God, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Sorry for the “””delay”””. At least two mass extinctions have happened since the last bio submission and that likely means that anyone who still cared about this is very dead but let’s continue anyway.
This guy, maybe not him specifically, but his character concept has been one stuck in my head for the longest of times. There’s something about undergoing the creation a meek, harmless individual and one of the strongest monsters in my current universe only to make them both the same person that gets the malevolent hands rubbing. Crunk’s demeanor may give you a wince from time to time, but he’s still a swell guy deep down. Deeper down, however, there’s a constant struggle for control over a reverse hive-minded entity with an insatiable thirst for utter destruction. So, really, nice dude through and through. Would buy merch.

Crunk’s life before waking up in Ave is a damaged jumble of horrific and unreliable memory. He knows that he was handcrafted by someone for the sake of the gift of life, but the how’s and why’s are largely lost on him. There are also semi-coherent memories of a large building fashioned to be a prison, and a constant, dreadful heat coming from a single source within the center of the building. Everything else brings forth a plethora of unpleasantries he rather not recall, especially with how well his life is doing now.
In truth, he spent much of his early life as a prisoner in the Heifarria Lumber Mill, a makeshift penitentiary housing those with magical affinities and any thralls that were birthed thanks to those abilities. With a specific strain of magic allowing people to give autonomy to previously inanimate objects being especially common in this area, more and more prisons like the one Crunk inhabited were built. Such buildings were often either controlled by a nearby human community or a much smaller gang. However, the handful of humans seeing over the lumber mill were more monstrous than anything they kept contained.
As the guards at the mill started feeling the stresses of overcrowding within its cells, their behavior became much more erratic. This manifested in living spaces for non-human prisoners becoming less and less habitable, their treatment mirroring that of a landfill in ever-growing places until the guards couldn’t keep up and ultimately resorted to mass execution.
The most popular form of this was the use of a large furnace built in the middle of the mill, allowing for easy access from any corner. Thralls, automatons, and any unnatural things of varying degrees of sentience were tossed into the fire by the dozens. Nobody within the mill could find peace when the inhuman screeches of agony reverberated through its halls ten times over. Smoke could always be seen escaping the mill in oppressive billows.
Over time, it became obvious that the furnace was not the only horror that resided within the mill. Some of the late prisoners were so complete, so astonishingly well-crafted, that their artificial souls lingered within the lumber mill long after death. Their increasing presence filled the air with a dreadful weight, making the simple act of breathing turn into the inhalation of a tumultuous concoction of paranoia. Nobody rested well here, not even after death, and the weak but plentiful souls have either intentionally or unintentionally set in motion an unstable buildup of energy that could not be contained forever.
Like the final moments of an ambitious chainsaw juggler, things reached their grisly but unsurprising breaking point. Crunk, immeasurably terrified but hopelessly broken by his time in the prison, resisted little as he was dragged to the maw of the furnace. As his fabric hit the flames, the power incubated by the mill’s restless spirits reached its peak, and each fractured soul worked as one to find the most suitable vessel the fire would give them. This vessel, which was later found to not be preferable by all parties involved, was Crunk himself. Bonded with the limitless power of the spiritual amalgamation, his body began to change. His cloth skin ripped to shreds as his metallic skeleton grew and twisted in impossible ways. Immortal flames blossomed within him, the powerful tool now in the hands of those that it wronged. Crunk’s altered form attacked the mill and its inhabitants with unparalleled fury. Within minutes, the mill was reduced to fuel for the flames, an abstract beast destroyed by the monster it created. A proxy of the flame that would be dubbed by those who lived through its onslaught “The Heifarrian Horror”.

With the mill gone, it wouldn’t be unfounded to think that the Horror would consider its job done. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The souls that resided within the mill were incomplete to begin with, but the rage that festered after their deaths twisted them all into a single working entity capable of nothing but exacting its never-ending desire for revenge.
And so, the beast continued its destructive actions. For weeks, it ravaged any and every source of life it could find. Forests, towns, even the more guarded civilizations all fell in the fire’s wake. The relentless attacks lasted until the Horror spotted the outskirts of an unusual town. Despite everything within it deteriorating as if it were abandoned, various types of living creatures inhabited it and went through their day as if nothing was out of the ordinary.
It was Ave. Wravner’s town.
Coherent thoughts were not what the Horror was known for, and so it did not question that when converting nearby buildings to ash, the bystanders looked on more in passive confusion than outright terror. The attack on the town was cut short rather quickly when Wravner entered the scene, and, rather miraculously, managed to lock eyes with the Horror.
It worked. Her powers did not reason with the Horror, but rather Crunk himself. With the vessel crippled, the souls were forced into a dormant state and Crunk returned to normal. When he finally came to his senses, he was fully under the mind control of Wravner.
Wravner did not forget this scenario, however, and the question almost instantaneously popped up in her mind regarding whether or not his more powerful form can be controlled. As of now, she has not found a way to do so. It seems that if he were to be released from her control, he would indeed revert back, but the method to change him while she can still control him is so far unknown to her. Such setbacks have not kept Wravner from giving up, and to this day she is silently calculating exactly how he ticks.

Crunk might not even be his real name. He can’t remember much before and during the Horror’s onslaught, so when pressured with a name he just came up with something on the spot. Currently, he serves as top advisor to Wravner and handles everything in her town that would otherwise be found unimportant and therefore neglected. This ranges from simple maintenance to rationing out food. Crunk is certainly the loudest- and admittedly only- voice of ethics within City Hall. Wravner’s control over him is kept as loose as possible, allowing his relatively empathetic and optimistic personality to shine through. Wravner cannot understand these quirks for the life of her, but she allows him to get away with more than usual, knowing fully well her eventual reward if she does. From an outsider’s perspective, they could almost pass as friends. Almost.
The Horror’s influence is not lost him, however. His body still houses the dormant form of an all-powerful fire beast, and thus side effects are not uncommon. Odd tears in his fabric, especially on his arms and hands, are in constant need of repair. His body is constantly producing an oil-like substance that, when ignited, burns for an unnatural amount of time. Purposefully burning them off within him is uncomfortable at best, so he oftentimes hooks his back up to a machine that drains the fluids for him. Even so, his body can sometimes be seen emitting smoke.
On some occasions, the vengeful screams of the souls lost to the lumber mill’s fire demand to be freed. Wravner can usually remedy this by putting him under for a while, but this doesn’t keep the experiences from being less disturbing. The last thing he wants plaguing his mind is what his life was before Ave.
Pastimes include exploring the town with a dumb little backpack solely to house his video game collection, behaving dumbly, and just overall being the town’s poster child of dumbness.