Tern

Feb 16, 22. Tern's real name is Nicodemus [surname], but he's done his best to leave that behind for his own safety. He's disconnected from most things so that they can't be used against him. He's a couple steps away from "human" akin to the way vampires are (granted, he's not undead). His kind almost always wear red cloaks? He's a very powerful being of which is usually hunted down to either remove a perceived threat or use for one's own gain. He's a vampire in the sense that he takes salt from people and uses this to fuel his powers. He can't kill people by sucking all the salt out of them and salt is gained in a sort of...video-game-y way. Like you don't get a lot out of one dude, it's like...five. Five salt. Whatever that means. He usually gets a lot more from highly salinified water in geysers or waterfalls, but those are a bit of a rare commodity. Those give thousands of salts. His powers often manifest in what looks like a force crush or gusts of wind full of salt grains, but this isn't the extent of what he's capable of. Typically, he can't totally change elements (fire, water, earth, etc), but no other limits were expressed. Using magic sometimes slowly drains salt, sometimes just takes a chunk out of it. Tern seems to know what the effect will be, but it's Greek to everybody else. His eyes take on a different appearance when he's doin' magic stuff. It's kind of a giveaway

Lives in a world that's a lot of steppes, mountains, rocks, short grass, and cold. Civilizations exist, but are far and few between. There's huge gaps of no man's land in between. It's seemingly too difficult and/or deadly to set up outside of the cities, so people don't do that. Ever. There's railways that connect the cities and are pretty much the only way to travel between places safely. Trains look akin to older steam engines, but are autonomous. They'll go to their stations on their own with no human input (and they also won't stop for what might seem like good reasons, so stay off the tracks). They're connected to a variety of flatbeds and boxcars which are never changed out or altered, as there isn't enough time when a train stops to do anything of the sort before it's off again (they stop for a while, but not that much of a while). You can throw stuff in the cars, but you also have to bring enough people to move that stuff out at the next stop or else it'll go on without you. Because of this, they're pretty bad for product transportation and generally just used as people movers

In the dream, Tern was living in a secluded sanctuary full of animals. This was majorly circles of grass ringed by big rocks with each circle being like a little zoo biome? But like animals could move around freely if they really wanted to. It contained mostly cats, a few small birds like budgies and lovebirds, some decorative fish (that can swim in the air), and a couple people that lived there. Tern spent the vast majority of his time defending the place from an unseen threat in a constant cycle of hiding at night, chasing off the thing in the morning, cleaning up the horrible mess that had been made overnight, and then hiding at night. The animals were in danger of being killed by this threat, so it was important that they were in their proper places at night. If they weren't, they simply wouldn't be there in the morning (which is just sad : ( ). This was exhausting and stressful for Tern, but hey. He wasn't dead or enslaved, right?

Things at the sanctuary were suddenly starting to slowly get worse to the point that Tern couldn't even defend the place. Most of the animals were gone and the people were getting pretty freaked out. Before all hope is lost, they get word of a competition starting. Apparently, a city somewhere is holding a contest relating to the railways. The trains will go as usual and whoever rides the whole circuit with the most time spent on the train wins. What they win is unclear, but it's implied to be really important. "Time spent on the train" is counted in days. If you step off the train on Monday then you totally lose that Monday off your tally. This is going to be a long contest (the dream said 752 days, but ahaha,,, I don't think so [side tangent: maybe that's just the length of a year? A combo of a bright star, but a far out orbit could account for their cruddy weather]), so people need supplies to last this long on the trains. There are constant supply drops and abnormal stops by the train at abandoned buildings for looting (this is an alteration in the train schedule that happens every x time? The city has no control over it, but made it this contest for fits and shiggles). Not only do you have to compete with other contestants for this stuff (granted, lots of people are on other train lines, but still-), but there's a huge risk of stuff falling off the train. Tern's group has a slight advantage, as he's able to fend off some of the unseen forces that attack the cars, but they still have to manage his salt and stuff they simply don't catch coming. This results in a lot of stuff falling off the train. Tern is assigned to be the winner among the group, meaning he is not to leave the train!!!! Everybody else can jump off and try to recollect the stuff, but Tern is under no circumstances to hurt his day tally if at all possible. Other people in his group have,, a bit of a bad habit of forgetting this

There's a progressive loss of people and stuff, but one person always makes it. This guy is Tern's Friend and the one dude who trusts him despite the fact that he could be a total loose cannon if he felt like it. Tern really appreciates this guy's friendship and trust, but is constantly on guard towards the other people around him because any of them could betray him at any moment. Note that this a cold, aloof type of on guard, he's not a stress baby type. Sometimes other people go on their train specifically to sabotage them only to find that they've got a heckin' salt guy over here, at which point they mount a great effort to off him. This is not cool as, remember, Tern is stuck on the train. He's also dealing with variable salt levels at all times. Sure, sometimes the trains go under waterfalls and that's great, but he has to spend a lot of salt fending off the unseen evil all over the place

Totally influenced the The Final Station (game) and Bird and I talking about salt for like 2 minutes the day before (throwing it over your shoulder and salt circles and such). These are weird, yes