reference - Camphire

Do not use, copy, or repost without my express permission. I’ve had too many run-ins with people doing it in the past.

Stitchpunk character #184938294. I've actually designed two others besides him but I plan on keeping this guy, hence the detailed reference sheet and profile.

This is Camphire. His design was in part based on some random things I had lying around in my possession - namely, two toggle buttons that were originally tied around candles as decorations, and some striped fabric that was lining the inside of a military-style jacket that I found several years ago that cost about four dollars. His name is a little weird - I found the symbol for something called "camphire" on an image that contained several alchemical symbols, and after looking it up it's the biblical spelling of "camphor", which is another name for the plant known as henna. And I put that on the sheet so I'm kinda repeating myself.

I blame Camphire's subsequent personality on one of the movies I was watching when I was deciding on the rest of his color scheme - and that particular movie was The Iron Giant. As a result Camphire took on the personality of the giant and at this point he's pretty much just a little kid in a body a bit too large and adult for him.


Name - Camphire
Gender - male
Voice - Tom Hulce [ Quasimodo - The Hunchback of Notre Dame ]
Description
When Camphire woke up, he had absolutely no knowledge about the world around him - much like 9, but more extreme, in that he couldn't understand speech or read, and didn't realize that the world around him was in a ruined state, or that the human bodies were supposed to be scary. His creator, fortunately, was there with him during the first few months of his life, and was able to teach him words and the basics of things. She probably would have spent longer with him if she wasn't sick and becoming sicker by the day. Though she didn't live close any of the areas that were directly gassed, she eventually dies from a very gradual exposure to the gas as small, diluted amounts of it reached her home on the wind. The woman had Camphire commissioned and donated some of her soul with the intention of giving her small daughter someone to be with, because human companions were out of the question due to their sickness, as well as there not being anyone the girl's age age nearby. The daughter, too, eventually dies from the gas, leaving Camphire alone. While the two of them were alive, though, they treated him like he was the new baby brother, and that may have influenced the childlike tendencies he has.

Camphire is very gentle and a bit timid, in situations where he's facing some form of contention - raised voices, negative remarks, the works. Otherwise he's very curious about everything and doesn't seem to realize that there are things out there that can hurt him. Whether they're objects or fellow living things. If he's had a bad run-in with something in the past, he'll remember it and be afraid of it, but until that happens he operates as though nothing bad will happen. One of his greatest fears is of scissors, after he fell from the sewing table and tried to grab onto something to keep himself from falling onto the floor - and that happened to be a small pair of sewing scissors, which fell right along with him and landed blades-first in the front of his leg when he hit the ground. He made the wound a lot worse than it initially was by clawing at the fabric around it as well as trying to remove the scissors himself, and cutting his leg up further and fraying the fabric because he had no idea how to wield them. It was bad enough that it couldn't just be stitched back up, and needed a patch. His creator was there to fix him up, fortunately, after the daughter happened on him and rushed him to mom because she didn't know what to do.


After his family's deaths, Camphire eventually wandered outside - where he hadn't been allowed to go before - and wound up walking far enough from home that he got lost and couldn't find his way back. A big problem was he couldn't remember what the house looked like from the outside, and all the rubble and things started to look the same the more he tried to remember which way he'd come from. He's been wandering the wastes known as the Emptiness ever since, naive and not realizing that there are dangerous things out there. From his "mother" he heard about other people building others, so he keeps an eye out for anyone that looks like him, but so far he hasn't had any luck.


Camphire is mine,
9 and stitchpunks are Shane Acker's.