dhavsingh's Journal

All about Dhaval

Name: Dhaval Singh

Age: 26

DOB: September 1, 1988

Gender: Male

Sexual Preference: Bi, or so he tells himself. Up until the world ended he was hoping to convince himself he liked girls, too, and might marry one eventually to make his parents happy. It's mostly moot anyway, since he never got out enough to date. Also, there are monsters everywhere.

Marital Status: Single

Premade: N/A

Mutation: Energy absorption. Dhaval no longer needs to eat and barely sleeps, though he does need water. Ambient energy sources will keep him running comfortably. Heat and light are the most ready sources, but he can grab a bit of power off any sort of chemical reaction. The sun is particularly pleasant, whereas just happening to be in a room that isn't freezing can leave him sluggish and a bit irritable.

Height & Weight: 5'7", 170 lbs.

Appearance: Dhaval is fairly light skinned for an Indian, with a fairly wide, strong-featured face. His heavy eyebrows are his most expressive feature, generally always in motion to denote everything from amusement to utter disgust. His eyes are a warm brown. Dhaval's natural expression is a smile, and in repose he has a very approachable face. His hair has an almost coppery tone in direct sun, but looks dull and black under fluorescent lights, where he spent most of his time until recently.

Which is all well and good, but far from the first thing anyone notices about Dhaval. He's been wheelchair bound since he was twelve, though he can get short distances with a walker, mostly just to prove he can. Dhaval has a very strong upper body, particularly his arms. He was always very good about physical therapy. Very few people get past the chair upon first impression, something he's constantly aware of. In an attempt to compensate, Dhaval otherwise tries to seem as perfectly, absolutely normal as possible. His clothes are as dull and conservative outside work as in the office, he refrains from jewelry or colorful ties, and he never does anything beyond shaving and combing his hair by way of primping. He was shy enough before his accident, and these days is mostly just determined to not be noticed at all. His one indulgence is sandalwood cologne in very small amounts, something you'd have to get very close to notice. And something that's hardly a priority during the apocalypse anyway.

Possessions: A folding wheelchair, his dad's Browning handgun (which he didn't believe in until very recently), several bottles of Vitamin water (he's addicted), binoculars, and a backpack stuffed with printouts of his stories, his baby blanket, pictures of his parents, a couple bronze figurines, and a bottle of his favorite cologne.

Religious Views: Atheist

Previous Occupation: His day job was as an office monkey, doing data entry and putting up with the various foibles of corporate America as immortalized in Dilbert, getting in trouble for having Dilbert comics on his cubicle. His aspirations were to support himself with writing, and he'd published a lot of short stories and a novel, but never would have paid the bills that way.

Personality: Dhaval is first and foremost extremely shy. He comes across as blunt or even rude in conversation, restricting himself to the most necessary communication to keep from having to look anyone in the eye too long. He absolutely cannot stand being told how brave he is, and if strangers feel the need to make that comment, it's about the only thing that will ever make his temper rise. His usual response is, "Yes, it was very heroic of me to be in a goddamn car accident." Dhaval isn't very good at cutting remarks. In addition to being very unsure of himself, he honestly prefers peace and quiet, and is almost always happy to be home alone, writing or reading or watching old movies. And those nights when loneliness hits in a big way? The only defense he's thought of is to call his mom.

Dhaval depends a lot on what he thinks of as a "rich inner life," putting everything into the stories he writes and to online friends. He's much better at communicating with people if he doesn't have to look them in the eye and can carefully consider every word. His room, and by extension his personal space, has always been a sacred thing to him, allowable as he grew up as an only child. The reason he's burdened himself with a backpack full of fairly useless artifacts is that he can't let go of the world he made himself, always a pocket in a larger universe that made him nervous. Now that nervousness has turned to outright terror, the zone of comfort is even more important.

Which isn't to say that terror has paralyzed Dhaval. Spending his life afraid of essentially everything means that monsters are really just an escalation, not that much harder to cope with than spiders, meetings with his office manager, or the conviction that his apartment building is at least a tiny bit haunted. Dhaval always hated the rat race and everything associated with his day job and was lousy at keeping up bills and schedules and appointments. All of a sudden, with the trappings of civilization stripped bare, the prospect of talking to people is a lot less frightening. If it weren't for all the death and ruin, the whole end of the world as we know it thing might be good for him.

History: Dhaval was born in India, but emigrated with his parents as a young child. He grew up with only dreamlike memories of his home country, though he maintained throughout his life a working knowledge of Hindi. His father moved to Detroit to join Dhaval's uncle working in the auto industry, a distinctly rocky situation. His father managed to secure an office job that ate up most of his time, while his mother worked part-time at a daycare center. Dhaval was mostly left to himself. His natural shyness was compounded by being the only Indian kid in his neighborhood and one of only a handful at school. He learned to put up with being mocked for his accent and accept his position as one of the weird kids. He was friends by default with the other quiet, nerdy kids, which worked out well for him. He was a competent student, but it was nice to be able to get math help from his fellow trading-cards-at-recess enthusiasts.

When he was in eighth grade, a drunk driver smashed into his mother's car on the way home from the grocery store. She survived with only mild injuries, but Dhaval spent several weeks in a coma and would never regain mobility. He wasn't paralyzed, but the damage to his legs and spine was extensive. Dhaval missed half a year of school, making it up over summer after a long series of surgeries that would continue intermittently over the next several years. Trapped in a suddenly foreign, constantly painful body and looked at with mingled fear and disgust by his contemporaries, Dhaval spent his teen years isolated and depressed. The only thing that helped was getting him out to various programs for the handicapped, making sure he worked hard at physical therapy, and even then he recovered his mood much more than the few social graces he'd ever had. By the time he'd normalized appreciably, he was completely out of the habit of making friends. As enthusiastic as he was about aerobics and martial arts classes geared toward the wheelchair-bound, he never talked much to anyone while he was there.

Dhaval was almost twenty when he started college, and did reasonably well at UofM, majoring in English with a minor in economics to placate his parents with something theoretically useful. He listened to experimental folk and country and hung prints of woodcuts and photography on his walls, writing letters to Amnesty International when he had a spare hour. He went though all the personal and cultural development one is supposed to during those four years, and came out a better-rounded person with a degree, but with no more human connections than he'd had going in. He published a few short stories while in school. After he entered the workforce with extreme apathy, moved into his ground-floor apartment (while tolerating and ignoring his parents' fretting), he managed to complete and publish a novel and a lot more stories, spending most of his nights hard at work. It was because of his published work that he began a blog and made a few friends, as good as he'd ever had, online, but mostly continued a very quiet, isolated existence.

Until the end of the world, of course. Dhaval usually indulged himself sleeping in on Saturdays, so he was roused from a nice flying dream by shrieks from the hallway. He had one of only three apartments on the ground floor, the others belonging to the landlady and a family with four kids. He managed to haul himself to the door and stand long enough to look through his peephole, falling back into his chair and almost vomiting when he saw an immense, hulking thing with pus-covered skin and limbs that seemed to be in all the wrong places stomping after the janitor. Perfectly well aware that he could barely handle the gun his father had insisted he keep and that he'd probably just fall over if he tried to stay on his feet to assist, he spun around to call the police. Of course, the lines were already tied up, and once he did get through, the breathless operator barely began to help him before her voice cut off short, replaced by gasping. As he'd sat there on hold, there'd been more screaming from all over the building. He settled on just locking his door, trying twice more unsuccessfully to phone for help, and leaving several messages on his parents' answering machine.

But after a while, there was nothing to do but curl up with a pillow over his head and try not to hear anything.