Bryce

A character for a mystery project I have in the works. (Also this may sound a bit rambley.  It’s literally 3 in the morning when I’m writing this)

Bryce / Male / Native American (Navajo) / Aro-Ace / Robotics Engineer

Like everyone else, Bryce has no recollection of his life before the desert, but unlike most of the others, he instinctually recognized that something was wrong from the moment he woke up.  He was supposed to be a Marcher, and he feels the pull of the desert’s center stronger every day that he’s not walking towards it, but he just knows that going there would spell his demise, so he came up with a solution; he would transfer his consciousness into a different body, one that would not be affected by the pull of… whatever it was that called the marchers forward.  Currently, he is still working on the project, and it’s taking much longer than it would otherwise, given he has to work with scraps, but he has faith in his work, and he knows that doing this will allow him to survive.

Bryce has met a few others along the way, mostly other Marchers, but also a couple folks who are just wandering the wastelands, seemingly unaffected by the pull of its core.  In particular, he has taken a bit of a liking to Kay, a Traveler who, like Bryce, is trying to figure out exactly what’s going on with this desert.  Bryce has entrusted Kay with helping him adjust to his new body once his consciousness is transferred (and in hiding his corpse from Sharks afterwards), and although Kay can be a bit unfriendly at times, there is no one Bryce trusts more to help him discover the truth about their situation.

Bryce is extremely pessimistic, and he has a very dry sense of humor.  He fully believes that the world is doomed and that there is nothing left to live for, but even so, he refuses to give up without a fight.  The way he thinks is very strange, and many who know him often have a hard time keeping up, not because he’s necessarily “smarter” than them (although academically, he does excel), he just has a very winding, almost rambling train of thought that makes it hard to explain to anyone what he’s thinking.  He easily convolutes even the most simple of topics in order to properly understand it, which can be frustrating to others, but that’s just how he learns and understands things, and he literally can’t do it any other way.  This, as you might imagine, makes him not very popular with most strangers, but to be fair, it’s not like he really wants a whole lot of company in the first place.  He is very much an introvert, and a fairly socially anxious one at that, and he’s very comfortable by himself in his own space anyway, so he doesn't really crave attention from others in the same way as most people.  Mostly, he just wants to be left alone with his work, and when he does want to talk to someone, Kay (one of the only people he has ever met who he genuinely enjoys the company of) never travels very far from the area.