Character Sheet for Rust
Species
Tarantula (Arizona Desert Blonde)
Character Description
Gunsmith by day, outlaw and a thrall to the Devil Herself by night, Rust seeks to break free from his begrudging servitude by any means necessary. Despite the blood on his claws, he is a good soul at heart, only taking the Devil’s contract out of desperation after She promises to have him reborn as a man. Now, with the Gates of Hell wide open, She’s claimed everything west of the Mississippi, and soon, the rest of the world will fall into wickedly lethal turmoil. Thankfully, a barn owl priest has traveled from the Vatican seeking to seal the Gates and save everyone needing his help, potentially freeing the spider himself! Despite being distrustful of preachers, the two make for a wonderful daemon slaying duo, and perhaps in time, something more?
The arachnid, while having a violent and troubled past, makes for a great ally, and you’ll find there’s more than meets the eye underneath his stoic exoskeleton.
Personality
For Rust, his disposition is like the sturdy exoskeleton of an arachnid. He doesn’t speak much as he isn’t one to ramble on, and is blunt to an extreme point. Despite this, he is one who likes dry humor, and will often say something satirical in a tone so serious, listeners will question if he means it or not even if it’s the most obvious joke of all time. (See: “I’m an even better shot while drunk.”) He can weather all sorts of harsh antagonism without even flinching, but if you do manage to get past his breaking point, he is very fragile and vulnerable underneath his exoskeleton. The gooey parts are filled with deep emotion and he’ll blubber and blabber and sob seemingly unable to stop the flow of emotion, and once it’s all drained, he’ll just be a quiet empty husk, unable to speak anymore.
There is a lot going on inside behind those firm eyes, even if he's not one to express himself much.
Background/History
For his first lifetime up until he was 14-16, he was forced by his family to abide by the crushing expectations of womanhood despite not being a woman. When his family discovered that he had been using his home taught sewing skills to modify his dresses into slacks, he was made to watch as his family burned his hard work. I won’t go into too much detail here but this is the time where violently hitting your own children for misbehaving was commonplace. So much of this parental abuse alongside the crushing dysphoria was too much to handle, leading to an attempted suicide that was stopped at the last moment by the devil herself. Out of desperation he readily agreed to the terms of her contract, and thus after some rewriting of time itself, he was reborn as a boy destined to grow big and strong like he had always hoped. Of course, this childhood was just as horrid as the one before it. Still stuck with physically abusive parents (even if this was par for the course at the time), things were made much worse after he was caught kissing another boy in the assumed privacy of the family barn. Even at such a young age, the family had always suspected there was more to their deep ‘friendship’ and long visits with one another, and a young Rust had to physically wrestle away his father’s gun in a desperate attempt to save his childhood crush from certain death. The last he ever saw of the other boy was him frightfully sprinting away, never to hear from him again. To ‘save his mortal soul’ his parents arranged help from a traveling priest and subjected him to exorcism after exorcism to try and rid the sinfulness from his mortal soul. Of course, being the devil’s thrall at this point, and not imbued with any daemons at all, the cleansing practices drove him mad with pain even if they did little if anything to actually free him from her clutches. After he had been deemed ‘cleansed’ he became much more withdrawn from men and especially any churchfolk. The nightmares of this incident continued well into adulthood, when he finally decided he had enough, and spent two years doing nothing but tracking down that priest, and finally put a load of buckshot into his body. With some clever work, the locals were never able to find out where the man had gone missing to, and assumed he had just resumed his travels. (Though some years later, they did eventually discover his involvement, and he is now a wanted man with a large bounty on his head in a town far away) this however, didn’t stop the nightmares, and instead just proliferated new ones. During his adulthood, he mostly served the devil doing stints of her dirtywork, much of it violent. It of course disgusted him to his core, but without any other options, he was forced into servitude. Murder, arson, and other forms of violence were rather commonplace, though rather than being forced into the position of a full time killing machine, he was mostly just used for disruption, only operating a few months out of every year, going into hiding and remission whenever the heat crept too close.
Relatives/Family
Rust has a modest family, consisting of a rounded pink toed mother, a burly red knee father, an older, gangly, striped kneed brother.
World/Setting
This is a world where the biblical creation story of genesis is in fact true, (though instead of 6000 years ago it’s an unspecified “somewhere in the distant past”) however, animals took of the fruit of knowledge instead of humans, who never came to be. (which means that fungi took the role of most animals, because it would be weird for me to include anthropomorphic sapient animals alongside non anthro, non sapient counterparts.)
Body
He is very large for a male spider, and just large for his species in general. Not only is he tall but he is quite muscular, his entire body toned from a life of hauling and shaping metal (and various amounts of travelling and highly immoral and illegal activities) Despite his otherwise excellent health, his eyes are darkened and drooped with large bags underneath them, as his dreams are often plagued with nightmares from his childhood or meetings from the devil in his mind. Part of her gift is his fortitude and constitution, so despite his copious amounts of drinking and smoking, he's otherwise unaffected (for now) other than the rasp in his voice and his large gut. He is often described as being ruggedly handsome. His face is dominated by a pair of large mandibles. His large and frighteningly sharp fangs are neatly tucked away under his “chin” and his pedipalps are almost always relaxed by his neck, only rising when he feels tense or agitated in some way His forearms are scarred with burns made from mishandling red hot metal, and in some places has completely lost all feeling. These burns make regular interruptions along his otherwise pristine gradient along his limbs. Despite being a big imposing man, his body fur is the softest you’ll ever feel, all except for his urticating hairs that is. His abdomen is large for a male spider as well, and is a dark coffee brown, with the longer strands of hair being tinged a beautiful rust orange brown. His spinnerets are long and slender, and produce a fine silk, even if he rarely uses it. Body type wise, he very comfortably fits directly between the “bear” and “hunk” categories, effectively making him a Bunk.
Clothing
He typically wears a light colored long sleeved shirt tarnished with a few holes and dirt stains with the worst areas being patched by random fabric shreds he has laying around. He wears a dark, almost poncho-like cloak over his clothing to help protect him from the harsh winds and subsequent dust devils that have increased in their frequency ever since the gates of hell opened up. His trousers are about as worse for wear as his shirts, and are frequently patched over on the knee and thigh area. He keeps his shotgun close at all times, and often wears it strapped to his back, with a thick belt which carries extra buckshot cartridges. He wears a dark colored, wide brimmed, pinched front styled hat. He wears practical western styled boots of the highest quality leather, as he is not one to cut corners on the arguably most important part of a man’s outfit.
Accessories
He is known to keep a flask of whiskey on him (for emergencies) as well as extra spice for seasoning (also for emergencies). In addition, he has a few pockets on his belt for carrying cases full of extra shotgun shells.
