This post, yes this one, is all about my delightfully dead Tristan McCall, one of the main characters in Dead Raiser!
Tristan is an odd character, the concept of him is joined to the concept of the story itself as a whole. I wasn't particularly thinking of a character as such, just the need to write something weird, something wacky yet still in my line of expertise (Morbid and sad with lots of fighting and baddies). To tell the truth, I believe that Tristan himself had put himself together in a dark, lonely corner of my mind and was suddenly ejected from the corner to the forefront of my mind. Ever heard the term 'unless your brain is waving a brilliant idea at you'? No? Well, where have you been? My brain literally started waving poor old Tristan around my head until I paid attention and sat him down to have a nice long talk about who the heck he was and what he was doing in my head.
The conversation between my brain and the idea of Tristan was a long one, my friends at school often see me walking around the school in circles at break and lunch with a distracted look to my eyes, this is my preferred method of thinking. I like to walk. It allows my body to do stuff without thinking about it and allows my brain to wander as it pleases. This walking habit started up when I was thinking about the mushed idea that would become Dead Raiser.
It was on the way to an author's event in Chippenham when I thought up the name. Down the cobbled pavements went me and my social worker (I'm in care) and then BAM! Brain waving idea alert! What about DEAD RAISER?! The only problem was that I wasn't sure if living skeletons were copyright or not. I asked one of the author's (CJ Skuse) and she said that if you have an idea but there's already a book out there with the same sort of thing, then it's ok as long as it's different enough to show you didn't just copy the other book.
Anyway this seems to have gotten a tiny bit off topic!
Tristan is a twenty-something year old man who is neither in his early twenties, but definitely NOT in the thirties quite yet. That's his supposed age at the time of his death, though being a sorcerer his apparent age judged on his appearance wouldn't match up to his actual age. In truth he is around one hundred, twenty-something being the age he would have looked if he were not a skeleton. The reason for this age anomaly is that magic keeps the user younger for longer. Tristan dies during a war against a dark sorcerer known as the Shadow Lord. Tristan stumbled across the Shadow Lord's weakness (he has no bones or hard tissue protecting his heart) and lands a punch to the Shadow Lord's chest, crushing the unprotected heart within and causing the Shadow Lord to have some sort of fit/heart attack which causes his magic to leave him. The shadow magic leaves via exploding, the effect catching poor old Tristan full on and stripped him of flesh, blood, muscle and organs. Killing him in a split second.
Around eighty ears later his very, very, very, extremely great granddaughter revives him from the dead as she wants to know a secret that her parents would have told her in the case of their untimely demise via letter, though these letters get burned by her nasty aunt and uncle who want to protect their own daughter, Charlotte, from it. Tristan is then taken to his granddaughter's house, Ivy Martin, who suggests he wears one of her father's suits. Tristan picks out a purple one. In Going Under Tristan is told he must wear a new suit as the purple one is fraying from being in a couple of fights which aren't too friendly to unprotective clothing. The new suit he picks is grey which causes a friend of his, Despondence Reticent (Des <--petname), to laugh quite a bit since the suit is a bit subdued for Tristan's usual tastes. Also, in Dead Raiser, Ivy buys Tristan a black fedora with a purple brim so he didn't look bald anymore.
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