Name: Zathrian Farrel

Age: 26

Gender: Male

Sexuality:  hetero

Profession: undetermined

Type of Variation/Abilities: None. Zath has no idea why either. Best he can tell, his never came active in his family line, but there doesn’t even seem to be a hint at what it might be either.

Appearance: Usually quick to a smile, Zath had a boyish charm about him. Soft, expressive light brown eyes that sometimes appear golden in the right light, especially with the mop of dark wavy hair framing them. Standing close to 6’ tall and wide at the shoulders, Zath can present a formidable foe, if not for his winning smile and boyish charm. From the shoulders, his form takes on a leaner build, narrowing at the waist and into long legs in a fit but not bulky form. Zath often dresses in nicer clothing, a collared shirt and vest over trousers, but on days he is more relaxed, his clothing style is as well.

Personality: Zath has always been the life of the party. His height and build make him hard to miss, whether he is searching through the Archives, wandering down the street, or within a group of friends. He always has a smile to share, as well as a helping hand. Zath can be generous to a fault, but usually this is limited to people he knows well. He is not one to fight, trying to find a way to de-escalate the problem rather than fight or flee.

Strengths: Finding the bright side in most situations, no matter how dark. Zath is one to stand up and look for a solution rather than wallow in a poor situation. He is handy with electronics and some mechanics, and working in the archives as a historian has given him excellent research skills and a solid base of knowledge in the past happenings.

Zath also developed a talent for sketching, brought on by trying to picture what the description of something he was reading might look like.

Weaknesses: Zath has no known Variation. In a place like the Domes where a visible ability will find a person in the upper ranks of society no matter where they were born, he finds it hard to see the light in such a thing the closer the day comes to his 26th birthday, the final day before the leaders decide a variation will not come.

Because of his lacking variation, Zath relies on his personality and helpfulness to win him friends. When darker thoughts hit, he finds himself worried that he is truly as worthless as society tells him he is.

History: Zathrian was born to parents who would have been fairly well off, in any normal sense of social standing. While technically “dome-born”, Zath lacks the usual tattoos along the arms and down the spine, as his birth was kept secret, his parents wanting a natural child from them, rather than something created in a lab. Growing up, they had a home, had good jobs and money. Zath truly lacked for nothing growing up - except the one thing that mattered most in the Eden Dome.

All through school, he watched as those around him gained their abilities, clinging to the fact that some people merely got theirs later on, sometimes even as late as early adulthood. His parents often told him to not worry, that it would happen, that his generation was one of the strongest, producing variations in nearly every family line. It was only a matter of time.

As he grew older, he found his own way of making himself known, learning that offering a helping hand and a winning smile would also get him places, even if he remained where he was within the social structure. He made himself useful in other ways, hoping that it might be enough to change the fate life seemed to have dealt him, all the while, desperately hoping in secret that his variation would appear. That something would happen to bring it out, and he could stop worrying over the inevitable and laugh about how crazy it had driven him.

After school, Zath gained a job in the archives as a Historian, tending to the records of Eden and researching aspects requested of him. He found the work satisfying as he had always loved reading and learning about what life was once like. He often found himself sketching what trees or birds might have looked like more out of curiosity than anything else, developing the talent of sketching from a description.

It was here he met Aris, the bright strawberry blonde that seemed to question everything that didn’t have some sort of proof, a fact that was off-putting to some, but Zath found refreshing. She didn’t just take Eden and the morality of its social structure at face value, but rather seemed to take each person and each circumstance as it came. Zath found she was one of the few that treated him as a person, rather than a useless item to be discarded simply because he had no variant ability.

Because of this, they became close, Zath often venting to Aris about how frustrated with Eden he was, and how he longed for either a variant power, or a place where having one or not didn’t matter. She often tried to console him that it never mattered to her, and that perhaps it would come in time.

Except it never had. His 26th birthday came, and on that day, while working in the Archives researching information related to whether or not any other family lines had such an occurrence, Zath found himself pulled away from the desk, a man on each of his arms as they dragged him from the Archives. The last memory he had was the heart-rending look on his friend Aris’s face as they pulled him away.

They stood him in a sterile room, forcing him to show his variation, and when he couldn’t, they tried to torture it out of him as “a way to awaken those variations sometimes too stubborn to show themselves any other way.” They beat him, electrocuted him, held him under water, and many more things he would rather forget happening.

In the end, now bloody and bruised, broken and exhausted, they stood him before the airlock, reading his fate for the gathered crowd to hear. Zath would be offered to the Outer World so that they may not attack Eden as they did other places.

He couldn’t bring himself to look up, not even when he heard Aris cry out to him, cry out at the injustice dealt to him as so many others. They left him with no more fight. In the end, he was shoved out the airlock regardless of her pleas. Only then, however, did Zath realize the true horror of his fate.

The monsters didn’t attack, not in the sense he expected. He expected them to tear him into pieces to feast upon, which had earned them the title of The Starving. What he found instead was another form of torment entirely. The haze of the outside world swirled around him, choking him as the voices first appeared, coming from nothing more than dark shadows too far away to make out clearly.

Those voices seemed to cut through him, entering his mind to share in their hunger, their desperation, their nightmares. They bound him in place with their fear, only then coming closer. Monstrous faces appeared within the haze, drawing closer. Long, spindly fingers ending in claws clacking together as they reached for him.

Zath couldn’t move, too broken, too beaten, too held in place with the torment these monsters left in his mind to fight them off. Instead, they fed from him in their own way, leaving him a huddled mass curled against the base of the Eden Dome only feet from the door he had been shoved through.