Name: Charlie Cote

Age: 26

Gender: Male

Appearance: 
[img]https://ak3.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/17974663/thumb/6.jpg?i10c=img.resize(height:160)[/img]

History:
Charlie was born in a rural area of Ontario, Canada, the second of five children. His family was never rich, but they didn’t struggle financially  - even so, there was never much question of what Charlie and his two brothers would do with their lives. They were born in a lumber town, and theirs was a lumber family, and while modern lumberjacking involved a lot less being burly and swinging a heavy axe around, it was still the family calling. Charlie and his brothers worked with their father from the moment they graduated senior high, never traveling far from home, never too concerned with the affairs of the world. It was a stark life, but a decent one, but deep down he wondered if this was all his life would ever be.

Unfortunately for the human race, it wasn’t. Charlie’s first encounter with the End War was seeing an arrow dart out of the darkness and impale his father by the throat moments before Fey began leaping out of the woods and cutting the entire lumber camp to bloody ribbons. Charlie and his brothers fought their way home, bundled their mother and younger sister into the truck, and drove to the nearest place they thought they could be safe from whatever was going on: Toronto.

Of course, when they arrived, all that awaited them was more madness and death, but not at the hands of the fey, elven monsters they had encountered – the population of the city was being systematically butchered by a horde of massive blue-skinned barbarians, like something out of a Norse myth. The Cote family ended up holed up in Fort York with a hundred other refugees, and the Siege of Toronto began. It was one of the greatest battles the world would never know about – for five days, a hundred refugees held out against a force of over four hundred Frost Giants, and felled at least half their number before they were wiped out. Charlie was the last survivor.
Since then, Charlie has traveled alone, staying away from population centers, helping others where he could but mostly keeping to himself. He’s journeying ever further south, trying to make it to Washington D.C, where the stories say the first of the artifacts can be found.

Personality:

Charlie is almost a Canadian stereotype. He’s jovial, good-natured, polite, and always ready to laugh or smile, even in the grimmest times. He loves people, but he’s quite accustomed to long periods of isolation. He’ll never hesitate to lend a helping hand to someone in need, which tends to result in his being very bad at making decisions ‘for the greater good’. Those who pay attention to the things he says may note that he seems to be undergoing a kind of denial, speaking of dead people in the present tense and referring to the things he’ll do ‘when we win’. As a corollary, he’s completely convinced by the story of the Prophets; he believes wholeheartedly that the world can and will be put right. He has no sympathy for monsters, however; though he approaches fighting them with the same lackadaisical attitude he applies to everything else, he will never hesitate to kill, either in self defense, to complete an objective, or just because he could.

Skills and Weaknesses: 

Strength – Charlie is in excellent shape, and has a great deal of muscle and brute strength. He can be relied upon to do most of the heavy lifting.

Melee combat – Since the End War started, he’s had a lot of practice chopping up monsters with that axe. He can’t go blow for blow with an elf lord or parry a frost giant’s club, but he’s fast on his feet, hits hard, and knows how to strike where it hurts.

Woodsmanship – Family camping and hunting trips have made Charlie an excellent woodsman. He can build a fire, pitch a tent, track an animal, or camouflage himself decently in the woods. Too bad going in the woods is a terrible, terrible idea.

Improvisation – Charlie has a knack for figuring out ways to use objects to hand in unexpected ways, mostly to kill things; some might say it’s because he’s too dumb to know why it shouldn’t work, but he’s not complaining.

Slow – Charlie has a high school level education, and even still he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed. He doesn’t always think things through, and his scientific, historic and mythological knowledge is basically nonexistent, save what he’s gotten from movies and such.

Marksmanship – Despite his father’s best efforts to teach him to use a hunting rifle, Charlie is a terrible, terrible shot, being very literally unable to hit a charging shoggoth at thirty meters.

Belongings: Tent, sleeping bag, five days worth of dried food, canteen full of water, flint and steel, rope, a few climbing spikes, binoculars, and his massive lumberjacking axe.

Color Code: [color=00aeef]00aeef[/color]

Other stuff: Nothing. Yet!

Sample Post: Charlie rubbed his hands together in front of his face, his breath steaming the frigid morning air. It wasn’t supposed to be this cold in the summer, but the temperature had continued to drop since the giants came. 

There was another thud at the brick wall in front of them, followed by the sound of snow sliding from the roof. Someone in the room let out a squeak. Gathered around him in this tiny warehouse were the last of Toronto’s defenders – five days ago, they had been over a hundred. Now they were twenty. Twenty warriors. Four days ago, they had lost the outer wall of the fort. Yesterday, they’d lost the inner one. This was the last safe place left, and the giants were at the door.

A hand clapped onto his back, and Charlie flinched. He turned to meet the cool gaze of his brother Jack, bundled up to keep the cold out, still clutching his climber’s pickaxe. “Eyes up, brother.” Jack said, and gave him a smile. They were all each other had left – their father had died as soon as all this madness had started, their mother and brother killed by frost giants, as had their younger sister Kari – but not before she’d begun telling some kind of story about the ‘End War’, and of a way all this could be fixed.

“Stay close together, everyone,” Anders, the de facto leader of the defenders, said, uncoiling a length of rope from his belt. “We’re gonna make these bastards pay for every drop of blood they spill.” Charlie opened his mouth. He wanted to make one last joke, say one last thing to his brother and to the men and women who’d become his comrades, make them laugh one more time before the end. But he was interrupted by the sound of crumbling masonry as a massive steel boot stove in the wall. Outside, the giants roared the great war chant that Charlie had long since become familiar with.

With a collective shout of their own, the defenders charged, advancing out through the wrecked wall to meet their attackers head-on. “Cote, catch!” Charlie heard Anders shout as a length of rope came flying at him. He caught it without breaking stride, and together, he and Anders pulled it taught as they ran on separate sides of the giant that had broken the wall, tripping him up and sending him tumbling to the ground with a surprised roar, where Nina scurried over and stabbed him in the eye with her carving knife. 

Though the smallest frost giant was twice the size of a human being and three times as strong, they paid for that strength with speed. Charlie dropped the rope and ducked out of the way as another giant advanced with an overhead swing, bringing his axe up to chop into the back of the giant’s fur-armored knee, hot blood spraying out into the frigid air. With a cry, the monster fell into a lunge, lowering its head just enough for Jack to grab onto it’s armor and begin to climb up it. Charlie chopped again, sawing at it’s thigh like it was a tree trunk, while his brother reached the top of the monster’s head and drove his pickaxe into its spine. A few feet away, Karl and Sam were taking on three of the giants between the two of them, ducking and dodging and scoring hits where they could with their makeshift spears. Anna was blasting away at the oncoming horde with her last machine gun, at least until an icicle took her in the chest. Behind him, Charlie heard the roar and felt the rush of heat that signaled that someone had lit their last Molotov.

They fought bravely, they fought well, they fought for what seemed like a hundred years, but they all knew they were delaying the inevitable. Charlie was panting, his face covered in blood, his axe gripped in white knuckles, searching for his next target, when the familiar hand grabbed him by the shoulder. “Charlie,” Jack shouted in his ear, “You need to go.”

“What? No,” Charlie turned, furrowing his brow as he took in the sight of his brother, bleeding from a massive gash in his side, frostbite spreading through his arm. Dimly, he was aware of the giants cutting through the last of his comrades, advancing on them like an avalanche. “No, I’m gonna stay with you.”

“We’re finished, Charlie,” Jack gasped, “But you don’t have to be. You can head south… find that thing Kari was talking about. Fix all this…”

“No. No, not without you…” But Jack did not wait to hear his argument. Instead, he roared like one of the massive berserkers he was facing, charging ahead to engage the closest giant in hand to hand, his pickaxe long since lost. He had no chance, but Charlie recognized the deed, had seen it many times in the last few days – his brother was buying him time.

His feet guided by some unfamiliar force, Charlie turned and ran, slipping away from the battlefield, out of the fort, and into the cold, lonely winter beyond.