Ryan Henderson - Two Years On

First off, check out the eyes on the head shot. I am immensely chuffed at how they turned out.

This is an updated version of Ryan Henderson (from [link])

I've just started playing a Buffy game again, this time set in a private school that hides a Watcher's Academy. The game is set in New York (Queens to be exact) so the character needed a little tweaking to transfer him from being British, to being American.

Also, the character is two years older (16 now, instead of 14). So all in all, it was time to change his looks slightly. He's a bit taller and has put on a bit of muscle; puberty you know. Also, at the end of the original game, he managed to successfully break the Soul Pledge put on him by his brother (who is now serving a life sentence in prison). I got about half way through colouring him when I realised that I must have subconsiously been influenced by TJ from the old Disney cartoon Recess. Oh well, too bad.

Appearance & Personality
At just over 1.75m (5’9”) tall, Ryan weighs 61 kilos (135lbs). He has an average build with fair skin. His hair is usually scruffy and light brown in colour. Ryan’s eyes are green in colour. Although it has faded in the two years since he managed to break the Soul Pledge, the scar from where his brother slit his throat when he was ten is still visible.

Clothing wise, Ryan prefers loose fitting garments that are easier to move around in. He tends to wear baggy jeans, a short-sleeved T-shirt, an old hooded top and he’s often seen wearing his favourite baseball cap. His schoolbooks and comics are kept in an orange Vans backpack that has straps on it to carry his skateboard. Ryan also has a single earring in right ear and a piercing across his right eyebrow.

Years of attempting to unnoticed, sitting quietly at the back of the class, never answering or asking a question and handing in work of intentionally below average quality has given Ryan a tendency to feel awkward in social situations. It was only after being fostered by the Johnsons two years ago that he started feeling able to trust other people again.

Although having more a reason than most teenagers of his age, he doesn’t exhibit the standard “emo” signs of bad poetry on deviantart and hypersensitive emotions. Though he is often found with a pair of oversized headphones on his head, listening to his favourite band with his nose buried in the latest of issue of his favourite comic.

A native-born Bostonian, Ryan is an avid Red Sox fan and never misses a chance to listen to their games on the radio, although he hasn’t been to a game in person since his father was killed.

Character History
Ryan was born in Boston to Paul and Tracy Henderson in March of 1995. He was their second child. Mark, their eldest was six when his younger brother was born. Despite the age gap, as Ryan grew up, the two bothers became very close. Mark protective of his younger brother and Ryan idolising his older brother.

All this changed a couple of weeks after Ryan’s 10th birthday. In the middle of the night he was pulled from his bed by a pair of masked figures, bound and gagged, and dragged into his parent’s bedroom. There, he saw the bodies of his already murdered parents. One of the killers was Mark who stabbed his partner before turning the knife on his kid brother. Mark attempted to cut Ryan’s throat but fortunately, the cut was not deep enough to be immediately fatal. However, he passed out from the shock as Mark threw his body to floor and dragged it in to a ritual circle. After finding an antique mirror in the attic, Mark’s personality had begun to change. Unbeknown to the teenager, the mirror was cursed and a demon lord and used to whisper promises of demonic power into Mark’s mind. Corrupted by the demon, Mark had slain his family and best friend in a form of ritual human sacrifice called Soul Pledging. Confident that he had completed his part of the ritual, Mark doused the bodies in petrol; intending to conceal the evidence of what he had done. He started a fire downstairs and fled into the night. Ryan however was still alive and the sound, smoke and heat of the fire woke him. Struggling with his restraints and the injury to his neck, Ryan almost didn’t make it out of the house before the fire consumed it along with the bodies of his parents.

He spent over month in hospital after the fire. The burns healed but the wound to his neck left a vicious scar. It also left him with a deep-seated fear of fire. Ryan tried to convince anyone who would listen that his brother was still alive, that the teenage body they had found had in fact been in his partner and that together they had murdered his parents and tried to kill him. No one would listen to him. The doctors diagnosed with Ryan with PTSD and put him on medication. They assumed that his claims were merely the product of a traumatised child’s mind trying to make sense of what had happened. Eventually he stopped trying to tell people and the official report stated that his family had been brutally slain following a home invasion.

Having no living relatives, Ryan was taken into care soon after leaving hospital and moved out of the Boston area due to the publicity surrounding the murders. Over the next four years, Ryan was bounced between numerous foster families and care homes across Massachusetts. He rarely stayed with one for more than a few weeks, foster parents finding the distant boy too much of a handful. This “mobility” was a ploy by Ryan to prevent his brother from tracking him down. Although at the time he didn’t know anything about the Soul Pledging ritual that Mark had attempted, Ryan knew that Mark would one day come looking for him and finish the job. By moving around and acting as a disturbed dumb kid, he hoped it would make it difficult for anyone to track him down. At the various schools he attended over the next four years, he acted as a below average student. In reality, Ryan was actually very intelligent but he worked very hard to conceal it. Ryan was effectively invisible at school. To stupid for teachers to waste time on and too weird to make any friends. When he eventually moved on, he was soon forgotten.

Shortly before his 14th birthday, Ryan was sent to live with a new set of foster parents in the coastal village of Cliffport in Cape Cod. Unlike his previous foster parents, Susan and Anthony Johnson actually seemed to care about Ryan as a person and not simply as another government cheque. Despite their best efforts though, Ryan remained distant and unwilling to open up and trust other people.

Two months after arriving in Cliffport, on his 14th birthday, Ryan was hit by a car during an altercation with Jake Matthews. Jake, an older boy in the same school as Ryan but a year above him had provoked Ryan into lashing out. Before the incident could escalate into a fight, an out of control car ploughed into the group. Without thinking, Ryan shoved Jake out of the way and was hit head-on by the car. The car threw him over a wall and into the harbour where Ryan, who couldn’t swim started to drown. Realising this, Jake dived in and pulled Ryan out of the water. The unconscious Ryan was rushed to hospital where he quickly recovered having only suffered minor cuts and bruises. His foster parents were by his bedside when he regained consciousness. As was Trey, the other boy being fostered by the Johnsons. Waking up surrounded by his foster family was a surprise for Ryan; it had been a long time since anyone had cared about him. It made him realise how lonely he had become.

Something happened to Ryan while he was unconscious. He saw his own body being pulled from the harbour and receiving CPR. As he “stood” there watching, a figure revealed himself to Ryan claiming to be a servant of a demon lord that had been sent to retrieve the boy’s soul. It claimed that it was owed to him because of the ritual that Mark had performed. The demon attempted to drag Ryan towards a flaming portal but he overcame his fear of the flames to escape just in time to be resuscitated by the paramedics.

After the incident the collector demon, he began to investigate just what his brother had attempted to do. Ryan acquired a book on occult lore that was written in Latin. Thanks to a previous set of foster parents’ attempts to beat some religion into him, Ryan knew the dead language well enough to be able to read the book.

Ryan’s attempt to investigate the Soul Pledging ritual may be what alerted Mark to his location as less than a month later he possessed Trey in order to force Ryan to do what he wanted. Trey was eventually released, remembering nothing of what had happened, but that wasn’t the end of it. Sometime later, Mark sent a vampire to Cliffport to kidnap Ryan. With the help of a friend, Ryan was able to slay the vampire but the confrontations continued over the next few months; culminating in Mark losing patience and coming to Cliffport personally to deal with his younger brother. He directly attacked Ryan’s foster family, putting Susan in hospital and forcing a midnight confrontation with Ryan at a graveyard outside of the village. Despite Mark’s sorcerous abilities, he faltered in face of Ryan’s martial arts skills; honed in four years of self-defence classes. Ryan defeated Mark just as the police turned up, alerted by a note Ryan had left a friend before heading off to what he feared would be fight he would lose. Mark was arrested and later convicted of his crimes, vindicating what Ryan had claimed all along.

The conflict with his brother wasn’t the only supernatural thing that happened to Ryan while living in Cliffport. In Ryan’s own words, the village appeared to be the “centre of craziness for the whole eastern seaboard.” While there, he ran into a number of aquatic creatures called Deeplings that seemed to be very interested in one of his friends. On the outskirts of town lived a troll and on one occasion, Ryan had to rescue Jake and his friend from being eaten by the monster.

After defeating his brother though, things seemed to calm down. Something that Ryan was extremely grateful for. With the threat from his brother gone, Ryan stopped deliberately underperforming at school. To the surprise of his teachers, he was able to graduate from high school two years early. This sudden improvement attracted the attention of a private school in New York who offered a Ryan a full scholarship. Despite wanting to stay in Cliffport with what had become his new family, Ryan realised that the only chance he’d ever get to go to college was if he got a scholarship. It was an opportunity he couldn’t afford to pass on.

Family, Friends & Enemies
Ryan’s only living relative is his older brother Mark who is currently serving a life sentence at Cedar Junction maximum-security prison.

Until arriving at Cliffport, Ryan had very few people that he could consider friends. He lost contact with his friends in Boston after the incident and made precious few since then. Things started to change when Ryan was sent to a live with the Johnsons. Ryan likes living with them and for the first time in years, he was happy.

Ryan wasn’t the only foster kid staying with the Johnsons. He shared a room with twelve-year-old Trey Bennett and despite himself Ryan soon befriended the younger boy. Both boys share a love of comics; although they often disagree over which superhero is the best. Trey had only been in foster care for a year after his father was jailed for supplying cocaine and his mother was judged an unfit parent. The two boys became close over the next two years.

Outside of his foster family, Ryan began to make friends at the local school. Ben Ford, Celeste Lamond and Thomas Preston were classmates of Ryan and he slowly found himself drawn in to their circle. Along with Tommy’s cousin, Jason Talbot, and Jake Matthews, who was grateful for Ryan for saving him from being hit by the car, Ryan made his first proper friends in years.

When Ryan got the scholarship in New York, Trey helped Ryan set up a skype account on a laptop given to him by the Johnsons. Ryan tries to keep in contact with his friends and foster parents as much as he can, spending the holidays in Cliffport.