send me aĀ ā¹ and a fc ;; i'll create a character on the spot !!! || @monstyrious sent in: Henry Stickmin || always accepting!
Full Name: Henry. Just Henry.
Nicknames: Henry. Still Henry. He waves when he hears it.
Titles: That Which Predates Form, The First Drawn, The Smiling Void
Age: Unknown. Older than he looks. Older than anything should be, probably.
Occupation: Varies. He's attempted bank robbery, government infiltration, prison breaking, treasure hunting, and party attendance. His success rate is a matter of ongoing philosophical debate. Currently, some sort of cosmic entity.
There isn't one. Not in any recoverable sense. Henry does not appear in records prior to his first documented incident-- a attempted bank robbery in which he failed seventeen times in a row before the bank simply closed for the evening-- because Henry does not appear to have had a prior to that. He simply was, one day, trying to open a vault with a hairpin and a level of optimism that the security footage described as, quote, not normal.
What is known: he has been attempting things for longer than the documentation suggests. The documentation is incomplete because most of the people who witnessed the earlier attempts are no longer available for comment, not because Henry harmed themā he's not like thatā but because time passed and they died normally and Henry didn't, which is, by all accounts, really fucking weird.
Henry cannot die. This requires clarification because it sounds like a statement about power, or protection, or divine favor, and it is none of those things. Those frameworks are complex. They have texture and history and meaning. They imply something that was built or granted or earned. Henry is none of those things.
Henry cannot die because he is so fundamentally, axiomatically prior to death that the concept does not recognize him. Death is a thing that happens to forms. Henry is not a form in any meaningful sense-- he is the idea of a form, the first mark made before anyone knew what they were making, the original gesture toward personhood before personhood had requirements. He predates the universe's decision about what a body should be. He will outlast the universe's decision about what a body should be. He is not protected from death. He simply exists at a depth where death has not yet arrived, nor shall it ever.
He has been shot. Exploded. Crushed. Launched into orbit. Eaten. Erased-- fully, completely, down to the last line, the circle and the strokes gone, nothing remaining-- and was back the following Thursday, attempting to infiltrate a government facility with a disguise that was just a hat. No explanation. No memory of the erasure. No mark where the mark had been unmade.
The truly terrible thing is not that he survives. The truly terrible thing is that the universe allows it. That reality looks at the erasure of Henry and does not register a loss because Henry is not the kind of thing reality knows how to account for. He falls outside the ledger. He always has.
He gets back up. He dusts himself off. He waves.
This is what the old things know that humans don't yet: he is not visiting. He was here first. Everything else-- the stars, the dark between them, the things that live in the dark, the civilizations that rose and burned and the ones that haven't risen yet-- all of it arrived after Henry, into a space that already contained him, already contained the wave, already contained the smile that isn't a smile because he doesn't have a mouth but that everyone who encounters him experiences as a smile and cannot afterward explain why.
He is not the void looking back. He is what was there before the void had a direction to look.
