General History, Personality, and Skills

[theroadremains]

Character name: Casey, Son of John. He refers to himself as the son of John. Other people mostly just call him 'boy'. No one ever asked him his name and he only remembers his father calling him 'son'. His name has since been almost completely forgotten.
Character type: Original Character
Age: 21
PB: Drew Roy





HISTORY:

The eruption of super-volcanoes across the Earth filled the skies of the world Casey comes from with ash before he was born. His mother had been pregnant with him before what would later be called an extinction-level event, and he was born on the road while his parents were still trying to learn how to survive in the dying world.

By the time he was five, his mother had died. She had been too distraught at the state of the world and too depressed to keep going and gave up, leaving John to care for the boy on his own in a desolate gray world. Ash covered the land and filled the skies, coating the air with particles that threatened to choke out the life that was left and plunging the Earth into a cold and unending winter without the sun's light to warm it.

Their lives were rough on the road. They could only travel a little at a time, and always had to keep covered to protect their lungs from the thick ash. John taught his son to follow the roads, because they were the only sure, safe ground. The ash coating the grass, swamps, lakes and forests made it difficult to spot dangers, traps, and weak spots on the ground.

The road they followed was a highway that would eventually lead them to a dock where many ships were meant to be. The ocean, John believed, would lead them to safety from other survivors, marauders, cannibals, and the ash covered landscape as he believed other continents might not yet suffer the same fate.

Their travel was slow and sporadic. The air kept them from travelling long distances at a time, and John frequently grew sick from exposure to too much of the ash in the early years before he had learned to keep his face covered. The boy was also young and could not walk for long without a rest.

Sometimes they stumbled across old stores or bunkers that still had food, and they would hide and lay low for a time to give them both time to recover. They would linger until food became scarce or other people entered the area, and then they would quietly pack some rations into their bags and wheelbarrow and continue onward.

John's sickness only continued to worsen over the years that they traveled the road together, attempting to reach the ocean. During the two years of their slow and often interrupted road trip, John imparted as much knowledge to his son as he could. Before he would sleep, John would make him recite the words he had given his son to live by. Follow the road, keep moving, never stop. Be good to the world that is good to you. He impressed on his son both the need for humans to help one another, and the danger that other people presented to him. He was never to trust, but always be ready to help. The lessons were impounded by actions over those two years. Encounters with violent marauders and cannibals, passing trades with wandering families and the occasional but always brief stays in survival camps when they found them.

John taught him to never stay more than three days, never take more than they needed, and always leave before they wore out their welcome. He taught his son how to use a gun, and put him to work fixing anything they found, teaching him how different things worked and went together.

By the time they reached the ocean, John was too sick to keep going and too weak to fight. They were both nearly killed when they were ambushed by a crazed, half starved man, and John was shot. The wound wasn't fatal, but John was weak and already dying, and the blood loss and injury would bring about his end. He told his son that both his mother and John could talk to him in prayer after he was gone, and to never forget that they were the Good Guys.

Though they had made it to the ocean, John did not make it long enough to teach his son about the boats, or where to go. He died on the same road they had been travelling for so long. The boy was stricken by the death of his father, and remained at the dead man's side for days before another struggling family found and took pity on him. The elder gentleman convinced the young boy to come with him only after managing to assure him that they were 'good' and would not hurt anyone.

The family was a man, a woman, and their teenage son. For a year the boy traveled with them in much the same way he had with his father. He rarely spoke, but he would fix things for the family and help by climbing or crawling through areas they could not reach. Like with John the family kept moving, until they found a survival camp that seemed promising. It was well armed and offered a strong defense against marauders and cannibals. The nine year old boy was reluctant and concerned by the idea, but didn't protest despite his father's warning mantra still in the back of his mind.

For a couple months life was okay. Rations were thin and tensions were high but people felt safe. A shift in the chain of command in the camp changed everything, however, when the rations finally ran out. The people with the guns took control, and began deciding who got to live and who would die. Chaos and panic took over the survivor camp, and during the in-fighting more than half of the camp died.

Terrified and small, he managed to slip the fences, unnoticed except by an abandoned dog that followed him in hopes of getting scraps. He ran and never looked back.

After that, life became repetitive for the boy. He and the dog moved constantly from place to place, searching out scraps and supplies and sleeping in well hidden alcoves. Whenever they found a camp the boy would work for rations for three days, and try and learn every new skill he could find offered. As soon as the third day ended, he would take the dog and slip away again with his rations before the sun came up again.

As he grew older he learned how to watch people before he approached. He learned how to ask to be taught new skills and how to barter his skills for food. He learned to fight and to defend himself and anyone being preyed on or hurt. He learned how to survive and he became a natural at it, living his life on three simple rules. Be good to the world that is good to you, follow the road, and never stop moving.

His interactions with other survivors were always short and reserved, giving the appearance of a soft spoken and stoic young man. That appearance was one that he had crafted through years of travelling alone and stepping lightly around strangers, never wanting to risk angering or turning them against him in the short time he spent around other people.

For six months he had been pushing the dog around in a wheelbarrow despite the extra energy it wasted and the rations he had to give up to keep Dog fed. Dog had saved his life many times and never left his side. Other than the dog, there was no one and nothing for him to miss. Even his father was just a set of moral values, stories, a few distant cloudy memories and a mantra. The dog was the most solid and present constant besides hunger, thirst and exhaustion in his long and painful journey.

During one of his gathering runs Casey left his injured Dog behind in a wheelbarrow in the relative safety of a building shell. When he returned with supplies Dog was gone. A bad storm struck that night, and when Casey emerged to search for Dog, any tracks or signs of him had been buried under dark grey ice and snow. He wasted a week in a barren outpost with dangerously dwindling supplies searching for Dog, but eventually his supplies ran too thin and his energy too low for him to keep looking.

With the voice still trapped in his head, Casey pressed on, leaving the wheelbarrow and half of his food supplies behind.

Personality:

As a survivor and a loner, much of Casey's personality is hidden below the surface rather than in the open for people to see. His outer facade was carefully crafted over the years to allow him to present himself as calm, stoic and nonthreatening individual. He kept his head down and his interactions polite to keep from angering the wrong people. He knew well how unpredictable a person could be; and how easily a nice, friendly chat could flip on its head and end with a knife at his throat.

Casey's life has been guided and shaped by his father's moral code. The man had instilled in his son a sense of justice and duty through stories and his unending mantra to live by, and for the most part Casey adapted his life to those ideals the best that he could.

John wanted him to be the good in the world. He wanted to keep his son from becoming as harsh and cold as the landscape around them in the hopes that by doing so he and Casey could help keep the world from becoming nothing but darkness. John filled his head with stories of great protectors who stood up for the weak and abused and pushed the bad out of the world with the light of their actions.

The logical, survival-based part of his brain knows he should keep his head down, get what he needs from his interactions with people and move on before they can hurt him, betray him, or become important to him. The teachings of his father tell him to protect and defend those in need of his help. His natural inclination to empathy has been one of the greatest threats to his survival in the frozen wastelands of his world. The conflict between his own survival instincts, his natural empathy toward others, and the teachings of his father have caused him a lot of problems over the course of his short life. Casey's empathy and his bleeding heart often threatened to kill him with the pain and betrayal he encountered along the road.

This conflict between survival, expectations and empathy molded Casey into an unusual opportunist. He found a balance over the years that allowed him to survive. Losing his father and the family that had taken him in had nearly broken him as a boy and he had only recovered thanks to his canine companion, his active imagination, and his adherence to the duties his father bestowed on him. Because of this he limited his interactions with people because he feared what getting to know them would do to his ability to survive.

He made a code for himself of his father's teachings. If a person was in danger from another who was acting violently toward them there were two parameters: If the attacker was doing so in defense of themselves or someone else, he would not interfere. If they were attacking for any other reason, he would defend the person being attacked as long as he could feasibly stand a chance of surviving.

Too aware of the dangers around him, Casey's soft outer demeanor hides a much more volatile internal personality. Above anything else Casey is set off by undue violence toward others. Anyone who lifted a hand to hurt someone outside of defending themselves or others could find Casey between them and their target. His rash reactions in the heat of the moment did not always allow him to see the situation clearly. More than once this instinctive reaction put him in danger and caused substantial injuries or a need for his dog to come to his rescue.

He was easily swayed into sacrificing his safety and rations to help people he saw as victims of what his father had instilled in him were the 'bad guys'. He never believed himself to be a good guy but he believed that by upholding his father's values he could keep that light his father had tried to put back in the world alive. He focused on the rules his father laid out for him, and defended those he thought were unjustly in trouble. Obviously such opinions were subjective, but he did his best.

For all the horrors he had seen and lived through, Casey's optimism survived remarkably well. By no means a blind optimist, Casey's brand of optimism was fueled by a persistent hope and a stubborn belief that some day the world and the people in it would start to be less treacherous and violent. He held on to the positive interactions and the little victories, burying down his fears and concerns, but never discarding the memories of the threats he had been exposed to.

His optimism was reserved for the future, while the present was filled with a different pair of survival-based emotions. Distrust and wariness. Casey held on to the belief that light would come back to the world and bring with it the Earth from his father's stories, but until that time came he cultivated his unease into a self-preservation system. He never allowed himself to fully trust anyone he met, which was only aided by his refusal to get to know them or learn their names. To survive he had to believe that everyone potentially wanted to kill him for what he had, or out of fear he would do the same.

When it came to people, he asked only to trade for skills or supplies. He let go of the names and personal stories people shared with him the moment he left, choosing only to remember the lessons and skills he acquired. He never lingered long enough to be known or to know anyone, and in doing so he believed he saved himself and others from the risk of hurting over whatever happened in the future. He was antisocial at best and actively avoided forming emotional bonds with others, too afraid to lose them once formed or hurt someone when he inevitably left and moved on.

His mind is sharp and sarcastic, filled with an inner monologue of imaginary and sardonic stories and conversations that let him create the temporary illusion of friends among the camps and his dog. The exercise helped to keep him relatively sane over the years of isolation. He assigned personalities to people rather than getting to know their actual ones so he could carry those personalities on to the next camp, keeping his imaginary acquaintances alive and present in his nomadic life. He also provided a sharp and pessimistic voice to Dog, his constant companion, as they traveled. Casey let Dog be the voice for his fears, his doubts, his uncertainties and his anger. In response, he would reply to the dog with optimism, jokes and banter that the dog likely never understood beyond the comfort of his reassuring and playful tones. He grew unfamiliar and uncomfortable with having to have two-sided conversations the more he became used to playing the role of both sides.

While the exercise helped him to keep going, it also manifested over time as a disassociated split in his mind between the two trains of thought. The optimistic, determined and willful side was represented by the conscious part of his mind while the representation of his major paranoia, negativity and pessimism was sequestered to the dog.

By necessity, Casey kept an optimistic and hungry mind. He craved knowledge and hope more than the food that sustained his life. He would fight for it the way most people in his world would only do for food or water. Skills make him useful, being useful guaranteed him a certain level of survivability, which in turn offered him more opportunities to learn.

Likewise he took a passionate enthusiasm in teaching his skills to others and considered it an important part of ensuring the future survival of the human race. Anything he knew that might help someone survive in the future was worth passing on to someone else in exchange for learning something new.

Casey comes from a world where the sky, the land, and the sea are all so full of ash that the world itself feels grey and devoid of life or color. The colors that do exist are muted by the choked out light from the sun. Life, food, even breathing is a constant struggle. Survival means never stopping and never getting caught in the open by the 'bad' guys. Because of all he has seen and endured a part of Casey will always feel restless at the notion of remaining in one place. He will always worry that the people around him will turn on him or each other and become cannibals or killers. It is only due to his stubborn insistence the Casey holds on so desperately to those little flickers of hope and optimism.

He has held onto this by channeling his darkest thoughts, fears and emotions into Dog's voice in his head, and in the process developed a dark and sarcastic sense of humor. While it has mostly been kept to himself over the years, that gallows humor is waiting under the surface to emerge the more accustomed he grows to talking to others.

He has a sharp but thin vocabulary, lacking in a large number of words that no longer had place or reason in his world. He is very intelligent when it comes to survival and how to interact around people by necessity, but he lacks education. He can barely read or write due to never remaining in one place long enough to learn more than a few handfuls of words found on cans and boxes. Some colors, history, math, science and the names of many types of food and animals are beyond him.

Abilities and Skills

Negotiation - If there is one thing he has learned well, it is how to barter for food, supplies, and life (both his own and others). He will usually try to talk his way out of a situation before he resorts to fighting.
Combat - He managed to barter for weapons training from various militant camp members in the use of a variety of small arms guns, a bow, and daggers. He has quick reflexes and an inventive fighting style that revolves around reacting to and attempting to throw off his opponent's own style defensively rather than offensively. He learns by observing, and he will always try to buy time dodging in a fight to try and find a weakness. He's strong but prefers using his opponents style, size and footing against them. He is not above taking cheap shots if stakes are high, but he will never deal a killing blow unless he is given no other choice, preferring to incapacitate people and make a run for it.
Physical Strength - Physical labor is one of the strongest currencies next to food and water in his world. This paired with his constant nomadic life through a dangerous land means that while Casey is thin, what mass he does have is mostly muscle.
Handy - He's good with his hands. If he has the chance to take something mechanical apart he can usually figure out how to put it back together. Most of his handiness skills lay in woodworking and building repair/maintenance: helping to both construct and keep structures solid. He has occasionally tinkered with and fixed small handheld electronics such as generators, clocks and radios, but his skills are more toward working with wood and metal than technology.
Survival - He has been on his own from the age of nine, and knows how to find food in a desolate wasteland, how to make masks to allow breathing in an ash filled world, how to filter water and reduce the acidity of it, and how long a person or dog can go between meals of set sizes and content before hunger or thirst becomes too dangerous of a risk and weakness to survive.
Hardy - His life has been an active one of constant movement and protecting himself. He knows how to patch up his wounds, how to protect himself from sickness, how to try and combat it where possible through means of rest and specific foods or medicines, and how to patch up injuries or set broken bones in both humans and some animals.
Empathy - His determination to follow his father's teachings and be one of the Good Guys has forced him to hold onto his heart. Although he does his best never to get to know other survivors, he never forgets that they are people with their own pain and struggles and pasts. He treats everyone he meets with a level of respect and hope that they are also one of the 'good guys'. Whenever he finds food to spare he shares his rations with others, and he reaches out to those he comes across in trouble, even going so far as to try and save other survivors from marauders or cannibals if there is a chance he can do so. He cares about people, and he wants to make the world a better place by being better to it.
Musician - One of his treasured skills acquired along his endless journey is the ability to play the harmonica. He has an old rusty silver harmonica he found as a boy that he uses to attempt to bring some cheer to long, cold, dark nights.