[hider=Preacherman Richie] [center][h2][color=olive]Richard Ezekiel "Preacherman" Bell[/color][/h2] [img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/848470809499533334/1199797881624854618/bb08c421124671.png?ex=65c3d9da&is=65b164da&hm=0a585ffade26faebba2d2d33e45c241eaf0ac2d78da890163466680ea6e36c47&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=330&height=430[/img] "This ain't the End. I'll tell you when it's the End, buddy, don't you worry." [color=olive]Sex, Age, Orientation:[/color] Male, 37, Straight [color=olive]Height and Weight:[/color] At a ludicrous 6'6, Richie has spent all his life feeling like a giant amongst dwarves. You add to that the strange fact that he's managed to stay somewhat overweight during the apocalypse, and he comes in tipping the scales at 265 pounds. [/center] [color=olive]Appearance:[/color] Not one for grooming or for blending in, Richie has a brutalist red beard so thick that it makes you think of a brick. His red complexion and fit-fat physique also put you in the mind of a brick. "Brick-like," in general, is the best description of Richie one can have. The second best description is "A basement-dweller that robbed a homeless man and exclusively stole his clothes." His oddly dainty-looking glasses are held together by duct-tape and kept tight by women's hair bands wrapped around the joints. [color=olive]Life Before the End:[/color] Richie was a Troubled Child. That was the term used for him, by relatives and neighbors, and by his parent's fellow church-goers. It had made itself known by the time he was old enough to walk. It was the recurring theme of his life that there was "something wrong with that boy." He couldn't keep up in school, even with the simplest concepts. And there was the way he couldn't control his emotions: his sudden, flaming red outbursts of panic and rage. He kept his parents in a state of constant distress over his struggling grades on the one hand and over his actions on the other. When he was in pre-school and kindergarten, they were told at least once a month that he had hit another student, cornered them and kept shoving them against the wall- like a game. His parents tried talking to their son so many times about why, but they could get nothing out of him. He would just stare at his shoes and give them simple, childish answers. "Because," he'd say, or "I dunno," or "I was mad." When he was in middle school, he bit another student who said something mean to a girl Richie had a crush on. Not hit him, [i]bit[/i] him. He clamped on to the skin of the poor kid's arm in pottery class and drew blood like a bulldog. When he was in high school, another student sat in "his seat" in algebra class- a class he was perpetually failing- and, when they wouldn't move, Richie picked up his pencil and stabbed him in the hand. It wasn't sharp enough to cut deep, but he threw enough force into it to repaint the desk red. The only escape was church. That had been the idea of his grandmother- an ancient Pentecostal woman, full of holy fire and good will. She knew her dear grandson was struggling, and she knew what the solution was. She decreed that he would start coming with her to church. There was no arguing with her: she was a Southern church lady of the old style, somehow both soft-spoken as a dove and with a iron will like all the holy men in the Good Book. She got her way. That ended up being what saved young Richie. The church provided what other outlets failed to- a sense of purpose- and it never erased his problems, but it gave him a motivation to try. And the church his grandmother liked was really quiet. It wasn't like the overwhelming, loud halls of school or the aisle of Wal-Mart that put him on edge. It was easy to exist there; he didn't panic the same. He loved it. When he started talking around the age of nineteen or twenty about being a pastor, his family wasn't surprised, but they [i]were[/i] very cautious. The young man Richie been leveling-out for years, learning to reign-in his internal emotional tornado and keep himself wearing a mask of normality. He still came off a little slower on the uptake than other people, if you studied him closely- a little vacant in the eyes. His family's feelings at the thought of Richie behind a pulpit were deeply mixed. Except for those of his grandmother, of course, that old prophetess that was always the one member of the Bell family who swore she could see something in him. She was the force who pushed him onward, helping him get into Bible College and nearly covered the cost of tuition. He sold plasma and worked part-time to make up the rest. Graduating Bible College, he spent years going through the usual motions of working with older preachers as their youth pastor, as someone who would cross-check their sermons ahead of Sunday, as an occasional fill-in when they were sick, and he'd work in factories and warehouses to make ends meet all the while. It was a hard life for him. The more stressed he was, the harder it was to control the angry outbursts that still plagued him. They succeeded in ending every relationship he began. There would be no Pastor's Wife for Richie Bell. When finally managed to gather enough experience and enough support to break away and start his own church at the age of thirty- the same age Jesus began His ministry, his grandmother would remind you- the Olive Plague came knocking on the door. [color=olive]Life Since the End:[/color] He felt powerless to stop it. The Plague swept through Richie's new congregation, fifty our so souls that had- in his mind- put their faith in him to be their spiritual covering. They had come for his ferocious and thundering sermons, his shouted words of hellfire and brimstone that could make you swear you saw Heaven and Hades both right before your eyes. Richie was known as a loud and impassioned preacher. But soon they were asking him for prayers over their health. In the early days of the Plague, he prayed for the Olive to pass over his church. "[i]No evil shall befall you, nor shall any plague come near your dwelling[/i]." In the midst of the pandemic, as it tore on through the Southeast like a dry fire and came to his flock, he had to switch to praying that they would survive it. "[i]A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; But it shall not come near you[/i]." When the Plague dragged on for months within those souls suffering from it and neither left them nor killed them quickly, he finally prayed that the infected could just have a swift death. "[i]Father, into your hands I commend my spirit[/i]." When every prayer seemed unanswered, all his pleas thrown up into Heaven never coming back down, something in Richie broke a little bit. There were soon no souls left in his church because there were no souls left virtually anywhere. In this world of corpses and quiet, Richie went wandering alone, and to be alone for a man with his history of emotional and mental trouble is certain to cause back-sliding. Somewhere in the silent black he lost his mask of rational and sanity, walking empty Bluffton roads by himself and talking aloud to God. He doesn't know exactly when he started to cry to himself, or when he decided it was a reasonable action to shout at stray dogs and flocks of birds. He still preached, is the funny part. His wanderings took him outside of Bluffton, to other surviving settlements. Whenever he'd come upon the sight of a human being still alive in the distance, Richie would know what to do: he'd start up a sermon, preaching to them exactly as if they were part of the congregation he lost when the Plague came through, and he would preach it to its conclusion even if they walked away. They didn't always walk away. It was the local Dixie settlements who gave Richie the nickname "Preacherman." He became welcome at their tables. Once, he even met Sammie Hunter himself, out near Atlanta. He preached for him a sermon on pride. Richie's memory is faulty, these days. He doesn't remember exactly when or why he decided to stay with the Jonesgroup. Maybe because it was getting too hard to find food on his own. But more probably, it was because they are but a block away from the church his grandmother took him to as a child, the one that salvaged his mind. For a time. [color=olive]Personality:[/color] Unstable, mostly. Unpredictable. There are times when Richie seems to feel nothing at all, dead-eyed and cooler than the water under a frozen lake. There are many more times when he is made out of fire and brimstone, screaming and bellowing, angry at something or else passionate about something different; he gets loud. At night, late at night, he'll be seen wandering around the grounds lost in his own thought, staring at the stars. He sobs and cries out to God alone in the church where he thinks nobody can hear. How he acts towards others, how he comes off, it'll depend on what mood he's in. Your first impression of him is essentially randomized. But, as he's been with the Jonesgroup for some two years now, most everyone's had enough experiences with him to learn the final lesson: that Preacherman Richie is a Molotov cocktail of feelings, and you never know what you'll get. He is intensely tempestuous. Somewhere down inside himself, there is the soul of a very gentle person. [color=olive]Spark:[/color] Faith. Richie has a strange feeling inside himself, resting at the bottom of his heart, which he cannot shake. The feeling that he was spared for a reason. An innate knowledge that it's not an accident he still breathes. It's what makes him open his eyes every day. [color=olive]Skills:[/color] Preaching! But that's a given. Outside of his passion, Richie has no one specific skill. His greatest attribute is simply his power and his attitude. He is strong, relentless. He is capable of working from sun up to sun down, lifting up things made of metal or concrete and toting them to-and-fro across the Jones property without ever complaining. People are always comically astonished as his strength when they see him working. [color=olive]Role:[/color] Preaching! That's his official role, at least. Every Sunday morning, he leads himself and a small group of others over to the First Assembly of God Bluffton, where he delivers a fiery and thundering sermon. Emotional and mental issues aside, Richie is still a very skilled, captivating preacher, who can make a clear point and hold an audience purely by instinct. He repeats the ritual again on Wednesday evening. He also leads a prayer at the start of every day (between breakfast and lunch), and hosts a Bible study on Friday. Bibles are provided. He raided a bookstore. Here again, he shows a way of leaping over the usual bounds of his mental functioning and is surprisingly insightful about finding new interpretations to scripture. But unofficially, he's also present for essentially any manual labor the Jonesgroup does. Tilling soil, putting up fencing, repairing walls with Gorilla Glue and old wood. He's also known for showing up unannounced to other's work areas and offering to help with whatever they need done. [color=olive]Tools:[/color] Remington 870: Quick, imagine a shotgun! Congratulations, you just imagined the Remington 870. It's the classic shotgun, and it was an easy find digging through pawn shops after the End. A shotgun is Richie's weapon because, much like himself when he's in a fight, it is loud, messy and unconcerned with who exactly it hits. Nelson's Study Bible, NKJV: A Bible full of annotations, explanations and footnotes running along the bottom of the page, explaining the history and context of the ancient Bible verses. (Very useful for not getting confused by the old language.) Swiss Army Knife: Pocket knife, bottle opener, can opener, screwdriver, scissors... 2006 Chevy Colorado, Orange: Working, but just barely. It's an old pick-up that squeals in pain whenever you press on the brakes and shutters with misery whenever it idles. But, for now, it moves. The gas tank is half-full and unless you can promise you've got something to fill the tank with, Richie will not take you anywhere with it. It's only for events that constitute an "emergency," as defined by the eclectic mind of Richard E. Bell. Various Workshop Tools: Stored on the back of the Chevy in aluminum chests, you've got wrenches, screwdrivers, jumper cables, hex screws, actual screws, a sledgehammer splattered with red stains in the shade of don't-ask-about-it, and more... [hider=Optional: Extra Details] [center][color=olive]What They Most Want:[/color] [color=olive]If They Had a DnD Alignment, It Would Be:[/color] Chaotic Neutral [color=olive]Do They Follow Their Heart or Their Mind?:[/color] Heart [color=olive]What animal are they most like?:[/color] A rabid dog. A creature that could've been gentle, but has been twisted by affliction into something uncontrollable and dangerous. [color=olive]Worst Fear:[/color] In his mind, what he considers to be his worst fear is Hell. But within his heart, buried so deep that even he himself does not realize it, his worst fear is something else: that he is really insane. [color=olive]Favorite Color:[/color] [color=ed1c24]Emotion Red[/color]. [color=olive]Favorite Song:[/color] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoIAcom2zAk [color=olive]How They Dress:[/color] Imagine one of those "The End is Near!" guys living through the apocalypse but deciding that he wanted to keep his quintessential style of dress intact. And then imagine he had a severe compulsive episode and had to draw a cross on every thing he owned. That is, verbatim, what happened to Richie. [color=olive]Thing they most miss about the world before the End:[/color] Fast food. [/center] [/hider] [/hider]