Xeres / Characters / Moss

Moss

You can knock him down. People have tried. He gets back up every single time.

Human Brawler / Street Survivor The Record The Glacial Wendigo

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Basic Information

Full Name

Moses Garkalsadon

Nickname(s)

"Moss", "The Record"

Race (Grade)

Human (F)

Class

Brawler / Street Survivor

Height

4'9"

Birthday

Stormhowl 22, 1294

Age

Birthsign

The Glacial Wendigo

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Bloodline Ability

🔮Won't Stay Down

Moss recovers. That is the whole of it, stated plainly, because the plain statement is more alarming than any elaboration. Where other people reach a point of genuine physical or psychological depletion and stop, Moss reaches that same point and then continues. He has been rendered unconscious by slavers enough times that the count stopped being notable and started being a pattern, and the pattern was that he always woke up and immediately resumed the exact behavior that got him knocked out. At F-grade this is pure instinct rather than conscious fortitude: his body simply does not accept the signals that typically tell a person to stop. Wounds close faster than they should for someone of his age and station. Exhaustion that would flatten someone twice his size passes through him in hours. He does not experience this as strength or power. He experiences it, when he thinks about it at all, as things being roughly normal. He has no reference point for what it feels like to stay down. He has only ever gotten back up.

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Physical Description

Moss, The Record

Appearance

Moss is eleven years old and has been eating regularly for two years, which turns out to make a measurable difference. He is still lean, still wiry, still built for movement rather than mass, but there is more of him than there was, and the practical muscle that street life built in his arms and shoulders has filled out into something that makes people reconsider him when they get a proper look. His dark chestnut hair is longer now, jaw-length and perpetually disheveled, carrying the faint salt-stiffness of someone who spends time near the water and does not spend much time afterward doing anything about it. His face is freckled and open and quick, with brown eyes that still clock exits before they settle on anything else. The most significant visual change since he joined the Garkalsadon household is the tattoos. Both arms from shoulder to wrist are covered in Vaitafe tribal markings, dark ink in flowing geometric patterns earned rather than decorative, each one representing something specific in the culture that adopted him. He wears a patterned wrap-tunic in deep earth tones and burnt reds, a braided sash belt, and loose printed trousers. A necklace of carved animal teeth sits at his throat, the gift from Karthos he has not removed since receiving it. At his belt cord hangs a large curved fang, his original trophy, now joined by two smaller ones that were not there before the World Games.

Unique Characteristics

Moss moves like he is always in the middle of deciding whether to run or fight, which is because he usually is. His default resting posture has his weight slightly forward, hands loose at his sides, feet placed wider than necessary: the unconscious stance of someone who has spent years needing to react fast. He has a collection of small scars on his knuckles, shins, and one notable one above his left eyebrow that he cannot fully account for because he was unconscious when he got it. The knuckles have new marks now, from the World Games boxing final, and he considers these categorically different from the others and is privately pleased about them. He makes sustained eye contact that some people find confident and others find unsettling, depending largely on what they were planning to do next. His vocabulary remains expansive in directions that Karthos is gently redirecting and Moss is, incrementally, actually working on. He still swears. He swears less than he did. This is measurable progress and he would like it acknowledged.

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Personality

Positive Traits

Completely and genuinely impossible to break
Loyal to anyone who has earned it, fiercely and permanently
Adaptable in the way only the genuinely desperate become
Honest to a fault; has no practice with social lies
Finds genuine delight in competition and challenge

Challenging Traits

Language is colorful in ways that require ongoing management
Default response to authority is skepticism until proven otherwise
Does not ask for help; has never needed to learn how
Escalates when he probably should not
Carries six years of loss he has not had safe space to process

Sixty-something boys. Swords, shields, armor, magic. I had my hands. Bronze is underselling it, honestly.

I haven't gone down in the dungeon yet. Not once. I'm not saying that to be impressive. I'm saying it because it's a fact and facts are useful.

Pops said I have to stop saying that word at dinner. I'm working on it. I'm working on a few of them actually.

Likes

Frogs (the original cause of everything, a fact he finds either funny or annoying depending on the day)
Boxing, specifically, above all other ways of hitting people
The dungeon strike group and the fact that he has not gone down once
The World Games medals, which he does not display but knows exactly where they are
The ocean; it is familiar and does not ask anything of him
Being useful rather than managed

Dislikes

Slavers, with a totality that needs no further specification
Being told to calm down before he has had a chance to react
Pity; he has received enough of it to know what it costs
Enclosed spaces with no clear way out
The word "can't," applied to himself by anyone including himself

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Background & History

Brackenwall

Moss grew up in Brackenwall, a working port city with more edges than comforts and more people looking after themselves than looking after each other. He does not speak much about his parents, partly because the memories are old and partly because street children develop an economy around not appearing vulnerable, and explaining that you lost your parents at four years old is the sort of information that gets used against you. What he has acknowledged, in the fragmentary and offhand way he acknowledges things that matter, is that there was a mother and then there wasn't, and after that there was the city, and the city was what it was. He learned it well. By the time he was six he knew which market stalls left unsaleable fruit at the back, which dockhands could be charmed into tossing down scraps, which alleys flooded in the rainy season, and which ones didn't. He made no plans beyond the next day. Days were enough.

The Frogs

He was eight years old and hunting frogs in the reeds at the edge of a canal outside Brackenwall when the slavers found him. This is the detail he returns to most reliably when he talks about it — the frogs — with a specific quality of bafflement that six years of life on the streets had developed in him a thorough and practical survival instinct, and then one afternoon he was simply somewhere he shouldn't have been because there were frogs there, and that was that. He fought immediately. He fought hard enough that it took three of them. He woke up in a cage with his hands bound and the canal already well behind him, and he spent the next several minutes conducting a very thorough assessment of his situation in language that would later become characteristic. Then he started looking for weaknesses in the cage.

Two Years

The slavers quickly determined that Moss was a problem and never meaningfully updated this assessment. He fought when they moved him. He fought when they tried to put him to work. He fought when they attempted to display him for potential buyers, which complicated the sales process significantly. He was knocked unconscious with regularity and woke up each time with the methodical patience of someone taking inventory: where am I, what has changed, where are the weaknesses, what is the next attempt. He was not heroic about it. He was not even particularly strategic about it. He simply could not make himself stop. The slavers cycled through increasingly frustrated approaches, and Moss cycled through the same determined refusal to accept the situation as permanent, and neither side made much progress. He was never sold. He was, in the end, never broken. He was just there, being an ongoing problem, until one day a small orange catfolk walked into the market with a gold bar and bought thirty-two people without haggling.

Tingle

Moss's first coherent impression of Tingle Geodegazer was that he was approximately the same age and size as Moss himself, and was somehow purchasing an ogre. Moss watched this happen. He watched Tingle count out thirty-two people with the focused precision of someone running a grocery list and the complete absence of any apparent awareness that this was remarkable. He watched him get arrested for it afterward and go to jail without complaint. Moss has not said directly that this was the most impressive thing he had ever seen a person do. He has, however, mentioned the gold bar incident approximately seven times in various conversations since, always in the context of making a point about what is actually possible when you simply decide to do something.

Karthos

Karrthosin Raukura Taringa adopted Moss recently and in Moss's estimation without making nearly enough of a production of it, which is to say Karthos simply treated it as the obvious next step rather than a significant decision, which Moss found disorienting and then quietly correct. Karthos did not require Moss to be grateful or reformed or presentable. He did require him to be present, to eat, and to make a reasonable attempt at moderating his vocabulary at mealtimes, which Moss considers a fair exchange for the first actual bed he has slept in for six years. He is navigating the experience of having a parent again with the same approach he applies to most things: observing what is expected, deciding whether it is reasonable, and either complying or making his objections heard with considerable directness. So far most of it has been reasonable. He has not said this. Karthos probably knows anyway.

The Pocket Dungeon Record

The pocket dungeon operates in altered time: one hour outside its walls equals one full day within. Tingle Geodegazer, who is Goodberry's reigning junior record-holder for almost everything, had held the dungeon endurance record at nine hours outside, which translated to nine days of solo survival inside. This was considered extraordinary. The general consensus was that it would stand for some time. Moss went in without announcing his intention and came out eleven hours later having spent the equivalent of eleven days inside alone, without resupply or backup, and emerged nearly dead and entirely satisfied with himself. He immediately wanted to know Tingle's exact time so he could be specific about the margin. Tingle is currently preparing a twelve-hour attempt. Moss is watching this development with the composed interest of someone who has already begun calculating thirteen.

The World Games

When King Xaneborr announced the World Games, Moss entered every boys event because it sounded like fun. This is his complete and honest explanation of the decision and he sees no reason to expand on it. He took gold in boys boxing, which surprised nobody who had watched him fight and very much surprised the boys he fought. He took bronze in the obstacle course and bronze in the grand melee, the latter being the result that gets described most often and with the most embellishment by people who witnessed it: over sixty boys entered, most of them carrying swords, shields, armor, and in several cases active magic. Moss entered with his hands. He beat all but two of them. The bronze is technically an accurate representation of his placement. It is not an accurate representation of what actually happened, which was a small freckled eleven-year-old with tribal tattoos and no weapons methodically working his way through a field of armed and armored opponents until only two of them had enough left to best him. The boys who did not make it to the end of that bracket have mostly declined to discuss the specifics. Moss discusses them readily, when asked, and occasionally when not asked.

The Dungeon Strike Group

The Geodegazer pocket dungeon resets every twenty-four hours and the children who want to run it have organized themselves into three strike teams. Moss joined one as a striker, which suits him with the specific accuracy of a role that was described to someone and they immediately said that one. His job is to get to the dangerous things before they get to his team, which he approaches with the same focused directness he applies to everything he has decided to do. He has not gone down in a dungeon run. He is aware this is notable. He is also aware that the dungeon resets daily with new content and new lethality, and that not going down yet is a statement about the past rather than a guarantee about the future. He holds this information and goes in anyway, which is the most Moss possible response to it.

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Goals

To Get Better at Everything

Moss does not have a specific vision for his future, which is unsurprising for a child who spent six years not planning past the next day. What he has is an instinct that has been with him since Brackenwall and has only sharpened since: the conviction that being better at things is the only reliable currency, that skill and toughness and adaptability are the only possessions that cannot be taken away. The pocket dungeon record is part of this. Whatever comes next will be part of it too. He is not ambitious in the way that people with futures in mind are ambitious. He is relentless in the way that people who have survived entirely on relentlessness are relentless. The direction will sort itself out. He will be ready for it.

To Stay in This

Moss has not used the word family out loud in reference to Karthos or Goodberry or the people around him. He uses other constructions. He refers to Tingle as "the orange kid" and to Karthos as "Karthos" and to the household as "here." But he keeps showing up. He keeps coming back to the dinner table, keeps participating in whatever is happening, keeps inserting himself into the life of this place in the specific way that someone does when they have decided it is worth inserting themselves into. Six years on the streets taught him to identify places worth staying. He is staying. He does not require anyone to make a ceremony of it. He just needs it to continue.

To Not Go Down

The dungeon has not put him on the ground yet. The World Games grand melee did not put him on the ground. Sixty-plus boys with swords and magic did not put him on the ground. The record is real and he knows it and it matters to him in the specific way that things matter to someone who spent years being knocked unconscious by slavers and waking up to try again. Not going down is not the same as being indestructible. It is a standard he has set for himself in the absence of anyone else setting one, and he intends to maintain it for as long as he possibly can, and when something finally puts him down he will get back up, because that is what he does, and then he will figure out what went wrong and make sure it does not happen the same way twice.

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Current Status & Relationships

Allegiance

Vaitafe Tribe / Goodberry

Role

Ward / Adopted Son / Current Record Holder

Family

Friends

Tingle Geodegazer (Friend) Thorg (Friend)

⚠️ Do Not Underestimate Warning

Moss is an eleven-year-old child. He is also a child who spent two years being systematically knocked unconscious by professional slavers and kept waking up and resuming the fight, who has survived six years without parents or institutional support in a working port city, and who just spent the equivalent of eleven solo days in an altered-time dungeon at an age when most children are worrying about schoolwork. His bloodline ability is not dramatic or flashy. It is simply that he does not stop. People who have assumed that his size or his age placed a ceiling on what he was capable of have been consistently wrong, and the slavers who held him for two years are among the more recent examples. He is not looking for trouble. He is not aggressive without cause. He swears freely and means no offense by it and is actively trying to moderate this in formal settings. But if something or someone threatens the people he has decided are worth protecting, the operational word for what Moss becomes is not "angry." It is "relentless," and there is a meaningful difference.