noticeable scars on her face or generally visible skin, but under her clothes, her legs and feet are rather scarred and rough in places from past injury and misuse. She has many long and thin scars, rough patches of skin and discolouration from her years climbing through sharp and dangerous spaces as a scavenger. Her hands are slightly scarred, but far less than one might expect due to her diligent use of protective gloves

|| Physical Description ||
Zana is very proud of what her grandmother called the "ideal physique" - she is short and slight with longer legs and neck that lend her extremely well to her training of classical ballet. Her only "flaw" in her and her late bába's eyes is her relatively low arch in her feet. For many years after her bába's death, she became consumed by maintaining her body as a form of control and comfort.

B A C K G R O U N D

|| Family ||
Zana comes from a Chinese-American mother and a Czech father, coming from a long line of ballerinas on her father's side. She had no siblings at the time of her separation from her parents, and it is unknown what their fate ultimately was. Her parents were divorced from the time she was 3, and she spent her upbringing living with her father and grandmother, Jolana Lebedev, in the Czech Republic.

|| Early Life ||
Zana was born in the Czech Republic while her parents were dating. She was an unplanned and mostly unwanted pregnancy, but her parents quickly married and attempted to raise her. Their differences became too great once Zana was three, her mother moving back to America where she was born and raised, her father moving back in with his mother and dying father. Zana's grandmother was almost solely responsible for her upbringing, as she disapproved of both her father's career choices and his choice of partner. She had hoped for him to follow in her footsteps as a classical ballerina, but when this failed to manifest, she swept their only daughter, Zana, under her arm and put her through rigorous training from a very young age.
Zana hated the tank of goldfish her grandmother kept as a child, as she felt they were watching her with their creepy, buggy eyes.
In the month prior to the Crash, Zana and her grandmother were visiting America to visit her mother and maternal grandparents, living in Washington. During their stopover in Colorado, things began to take a turn for the worst.

|| Post Crash ||
After realising they were trapped in America with a deadly infection spreading, Jolana, a near 70-year-old Czech woman who spoke only very rudimentary English, knew she would struggle to protect her granddaughter. They'd been trapped in the airport for several days before the infection spread inside the quarantined terminal, the pair of them joining up with other recent Czech passengers they'd met in that time to flee. They headed to Utah, hoping to continue on to Washington and connect with Zana's mother.
While taking shelter one night in a relatively isolated gas station, one of their travelling companions, another Czech citizen trapped in the US, turned on Jolana suddenly. He violently beat her to death while Zana, only 13, hid from him. Afterwards, he took Zana and told her that Jolana had been slowing them down, but that he would take her to Washington instead, and that this death had been more merciful than letting her be taken by the infection. He would ask her to dance as entertainment. If she refused, he would threaten to abandon her to the infection as well.
While travelling through Nervada, Zana managed to slip away from him while he was distracted, hiding in crumbling buildings and scavenging to survive.

|| The Mall ||
It was just after her 17th birthday when Zana made her way to the Mall. She'd been on her own for about three years, avoiding contact with other survivors and picking her way across the country, aiming for the coast, hoping she'd be able to find some way out of the country and into Europe. Once in California, she was cornered and injured, stopping her plans in their tracks. As she recovered, she was found by a scavenging party, where she pointed them in the direction of some supplies, which resulted in her acompanying them on their trip and back to the Mall, where she never really left, even after fully healing.
At 18, she had a happen-chance encounter with a young child, born after the Crash, who didn't know what ballet was. This inspired Zana to teach the dance to a handful of students predisposed to it, something she offered for free on the side of her scavenging.


|| Languages Spoken ||
Formerly fluent in Czech, but she has not had cause to speak it for many years, so she sometimes struggles to recall certain words or ideas. Still conversational. Is now fluent in English but struggled with it for many years, as she was barely able to speak it when she arrived 16 years ago, despite her American mother. She can speak French only insofar as the various terms and phrases associated with classical ballet

|| Recruitment ||
Zana has shown incredible flexibility, dexterity and quick thinking during her time at the Mall. She is fast on her feet and has an above-average reaction time. She is not much of a fighter, but she has many other skills that she has honed in the last decade, including sewing, scavenging, navigation and even some basic medical knowledge. She has worked for some time with various groups as a search and rescue specialist, as well as a scavenger, making her widely but not intimately known to most of the community.

She's never quite liked her lot in life and would like things to "go back to normal", as silly as that sounds. A vaccine is possibly the single most important thing needed for this to happen, so she was sold the moment she heard about it. Having worked with Sybille in the past on several scouting and scavenging missions, her skillset was well known to be useful in any expedition which required long-distance travel and survival through her ability to find safe spots to rest and the highly valuable food and water needed to survive.
Zana was not hard to convince, the danger not quite occurring to her, and the idea of being part of the group making the world "normal" again that was a prerequisite for the unrealistic possibility of going home to the Czech Republic was more than enough to gain her support. Her only condition was that her prized restored piano is left in trustworthy hands and that she be able to collect any music- or ballet-related materials she desired along the way.

P E R S O N A L I T Y

|| Basic Personality ||
Zana is incredibly socially awkward and attempts to hide this behind reserved politeness and indifference. Upon first arriving at the Mall, she was perceived as incredibly haughty and rude, a reputation which sometimes still sticks with her to this day. She can become quite outspoken and authoritarian when it comes to what she sees as her areas of expertise, but on most other occasions she is quite comfortable deferring to whoever she perceives as the most experienced or knowledgable on a subject.
She can be quite jumpy and skittish in uncomfortable situations and will always prefer to have her back to a wall or be in a small space as opposed to any wide-open or exposed area. She has a very complicated relationship with food, which coloured many of her interactions and experiences in the early days of survival, as so much of other's thoughts and actions revolved around obtaining and consuming food, something that was very difficult for her to relate to and communicate with others about.

|| Strengths + Weaknesses ||
+ Quick-witted and sharp
+ Knowledgable on a wide range of interests
+ Decisive and determined
+ Able to take calculated risks

- Socially awkward
- Overly polite in most scenarios
- Can be rude or overly assertive
- Tends towards thinking that she is the sole person best suited for a job
- Sees other people as potential threats and liabilities rather than allies or possible friends

|| Quirks ||
* Often rolls and stretches her ankles and legs
* Likes to climb to high-up places to be alone
* Clicks her tongue often
* Rubs her hands up and down her legs compulsively in uncertain or uncomfortable situations
* Prefers all her vegetables raw and has been known to carry whole heads of raw broccoli in her pockets and consume them like an apple when available

C O M B A T

|| Training ||
She has had some informal training in providing medical assistance and has no other instructional experience besides her many years of ballet. She is mostly self-taught while learning on-the-job

|| Skills | Weaknesses ||
Zana found her niche in the community at a very young age after her grandmother died, having to fend for herself despite her discomfort with violence. She is one of the first to be called to navigate a dilapidated building on short notice, and specialises in search and rescue, able to adeptly climb and traverse most difficult terrain. When not going search and rescue, she's mainly hired as a scout or scavenger, specialising in getting in and out quickly and quietly while providing detailed and accurate reports. She will run ahead of the group and map out the main entrances and exits in a building or area, determine the security and stability of a potential camp-site or base camp, and catalogue usable water, food or shelter. Over the years she has become quite adept at this and many permanent camps or halfway shelters outside the perimeter of the Mall were either first discovered by her or were placed where they are through her guidance.
Zana also has some limited experience in caving, having briefly accompanied a group into a cave system, looking for a previous expedition that had not reported back in the expected time. She was responsible for testing the stability of rock shelves and finding appropriate anchor points for the climbing gear.
When she is not working, she spends a vast amount of time teaching younger children to dance. She is not especially fond of either children or teaching, but she fears that classical ballet and all she bled and trained for will disappear from the world if she doesn't find some way to keep it alive. Because of this, she has some capacity to work with children and teach, though she is known for being something of a taskmaster. She has an ongoing project of attempting to rebuild a grand piano and recover as much sheet music and instructional books as possible. Through this, she's picked up the presumably niche and useless skill of piano tuning and repair, as well as how to play several songs. She's been known to nick fishing wire to repair her baby grand.

She is used to working alone and has done very little coordinated work with others, but she has not displayed an inability to work in a team. She is almost completely incapable of fighting beyond using a short knife she keeps on her to defend herself. Though she has been taught to disassemble and maintain a firearm, she was incredibly bad at aiming and firing it. She has some limited experience with bows, but the weapon she is most adept with besides her knife is a crowbar, though this is secondary to using it for its intended purpose during her scavenging and scouting.
Zana has never been taught to swim and is wary of water because of this.

|| Gear ||
Zana always keeps a variety of climbing and safety gear on her, as well as a sewing kit and basic medical supplies when she can. Her shoes are always practical and durable, allowing her to climb and run freely. When going out to more dangerous locales, she will also take wrist and knee guards and a face mask to keep out dust and infection. She has a small combat knife that is more often than not used to cut loose threads from her clothes or pry open jammed doors. When she has the available space, she will bring a crowbar with her for its usefulness and its extended reach in combat scenarios.

R E L A T I O N S H I P S

|| Platonic ||
Noelle
Zana has spent some time in and out of the Target Hospital for minor sprains and other injuries related to dancing and scavenging. She struck up an odd but sweet friendship with Noelle between these trips.

|| Antagonistic ||
TBA

|| Romantic ||
TBA

​

 

[guac]

Hayleigh “Hazel” Brychynleigh Potts
​

Gender: cis female
Age: 22
Sexuality: bi
Height: 5’1’’
Weight: 140
Build: annoyingly good looking
Hair Color: blond
Eye Color: blue
Complexion: pale, with some light freckles on her face
Distinctive Physical Features: A scar on her shoulder from a close call with a ghoul, the same one that killed her father.
General Outfits/Clothing Wear: Hazel will prioritize cuteness over practicality 9 times out of 10. Crop tops are not the best idea in a zombie apocalypse, but that usually doesn’t stop her. Though if you slap some pink on a kevlar vest or some knee pads, she just might consider it.

Personality: Hazel is bubbly and comes on strong, to the point that some find her a bit annoying. She wears all of her emotions right on her sleeve but is surprisingly skilled at lying.
Quirks: Can be a little bratty at times. Always wears her hair in pigtails or double braids, and will fight tooth and nail for a tube of lip gloss, expired or not.

Skills/Equipment: Hazel always carries a wooden baseball bat augmented with rusty nails in her right hand (it belonged to her father), though since it’s not the most practical weapon imaginable, she has become pretty skilled with wielding a pistol in her left. Since she has spent almost her entire life fighting zombies, Hazel is confident and adept in all things violent.

Bio/Backstory:

Poor little Hayleigh Brychynleigh was cursed with this name by her suburban millennial parents, Sarah and Matt, who really did mean well. Matt, a real estate broker, made sure that stay-at-home mom Sarah and their two precious babies, Hayleigh and Brock, wanted for nothing. Those first five years, they lived in a picture-perfect suburban paradise.

Adult Hazel knew this, and remembered bits and pieces here and there – running around in the backyard with her little brother, watching her daddy win her a goldfish at the carnival – but that life felt more like a distant dream.

Something she did remember, quite vividly, was the fear that grew in her stomach on that fateful day in March, as she watched her daddy hammer big nails through his favorite wooden baseball bat, as Brock cried and their mommy begged him to be quiet so the monsters wouldn’t hear.

At the start of the outbreak, Matt had an idea, more of a vague notion than anything, that the Channel Islands National Park could be a safe haven from infection. They were a group of islands off the coast of Los Angeles only accessible by boat, and the more Matt thought about them the more plausible this idea felt. The Potts family would spend the next decade fruitlessly chasing that dream.

They bounced from settlement to settlement, moving vaguely west but usually getting comfortable and stalling for years at a time. The journey wasn't easy, and Hayleigh was ultimately the only survivor.

The first to fall was Sarah, shot by Scavengers on I-80. The next was Matt, killed saving Hayleigh from a ghoul. Then Brock, the idiot, throwing himself in over his head against a group of infected and suffering the consequences.

At the end of it all, Hayleigh found herself angry, alone, and desparate to forget. She made it as far as San Franscico, where she found the Mall and decided to stay.

She introduced herself as Hazel on an impulse, as she felt the need to keep her life's story mysterious, but that act didn't last long. She barely made it a week before she was trauma-dumping on anyone who would listen. She kept her name a secret for a bit longer, but eventually she tearfully confessed to Sybille that she had lied, feeling overwhelmingly guilty about it for no evident reason. Most prefer to call her Hazel anyway.

Why did Sybille recruit you for the trek across the country? As (at least temporary) residents of the same settlement, everyone’s character already knows Sybille, but how do you know her well enough to have wanted to join her?

Hazel has a way of getting on most people’s good sides, though she found Sybille to be a bit tougher to crack. She finally found her in when Sybille noticed that Hazel also shoots left-handed, and offered to modify her gun to make it easier to use. Ever since, Hazel has found every opportunity to hang around Sybille’s shop and chat her ear off, secretly viewing her as a mother figure. Though Hazel grew attached to the safety of the Mall, her attachment issues would never allow her to let Sybille leave her behind.

 

[spottednewt]

Name: Liberty Jane Archer
Gender: Cis Female
Age: 38
Sexuality: Lesbian
Height: 5'6"
Weight: 160Lbs
Build: She's a brick,,, house.
Hair Color: Dirty Blonde with a bit of an uneven sun-bleached quality.
Eye Color: Green
Complexion: Tanned, battered from sun damage.
Distinctive Physical Features: Most notably, a pink scar that sprawls diagonally across her left cheek, as well as a lesser-known sea of crude tattooed squiggles littering the side of her ribcage.
General Outfits/Clothing Wear: Despite having separated from the military unit that sent her out west two years prior, Liberty still wears her RSA-issued uniform and gear more often than not. Since settling in at the mall, her usual attire has been shaken up with the addition of more colors and graphic t-shirts, but her green-smattered fatigues are never too far. She's personally attached to each of the pockets.
Personality:
The lord’s year of two-thousand-and-I-lost-count knows a much different Liberty Jane Archer than the one it saw the end of pizza delivery with. A young LJ had entered her early years of adulthood bitter and deeply jaded - attached to her cell phone, upset by the evening news, and always travelling between her car and the door of her apartment with her keys jutting out between the fingers of her closed fist. These things were normal. The world around her did not make sense in a way that vexed her so deeply, that she often couldn’t see out from behind her own grey cloud. Everywhere she looked were new pressures and expectations that stood before the backdrop of a planet that seemed hell bent on its own destruction. Liberty's life as a young adult before the outbreak was characterized by a struggle for equilibrium, and the never-ending pursuit of money and success.

The EOP (End Of Pizza) saw to it that every one of these problems disappeared in one way or another, a phenomena that took her several months - but only months - to see the novelty of. Call it ignorance, call it a psychotic break; Liberty was finally living in a world that made sense to her and it didn’t take long for the dark cloud that hung low over her head to move along. There was no longer any reason to say things you didn’t mean or do things that didn’t make sense. All motivations boiled down to survival - and that made for easy math.

Liberty has found a certain light-heartedness in the midst of death and destruction. Fierce loyalty instilled in her by her father has made her a solid and reliable soldier, but the ever-present reality of death and suffering has made her touch more gentle, and her words more soft - even when behind the scope of a gun. Even as she found herself a soldier without a cause two years ago, Liberty has remained nihilistically optimistic - even if the trauma of this new world had made her more reckless and less calculated than in her youth - an affliction that worsened deeply over her time spent wandering the wasteland.

These days, she more closely resembles the sunshiny, southern sorority-adjacent business student than she ever had before.

What’s the point in anger or bitterness, when everything could be over in the next minute?

Quirks:

• She has a certain customer service voice for dealing with strangers.
• When thinking, she often twirls her hair between her fingers.
• Given a stick and the dirt, she often scribbles drawings of her childhood goldfish, Toilet Bowl.
• She's constantly scanning for junkfood among the rubble.

Skills:

• Although all of her pre-crash background in shooting came from hunting ducks, she later spent six years working for the RSA as a sharpshooter. Refining these skills in the days of limited ammunition was no easy task, but she’s become an excellent shot - especially in moments of chaos.
• In a similar vein, Liberty still maintains her pre-apoc hunting skills - now cherishing the hours she spent hiding out in bushes with her fathers.
• Calm creativity in the face of disaster - but this sword is double-edged. Archer has spent most of her time up on rooftops and hidden in the hills, making ranged combat her strongest suit by far. Close combat is avoided at all costs, but the newfound quiet in her head and the absolute necessity of coming up with ways to hold your own when you’re the smallest person in the company had helped in the adaptation process. Redneck engineering had also always had a place in her fathers' household.

Equipment: Widely, all the same things she had when leaving the comfort of her RSA quarters three years prior.
On her person: Sniper rifle, canteen, sunglasses, a back brace, a small handgun, two sets of dog tags reading "Archer, William Bennet" and "Sullivan, James Gregory"
In her pack/pockets: A few rolls of duct tape, a sharpie, several protein bars/wrappers, a Zippo lighter, a paperback of “Twilight”, a compact sleeping bag, a multi tool, a small collection of driver's licenses, several chapsticks, and ammunition shoved into any free crevice.

Bio/Backstory:
Born to an absent biological mother who contributed little more than a cheesy first name, Liberty was raised by Bill and James Archer in a small townhouse in Asheville, North Carolina. From the day she came home as nothing more than a bowling ball-headed toddler, she was safe and cared for in the village created by Bill’s parents and extended family. Their entire lives revolved around birthdays, weekend cookouts, extracurriculars, and Sunday morning church. Liberty Jane grew up with a charmed life. As she aged, she both welcomed the performative nature of fawning over shitty potluck food and hated it at the same time. It was lying - sometimes the Mac n’ Cheese was downright crunchy - but she soon learned that lies were beneficial. Lies kept the peace, and they could be used softly to her advantage.

“You’re so funny.”
“Oh my god, I didn’t know that! Tell me more.”
“I think plaid socks are going to be the next big thing!”

After completing her first two years of college as a psychology major, Liberty had to transition her classes to remote learning and move into a small inner-city apartment. Liberty’s careful little white lies had become more than fulfilling - they’d become lucrative. While her tinder profile may have labelled her as an accountant, her reality was far more social. The young woman’s days consisted of morning runs with one client, brunch with the next, dinner with another, and hours upon hours of live streaming herself doing chores or studying a myriad of flashcards in one designated corner of her room. Clients could get the full tour, but they’d have to schedule it.

This one aspect of her life made sense. She made people happy, and in turn, they wanted to keep her housed and feed her love for high-end coffee. Days were long, the emotional labor was constant, and there was an emphasis on her body and the way that she looked at any given moment in time. There was give and take to being a workaholic in any industry, this one just looked different than the average office job. In the end, accounting was worth all the diets, all the uncomfortable situations she had to endure, being constantly attached to her phone for fear a client might call. For every five freaks, there was one person that she could connect with - one person she could make happy without sacrificing too much of herself.

In the long run, the drawbacks to her line of work, the desire to live differently than her cookie-cutter parents, and the constant pressures of the world weighed on her. Outside of work she became jaded and angry. Having to keep her phone on her at all times meant that she had constant reminders of all the injustice in the world that she could do nothing about. Corrupt politicians, Global warming, world hunger – she had a hard time keeping the things out of her hands compartmentalized. Living such a public life to an often obsessive audience meant that her private life and sensitive information was under constant threat. Leading a closely regimented life where she pretended to be some romanticized version of herself at any given point in time was a headache that anyone could relate to at one point of another, but meant that she was constantly exhausted, and constantly denying herself of the things she wanted.
The moral of this Saturday afternoon TV special had been narrated by Charlie Brown’s parents as far as LJ was concerned; but the facts were all the same. Too much of anything - even the things you love - leads to destruction.

When the world came to a grinding halt, Liberty had already been holed up in her apartment for days, drowning herself in whiteclaws and surviving off of doordash; mourning the loss of someone who neither cared for her, or actually died. A gas stove to heat water for ramen and a constantly hungover aversion to light meant that she barely noticed when the deliveries stopped coming and the power went out. By the time she turned her phone back on, Asheville was a full week into hell and she was far too late. In all the madness, it would take her another week for her to make it across town to her family home, and another month to conclude that her village had all died or disappeared - all but Bill Archer. Bill and James were an older couple when they signed the paperwork to make Liberty an Archer. They were lovebirds in the mid 80’s that had gone quietly to change James’ surname to Archer after a small, informal, and nowhere near legally binding wedding on a boat off the coast of South Carolina with their chosen family. It would be 10 more years before Bill could bring James to family gatherings, and James would never hear from his own family again. As the rest of Bill’s folks warmed up, family would become their entire lives; only to be ripped away from them after a lifetime of cultivating an accepting kind of love and authenticity.

The death of his high school sweetheart left Bill as a shell of a human being. Liberty never went back to her apartment, instead keeping a close eye on Bill as he meandered through is own nothingness. They stayed in their family home for an entire year before nearby supplies had been picked clean. Bouncing from group to group would paint the landscape of the next few years before Bill fell ill and they found themselves trying to defend a small convenience store on their own. –That was when the RSA got involved.

They had no option in their first visit to the local compound, but they had medicine, and children, and other old folks who had survived. Bill finally had a bit of life back in his eyes and to keep it, all Liberty had to do was keep shooting her gun. The math was simple. This made sense. It wasn’t long before Liberty was sorted into a squadron and sent out into the hellscape for this or that - some runs were made for supplies, some for recruiting, and others she had little to know information on. It didn’t matter. In one way or another, she was helping people - she was keeping her father happy.

Before long, the hellscape became reassuring. Orders were vague, but she always knew what she was meant to be doing. There was only a small handful of people that she had to keep the interests of in mind. Better yet, anything neat she found while rifling through dilapidated buildings was hers to keep, and she never had to wear itchy underwear again. Protect your people, stay focused, and complete your mission. Easy enough, right? –Only when you developed the new single mindedness that Liberty came to love.

It would take several more years for life in the RSA to turn sour. Bill seemed to age at hyper speed, even in the comforts of the compound. Whether it was simply a sign of the times, or his broken heart catching up with him; Liberty could never say. All she knew was that her orders were getting more confusing - growing all-encompassing - and her father was withering away. On her last mission with the task force she'd spent 6 years with - a 7 month engagement just east of Kansas city as a part of the new reclamation efforts, their outpost was attacked by raiders one week prior to their departure for home. Liberty found herself battered, confused, and separated from her unit. Whether it was due to a growing distaste for the establishment she was working for, fear that she had no one to return home to, or merely concussed delusion; Liberty never made any effort to find the rest of her unit.

Instead, with nothing but the pack on her back, two black eyes, and a fresh gash across her face, Liberty merely laid her radio on the ground by her feet, and began her walk to the Pacific Ocean.

Finding The Mall was a godsend - a mirage at a time when she was falling apart at the seams and well into the process of losing her civilized mind. Two years later, she still changes the story of her displacement from the RSA each time she's asked to recall it.

Why did Sybille recruit you for the trek across the country? As (at least temporary) residents of the same settlement, everyone’s character already knows Sybille, but how do you know her well enough to have wanted to join her?
Without the resources to return to her father without a small army of her own, or the will to work for his caretakers any longer, she leaned into her “presumed dead” status and settled into a new way of living - a way that kept her distracted from the fact that she was a deserter of the institution that created her. Much such as the rats and the tacky tilework, Sybille has always come with the territory of living at the mall. As Liberty found her place trading deer and scavenged goods to pay her way at her new home, the two became pleasant acquaintances out of necessity. When Liberty happened upon Sybille’s stash of supplies, Liberty had only connected a couple of the dots before she invited herself along. She didn’t mind where Sybille was headed, or what her intentions were; she just needed a new cause to distract her from her hesitance to return east.

—And in the process, a part of her didn’t mind if she fulfilled the prophecy her RSA status had set before her. What were the chances that she'd make it all the way home, anyway?

 

[kaito9049]

Name: Joseph Park
Gender: Cis Male
Age: 34
Sexuality: Straight
Height: 5'11"
Weight: 172
Build: Slightly heavier-set and muscular
Hair Color: Black
Eye Color: Dark brown
Complexion: Generally clear
Distinctive Physical Features: Some thin scars on the left side of his face, stretching down from the eyebrow to his cheek
General Outfits/Clothing Wear: Joseph tends to travel comfortably, wearing a gray hoodie and blue jeans. He also has a collection of gloves that he rotates through; ostensibly he wears these to protect his fingers and provider a better grip on his weapons, but they also provide some cushion for hand-to-hand fighting.
Any other general appearance specifics: Joseph is rarely seen without a golden eagle pin — a gift from his former employer — that he keeps shined and clipped to the front of whatever shirt he is wearing.
Personality:
You can trust Joseph Park — but you shouldn't believe a word he says.

Even if he is not telling falsehoods outright, he's almost certainly withholding information, or twisting it in a way to push you toward deciding a certain way. Unfortunately, if you're the target of one of his manipulations, he'll probably be long gone by the time you find out. And his natural charisma and self-confidence hide his ever-plotting mind. Joseph is, in some ways, a very ruthless spirit, willing to sacrifice nearly anything to ensure the safety of those for whom he cares.

On the other hand, you will be hard-pressed to find a more loyal soul than Joseph. He naturally gravitates, ironically, toward leaders who prove themselves trustworthy, while disdaining others who selfishly act against the needs of the group. He will not hesitate to lie to a friend if he believes doing so will somehow benefit them, and he is fond of elaborate schemes that generate camaraderie between group members.

Despite his perhaps-noble aims, Joseph also deeply craves being useful, even if he could care less whether he is appreciated. He tries to make himself very available to whoever is in command of a situation, assuming he respects them, and solidify a place as their chief advisor or assistant. But he is not above going behind their back in order to execute a necessary plan he believes his leader cannot do for fear of looking weak or cruel.

Quirks: ​

• Joseph has a fake tell that he uses when he suspects that someone is catching on to his deceptive nature: fidgeting with his eagle pin. His true tell, which he himself sometimes forgets to catch, is pulling at the glove on his left hand.​
• He has a habit of doing bicep curls with whatever liftable object is in his immediate vicinity. Past examples include a brick, a sack of flower, and a small child.​

Skills/Equipment:​

• Joseph is a cunning negotiator, able to subtly persuade others into doing what he wants. Other times he is more brazen, such as when he wishes to intimidate or overwhelm a person to shatter their morale.​
• He is also a shrewd manager, with a keen mind for allocating resources and personnel to where they are best suited. Though he doesn't shy away from giving unpopular orders, he is often able to make even dismal news sound somewhat balanced with a few honeyed words.​
• Joseph is quite physically strong, and can sprint very quickly, though he prefers to refrain from fighting when possible. He carries a woodcutting axe strapped to his back, a tool useful for both chopping lumber and breaking bones.​
• Furthermore, he carries a six-shot revolver at his right hip, though he's a poor shot and uses it more as an intimidation tactic.​

Bio/Backstory:
Joseph Park's favorite book growing up was Tom Sawyer, so really he was doomed from the start.

The idea of manipulating another group of kids to do your work — and even have them think that they wanted to do it all along — was attractive to many young children, but Joseph never really grew out of the concept. A Los Angeles native and son of a lawyer-entrepreneur power couple, Joseph spent most of his pre-outbreak life exposed to rhetorical techniques that were mostly used to keep him in line. Still, he learned enough from his silver-tongued parents (and benefitted more than a little from their connections) to get an ace job at a local politician's office.

Joseph was a skilled worker, quickly learning how necessary backroom negotiations and power-brokering were to L.A. society. Each day, he donned a gold-leaf eagle pin — the emblem of the office's staff — and spent hours convincing other politicians and average citizens alike to go along with his employer's plans. But he soon became frustrated with what he saw as his colleagues' own hunger for prestige, which he believed hobbled the office's mission. To solve the problem, he attempted to rally his coworkers under the banner of idealism, hoping to convince them to put aside their backstabbing. He got laughed out of the office instead.

"You have to understand, Joseph," his boss told him later, "we're all selfish. You, me, the voters — all of us. We all gotta look out for ourselves. It's the only thing that keeps this machine going."

If the apocalypse hadn't started, Joseph might have grown to agree. As the infected tore through high-density areas and bombs fell from the sky, he quickly adapted, lying and cheating his way to safety. But something in him resisted buying his former employer's advice wholesale, and he took a risk to ensure a handful of his loved ones — even his pet goldfish, Gogi — were transported to the East Coast.

Joseph himself decided to stay for reasons he himself doesn't fully understand. Perhaps he saw an opportunity to become a shadowy monarch to the scattered survivors of the West. Maybe he feared that submitting himself to RSA rule would stifle his ability to have an impact. Or maybe he just couldn't abandon the place he'd called home his entire life.

Over the years, Joseph spent time in a variety of settlements, integrating himself as best he could into the management of each before leaving when perception of him soured. He arrived to the Mall a few years ago, volunteering, as he did at other settlements, to undertake any physically intensive jobs that were available. The practice has honed his physique, but many of his teammates have at least one Joseph Park story in which the man somehow convinced them to do his tasks for them...

Recruitment

Joseph has spent some time attempting to get into Sybille's good graces, seeing her as a potentially influential figure as an elected representative. This has taken the form of sending the occasional gift, slipping her name to the right people, and even trading some favors to make her job a bit easier. Suspecting that someone might depart from the settlement to chase the virus out East, Joseph has also decided that it's time to secure a few doses for himself — and maybe for those on the West Coast. He's made sure to drop hints about his general usefulness as a coordinator, and has encouraged his friends to spread rumors (not entirely untrue) about his physical strength.
​

 

[Aeris]

Hallie (Hal) Moore​

Gender: Female
Age: 23
Sexuality: Heterosexual
Height: 5’3 (160 cm)
Weight: 105 Ibs (47.6 kg)
Build: Slender
Hair Color: Red
Eye Color: Blue/Grey
Complexion: Fair-skinned with freckles
Distinctive Physical Features:

• Freckles cover her face and body
• She has a birthmark on her upper right arm that she is convinced looks like a butterfly
• A small heart tattoo with her mom and dad's initials on her inner left wrist
• A burn scar on her left leg from when she was 7 and tried to iron her skirt while wearing it.
• A scar on her cheek. From what? She can't remember anymore

General Outfits/Clothing Wear:

• Oversized t-shirts and flannels are her weakness
• Miss ma'am cannot stand pants and would rather die
• If she is not wearing shorts it's leggings, no in between
• She has plain white Adidas that have seen better days
• Her favorite tee is a Strawberry Shortcake one she found one day

Personality:

Hal has been told once or twice in her 23 years of life she can be a little too intense. Especially when she finds herself talking about something she's a bit too passionate about or when she's caught in the middle of an argument she has no intention of losing. That never stopped her from trying to look on the bright side of being alive in this godforsaken world. Sure, zombies are real, but now she can say she survived them when things eventually turn back to normal. Eventually. Once upon a time, her dad used to joke that her stubbornness would be the death of her, though, with how things are, Hal is fairly certain her stubbornness has been the only thing keeping her alive. She likes to think she's a little brave, in reality though, she simply doesn't think her ideas out until it is too late to turn back unless she wants to admit she was wrong (she doesn't). Despite her intense (and borderline stupid) nature, Hal is a very friendly person and has no problem initiating conversations with strangers.

Quirks:

• Hal doesn't sit still. Ever. If she is not pacing the room, she will be fidgeting with a hair tie.
• She picks at her lips when she is nervous
• Hal is a hummer, I am not sorry and neither is she
• She writes letters to her deceased parents
• She is clumsy but if you ask her she's not

Skills/Equipment:

• Growing up with a military father, Hal learned to shoot from a young age. She carries her father's old revolver
• Hal is quick and able to fit into smaller spaces for supplies or hiding
• She's got a pocket knife, though she rarely uses it against infected
• She carries a backpack with pictures from her childhood, an old Peter Pan book, and then things such as food and water

Bio/Backstory:

Hallie Moore never knew her birth mother. She had been told that the day she was born was a miracle, and she was lucky she made it. Her father never tried to make her feel guilty for being born, as the rest of her family did. He took his newborn daughter and moved to a remote town in Oregon where it would just be the two of them. He left the military and got a job as a simple office job. The two didn't have much, just a small apartment and a carnival-won goldfish lovingly named Pudge, but Hal wouldn't have changed it for the world.

For the first seven years of her life, Hallie lived in peace. She attended a small elementary school, had sleepovers, and hiked the mountains with her father during the warmer seasons. Hal participated in her share of activities, such as the local softball team and a dance class, though she wasn't all that good in either of them. It didn't matter though, "so long as your happy, Hal," her dad would say.

The young child's seemingly perfect world came crashing down on March 11th, 2021.

Hallie prefers to not talk about that day. When prompted, she'll tell everyone she was too young to remember, lies were an easy thing to tell.

She had been woken up by her father, who told her nothing except to pack a bag of anything she could carry. When prompted to explain, Owen simply told Hallie he'd tell her later. That day they packed their life away into two backpacks, released Pudge into a lake (Hallie's request), and left St. Helens, Oregon behind. It was later that day, as they stayed in a motel outside of town, that the airstrikes started. Owen had explained the end of the world the best he could to a seven-year-old. Bad people were running around and they wouldn't be able to stay in one place for a long time. They had to keep moving until they could find a safe place to make permanent roots.

Safety would take nine months to find. Over time, civilizations became less and less as the two jumped from one newly abandoned spot to the next, staying in small settlements when they could. Owen had caught wind of a new settlement forming in an old mall near the coast of San Francisco. He made the quick decision they would go there, it'd be safer for his daughter. Hallie was eight when she was relocated to what her dad promised would be their new home. The Mall.

Hallie adapted quickly, as most kids do. She learned all she needed to know about the infected, what she should do if she encountered one, and what should be done if she or someone else got bit. Hallie learned to shoot, how to use her size and athletic skills to her advantage, things a kid should not have to worry about. Soon, the apocalypse was simply a new normal.

She was twenty-two when her father went out with a group. Hours went by, then days, then weeks before the word had gotten around the group had run into trouble. It was a rainy day when she was told they had found her dad's body and had to put him to rest. That's the day Hal doesn't remember, except for the way the rain covered up her tears.

Hal decided that day she would continue to live a long life for her parent's sake. She stepped into her father's role of scouting, probably against his better wishes. When she was twenty, Hal got a small tattoo to remember her parents. She worked up her reputation as a scout, though found herself taking on more scavenging jobs than anything.

Why did Sybille recruit you for the trek across the country? As (at least temporary) residents of the same settlement, everyone’s character already knows Sybille, but how do you know her well enough to have wanted to join her?

Hallie had grown up around Sybille. Her father had visited the shop frequently, helping when he needed. When he passed, Hallie took it upon herself to take his spot as a scout. It was less Sybille recruited her and more Hallie argued her way into her position, going as far as to provide a pro/con list as to why she should help.

 

[Solar Daddy]

Lars Thompson
The Ashen

​

Gender: Male (He/Him)
Age: 32
Sexuality: Lars doesn't care.
Height: 5’-10”
Weight: 170 lbs.
Build: Lanky
Hair Color: Blond
Eye Color: Blue
Complexion: Fair/pale
Distinctive Physical Features: A cut on the chin , burn marks sporadically across his body, and a distinctive bite mark on his neck (non-infected related). Lars has an intense stare, which never seems to fade. He could be in the best of moods and he'd still glare right through you. He doesn't mean to seem that intense, he promises.
General Outfits/Clothing Wear: Lars often wears ponchos outfitted to the environment he expects to find himself in. Usually dull earth tones in general, and maybe some foliage if he plans to be out in the wilderness. Under the poncho, he wears a thin brown outer jacket with a hood and a plain undershirt. In addition he often wears dark stained khakis or jeans, along with workers boots. Lars, in most situations, wears an M95 gas mask to conceal his face.

Personality: Lars is fairly introverted, usually keeping to those he knows but won't outright deny a conversation should a stranger start one. Most would find him odd, even those who really know him, but Lars is a caring person despite his paranoid tendencies and trust issues. He's extremely observant and tries his best to pay attention to the voices that are often spoken over, especially since he finds himself to be more on the quiet side himself. Lars is also extremely community oriented. He would rather the many survive and would gladly give his life should the stakes require it, if it meant ensuring the group could go on. These bouts of selflessness and paranoia often make Lars seem hot and cold. It's never personal; sometimes, Lars just needs a bit of time to himself to compose his thoughts and just slow down for a moment.

Quirks: When feeling uncomfortable in a situation, Lars often puts his hand wherever his sidearm is stored out of habit; this is oftentime his outer right thigh, even if he’s not currently equipped.

Being from Seattle, Lars often wears his typical rainwear even on bright sunny days.

He had a pet goldfish named Ludacris during his childhood.

Lars has a persistent cough that he's learned to suppress the sound of mostly, but it still visibly pains him every time. Occasionally he clutches his side, but not often.

Skills:
Lars has prospered in the wasteland of the West as best he can. Being a hunter since before the Crash, Lars has turned his skills into a trade and often takes on big payouts for animals. Since many eat mostly crops or farm products, Lars’ keen ability to hunt in the sparse wilds means he can bring wild animal meat to anyone who would want to pay him for it. Even though he isn’t an assassin of any kind, he’s been known to take on hunting down or at least tracking another survivor if the price - or reasoning - was good enough, though this is a rare occurrence for him. His attitude is often somber and straightforward, and while he isn’t much for talking, he still finds time to socialize with those around him despite probably seeming a little off at times.

• Lars is an excellent hunter and tracker and his skills are often employed by those around him.
• While not being in the business of killing for pleasure or personal gain most of the time, Lars has become a good shot with his specific rifle due to countless game he’s hunted over the years. He is not a firearm expert however and isn’t familiar with many weapon types besides his own.
• Lars is a rather good cook and can substitute as one whenever needed.
• Lars studied abroad prior to the Crash and developed a love for cyrillic languages. His strongest second language is Ukrainian.
• Lars is great at navigating nature and the wilds, and while some of his navigation prowess transfers over to urban environments, it is clearly not as developed for him.

Equipment:

• Lars has a customized Mosin-Nagant rifle from his time abroad in his earlier years. Due to the specialized ammunition used, he rarely uses it outside of life threatening moments or for protection. This rifle is often hidden away in one of his many caches for emergencies.
• Lars' second rifle, a Remington, is his everyday rifle that he’s grown fond of as well. Since the ammunition used for it is easier to find than for the Mosin, this is the rifle he uses for most jobs.
• He also possesses a glock sidearm.
• Hunting knife.
• Various navigation tools such as a compass and map of the local area.
• Various types of outerwear with different patterns and colors to camouflage for different types of environments.
• A small backpack that’s easily concealable within his outerwear.
• Lars is an expert at surviving away from civilization and his combined knowledge of this and his rations allows him to go out on odysseys for up to two weeks with comfort.
• M95 Gas mask with backup filters. Lars is never without this and keeps it ready to use at all times.

Spoiler: Gas Mask

Bio/Backstory:
Lars grew up in a loving family in the city of Seattle. His father imparted a love for hunting in him at a young age as a way to escape their busy city life. His best memories in childhood were being out in nature with his father. No moment was more dull than the times he spent away from his tree stands. He hunted with bows and rifles, and set traps of his own design with the help of his father. Even at such a young age, Lars had quickly come to match his father’s prowess in hunting and trapping. In the summers, he’d spend his break alone or with his family at their secluded cabin in the woods; Lars’ paradise, where he’d do whatever he wanted. Exploring, hunting, enjoying nature. Every fall, he’d find himself shackled to the confines of city life and a focus on education which bored him endlessly.

When Lars was 16, he found the overwhelming nature of his “normal” life to be too much to bear, and he abandoned his schooling and his family home for their secluded cabin, the place where he wished to spend the rest of his days. That was, luckily for Lars, the year the Crash happened. He narrowly avoided the bombing of Seattle, which may have been the death of him had he not ran away from home. He felt the earth shake and he saw massive fires that burned away entire countrysides. When he came back to Seattle, the apocalypse had been well underway and his family home was nothing but dust. Lars quickly encountered a string of events that led him to be more and more cautious. Events that increased his already paranoid nature. As he searched for his family, Lars grew into a full survivalist focused on keeping alive at all costs.

Lars eventually gave up his search for his family. He was a good tracker, but had no lead he could follow on them. He searched for family vacation spots, relatives' homes and everything in between. All he was met with were skeletal remains, or the dead, far too decayed to recognize. He never found out what happened to his family and it's one of the things that keeps him up at night. Leaving the Seattle area in his wake, he quickly found himself stuck in the middle of one of the infamous wildfires that turned the Northwest forests into the Ashfields. Lars was one of the few that survived the ordeal, at its height being a devastating inferno that turned most to ash. Lars, someone who could outlast this harsh heat, became an Ashen as a way to avoid infected. He joined the league of scouts that vied for the survival of all who would call the Ashfields home and helped to stabilize the region. Lars' work was thankless, but he contributed heavily to the community he loved.

He spent his years surviving inferno after inferno, further reducing the fields to nothing. He waited out firestorms in bunkers, created fireproof lodging in outcroppings, and scoured the difficult terrain for anything to sustain the tribes. However, a fling of intense encounters with a specific tribe left him running. He found himself at The Mall, far away from the pressure of the Ashfields and those that hunted him. He quickly grew fond of those there and became a regular seller, and furthermore a resident. He still left for long periods to hunt and enjoy the wilderness where he felt most at home. However, he felt a longing to return to the land where he felt most comfortable, and someday wishes to return.

Why did Sybille recruit you for the trek across the country?
Lars is well acquainted with Hallie, having been somewhat of a friend and mentor in the apocalypse. When Lars discovered that she intended to join Sybille’s trek, Lars could think of no other option but to volunteer himself as well. He couldn’t fail her father now, and he’d make sure she’d make it across that damned river if it was the end of him.

 

[Pipsqueak]

Name: Noelle Wintz

Gender: She/Her (Cis female)

Age: 58 y/o

Sexuality: Ace/ Biromantic

Height: 5'5"

Weight: 186 lbs.

Build: Definitions of muscle mass still remain, but due to her growing age she's becoming thinner

Hair Color: Dark brown, beginnings of aging at the roots

Eye Color: Light brown

Complexion: Dark with warm undertones

Distinctive Physical Features: Noelle has a scar on her left knee from a surgery she received a year before the infection

General Outfits/Clothing Wear: Thin button up shirts, mom jeans and sneakers

Any other general appearance specifics: Freckled face and arms, wrinkles carved on the corners of her eyes, mouth, and forehead. She has her lobes pierced and frequently changes them with a box of different earrings she took with her.

Personality: Noelle is extremely caring, almost motherly to everyone in the group. She views them all as her children and will do anything to protect them. Because her main priority is giving them a good life throughout the disasters around them, she can often come across too tough and hard headed on occasions. She cares a lot for people, but it's hard to gain trust from her with outsiders unless they prove they’re trustworthy. Noelle is understanding of most situations and has a soft spot for those with tragic pasts, but she often views herself too knowledgeable because of her age and will greatly overestimate what she knows about other’s life scenarios, even if she’s never been in their shoes.

Quirks: Fiddles with a necklace her late wife bought her when nervous or agitated, cooks to relieve stress, Flexes her fingers to relieve the beginning pains of arthritis

Skills/Equipment: Medical knowledge, Cook, Sew/ Mend, Public speaking. Noelle carries an old handbag with her that has needle and thread, her earring box, and whatever medical supplies she's able to find.

Bio/Backstory: Noelle was born March 16, 1979 in Lewiston, Maine to her mother Delilah and her father Marcus. Marcus was a priest down by their local church, and her mother was a devoted Christian, yet Noelle always struggled to find happiness in their beliefs and the church. She was also home schooled until her Junior year of high school, so her only friends for years had been the family's pet goldfish Stewie and her little brother Demetrius. Because this was the only pet the family could really afford to keep, Noelle became particularly fond of fish.

In college she spent 7 years studying to become a nurse, and when she turned 25 she moved to San Francisco to get a job at a hospital. There she met her soon to be husband, Joshua, and just 2 years after that got married and had a little girl named Elizabeth (Born on June 3, 2006). They were together for 5 years before they got divorced, and only a year after Noelle met her wife Bailey. The family was happy and lived a good life until the outbreak struck. Since then the family has been separated, and Noelle found her way to Sybille and her safe haven.

Why did Sybille recruit you for the trek across the country? As (at least temporary) residents of the same settlement, everyone’s character already knows Sybille, but how do you know her well enough to have wanted to join her? Noelle made it a point to speak with everyone she possibly could in the settlement, including Sybille. Noelle isn't the closest with her, but she tends to still feel protective of her and those going on the trek, so through pure stubbornness and a bit of convincing, she got to come along. She feels better knowing she's there with them.

 

[Ha_lfLife]

Name: Thomas Lee Caldwell
Gender: Cisgender male
Age: 47
Sexuality: Straight, not looking for someone.
Height: 6’3”
Weight: 220 lbs
Build: Dad bod in progress. Has the strong arms, shoulders, thighs of a manual laborer.
Hair Color: Dark brown, graying
Eye Color: Gray
Complexion: Rugged, sun-worn

Distinctive Physical Features:

• Forearm tattoo, left arm
• Scar above right eyebrow
• Raised skin on left collarbone from pacemaker
• Calloused hands
• Faded yet permanent farmer’s tan

General Outfits/Clothing Wear:

• Utilitarian. Jeans, flannels, leather - whatever fits will work.
• Woven thread and bead friendship bracelet, made by his daughter circa 2020
• Metal wedding band; inexpensive, scratched up

Personality: Being a man of few words, Tom can easily come off to strangers as cold and detached. Those who do know him, though, understand him to be rather gentle, protective, and stalwart. Though not fancily educated or book-smart, he’s quietly insightful and often very reflective.

Quirks:

• Good whistler.
• Used to smoke. Doesn’t anymore.
• Used to be a Baptist. Isn’t anymore.
• Managed to replace his oldest daughter Katie’s dead goldfish, Gill, with a cycle of others over the course of six years. It wasn’t until she displayed the immortal fish at her fourth grade show and tell (and was harshly ridiculed) that she realized what he’d done.

Skills/Equipment:

• Can wield a lasso.
• Horse riding.
• Experience welding.
• Experience as an electrician.
• Handy at carpentry.
• Handles firearms just fine.
• Can wrangle things twice his size, i.e. fully grown bulls.

Bio/Backstory:

Tom always seemed one to have a humble life story. Nothing too flashy, nothing too enthralling. And that was alright by him. Colorado born and raised, nobody was surprised when he returned to his homestead outside Fort Collins to settle down with a family.

Since he was a kid, Tom wanted to be a forest firefighter, like his dad had been for over three decades. First, though, he enlisted in the Marines at the age of 18, his family not having any traditions of pursuing higher education. In Afghanistan in 2012, a piece of shrapnel from an IED got too close to his heart. He found himself with a shiny new pacemaker that’d need itself replaced every few decades or so, and an honorable discharge. With that incident, he quietly dismissed his aspiration to following in his fathers footsteps.

In the years before the Crash, Tom was what one described as a Jack-of-all-trades. He got a couple of trade school certificates from Front Range Community College and bounced around on contract jobs for most of his twenties. It wasn’t until he took up some odd jobs on a cattle farm that he really felt like he could settle into something. He had a knack for it, and a general enjoyment of the work. He spent days under the sun, riding horses, caring for cows and bulls. And when the time came for them to fulfill their purpose, he put them down with dignity. When the elderly ranch owner he’d been working for passed away in 2015, Tom took over the business and made an honest living for himself. He was known around Fort Collins as a genuine businessman who never tried to scalp an indecent profit off folks.

He was a single dad of two girls, who were his whole world. They lived in a modest house on a good plot of land. His oldest was always trying to spruce the place up, commenting how the La-Z-Boy and wood-paneled walls were too harsh for a majority female household. His wife died in 2019.

His oldest, Katie, was 14 when the Crash happened. She was on a softball team retreat in Austin when things started collapsing. In the ensuing chaos, word got out around the team parents that the city had been bombed and that the coach had called her husband in her final moments alive. While the rest of the girls were presumed dead, Tom and a few other parents tried to get to Austin to look for them, but the quick escalation of events soon made getting across Denver impossible. He continued to try to get in touch with her in the following year, but he never heard from her again.

His youngest, Haley, was 8 when the Crash happened. In the early days of fallout, when the nearby disaster shelter collapsed to the infected, she was bitten in the shoulder. She died quickly, Tom putting her down mercifully and mournfully after she’s turned. He buried her in a quiet corner of the city park. The cemetery where her mother was buried was too overrun with infected to risk it. Without a population left in Fort Collins, And his cattle entirely slaughtered by infected, Tom made a desperate flight West in his truck. It was when he hit south of Salt Lake that he started hearing passing rumors that a safe zone had been erected in California.

Why did Sybille recruit you for the trek across the country? As (at least temporary) residents of the same settlement, everyone’s character already knows Sybille, but how do you know her well enough to have wanted to join her?

Tom came to the Mall in October 2022 and has been there ever since. Most folks knew him, or at least had heard his name. Like he had in his previous life, he’d established himself as honest and dependable, often humbly setting himself to whatever odd jobs the Mall needed him to do. While his one true area of expertise, raising livestock, wasn’t truly utilized here (lack of space, grain, and initial population making the endeavor futile), he was still a strong body with a tireless work ethic. People came to know him as someone they could call on in the middle of the witching hour when their faucet was leaking or their husbands were too drunk to get up the stairs.

It was no surprise then that Tom was fine with offering to join Mis Sybille’s crew. It wasn’t like his talents would be greatly missed or irreplaceable back at the Mall. And while he couldn’t offer much in the way of specialized help, he would do what was asked of him. Besides, the life of his pacemaker battery was near its expiration point. With such a specific device in scarce supply, Tom had for many years after the Crash come to terms with the fact that the last few years of this battery’s life would be his last, too. If he could at least finish off his life with some semblance of something meaningful, then that was fine by him.

 

[Swoob]

NOAH PROCTOR​

Gender Male (he/him)
Age 26
Sexuality Heterosexual
Height 6' 0"
Weight 180 lbs

QUIRKS​

• Noah's nervous ticks are scratching himself & touching his face. He's also a leg bouncer.
• He found some glasses in the Mall that he pretends just so happened to be around his prescription, but he's embarrassed to admit that he just likes the way they look.
• He recently dyed his hair white.
• He owned a pet goldfish as a child.

SKILLS/EQUIPMENT​

• Noah's hands are steady & he is very dexterous. Aside from art, he can be a quick learner with a good amount of tools & his climbing skills are above average.
• He is competent enough in scavenging & combat to somewhat pull his weight, but he is not exceptional like others.
• He carries a hunter's knife, & an old, almost too-small backpack at all times. The rest of his equipment isn't his; he borrows often from other residents of the Mall.
• He plans on taking tattoo needles with him & wants to learn if they'd be useful in combat.

CONNECTION TO SYBILLE​

Noah first met Sybille after a few years of staying at the Mall. She asked for a crow tattoo on her back right shoulder. After practicing on the design for a couple weeks, he gave her the tattoo, and since then the two have become friendlier with each other.

Besides being trustworthy, Noah is at least capable enough to not be a hindrance to the expedition. He has abundant motivation to aid the group. Most of all, though, he has an unyielding desperation to join in order to search for his mother & father, praying they're still alive in the East.

APPEARANCE​

Noah is a tall, leaner man with a faintly jagged & wiry complexion. His hair, naturally blonde, is wavy, curling in wisps at the extremities. His fingers are long & bony. Honey brown eyes. Little scars everywhere. Noah has white skin with warmer undertones, interrupted everywhere by thick black ink. For practice & for freeform spirituality, he has blanketed himself in geometric tattoos. Some have more meaning than others.

He typically wears t-shirts, tank tops & shorts. Never caught on to clothing fashion, despite everything else. He'll go for something lighter if given the option, but usually takes what he can get.

PERSONALITY​

Noah is a dreamer, drifty, deep. His soft & slow demeanor carries a kind of natural genuineness, if a little annoying. He is quiet & calm, steady, & naturally draws others in. He seems like someone you can trust—no ulterior motives, and a kind of guarded childishness that only comes from growing up in a world like this. In his environment, he had little time to explore his emotions. Since he began living in the Mall, and because he hasn't necessarily been needed as much as others for combat, he's placed more importance into art, spirituality & self-discovery. He wants to be the strong, kind person his father was—would tell stories about, when kindness was taught & held precious. Since he's been gone, Noah has developed a co-dependency problem, looking for others to validate him, make him feel less alone. He is happy to listen, to talk, help with anything, say yes; it's unhealthy, but it makes him feel reliable for now.

But don't bring up his father. & do not imply that he's dead. It's always the good-natured guys that snap the hardest.

BACKGROUND​

In another life Noah could've been a wild child. Could've been a traveller or an artist. Gone to university. Found himself. Loved the world.

Instead he became a child of the apocalypse. His upbringing before the disaster was suburban & tranquil: he was born to loving parents in southern Canada who taught him to be kind & quiet. As a child, Noah displayed an innate passion for exploring the world & talking to others. Too much. Ethan & Lola Proctor had their hands full trying to teach him manners & get him to settle down. Noah brought a lot of energy to the family that they could never quite contain & never totally wanted to. It really was a good life.

March 11, 2021 & the world was undone. Noah was only 10 years old. When the outbreak reached their home he was thrown onto his father's shoulder & a large, warm hand pressed his face into his father's chest. It all fell apart at a dizzying speed. Noah's memories of the day are distant & jagged: the hot sting of fires, the disembodied screams of infected & escapees; he was so little. In the middle of the wild flight from hell he didn't know what to do except scream and cry into his father's shirt, holding onto his mother's voice for dear life.

The three made it as far as they could together before Noah & Ethan got separated from Lola while escaping a temporary encampment. The grief. The aimlessness. Through the ensuing years of moving from settlement to settlement & living at the sharp edge of survival, Noah & his father found reprieve in each other. Ethan made it his duty to raise Noah into the new kind of self-reliant man the apocalypse demands. He taught him scavenging, combat, hunting, awareness. During the slower days he taught Noah the importance of being kind once everything was over. Ten years & it was over soon enough: Ethan too got separated from Noah while fleeing a horde of infected. Twenty years old. Alone.

Surviving on his own for nearly a year, Noah finally caught wind of the Mall settlement and made his way to San Francisco. When he arrived he was a tired, afraid & lonely boy. After all the experiences that hardened him, he found himself distressingly unremarkable in the Mall. He could fight, but not like some of the others. He could scavenge, but some of the Mall residents were so exceptional. For a long time, he didn't know what to do, until he really started to think about what he wanted.

Noah was naturally drawn to art. It quickly became his outlet. He liked the look of tattoos & began practicing on himself, only doing large, thick lines & expressionist shapes. When others saw it, they began asking for tattoos as well. Although Noah is still a bit awkward & doesn't exactly talk at a normal pace or volume, finding his place in the Mall gave him new peace to open up to the other survivors. In his tattoo parlor you can trade small talk with him or share your deeper thoughts. No judgment. Everything's good.

After all, Noah has nothing to worry about. His mom & dad are still out there, definitely. They're waiting for him to find them.

 

[evermoon]

- - - the basics

Name: Oliver "Ollie" Joseph Jones

Gender: Male

Age: 27

Sexuality: He would love to know and so would I

Appearance: Ollie is a warm looking guy, with blue eyes and curly ginger hair. His height is almost deceptive, because while he looks rather lanky from far away (it's the long limbs), he really only stands at about 5 foot eight. Like his height, his muscle mass is not what you might guess when you first look at him. His brother once said you could probably push Ollie over with a stiff stick, but that was before the virus hit. Now, Ollie's still got that slim build, but he's also got a nice coating of lean muscle gleaned from hard work. This is most noticeable in his arms, as working as mechanic has meant he's gotten used to lifting heavy things and whatever else might be needed of him. He's on the younger side, and from close up, you can definitely tell he's in his mid twenties, but from far away, he can be mistaken for a teenager without too much of a struggle. He's somewhere in the gray zone between being good-looking and a little dorky, but as he's gotten older and gained muscle, he has become more attractive in a conventional sense.

Day to Day Dress: If you're looking for Ollie in the mall, the easiest way to pick him out in a crowd (besides his bright red hair) is to look for his clothing. Ollie can usually be found in one of two things. The first is a pair of deep brown overalls, made out of the same material you'd expect in cargo shorts, and he usually pairs this with a random tee shirt with some graphic design he doesn't care too much about. If he's not wearing that, there's a good bet you can find him in a khaki green pair of coveralls with short sleeves. Both of these things have splatterings of grease on them from use, but the coveralls are noticeably more stained. Outside the mall, he'll don things he considers more protective or harder to bite through. This can be a jacket made out of either thick denim or stiff leather, but these are a more rotating collection he isn't particularly attached to, as he's likely to toss them off if he feels like they're gonna hold him back.

Distinctive Features: Ollie's ginger hair makes him stick out already, but if that wasn't enough, his entire body is splattered in freckles. Alongside that, one of the things that's distinctive about him is his grin, which is warm but certainly a little goofy.

- - - personality

Quick Traits: [ creative, light-hearted, high-energy, trusting, distractible ]

Description: Ollie is generally an upbeat dude. Maybe he's not the type to whistle a song as he walks down the street, but he is the kind of guy who does his best to offer smiles to the people he sees. He's managed to keep these attitude throughout the apocalypse; in fact, it might be the thing that pushed him into becoming as optimistic as he is. Having a positive attitude is a conscious choice he makes, because when he thinks negatively, he tends to suck himself into a whirlpool and often ends up overthinking or pushing himself into a downward spiral. In conjunction with the positive outlook, he does his best to be friendly and outgoing, and is generally likable, even if he seems like an odd duck at times. He wants to be funny, and he thinks he is, but sometimes his jokes just aren't funny or don't make sense. He isn't super talented in the art of listening or comforting, but he will try if it's asked of him. He is empathetic, but he doesn't have much skill with actively calming people or being a voice of reason. His ideas tend to be off the wall, and they aren't always serious, but sometimes these plans can be a good stepping stone for better ideas. He likes to feel useful, so it's a pretty safe bet that he'll help out pretty much whenever it's asked of him.

Ollie's friendly demeanor isn't always to his benefit, however. He can be too trusting, and can sometimes have a habit of being too jovial or upbeat when the tone of a conversation or moment isn't suited for it. It's not that he can't be serious, even though he usually isn't, but that he doesn't always recognize the moments where he should be. This can sometimes make him seem insensitive. While he's learned over time how to handle his own emotions, he isn't always the greatest at dealing with those of other people. To add to that, he can be easily distracted or lose focus on something if he isn't fixated on it.

Quirks: While some might find his personality itself a bit quirky, he doesn't have too many actual quirks to speak of. Ollie does fidget and mess with his hands at times, most commonly by cracking his fingers or his knuckles. When he's deep in thought, his tongue often pokes out from between his lips, especially if he's writing or working on something. One weird little thing that he's strangely proud of is his ability to touch both the point of his nose and the tip of his elbow with his tongue, but that's more of a weird party trick than anything.

- - - assets

Skills: Ollie may not be the first person you think of when you need somebody to help you out, considering he neither looks built nor seems like he's got the serious mind you need to get you out of a jam, but he's got a good list of skills on the back burner that he's developed and learned to stay alive.

• Agile: It's true that Ollie can not run forever, but one thing he does have on his side is agility. He's quick on his feet when he needs to be, and his general height and figure make him ideal for fitting into small spaces or getting out through quick holes. You have a vent that needs crawling through? He's your guy.
• Creativity: Ollie may not be the guy you want to leave in charge of your plans, but you definitely want his help. He is able to think in a way that sets logic aside in the beginning so that he can come up with a way that would get them out of a problem, and then figure out a way to make that work within what he has available to him at the time.
• Explosives: So maybe Ollie was a bit of a pyro as a kid, and what about it? He's good with pretty much anything that explodes. Ollie almost always has something on him that explodes, and he's got a good throwing arm to go with it. While disarming isn't his forte, he's been doing his best to learn that as well.
• Close-Range Firearms: He may not be your best bet for a sniper, but along with being agile, he's good with fighting up close. Weapon-wise, he's good with a shotgun or a pistol, but he has a decent swing with bats at other blunt objects. He can also make due with a knife, but he doesn't like to get close enough to use one.
• Mechanics: Ollie was finishing up an apprenticeship at a mechanics shop when the world decayed. In order to keep these skills sharp, and manage a living, he works in Sybille's mechanic shop at the mall. He's pretty good with most cars, but motorcycles have been a bit of a challenge for him in the past, so he's taking extra care to learn that now.

Equipment: When it comes to carrying things around with him, Ollie has a tendency to stockpile. He does this by wearing three main things: a cargo backpack, a toolbelt that's all but a glorified fanny pack, and a holster he's modded (a bit crudely) that holds a knife on one side and a pistol on the other. He usually has an assortment of items along the lines of the list below.

• Berretta Px4 Storm: A 9mm pistol that's ideal for not only shooting zombies, but a concealed carry. It's not that Ollie wants to keep it a secret that he has a gun on him pretty much all the time, but something about having one displayed openly makes him feel weird, so he prefers this bad boy.
• Melee Weapons: Ollie carries two melee weapons on him at all times: a dented metal baseball bat that he keeps strapped to his backpack, and a hunting knife on his holster. The knife sees more practical use than combat, considering he would rather stay an arms length distance from any zombie that comes his way, but the bat is a frequent flier. He'll opt for the bat over any other weapon if he has a choice, although this is largely due to the scarcity of ammunition.
• Ammunition: As a part of his toolbelt, there are three bags marked aside for ammo. One contains 9mm for his Berretta, another contains shells for his shotgun, and the third contains any other spare ammo he can find, which he will then bring back to the Mall and comb through in order to sort them. While the bags are all a decent size, they're never really that full.
• Explosive Supplies: He may not be carrying a handful of grenades on him at all times, but he always has something on him that he can make something out of in a pinch. Most commonly, this is a few bottles of cheap vodka with some rags and matches, and at times, an old Nalgene water bottle that's half full of gasoline.
• Tool Set: Ollie has an array of tools he never goes anywhere without. He's got many of a toolkits usual suspects, like a few screwdrivers and a pair of sturdy pliers, but there are usually a few others in the mix. If he's expecting to have to boost a car or two to get where he needs to go, he might even bring a battery-operated power drill.
• Sustenance: You should never go anywhere unprepared, and as such, he often has something to sustain him for wherever he goes. Water is a big must, so he always has a few bottles, and this is usually complimented by smaller things that travel well, like granola bars or packs of old beef jerky.
• Emergency Socks: Ollie hates wearing wet socks, and therefore does his best to keep a spare pair on him in case of any wet foot emergency.

- - - information

Backstory: Ollie's background isn't filled with a lot of trauma, but it isn't exactly cookie-cutter, either. He was born as the youngest of three brothers, and coincidentally, the only redhead. His whole family swore up and down that it would probably fade away with age, but it never did, and he carried his ginger hair with him throughout the entire rest of his life. It was a common joke among his grandparents and his two brothers that the red hair had to be from somewhere else, and they would sometimes joke that his father was actually Stew, his dad's best friend with bright orange locks who had been like an uncle to Ollie and his siblings.

The joke ended up being based in reality, though the only ones who had known before the secret slipped was his mother and Stewart. When Ollie has to get an emergent appendectomy in third grade, his blood type ended up revealing that there was no way Wayne, the man he had thought was his dad, could have been his biological father. After this revelation, Ollie's mother ended up confessing to the affair, leading to the divorce that broke up his family, and it was messy. All of the Joseph brothers struggled, but Ollie took it the hardest. While his parents got split custody, Ollie and his father couldn't quite move past the news that he wasn't his son. Wayne never treated him badly, but the news created a sort of wall, and Ollie could never figure out how to cross that distance. His mother loved him just the same, but he spent years being angry with her for all the things she did. His brothers were still his brothers of course, but sometime he would get the feeling that they resented him for the affair, as if the fact that he was proof of the affair was what caused their parents to split, not his mother's infidelity. Stewart, for the most part, was cut off. Neither Ollie's parents nor his siblings cared to keep contact with the man, and Ollie wrote him off as well, hoping the decision would appease his father.

When Ollie was ten, and his mother had remarried, she gave birth to Josie, Ollie's half-sister. Ollie loved her from the minute she was born, and she quickly became his favorite member of the family. There was no resentment or judgement from an infant, just love and dependency. Despite the age gap, the two were incredibly close, and she spent the first few years of her life practically attached to him at the hip.

When the world fell apart, Ollie had been on a school trip across the state his family lived. His teachers and classmates had hurried back there as quickly as they could, but his mother, and Josie, had vanished. He had no way of knowing what had happened to them, despite searching. He took Josie's disappearance particularly hard, but he was just a kid-- it wasn't like he could sit around and wait. Instead, he followed the rest of his classmates and teachers and they moved from place to place and group to group. By the time they reached the Mall, what had been a group of 23 had dwindled to 7.

The Mall wasn't that far from where he had grown up, but anything was better than where he had started. Ollie had never felt like he'd had much to lose, but Josie did sting. However, he was also astounded by the fact that the world just kept turning, even when everything seemed lost. This, more than anything, inspired his positive outlook, and he tries to hold onto everything that is still standing as a reminder than humanity is strong enough to overcome even the heaviest of losses. After all, if so many people can wake up and keep going despite all the things they've seen and done and lost, the least he could do is wake up with a smile.

Why is Ollie with the group?: After inheriting the mechanics shop from Sybille, Ollie had no real intentions on running off outside the Mall. The shop was in his hands, and while Ollie might not be the brightest or the most diligent, the fact that Sybille trusted him with it means something to him. However, recent events in the Mall might push him to leave, at least for the moment.