Roman

Roman's Scrapbin

Arthurian Knights - 1100's Briton
Wild West Cowboys - 1800's American Frontier
Pirates - 1600's
Feudal Japan Samurais - 1400's Japan (Sengoku Era)
Invading Vikings - 800's Scandinavia
Native American Tribals - 1400's Americas
Roman legionnaires - 200's Europe
Ancient Egyptians - 1550-1300 Egypt (Eighteenth Dynasty)
Biblical Era (Old Testament) - ~2000BC
Biblical Era (New Testament) - ~10BC-100AD
Mayans - ~600AD Central America
City Noir - 1930's New York
Ancient Greece - ~500BC Greece
American Revolution - Late 1700's
American Civil War - 1860's
World War 2 - 1939-1945
French Revolution - 1790's France
Industrial Revolution - 1720's Britain
Ireland, the Troubles - 1960-1998 Ireland
Vietnam War - 1955-1975
Tudors - 1500's Britain
Sinking of the Titanic - April 15th 1912
Hidenburg Disaster - May 6th 1937
Great Fire of London - September 2nd-5th 1666
Pompeii Eruption - 79AD
Chernobyl Disaster - April 26th 1968
9/11 - September 11th 2001
7/7 - July 7th 2005
Fidinae Amphitheatre Collapse - 27AD
Royal Plaza Hotel Collapse, Thailand - August 13th 1993
Victoria Hall Disaster - June 16th 1883
Bethnal Green Tube Station Panic - March 3rd 1943
Hillborough Disaster - April 15th 1989
1955 Le Mans Disaster - June 11th 1955
Vaal Reefs mine disaster - May 10th 1995
Irish Famine - 1845-1852 Ireland
Spanish Flu - 1918-1920
Black Death - 1346-1353
COVID-19 - 2020
Great Chinese Famine - 1959-1961
Boston Massacre - March 5th 1770
Tulsa race massacre - May 31st 1921
Haymarket Affair - May 4th 1886
2008 Financial Crisis - 2008
Salem Witch Trials - 1692/3

Vanguard: Calder City

I am going to bow out of Vanguard for now. I will read along because there's great work happening in here and I love to see it, but the IC has gotten very far away from me and we're at a point where delivering a follow-up to something that's now 32 posts old would be frankly embarrassing, and that's assuming I even have a plan for Lance or know what to do with him. I fear the pace is simply too fast for me to keep up with - the proverbial monkey's paw.

I may simmer away in the background on potential concepts for something to return with, but for now I will lurk.

Vanguard: Calder City

<Snipped quote by Roman>

... you're... you're gonna eat it, aren't you?

@Eddie Brock

Vanguard: Calder City

Someone will compile the lore into a doc, I just know it

@Fabricant451

Has anyone started this already? If not, I might.

Vanguard: Calder City

P I C A
P I C A

_{Location: Calder City}

Set The Table

^{_{_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}}

People who have lived through famine and regional starvation often share, after-the-fact, that their heads were occupied solely with thoughts of food. All other musings were pushed aside; famine, in its fundamental hunger, consumed your mind. People walk dazed, as if in a dream, slow and plodding. Eyes turn and swivel and sweep across everything but don't see anything - what they are searching for is not there. Once the crops ran out, animals were the first to go; neighbours would give away their pets, unable to do what had to be done themselves, trading a cherished cat for a beloved dog, both families choosing to believe that the other was perhaps merciful enough to release the creature rather than butcher it, neither admitting the truth that laid behind feverish eyes and salivating mouths - so easily recognised as it was, splayed across their own faces.

After the animals was where desperation truly dwelled. Grass was fair game; torn-up handfuls of dry and yellowed sod. Clods of dirt and earth, when you'd scrape in the mud for seedlings. You'd suck on pebbles, too, and might even try swallowing them - you'd regret it the other end, if your system was still even capable of passing waste, but having something with tangible mass in your stomach could almost feel worth it. You'd fill your mouth with splinters gnawing on wooden furniture, if you hadn't already burnt it all fuelling a fire only barely keeping your dying body warm. You might even start looking at your family differently; and when they would see that look in your eyes, and you in theirs, you'd wander off into the distance to die alone, curled into a ball as your organs shut down one by one. But you'd never stop feeling hungry.

Hunger: the hole in your belly that became the hole in your psyche, humanity draining out and something darker, baser, rushing in to plug the gap.

-

Lance was hungry, but that wasn't new. He was sat on cold concrete leaning against the brick wall of some poorly-maintained apartment block, a small flock of amused bystanders forming a semi-circle around him. On top of a harriedly-constructed table consisting of a plywood board balanced atop a cinderblock, both pilfered from a construction site that had long since had its budget re-allocated before chance of completion, was a growing pile of...things. Assorted bric-a-brac, including bricks and braces; it had begun with a sign saying
'ＷＩＬＬ ＥＡＴ ＡＮＹＴＨＩＮＧ ＦＯＲ ＄＄＄'
and someone questioning it, only to be answered with Lance scooping a discarded crisp packet that was lazily drifting pass in the late-morning breeze and putting the whole thing in his mouth, chewing and swallowing and opening his maw to prove it was empty and that he had, in fact, eaten it. The guy, curious, gave him a dollar to do it again, and he did, savouring the faint traces of flavouring, a thin film over the bitter plastic-and-ink base taste, and then he'd been approached by a couple teens who'd been watching from across the street.

The teens had slipped him a good old Honest Abe with one hand and offered a tennis ball they'd been tossing back and forth with the other. Lance bit into it like an apple, disliking the fuzzy texture on his tongue and the way tiny fibres got stuck between his teeth, but finding the way his canines sank and sliced into the rubber beneath quite satisfying. When he finished the whole ball and grinned, the bits of neon-green fuzz caught in his smile elicited a laugh, and then the show really started. Right now he was polishing off a brick, likening the hard crunch of the bite to a particularly large and dry pretzel. The flavour was pleasantly earthy, all kinds of ages coming through the clay, but it left a decidedly gritty feeling in the mouth - he'd given a couple bills to the most nervous-looking teen and sent him for a bottle of water from the nearby deli. The kid came back with the drink, and also a shard of glass - testing, prodding, trying to win some clout in front of his friends. Lance got his money first, then bit down on it like breaking off a piece of hard candy. You could chew forever on glass, and if you really rolled it around your tongue you might even pick up the faint sea-salt hints of the sand it came from, but mostly glass just didn't really taste of anything. You could smear anything on its surface for flavour and not worry about clashing with the undertones - Lance compared it to chicken in that way.

None of it filled the hole, obviously. Perhaps a micro-second of respite as he swallowed, but as soon as it hit the belly the hunger returned. He'd live, of course - his body would pull whatever it needed from what he fed it to keep him alive, almost at normal function, too - but he'd still be hungry. Another buck came with a palm of loose bolts; Lance sucked on these like a caramel, having come to be strangely fond of the metallic tang of rust, and then broke them down between his molars and swallowed the lot. In front of him now were foam packing peanuts (melted in the mouth like candyfloss, tasted of starch), a torn piece of flag (technically treasonous but cloth was fibrous and good roughage), a broken bit of traffic cone (the plastic was great to gnaw on if you were teething but they were often bitter with a coat of exhaust fumes), and a street sign stripped from its pole (the paint and steel mixed together into an oddly umami flavouring that paired well with coffee, and the thin metal was a pleasure to bite into). He'd pocketed at least $30 by now, which he would probably spend on a new toothbrush and an actual lunch of actual food from a local diner, before he returned to panhandling while the sun was still up. When it would begin to dip he'd seek shelter; a street refuge preferably, provided he had the necessary cash. If he didn't, he'd have to buck up and return to St. Dymphna's. The recent evenings had been cold and wet and Lance wanted a break from sleeping rough, loathe though he was to admit it, and he'd just have to try and squirrel himself away in a corner, avoiding prying eyes and the questions and concerns of people who meant well but he simply didn't want to involve himself with to save them the risk. Prevention was better than cure.

The pile ended, but one of the teens announced he had a final challenge, and there was a stone-cold-twenty in it for Lance if he really had the stomach he said he did. Considering the banquet he'd just devoured, Lance wasn't really sure how anything could be in question anymore, but twenty dollars was twenty dollars. He said sure, and the boy disappeared, the small gang now the only audience left, and they made awkward, nosy small-talk with Lance as they waited; Lance either lied or stone-walled when they asked something he didn't want to answer, and despite their adolescent street-forged bravado they retained enough manners not to push. It didn't matter, anyway; the ringleader soon reappeared, and slapped something down atop Lance's board with a wet splat. Lance's face darkened when he saw what had been delivered.

The carcass of a cat oozed coagulated blood into the plywood, flies buzzing about where their meal had been interrupted. Maggots writhed in the rotting flesh, and the putrid smell of the corpse made them all bring their hands to their noses and take a few steps back, wafting the air away from their faces. The ringleader wore a cunty grin on his face, seemingly amused at his own daring. It was deliberately revolting, clarifying immediately into sharp relief what Lance was to these children: not a down-on-his-luck Gray, nor a comrade-in-arms seeking survival on the streets of Calder. He was a sideshow, circus entertainment, a freak to be gawked at and poked with sticks. Lesser. Sub-human. Not fit for compassion or empathy.

The board and the cadaver upon it skidded off along the pavement as Lance threw it violently away, rising to his feet with such vigour and a throaty growl accompanying his movements that for a moment they were all frozen in fear, suddenly keenly aware their erstwhile leader had pushed too far, stepped over the edge they'd all so carefully danced along for weeks prior. In that instant, every member of that group lost what modicum of respect they held for each other, and this incident would be the inciting catalyst to a breakdown of their tenuous friendship entirely - but for now, they were broken from their stupor as Lance took another step toward them, and immediately turned tail and fled, youthful speed on their side and Lance's own shaking rage inhibiting a proper pursuit.

He let them go. He collected the corpse, returning it to the uncovered patch of earth in the abandoned worksite and affording it as dignified a burial as he could manage, sucking soil from beneath his fingernails as he walked away after marking the grave with a ring of pebbles and a quick-gesture cross over himself in lieu of prayer or elegy. He went for a lunch of cola and omelette, opting for a follow-up of coffee when rain started to patter against the diner window, and he watched the grey clouds march overhead, and he thought of the cat, and he was still hungry.

Vanguard: Calder City

Roman's Scrapbin

Myconid
Druid, Circle of Spores
Folk Hero background
Chaotic Good
High Wis/Con, Low Charisma/Dex, Middling Strength

- Has left the Underdark after being exiled by the leaders of his previous Circle for being too outspoken about the potential for expansion above the surface away from the vicious societies and predators of the Underdark; the Circle had recently survived an attack, which the PC was instrumental in fighting off, and his subsequent rhetoric combined with his new respect within the Circle for his deed was deemed a threat to the Circle at large and heretical to the Myconid way of life. Now roams the surface experiencing life and society outside of the Underdark and ultimately seeking to start his very own Grove, the first-ever surface Myconid colony not only as a refuge for forward-thinking Myconids but also Druids in general, to prove that the future of his people lies in escaping the Underdark and integrating with surface culture.

Drow Elf
Ranger, Gloom Stalker
Acolyte background
High Dex/Strength, Low Charisma/Wisdom/Intelligence, Middling Con
Lawful Evil

- Male Drow still a fervent worshipper of Lolth, believing enough faith and actions in her name will finally seize her attention despite his low standing in Drow society as a male, and potentially even convince her to bestow what he believes is the highest honour she can for Male Drow, and his ultimate destiny - transforming him into a Drider. Favoured enemy is other elves - Drow because of the naturally Darwinistic/Meritocratic society encouraged by Lolth, High/Wood Elves because of Lolth's disdain for non-Drow elves. Has made it his mission to seek out and assassinate Vhaeraun's masked traitors, as well as Lolth clerics/priests he deems 'not pious enough' believing that purging the ranks of Lolth's clergy of traitors and weak-faithed cardinals will elevate him in the eyes of his Goddess.

Hill Giant Goliath
Warlock, Hexblade
Sailor background
Neutral Evil
High Strength/Con, Low Charisma/Intelligence, Middling Wisdom

- Ex-sailor Goliath who was a member of a part-salvage, part-pirate crew, who went out to far seas on good word of sunken treasure; they laid anchor at a point where land could no longer be seen and PC was one who went down in diving suit to inspect the salvage point. Turned out to be a long-forgotten temple to a long-forgotten old god, who's power had lay dormant and was now awakened by PC's intrusion. Desperately tried to escape but when the Old God seized him and the anchor and started pulling the boat down with him, the crew made the decision to cut the anchor line and leave PC to die. PC was enraged by this 'betrayal' and made a pact as he died with the old god to bring its power back to the contemporary world in exchange for the power to take revenge on his crew, becoming sealed inside the diving suit (heavy armour, flavoured) and taking up the anchor (maul, flavoured) as his weapon, being changed into something no longer truly mortal as he set out walking one incredibly slow foot in front of the other across the seabed back to civilisation. By the time he emerged in Port Llast, it had been months/years, and his crew had not been seen since they left port for that salvage in the first place. Now wanders the land, always searching for his crew to fulfil his revenge.

Ratfolk
Rogue, Thief
Criminal background
High Dex/Con, Low Charisma/Strength/Int, Middling Wisdom
Neutral Evil

- Overly-ambitious but not-too-smart Ratfolk career thief who made a pretty penny for his clan but got a bit too greedy and started pilfering their own coffers for his own personal enjoyment and gain. When he was caught he challenged the clan leader to a fight in a desperate bid to cover-up his crimes, but was soundly beaten and discarded into the deep sewers, presumed dead. Somehow recovered and swore to steal the ultimate treasure to not only show off how he's the greatest ratfolk thief there's ever been, but also to find something magical and powerful enough to go back and murder the fuck out of the clan leader and then take every single coin of gold they have and leave the rest to starve out of sheer spite.

Absolute Comics - A Multi-Fandom Singular Universe Roleplay

G H O S T R I D E R
G H O S T R I D E R

_{Location: The Desert}

1

^{_{_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}}

Somewhere in the distance behind her, a column of smoke rose into the dry desert air, straight up and unbuffered by wind; the remains of her razing escape, not that she recalled much of it. In groggy waking she could catch only flashes at best, but was neither able nor willing to uncover anything further.

Instead, she picked herself up out of the dirt, dust and sand pluming around her as she lifted her prone form off the ground and moved to unsteady feet. Carrion-picked car chassis ladened her immediate surroundings, some stacked atop each other, some leaning at precarious angles; amidst these, gaps were plugged with scrap metal, rusted debris, discarded bits of wood and sheets of plastic. Pipes and divots played dual homes to rodentia and invertebrate alike, and avian carcasses crawled with new corpus life. Automobile and animal alike shared a graveyard here, and Danielle shivered to behold it. A death-place, and she standing on scorched earth in the heart of it.

'Or it's a junkyard and you're being melodramatic,' she thought to herself. Abandoned in the dust only a metre or two away was a sorry sight for a motorbike, some skeleton motor that in better days might have been a passable bobber or cruiser, but now could only be described as a rickety collection of oxidised bolts and struts, with a whimpering motor and tyres with rubber thinner than a rubber. The engine block was still warm - unusually so, Dani thought, hovering her hand over the metal - and the grooves in the dirt suggested she'd crashed it here; how it hadn't crumpled beneath her the moment she'd apparently mounted it, or shaken itself to pieces as she'd ridden it, confounded her - and if that distant smoke really was her hometown, she'd come some distance on it too.

Dani turned her attention inward. Her throat was painfully raw, lips dry and cracking, and she was thirstier than she'd ever been in her life. Water seemed fabled panacea to her in this moment, and she scrambled woozily past the scrap's perimeter toward the large hut adjoined to the junkyard. First and foremost she sought faucets, bottles, anything that might contain even ambiguously potable liquid; human life that might shed light on her circumstances was optional, a mere afterthought in the face of slaking her screaming thirst. The door hung lazy on its hinges and she burst through with frantic energy, only to take two steps in and immediately pivot on the balls of her feet and dart back out. The place reeked, the heat doing the stink no favours, and she dry-retched into the dirt, propping herself up on her knees as her shoulders heaved and back rippled in waves, failing to eject anything but the most acid-yellow bile.

Once recovered, she found a dirty handkerchief amidst the discarded rubbish of the junkyard and dipped it lightly in a thick-tar puddle of motor oil, wrapping it around her face so that the only odor she could make out was that of petroleum and earth. Armed with her hasty mask, she crept back in, slowly at first but with increasing confidence as the oil-soaked rag proved an effective shield. The place was a goddamn mess. Trash thrown everywhere, metal struts bent and sheared in two, and the wood burnt and charred in strange places. The front door was simply gone, wooden splinters and ash the only indication of its fate, and a series of blackened footprints made their path from the entryway to a point in the middle of the cabin; although blackened wasn't quite the right word - it was as if someone had stood in place while black paint had been sprayed around it, using a boot like a stencil. The floor was scorched in a distinct pattern around a series of footprints, and as she crept closer more bile rose in Dani's throat to realize that the shape and size fit her worn-out New Rocks.

She followed the trail with her eyes, casting her gaze along the path laid out until its conclusion; against her better judgement, she stood in that same spot, trying to reason it out, pick apart her foggy head, memory recall by recreation. She looked straight ahead, and felt compelled to raise her arm and point, but found she couldn't move as the colour drained from her face and she rushed back outside once more, not even the oil-soaked rag able to stem the new nausea.

Within the cabin against the wall was an impression much like the bootprints that had forced entry, but with the distinct outline of a person, some Hiroshima-shadow the only remains of a stranger she didn't remember murdering, but knew deep in her bones that she had; and with that realization, a single word intruded upon her inner monologue, hot and fiery and fierce, reverberating around her brain like an echo that impossibly magnified itself:

𝐆 𝐔 𝐈 𝐋 𝐓 𝐘

---

"Well ain't this a fine goddamn fuckin' mess."
Sheriff Jim Corrigan sighed, hands on his hips as he stood in the Maynooth lockup, staring at the bars of the cell their suspect had been ensconced in not some twelve hours ago, and more pointedly staring at the still-warm slag that marked the exit that had apparently been melted through the metal from the inside-out. He'd been called from the next town over, Bird's Creek, on account of the Maynooth sheriff department now being dead to but a single survivor, who was somewhere outside covered in a shock blanket and ranting to one of Jim's deputies about a walking talking skeleton-on-fire dressed head-to-toe in leather and murdering its way out of the station and off over the horizon. Jim hadn't even dignified the man's initial raving with a response; he'd merely flagged a deputy down and pointed at the survivor, and then when his attention was suitably distracted, walked away. Would a flaming skeleton be able to burn through the iron? Sure, why not, it made as much sense as any other part of the story; but so could a blowtorch or the right chemicals or a stick of fucking dynamite. And this was 'Dog-tooth' Maynooth, after all, the hemorrhoid on the Devil's asshole. Jim sighed.

He walked outside, removing his hat to fan himself while he held a hand over his brow. Hot one today, and dry last night; that hadn't done the fire any good, but at least they'd put it out now. Firemen picked over the hollow carcasses of burnt shop-fronts, water dripping from damp wood as the last of the smoke plumed up into the air. You could see it for miles. Jim turned, and followed the burnt-rubber tyre tracks with his eye, as far as he could until they disappeared into the heat-haze on the edge of town. Somewhere out there was their culprit; arsonist, murderer, fugitive, vagrant. Couple questions around town and he'd be able to get at least the beginnings of the story; nothing ever went on in Dogtooth - it was a ghost-town-to-be, a place where dreams and excitement came to die - so it would be very easy to get people to talk about the most noteworthy event in the town's history since founding. But first, some coffee, ideally served Irish, and then once he'd whet his whistle, he could get down to the business at hand: a good ol' fashioned hunt for a good ol' fashioned outlaw.

---

Somewhere along the Iowa Corn Belt, a thin man in a worn suit stepped out from between stalks whistling jauntily and raising his head to survey the sky; the weather was fair, sunny and clear after a few day's rain, and crows circled overhead in unusually large numbers. He wore a battered fedora and a tie that frayed at its end, and his mouth was stitched over with string and his eyes replaced with buttons. He scooped a handful of damp hay from the ground and held it to his face, taking a deep breath of grassy musk and earthen aromas.

"ꁅꂦꂦꀸ ꓄ꂦ ꌃꍟ ꌃꍏꉓꀘ," he mused, and then carried on his way.

Vanguard: Calder City

holi-bobs

@Colonel Sep

Vanguard: Calder City

M O R O S
M O R O S

^{"The doom lies in yourself, not in your name."}

C H A R A C T E R P O R T R A I T C H A R A C T E R P O R T R A I T _________________________________________________________ (FC: Mads Mikkelsen; Dialogue: #B39EB5) _________________________________________________________ S U M M A R Y S U M M A R Y _________________________________________________________ Mallory _________________________________________________________ DOB Unknown | Age Unknown _________________________________________________________ Single | Male | Heterosexual S T A T S S T A T S _________________________________________________________ Height | 6"1 _________________________________________________________ Hair Color | Brown, greying _________________________________________________________ Eye Color | Brown _________________________________________________________ Hometown | Unknown -

H I S T O R Y H I S T O R Y ___________________________________________________________________________________ Mallory was born somewhere, somewhen, to somebody, raised in some kind of way, and eventually died. Mallory woke up in a new body assuming his first life was a fractured dream, and went about returning to a life that felt unfamiliar in a body he didn't recognize. He died painfully a few years later. Mallory woke up sharply, gasping, still feeling the pain of his demise echoing through new limbs. Another life he didn't know, another face that looked like a stranger. This time he lived only a handful of months before death found him again. Mallory woke up for the third time and despaired. He took his own life the same evening. Mallory woke up again. For as long as he can remember, through as many lives as he cares to count, Mallory has lived, died, and lived again, remembering every fresh face and every new agony - with the key exception of that first life, his original life. He has not lived chronologically; some lives he wakes and walks through 20th Century New York, only to die and be reborn in 1500's Europe. He has seen humanity's growth in non-chronological order, and died to most of its worst atrocities and accidents. With every death, he feels a little more disconnected, and with every new life, a little more cavalier. His name isn't even Mallory - he's not sure he's ever woken up as a Mallory - but somewhere along the way it became the name he took for himself, the single solitary anchor for any kind of personal identity. Recently, the unthinkable has happened to Mallory: he's woken up in the same place, in the same body, in the same time period, more than once. Something is clawing at him through the pale, dragging him back to Calder City, determined to make him stay there. He just needs to figure out what. Maybe that's the key to his entire lives. A B I L I T I E S A B I L I T I E S __________________________________________________________________________________ Doomed Reincarnation Mallory didn't actually realize he had 'powers', not that he refers to his condition as such, until his second death. His first life, as far as he is aware - the two or three fleeting, banal glimpses he has - was as normal as anyone else's: he was born, he grew, he eventually shuffled off the mortal coil...and then he woke up as someone new. He wrote off those glimpses as fragments of a forgotten dream, getting on with his new life, as unfamiliar as it felt - until he met a grisly end, and woke up once more. This time, he remembered his previous life, and his previous death, and took those fuzzy memories of the life before that one a little more seriously. Since then, Mallory has spent uncountable lives over uncountable years waking up as someone new, being delivered unto an unpleasant death, and waking up again to do it all over. He remembers every life except for his first, and every death equally, the pain of it seared as scars across his consciousness even as he meets new, pristine bodies. He doesn't know why, but he knows, or believes, he's cursed - and so far, he hasn't been able to break it. P E R S O N A L I T Y P E R S O N A L I T Y __________________________________________________________________________________ Through his many lives and deaths, Mallory has developed a distinctly aloof, laissez-faire attitude toward daily life, spending freely and hedonistically while awaiting his inevitable doom, knowing that whatever he has he won’t be able to hold onto; he keeps enough to carry on living, but never plans ahead further than the next week. At the same time, he’s become incredible world-weary, having watched humanity crush and rebuild itself for thousands of years, and while he has seen some of the wondrous achievements of Man, his fated death also means he’s experienced first-hand most of society’s greatest failures and deepest atrocities. While full of life experience, wisdom, and compounded knowledge, Mallory keeps others at a deliberate distance, knowing that at best he will simply invite needless grief into people’s lives, or at worst take them down with him when his doom arrives once more. M O T I V A T I O N S & G O A L S M O T I V A T I O N S & G O A L S __________________________________________________________________________________ Mallory is ready to die. Which is to say, Mallory is ready to age with grace and slip away peacefully at the end of a calm and generally-unremarkable life, and not wake up again on the other side of the globe in another unfamiliar body. He is aware, or at least completely set in his belief, that some long-forgotten sin from that elusive first life has burdened him with this heinous curse; his only goal now is to either atone for it, redeem himself through other grand magnanimous acts, or break the curse through any means necessary.