Month: September 2019

Genre: Adventure / Fantasy Species: Human Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Physical Description: A somewhat short woman, her stocky build displays her incredible athleticism. By looks, her age could reasonably be anywhere from twenty to fifty. Her coarse black hair is braided and dreaded close to her head, and her skin is a very dark brown, nearing jet black. Her eyes are incredibly intelligent, but also somewhat unsettling. There are many scars across her body, but all have faded to be almost imperceptible.

Attire: A mercenary by trade, she wears a dull grey chainmail hauberk over simple cloth. Her arms and legs are covered by hide bracers, and she wears a short-brimmed bronze helmet. A wooden bow is strapped to her back, engraved in all manner of odd magic runes — it’s enchanted to fire illusory arrows should she run out of (or need to conserve) ammunition, as a way to keep hostiles at a distance. A bronze khopesh sword swings at her left side, and a studded leather shield is on her right.

Backstory: Karda was born in the territory of lands that would later be known as the Ghabudai Empire. Growing up with a mastery of the magic all humans are born with, she became a powerful shamaness inside her own community before expanding her reach beyond it. It was sometime after she turned fifty that she realized her own mortality — after all, in such times people barely expected to make it past thirty.

Terrified of death, Karda assembled her most devout acolytes and began a harrowing ritual, intending to become immortal. Nothing could have stopped her, not even the innocent lives that she took in the process of accomplishing her goal. Heroes assembled, trying to stop the ascension of an evil Empress. They all fell before her, but not without crippling the spell she had been weaving for her immortality.

A burst of energy went forward, wiping out any nearby life, and Karda fell unconscious. She woke far younger than she had been, and used her new youth to found the Ghabudai’s Empire. Soon after, she noticed that she was aging normally…

When she found herself becoming infirm again, she spent a year experimenting with magic that could reactivate the spell and return her youth — and she did. Using this method every thirty years or so, Karda was able to rule the Ghabudai Empire for over two centuries. Unfortunately for her, a human mind is not meant to hold two centuries of knowledge, it simply can’t. Slowly her madness overtook her, until a coup was organized against her reign and she was ousted from her own Empire. 

Karda spent a full century wandering the world in madness, until she learned of a spell component that could restore her sanity — though it also stole the majority of her memories. Now sane, Karda returned to her home, only to find her Empire razed and replaced by the Hamenatoan Theocracy, worshippers of a god she had never even heard of before.

Now four-hundred years old and without a home, Karda uses the countless talents and abilities she gained over the years to be a perfect mercenary, known by many monikers — though “The Moth” has always been her favorite. Though she is currently content to remain as a sword-for-hire, her old aspirations of true immortality never fully died out. As she lives, and grows, and learns, and forgets, Karda continues to amass power and wealth. One day the ruler will return, but whether she will be the Evil Empress of past times or a new Paragon Queen is still for the world to see.

Genre: Science-Fiction Species: Cyborg (Human) Alignment: Lawful Good

Physical Description: A tall, older man, likely in his 50’s — though his gray head of thinning hair might easily cause overestimations. His face is thin and his frame is skinny, though his long white coat stretches unnaturally around his midsection. This visual disparity is caused by the blocky mechanical organs that replace the front of his chest and stomach, as well as everything once contained within. Dearly’s left leg is also mechanical, a crude patchwork of parts painted bronze, and both of his eye sockets are occupied by simple cybernetics that resemble camera shutters. 

Attire: Aside from his lab coat, the doctor wears a heeled black boot on his right leg (to compensate for the added length of the left), one of a wide collection of polo shirts, and long khaki pants. He has a very complicated and highly technical bracelet on his left arm — a multi-purpose medical apparatus.

Backstory: 

Doctor Hibbs Dearly isn’t an actual doctor, at least not in the literal sense. He never went to medical school, and he never had a formal education. Instead of spending his childhood studying, Dr. Dearly spent his time pulling bullets out of gangsters and stitching up anarchists on the streets of the Duat slums.

Duat was similar to most other planets that bordered the civilized universe — smaller than Earth and mostly uninhabitable. There was only one continent that could support a colony, with a landmass just cresting over three million square miles. If you were one of the privileged few on Duat, you lived a life of power and luxury among the Cult of Osiris, the theocratic government of the planet. If you were anything lower than that, you lived on the streets.

Pockets of civilization formed in the anarchism, bubbles created by great people who were always replaced by warlords and khans. Hibbs was born into one of these pockets and sold to a warlord — there he was apprenticed to the other untrained medical staff that were trying their hardest to combat the rampant disease, madness, and carnage that washed through their doors, all with no idea how.

Dr. Dearly was a prodigy among them, learning quickly and rising through the ranks even faster. After turning thirty, he had treated hundreds of Khan Torley’s subjects and lost only eighteen of them. He was at the height of his career then, eking out a better living than he could have ever hoped for. It was when his khan’s son had a motor accident that his life would take a sharp turn.

The khan’s son was an impossible case, but Dr. Dearly worked diligently anyways, trying everything he could. After all, he had worked miracles before, anything was possible…

When the khan’s son inevitably died, Dearly was dismissed from service — but not before Khan Torley took reparations from the good doctor. Nineteen parts for nineteen patients, his eyes, his leg, and most things inside. Wandering the streets of Duat with a mutilated body and crude cybernetics, Dearly began to hope to die.

Before that wish could be fulfilled, he was picked up by a refugee ship, the NJS (No Jurisdiction Ship) Notre Dame, where he currently serves as the head medical officer — a valuable, if unlikely addition to the crew.

Greetings and salutations! I’m Charles Cote, an aspiring fiction writer. While I considered writing short stories for this blog, I realized that my standard length for those stories is about 4 times the expected submission. As a result, instead of writing whole short stories, I’ll be flexing my author muscles in a different way — I’ll be creating a new original character for each post, complete with a physical description, a quick (no promises) backstory, and the types of stories that they might appear in. Here’s hoping that it works out and y’all enjoy it!