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thebastion
Jun. 21st, 2014 12:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonsorcsandwolvesPlayer name: Goggs
Age: Over 18
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
GoggleDragon
Other characters: None
Character name: Rob Edwards (Full name: Robin Liam Edwards)
OC info: Rob's world is a near-duplicate of our world in the early 21st century, apparently devoid of any and all supernatural phenomena, hyper-advanced ancient civilizations, or secret orders with plans of world domination. It's a world for slice-of-life, romance, and mystery stories, not kaijuu battles, giant robots, or magical girls, and children's card games never have and never will decide the fate of humanity here. It's a perfectly ordinary world aside from one difference; it's about to be destroyed by the Calamity.
The specific region that Rob's from is southern Ontario, Canada, in one of the small cities within a few hours of Toronto. While his hometown is technically a city, it lacks many of the features and variety that most people would expect an actual city to have and thus has limited options and opportunities compared to larger cities.
To prevent fourth-wall breaking for anyone who doesn't want it, certain media franchises may not exist in the same forms in Rob's world as they do in ours.
Summary: Rob has never been an "average" child. He walked so early that he almost skipped crawling entirely, pestered his parents to teach him the alphabet before he started school, and would spend hours playing with lego if he was given the chance. He also had some significant problems with social interaction, having a hard time learning when people didn't want to play and not understand why hitting someone wasn't fun for them. This trend continued throughout his life; intellectually he was a step or two ahead of everyone else his age, but socially and emotionally he was a step behind what people expected him to be. He could talk with adults quite well and was generally thought well of by them, but other kids his age were a different story. As one might imagine, having to essentially rely on trial and error to learn what others would consider basic social interaction made gaining and retaining friends difficult, and more than once he found other kids no longer willing to be around him. Not being interested in sports and most other traditional male past-times didn't help either, and while he's gradually gotten better at socializing, by the time he was finished elementary school there were only two people he could consider friends.
Once Rob got to high school, his situation improved, but still wasn't perfect. He gained a few friends, and people who he couldn't consider friends but were more than just acquaintances, but he was hardly a social butterfly. University was a completely different environment, however; while his natural intelligence had gotten him through high school without a problem, the result of that was that he had never learned how to study properly and he failed most of his courses when they proved significantly harder than expected. Dejected, he returned home and got a part-time job while he tried to decide what to do next. At the time of the Calamity he was 25 and still hadn't figured out what to do with himself.
Even with people he knows well, Rob is fairly reserved. He doesn't go out of his way to give people information about himself and will usually respond to questions about the state of his life with generic statements, regardless of the reality. That's not to say that he never talks about himself, but he tends to keep his emotional distance from people. He's terrible at small talk and idle chit-chat, leaving a lot of awkward silences when he can't figure out how to continue the conversation, and he has trouble reading subtleties of people's behavior to the point of occasionally misinterpreting the encounter as a whole. Human behavior in general can be confusing for him as he doesn't have the level of intuitive understanding of people's motivations that the average person does, instead often needing to work out such things intellectually. In conversations he defaults to being literal-minded if he doesn't pause and mentally double-check that he's interpreting the words he's hearing right. He finds eye contact distressing (even with himself in a mirror) and usually fakes it by looking at a person's mouth instead, having worked out how to do so in a way that most people never notice.
Rob's strongly introverted, and while he's by no means opposed to interacting with other people he needs time alone to "recharge" after most interactions. People who are loud and overly-friendly annoy him, and a stranger walking up to him with friendly introductions and attempts at starting up a conversation causes him to become awkward and uncomfortable. He's not unfriendly, especially once he's spoken with someone a few times, but unexpected interactions with others give him trouble and cause him to pull back, which can easily be mistaken for unfriendliness or rudeness. He has a low voice, to the point of frequently being hard to hear, which means that conversations with loud and talkative people often result in him being unable to get a word in edgewise. With conscious effort he can raise his voice to a level that's easily heard, but if he doesn't get it just right he sounds like he's angry, which leads to even worse problems and considerable frustration on his part.
If one can get him talking and can get past his general awkwardness with people, they'll find that Rob's friendly and generally kind. Even when he's angry with someone he makes a point of not saying things that he knows will hurt them deeply, focusing on what the person does that angers him rather than using their insecurities against them. He's more likely to deal with someone he doesn't like by following the old "if you have nothing nice to say then don't say anything at all" advice and just ignore them when they try to talk to him than he is to escalate the situation, though if he's angry, frustrated, or stressed enough (as he's more likely to be post-Calamity) he can and will move on to yelling matches or beyond if he can't stop himself in time. If the conversation moves into an area that he has particular interest in he can talk at length about the subject and has to stop himself from rambling on about every little thing he knows on the topic. He gets some enjoyment out of seeing how people react to him saying or doing unexpected things, but at the same time he doesn't like being the center of attention for more than a few people at once, so how intentionally unexpected he is gets moderated somewhat.
Rob doesn't deal with stress particularly well, bottling it up inside until he either explodes or breaks down and goes off to cry somewhere. Neither of these actually release enough stress to solve the problem, just to keep him functioning. The amount of stress he constantly feels requires him to put most of his mental energy into not breaking down, so any extra burdens, even minor ones, provoke far more stress and stronger reactions than they should. In the interim, he distances himself from his own life by finding ways to distract himself, most often by fantasizing and creating worlds in his mind or working out ideas for various things (in Bastion, this will involve a lot of working out what he'll exchange his shards for well in advance of him actually doing so). Along with stress (and often caused by it), Rob has a lot of pent-up aggression that he has even fewer ways to release. He mostly deals with it by fantasizing about what he'd like to do to the object of his ire, but he puts a lot of effort into suppressing his anger, being terrified of hurting someone if he were to let himself go since his vengeance fantasies tend towards the violent.
His opinion of himself is generally pretty low. He doesn't think that he's a particularly good person and can see his flaws more easily than his virtues. He dwells on his failures excessively and dismisses his successes as not being worth much, in turn struggling with depression and a lack of drive that makes it even harder for him to change his situation or accomplish anything that he feels is worthwhile. Despite how he feels, he's not as bad a person as he thinks he is. He's honest and honorable, not promising things that he isn't at least 100% sure that he can deliver and feeling bad if circumstances beyond his control or ability to anticipate prevent him from following through. The times when he's dishonest are times when he doesn't want to offend, hurt, or worry other people, and he's almost always willing to listen to others' problems despite how easily he can be drained by dealing with their burdens as well as his own. He'll offer up words that usually make people feel better, but he hates doing so because to him the words are just meaningless platitudes and he isn't actually solving the problems the person has.
Rob can get extremely focused on activities that he's interested in, but usually lacks focus or attention on most other activities. What he's interested in can change quite rapidly; he gets hyper-focused on certain topics and goes on "research binges" about them for a time before moving on to something else. Just because he's interested in something though, doesn't necessarily mean that he prioritizes it; his habit of procrastinating often extends to putting off things that he wants to do in favor of other unrelated things. He continually forms habits and patterns of behavior as he goes through life, which even he will admit are often arbitrary. For example, when preparing to make a particular dish he'll place the utensils he needs in specific locations every time. Similarly, frequenting a particular restaurant will eventually result in him sitting at a usual table or seat, with the other tables in a hierarchy that determines which one he'll sit at if his usual table is occupied. This behavior is unintentional and he's rarely aware of the habit developing until it's been fully formed, at which point he can intentionally violate his normal patterns if he's paying attention but will usually not think to do so. When it comes to his workspace or his private space, he can be very territorial about it; it's his and no one else should be interfering with it. While circumstances often prevent him from acting on that feeling - he can't exactly kick customers or coworkers out of the area he's working in, for example - he'll silently gripe about it.
His basic philosophy on life is fairly straightforward; treat others as you want to be treated and do whatever you want so long as you don't harm someone else. Only human, he doesn't always follow through on this and hates himself for it afterward. That other people fail to follow such basic concepts, that the society he lives in seems like it's actively doing the opposite of his beliefs, and general human irrationality are all the source of continual frustration for him. He despises double standards and hates that he feels the weight of others' expectations so strongly that he frequently has trouble taking actions because of the reactions he's likely to get. He's cynical about people but still has a spark of hope that humanity as a whole can change for the better. He likes the idea of a simpler world where a person can just go out with a bow and a knife and live without having to worry about all of the extra details that civilization seems to require, but he's still a child of the 20th and 21st centuries and enjoys the fruits of modern civilization, not to mention that he knows that he doesn't (yet) have the ability to live in that kind of world.
Rob's ultimate goal is to be happy, able to wake up every morning and be content with his life despite whatever flaws it might have. Leading to that, he wants to be closer to his idea of a "real man": strong, courageous, honorable, and able to take care of himself and others.
Powers: Rob has no supernatural abilities.
Physically he's not especially strong, fast, or agile most of the time. His full strength and speed can only be brought out in bursts, which tire him out quickly; he's a sprinter (and surprises most people by how fast he can actually run), not a long-distance runner. When operating at his baseline strength and speed his endurance is fairly high, and he can walk or perform medium manual labor for hours without needing extended breaks. He has a high tolerance for pain, especially continual pain, and though he'll still flinch if he stubs his toe or cuts himself he can push through it, to the point of injuring himself further if he doesn't realize that what to him is a minor pain is actually a serious problem. He has excellent fine motor skills and is able to work on very small objects, but he's lucky if he can touch a thrown object with his hands, let alone catch it, despite his gross motor skills being otherwise fine. He has a bit under a year of training in kung fu, but he only ever became reasonably competent with one move, a deflect/hold/retaliate combo that's he's never actually used in a real fight. That said, from seeing other students practice, watching movies, playing video games, and reading he does understand intellectually how to fight both armed and unarmed at a basic level, but he's never had the practical experience or the full training so he'll still need to work out how to do what he knows should be possible. Finally, he gets hot and sweaty easily; 70F/21C is tank-top-and-shorts weather for him, and at this temperature he'll start sweating quickly if he exerts himself.
Mentally Rob is intelligent and well-read, and can teach himself a lot with an example to follow or something to go on, though he learns faster with a good teacher at his side. His reading and research binges have left him with basic understanding of a lot of subjects but he hasn't focused on very many, leaving him with a broad but shallow knowledge base. As with the fighting example above, he knows how to do many things on a theoretical level - wiring a house, skinning a deer, flying a plane, building a fire, and so many other things that it would be pointless to list them all - but has practical experience with only a few; he may understand how a nuclear reactor works, but he's by no means qualified to build or operate one. To put his knowledge into practice will require trial-and-error on his part. The areas that he has enough practical experience in to be able to complete something on his own are baking, computers (both repairing and programming), gardening, sewing, and woodworking. He's also a gamer and has knowledge of several franchises, most notably Minecraft, Warcraft, and Magic: the Gathering.
As for what items he will have on him when he arrives, he was on his way to a day of card and tabletop gaming and is carrying a backpack of various games and game accessories, with a handful of more practical items but nothing even remotely game-breaking.
Entry: He'll make his way to the Bastion on his own, having a stroke of good luck in not encountering any monsters and even finding one shard, but will initially be operating under the assumption that this is a pretty standard "average Joe from Earth gets transported to another world" story made real. Whoops.
Age: Over 18
Contact:
Other characters: None
Character name: Rob Edwards (Full name: Robin Liam Edwards)
OC info: Rob's world is a near-duplicate of our world in the early 21st century, apparently devoid of any and all supernatural phenomena, hyper-advanced ancient civilizations, or secret orders with plans of world domination. It's a world for slice-of-life, romance, and mystery stories, not kaijuu battles, giant robots, or magical girls, and children's card games never have and never will decide the fate of humanity here. It's a perfectly ordinary world aside from one difference; it's about to be destroyed by the Calamity.
The specific region that Rob's from is southern Ontario, Canada, in one of the small cities within a few hours of Toronto. While his hometown is technically a city, it lacks many of the features and variety that most people would expect an actual city to have and thus has limited options and opportunities compared to larger cities.
To prevent fourth-wall breaking for anyone who doesn't want it, certain media franchises may not exist in the same forms in Rob's world as they do in ours.
Summary: Rob has never been an "average" child. He walked so early that he almost skipped crawling entirely, pestered his parents to teach him the alphabet before he started school, and would spend hours playing with lego if he was given the chance. He also had some significant problems with social interaction, having a hard time learning when people didn't want to play and not understand why hitting someone wasn't fun for them. This trend continued throughout his life; intellectually he was a step or two ahead of everyone else his age, but socially and emotionally he was a step behind what people expected him to be. He could talk with adults quite well and was generally thought well of by them, but other kids his age were a different story. As one might imagine, having to essentially rely on trial and error to learn what others would consider basic social interaction made gaining and retaining friends difficult, and more than once he found other kids no longer willing to be around him. Not being interested in sports and most other traditional male past-times didn't help either, and while he's gradually gotten better at socializing, by the time he was finished elementary school there were only two people he could consider friends.
Once Rob got to high school, his situation improved, but still wasn't perfect. He gained a few friends, and people who he couldn't consider friends but were more than just acquaintances, but he was hardly a social butterfly. University was a completely different environment, however; while his natural intelligence had gotten him through high school without a problem, the result of that was that he had never learned how to study properly and he failed most of his courses when they proved significantly harder than expected. Dejected, he returned home and got a part-time job while he tried to decide what to do next. At the time of the Calamity he was 25 and still hadn't figured out what to do with himself.
Even with people he knows well, Rob is fairly reserved. He doesn't go out of his way to give people information about himself and will usually respond to questions about the state of his life with generic statements, regardless of the reality. That's not to say that he never talks about himself, but he tends to keep his emotional distance from people. He's terrible at small talk and idle chit-chat, leaving a lot of awkward silences when he can't figure out how to continue the conversation, and he has trouble reading subtleties of people's behavior to the point of occasionally misinterpreting the encounter as a whole. Human behavior in general can be confusing for him as he doesn't have the level of intuitive understanding of people's motivations that the average person does, instead often needing to work out such things intellectually. In conversations he defaults to being literal-minded if he doesn't pause and mentally double-check that he's interpreting the words he's hearing right. He finds eye contact distressing (even with himself in a mirror) and usually fakes it by looking at a person's mouth instead, having worked out how to do so in a way that most people never notice.
Rob's strongly introverted, and while he's by no means opposed to interacting with other people he needs time alone to "recharge" after most interactions. People who are loud and overly-friendly annoy him, and a stranger walking up to him with friendly introductions and attempts at starting up a conversation causes him to become awkward and uncomfortable. He's not unfriendly, especially once he's spoken with someone a few times, but unexpected interactions with others give him trouble and cause him to pull back, which can easily be mistaken for unfriendliness or rudeness. He has a low voice, to the point of frequently being hard to hear, which means that conversations with loud and talkative people often result in him being unable to get a word in edgewise. With conscious effort he can raise his voice to a level that's easily heard, but if he doesn't get it just right he sounds like he's angry, which leads to even worse problems and considerable frustration on his part.
If one can get him talking and can get past his general awkwardness with people, they'll find that Rob's friendly and generally kind. Even when he's angry with someone he makes a point of not saying things that he knows will hurt them deeply, focusing on what the person does that angers him rather than using their insecurities against them. He's more likely to deal with someone he doesn't like by following the old "if you have nothing nice to say then don't say anything at all" advice and just ignore them when they try to talk to him than he is to escalate the situation, though if he's angry, frustrated, or stressed enough (as he's more likely to be post-Calamity) he can and will move on to yelling matches or beyond if he can't stop himself in time. If the conversation moves into an area that he has particular interest in he can talk at length about the subject and has to stop himself from rambling on about every little thing he knows on the topic. He gets some enjoyment out of seeing how people react to him saying or doing unexpected things, but at the same time he doesn't like being the center of attention for more than a few people at once, so how intentionally unexpected he is gets moderated somewhat.
Rob doesn't deal with stress particularly well, bottling it up inside until he either explodes or breaks down and goes off to cry somewhere. Neither of these actually release enough stress to solve the problem, just to keep him functioning. The amount of stress he constantly feels requires him to put most of his mental energy into not breaking down, so any extra burdens, even minor ones, provoke far more stress and stronger reactions than they should. In the interim, he distances himself from his own life by finding ways to distract himself, most often by fantasizing and creating worlds in his mind or working out ideas for various things (in Bastion, this will involve a lot of working out what he'll exchange his shards for well in advance of him actually doing so). Along with stress (and often caused by it), Rob has a lot of pent-up aggression that he has even fewer ways to release. He mostly deals with it by fantasizing about what he'd like to do to the object of his ire, but he puts a lot of effort into suppressing his anger, being terrified of hurting someone if he were to let himself go since his vengeance fantasies tend towards the violent.
His opinion of himself is generally pretty low. He doesn't think that he's a particularly good person and can see his flaws more easily than his virtues. He dwells on his failures excessively and dismisses his successes as not being worth much, in turn struggling with depression and a lack of drive that makes it even harder for him to change his situation or accomplish anything that he feels is worthwhile. Despite how he feels, he's not as bad a person as he thinks he is. He's honest and honorable, not promising things that he isn't at least 100% sure that he can deliver and feeling bad if circumstances beyond his control or ability to anticipate prevent him from following through. The times when he's dishonest are times when he doesn't want to offend, hurt, or worry other people, and he's almost always willing to listen to others' problems despite how easily he can be drained by dealing with their burdens as well as his own. He'll offer up words that usually make people feel better, but he hates doing so because to him the words are just meaningless platitudes and he isn't actually solving the problems the person has.
Rob can get extremely focused on activities that he's interested in, but usually lacks focus or attention on most other activities. What he's interested in can change quite rapidly; he gets hyper-focused on certain topics and goes on "research binges" about them for a time before moving on to something else. Just because he's interested in something though, doesn't necessarily mean that he prioritizes it; his habit of procrastinating often extends to putting off things that he wants to do in favor of other unrelated things. He continually forms habits and patterns of behavior as he goes through life, which even he will admit are often arbitrary. For example, when preparing to make a particular dish he'll place the utensils he needs in specific locations every time. Similarly, frequenting a particular restaurant will eventually result in him sitting at a usual table or seat, with the other tables in a hierarchy that determines which one he'll sit at if his usual table is occupied. This behavior is unintentional and he's rarely aware of the habit developing until it's been fully formed, at which point he can intentionally violate his normal patterns if he's paying attention but will usually not think to do so. When it comes to his workspace or his private space, he can be very territorial about it; it's his and no one else should be interfering with it. While circumstances often prevent him from acting on that feeling - he can't exactly kick customers or coworkers out of the area he's working in, for example - he'll silently gripe about it.
His basic philosophy on life is fairly straightforward; treat others as you want to be treated and do whatever you want so long as you don't harm someone else. Only human, he doesn't always follow through on this and hates himself for it afterward. That other people fail to follow such basic concepts, that the society he lives in seems like it's actively doing the opposite of his beliefs, and general human irrationality are all the source of continual frustration for him. He despises double standards and hates that he feels the weight of others' expectations so strongly that he frequently has trouble taking actions because of the reactions he's likely to get. He's cynical about people but still has a spark of hope that humanity as a whole can change for the better. He likes the idea of a simpler world where a person can just go out with a bow and a knife and live without having to worry about all of the extra details that civilization seems to require, but he's still a child of the 20th and 21st centuries and enjoys the fruits of modern civilization, not to mention that he knows that he doesn't (yet) have the ability to live in that kind of world.
Rob's ultimate goal is to be happy, able to wake up every morning and be content with his life despite whatever flaws it might have. Leading to that, he wants to be closer to his idea of a "real man": strong, courageous, honorable, and able to take care of himself and others.
Powers: Rob has no supernatural abilities.
Physically he's not especially strong, fast, or agile most of the time. His full strength and speed can only be brought out in bursts, which tire him out quickly; he's a sprinter (and surprises most people by how fast he can actually run), not a long-distance runner. When operating at his baseline strength and speed his endurance is fairly high, and he can walk or perform medium manual labor for hours without needing extended breaks. He has a high tolerance for pain, especially continual pain, and though he'll still flinch if he stubs his toe or cuts himself he can push through it, to the point of injuring himself further if he doesn't realize that what to him is a minor pain is actually a serious problem. He has excellent fine motor skills and is able to work on very small objects, but he's lucky if he can touch a thrown object with his hands, let alone catch it, despite his gross motor skills being otherwise fine. He has a bit under a year of training in kung fu, but he only ever became reasonably competent with one move, a deflect/hold/retaliate combo that's he's never actually used in a real fight. That said, from seeing other students practice, watching movies, playing video games, and reading he does understand intellectually how to fight both armed and unarmed at a basic level, but he's never had the practical experience or the full training so he'll still need to work out how to do what he knows should be possible. Finally, he gets hot and sweaty easily; 70F/21C is tank-top-and-shorts weather for him, and at this temperature he'll start sweating quickly if he exerts himself.
Mentally Rob is intelligent and well-read, and can teach himself a lot with an example to follow or something to go on, though he learns faster with a good teacher at his side. His reading and research binges have left him with basic understanding of a lot of subjects but he hasn't focused on very many, leaving him with a broad but shallow knowledge base. As with the fighting example above, he knows how to do many things on a theoretical level - wiring a house, skinning a deer, flying a plane, building a fire, and so many other things that it would be pointless to list them all - but has practical experience with only a few; he may understand how a nuclear reactor works, but he's by no means qualified to build or operate one. To put his knowledge into practice will require trial-and-error on his part. The areas that he has enough practical experience in to be able to complete something on his own are baking, computers (both repairing and programming), gardening, sewing, and woodworking. He's also a gamer and has knowledge of several franchises, most notably Minecraft, Warcraft, and Magic: the Gathering.
As for what items he will have on him when he arrives, he was on his way to a day of card and tabletop gaming and is carrying a backpack of various games and game accessories, with a handful of more practical items but nothing even remotely game-breaking.
Entry: He'll make his way to the Bastion on his own, having a stroke of good luck in not encountering any monsters and even finding one shard, but will initially be operating under the assumption that this is a pretty standard "average Joe from Earth gets transported to another world" story made real. Whoops.
