Rash Barder

When there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who’re you gonna call?! Actually, it’s probably not a good idea to call The Ghostbusters, because they’ll probably exterminate Rash Barder with those nuclear guns of theirs. You see, Rash Barder is a lich. I admittedly know very little about liches except that they’re evil ghosts who will eat you alive like a Taco Bell five buck box. Add to his lich heritage his occupation of bounty hunter and he instantly becomes a mind fuck and nightmare fuel all rolled into one. Can you imagine a creepy looking ghost staring you in the eyes asking questions about where the world’s most dangerous criminal is? At that point, I don’t know who you should fear most, the wanted criminal or Rash. It’s like the cure being worse than the disease, which is the medical equivalent of Cialis causing your dick to hemorrhage blood and your eyes to pop out of your head. As frightening of a bounty hunter as Rash Barder is, he actually comes from very humble roots. He first made his debut in an RPG I was a part of in 2002 with an old friend named Justin and my first girlfriend Jesse. In this RPG, Jesse’s character, Makoto Tribal, was looking for her husband, another character I created named Sharry Seran. The only thing that remained of Sharry was a final love letter before he officially went off the grid. Makoto hired Rash Barder to help her look for the love of her life and Rash was more than happy to accommodate her. The scene between Makoto and Rash was very tender, almost in a best friend relationship sort of way. Justin was confused by all the tenderness going on, because according to him, people are apparently very bigoted towards the undead. I assigned the lich species to Rash Barder without knowing the full depth of how racist the non-player characters could be. Unfortunately, the RPG didn’t last very long and was inactive within the first few weeks. Rash didn’t have the appropriate amount of time to experience prejudice from his humanoid peers. At this point, I didn’t know if it was better to put my characters in compromising situations like racism or try to build them up as much as possible without unnecessary obstacles. Throughout my role-playing career, I’ve done things to my characters to purposefully put them in harm’s way. As I grew older, I realized it was better to do that when writing a book as opposed to playing an RPG. The G in RPG stands for game and games are meant to be won (even though the role-playing variety has no pre-determined goal). But in books, the idea is to create a story and the best way to do that is to create obstacles for your main characters. Can I do such a thing with Rash Barder? Can there really be a civil rights movement for liches? I could call the book Stuck Rotting Baby! (Groan)

　

***LYRICS OF THE DAY***

“Ever seen the Lord smile? All the care for the world made beautiful a sad man? Why do we still carry a device of torture around our necks? Oh, how rotten your pre-apocalypse is. All you bible-black fools living over nightmare ground. I see all those empty cradles and wonder if man will never change. I too wish to be a decent man-boy, but all I am is smoke and mirrors. Still given everything, may I be deserving. And there forever remains the change from G to E minor.”

-Dialogue from “Song of Myself” by Nightwish-