Charcoal "Coal"

A player Character of the Online Wraeththu RPG

Tribe:  The Fragmented (Agh'mahaiil)
Age at Inception: 22
  Current Age:
Yahoo ID: FragCoal


"Why do they call you Charcoal?"

The dusky haired Har looked back over one slender shoulder. Smiling a little, his perfect lips formed a gentle bow and he turned back to the soil he dug at with a small shovel. Digging in the hard earth felt like trying to tunnel to some faraway land on the other side of the planet, each inch of broken ground a step closer to an unreachable destination. The ground was dry and stony, filled with ash and refuse that needed to be cleared before anything would ever grow.

"Coal, it will never grow, why do you keep planting those?"

One seed fell into the newly dug hole and Coal swept earth over it a single swipe of the small shovel. Coal could hear the contempt in the others voice and he shrugged it off as he stood and looked down at his work.

"They call me Charcoal because of how I was incepted..."

He recalled the pain in a flash of memory. The explosion had lit up the sky in a blinding white glare of superheated light. Ground Zero of a thermo-nuclear strike was somewhere high above the city but still close enough to burn. Coal, although that wasn't his name then, had been burned, and badly. He writhed in the street, naked and blind, like many many others. Radiation didn't descriminate, it just burned. Har and human alike.

The streets had belonged to the Wraeththu after dark, that was when the explosion had come, but others were comfortable on the dark streets as well. Coal was one such comfortable soul. He had walked in happy delerium, plying his trade among the few humans that were left to want him. Sure he knew about Wraeththu, they chided him nightly, cajoled and even begged him. "Join us!" they called and with a laugh and a grin he would move on seeking the next and the next. Coal's trade was flesh, his own, and for it he traded cash, until that went the way of the dodo. Food or drugs sufficed after that, and he lived a comfortable if delusioned life moving among his regulars, night after night and sleeping in between. What came after, in the future, Coal didn't care. He never looked that far away, not even into the next day, it came when it did. Sure he had dreams, and his current business was just for now, to get him over the hard times, just until he got back to school or got a good job, or, or...His excuses went on and on, and he really didn't care, at least not that anyone saw.

Inside he felt like the truly lost boy, the bleakness of looking into the future scared the hell out of him. It was empty and black, filled with a longing for something, anything. Like looking over a cliff in the dark of night, the bottom nowhere to be seen. He teetered on the knife edge of it when times were hardest. Frightened and alone some nights he would sit in a darkened husk of a building, hearing the sounds of the chaos streets, even the wilding Wraeththu sounded like some twisted version of family, a family he wasn't part of. Even their invitation didn't touch him, he couldn't let them in, let anyone in. No one could make him look at that empty heart of his, nothing touched him, or so it would seem to outsiders and everyone was that, an outsider.

Then the light had flashed and his eyes, looking up into the instantly daylit sky, had gone suddenly dark. He blinked and had time to wonder why his eyes stung before the blast of superheated air struck him full in the face and seered the flash from his bones, withered his eyes in their sockets and shredded his clothing to ash. He gasped in the force of the heat, air not coming, his lungs heaving and collasping into ragged sacks, like torn paper bags in his aching chest. He fell on the smoldering concrete and writhed into the melting tarmac and liquid yellow lines of the street. His mind screamed when his husked body couldn't and somehow in all the white hot pain of the burning, he survived, survived long enough for them to find him

"He's just a charcoal bit...are you sure? How can you tell?"

"I don't care! Just do it, its him I tell you!"

Fragmented parts and pieces of conversation that broke into the pain like daggers in eardrums that no longer heard, their skins evaporated in the blistering millesecond blast of illuminated death.




Coal turned and looked back at the young Har who sat on a broken section of wall behind him.

"So you see, I was charcoal, so Charcoal I am." Coal grinned and the Har's cigarette flared to life in his hand, the tip suddenly becoming a glowing ember of burning tobacco. The young Har gasped and looked down as the smokey scent of burning clove reached his nostrils. He looked up to Coal confused. If ever there was a scar or burn on Coal it wasn't evident now, he was stunning. His skin was milky white, like translucent cocaine in a syringe, blue veins hiding just out of sight. He was trim and fit like all Har, albeit slightly on the effeminate side, his inky black hair was jagged and long at the back, giving him a feral unkempt beauty even in rags and dirty velvet coat. His eyes were like twin onyx pools, all pupil, even in bright light, set under fine dark brows. Althaia had redefined him, smoothed out his imperfections and delivered after three days a truly wonderous Har. He was one of the few exceptions among the normally hideous and frightening Fragmented but he kept himself apart from them coming only to take Aruna on occasion and preferring to tend to his seeds. His seeds, he planted them daily, picking each spot carefully. The future would come and until then the seeds would wait in the hard packed radiated soil. When the time came, they would grow and life would begin anew in the city, in the future, a future Coal now felt part of.

Coal's magical level is very basic at the game's onset, Kaimana- Neoma but because of his mutation he is a pyrokinetic, currently able to produce anything up to the a flame the size of a torch.