Post by Bryce McCauley on Jul 15, 2013 2:00:10 GMT
Name: Bryce McCauley
Alias: Bryce
Age: 33
Gender: Male
Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual
Faction: Survivors
Role: Mercenary
Location: Roughly around Jackson County (though some there aren't fond of him)
Physical Description: Well-fed and only decently trained during his days in the military, Bryce's six-foot-two-inch frame carries a great deal of muscle mass, but he's by no means in perfect shape. Though obviously not overweight, as being completely out of shape would be a great way to die with hunters, Fireflies, infected, and all manner of other dangers infecting the world, Bryce is rather thick and doesn't look particularly malnourished like many in the world, though he's lost weight since leaving the military. He stands and walks military-straight only part of the time, too. A fairly consistent intake of rations has kept the rest of him fairly healthy, too - he has a decent head of brown hair that's been growing out consistently for the past couple of months, plus a good complexion, though he does look a tad older than his age of thirty-three. In contrast, he has rather rounded features. He tries to stay shaven when he has access to a razor. Additionally, he possesses pale blue eyes. For clothing, he still has his old military gear, but rarely wears it anymore outside of the boots. Mostly, he's seen in any decent pair of jeans he can find, plus a warm shirt and an old, beaten-up jacket he's had for years. He sort of detests headwear.
Personality: Born a good old country boy, Bryce thought joining the military would see him doing right by the world back when he was given the chance. Such an idealized vision of the military should say a great deal about Bryce's nature. He just tries to do right by people if he can manage it. Sadly, the world he's lived in for twenty-five years of his life has made him believe that no one can really do right anymore, and his ideals have slowly and steadily been torn down as he's seen what the world has to offer. What's left of that kid who joined the military is a man who silently steals through the world, tending to avoid the majority of people who'll only further disappoint him in humanity. He's introspective and rather aloof, though somewhere, deep down, he still has a bit of gentlemanly charm to call upon and an occasional flash of it can be seen. While one might think Bryce dislikes people or is hateful and spiteful, he's simply distant, just choosing not to get all too involved. Some might mistake this distance, still, for laziness, but Bryce never bothers to do anything unless he puts a good effort into it. These days, though, he's simply really careful about what he puts that effort into.
As said, the country boy still lives inside him somewhere, and the smattering of people in the world who haven't disappointed him or earned his ire get to see it more often than others. Bryce can be rather courteous and even whip out a warm smile or a bit of banter every now and then, though he does so in a slow-talking southern drawl. He's not a really warm and fuzzy person, but after one can get past just how guarded he is, they might just find Bryce to be a good source of conversation and not at all unpleasant to be around. But boy, do other folks have to do a hell of a lot for Bryce to decide they're worth spending his time on. Most people he just chalks up as being just like most of the others he's met over the course of his adult life - the ones who dampened his view of the amount of good that exists in the world. So if Bryce does want to spend time with someone, or even take a sit-down and have a chat with them, they can count it as a success.
As for morals, Bryce's obviously shot his fair share of "lawbreakers" over the years, and doesn't have any trouble pointing a gun at another human being. That his life as a soldier - or an executioner, as he calls it - bothered him so much, though, speaks of his dislike of killing without a clear reason. Too often, he believes, people in this miserable world are willing to trod other human beings in the ground just to get themselves a little further ahead. Unfortunately, he falls into that same pattern from time to time, and he's well aware of it. Nowadays, though, Bryce tries to live by something of a code - he only shoots at another human being if the other shoots first. It's made his attempts to survive as a mercenary a little complicated, but as most people want him to take out hunters or infected and both of those groups tend to shoot first...Bryce tends to survive just fine. Hunters, though, are sometimes an exception to his rule - they've killed two of his brothers, so Bryce tends to react to them with considerably more aggression than other groups.
Alignment: In action, he's rather neutral, but he's an intrinsically good person
Likes: open spaces or woodlands, worthwhile people, campfires, hunting game
Dislikes: hunters, military protocols, female infected, cities, cold weather
Strengths:
Strategy: Though the military never applied particularly much strategic training to its soldiers and officers, Bryce nonetheless has a rather instinctual grasp of how to approach gunfights with the likes of hunters or, potentially, other survivors.
Marksmanship: Bryce spent most of his days with the military in a tower, with a rifle in his hands, ready to rain down gunfire upon anyone who dared break the quarantine. His youth saw him hunting often with his uncle and brothers. Bryce, thus, is a solid shot from long range.
Weaknesses:
Judgment: Bryce has indeed figured out that most in the world will throw fellow humans into the path of infected to save themselves, but it took him a long while and a few rough situations to help him figure out how bad people could truly be deep down. He still has a little too much optimism as to how people will react to their circumstances.
Wild Country: Even if he was born in an extremely rural area, Bryce has spent almost the entirety of the past decade and a half of his life in a city, coming into contact with infected and hunters in a controlled environment. He's still getting used to dealing with infected, especially, that run rampant in the wilder areas of the country.
History and Background: It took Bryce a little longer than most to feel the full effects of the infection, though he was almost nine years old when it first began to spread. Born out in the country, where the closest house was a couple miles away, Bryce lived a simple life. Though many of those neighbors farmed, Bryce's dad was a military officer who focused strongly on education for his three boys. Bryce didn't mind having to keep his focus on education, but he did have a passion for sports and hunting from a young age. He spent many a weekend out in the woods with his uncle, who was less strict than his dad, and his brothers, and planned to play football once he got into high school. When eight, though, the country got its first taste of what was to come, with the infection slowly breaking out in metropolitan areas first. Before it hit the rural areas where Bryce lived, he was close to his eleventh birthday, but his family had known for a long time that the world would not be the same, and plans to play football would not be coming to fruition.
His family and several of their neighbors remained on their land as long as they could, banding together with their resources to try and last, Bryce's father pulling a few strings to give the area a little bit of a military presence and almost adamantly refusing to let his family enter the ever-declining distant cities. However, after Bryce's father was killed by an infected fellow officer and his brother died when looters scoured the area, the family finally submitted to necessity and migrated into the quarantine zones that were being formed within the cities, being given an "apartment" too small for them. There Bryce's family remained, surviving but uncomfortable, for a number of years. As rations became more and more scarce, his remaining brother attempted to join the military to support the family, but as he'd never been a healthy child, he was deemed unfit for service. Angry and sick of their situation, Bryce's brother broke out of the quarantine to see if there was anything worthwhile to be found in the world that could get his family out of their poor situation. Bryce, his mother, and his uncle would learn about his brother's death at the hands of hunters several months later.
By the time Bryce was the age to join the military, he'd long since decided to do what his brother and dad would have wanted to, and put himself forward for potential service, hoping he could improve his family's situation and generally help those in the quarantine zone. Deemed healthy enough and skilled enough with weaponry, Bryce was given a position at a checkpoint near his family's apartment by his superior officer at only eighteen. With the military still somewhat structured and attempting to merely keep potential dangers under control, Bryce found himself comfortable with most of what went on at the checkpoint for the first few years. A hunter attack in a portion of the city was his first real taste of widespread action after dealing with small groups of infected, though, and for an admirable performance and a cool head, he was given a promotion. His mother and other family members, though still stuck in their apartment, managed to survive a little more comfortably. Not long after, though, the military in the city, and around the country, began to consistently degrade and devolve.
Bryce's first taste of this degrading came when he shot down a man thought to be infected trying to enter the city at the order of his checkpoint officer, only for the man to have been revealed as carrying supplies. Bothered by the incident, his slow trigger finger during an attack by a group of freshly-infected civilians in the city earned him a few months away from service at the demand of the new officer at his checkpoint. Though Bryce considered leaving the military altogether, his uncle pulled him aside and told him how much his mother had suffered after the deaths in the family and that she didn't need to starve, as well. Returning to service reluctantly, Bryce tried to go on about his business systematically, but could not bear to see what was becoming of his comrades, who were shooting survivors right and left if they even had a small guess that the survivor could be infected. Some had even resorted to taking many of the rations meant for civilians for themselves, though Bryce worked counter to them in giving his family most of his. When the military discovered that he was doing so, they moved him to a checkpoint clear across the city.
Though Bryce personally was involved in no more "executions," the actions of his fellow soldiers drove him to his wits end. With his mother sick and the military promicing medicine that would take too long to arrive, Bryce had planned to set out himself, with permission, to fetch it once he could get permission. His uncle, though, proved impatient and attempted to break the quarantine on his own. He was captured in the middle of the night, and the presence of infected in the area led to the soldiers at the checkpoint shooting and interrogating him. Once Bryce found out, he knew he'd had enough of the military. Operating his checkpoint one evening, he organized for his mother to escape while he created a distraction, and joined her once she was out of the city. His uncle wished them well as they left the city for the last time.
They survived for a time not far from a Firefly camp, though the Fireflies were quick to shoo them away, not wanting extra mouths to feed if they had no plans to join the group. Hearing of an attempt at creating a self-sustained settlement out in Jackson County, Wyoming, Bryce and his mother headed there and were slowly but surely accepted. Bryce attempted to keep word of his days in the military to a minimum, given that most of the people in the settlement had banded together to avoid the military and generally despised it. Bryce set himself up as a mercenary, offering to keep hunters and infected away or go after supplies if necessary. Bryce obviously couldn't keep his secret for long, and when a civilian from the city he'd served in revealed him to have been in the military, the settlement didn't exactly continue to deal with him warmly. A few even reacted to him aggressively, some of their friends and family members having been shot by soldiers during the length of the infection. Deciding to leave his mother with them, Bryce has lived in the area ever since but has avoided becoming too involved, simply hiring himself out when he can.
Arsenal: Bryce has an old assault rifle from his military days that he rarely finds clips for. As such, he's usually seen with a hunting rifle and a 9mm pistol, both of which he's quite skilled in using.
Equipment: Bryce has a few toys from his old days in the military, including a bunch of ration cards he stole, a pretty decent amount of cash, a mostly-broken motion detector attachment for the aforementioned rifle, and a flashlight, all of which can be carried in his jacket. Otherwise, he's come across some matches and the remains of a set of darts.
Roleplay Example: It was still strange to hear clicking without the rattle of gunfire silencing it.
Bryce only responded with his own clicking, made by the safety lever on his handgun and the slide atop the barrel as it loaded his shot. He'd heard way too many clickers after dark all these years and knew when one was lost without a bit of direction and when one had that big cone-head listening for prey in the area. This one he heard - these ones, actually - were focused on something nearby. Bryce would have thought it was him, since so far as he knew he was the only one out in this part of the woods. He stared coldly down the length of his pistol and the arm holding it in all directions, though, and didn't see even one of the things jittering his way. His heavy breathing, having started without him noticing at the first sound of the clickers, was consciously slowed, and he dropped his arms back to his side.
But they were indeed close, around here somewhere. Bryce didn't know if he should bother checking it out. Heck, he'd been passing through this part of the woods to get back home without any trouble. Worth checking out though, right? His military training told him yes. Bryce would have loved to tell his military training to kiss his ass, too, if it had ears and he didn't think that clicker would hear him. But Bryce sure didn't feel right just roaming around with a couple clickers sticking around this area to pester and worry him every time he walked through this dark part of the woods. Blowing air through pursed lips, disappointed in his own decision-making, Bryce took careful steps forward past a few trees, trying to triangulate the location of those clickers and hopefully get a bullet in their heads before they saw fit to rip his throat in two.
He counted six trees he'd passed before the scream. And there was the person the clickers had found. Their clicking and screeching reach a climax with the discovery of their prey, and Bryce could only imagine he'd find a female body being ripped apart when he arrived. Still, he kept going, even if he might not be of any benefit. Speeding to a stiff jog, Bryce bobbed and weaved through the woods, cracking a few too many sticks for his liking. One clicker's head emerged around a splintered trunk up ahead, and Bryce almost slid to a stop in the leaves to quickly take aim. As soon as he'd gotten his mental crosshairs dead center of the back of the head, though, the clicker jerked to the side, back behind the tree. "Ffft," Bryce nearly cursed, teeth clenched, as he started moving again with gun raised.
Once around that cursed trunk, he got another shot, and a look at the woman now rushing in his direction, apparently having thrown a rock to get the clickers distracted. And running to get her head in the way of a shot Bryce would have had. "Down, down!", he yelled, and in her panic she stopped to stare at him fearfully for a few seconds, blinking through her tears. The cold glare that Bryce gave her from behind his handgun apparently was enough to get her collapsing, fearfully, to the ground, and as soon as her head was away, Bryce squeezed an eye shut the same time as he squeezed the trigger twice. Two shots rang out, and one clicker went into a frenzy at the sound as his friend's neck crackled and shattered in two different places, sending it to the ground in a fit of swinging arms.
Bryce exhaled and inhaled wildly as he turned to aim again, having to backtrack as the second clicker took off towards him in a dead run. Though he could see the woman scrambling away out of his peripheral vision probably as a way to make sure the clicker didn't land on her, he had all his focus on his target and squeezed the trigger two more times. One shot missed, and the thing wasn't dead. The only option for a charging clicker in this case was to get the hell away from it, and Bryce did so, burying himself in the ground at the base of the tree. The clicker unceremoniously collided with his feet as he descended, and in a blink, Bryce didn't know where it'd gone.
The woman screamed. She did. Bryce realized just in time to see it hovering over him and coming down hard for his neck. Bryce didn't think, just acted, and a second later, his face was being littered with the debris from the creature's hardened flesh before it slumped and dropped to the side. Bryce didn't have the mind to brush it off as frantically as he normally would have, lying on his back in the grass and staring at the bleak sky above, taking deep breaths. All his years with the military, and not one damn clicker had ever come that close to killing him. Heck, he didn't know yet if it had killed him or not. Might have bit him, and Bryce was too tense to tell.
The woman he never saw, as he lay there long enough to catch his breath. He heard her footsteps though, and the frantic mumbling she rattled off under her breath, saying how he was that "military jerk" and she needed to "get away before he shot her too." Taking in a deep breath, Bryce sat up without wanting to, brushed himself off, and stood to head back home, thinking about anything and everything but that woman...and that monstrous face hovering over his head.
Extras:
Player Name: Kent
Age: 22
Roleplay Experience: Almost four years
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