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keephersafe) wrote2025-03-17 03:54 am
keephersafe) wrote2025-03-17 03:54 am
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User Name/Nick: Fiona
User DW:hardtostarboard
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hardtostarboard, DM
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Cain (Alexei) -reargunner
Character Name: R (R---- Atvist)
Series: Warm Bodies (book series)
Age: Adult/Indeterminate. Mid to late 20s on death, plus another 10 years dead
From When?: Early in book 2 (The Burning World), when a bomb detonates in the armoury. R is thrown through a sheet metal wall and climbs out of the debris relatively unharmed. In the case of his port into the Barge, he doesn’t survive the explosion.
Inmate Justification: As both a zombie and a Living person, R has been the cause of death of dozens of people (either directly or indirectly) and is 100% avoiding thinking about any of it.
He regrets the necessity of what he did while he was Dead, but is also very firm about putting it as well as his ‘past life’ behind him, saying that he does not want his old life back since he wants ‘this one’. He experiences frequent existential anxiety and hangs his sense of direction and purpose almost entirely on one person, regardless of the pressure that puts said person under and often to her detriment (and sometimes the detriment of others). Julie often pushes forwards and puts on a good front for his sake, and R's tendency to be somewhat helpless or require additional support while also being in an important community position as 'Julie's Boyfriend' and some kind of zombie expert means that he can be given priority in situations where people should really be putting themselves first.
R struggles with feeling like a Valid Person, in part due to the attitudes of Living people towards ‘recovering zombies’ but also just because he’s an anxious mess who feels like he’s just playing pretend until someone notices and shoots him in the head. Since he no longer remembers anything about what made him ‘him’, he tends to cling to the memories that he gleaned from the last brain he ate (Julie’s previous boyfriend Perry), and his peculiar hoarding tendencies. The problem isn’t that he has these sorts of doubts but in how he expresses them (compartmentalising, over-reliance on others, denial of personal responsibility) but also in how he sometimes simply doesn’t address them at all, using the cover of just wanting to ‘move on’ as a janky coping mechanism. While wanting to leave an old life behind is not a bad thing in and of itself, R's particular past and acknowledging it is important to understanding who he is and a lot of whys around the Plague itself and how it works, as well as the part he had to play in Axiom's rise to power.
Arrival: He agreed to come!
Abilities/Powers: Any ‘powers’ that R has are a result of his still being a bit Dead. He has severely reduced sensitivity to pain and doesn’t need as much food/water/sleep as regular people would. He is capable of pushing his body past normal physical limits, but this will bite him in the ass later as he can still be damaged and injured in the same way as a regular human.
Inmate Information: Though he doesn’t remember any of it at this point in canon (and he will not need canon updating for this, it’s an ongoing process either way and isn’t reliant on him being in canon situations for triggers), R had a starring role in the downfall of the civilised world following the outbreak of the Plague. As a teenager he was indoctrinated into an aggressive religious cult which sprang up and was so warped/brainwashed by their teachings that he set five cities on fire to ‘cleanse’ them before he was finally locked up. After a few years he was taken in by his grandfather, the CEO of an organisation set on the ‘preservation of the old world’ (though it was not anything of the sort), and spent several more years working his way up the ranks with ruthless efficiency. It was only through severe emotional detachment (beginning following his mother’s death and only growing worse in the years that followed) that he did this without a hint of remorse.
After he died, his entire life was wiped out of his head. He didn’t remember anything he’d done - even the events directly leading up to his ‘turning’ were gone. He eventually found his way to the nearest airport, where he set up a ‘home’ in an abandoned commercial airliner and spent the next ten years hunting still-Living people for food while trying to cling on to the last scraps of his own humanity.
The Dead operate under a semi-cultish ‘societal order’, where the ‘boneys’ are the ones in charge and the others do as they’re told. The zombies living in the airport lived a ghoulish kind of mimicry of Real Life under their instruction, using the airport’s facilities and even being joined in ‘marriages’ to other zombies. R himself was given a ‘wife’ and two ‘children’ to take care of, though he was very indifferent to it at the time.
Everything changed for him when he met a vibrant Living girl called Julie, laying eyes on her moments after consuming a piece of her boyfriend’s brain. He decided to protect her, and through their next weeks together began to see a different potential future for himself. She gave him a sense of direction, becoming his True North in a manner of speaking, treating him like a person and showing genuine curiosity about him, eventually leading him to abandon the ‘hive’ to follow her and resulting in his beginning his route to returning to Life.
In terms of personality, R is a soft-spoken person with an inquisitive mind and a wry, ironic sense of humour. He’s a bit of a hoarder, collecting anything that he finds interesting (with a particular emphasis on vinyls). His thoughts are generally far deeper than he is able to express verbally - something that he occasionally finds frustration with - and he is by no means the simple-minded man that his hesitant verbal expression and fumbling might have people think.
Path to Redemption: R needs to become self-reliant and accept his past in order to move forwards. He needs to work through his existential anxieties and become certain of what makes him ‘him’ outside of the ill-fitting pieces he’s slotted in along the way to fill in the gaps. On board the Barge he would also have to make good connections in order to avoid backsliding in his status of being ‘cured’ (as the cure relies on emotional/social connection), but without the social grease of having Julie at his side to make things easier for him.
Being dead is no new thing for him to process and he is more likely to struggle with the isolation of being without the people he had grown close to in canon and not knowing what happened to them than he is with the thought of having died (again).
As R came aboard willingly and with knowledge of what’s expected of him he’d react relatively positively to wardening, however he would definitely need one that wouldn’t just allow him to follow them around like a lost puppy (thereby mirroring them rather than Perry/etc, and not actually finding himself). Though it would probably be quite tempting for some wardens to want to ‘look after’ him, as he can give off an air of helplessness, he would be better suited to one who would give him more of a push towards being independent while not leaving him completely out on a limb.
I would expect progress to come from participation in Floods/Breaches as well as the encouragement of any friends that he manages to make. R does not object to personal growth, he just tends to find it difficult to do by himself.
History: R wasn't always a zombie. Of course not. He was born a perfectly normal boy, by the name of R--- Atvist, to a woman who worked her fingers to the bone and a father who thought himself just enough of that little bit better than everyone else to be entirely too noticeable. As a child, he didn't get far into his young life before the world was plunged into the creeping terror of the Plague, and his mother helped as much as she could in the refugee camp they called home while he picked up donated clothes to replace the worn out rags of his current outfit. His mother would slip a few tins of food into her purse each night, and tell him not to breathe a word to his father.
As he grew older, though, he began to express a kind of bitterness towards his mother and their situation that he hadn't before. She grew flowers and helped the refugees, and he didn't see the point, didn't want to be part of this stoic survival that was barely a step above simply being alive. As often happens in such trying times, a religious cult rose in the ranks of the refugees, sinking its claws into them until they couldn't consider believing anything else. It was to this cult that the young man lost his mother - stabbed with a potato peeler in the middle of making food for the chanting crowd that prompted the assault. R questioned, and he wondered why, and he wondered if she had deserved it in some strange and twisted way. He had to believe that there was a plan, that this was part of it, and all the while something inside of him cooled and hardened and kept him from feeling the things he should have felt at her death.
Instead, he retreated further into the blind, dark faith of the cult, growing his own from the roots of it. At sixteen years old, he had already united a group of frenetic teenagers and burned five major cities to the ground.
A streak like that can't go on forever, though, and R spent three years in prison after being captured. Finally released by none other than his grandfather, he was taken into an organisation going under the name 'Axiom', and easily indoctrinated into their service. Axiom, while presenting itself as a group keen on the revival of the old world and the safety of all, was little more than a ravening beast sweeping its way across the former United States in a quest for unending expansion. Anyone who opposed was simply removed by the groups of hollowly-smiling representatives of the organisation. R proved himself a capable employee and quickly rose through the ranks, though as years went by, he found himself becoming more and more detached from the world and from the people around him.
It was one fateful plane journey that finally sealed the young man's destiny. After complications in the cockpit and the death of the copilot (who quickly began to reanimate), R was bitten on the ankle and began to suffer the same descent into (un)Death. The pilot, also condemned to the same fate, struggled to land the plane before the infection took hold.
They crashed in a remote, wooded area, and R's past was quickly forgotten as Life left him.
He wandered through the woods, trying to recall what had happened and waging war with the hunger gnawing at every part of him. It was during this time that he first saw Julie, with her mother and father, on their way to the Canadian border (though at the time he did not know her, and he did not recall this meeting later). Though hungry, he didn't attack them, sensing something about the girl that was best left alone. In time, he joined a small group of other hungry Dead - including his future best friend M - and they made their slow, shambling way to a nearby airport.
And so time passed in a haze of cloudy, greyscale memories made fuzzy by a lack of ability - or want - to hang on to them. R was always an oddball, even when he was Dead. He disliked the necessary rituals that he and his fellow Dead had to go through - the hunger, the feeding, the mindless shuffling - and he clung on to whatever semblance of life could be said to reside within a corpse with a fierce intensity. He would speak, when he could, and even sometimes hold what might be called 'conversations' with his best friend (an equally stubborn corpse by the name of 'M'), who would often scoff or even laugh at the softness and squeamishness that R could so often display.
He lived in an abandoned Boeing 747, and over the years had filled at least a third of the plane with various pieces of junk he had gathered from the hunts he had joined. Snowglobes, comic books and, more ghoulishly, items of clothing taken from the people he killed. At the time, he wasn't sure why he did any of it, but later he would be able to coherently realise that it was a way to maintain some kind of connection to the Living world. His pride and joy was a working record player and stack of vinyls, of which a compilation of Frank Sinatra's hits was one of his favourites.
R couldn't track the time, but it moved on. He wandered the airport, always far more eloquent in his head than he was when he tried to speak, and wondered things that he was sure most other zombies didn't even think about. One day, while riding one of the moving floors - brought temporarily to life by a burst of power from the failing generators - he passed a female who caught his attention. She seemed different to the others in how she appeared to be resisting the progression of decay as much as he was, and even more interestingly, was wearing a name tag. Unfortunately, like R, she had no idea of what it said. As much as a zombie can have a girlfriend, she became his, and when she pulled him (reluctantly) to 'church' later that same day, they were married by one of the ghoulish 'boneys'.
The boneys were, in essence, the leaders of the hive. Not looked to as authority, most of the time, but undeniably in charge. They were not like R or others like him, but were distorted, walking skeletons, skin stretched over bone and held together by a strange, humming energy that could be felt and even heard when they were nearby. Whatever they were, they were the final stage and spoke with the voice of the decay.
After the marriage, R and his 'wife' were presented with two children, and R accepted this with the weary resignation that he accepted most things.
It was not long after this, in the midst of the weary humdrum of Dead life, that something happened which would change the course of R's existence forever. R became so suddenly hungry that he pressured a too-small team of Dead into a hunt, and they fell upon a group of teenagers scavenging in the city ruins. There, he pried open the skull of one of the young men in the party, removing his brain and biting a chunk out of it. It was then that he saw her.
Julie.
In a very peculiar turn of events, he made the sudden decision to protect her, warding the other gathered Dead away from her and carefully smearing his blood on her skin to mask her scent. Like this, he took her back to the airport with him, and stashed her away in the aeroplane he called home. It was a bold, and very strange move - not many, if any Dead would bring a Living person back to the hive in such a way. The only reason would be to attempt to turn them, which required a certain level of restraint. R did not intend to do that. He would later learn, through repeated nibblings on the piece of brain he was keeping in his pocket, that his sudden urge to protect her might just have come from the fact that the brain belonged to somebody who cared for her very deeply - a young man named Perry.
Over the following days he kept Julie safe and protected her on the occasions that she came up against other Dead, displaying a level of aggression in doing so that was quite unlike him (even punching his best friend hard enough to cave in one side of his face). In that time, Julie grew less afraid and more interested in her captor, and taught him to drive a Mercedes he had been lovingly taking care of for several years. Eventually, though, she insisted that it was time for her to leave, and R had to grudgingly agree.
In escaping, R (with the help of his friend M) defied the rule of the boneys and took the Mercedes out into the city with Julie in the passenger seat. As they drove, it began to rain, and they stopped in one of the suburbs to find shelter and somewhere to rest for the night. It was the following morning, after sending R searching for some more gas for the car, that Julie made a break for it and left him behind.
As much as he had one to break, you might say that the (very smart) move broke his heart. He began the long walk back to the airport, but on the way, was found by M and a small group of Dead who had been kicked out by the boneys and had come looking for him. As R was different, so were they, and the change was not tolerated by their desiccated leaders. Between them, they concocted a plan to get R into the human settlement, to find Julie and figure out once and for all just what it was about them that was provoking these new changes in the rest of the Dead.
The plan, amazingly, worked. R used a distraction at the gate to slip away from the guards and searched for Julie through the maze of narrow streets and alleys. Where the humans lived was nothing like a paradise - the buildings were thin and tall, stacked high to cram in as many people as possible. It wasn't easy, but R followed Julie's particular scent with the dogged determination of a bloodhound, and eventually found himself below her window, listening as she talked to her friend Nora. At hearing the somewhat encouraging revelation that she missed him, he got her attention, and was quickly ushered inside.
After a shower and some careful application of makeup, R was - to Nora's delight - very ready to 'play Living' for the night. The two young women showed him around the settlement, provoking memories and flashbacks from the fragments of Perry's mind still floating around in his own (a very strange thing, and not something that would normally happen). It couldn't last long, though, and it only took a moment of R losing his self-control for a second zombie to be loose in the stadium, and the whole place to be on high alert. In hindsight, it was a bad idea for him to think that he could drink alcohol at all. Nora and Julie did their best to hide him, but in the middle of trying to smuggle him out the following morning, came across Julie's father.
Grigio, a veteran of the infection's progression and a man who advocated the destruction of all things Dead, quickly saw through R's disguise. He stabbed him, revealing his true nature through the near-black blood that seeped from the wound. Julie and R escaped only through Nora's intervention - holding a gun to Grigio - and made their way out into the streets surrounding the stadium.
There, they met up with M and found that the group of exiled zombies had only grown. More of them were beginning to change thanks to whatever R and Julie had caused to be set in motion, and all of them were growing more and more curious about just what that 'change' actually meant. Though Julie wasn't sure, R assured her that it would be safe, but as they tried to work out what their next move could be, the boneys attacked them. Set on eradicating this threat to the morbid 'peace' that they believed was the only way things could be, they tore into the group, and Julie and R fled back towards the stadium. There, they hoped that the Living would be able to shoot their pursuers down, but the boneys converged on the stadium in far higher numbers than they had anticipated.
They headed to the roof, finding Nora along the way, and watched the fighting going on below them. There, Julie had an epiphany about the cause of the plague - the weight of the evil of humankind had become so great that it had turned in on itself, cutting their bonds to each other and turning them into mindless husks of their former selves. With this in mind, Julie and R did the only thing they could think of - they kissed. At that moment the plague inside R was fought against and beaten, pushed out of his body entirely.
Julie's father found them once again, and might have killed them both were it not for the timely interruption of one of Grigio's soldiers. A boney appeared over the top of the roof and grabbed him, and though Julie tried to shoot the creature, she wasn't quick enough to save her father from being bitten. Giving up, Grigio fell with the boney into the streets below, turning into dust as he did so. Something about what had happened on the roof caused the boneys surrounding the stadium to halt their assault and leave, as if realising that the thing they had been trying to keep from happening had already come to pass. They returned to the airport and dark places in the city, to die as the force sustaining them was drained from their bodies.
It would be nice to say that at that point, all of the Dead were cured and life began to get better. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. The Dead came back to Life slowly, and some of them didn't adapt well to their new states. In some cases, the wounds they received while Dead were simply too grievous and coming back to life only hastened their path away from mortality. In others, the returning memories were so overwhelming that it caused the revived Dead to commit suicide. R repressed his own past, deciding that he didn't want to remember his own life, he only wanted the one he had now.
Months on, and little had changed for those living in the stadium. Things were safer, in a manner of speaking, and they could scavenge without so much fear of attack. Julie and R, despite advice to the contrary, took up a house in the suburbs and began making efforts to renovate it, while Julie took the surname 'Cabernet' to further distance herself from her father's memory. Though they were defying the expectations of the world around them, the fact they were together was looked down upon by many, and their relationship was beginning to become strained.
Things could never be easy, and as they tried to build their lives and work on the best ways to cure the Dead who still remained outside their reach, a new threat arrived on their doorstep in the form of the eerie representatives of a group calling themselves 'Axiom' - a group thought decimated by misfortune years previously. R found something to be strange about them immediately, thanks to the amount of makeup that they wore (even on their hands), and suspected them to be more like him than the rest of the Living in the stadium. He never had the chance to search into his suspicions, however, as the otherwise mild-mannered (if very pushy) representatives soon made their true intentions clear - they would take over the stadium and all related assets, whether the people in charge of the settlement agreed with them or not.
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hardtostarboardE-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact:
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Cain (Alexei) -
reargunner Character Name: R (R---- Atvist)
Series: Warm Bodies (book series)
Age: Adult/Indeterminate. Mid to late 20s on death, plus another 10 years dead
From When?: Early in book 2 (The Burning World), when a bomb detonates in the armoury. R is thrown through a sheet metal wall and climbs out of the debris relatively unharmed. In the case of his port into the Barge, he doesn’t survive the explosion.
Inmate Justification: As both a zombie and a Living person, R has been the cause of death of dozens of people (either directly or indirectly) and is 100% avoiding thinking about any of it.
He regrets the necessity of what he did while he was Dead, but is also very firm about putting it as well as his ‘past life’ behind him, saying that he does not want his old life back since he wants ‘this one’. He experiences frequent existential anxiety and hangs his sense of direction and purpose almost entirely on one person, regardless of the pressure that puts said person under and often to her detriment (and sometimes the detriment of others). Julie often pushes forwards and puts on a good front for his sake, and R's tendency to be somewhat helpless or require additional support while also being in an important community position as 'Julie's Boyfriend' and some kind of zombie expert means that he can be given priority in situations where people should really be putting themselves first.
R struggles with feeling like a Valid Person, in part due to the attitudes of Living people towards ‘recovering zombies’ but also just because he’s an anxious mess who feels like he’s just playing pretend until someone notices and shoots him in the head. Since he no longer remembers anything about what made him ‘him’, he tends to cling to the memories that he gleaned from the last brain he ate (Julie’s previous boyfriend Perry), and his peculiar hoarding tendencies. The problem isn’t that he has these sorts of doubts but in how he expresses them (compartmentalising, over-reliance on others, denial of personal responsibility) but also in how he sometimes simply doesn’t address them at all, using the cover of just wanting to ‘move on’ as a janky coping mechanism. While wanting to leave an old life behind is not a bad thing in and of itself, R's particular past and acknowledging it is important to understanding who he is and a lot of whys around the Plague itself and how it works, as well as the part he had to play in Axiom's rise to power.
Arrival: He agreed to come!
Abilities/Powers: Any ‘powers’ that R has are a result of his still being a bit Dead. He has severely reduced sensitivity to pain and doesn’t need as much food/water/sleep as regular people would. He is capable of pushing his body past normal physical limits, but this will bite him in the ass later as he can still be damaged and injured in the same way as a regular human.
Inmate Information: Though he doesn’t remember any of it at this point in canon (and he will not need canon updating for this, it’s an ongoing process either way and isn’t reliant on him being in canon situations for triggers), R had a starring role in the downfall of the civilised world following the outbreak of the Plague. As a teenager he was indoctrinated into an aggressive religious cult which sprang up and was so warped/brainwashed by their teachings that he set five cities on fire to ‘cleanse’ them before he was finally locked up. After a few years he was taken in by his grandfather, the CEO of an organisation set on the ‘preservation of the old world’ (though it was not anything of the sort), and spent several more years working his way up the ranks with ruthless efficiency. It was only through severe emotional detachment (beginning following his mother’s death and only growing worse in the years that followed) that he did this without a hint of remorse.
After he died, his entire life was wiped out of his head. He didn’t remember anything he’d done - even the events directly leading up to his ‘turning’ were gone. He eventually found his way to the nearest airport, where he set up a ‘home’ in an abandoned commercial airliner and spent the next ten years hunting still-Living people for food while trying to cling on to the last scraps of his own humanity.
The Dead operate under a semi-cultish ‘societal order’, where the ‘boneys’ are the ones in charge and the others do as they’re told. The zombies living in the airport lived a ghoulish kind of mimicry of Real Life under their instruction, using the airport’s facilities and even being joined in ‘marriages’ to other zombies. R himself was given a ‘wife’ and two ‘children’ to take care of, though he was very indifferent to it at the time.
Everything changed for him when he met a vibrant Living girl called Julie, laying eyes on her moments after consuming a piece of her boyfriend’s brain. He decided to protect her, and through their next weeks together began to see a different potential future for himself. She gave him a sense of direction, becoming his True North in a manner of speaking, treating him like a person and showing genuine curiosity about him, eventually leading him to abandon the ‘hive’ to follow her and resulting in his beginning his route to returning to Life.
In terms of personality, R is a soft-spoken person with an inquisitive mind and a wry, ironic sense of humour. He’s a bit of a hoarder, collecting anything that he finds interesting (with a particular emphasis on vinyls). His thoughts are generally far deeper than he is able to express verbally - something that he occasionally finds frustration with - and he is by no means the simple-minded man that his hesitant verbal expression and fumbling might have people think.
Path to Redemption: R needs to become self-reliant and accept his past in order to move forwards. He needs to work through his existential anxieties and become certain of what makes him ‘him’ outside of the ill-fitting pieces he’s slotted in along the way to fill in the gaps. On board the Barge he would also have to make good connections in order to avoid backsliding in his status of being ‘cured’ (as the cure relies on emotional/social connection), but without the social grease of having Julie at his side to make things easier for him.
Being dead is no new thing for him to process and he is more likely to struggle with the isolation of being without the people he had grown close to in canon and not knowing what happened to them than he is with the thought of having died (again).
As R came aboard willingly and with knowledge of what’s expected of him he’d react relatively positively to wardening, however he would definitely need one that wouldn’t just allow him to follow them around like a lost puppy (thereby mirroring them rather than Perry/etc, and not actually finding himself). Though it would probably be quite tempting for some wardens to want to ‘look after’ him, as he can give off an air of helplessness, he would be better suited to one who would give him more of a push towards being independent while not leaving him completely out on a limb.
I would expect progress to come from participation in Floods/Breaches as well as the encouragement of any friends that he manages to make. R does not object to personal growth, he just tends to find it difficult to do by himself.
History: R wasn't always a zombie. Of course not. He was born a perfectly normal boy, by the name of R--- Atvist, to a woman who worked her fingers to the bone and a father who thought himself just enough of that little bit better than everyone else to be entirely too noticeable. As a child, he didn't get far into his young life before the world was plunged into the creeping terror of the Plague, and his mother helped as much as she could in the refugee camp they called home while he picked up donated clothes to replace the worn out rags of his current outfit. His mother would slip a few tins of food into her purse each night, and tell him not to breathe a word to his father.
As he grew older, though, he began to express a kind of bitterness towards his mother and their situation that he hadn't before. She grew flowers and helped the refugees, and he didn't see the point, didn't want to be part of this stoic survival that was barely a step above simply being alive. As often happens in such trying times, a religious cult rose in the ranks of the refugees, sinking its claws into them until they couldn't consider believing anything else. It was to this cult that the young man lost his mother - stabbed with a potato peeler in the middle of making food for the chanting crowd that prompted the assault. R questioned, and he wondered why, and he wondered if she had deserved it in some strange and twisted way. He had to believe that there was a plan, that this was part of it, and all the while something inside of him cooled and hardened and kept him from feeling the things he should have felt at her death.
Instead, he retreated further into the blind, dark faith of the cult, growing his own from the roots of it. At sixteen years old, he had already united a group of frenetic teenagers and burned five major cities to the ground.
A streak like that can't go on forever, though, and R spent three years in prison after being captured. Finally released by none other than his grandfather, he was taken into an organisation going under the name 'Axiom', and easily indoctrinated into their service. Axiom, while presenting itself as a group keen on the revival of the old world and the safety of all, was little more than a ravening beast sweeping its way across the former United States in a quest for unending expansion. Anyone who opposed was simply removed by the groups of hollowly-smiling representatives of the organisation. R proved himself a capable employee and quickly rose through the ranks, though as years went by, he found himself becoming more and more detached from the world and from the people around him.
It was one fateful plane journey that finally sealed the young man's destiny. After complications in the cockpit and the death of the copilot (who quickly began to reanimate), R was bitten on the ankle and began to suffer the same descent into (un)Death. The pilot, also condemned to the same fate, struggled to land the plane before the infection took hold.
They crashed in a remote, wooded area, and R's past was quickly forgotten as Life left him.
He wandered through the woods, trying to recall what had happened and waging war with the hunger gnawing at every part of him. It was during this time that he first saw Julie, with her mother and father, on their way to the Canadian border (though at the time he did not know her, and he did not recall this meeting later). Though hungry, he didn't attack them, sensing something about the girl that was best left alone. In time, he joined a small group of other hungry Dead - including his future best friend M - and they made their slow, shambling way to a nearby airport.
And so time passed in a haze of cloudy, greyscale memories made fuzzy by a lack of ability - or want - to hang on to them. R was always an oddball, even when he was Dead. He disliked the necessary rituals that he and his fellow Dead had to go through - the hunger, the feeding, the mindless shuffling - and he clung on to whatever semblance of life could be said to reside within a corpse with a fierce intensity. He would speak, when he could, and even sometimes hold what might be called 'conversations' with his best friend (an equally stubborn corpse by the name of 'M'), who would often scoff or even laugh at the softness and squeamishness that R could so often display.
He lived in an abandoned Boeing 747, and over the years had filled at least a third of the plane with various pieces of junk he had gathered from the hunts he had joined. Snowglobes, comic books and, more ghoulishly, items of clothing taken from the people he killed. At the time, he wasn't sure why he did any of it, but later he would be able to coherently realise that it was a way to maintain some kind of connection to the Living world. His pride and joy was a working record player and stack of vinyls, of which a compilation of Frank Sinatra's hits was one of his favourites.
R couldn't track the time, but it moved on. He wandered the airport, always far more eloquent in his head than he was when he tried to speak, and wondered things that he was sure most other zombies didn't even think about. One day, while riding one of the moving floors - brought temporarily to life by a burst of power from the failing generators - he passed a female who caught his attention. She seemed different to the others in how she appeared to be resisting the progression of decay as much as he was, and even more interestingly, was wearing a name tag. Unfortunately, like R, she had no idea of what it said. As much as a zombie can have a girlfriend, she became his, and when she pulled him (reluctantly) to 'church' later that same day, they were married by one of the ghoulish 'boneys'.
The boneys were, in essence, the leaders of the hive. Not looked to as authority, most of the time, but undeniably in charge. They were not like R or others like him, but were distorted, walking skeletons, skin stretched over bone and held together by a strange, humming energy that could be felt and even heard when they were nearby. Whatever they were, they were the final stage and spoke with the voice of the decay.
After the marriage, R and his 'wife' were presented with two children, and R accepted this with the weary resignation that he accepted most things.
It was not long after this, in the midst of the weary humdrum of Dead life, that something happened which would change the course of R's existence forever. R became so suddenly hungry that he pressured a too-small team of Dead into a hunt, and they fell upon a group of teenagers scavenging in the city ruins. There, he pried open the skull of one of the young men in the party, removing his brain and biting a chunk out of it. It was then that he saw her.
Julie.
In a very peculiar turn of events, he made the sudden decision to protect her, warding the other gathered Dead away from her and carefully smearing his blood on her skin to mask her scent. Like this, he took her back to the airport with him, and stashed her away in the aeroplane he called home. It was a bold, and very strange move - not many, if any Dead would bring a Living person back to the hive in such a way. The only reason would be to attempt to turn them, which required a certain level of restraint. R did not intend to do that. He would later learn, through repeated nibblings on the piece of brain he was keeping in his pocket, that his sudden urge to protect her might just have come from the fact that the brain belonged to somebody who cared for her very deeply - a young man named Perry.
Over the following days he kept Julie safe and protected her on the occasions that she came up against other Dead, displaying a level of aggression in doing so that was quite unlike him (even punching his best friend hard enough to cave in one side of his face). In that time, Julie grew less afraid and more interested in her captor, and taught him to drive a Mercedes he had been lovingly taking care of for several years. Eventually, though, she insisted that it was time for her to leave, and R had to grudgingly agree.
In escaping, R (with the help of his friend M) defied the rule of the boneys and took the Mercedes out into the city with Julie in the passenger seat. As they drove, it began to rain, and they stopped in one of the suburbs to find shelter and somewhere to rest for the night. It was the following morning, after sending R searching for some more gas for the car, that Julie made a break for it and left him behind.
As much as he had one to break, you might say that the (very smart) move broke his heart. He began the long walk back to the airport, but on the way, was found by M and a small group of Dead who had been kicked out by the boneys and had come looking for him. As R was different, so were they, and the change was not tolerated by their desiccated leaders. Between them, they concocted a plan to get R into the human settlement, to find Julie and figure out once and for all just what it was about them that was provoking these new changes in the rest of the Dead.
The plan, amazingly, worked. R used a distraction at the gate to slip away from the guards and searched for Julie through the maze of narrow streets and alleys. Where the humans lived was nothing like a paradise - the buildings were thin and tall, stacked high to cram in as many people as possible. It wasn't easy, but R followed Julie's particular scent with the dogged determination of a bloodhound, and eventually found himself below her window, listening as she talked to her friend Nora. At hearing the somewhat encouraging revelation that she missed him, he got her attention, and was quickly ushered inside.
After a shower and some careful application of makeup, R was - to Nora's delight - very ready to 'play Living' for the night. The two young women showed him around the settlement, provoking memories and flashbacks from the fragments of Perry's mind still floating around in his own (a very strange thing, and not something that would normally happen). It couldn't last long, though, and it only took a moment of R losing his self-control for a second zombie to be loose in the stadium, and the whole place to be on high alert. In hindsight, it was a bad idea for him to think that he could drink alcohol at all. Nora and Julie did their best to hide him, but in the middle of trying to smuggle him out the following morning, came across Julie's father.
Grigio, a veteran of the infection's progression and a man who advocated the destruction of all things Dead, quickly saw through R's disguise. He stabbed him, revealing his true nature through the near-black blood that seeped from the wound. Julie and R escaped only through Nora's intervention - holding a gun to Grigio - and made their way out into the streets surrounding the stadium.
There, they met up with M and found that the group of exiled zombies had only grown. More of them were beginning to change thanks to whatever R and Julie had caused to be set in motion, and all of them were growing more and more curious about just what that 'change' actually meant. Though Julie wasn't sure, R assured her that it would be safe, but as they tried to work out what their next move could be, the boneys attacked them. Set on eradicating this threat to the morbid 'peace' that they believed was the only way things could be, they tore into the group, and Julie and R fled back towards the stadium. There, they hoped that the Living would be able to shoot their pursuers down, but the boneys converged on the stadium in far higher numbers than they had anticipated.
They headed to the roof, finding Nora along the way, and watched the fighting going on below them. There, Julie had an epiphany about the cause of the plague - the weight of the evil of humankind had become so great that it had turned in on itself, cutting their bonds to each other and turning them into mindless husks of their former selves. With this in mind, Julie and R did the only thing they could think of - they kissed. At that moment the plague inside R was fought against and beaten, pushed out of his body entirely.
Julie's father found them once again, and might have killed them both were it not for the timely interruption of one of Grigio's soldiers. A boney appeared over the top of the roof and grabbed him, and though Julie tried to shoot the creature, she wasn't quick enough to save her father from being bitten. Giving up, Grigio fell with the boney into the streets below, turning into dust as he did so. Something about what had happened on the roof caused the boneys surrounding the stadium to halt their assault and leave, as if realising that the thing they had been trying to keep from happening had already come to pass. They returned to the airport and dark places in the city, to die as the force sustaining them was drained from their bodies.
It would be nice to say that at that point, all of the Dead were cured and life began to get better. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. The Dead came back to Life slowly, and some of them didn't adapt well to their new states. In some cases, the wounds they received while Dead were simply too grievous and coming back to life only hastened their path away from mortality. In others, the returning memories were so overwhelming that it caused the revived Dead to commit suicide. R repressed his own past, deciding that he didn't want to remember his own life, he only wanted the one he had now.
Months on, and little had changed for those living in the stadium. Things were safer, in a manner of speaking, and they could scavenge without so much fear of attack. Julie and R, despite advice to the contrary, took up a house in the suburbs and began making efforts to renovate it, while Julie took the surname 'Cabernet' to further distance herself from her father's memory. Though they were defying the expectations of the world around them, the fact they were together was looked down upon by many, and their relationship was beginning to become strained.
Things could never be easy, and as they tried to build their lives and work on the best ways to cure the Dead who still remained outside their reach, a new threat arrived on their doorstep in the form of the eerie representatives of a group calling themselves 'Axiom' - a group thought decimated by misfortune years previously. R found something to be strange about them immediately, thanks to the amount of makeup that they wore (even on their hands), and suspected them to be more like him than the rest of the Living in the stadium. He never had the chance to search into his suspicions, however, as the otherwise mild-mannered (if very pushy) representatives soon made their true intentions clear - they would take over the stadium and all related assets, whether the people in charge of the settlement agreed with them or not.
Sample Network Entry: TDM top level (thread)
Sample RP: TDM top level (thread)