User Profile

Character Name: The Coffin Man
Series: Baroque
Gender: Male
Age: Unknown, but a rough guess would put him at his late twenties/early thirties prior to the Blaze.
Species: What you get when you run a human and his delusions through the mind of a god driven mad.
Sexuality: Yes, please! 8D

Appearance: He is a tall, lanky man - as a matter of fact, "gangly" might be a better word, as he is also so thin as to appear emaciated. His facial features are slightly exaggerated, with a large nose and an unnaturally wide mouth. His eyes are a vivid, equally unnatural teal, and his pupils are often mere pinpricks. His hair is stone-grey and perpetually spiked upward, strangely stiff - it would not be unwise to question whether it's made of the same stuff human hair is at all.

He doesn't wear much, and obviously doesn't care much about what he does. He goes entirely without shirt, wearing only the harness and strap that holds his handmade coffin to his back. His pants are clearly scavenged scraps - the long black pants are missing their left leg, and the ratty brown shorts he wears over them look as though they were once pants themselves before meeting an untimely fate. He does not wear shoes, only bandages on his legs and feet. His most striking piece of apparel is his red headband, which boasts a single eye carving inlaid in the front, the same color as his own eyes.

None of this, however, is his most apparent physical feature overall. That would be the fact that his entire left-hand side, from the base of his neck down, is covered in strange, scaly grey protrusions. His left-hand fingers and toes end in sharp points due to this, and the limbs are wrapped more thoroughly in bandages. These protrusions actually seem to have grown over part of the shoulder strap of his harness.

Personality: "Coffin Guy," as he so refers to himself, is at heart an opportunist and a scavenger. His will to survive is strong and wavers rarely - even in the post-apocalyptic world he hails from, the slightest reasons he could find to keep going were enough to fuel that will endlessly. His compulsions and obsessions work for him in all these ways.

He is ever so fond of building dungeons. Any abandoned cavern or mine shaft or what have you will do, and he has mastered the art of luring the monsterlike Meta-Beings into them to serve as a challenge. He adopted the strategy of offering these masterpieces of his up to other survivors of the Blaze as a sort of training for further survival in the ruined world. If they came out alive, well, good for them, whatever, grumble grumble wasted coffin. If they died, he got to loot the corpse and the honor of putting them to rest. Over time, this strategy became more hobby and compulsion than anything else, and eventually his goal in life.

Hey, the apocalypse can get boring, goddammit!

Interestingly, he does not present this strategy very deceitfully, telling potential customers up-front that they're all his if they kick the bucket. Once you realize that the Coffin Man is the very opposite of subtle, however, this is wholly unsurprising. He is blunt and brutally honest, as well as somewhat loud and often comes off as obnoxious (especially since he has no qualms about badmouthing others). Despite this, he has a habit of dispensing advice based on his experience that is true, clear, and quite useful. It's about equal to his habit of simply blurting out whatever's on his mind.

Coffin Man is, at least at first glance, the only truly optimistic person left in his homeworld. His baroque - the fantasies and delusions that make up the core of his being - is focused simply on making the best of the situation no matter what, to the extreme of enjoying and even looking forward to making coffins for those he's indirectly killed. (It is, in fact, the one thing he enjoys most.) He seems wont to complain, true, but it's always in the terms of shaking his head at the antics of others, or tsk-tsking at the state of affairs as if they had nothing at all to do with the consequences of someone's actions. That, and he always shrugs and moves on from them with due speed.

However, it is of note that he possesses a verbal tic - a noticeable tendency to insert "goddamn" or "goddammit" into his speech, even when seemingly unnecessary. Given that in his world, the being they called God has been corrupted and driven insane, thus producing the twisted and malaligned state of the world... it could very well be the most potent expletive left to the survivors. Perhaps this is the only outward sign that the Coffin Man, despite his forced optimism, is just as frustrated with such a situation as anyone else. Certainly, his tendency to immediately dismiss and refuse anything that bothers him is telling of this as well. He simply distances himself from whatever makes him uncomfortable, using an upbeat appearance to shield himself.

Such a mindset, like everyone else left in his world, is what has shaped his distorted form. That too-wide mouth forms the exaggerated, cheshire grin he often wears as a reflection of his optimism, and the scales along his left side illustrate the armor he's forged it into. Which, one might note, he only half-acknowledges, prefering not to think much of even his own twisted baroque. (Perhaps his hair represents his thick skull and slight pointy-headedness when it comes to dungeon tactics?)

Abilities: He has no small skill in construction, given his hobbies of making both dungeons and coffins. Neither is he a slouch when it comes to fighting, being that he's had to learn to handle the monsters of his world in order to coax them into said dungeons. He can pinpoint and take advantage of the weaknesses of most opponents with ease, and is fond of making the utmost use of the surrounding area and anything he has on hand. He's most skilled with long, blunt or spiked weapons, and normally keeps one in the coffin on his back, along with other useful things - unfortunately for him, that coffin is something he'd arrive in Manhattan without. His scrawny frame still belies a surprising amount of strength, however.

Additionally, the protrusions down his left side are thick enough to shield him from certain attacks. They are tough but pliable, so they don't hinder his movement noticeably, and while not impervious by a long shot can most certainly keep a blade from digging further than it would into bare skin and flesh. Their toughness is roughly equal to that of a layer of thick but soft bark.

Weaknesses: The state of denial he keeps himself in can both ostracise him and cause important details to fly over his head. He's not actually all that dumb, but his stubborn refusal to think about depressing things for long works against him when there are serious things he needs to consider in order to get anywhere. He's the type who doesn't believe it until he learns it the hard way.

Aside from that, there's the fact that, like most affected by his world's affliction, the Coffin Man cannot feel pain. Given his taste for survival, he tends to pay close attention to any wounds he receives, but regardless of this he still may not register damage properly, or at all depending on the nature of the injury.

Also, though the scaly protrusions on his left side are tough met head-on, the spaces between them are weak. An object wedged between them can very easily set them to bleeding, and/or force them apart. It would have to be a precise maneuver, but it would cause damage that only worsens whenever the struck area moves too much.

Manhattanite or outsider? Outsider

History: He was an ordinary man before the Blaze, but if he remembers much about that life, he certainly doesn't show it or seem to care. Once that strange heat wave altered the world forever (on May 14th, 2032), he began to twist and change just like everyone else, but his sheer determination to survive allowed him to maintain something of his own will. Unfortunate others became completely distorted, turning into Meta-Beings, creatures little more than mindless monsters... but instead of being horrified by such things, the Coffin Man opted to take advantage of them. He scavenged their kills when they attacked others who had remained somewhat human, taking anything useful and laying the bodies to rest. Doing this so many times caused the act to wind its way into his baroque, and soon it was a compulsion, a need he had to fill whenever he was confronted by a corpse. It was not much longer before he began to enjoy it, and even to rename himself after it, since he'd forgotten his old name some time ago.

Regardless, the experience he accumulated defending himself from the Meta-Beings made him proud, and whenever he encountered a companion he would often spout off all the advice he could. If they didn't see fit to follow it and failed to survive, as so often happened... well, another corpse was his! Win-win situation, through his eyes.

Eventually, he came to the Neuro Tower, the strange structure that had been the center of the Blaze that devastated the now-barren world. He learned of the Meta-Beings' attraction to it, and it was then that the idea of dungeons struck him. The area surrounding the Neuro Tower consisted of some of the last semi-standing buildings in the world, and it was enough for a small collection of fellow survivors to live there. He might as well settle in - especially since there was a convenient old mine shaft right over there, perfect to test his dungeon theory with!

Time passed, and he created several dungeons, learning more about the art each time. Luring Meta-Beings in and offering the dungeons as training runs to hotheaded survivors was usually quite rewarding, and these dungeons became another of his obsessions. Sure, it decreased the population, but that just meant less competition! Anyway, it wasn't like he was doing anything to them directly; they just couldn't handle the world the way it was now.

Then that kid came along. The weird one. The one who didn't speak. The one who actually beat his training dungeons, making him waste a coffin! Well that was no good at all. Clearly he had to make something INCREDIBLE to get the best of this guy! The kid headed off to the Neuro Tower, and Coffin Man began working on his final masterpiece. Or seven.

Strange bursts of light from the tower seemed to reset the world from time to time, and every time the kid would appear back in town. It was a little odd, but Coffin Man shrugged it off and kept working on his dungeons. One time, however, when the light faded away... he was met not with the red, burnt landscape of the ruined city he was used to, but with a much less red and more archaic city that was a hell of a lot less destroyed. No Neuro Tower either, and no one he recognized... just what had happened, goddammit?

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