| Daniel Ratzenberger |
|---|
| Nickname | Dan |
| Species | Corpsehound (Zombie-eating werehyena) |
| Age | 19 years old |
| Gender | Male |
| Languages | A variant of Middle Kingdom Egyptian, through his Shadow
English (Native, US Midwestern)
Skywolf (Toddlertalk) |
| Player | Atalhlla |
| Approved | |
| Go to Character Sheet |
Description
- Height & Weight: Bipedal, upright, nearly 7'. (~2.1 m) Quad, about 3.5' (~1.1m) to the shoulder. Some 360 lbs. (~160 kg)
- Apparent Age: Young Adult
- Character Build: Muscular
- Body Type: Bipedal
- Usual Clothing: Well, he used to be a slacks and button-up kinda guy, but right now whatever fits.
- Voice: He has a rich deep tenor rather unbefitting of his appearance.
- Usual Scent: Hyena, Human, and a very slight lingering scent of carrion that never seems to leave. When his Amulet of Pine Freshness is charged, the carrion smell is replaced with the smell of pine needles. Also smells of Tom as of late and, oddly, slightly of earth.
He's a big ol burly werehyena with suspiciously well kempt fur, big ol triangular fox ears, and a long floofy fox tail. Relative to human proportions, his arms are a bit longer than normal while his legs seem kinda short short, giving him a typical sloped back appearance when walking quad. He can stand up right, and though he's usually slightly hunched over he can stand up straighter if necessary. He's equally comfortable quad.
His hands, though dextrous, are not capable of as fine of manipulation as a human's hand is, even accounting for relative size.
His coat is mainly a golden color, and his markings are rather curious, spots coalescing in a well ordered double helix down his back. Starting at his head and running down his back is a mane of longer light brown fur with a reddish highlight above his forehead. From his hands to about his elbows, and his feet to a bit past his ankles, his fur is dark gray-brown. The fur on his vulpine tail goes from orange at the base to red towards the end, where there's a distinct ring and flag. His fox ears are black on the back, white on the inside.
He has a dark face-mask, as is typical of hyenas, except he also has three dark lines drawn across each cheek like cartoon whiskers. His eyes are blue, slit pupils.
- Height & Weight: Bipedal, upright, nearly 7'. (~2.1 m) Quad, about 3.5' (~1.1m) to the shoulder. Some 360 lbs. (~160 kg)
- Apparent Age: Young Adult
- Character Build: Muscular
- Body Type: Bipedal
- Usual Clothing: Well, he used to be a slacks and button-up kinda guy, but right now whatever fits.
- Voice: He has a rich deep tenor rather unbefitting of his appearance.
- Usual Scent: Fox and a very slight lingering scent of carrion that never seems to leave. When his Amulet of Pine Freshness is charged, the carrion smell is replaced with the smell of pine needles. Also smells of Tom as of late and, oddly, slightly of earth.
When he's actually transformed, his body by and large isn't changed from his base form, other than having a fox face, though on further inspection his arms and legs are a bit longer and his wrist doesn't do the weird hyena thing.
Even while glamoured he still seems like a vulpine version of himself, even his face despite the disparity between vulpine and hyenid countenances. This is the most obviously illusory part of the glamour, though you have to watch a bit to catch it. His ears and tail, however, aren't really affected by the glamour because those features are already vulpine.
In either case, his coat is more or less normal for a red fox, save that his body has more golden fur which fades towards orange going to his head, wrists, and ankles. He still has a white counter coloration down his front. His hands and feet have black socks with white digits. His tail looks like a fairly typical vulpine affair, though it also has that same gold to orange gradient down its length before terminating with a black ring and white flag. Ears are black and look pointy. Hair/mane is now blond rather than light brown, though the red highlight at the forehead remains. Eyes are still blue with slit pupils.
Corpsehound with Vulpine Accoutrements, Feral Edition
- Height & Weight: Quad, about 3.5' (~1.1m) to the shoulder. Some 360 lbs. (~160 kg)
- Apparent Age: Young Adult
- Character Build: Muscular
- Body Type: Quadruped
- Usual Clothing: Probably nude, but may have his magic bag on him.
- Voice: Big Hyena with a bit of Big Canine. He can actually squeal, now!
- Usual Scent: Hyena, Human, and a very slight lingering scent of carrion that never seems to leave. When his Amulet of Pine Freshness is charged, the carrion smell is replaced with the smell of pine needles. Also smells of Tom and Xirah as of late and, oddly, slightly of earth.
He's a big ol burly hyena with suspiciously well kempt fur, big ol triangular fox ears, and a long floofy fox tail. His proportions are pretty typical of a hyena's albeit he's quite a bit bigger than one. He can stand upright about as well as a hyena can, or as well as a dog can for that matter.
His coat pattern is unchanged from his base form.
History
Suburbs. School. Highschool. College. Zombies! TF! MIGRANT! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
Life growing up was nothing particularly remarkable. Thoroughly suburban and white, even. He got great grades, except in literature and history, built catapults and trebuchets, participated in the Science Olympiad, grew questionable things in his room and the fridge, participated Habitat builds, went to various fannish conventions, and in general lived a well to do life full of well to do things.
As is normal in America, immediately after highschool came college and, about a month into classes, a rather startling apocalypse of zombies occurred causing an indefinite hiatus in schools and pretty much everything else all over. Even though everyone and their grandmother had at that point given at least some thought to zombie plans, shit never the less hit every fan imaginable.
For his part, Dan and his friends rather successfully holed up in one university building and, not too long afterwards, connected with a few other groups of survivors. Despite the dire initial outlook, a life time of zombie infested media had prepared them all for many of the scenarios they now had to face, although having to actually act on reality was still quite different from performing thought experiments. Emotions are difficult drives to deny, and plan-As rarely survive contact with reality.
Even with all that, the situation was going not too terribly a month on from Z-0. Things took a turn for the fuzzier, however, when on a scavenging mission, Dan got separated from the group by building code violations. They came back and tried to locate him, but could neither get a response nor find a way down to where ever he went, and so according to previously agreed protocol they had to leave him.
Some time after that, he awakes to find himself transfigured into a terrible beast that hungers for the flesh of the undead. Kinda freaky, but being able to eat them before they eat you was undeniably useful, and really, the only complaint Dan could level against this body in the current situation, besides the deplorable lack of appropriate clothing, was that he was not a fox instead, though he supposed foxes weren't stereotyped as eating corpses.
Now rather more hyenid than before, he needed to reconvene with his compatriots, preferably in a manner that didn't result in the wasting of precious defenses on him, to say nothing about the injury this might pose to himself. He was on the point of convincing them that, yes, he really was Daniel, just fuzzier, and that he only wanted to eat zombies, and not living people and most certainly not friends, when he was whisked away to Infinitas.
Homeworld
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Er, I mean Earth and Zombies, which pretty much means everything was anded with Zombies.
Powers
Accelerated Healing
He heals much faster than normal! Handy when wading into hordes of bitey corpses
He had this tweaked while getting his Incantation changed so that his healing is more powerful even without the aid of his magical portion, and less likely to require rebreaking of bones and other such things.
While he already has to eat a relatively large amount of food to maintain his body, healing really jacks up the metabolism. He could end up in the paradoxical situation of his body eating itself to repair itself. While it would shut down at some point, this is not an advantageous situation to be in, as it at that point he's very weak, but also very, very hungry.
Resistance to Zombie and other Undeath Effects
- He very strongly resistant to zombification, and many necrotic effects.
- He is weakly or somewhat resistant to many other necromantic effects, usually those dealing with death, dead things, and especially undead things.
- This applies to his corpse, too.
- Life stealing effects are not counted as related to death or undeath, here, and so he has no resistance to such effects.
- He can only be sustained by corrupted Spark, that is the corrupted animating principal of undead things. Fortunately a mad runist put runes in his throat to corrupt anything he swallows, so he's no longer entirely dependent on necromancers or crazy but well meaning school superintendents.
- No specific system.
Shadow
- His Shadow is sapient, somewhat sentient (does not feel pain or pleasure, eg), and not sophant; it still considered a part of his body proper. Sort of like a very smart arm that has its own arms.
- It can be instructed to carry out commands of varying complexity, though the ability to take standing orders is limited due to it also being a sentinel and coordinator in his own body.
- It has sensory capabilities including the feeling of various magics, physical touch, and limited forms of sight.
- Being a shadow doesn't grant Dan automatic darksight or lowlight vision, but he can feel around if he want.
- It can partially or fully solidify into a physical form much like Dan's own. Actual interaction however does cost Spark, though casual use doesn't cost very much, certainly no more than just living costs.
- It can block things as part of its physical interaction abilities, although depending on the nature of this interaction it may drain some or a pretty decent amount of Dan's Spark. (e.g. it would be very unwise to try to just weather large gouts of sunfire, although his corpse would at least be unburned so there's that.)
- It can dispense advice to Dan free of charge, however it is not always useful advice.
Magic!
- He has a limited but essentially built-in repertoire of shadow-based and funerary centric magics.
- He can create shadows, darken or black out areas, draw figures, etc. He can block out mundane light and some magical forms of light.
- He can perform express embalming of bodies which will leave preserve their form and leave them resistant to being used as zombies.
- More recently he's learned to take part of the enbalming spell and adapt it for use as a purification spell.
- He has started taking instruction under Shana and has learned some basic general magic work, about apprentice level.
- These are things he has to do manually through his Shadow. It ends up being a combination of gutteral muttering, airy hieroglyphs, and whatever other things are suitably ominous, including drawing his own blood at times.
- Some basic elemental manipulation, creation of lights. Basic cantrips.
- Rather importantly, basic dispelling.
- He can create more useful things like directed lights, simple figures using both light and shadow, barriers, manifest elements, etc.
- Regardless of which repertoire he's drawing from, it all consumes his Spark, which is essentially his animating principal. If he runs out of Spark he dies. Fortunately, he's quite lively, and even has some extra storage in his tail.[ul]
- Things like Stamina potions can give him a temporary boost, but they're no substitute for actually eating.
The world is somewhat more than mundane Earth, to say nothing about the presence of zombies and zobie-eating hyenas themselves. Dieties of various sorts have been active, though in less and less showy forms, through out all of even modern history, trading direct action for more discretion as the objects of veneration changed from themselves to more secular things.
The corpsehounds, and indeed the zombies too, are actually the result of a brotherly tiff, where the brothers are gods who own a ... business. (They have great benefits including health insurance with dental and after life counseling.) While neither the zombies nor their predators are all that outwardly magical, they are never the less underlayed by such power.
As to whether such world changing incidences such as zombie apocalypses have occurred before, no such things have been recorded in recent history.