Bryn ✖ World Info ✖ History

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✖ Character Name: Bronwyn 'Bryn' Fletcher
✖ Genre: post-apocalyptic fantasy adventure

✖ Character Appearance: Cykeem White
✖ Character Age: 19 or 29
✖ Personality and Abilities: here

✖ World Setting: Bryn's home world is a post-apocalyptic Earth that, after developing quite far past our current, everyday world, succumbed to chemical and biological warfare and global warming. This resulted in a reversion to very basic technology for the human race, mutations and accelerated evolution in plant and animal life across the board, massive changes in climate, and a large portion of the Earth's surface becoming completely uninhabitable with most living things that are close to an approximation of current life on Earth being relegated to higher altitudes and mountain tops.

Here are a few facets of Bryn's world quickly defined to make for an easier and more detailed explanation.

Old World: The world as it was before the war. More advanced than our current Earth.

Miasma: A thick, toxic cloud of gas that sits halfway between the Earth's highest mountaintops and sea level. Prolonged exposure to the miasma can result in various illnesses from mild mutation to cancer. Miasma gets thicker the closer to sea level you go, though storms occasionally whip this more toxic, heavier miasma closer to the 'surface.'

Underground: A nebulous series of underground tunnels, compounds, and living areas that go deep into the mountains upon which most of humanity still lives. Mostly consist of compounds and bunkers created immediately before the war, they also encompass subway systems from the Old World cities to underground laboratories the Old World scientists worked on new tech in. Can encompass 'undercities' or abandoned underlayers of newer cities (example: Seattle Underground).

Ruins: Old World cities - anything from broken-down skyscrapers to smaller towns all broken down in ruins.

Mutants: Mutated human beings who were born and live in the more toxic areas of the miasma. Often cannibalistic due to the lack of any kind of sustenance in the miasma.

Artifacts: Anything from the Old World that could be construed as valuable. Usually weapons or bits of technology that are on a much higher level than the tech available to people in the current world. Anything from a Tesla coil to a vehicle or a weapon can be considered an artifact, and they are extremely valuable, especially if they serve practical purposes. Some examples are the Shard, a train that still functions in the Underground, and Bryn's modern compound bow.

The Shard: A particular artifact that can fuse with and corrupt humans. Originally created as a biological weapon by Old World scientists, the Shard was corrupted even further by the miasma and the chemical warfare into a sort of parasite that feeds off the life force of a person. It was shattered into various pieces in the war and it is speculated that once they're reintegrated, the Shard will become dormant.

Campmate: A socially recognized alternate relationship among adventurers, generally formed with someone the opposite sex to one's primary in-city relationship, and maintained only outside the confines of the city while on missions or adventures, never in the same space as a relationship maintained with a spouse. Usually heterosexual inside the city and homosexual outside of it, though this is sometimes reversed. Both parties are generally aware of the other relationship, and they're common enough to not be considered a problem.

As previously stated, Bryn's world is a post-apocalyptic one, recovering from a cataclysmic series of events put into motion by heavy population and development of the world paired with chemical and some nuclear war. The time period immediately before the war was one more advanced than our current one, with worldwide development reaching a point of cohesion so that most places in the world have a similar level of technological and sociological advancement. This didn't mean that people were any more enlightened, however, simply better equipped to destroy the world, and each other. It didn't take long after humanity was satisfied with its level of reproduction and development for them to turn on each other, and the big war to end all wars escalated quickly, and was over even faster. The pinnacle of all human technology, as always, went into weaponry, and their weapons were spectacular. Chemical warfare, biological agents, and nuclear weaponry were all thrown out and it didn't take long for the world and humanity itself to succumb to the damage.

After all the available weapons had been used and the dust settled, at least 90% of the world's population was dead, with most of the remaining 10% locked underground in bunkers. The damage to the Earth's environment resulted in global warming and permanent changes to the world's climate, the ice caps partially melted, lifting the sea level significantly, and an unhealthy miasma in the wake of chemical weapons paired with radioactive fallout from nuclear weaponry left the remaining flora, fauna, and the humans who survived outside the bunkers warped and damaged, a situation only compounded by reproduction of life. By the time the people in the bunkers found it safe enough to leave, the world was vastly different, with healthy life only possible on mountaintops that rose above the toxic miasma hovering over the polluted water and ground above the new sea level.

Still, life persists, and those people and their descendants eked out a living in this new world - the new fauna, a chaotic mix of jungle, deciduous forest, and mutated plant life that almost resembled the prehistoric world, was unable to be tamed. Slowly, cities and towns walled off to protect the inhabitants against the wilds started to form, and over the course of around 200 years (around 3 generations) things are formed into something more stable.

Walled cities are centers of civilization, with a level of technology similar to the Renaissance with occasional anachronistic pieces of tech here and there due to artifacts, and a higher than Renaissance level of understanding of the sciences and medicine (basic understanding of how the human body works, capability to do surgery, moderate to light use of medicinal drugs etc.) but with little to no advances in vehicular travel and such. Due to the harshness of the wilds and the dangers of traveling between cities and towns, people generally only do so for specific reasons, or if they are bandits or adventurers who go out into the wilds to gather artifacts. Each town is generally self-sufficient, though they often have specialties that can be exported, and all inhabitants are required to have 'papers' granting them permission to live in the city. The population is carefully controlled to avoid outgrowing cities before new ones can be formed, and anyone without papers is refused entry into the cities and forced to make do outside the city. Papers can be obtained either through birth in a city or by proving one's worth to the leaders of the city. Most cities have a City Guard, similar to a police force, and who make trips into the wilds and ruins to get artifacts to enrich the city or to keep them out of the hands of bandits. The 'best' and richest cities are higher up in altitude, where the atmosphere is healthier and the habitat more suitable to human life. There is a seedy underground to civilization - at lower altitudes, close to and just beneath the surface of the miasma, sprawling less-protected cities have formed that are home to bandits, thieves, criminals, and refugees. No papers are required in these cities, and they often contain a large population of mildly mutated people. These cities are often supported primarily by sale of looted artifacts.

Most of the population is heavily culturally and racially mixed, with little concern placed on these differences - it is a culture focused on survival for the moment, and though there are still different languages and dialects, these are not often emphasized and most people speak a common language. Also, due to the restrictions in population growth and the concerns about overpopulation, homosexual relationships are openly accepted and in some smaller towns with less resources, actively encouraged. Most cities are based around a particular special trade, and tradesmen are considered more valuable than scholars or scientists. Surnames are based on a person's occupation, which is generally passed down from parent to child with apprenticeships available for orphans and people wishing to switch trades. Cities are generally named after their primary industry, and both surnames and city names are extremely uncreative - for example, Weaving's primary industry is, predictably, weaving and dying of cloth. Most travel within cities is on foot or by horse, and between cities by horse or in wagon caravans. It's generally considered extremely unsafe to travel between cities unless one is an adventurer fully prepared with supplies, armor, and weaponry, or with a caravan. Caravans are often accompanied by adventurers who protect the caravan from bandits or wild animals.

Being an adventurer is not considered a proper job like being a blacksmith, weaver, leatherworker, carpenter, or any other kind of commonly accepted job. It's not the type of job a person would be inclined to hold in the long term, but rather something that rash youth tend to do until they get mature enough to join the real job force, or that people do on the side to earn extra cash by finding and selling valuable artifacts from the Underground. Bryn has been an adventurer for much longer than most people have, but when he's in the city, his 'proper' occupation is fletcher and bowmaker, with some leatherworking on the side.

✖ Character History:

Bryn was born Bronwyn Fletcher to a mother who was a city girl of decent standing in the relatively large city of Weaving, and a father who was an adventurer, ejected from his city of birth and therefore without papers to live on the inside. Despite the disparity, they fell in love and were married, but she was unable to get his father papers, and as a result, she left home to live on the outside, in the jungle, with him. It went surprisingly well - they created a small mobile sanctuary, a safe home to live in that they could move with the changing of the levels of miasma, the dangers in the area, to follow the game. It was a satisfying life, with him hunting and trapping for profit, and her keeping house and learning survival in the wild. Her pregnancy was just another life event, a middle finger to the people who said no one could survive outside the walls, and when she was ready to give birth, she added insult to injury by going inside and having Bryn in the city to ensure he was given the rights to papers so he could live where he chose when he grew up.

Bryn's early life was relatively peaceful. His father taught him archery from a young age, and his mother, the more well-educated of the two, taught him how to read, write, and do some math. Everything changed, though, when Bryn was 6 years old, and his family's camp was invaded by bandits in the middle of the night - his father was killed trying to defend them, and his mother hid him and put on a show of running away in order to distract them. Bryn stayed hidden while the bandits left his mother to the wilds, looted his home for everything they could get their hands on, and left the camp ripped apart. The next morning, he crawled out of hiding and cried until he got hungry and there was no one to feed him - it was at this point that Bryn came to understand a crucial fact: the world was large, hostile, and didn't care a bit if he lived or died. After a while, he accepted that the only way to survive was to take care of himself, and so he did. He foraged for food, he found places in the wreckage of the camp to shelter himself, and he survived. Two days later, he found his mother's body, and he cried again until he was hungry and exhausted, then continued foraging.

A few months after his parents' death, his camp was looted again by a different batch of bandits, and he realized that in order to survive and escape detection, he would have to hide in plain sight, leaving the camp as it was and living in the nooks and crannies not immediately visible, caching food in the jungle around. During this time, he also followed travelers back to the nearby city that his mother was born in and realized that one needed papers to get in and out. By the time he was 8 years old, he was regularly moving in and out of the city by pretending to be with unrelated groups of people, and stealing supplies from the street markets.

When Bryn was 10 years old, his luck ran out, and while a group of slavers picked through the remains of his camp, they found him in his hiding place. He was tossed in a cage, lost his papers, and was transported back into Weaving for sale at a market - it didn't last long, though. He escaped readily, but without his papers he was unable to get out through the gates, leaving him effectively trapped inside the city. He survived on the streets for several months, stealing and hiding, growing progressively more afraid and cornered, until he was caught at stealing by a particularly territorial shopkeeper he regularly hit up, who intended to turn him in to the authorities.

While he struggled to get free from the man, salvation appeared in the form of a younger boy, smartly dressed and carrying several coins. The boy offered his money as payment for what Bryn had stolen, and when he mentioned that his father was the Head of the City Guard among his sweet pleading words, well, that didn't hurt his cause much. Bryn, a little amazed by the boy's persuasiveness, followed him home, and once they were safely hidden away in the stable, the boy introduced himself as Lark Watcher, age 7. He offered Bryn a home in the stables, and promised to feed him, and Bryn gladly accepted. This state of affairs lasted for approximately two weeks before Lark's parents caught on and dragged Bryn into the house - unafraid, he explained where he'd come from and that he wanted to leave the city but couldn't find his papers, explained his living situation, how he'd come to meet Lark, apologized for eating their food and asked for help to get out of the city again. Instead, Lark's mother convinced Lark's father to adopt the boy - which they did, after obtaining a copy of Bryn's papers.

Bryn settled in with Lark's family quite well, adapting to city life just as easily as he had to living in the jungle by himself. While Lark's father worked, his mother worked her trade of weaving, the city's specialty, and home-schooled both of the boys, teaching them reading, writing, math, history, and some other basic matters of education. When Bryn was 11 and Lark 8, Bryn started to long for some of the things that had been abandoned at his camp - his father's bow particularly, and some of his mother's jewelry he'd managed to find after the lootings. The two of them managed to sneak out after a bit of planning, and had a short, grand adventure with very little danger - at least aside from getting in some very serious trouble with Lark's parents. Bryn thought it was worth it to have his father's bow, a rare compound bow looted from the ruins, and a few pieces to remember his mother by.

After that, things settled relatively well for a few years. Bryn learned the basics of education and continued to practice his archery, picked up a bit of weaving, and taught himself some other useful skills like sewing and easy weaving, a bit of leatherworking. When he was 16 years old, and Lark only 13, Lark's father was killed on a Guardsman mission outside the City, and it tore a hole through the family. Lark, a born daddy's boy, became angry in his grief; Lark's mother, already a little frail before the death, started to simply fade out; and Bryn became distant from his adopted family, devastated at having to endure the death of another parental figure, a situation not helped by the fact that the gap in ages between himself and Lark was more pronounced than ever at this age. Lark's mother lasted for two years before she followed her husband, and during this dark period is when Bryn, while still living with the family, went his own way to some extent - he started to experiment with intoxication and sex, flirting and drinking and occasionally going out on ill-advised 'adventures' outside the city. It was during this time, slightly estranged from the Watchers, that he met his future wife, Lili. They went on several adventures together, heading into ruins to find artifacts to sell once they returned to the city, and they formed a deep bond during this time, both romantic and sexual.

When Lark was 15 and Bryn was 18, Lark's mother died, leaving Lark an orphan and Bryn an orphan twice over. It was at this point that the two reconnected, their age gap mattering a little less, pulling together as the only family either of them had left - and it was during this time that the two finally broke the barrier of sex themselves, in the stables where Lark had first taken Bryn home when they met. It wasn't something that happened frequently, with Bryn's interest mostly taken up with Lili, but it certainly helped both of them in the grieving process. In need of supporting themselves, Lark finally joined the City Guard, and Bryn took on a year-long apprenticeship with Weaving's fletcher, expanding on his already extensive knowledge of making arrows and caring for the bow.

✖ History Ends Here for 19-year-old Bryn

At 19 and a half years old, Bryn found out he was going to be a father for the first time - Lili, already his girlfriend for several years, was newly pregnant, and rather than being afraid Bryn was pleased as punch, he proposed to her, and the two were married in a small, private ceremony, with Lark as his attendant. Now in more need of income than ever, Bryn started to accompany Lark on his city-run missions so he could find artifacts to sell on the side, along with his budding career in fletching. Bryn, with a good head for money, a quick tongue, and a sort of natural charm, was able to save up enough to get a decent house for himself, Lili, and their unborn baby, and the two had their own place by the time his daughter, Rena, was born.

Things continued on in this way for quite some time, with Lark heading out on city-sponsored missions and Bryn tagging along as his adventuring partner, and returning to Weaving to be with Lili afterward. Despite their close relationship, though, Bryn and Lark rarely slept together and didn't become campmates. Bryn's younger child, a boy named Nicholl was born three years after Rena, and things carried on in the same way until Nicholl was around 4 and a half years old.

It was at this point that the City Leaders had heard rumors of a powerful artifact in the ruins under the miasma that would be extremely dangerous in the hands of bandits, and Lark, by now an experienced adventurer and trusted member of the City Guard, was tasked with leading a small expedition into the Underground to bring it back to Weaving before the wrong hands could get hold of it. Bryn went along with him, not expecting the mission to be much different from normal, aside from a little more difficult - once they got below the miasma, and found their way into the Underground, though, they realized it was going to be much different. They were confronted by a population of cannibal mutants, and lost their two companions, fighting their way through into the clearer air of the deep Underground, and that's where they ran into the other exploring party. There were four members, headed by a woman named Vanessa, and while Lark became infatuated with her and wanted to help her escape, believing the group was trapped there only by the mutants near the entryway into the Underground, Bryn had a distinct feeling something was off about Vanessa and her party.

In the end, Bryn's gut feeling was correct - Vanessa had been infested by the Shard, an artifact from the Old World, a biological agent corrupted by the miasma that gave her superhuman powers while sapping her life energy and keeping her from leaving. She and her party were trapped in the Underground by a need to feed the Shard, the remnants of the near-lifeless husks of her team, all sucked dry by her need for life force. Lark, unwilling to see the danger until the last moment, was grievously injured trying to rescue Vanessa and her party, and Vanessa, faking altruism, passed the Shard into his body to 'save' him. As soon as the Shard was embedded in Lark, as their curse was passed on, Vanessa and her team also passed away. With Lark's newfound powers still a little out of control, the two managed to escape and make their way back to Weaving after restocking in one of the small bandit towns under the miasma.

The difference to Lark's disposition didn't become obvious until the two were back in Weaving - his personality had changed drastically, he was meaner, more sarcastic, less emotionally available, and Bryn started to feel like he'd lost his best friend, the man he considered as close as a brother. Over the course of a few weeks, Lark had an almost complete falling from grace. As his demeanor changed, so did his actions. Bryn was forced to stop him from attacking others to steal their life force, either through sex or violence, and as things progressed, he was soon no longer able to stop him, only to help clean him up and hide the consequences of what the Shard drove him to. It couldn't always be hidden though - between his failure to contain the Shard and his behavior after returning to Weaving, Lark was soon exiled from the City Guard and Bryn was increasingly finding himself faced with a choice between living in normal society in Weaving and staying loyal to Lark.

This is when Bryn would be leaving his canon. Faced with a serious conflict of loyalties - Lark, who has been his best friend and brother, his savior, his lover and partner for most of his life, has become dangerous. Dangerous enough that Bryn no longer feels comfortable allowing him to see his young children, enough that his misbehavior is endangering the peace of Bryn's life. He's wavering back and forth between his loyalty to and love for Lark, and the loyalty to and love he has for his wife and children. He goes back and forth between rejecting and distancing himself from Lark and having intense sex with him, one of the few things that keeps Lark pacified, but which leaves Bryn feeling like he's cheating on Lili. His need to choose is becoming obvious - to leave the city and his family with Lark to find the rest of the pieces of the Shard in hopes that it will stabilize and be able to be separated from his body, so Bryn can get back the boy he loved before the last mission; or to reject Lark completely and stay safely in his life in Weaving with Lili and the children.