Applications for What We Become: Survivor Stories are currently on hold while we work on creating our second wave of combat tests.
What We Become: Survivor Stories is a series of bite-sized scenarios meant to test our new and improved combat system in action! Our first wave contained 5 different scenarios, all taking place within the What We Become universe. Our second wave will contain 5 more scenarios. If you've been waiting to play on the server, now's your chance!
Additionally, each scenario has a limited number of slots for each role in the party, as well as an overall participation limit. If you apply for a role/scenario that is already full, you will be asked to apply for a different role/scenario. You can view the number of slots remaining for the current scenario on its respective forum post, linked above.
Make sure to check out our latest newsletter if you haven't yet! It has lots of information about our upcoming lore, among other things.
Ridge was an athletic man for forty-one. He had a straight backed, broad shouldered posture that lifted him just shy of six feet. His hair was naturally straight and full bodied -- worn fashionably short to match an equally fashionable mustache, a gentleman's scruff -- though he seemed rough around the edges, as if keen to avoid barbers. Not unlike his other features, the cut of his jaw was sharp and pronounced; complimenting the narrow glare of fiercely blue eyes; ears pinned close to his head; with a nose that seemed average save for an indentation that ran the bridge, the result of a break or an injury, it would have to be clarified. Often misinterpreted for animosity rather than scrutiny, he wore an uncommon sort of smile, a somber affair, to glower more than to beam, accompanied by wrinkles that suggested his optimism had been buried somewhere in Yamacraw.
Biographical Information:
Simple living in the Yamacraw holler was destined for one thing and one thing alone. If you weren't in it, you were raised by people who were. If you didn't collect your paycheck from Stears Coal & Lumber, you were a government employee. By your earliest accounts, you'd have seen what happens when someone chose to deviate or seek foreign opportunities. Stepping away from the coal mine was like an insult to every family settled in that ancient stretch of land, by choice or by tradition, and warm though they were to kinfolk and community, they were slow to forgive or to set aside differences. Many fathers and sons had died in those hills, and the people there did not forget.
With that to recognize, Ridge was defined by Yamacraw. As an active child and an even more active teenager, he was accustomed to the outdoors, shooting and fishing, playing sports, and ran the fifteen-hundred during his junior and senior years. From anyone he might lend an ear, for as long as he could remember, the advice had always been the same. College would have been a waste of his time. Straight out of High School you could find sixty grand a year down in that mine. "Stay in Yamacraw," they'd told him.
And for the first ten years or so, life was an adventure. Every day was exciting, the persona of the working man. Living dangerously and confronting that danger had become his sole purpose for getting out of bed in the morning. He drank too much, drove too fast, got picked up time and again by the local Smokey's, but he was there to punch his card and ride that coal elevator down a few hundred feet so he could do it all over again without a moment's hesitation.
Though death and injury weren't uncommon in shaft number eleven, Ridge had been lucky and capable enough to avoid anything disastrous until his mid-thirties, when the result of a coal dust explosion killed thirty-nine miners and left nearly a hundred more hospitalized. A firedamp ignition, caused by electric sparking from equipment such as the bell signalling gear, was suspected to have started the reaction. Of the one hundred men who survived the initial collapse, most of those who had been trapped were killed by monoxide poisoning, but a handful were eventually rescued some seventeen days later, and one of them was Ridge.
He was never quite the same after that, spirit dampened. Life slowed to a halt, locked him into a box, kept his mind stuck in that tunnel and the deep, endless dark. Where he used to love crowds and large parties, he found himself straying away. Months passed before he could sleep comfortably under his own roof, and the walls of his home began to feel more like a prison than a sanctuary. For six years he kept to the open sky and fresh air, found on his porch or not at all, wondering the holler on some forgotten trail through a procession of solaced pines, that was, until the evacuation. Like every other resident of McCreary County, in the month of March, 2013, he was rounded up, loaded onto a bus, and flung into crisis without a hair of concern for his well being or where they were sending him: a refugee.
