Evan Cerza

"*If you care, feel free to call me an adventurer, or an unprofessional explorer, or some dumb kid with a tent.*"
—Evan Cerza
Evan Cerza is an adventurer, pan-elemental magician, and seller of all sorts of practical alchemical devices. From a young age, the outdoors has felt more like home, and it's fair to say that he grew up just as much outdoors as he did indoors, if not more. Though he left home to roam the outdoors as soon as he could, he still fulfills his promise to write letters to his parents every week.

## Appearance

A little shorter than average, though physically he's decently fit. His fur is gingerbread-brown with a grayish forelock up top, joined with mulberry eyes covered by gold-rimmed glasses.

He always wears a pouch full of potion vials and usually joins this with a backpack made to carry along equipment such as a one-man tent and bedroll, though the tent is often absent due to being in use elsewhere.

His normal outfit consists of a very well-padded zip jacket with an upturned collar and double sleeves over khaki cargo shorts. While he owns a pair of steel-toed boots—usually clipped to the outside of his pack—he prefers to go barefoot as often as he can, and he usually wears a set of protective goggles made to fit over his glasses. You know, just in case he needs them.

## Personality

A little bit pragmatic, a little bit idealistic, and just the smallest bit socially dysfunctional, it's hard to tell whether Evan is more accurately described as a generally helpful person with a slightly inflated head and a tendency to pick his battles, or as a morally relativistic egotist who just happens to help people when it's not more convenient to keep going about his business. In all truth he lies somewhere in the middle, in that grey area just between not always caring and not caring at all, right where it's just as in character to see him patiently keeping someone company despite not entirely wanting to as it is to see him dismiss the same person entirely. In most cases it depends on how he's feeling at the time, how much he likes the person in question, and whether or not he has anything better to do.

Evan is by all means a rather antisocial person, perfectly able to survive without much social interaction and indeed a lot more likely to keep to himself and keep busy with his own needs than to go out of his way to talk to others. This isn't to say that he's the quiet type, or that he completely ignores the rest of society. Quite the opposite; if you manage to get him into a conversation it's sometimes hard to keep him from blabbing on about things, and he's the textbook example of a backseat driver. It's more a case of not always seeing much of a point in bothering to make friendships with others, though if someone manages the same with him he'll naturally drop some of his attitude on the matter. Even if you're not actively seeking out new acquaintances there's no reason to be rude towards the people you care about. Of course, that's not going to stop him from doing what he does, something that greatly aggravates at least half of his family. But at least the others are mostly fine with it, for whatever that's worth to him. Mostly.

Evan is in a lot of ways a "survivalist" who bases many of his actions off a nine-point philosophy, and in just as many ways a grown-up kid who just loves camping, depending mainly on his wits and tricks to keep himself safe and leaving the rest to equipment hand-made or bought from the appropriate businesses. He has a tendency to set up camp anywhere that strikes him as being suitable, leave his base there for a handful of weeks, and explore the surrounding area to see if there's anything of interest. Once he feels like leaving he'll then decamp the short distance back to civilization to finish unloading anything he's made or found for a quick buck, resupply what he needs to resupply, and get himself refreshed before wandering off again. He doesn't strand himself outside civilization by any means, and it's not uncommon to see him leaving camp to wander back into town either to restock or to blow off steam, but he certainly goes deep enough into the unfriendly wilds that it helps to have a good sword he kinda sorta knows how to use by now.

It also helps that camping away from civilization makes it a fair bit easier to cut down on expenses, leaving more pocket change for food, equipment, and experiments. Truly these three goals are the only things Evan really cares about spending his money on, though it's mostly the last two. The simple fact of the matter is that aside from exploring there's often very little for Evan to do, explaining his odd experiments and practice when he doesn't feel much like charging into battle without thinking, and the excursions into the urban jungle that make it increasingly apparent to anyone watching that his exploration is really just an excuse not to have a house. At the very least, with how uncommon even his unpolished level of talent is, selling items he's taken the time to work some magic into tends to make being bored worth his time.

## Strengths and Weaknesses

Evan's ability in any situation comes down to outdoorsmanship, improvisation, or having a bag of tricks. Despite being above-average physically his capability comes down mainly to movement, and if you take away his (rather expensive) magic gear and the sword he relies on, Evan's left without much more to show than his wits and a few unreliable spells.

Thankfully, his wits are usually sharp enough to take care of him, as long as he remembers his rule of threes: three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food, and three seconds without thinking. And if he doesn't even have that, he can always run for dear life.

He's also extremely nearsighted, so there's that.

## Skills and Abilities

Evan is a jack of all tricks, and at the same time a master of very few. He has a very flexible talent for magic of every element, but the downtick of that is being terrible at controlling any of them with a real semblance of skill and without it blowing back in his face. However, the one thing he can do well is the time and material-consuming task of working that talent into alchemy and enchantment. This has become something of a niche, as he finds it far easier to spend a bit of extra energy and a lot of extra time to imbue an effect or spell into an object or potion than to try and force that effect to manifest, and there's really no reason not to take whatever extra crystals he has and put some of their energy to good use.

### Equipment

Evan carries around a trio of self-created magical items. First: A pendant capable of spawning small balls of light, about the brightness of your average camping lantern, able to last up to two hours. In case of him or the pendant becoming lost, it is possible for these lights to seek Evan out. Second: A crystal able to form large fireballs or beams of freezing magic. In lieu of having anything close to the skill needed to consistently pull this off himself, and despite it having a very limited number of uses before running out of charge, this gives him a cheap trick and a way to pummel foes in self-defense. And the third and simplest: His short sword caries a line of fire magic across the edge, making it undeniably more dangerous to use but giving it a nice burn effect and a fair bit more impact where needed

## History

### Backstory

As a child, Evan was always obsessed with the outdoors. Between the ambiance of nature, the thrill involved with Avalice's wilds, and the inherent awesomeness of being able to create by yourself something that others would never dream of finding outside a store, something in it stuck with him provided a spark of inspiration. He was climbing trees almost as soon as he could reach the branches, and constructing makeshift backyard camps even before then. To his parents' credit, they did their best to play along; what child wouldn't find their own brand of games, and what parents wouldn't support them? It wasn't like he wouldn't learn anything from it.

And after a while, things changed in ever so slight ways. Instead of building little fortifications, he'd work up walls and play at building (easily destroyed) treehouses. Rather than just making a hole in the yard and calling it a fire pit, he'd start actually constructing fires and working up small campsites around them. And rather than setting up a toy tent in his bedroom, he paid (out of his own earned money) for a simple one-man tent and begged permission to camp out back overnight. It surprised no one when soon after striking the ripe age of 18 he gathered up some money and decided to skip town to explore; as a matter of fact, his father, Matthew, had seen the decision coming long before then.

Talking things out, because no one was going to let him get away with that, an agreement was made and Matthew pushed the rest of Evan's family to accept the idea: put simply, Evan would prove he wasn't going to die and keep them updated, and they'd try to keep out of his hair about the decision. While the truce was shaky for a while Evan hasn't yet managed to get himself killed, and he hasn't missed a week without sending off a letter, so his side of the bargain's stayed full. Even despite the increased danger of staying outside civilization after the incident that nearly took away the Kingdom Stone, he's been making ends meet long enough to more or less know what he's doing.