When I started playing Meli I didn’t know where I wanted to go with him. All I knew was that he had a bad past and he was mentally ill, not able to function properly in the real world. That was the kind of character that I created and that was the kind of character I wanted to play. Someone who wasn’t afraid of anything because he didn’t have much to live for.

I was really mad that I had to miss so many weeks of playing since that made such a huge gap in his story and not much happened in the first and last ones. I still wanted to do more writing on his character so I had to go deeper into his personal history to figure for material. It wasn’t until the last session that I figured out that it would be interesting if he wasn’t crazy but poisoned. I remember hearing as a kid that if you took LSD even once you could be doomed to a future of bad trips, total nightmares that you couldn’t escape and that scared the hell out of me! So I started thinking that maybe that’s what Meli was suffering from. He was part of an elite squad of soldiers so it would make sense that he would have been involved in raids on the labs.

My family life has also been nuts. Trying to keep a marriage going while raising a kid, holding down a job, and going to school doesn’t leave me much time for fun, but they mean the world to me. I started thinking that, as stressful as life is, I wouldn’t have much to live for if anything ever happened to them. When I was at work I was thinking about this post-apocalyptic world and how hard it would be to raise a child to adulthood, and it just clicked that Meli had it all, but then lost it all. He lost his kid and his marriage dissolved and from then on he was just like “Fuck it, I’ll do whatever.”

Now I’m mad that we’re done playing because I know Meli a lot better now. I don’t think he necessarily wants to die, but he doesn’t have a great reason to live. He likes being a soldier and has used that routine to give him some grounding. As the jack gets out of his system, he might be able to form some normal relationships with people and he’s still a pretty young guy. He could even settle down and have another kid, if he doesn’t get killed first. I could see him becoming a drill sergeant at the Rock for example and being perfectly happy doing that. Hopefully we can start another session soon, life will be less nuts, and I can find out what happens next.

--Simon