Age: 42 at Death, 1024 current.
Place of Birth: Sed, a city within the great empire of Tiatha
Personality:
An appropriately somber mood and dreary attitude to suite a member of the living dead. Pravus does not like to talk a lot but he is not expert at hiding his disdain towards almost everyone. In a way his mask actually makes him more approachable as anyone talking to him without it could immediately see the resentment painted clearly across his face. Given his undead state he has had very little to be happy about and is pretty much always wearing a frown.
If anyone ever manages to get him to warm up to them then they would see a strange fellow indeed. His respect for the dead and people's ancestors is great and he would go to great lengths to appease a spirit should one be disturbed from it's afterlife. He looks down with great disgust upon the mutilation and defiling of corpses. This level of kin-hood didn't begin at reanimation either, he's been this kind of person from childhood. Around undead like himself he is polite and has quite a kind and charitable soul to his fellow unliving ladies and gentlemen. To a true friend he can be similarly kind but he has a large round zero on his list of closest friends indicating just how many he's made.
When put to challenge he has the character of a mountain. He can be calm and calculating, carefully planning his way to his goal when a solution needs to be had. When a moment requires action he persists with a precise and steady onslaught, his mind still ever processing for more solutions while he presses on. His will is strong like a mountain, refusing to yield no matter how hard he is pushed. He may come up with better tactics to better suit his situation but never has the day where Pravus refused to do something he knows is right because it wasn't easy been seen.
Ultimately he simply wishes to perform his duty in peace. He has accepted that his role in life was to tend to the needs of the dead, making sure people do not suffer after death. He does not seek the company of the living but is not against cooperation for everyone's betterment.
Appearance:
The first thing anyone would notice about him is his plague doctor's uniform, not that anyone would see anything else underneath this thorough getup. Clad in a brown full circle cloak his most notable feature is the mask. A long curved brown cloth mask with two armored glass eyes. Atop his head sits a wide brimmed brown hat that looks like it was put together like a quilt, all pieced together from several parts of other hats.
Underneath this uniform lies a rather grim sight. He is dressed in a black baggy shirt which has seen better days worn underneath a suit of plated chain mail. He is almost always wearing long black leather gloves and high rimmed black leather boots which are caked in mud and well worn from the countless hours they've been walked in. Around his neck he wears a thin grey scarf which has seen better days.
Pravus's own face is could give the grim reaper something to compare his own to. He's got medium length pitch black disheveled hair and dark brown eyes that almost look black from a distance. His skin is a cold, lifeless grey color, small cuts and scraps still present from past confrontations with the other living dead resident's of Sed. He stands at about 5'5" and weights around 198 pounds.
Spoken Languages: His native tongue is Sedian though in his time serving in the Tiathan army he has picked up a smattering of Ru'ulian.
Theme Song: The World - Yuki Kajiura
[Combat Section]
Weapons:
His weapon is a specialized shovel handed down through the family on his father's side. This five foot long shovel is designed to be able to cut through rocks and especially tough dirt with ease. The region this shovel herald's from is mountainous and very rocky. There is very little dirt that doesn't lead about a foot or two down simply to rest atop buried boulders in it's homeland. With the advanced metallurgy and technology of the Tiathan empire this shovel could, supposing if it's wielder were both strong and patient enough, Cut a mountain's worth of rocks down until there lay nothing but a pile of pebbles and chips before it's edges would begin to dull.
Powers: Firstly he is a member of the living dead. His power's mostly derive from this mysterious state he's been left in. He lacks the need to eat, drink, sleep or breath and he never tires no matter how hard he exerts his body. He cannot get sick and poisons are useless against him. If he is damaged he does not heal the wound naturally nor does healing magic heal him. He can instead put himself back together again from any lost pieces or body parts from himself or other dead bodies.
Secondly he can see and interact with ghosts and other intangible beings that normal life forms cannot perceive.
Technology: The society he is from possesses a very advanced pseudo-magical state of technology. Despite having access to an advanced state of mechanical engineering they were at about a renaissance stage of medical science and computers are basically non-existent to them. In addition they utilize a variety of magical metals, the most commonly used being orichalcum which they use as wires to transmit magical energy to their various techno-magical devices. They used to wield an advanced array of alchemical knowledge and some of the finest magic universities in the realm called Tiatha home.
The last and most prominent invention of the great empire was the Empowerment Gem. The Empowerment gem could grant a nearly endless multitude of qualities to any structure, device or item it is socketed in. Furthermore these gems could grant these qualities to the wielder of said items they were socketed in, capable of transforming even a lowly peasant into a mythical hero of both might and magical prowess. These improvement's would only last so long as the gem remained socketed to the item and the item on it's user's person. Actual skills could be learned while using the skill gems but once removed the vast well of information disappears, leaving a person with only what he or she experienced while using it.
It was the ease with which these Empowerment Gems could be removed and replaced with other gems that made them so widely used. The wealthy would carry dimensional pockets loaded with piles of these gems, adorned head to toe with various types of jewelry which they would gem depending on the circumstance. If they wanted to cast magic they would deck themselves out with Empowerment Gems granting them the needed magical essence and many life times worth of magical knowledge in an instant. If one was cooking he or she could pop in a set of Empowerment gems gifting it's user with a natural talent for cooking and an extensive knowledge of every single culinary food item known to the empire. For combat, Empowerment gems to grant oneself the spirit and strength of a warrior as well as a mastery of all weapons. If anything was possible for someone to do, there was a gem that could do it. Very few people actually knew how these gems were made. They weren't telling anyone back then and they are most certainly not telling anyone now. The process of creating the Empowerment Gems was a very closely guarded secret.
Pravus has used Empowerment gems in the past but at the point of crossing the gate he possesses none.
Skills:
- Pravus has served in the Tiathan military for twenty years as a front row spear man. This has made him a veteran when it comes to combat.
- Pravus knows a great deal about human anatomy and disease given how much of it he has seen working as a mortician.
- Pravus possesses a fair knowledge of chemistry. He learned much about which chemicals he was working with when preparing bodies for burial.
- Pravus has learned various burial rights as a result of all the funerals he has attended. He has had a long time to practice them in his service in undeath.
Proficiency:
- Pravus can be a quick learner.
[Back-story]
Father: Gravitius the Grave Tender of Sed
Mother: Vitalis of Sed
Connections and Affiliations: The Imperial Army.
History:
Pravus was born into a family who's family business was preparing bodies for burial, burying them and tending to the graves forever after. It was his father's profession, his father's father's profession and every father of his family for many generations. It was expected that Pravus become a Grave Tender as well when he becomes old enough to. Every day his father taught him the trade, preparing him for the time when he would pass the family shovel down to him. Interesting thing about Pravus was that he was gifted. He could see ghosts as well as other spirits lingering in the material plane. His whole family thought him strange for talking to seemingly nothing most of the time. Instead of socializing and having fun like the rest of the kids he would go out into the graveyards and converse with the dead, fascinated by the tales they had to tell.
Now this may all point to how he'd be ideal for becoming a Grave Tender but it all lead to him looking out towards a very different path. Out of all the dead he listened to, the ones with the most fascinating were the ones of soldiers out in the fields of battle. He always wanted to see a battle from their point of view. Him and his father had many heated arguments over the matter. Pravus was determined to be a soldier but his father was adamant about him becoming a Grave Tender. When he was twelve years old, old enough to join the army, on one fateful evening Pravus and his father had one of their more unpleasant arguments. The last words he had shouted at his father were "I'm leaving this accursed household forever! May your health falter in the years to come!". He left his home and ran off to the recruitment center in Sed that night. After signing some forms they directed him to the Traveling Stone and he was instantly ported thousands of miles away to a Tiathan military barracks.
---
There he trained hard both physically and mentally. He took rather quickly to the information they had to offer, quickly climbing to become one of the top students of his class. He was honed until he became the ideal soldier. After successfully passing his training course he was assigned to be the one of the foremost spear men of his legion. Of course most of the soldiers in his legion were all new to true combat, just like him, so they were picked less over the veteran legions. Eventually after proving their mettle in some skirmishes his legion was assigned to a general who was promoted rather recently but showed promise. General Atus took the legion to the snowy wilderness's to the north where the barbarian kingdom of Ru'ul stood and promptly invaded it.
The employment period of a soldier in the Tiathan army was twenty years, no more, no less. During that period each soldier receives a monthly salary as well as having the costs for eating and equipping covered by the imperial taxes. Pravus spent pretty much that entire time fighting in the cold northern woods of Ru'ul. Walking fifty miles on a typical day, more if haste was needed and constantly cutting down trees to make temporary fortifications for each night. Pravus fought seemingly endless hordes of wild men wielding primitive weapons and bolstered by druidic magic. Some of the Ru'ulian armies would call upon all sorts of tamed beasts, from worgs and war bears to mammoths and dragons.
His legion's odds were stacked against them but they had something to even the playing field: Some of the first Empowerment Gems. The reason this new general was given these rather green troops was because he would be the first to test what was a completely new magical invention. Each of them had been equipped with several prototype combat Empowerment Gems to see how they would function in combat. They worked brilliantly, giving General Atus and his men strategic victory after victory, crushing the forces of Ru'ul under heel as his forces conquered the lands in the name of their glorious empire. In these twenty years the Empowerment gems would become universally used throughout the Tiathan army before getting the green light to be released for civilian use.
Twenty long years Pravus fought, using the Empowerment Gems they gave him. In some ways he had become somewhat bitter, disappointed that all his greatest victories were won using the knowledge and power granted to him by special gems rather than by his own skill. He never got to know just how good he truly was at fighting in all the battles they fought. Though disappointed as he was Pravus was not totally disenchanted with the whole experience. He was still happy to have seen so many odd sights and unfamiliar settings. He was thankful for the memories of getting to do battle with strange and unusual monsters and witnessing the effects of foreign magical practitioners. The wealth of loot they plundered from these villages made him quite rich indeed. Now that his term of service was over Pravus could retire with the cash he collected over the years. He couldn't keep the Empowerment Gems because they technically belonged to the military but he wasn't so attached to them anyways. He decided he would return back to his home city. He was homesick and though he had plenty of bad memories from there he also had many good ones. The nostalgic sight of his city would be a welcome sight indeed He thought. Oh, how things had changed.
---
He returned home greeted by a lonely widow. His sisters had all gone off and started their own careers and some had even gotten married. The only person left to look after his childhood home was his mother. His father had died of a painful illness of the lungs about five years back. This news hurt Pravus down to his very core. In a way he felt it all his fault as he had wished this upon his father so long ago. His anger towards his father that he felt on the day he left had whittled away as he grew more mature while serving the legion. He regretted what he had said that faithful day. It tormented him in his dreams and in every thought of every waking hour. He spent several days mourning his fathers death, the guilt refusing to leave him. In the end there was only one way he could possibly stem the guilt. He went and took up his fathers shovel. He became the Grave Tender his father always wanted him to be, continuing the family tradition.
The city of Sed had changed greatly as well since his absence. Empowerment Gems had become the height of fashion, everyone trying to get their hands on whatever gems they can for the sake of having one. They were both a tool and a fashion commodity now, something he never really got. Then again, being a Grave Tender meant he wasn't expected to be seen in public much anyways. Almost no one wanted the title of "Grave Tender's friend". Of course, they all might of fared better had they been his friend when the sickness came.
Pravus was the only person who saw it coming. A black cloud was rapidly traveling towards Sed. By the time he saw what it really was it was too late. The black cloud was in fact millions upon millions of dark spirits, their twisted black skeletal forms howling curses towards everyone. He tried to warn them. He told everyone to flee the city as fast as he could but no one believed him. No one could see the cloud he was seeing and simply believed him to be deranged. Pravus could only take cover as it swept through the city, infecting everyone with a deadly plague overnight. It devastated the city, the whole populace was in a massive panic. Pandemonium swept through the streets, people were looting stores and running for the Traveling Stones. It was to many a victim's dismay when they arrived only to find every other city in the exact same state. The whole empire of Tiatha was suddenly struck by this devastating illness. All the plants and wildlife were dying as were the people. Interestingly though the spirits seemed particularly drawn to those who carried Empowerment Gems on them. Pravus had no gems on him so on the night the disease hit he was passed over by the howling dark spirits virulent touch.
As the disease progressed all the streets and buildings were homes to literal piles of corpses. It became nearly impossible to walk through the city without stepping on an infected body. Pravus and a few other people who had stronger immune systems banded together to do something about the rampant amounts of death and infection in the streets. The small few who were still healthy enough built him a suit that would allow him to go gather bodies and perform the proper burial rights for them. It was Pravus's vigil and he would carry it out, even if it meant burying every single member of this entire city. He put on his plague suit and accompanied by the few noble souls who remained to aid their city he gathered bodies in a large wagon, taking large stacks of bodies from the streets and burying them in mass graves before saying the appropriate funeral rights for this situation. Interesting note is that there was a funeral right written specifically for people who died from a large plague and had to be buried in a mass grave. One of his followers would carry a bell, ringing it loud and clear while announcing for everyone to "Bring out your dead!" to everyone who was still alive so that they could bring out the bodies for them to take.
For the months to come Pravus worked hard burying all those who had died to the dark spirits touch. Many of his assistants died from becoming infected after handling some of the bodies. No matter how cautious they all were when handling the dead it was impossible to avoid infection for too long. He buried his treasured helpers in single marked graves, a way for him to honor them for their service by allowing them to be remembered and putting their souls to rest. Pravus never once doubted his duty, even when he had to bury his sisters and finally his poor widow of a mother. He bore the sorrow for that was his purpose in life. His selfishness had cost his father his life. He would not betray the duty of a Grave Tender and forsake his only way to serve penance for what he had done. He continued to bury the dead, even when he was the only one left alive to do it.
As winter came even Pravus himself eventually became ill with the infection. Even as protected as he was from it, not even he was exempt from the all consuming plague. Even as his health began to fail he continued to bury Sed's dead and say their prayers. Eventually he became so ill that he could no longer physically walk. When it became obvious that his end had come he decided he needed to accept one last responsibility. He managed to crawl his way up the graveyard until he came up to a hill with a small dead tree on top. He sat himself against the tree and watched the sun set across a graveyard that stretched farther than the eye could see. He could feel a sorrow greater than anyone in the history of Tiatha ever could. He felt the sorrow of having been chosen to witness the death of all life in the whole empire of Tiatha, possibly the world. As the sun set, Pravus passed into the night.
of course, this story doesn't end here.
Pravus awoke. He doesn't know how or why but he was suddenly awake. At first he thought he was alive but that cheerful thought soon passed as soon as he observed that he couldn't feel any warmth. His blood no longer pumped through his veins, he felt no pain, no hunger, no need to breath, almost nothing at all. He realized what he had become. He was now a member of the living dead. But why? He pondered before he was stunned to see what stretched out before him. There were rows of colossal headstones so numerous these rows extended beyond what his eyes could see. Upon each of these headstones was the name of every single person who lived in the empire of Tiatha. The names were all etched out in the basic Tiathan alphabet. Who could of done this? Why did they bring me back? How much time has passed since I died? He wondered, questions now clogging his brain. With a sigh he resigned all the questions he had to simply sit unanswered for now. After all, he had a duty to uphold. There were still many bodies in the city that had yet to be buried so he got back to work. In the dead empire of Tiatha in the rotting city of Sed Pravus worked to make sure the dead were all properly respected, his eternal vigil.
At least, for a while...