Extinguished - Application (Accepted)
Character Name: ”Cid” Zed Tollson
Series: Original Universe
Appearance: At five feet five inches, Zed is hardly tall, but he’s not terribly short either. He has thick, brown, curly hair that is often matted and unruly. He sports a short beard that was originally grown out of laziness. Shaving took too much time in the morning. He has brown eyes, and is slightly farsighted, requiring him to carry around a pair of dirty glasses for reading. Luckily, dollar store glasses are all that he really needs, which makes replacements fairly easy to find. His build is scrawny, weighing in at 140lbs. He’s usually seen running around in dirty shirts with some nerdy reference on them, and a pair of cargo pants with as many pockets as possible, usually with tools, spare glasses and a multitool stashed on him at all times. If anyone were to actually check out his health, they’d find that the top left of his head has a 2-inch long gash that doesn’t bleed, a pair of broken ribs on his left side and a complete lack of a heartbeat. His full head of hair hides the old head wound. Completely inexperienced with guns, and since his roommates didn’t have permits, he elected to carry around a sharpened bastard sword one of his roommates had hidden in a closet, and a cheese grater. The cheese grater is really only for distractions.
Personality: Zed is nothing short of a nerd in every aspect of his personality. He loves to take things apart and put them back together, often not the same way in which they came to him. He loves to hack hardware, and his software hacking skills are slightly above that of the average geek as well. He’s a fast learner, and has a natural intuition for taking things apart, figuring out how they work, and then being able to put them back together, either the same way, or in a better way. This applies mostly to electrical devices, but if he takes his time, he can apply the same logic to mechanical items as well, though at a slower pace.
Zed is a glass-half-full person. When the zombie apocalypse occurred, he’d just died in a car accident, and considers waking up in the back of an ambulance in a body bag the luckiest break he could possibly be given. He tries to do what he can to help people, but he’s also wary of anyone he doesn’t know. He’s not oblivious to the way the world works, and his faith in humanity only goes so far. Having been on the unpleasant side of a couple bullies in his time, he knows that there are some pretty unsavory people in the world, and wholly suspects that a number of them survived by feeding anyone around them to the zombies to escape.
That doesn’t mean he’s not friendly, in fact he can be annoyingly pleasant. He’s upbeat about most things, and loves to ‘kill’ people with kindness. If he sees someone violating his ideals of right and wrong, his initial reaction is to remove himself from the situation, unless the victim is in mortal danger, then he will consider intervening, usually by finding someone stronger to help.
He’s always willing to divulge the vast amount of information he knows, however useful or useless it may be, so long as someone asks a question. He may be socially awkward, but years of studying people around him have allowed him to socialize well enough to get by without being that painfully awkward geek in the corner.
Zed is also a young adult, so his perspective can be a bit childish. His idea of holing up once he realized that it would be a while before things started to get better, was to raid the other apartments in his building, looking for game systems, TVs, and video games. He is in the process of maturing, so occasionally he will show more mature judgment, as he begins to realize what he really needs, and what he doesn’t in order to survive. He’s still idealistic, but he has learned to bend some of his own rules, and also has learned when it’s time to be serious about a situation. Usually it takes a life-or-death sort of situation to get him to act like a full-fledged adult, but if someone treats him less like the 22-year-old that he is, and more like an adult, he will rise to the occasion. He also has a good work ethic. If he’s given a task or set of tasks, it will be carried out promptly, to the best of his ability and to the highest quality that he can attain.
Unfortunately for Zed, he is also a very clean person. Becoming a zombie makes this a difficult task to keep up on. He always smells slightly of decay, even though he tries to clean up, use cologne, or find other more pleasant smells to try and mask the scent of undead about him. Occasionally he may be found cleaning up a mess that no one will ever see, or randomly straightening objects that may be off-center. He’s not obsessive about this behavior, but it will make itself apparent when he’s bored or nervous. Lacking something to straighten, he’ll clean his sword, or try to untangle his mess of hair. He’s long given up on removing wrinkles from clothes, and they often get stained beyond the point of reclaim anyway.
Abilities: Zed is a zombie. He does not age, but he is very slowly decaying. Ingesting warm meat from a fresh kill or a living being helps to slow the decaying process, but there will be a point where he becomes little more than a highly functioning corpse, whether he eats or not. If he’s good about getting something to eat every few days, he will slow the process enough to pass as human-looking for quite a while. Otherwise, he will become emaciated and begin to look drawn. Human flesh is preferable, but his morals prevent him from willingly eating it. Animals will suffice, but are not nearly as effective in staving off his decay.
Being shot or dismembered is briefly painful, but the pain will subside after a few minutes and he will be able to function unimpeded by pain, much like a regular zombie would. Extreme head trauma or a shot through the brain will kill him, as it would any other zombie.
Being undead also means that his endurance has improved since he technically does not need to breath, and does not have a heartbeat. He can’t run forever, and he’s not very fast to start with, but he can go for a significant time longer than he could before he became a zombie.
Zed is 22 and in his fourth year of Electrical Engineering. His knowledge base is on par with four years of college education and a couple summers of internships. He requires only a year more to graduate, so he has a professional level of knowledge that has been both learned in an institute setting, and also gleaned from having far too much time on his hands for extracurricular activities that expand his knowledge base.
Alliance or Coalition? No Preference
History: Zed grew up in suburban America, in Upstate New York. The town was smaller, but not tiny, and there were certainly enough people in the area to generate a fairly thorough cross section of suburban America in the Northeast. Both of Zed’s parents worked, so the money wasn’t rolling in, but they lived comfortably. As an only child, Zed had a fairly easy childhood, his only gripe being that he was born nerdy. He was always a bit on the scrawny side, and had an innate aptitude for technical work. His father was an electrician, so that particular preference was well-supported, and he learned to solder at a very young age.
He quickly became the local computer guru when they became commonplace items in businesses and homes, and spent most of his free time in middle school and high school running a small IT business out of his family’s garage. Much of his high school career, he was mostly left to his own devices, but he did suffer the wrath of the occasionally bully. He wasn’t beaten often, but a small group of kids would occasionally gang up on him and make life difficult. Taking lunch money and stealing his homework were not uncommon occurrences; along with verbal taunts were weekly norms. He managed to avoid them most of Junior and Senior year by taking his bike to school a number of different routes that allowed him to see trouble early enough to take a different direction to school.
He was, for the most part, the sole member of the computer clubs in the school; with an occasional group who were recreationally interested in the things he considered his career. He was a high-scoring student, and was accepted into his choice technical college which was only a couple hours away, for Electrical Engineering.
His performance in his college courses was notable, with a 3.4GPA that kept him competitive with most of his class. The remainder of his college career was as to be expected, with classes and internships progressing on schedule.
It was in March of 2009, his 4th year of school, when Zed was walking across campus in the evening, heading toward his apartment when a car swerved onto the sidewalk and clipped him. Paramedics reached the scene quickly, but he was already dead, blood oozing from a minor head wound. It was internal damage, specifically to his heart, which had caused his early death. On the way to the hospital, Zed awoke in the back of the ambulance in the body bag. By the time the ambulance reached the hospital, there had been a complete outbreak of the dead rising up and searching out the flesh of the living. The paramedics were attacked when they opened the doors to escape from Zed, but they were rushed by zombies. The driver took off, with Zed still in the back, only to later crash the ambulance.
Alone, and finding that nothing was actually attacking him directly, Zed made his way back to his apartment. He found the entire apartment complex deserted, and after waiting it out for a few days, he began to realize that his only company left were mindless undead that shambled about with no reason or drive.
Reveling in his newfound freedom, he raided apartments, clearing out zombies and taking anything he could carry. He accomplished this with the help of a bastard sword one of his roommates kept, since it was the only weapon he could find, and he had no experience whatsoever with guns. His initial focus was on electronics, until he realized he needed more than that to survive. He began to experiment with food, realizing he hadn’t eaten in a while, and found that there was little rhyme or reason to the things he could eat without getting sick. Warmed meat from the freezer barely sufficed, while coffee tasted fine.
Eventually, while wandering about a small mall nearby, he discovered the lower functioning undead were not as apathetic to his presence as he’d thought. At one point he was nearly mobbed, and while trying to escape them, he was aided by other undead like him who had maintained their cognitive abilities. They provided him a safe place to rest, revealed to him that he needed fresh meat in order to survive, and suggested that he join up with them. Content to live as he had in seclusion and take his chances, he brought this knowledge home and tried to come up with ways to trap something that might provide sustenance.
As time wore on, he would venture further and further out on his bike, eventually raiding campus for electronics, components, and books. He essentially kept up his education, breaking into offices and following curriculums professors had set out for classes he had intended to take.
Eventually he witnesses the other free-thinking zombies tracking down a group of humans and taking them to be eaten. Appalled, he decides to leave the area while summer is approaching and heads south on his bike, following the main roads and towing his supplies behind him. He manages to create a generator for his bike that can charge batteries while he pedals, so he has a way to power a laptop he takes with him that has a satellite card. Ever addicted to the internet and electronics, he tries to find someone online to contact when he stops at night, scouring the internet until he falls asleep, knowing eventually this method of connectivity will too come to an end.
Zed is taken from a point where he stops in a small town, looking for supplies. He is armed with his bastard sword, and a cheese grater, which he uses for distractions whenever he comes across the living. Usually random objects help to confuse people long enough for him to escape, without the need for any bloodshed. He’s become relatively proficient with the sword, and at this point has been a zombie for about a month and a half. He is showing some slight signs of decay: his ribs are showing and the slight smell that he tries to cover up is more persistent, but aside from the lack of a heartbeat, there is little else so far to distinguish him as a zombie.