The Lifter's Paradox [Round One: the Great Golemworks!]

Username: Pick Yer Poison
Name: Annie and Watchdog
Gender: Female and male
Race: Human and mutated bulldog

Description: Annie is a young girl, about twelve years old in appearance. She wears a dark teal dress with frayed edges that speaks of narrow escapes in the past. Dried blood is evident on her face and hands, but none of it is hers. Her brown hair is tied back in a ponytail, but has a number of hairs out of place. She has bright green eyes and a blissfully ignorant expression on her face.

Her innocent mind is in tatters, but is clearly the dominant aspect of her mentality. Having spent years with Watchdog as her only close companion, she has come to see things differently than most, both metaphorically and literally.

Watchdog is a large, mutated bulldog, four feet tall with scraggly grey fur. He has gruesome, yellow fangs - they can hardly be referred to as teeth anymore - that are bloodied enough to make it clear what he enjoys doing with them. His paws have also developed equally fearsome claws. His beady yellow eyes have no pupils. All across his back are throbbing lumps and bulges, some as big as tennis balls.

He never strays very far from Annie unless absolutely necessary, and flies into a murderous rampage if he loses sight of her for more than a few seconds. He is prepared to protect Annie from any threat he can understand, even if he has to kill himself in the process, something Annie is not quite able to understand.

Weapons/Abilities: The true extent of Watchdog's mutations are unknown, but he is stronger, faster, and generally tougher than the average bulldog, although not much smarter.

Biography: The apocalypse, Annie's parents had agreed when it came, was not something any nine-year-old girl should have had to endure. Unfortunately, it wasn't exactly optional, and while Annie's parents wanted nothing more than to lock themselves in the basement until the glowing meteors stopped falling and everything was back to normal, but they also agreed that living one's life in the basement and eating every meal out of a can was just as bad for a nine-year-old girl as living through an apocalypse. Perhaps worse; canned food was usually quite bland.

So dad grabbed his shotgun, mom grabbed her pistol, and Annie grabbed the bulldog puppy she had gotten as a birthday present about a week ago, and the family set off through their suburb in order to reach the farmland they owned but didn't really use all that often. The journey took several weeks, and by the time they got there it had become obvious that Annie's beloved bulldog was growing unusually. By the time the seasons had changed, it had become a full-blown monstrosity in appearance, but had fortunately retained its loyalty to Annie, keeping watch over her at all times. Annie's parents thought this was positively heartwarming, and named it Watchdog, a name both it and Annie accepted without fuss.

As they soon found out, however, Watchdog had not been the only creature to mutate. Warped cries and frightening calls echoed from the woods outside the farmhouse at night, and Annie's parents forbid her from entering them. Naturally, she slipped away to explore them at the first opportunity, with Watchdog trailing close behind. After a quiet twenty minutes of walking, Watchdog loped up in front of Annie to make her pause while he sniffed the air, growling faintly. After a few seconds he barked, the noise reminiscence of a harsh, hacking cough combined with a scream. A mutated bear stumbled out of the undergrowth at the noise and growled at the pair. Its back legs were large and bulbous, while its front arms appeared almost normal, save for the long, fearsome claws at their ends. Like Watchdog, it had beady, yellow eyes lacking pupils, which followed the bulldog intently.

Watchdog moved between it and Annie, who had begun to cower in fright, growling back at the bear as a warning. When the creature did not flee, Watchdog pounced on it and tore into it with his front claws and fangs, blood flying everywhere until the bear stumbled back and collapsed, dead. Watchdog immediately retreated to Annie, nuzzling her and licking her face like a normal puppy. Annie pulled herself up and began to run back to the farmhouse, Watchdog loping along behind her excitedly.

When they returned home, Annie found the place destroyed. The bodies of a few mutated animals, riddled with bullet holes, made clear the perpetrators of the attack. Although she couldn't prove it, deep inside Annie felt certain that the only reason the attack had not come previously was because Watchdog had been standing guard over the house. She followed a still-wet trail of blood through the kitchen, up the stairs, and finally into her parent's bedroom, where she found her parents' dead and eviscerated bodies. Annie stared at them long and hard for several minutes; Watchdog sat down and watched the stairs, tail thumping against the floor. Finally, a faint smile appeared on her face, and she skipped over and kissed each corpse on the forehead, telling them she was going out to play in the woods and would be back soon. She skipped out the door and gave Watchdog a hug, then giggled as he tried to lick her face again, heedless of the terrible stench coming from his mouth.

Annie spent the next three years out in the woods. Watchdog protected her loyally from everything that tried to hurt her until the more violent creatures of the forest began to avoid her for fear of invoking his wrath. The more harmless critters quickly picked up on this and began to gather around Annie for the relative safety she offered. Where she went, herds of deer gathered, birds perched on her shoulders, squirrels scampered around her legs, and rabbits did as rabbits are known to do, enjoying the extended protection they received by being near her; were a predator to attack them while they were near Annie, Watchdog would come to her rescue, and by proxy, theirs. This all worked out quite well until the pair up and vanished without warning.