Just imagine if the world really ended when mankind ushered in their new millennium. Imagine if the warheads launched and the planes crashed and digital technology failed.<br/><br/>Well, on December 31st, 23:59â€¦it did.<br/><br/>The warheads took to the skies and landed with their flying predecessors, carrying thousands upon thousands of passengers, subsequently exploding, destroying the hopes and aspirations of the world as they destroyed all in their path. Billions died within minutes. Nobody could have stopped it, but many had foreseen it. For the cities that remained intact or at the least, relatively unscathed, mass hysteria took them, like the claws of Satan himself, reaching up to snatch the stragglers and destroy the last hopes of mankind.<br/><br/>As insanity strangled the minds of all who lived, strength was born from weakness. Somehow, in a miraculous last breath of hope, a sliver of salvation was offered to the slab of rock that had once been a proud planet. Now, it was nothing. The only proof of humans were the few and far-between survivors. Men and women living on the gristle of dying life, surprisingly still in the tens of thousands. But never children, never couples. Love and reproduction had died with the holocaust.<br/><br/>There were those that hoped, those that tried, but love died hard. But still, they tried, they hoped and they went through their pain with every failure and started again.<br/>But amongst the ones that wanted to rebuild, their lived the ones who just wanted to live. They just wanted to forge their way through the hell and die as humans. Men like Terrence M. Opus.<br/><br/>He was a young man when the end came â€“ in his early twenties â€“ he had been a Gunslinger. An ambitious one at that. A month after the end, he used his ambition to lead survivors to a new life, to take one of the untouched cities and rebuild it. But his ambitions were nothing but mere pipe dreams. It all went wrong, his ambitions, his dreams, his visions, they all came crashing down to the ground and shattered like glass, but they sounded like the cities crumbling beneath the weight of one-thousand megatons. He became known from that day as the "Cursed Piper". Through word of mouth, before humans dwindled so much that the vocal medium became redundant, he became known. He never understood it, but people just seemed to know who he was. But he was never known by name, only by title. So it was that Terrence Opus became the Cursed Piper.<br/><br/>With his failure came famine, with famine came death and with death came sorrow. Terrence Opus was the last survivor. He knew he had failed, he knew those deaths were his entire fault.<br/>Though, through the strangest occurrence, he kept going. He was determined not to let his mistakes ruin him. With mistakes, came learning and he took away so much from his.<br/><br/>Now, as a man reaching his mid-thirties, his weathered face holding the scars of his battles and his only friends - the twin revolvers at his hip, hardy and ready at all times, they're only either in his hands or in their holsters. He cared for it almost like a lover, keeping it clean, safe and always ready. The ambitious man that was, now a hardened survivor, living off the scraps of what could hardly be pinned as a planet. He stoically chewed on lifeâ€™s gristle with nary a complaint or moan.<br/><br/>He was made of harder stuff now and he was more than what heâ€™d been.<br/><br/>But his ambitions never died. His burning desires braved the hardships and soon became as resilient as he was. He yearned for the fabled â€œNew Cityâ€ and above all, yearned for love, for a womanâ€™s warmth, yearned to feel those earthly pleasures that he refused to believe had ever died, he spat blood in the sneering visage of defeat and laughed in the face of danger. His blood ran deeper than that.<br/><br/>Terrence Opus is a Gunslinger, and he remembers the face of his father, he cries no-one's pardons anymore.<br/><br/><br/>Character Sheet<br/><br/>Name: Terrence M. Opus<br/><br/>Age: 39<br/><br/>Appearance: I'm using pictures since they get my message across better than anything I could write.<br/><br/>Aesthetics<br/>Though, years of being without fine grooming has led his hair to grow long and adopt a wavy sort of texture and his face is usually marked with a thick mask of whiskers.<br/><br/><br/>Weapon(s): Twin Revolvers.<br/>Chambered in the .45 calibre, Terrence still has an astonishing 100 bullets remaining.<br/><br/>Evidently, when it comes to character sheets, I'm taking a minimalist approach, because character development is integral and this will give us more meat to chew on when it comes to posting.<br/>All the information such as personality, history and other things should be included in the posting. Doesn't have to be the first post - though it helps - but it definitely should be included somewhere along the (early) line.<br/><br/>All that said...happy posting.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>The world had moved on, and Terrence Opus followed. When those first bombs dropped - spreading their pestilence, their plague and ultimately, their death - Terrence had been one of the lucky survivors, packed into underground cellars, lovingly called Vaults. That was beginning of his inner transformation, the one that would make him the cursed piper.<br/>As soon as he had begun this transformation, he had begun to see the world about him as it now was. Every single mask was ripped from the distorted faces of the earth.<br/>He came to detest the men he saved as they went on what could only be described as crusades to fulfill their sexual - and paranoid - desires to give the world hope.<br/>He cringed in fright and disgust as they tore the panties of the pretty ones, gazing at the pretty, soft, wet flesh between their legs before plunging their engorged selves in, skewering the last dignities along with all hopes of a final mental frontier.<br/>Occasionally, a few stragglers would keep going after the men's tainted seed was spilled inside them and the life long strangled out.<br/>That was when Terrence began to kill.<br/>Not just the men, but the victims, their trauma was too great for them to go on.<br/><br/>Filth was all the world had to it's name now, and Filth was all it boasted. Mother Earth was at the end of her tether and God - if that glowing figure of salvation even existed up there on the now black clouds - had given up on the earth.<br/><br/>So, Terrence was found, walking through the tattered remains of the city, tracking an elk. It seemed to be fairly meaty and only had one extra limb. It would be fine enough for a week's meal, provided he ate sparingly.<br/><br/>He had a gun in his hand, hanging at his side, but ready to raise like a lightning bolt to secure a meal.