Colin Blake - Lost and Found

[soulside]

Basics as they appear:

Introduces as: Colin Blake
Gender: Male
Race: Human
Age: Can’t be older than twenty



Physical details:

Height: 5’8” / 177 cm
Weight: 180 lbs / 82 kg
Hair: Brown and cropped quite short
Eyes: Light brown
Skin: Light shade, lightly tanned on hands and face.
Body (attribute hints): He is normal looking and doesn’t stand out. He is on his way of becoming well built for combat and looks to be in fine health.
Voice: Normal sounding for his age. Noticeable mid-to-lower class Waterdhavian accent.

Notable details etc: There are matching markings of a blue rose on a golden base on both his armor and his shield so it would seem he belongs somewhere - or used to. People with ties to the Sword Coast and appropriate lore could recognise them to be a noble house's insignia, specifically house Camarra.




General appearance and current demeanor:

Though his armor technically seems to be the right size for him, it might seem like it’s a half size too large, as though he hasn’t quite found his comfort in it yet. Despite his youth, his general demeanor is quite serious, as though he grew up fast. His eyes often betray his state of mind.




Personality hints

• Honest - He seems to be honest in everything he says and does.
• Cautious - He seems to be quite a cautious individual.
• Serious - He seems to take a lot quite seriously, though this is not done with a sense of superiority. Those with higher than average wisdom might be able to deduce that this comes at least in part from the rootlessness of being completely severed from the rigid structure of his old life.
• Inexperienced - Those speaking to him will easily note that despite his combat abilities and serious mindset, he just plain lacks a bit of age and experience. As a result of this, he can at times be quite gullible.

I like writing journals. If you don't want me to write about your character, please let me know.

[soulside]

Lost


A bodyguard’s worst nightmare: his charge disappears on his watch.

And worse: she disappears on his watch while he’s walking two steps behind her, into what looked like the tent door to a massive carnival set up right behind two houses in the little farming village they were supposed to just take a walk in before continuing their journey. Though large tent openings aren’t normally found in alleys, and he was sure there was no carnival in that village, (when he tried to piece it all together afterwards) and then when he goes in after her it suddenly feels like he’s falling down a hole while it’s falling down on him at the same time and for a few endlessly long seconds it feels like he can’t breathe --- only to be spat out at the moment he thinks his life is going to end, and land hard... bruised, dizzy and completely alone.

He looks around. It’s an alley. It's dark, and there’s nothing but crates, debris and trash nearby. A low, distant din has replaced the countryside quiet.

As soon as he can stand he gingerly stumbles towards the relative light of the end of the alley, and the background murmur increases. The pain in his leg gets slightly better as he moves, and by the time he reaches the mouth of the alley he can almost walk without limping. There are plenty of people out on the street. As soon as he exits the alley he shouts the lady’s name and looks about. She can’t have gone far. But why wasn't she in the alley with him?

The second time he’s about to shout her name it it gets stuck in his throat, because his mind has started processing what he saw the first time he whipped his gaze around the street. And there he stands, staring, his jaw falling slack. And eventually gulping when someone, or some...thing snarls at him for having stared too long.

“Merciful Helm,” he whispers and involuntarily takes a few steps back, until he’s nearly backed into the alley again, his arms curled protectively against his chest. After a little while, it is this very alarm that spurs him to try to gather himself, for surely his charge must be here, too, and she has no armor and no sword, and she needs him now, more than ever!

Certain that she can’t have gone far, he picks himself up, fights hard to wrestle the fledgling terror into the “deal with it later” box and hurries out into the street.

“Lady Camarra!”

[soulside]

Colin was scanning the faces of people walking by. His shoulders were drawn with tension.

It had been too long.

The days had passed infinitely slowly and far too quickly and with them his initial panic had turned to a deeper, harder despair. He was over the shock of where he was... or was he? There were some things, or some beings, that he really didn't like to look at, because they gave him a very uncomfortable feeling he couldn't name. One that nudged him whispering of just how little he knew, how clueless he was, and that it wasn't safe to turn his back on them. But he just didn’t have time to freak out.

He must have scanned a thousand people for her face. Whenever he closed his eyes the flashes of faces he saw made his head spin.

His mind made circles over and over again so much it exhausted him. Had he really tried hard enough? Had he made the right choices? It always came back to the forbidden questions - was it too late? Was she alive? And if she was - was she alright, or... had something horrible happened to her?

He had found some people who spoke of portals and travels and he had felt the first real hope in the days since his arrival. If he could contact the house, he could find out if she had actually stepped through the portal or not. He had been shown that portals didn’t always transport people, even if they glowed. So maybe she wasn’t actually missing at all. Maybe he was the only one in this sordid mess. He prayed, and he prayed hard, that this would be the case. And he prayed that if it wasn’t, that against all odds, she would be safe. The thought of anything else was unbearable.

The last time he rested, and he had only done so twice since his arrival, it had turned into a sixteen hours long deep sleep. Initially he became very stressed when he found out how long he had slept, because it meant both that it was sixteen hours more that she had been on her own, and it also felt like he in some way had deserted his post, rven though he on some level knew that he hadn't, that he couldn't go forever without sleep and that the ones who reminded him of this and ushered him to rest had been right. At least there was a little bit of a bright side to it, as he figured he could go at least a full day now without resting again.

Stocked up on the least alien looking food he had found and with a newly bought waterskin in his belt, Colin kept looking.

[soulside]

Found

...adapting to one’s circumstance...

Colin was thinking. He was thinking about how suddenly everything could change, and how an old life could be over with so little... closure. It was just over, without any of the symbolic rituals he was used to always marked beginnings and ends, rituals that had been a natural part of his daily life ever since he properly starting his training in his early teens. This lack of a symbolic ending made it hard to really grasp the change. After all, the floorboards were the same before as after; so was the strange haze outdoors. Fire still burned. It was easy to toy with the thought that nothing had changed at all, and that the next day he’d be going home.

But that thought always brought with it a great deal of pain, because reality always caught up a split second later and reminded him just how things really were.

His fingers were playing with lady Cassidy’s locket. She had insisted he should have it, and told him that she would talk sense into her father and her husband-to-be, and that she’d find a way for him to come home. He wasn’t sure whether or not he believed she could. That she would try, he had no doubt about. Her intentions were always good. But reality, he had found, was often very different from what his lady thought it was.

Painful thoughts, those. He shied away from them, but the image of how her smile at their reuinion was hard to forget. It lingered in all its golden beauty. It made him ache somehow, as soothing as it was painful.

Adapt. He had to adapt here, if he wanted to live. There were things out there that could eat him... and he had learned the hard way that not everything that looked human actually was.

He smiled despite himself when he thought of the conversation he’d had with the wolf-man. A wolf-man had talked to him in a way that made him feel a little bit less like it was going to... to go some bad way. He had had a supportive conversation with... with a wolf. A wolf-man. At home he’d sometimes give some scraps to one of the guard dogs at the house he had taken a liking to and on rare occasions he’d sit down on his free time, and the dog would lie next to him, and they’d talk. Colin would talk, and the dog would listen. He didn’t think it understood what he was saying, but he had gotten the sense that it cared, anyway. The dog would look at him with his tongue hanging out by the end of it, looking like he was smiling, and somehow Colin would always feel better. The similarities with the wolf-man conversation felt like some sort of cosmic humor.

It had been a really strange day.

He looked at his new gear, a little heap of things next to him.

Adapt. Could he do it?