Name: Robin Michael Braddock. Rob for short.
Role: Male 5
Age: Twenty-three
Occupation: Farmhand, hunter, smuggler
Dislikes: The awkwardness of a high-intensity situation petering out, feeling trapped in one place with no freedom of movement, trying to console people, dilly-dallying when there's work to be done, pointless gestures of affection, spoilsports, seeing his sister (and, perhaps, his brother-in-law) disquieted, people with lack of resolve.
Fears: Being the restless soul that he is, he's afraid of being pinned down or made to settle downâand actually enjoying it. He supposes he has Juni to blame for that. As such, he prefers to stick to brief, meaningless rendezvous. He's also afraid of losing control of himself and how that will bode for him should he choose not to stop his fixation with work as a means of distraction, which he's sure will evolve into distraction as a way of life.
Dreams: He doesn't hope for much for himself, but he wishes that Ginny's and Owen's child(ren) won't have to go through the same trials they endured when they were growing up, and that one day they'd be able to experience the childhood their parents relished and that he never got to experience.
Background: Rob's earliest memories were that of his parents telling him and his older sister Ginny stories before bed. Copies of Grimm or Andersen's fairy stories were long since hidden away in the wastelands of the chaotic city settlements they came from. Instead of those less practical, archaic cautionary tales, they told them stories about a world they had largely taken for granted in their timeâone which was easily as fantastic as those in those storybooks. His early years were driven by the longing to know about and experience all the things they had told them in the stories they wove, though eventually, he got over his childhood longing when he realised that all the things in those fairy tales were far beyond their reach. What was ice cream? Television? Spending time with your friends watching movies? There was none of that growing up in the farm his mother and father built where he was born. Instead they had crops, roughhousing, and a rabbit at the end of the day, if they were lucky. He worked the fields when he was old enough to do so, doing the same work his father and oftentimes working harder to ensure that Ginny wouldn't have to go through the toil.
He would often accompany their father on hunts when he had finished his duties on the farm. There, he was taught the basics of surviving out in the wilderness. Eventually, he would go out on hunts alone to expedite the increase in food stocks. His going out to explore and hunt became a constant point of contention between him and his father, who needed more hands on the farm now that his mother had passed away and he was growing increasingly frail. It all became far less burdensome when his father was next in line. Knowing the farm was going into ruin, he bequeathed him his heavy-duty compass and told him to keep his sister and her family safe, and to that he couldn't disagree. Following his death, they left the farm they once called home to find other settlements.
It was in the first settlement they managed to find themselves in that he started participating in the local smuggling operations. He would go out with small scattered groups, looking through abandoned towns to find any leftover supplies or food, even going so far as to rob from existing settlements. He met Juniper on one of those operations, having settled down in an abandoned shack somewhere near where they were scavenging. She had become something of a friend to him, and he managed to visit as regularly as he could. A few months into it changed what they had into something far more than he had anticipated: he had fallen in love with her. His mind was overwhelmed with thoughts of her day by day, though he never confided in any of it to his sister or brother-in-law. Circumstances changed as their settlement was falling into chaos and became no place to live peacefully. To spare himself the pain of telling the truth of not wanting to leave her, he pushed Juniper away and told her he couldn't stay together with her any longer. The words he'd used to leave her still haunts him to this day.
Finding Dust was a godsend after their last settlement had turned them out, as Ginny's condition made her a liability to the community. He hopes it will be much kinder to them this time.
"Look, sweetie, that's all you're getting today. Take it or leave it."