Character’s Name: Toby Yates
Age: roughly 15 (birthday next week)
Appearance: Green eyed, light skinned boy with short dirty blond hair and one streak dyed green on the left side of his face.
Today, he's wearing a fairly plain outfit. A Full Metal Alcemist themed shirt, pants, and good shoes.
Personality Traits:
(Full descriptions in quest)
Virtues:
Assume the Best of Everyone: if it isn't obviously malicious, it clearly isn't.
Just Do It: No procrastinating or waffling from him
Count on Me!: He does what he can, as much as possible
Flaws:
Too Trusting: Very easy to abuse his trust
Nosy: He wants to know. So much.
The Space Cauldron
Prompt:
While making your way through Destiny City, you wind up taking a path you’ve never taken before. Maybe you’re following directions, maybe you got lost, maybe you were just looking for a shortcut—things were going good, until you wind up needing to pass through a graveyard. It seems normal enough—until you pass by a grave and get powerful chill down your spine. When you stop and look at it, you see the gravestone has your name; beneath it, your birthday and today’s date. If you leave and return, the gravestone remains, but the name and dates look like they’ve been clawed off.
If you have a taste for wandering around and peering around into all the unknown places, then moving to a new city--one with a weird reputation--can definitely be an exciting thing. Or it could be terrifying. Or boring.
In Toby's case, it was definitely the first. He loved finding new things, seeing different places that he'd never witnessed before, though unusual things were better. It was that desire that led him to go wandering off through Destiny City--he'd only lived here for a short while, so the whole place was new. And those stories...he just had to look around a place like that.
He had his phone, with GPS and all that, so it was more or less impossible to get lost, but since he had no real destination in mind, he didn't consult it most of the time, choosing directions to go at random. And so it was that he found himself at a cemetery. It wasn't all that unusual looking of a place. Gravestones of different sizes in neat little rows, the occasional tree. Some old flowers. A worn entry gate that he forgot to look at. The name didn't really matter, though. Thanks to some road construction, it was just part of his meandering path.
Being there, though, naturally he had to peer at the stones. Maybe there would be something interesting written as a message. The only one of any note was the stone of one "Clarence Bumblewood," which had the very powerful quote, "Hey man, I think I'm dead." written on it.
He decided that there wasn't really anything interesting, so stopped reading them all, and just walked on. That is, until he felt a shiver run through him, and he felt compelled to look at the one he just passed. At first, it didn't register what he was looking at. Then he took a step toward it, and read it again. "Toby Yates," it read, dated October 18, 2017. He gawped at that for a few seconds before looking around quickly, as if expecting someone to pop out with a laugh and a camera, then pulled out his phone. He confirmed that that was, in fact, today's date. And the birth date... October 26, 2002. HIS birth date. "Wh-what the...?" he sputtered, shocked and confused. "No way, that's..." He stepped forward, poked the gravestone. It was definitely there. All the letters were etched right in. He recoiled back from this thing. One step, two...then a foot sank into a soft spot in the grass.
With a highly dignified...that is to say girlish shriek, he jumped back, a bit of dirt flying from the hole his foot just revealed, and he ran. Not the way he'd come...he pressed ahead, mostly because it was the closer gate out of the place. At a dead sprint, of course.
He sprinted two full blocks before coming to a stop and leaning against a light pole, panting heavily. There's no way. That can't be real, he thought, It has to be some kind of trick... Once he'd caught his breath, he straightened up again, and resolved to put it out of his mind, keep doing what he was doing before. But he couldn't. Just couldn't. That grave kept coming back into his head.
After a while, he decided he had to go back. Look at it again. Kick it, maybe. Or, probably better, try to figure out who maintains the place and ask them. But, mostly just stare and gawk at it. So, cautiously, he went back to the place, glancing furtively around, as if expecting something spooky to jump out at him.
His heart was pounding as he returned to that grave. The divot from where he sank into the dirt a few inches was still there, and he gave that a wide birth. He turned to read the gravestone again and...
Nothing.
It was blank. Well, not exactly blank. Where the writing was, it looked like claw marks No more words, just gashes in the granite. Like some horrible creature had gone to town on the headstone, then got bored. He looked around quickly, but saw no clawed monstrosities around. He took a deep breath and, heart still pounding, decided perhaps he'd had enough exploring for today...
