Character History He just needed to get away. Charlie's mom was an ignorant smoker and a drunk, and his dad was dead (incidentally, killed by a drunk driver). When his mom wasn't dragging on a cigarette she was downing one bottle of alcohol or another. He tried to force her to quit both habits by hiding her smokes and booze, but she just hit him over the head with a frying pan and demanded for the stash back.
Charlie wasn't an athelete, but he was fairly good at running and jumping, and he eventually set the records at his school for the 50m and the High-Jump. When he wasn't playing video games, Charlie was tending to his pet spider. He takes an interest in spiders, a fascination he doesn't know the cause of. His tarantula, Razzer, was found living in his baseboard when Charlie was twelve. How a tarantula made it into his house in the first place, Charlie may never know.
One afternoon when Charlie came home from school, he found his mom draped over his desk, being violently ill into Razzer's tank. An empty bottle of booze was sitting in a pool of vile on Charlie's desk. Charlie pushed his mom off of the tank and looked into it. Razzer was dead in the tank, obviously drowned in the vomit. That was it for Charlie. He yelled and shoved his mother out of his room, and packed his bags. She was too drunk to stop him, and so Charlie left home with a suitcase and a hundred and eight dollars - money he
had been saving up to stick his mom in a clinic.
Two weeks and eighty four bucks later Charlie finally made it across the continent - from Ottawa, Ontario, to San Diego, California. His brother, Tim, lived with his girlfriend there. His body scrawny and underfed, his clothes ragged, Charlie knocked on the door to Tim's apartment. While he waited for his older brother to open the door and welcome him in, the landlord noticed Charlie waiting in the hall, and delivered the news. His brother had moved. Not less than a week ago he and his girlfriend moved out of the state, the location of which the landlord didn't know. Charlie was broken. His only place to go had vanished, and he couldn't go back to his old home. In simpler words, he was screwed. For hours he sat in the alley beside the apartments, huddled in a ball and crying. It was the first time he had cried in a long time, but it fit the situation. Sobbing and distraught, the boy stumbled out of the alleyway and walked into a man in a business suit. The man turned out to be the owner of a local homeless shelter, and volunteered to give Charlie a bed there until he could regain his ground.
The shelter itself was in ruin - it was obviously struggling money-wise. Charlie offered to help the owner clean things up, and for the next few weeks he was a part-time janitor at the shelter. One day, twenty-three days after Charlie arrived at the shelter, a wonderful thing happened. A large pharmaceutical company, Feral Labs, had made a generous contribution to the shelter. Its days of being hardly better than the streets themselves were over! According to the shelter's owner, Feral Labs had also offered to allow one of the homeless children to come on a trip to come and stay at their labs for a few days, to give them some time out of the povertious life of someone who was homeless. The owner, who probably would have lost the shelter had it not been for Charlie's help in cleaning it up, asked the boy if he'd accept the offer to see the labs. Charlie was overjoyed! He had a slight interest in science, and wanted some time away from the shelter. Would he still have accepted so quickly if he had known what the repercussions would be?
