Tranq the Penguin

This article is about the CrossRealm version of Tranq. You may be looking for his normal counterpart, Tranq the Hedgeguin.

Tranq is a penguin whose main strengths are his eternally calm composure and his ability to keep situations cool. Tranq also frequently carries a foldable shield, which he is quite proficient at using for both offense and defense.

Appearance
Tranq is a male penguin with black fluff and cyan markings in a pattern resembling a Magellanic penguin. He has gray eyes and a longish beak.

He always wears light gray sneakers with cyan laces and black socks; additionally, he usually wears one of his pairs of light gray fingerless gloves. Tranq also usually wears some kind of a T-shirt (sometimes two, one over the other) and a pair of either sweatpants or cargo pants; however, he occasionally wears other clothing. All of his clothing is grayscale or bluescale, as he prefers not to wear other colors of clothing (though he could, if persuaded to do so).

When outside of his dorm room, he usually wears a black backpack with cyan accents. This backpack usually contains any relevant school supplies. It also usually contains his tablet, which he uses in his DJ capacity to mix and play music, and a pair of cyan-and-gray noise-cancelling headphones, which he wears when DJ'ing or listening to music. The backpack has a clip on its side for his folding shield, which he keeps attached to the backpack when not using the shield.

Personality
Tranq is almost always calm and optimistic about everything. He knows that everything is going to turn out right, and almost nothing will make him lose his cool. Due to this, he tries to keep everyone around him in the same state; if there's an argument, he'll try to break it up and try to get everyone to calm down.

It's very difficult to get Tranq to stop being happy; it takes something really life-threatening or depressing to do so. However, if something does make him stop being happy, he won't become sad or angry. Instead, he will become completely void of emotion and act almost robotic until whatever bothered him goes away or becomes irrelevant.

Tranq is fairly extroverted, and is quite content to spend most of his time with other people. If left alone for too long—say, a week or two—he could enter his neutral state.

Tranq doesn't have a specific set of activities that interest him; he generally will just go along with anything reasonable that his friends are doing. However, he is better at some activities than other. For example, he is fairly good at dancing and at making music (the latter of which he mostly does through computer programs); however, he is terrible at singing. These skills mostly come up when he DJs for people.

Tranq's personality is both an advantage and a disadvantage for making friends. On one hand, some people enjoy his constant happiness and ability to keep the mood bright; on the other hand, some people find it frustrating that he can't show negative emotion at appropriate times like most normal people.

Strengths and Powers
Tranq has no magical powers. However, he is very proficient with shields. He can use them to block most incoming attacks, and even use shields as weapons. Granted, a shield won't deliver a fast attack, but if it hits, it'll hit hard. His personal shield's folding capabilities make it very compact and allow him to bring it almost everywhere with him. Tranq's calmness also keeps him from becoming possessed by emotions and doing something stupid or reckless in the middle of a fight.

Early Life
Tranq lived a fairly normal and happy life with his parents and his younger brother. Somewhere in his childhood, he started taking self-defense classes, and quickly learned that shields were his favorite implement of combat. He then devoted his self-defense learning to mastering the intricacies of combat using a shield.

His personal folding shield was created by taking a normal shield and having a metal-worker cut the shield into a few pieces and attach them to each other with hinges. After he obtained this folding shield, he started carrying it with him nearly everywhere he went.

College
When Tranq was about 18, he started going to college at Sterling University, where he applied for a part-time job as a DJ at the college. He kept this job up for his whole first year, but in his second year, where he continued to go to Sterling, he decided that his former job as a DJ was too time-consuming and didn't apply for it again. However, he started offering to use his DJ skills at parties on campus for a small amount of money.

Near the end of February in his second year, he got attacked by something very colorful with fangs. Unprepared, he did manage to whip out his shield in time, but the attacker managed to make a large dent in his shield (near its center hinge) before mysteriously disappearing. No one would own up to having attacked him, so he began a search to see who—or what—was responsible, hoping to stop whatever it was from attacking more people.

Statistics

 * Strength: 9 – Tranq can take a lot of hits with his shield, and his shield packs a massive punch if he hits.
 * Speed: 6 – Tranq can move his shield at a decent speed. His shield does weigh him down some, but this is compensated for by his proficiency with it.
 * Sharpness: 2 – Tranq's slow, steady fighting style and attitude, coupled with his moderately slow reflexes, cause his noticing critical attack opportunities to be infrequent.
 * Smarts: 6 – Tranq is moderately intelligent, and he recovers quickly from a beating.

Fun Facts

 * Tranq the Penguin is my first alternate version of a character. The main version of this character is Tranq the Hedgeguin.
 * His name, Tranq, is a shortening of the word tranquil. This is a word that describes a facet of his personality.