Dissentions Charater Back Stories

Grrrrr. Vampyres have no need of baths! We are naturally good-smelling! Speaking of, I'm thirsty. Ronin! Look! Behind you! There's something there, just keep your neck still and I'll be able to get your bloo- I mean you'll see a very rare bird.

Didn't you read my backstory? Vampires are weak against light. Not vampyres!

Ha- lycanthropes do not take baths. lycanthropes are too manly for baths. there is nothing anyone can do to make them take baths.

*The vampyre's ears pick up the sound of the lycanthrope*. Grrrr. I will have him killed myself. It is one of the very few things vampires and vampyres agree on- lycanthropes, especially werewolves, must all die.

The Void Walker

The Void Walker. Ah, such an image of noble beauty. It really does come to mind, right? A young, blond man, resplendent in shining, freshly forged armor, no helmet (so his tresses can sail gracefully behind him as the wind caresses his face), lance in one hand, beautiful rune sword (always with a fancy name) sheathed at his left side, on his horse, a stomping mare of great beauty (on some occasions, a thumping male beast of a horse can be substituted), riding forth gallantly to save his kingdom, country, province, city/town, neighbors, family, and that fair maiden. No, wait, that sounds like me. Let me try again.

The Void Walker. On second thought, what is a Void Walker? I certainly didn't know. All I did was stroll around one fateful afternoon. The first tournament ended rather arbitrarily.

"That's it," they said, "you're done."

Well, done indeed! I had already saved every maiden around these parts, even the ugly ones that they never tell you about in those tales, and some even more than once. I wasn't about to go through all that trouble again. I sat down under a tree, wondering just what to do with my life. I had a doctorate in Melee Attack with a focus on Lances and Swords, but those skills just weren't applicable anymore. Due to the curse of structural unemployment, I was done.

So I sat down under the Black Tree of Gallia and thought. Suddenly, a gaping maw in the fabric of the universe opened up in front of me. I quickly appraised the situation; the hole was two feet in front of me, and my sword was two inches from my hand. It would work. I grabbed my sword, did a nifty sort of roll along the side haphazardly, and did a sort of alert crouch I'd seen some sneaky thieves do before. It made my knees hurt.

"Speak!" I said, ignoring the general rule that when you wish to parley with someone, it's best not to point a weapon at him.

"Hello there," he said. What a jovial chap.

"I was just walking along in the Void--"

"Whoa, whoa. What's that?" I asked, sort of dumbly, as if I were making an exposition for any unacquainted readers of our conversation.

"The Void? Well, it is what it isn't. It is the gap between worlds, if you would."

"I won't have any of that."

"And you're right, you can't. You are not of the Stuff that the Void is made of. You are of Things." As he said this, he slid forward. It's hard to describe what he looked like. He looked pretty humanoid, except when I tried to look at him, it was like looking at something from the corner of your eye. Hard to pin down. But he was black, all black, the sort of jet black that seems to suck light in and leave the surrounding areas dimmer, the sort of black that leads me to make paradoxical explanations like the above.

"Then, how'd you manage to step here?" I asked.

"Well, to go from There to Here is quite easy. You just need these magical bracelets," he said, patting the black bracelets around what I presumed were his wrists. There were two total, one for each arm. Black bracelets on a black body. By this point he had stepped fully into our world and closed the maw with a snap of his fingers that pierced through my ears with the sound of screeching nails on chalkboard.

"These tie me to this world."

"So you're here because..."

"I was just walking along in the Void. That's my job, you know. I heard there was going to be some grand tournament."

"You're too late, they've already held one. I was in it."

"No, there's a second one," he said. "I guess I'll see you."

And with that, he shuffled off. It couldn't have been walking, because he looked like he was just shuffling his feet and popping from place to place without crossing any of the places in between, but it looked quite like he was just a guy lumbering along.

As he crossed the crest of the hill, he turned back and waved to me.

That's when I realized the half-grin he had on the whole time hadn't gone away. It had, almost imperceptibly, gotten bigger, until it was almost a three-quarters-grin.

As told by Alphaeus Silanus.

mythmonster2 said:

Didn't you read my backstory? Vampires are weak against light. Not vampyres!

Click to expand...

OOC: That was just to annoy you, not to harm you. I'm saving that for the arena .

The Ronin flips, avoiding the stream of corrosive acid stumbles upon landing and falls on his face. Scurrying off with more than a few curses he flits after the Forsaken beast. Keeping to the shadows.

(OOC: There's a small reference in here to something Tolis said in his intro post in the game thread.)

She is a small woman, just on the cusp of her middle years, and ordinary in appearance. She is not armed. No one looks twice at her as she makes her way through the crowds of spectators come for the tournament; certainly no one would believe her to be one of the fighters. She stops at a food stall for some fried bread and some fruit. The vendor and his son make small talk with her over the popping, bubbling oil. They like her immediately, as most people do. She is not pretty, but her smile conveys a certain warmth, and a lively spark in her bright black eyes suggests a wry sense of humor. There is no deception in the way she presents herself; still, her instinctive friendliness is among the most dangerous of her lies.

There is a Before and an After in her life. The end of the Before:

Her husband was dead almost before she herself was awake, though she’d moved anyway, leapt from the bed without consciousness to protect herself and the baby. She had nowhere to run. Three men, their features indistinguishable in the dim light, backed her into a corner. She could see her husband’s blood on their knives, could smell it in the air. She crouched and turned, clutching her daughter’s warm body to her for the last time. She must have been struck deaf with her fear; she remembered tears on her collar, but never heard her daughter’s cries. She never saw the blow that struck her down.

The beginning of the After:

On the bed, two bodies, one large and one small. She’d cleaned them as best as she could while the sun came up, and the morning breeze helped carry away the smell of blood. They didn’t look right, lying there alone with no life in them. She joined their hands, hoping they could help each other in their voyage into the Eternal Lands.

She herself was damned. Her religion was uncompromising on that score.

In the ravine behind the house were three more bodies. One was charred to a mere husk of a human being. One had had its flesh stripped away; clean bones left nothing to attract even the birds. The third – well, the third was indescribable. The birds wouldn’t touch that one, either.

She had no idea how she’d been able to do what she did to them. But she knew she could do it again.

It turned out there was a market for her particular talents. Many markets, even; the possibilities were limited only by her scruples. Of those, she had few left. She was a killer, and destined for Hell; there was little point in niceties. One day, she found herself at the palace gates of a petty fiefdom not far from her homeland. The princeling in residence was holding a grand tournament; on a whim, she put her name down. When she stepped out into the arena, she found herself facing a very large man with a very large sword. The crowd laughed at her presumption. She laughed, too, for a very different reason. Five minutes later the sword was in a slag heap on the ground, and the very large man was groveling for mercy. She was still laughing, but no one else was.

That day, the start of her fighting career, led directly to this one. Except today, she is told that she is not fighting for blood or money; today, she is fighting for her homeland against the vastness of the Imperium.

Ah, the homeland. She crosses the plaza toward the gates of the coliseum. The vendor she had talked to earlier was from the very city of her birth. They had talked of streets and shops that they both knew, and he had given her a small banner with their city’s name on it, to wave in support of their country’s team. In the middle of the plaza, unwatched by anyone in particular, she drops the banner into the dirt. So much for the homeland. Home is from Before; nothing from then can touch her now, After.

Except that someone has set up a podium by the gate and is speaking, his voice lost in the noise of the crowd. She doesn’t notice him until suddenly purple writing appears above his head, reading, “SHUT UP OR I WILL KILL YOUR FIRST BORN CHILD”.

“Too late,” whispers the Planeswalker. She ducks her head, and walks by him into the arena.

The Sacred Fist



He, although he rarely identifies himself as male or female, is the protector of all that is holy in our world. From a very young age, something out in nature seemed to call to him, beckoning him to accept these duties. Soon he came to identify that voice as the mythical voice of nature, that of the divine.

The divine is everywhere according to him. It calls out with its strange yet beautiful voice from every tree and insect, from the clouds above us to the core below us. Nothing fails to get touched by its majesty, and all is consumed by it. The only thing it ever needed was a guardian in the physical world, a task taken up by him.

Of course, some would consider him to be little more than a deranged loony, and indeed they may be right. Nobody else could hear the voices that he claimed to, and he became quick to anger when anybody denied their existence. The one attempt to commit him to a sanitarium failed, despite considerable manpower, when three nurses were killed attempting to subdue him.

So now he is on the run, picking fights with anybody who dares to challenge him or his worship of the divine. He is not at all tolerant of other worshipers, considering many to be no better than blasphemers. When he runs into one, they are generally worse off for the encounter.

Thus the idea of a tournament was very attractive to our religious zealot. He secretly loves violence in the name of preserving holiness, and the contest gives him a chance to break lots of skulls. Although considered by many a nut, he did receive martial arts training as a boy when he was though to not be dangerous. As a result, his powers are immense physically, and somehow he seems to contain an awesome power within. The skeptics don’t like to acknowledge its existence, but every punch contains both his expertice with the martial arts, and something more. Something even more powerful.

So let us conclude:

Holy or nutcase?

You decide.

Wrong picture, Pinman. The one you wanted was




EDIT: Fixed Name

Tasslehoff said:

Wrong picture, Kol. The one you wanted was

Click to expand...

Kol hasnt posted in this thread

It was a small, isolated village, in a grove high in the mountains. But it was a prosperous one, that had never bowed to the rule of outsiders, nor to the demands of bandits. This could be credited to an ancient practice in the village, which had been continued for countless centuries.

For many years, the Mentor had acted as the leader and protector of this village. For the last fifteen years, he had been training a Student to replace him. The Mentor had seen his Student grow from a child, to a teenager, to a strong, healthy adult, and he worked to teach his Student everything he knew about battle.

With a certain degree of training, a man can singlehandedly fight a much more numerous force. As the protector of the village, the Mentor had been its only warrior, fighting bandits and soldiers, and bringing the village's criminals to justice. The village was isolated enough from the outside world that he had never been faced with a force too large to defeat - he had fought for many years, undefeated.

Yet on a certain day, a matter of weeks ago, the Mentor sincerely hoped to be defeated. His Student claimed that he had learned everything he could learn from the Mentor, and demanded the right to fight against the Mentor, to take the title for himself. The Mentor disagreed, but the challenge could not be refused. Mentor and Student fought, and it was a spectacular battle, between two legendary warriors. Yet in the end, it seemed that the Mentor had only taught his Student how to die.

As he stood over the corpse of his Student, the Mentor despaired. This was not a new story. Six times now, the Mentor had chosen the most promising child of his village and trained him to the best of his ability, and six times, he had stood like this, over his Student's body, in a way victorious, but in another, utterly defeated. The Mentor's large medallion, which he wore about his neck, granted immortality of a sort - if not for his unnaturally pale hair, the Mentor might be able to pass for a man in his 30's. He had stood guard over his village for almost a hundred years, and had been a Student himself before then. It almost seemed like yesterday that he had killed his own Mentor, taking the medallion from the corpse's neck.

All six of the Mentor's students had been mightier than the Mentor's own Mentor. He took some pride in that. And the Mentor had been his own Mentor's third Student. It was an ancient system, stretching back for centuries, and the Mentor had always kept his village safe. But now the Mentor grew tired of his task, and he feared that he would be cursed forever by this task that he refused to set aside.

When he was called to represent his tiny domain, the Mentor at first intended not to participate. Even if the other countries of the Algean Scar all gathered together under one banner and tried to attack his village, the Mentor knew that he could split them up in the mountain passes and bleed them dry until they decided it was too expensive to continue the assault.

Yet another possibility occured to him - a way to honorably free himself from his task. The mightiest warriors in the land would gather to fight in the tournament, and the village's leader did not have to be one born in the village. Surely there would be a worthy fighter in the tournament, one who was mightier than the Mentor, and who could act as the village's Mentor after him. Yes, the Mentor had not come to the tournament to win, but to lose, and in so doing, fulfill his life's obligation.

And so the Mentor stood among the competetors, looking at each of them in turn, wondering what mysteries they hid. He would have to pick his foe wisely. One who could defeat him, but would also accept the Mentor's task... And if it turned out that none of these competetors were worthy, then the Mentor would defeat them all, for the sake of his village. He would be victorious, one way or another.