​Charles Coddly was born in northern Manitoba around 1973 and grew up in a remote working-class community where being different was difficult to hide. Charles had dwarfism, but his greatest childhood challenge was never his height itself. It was the way people reacted to it. Some underestimated him, others patronized him, and enough openly mocked him that Charles began expecting disrespect before it occurred. By adolescence, that expectation had hardened into a defensive temper that made him quick to confront anyone he believed was treating him as weak.

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Home offered little stability. His family was dysfunctional, emotionally distant, and increasingly unable to manage the conflicts surrounding Charles's anger, school problems, and repeated fights. Eventually, after another serious confrontation, Charles left home at approximately sixteen. From his perspective, he had been abandoned. From his family's perspective, they had reached the end of what they knew how to handle.

 

Charles spent the next several years surviving through whatever work he could find.

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He washed dishes, cleaned buildings, worked maintenance jobs, collected refuse, assisted mechanics, and learned how to repair equipment because machinery was easier to understand than people. Machines either worked or they did not. They did not laugh at him, pity him, or pretend not to notice him. His compact stature also made him unexpectedly useful in tight mechanical spaces, and over time Charles developed a practical understanding of engines, pumps, hydraulic systems,

shipboard equipment, and confined-space maintenance.

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Eventually, he found work aboard a commercial fishing vessel. It was one of the rare jobs where Charles began feeling less like an outsider. Because he could reach machinery compartments other crew members struggled to access, the sailors nicknamed him “Bilge Crab.” For once, the name was not entirely cruel. It was practical, affectionate, and tied to something Charles was good at. He never admitted how much that mattered to him.

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That fragile sense of belonging ended during an Atlantic Kingdom attack.

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The fishing vessel was catastrophically damaged and began sinking. Charles became trapped inside a partially sealed engineering compartment, where he improvised an emergency air supply and fought to stay conscious while the wreck descended. Before pressure and structural collapse could kill him, an Atlantic Kingdom salvage team recovered part of the vessel and discovered Charles barely alive inside.

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They did not rescue him.

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They selected him.

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Atlantic Kingdom researchers were developing an experimental amphibious cybernetic combat system designed for deep-water assault, hull breaching, sabotage, heavy engineering, and shoreline warfare. Charles's severe injuries made conventional survival uncertain, and the researchers used that fact as justification for converting him into a test subject.

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The process saved his life while violating almost every meaningful boundary of it.

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His damaged body was surgically integrated with reinforced skeletal supports, neural interfaces, life-support systems, synthetic musculature, pressure-compensating armor, and heavy mechanical actuators. External armor could later be removed or upgraded, but portions of the system were grafted permanently into his body. Charles was no longer simply wearing a machine. Part of the machine had become him.

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Worse still, the Atlantic Kingdom retained control over it.

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Charles remained conscious while remote command systems controlled the armor's movement. He could see what was happening, feel the suit move, and understand what it was doing while being unable to stop his own body from obeying someone else's instructions. That experience became the defining trauma of his life.

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The Atlantic Kingdom eventually deployed him near Halifax as part of a live-fire field test and geopolitical provocation. Canadian military and security forces encountered what appeared to be a heavily armed foreign combatant emerging from the sea and attacking strategic targets. Charles fought them because the armor forced him to.

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Commander Canada was among those who responded.

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During the confrontation, Commander Canada realized that Charles was not behaving like a willing combatant. Charles managed to resist the control system enough to signal that something was wrong, and Commander Canada deliberately targeted the external command architecture rather than simply trying to destroy the armor. The link was broken.

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For the first time since his transformation, Charles stopped moving because he chose to.

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Canadian authorities nevertheless faced an extraordinary problem. Charles carried invasive foreign cybernetics, unknown communication systems, potentially recoverable Atlantic Kingdom control technology, and a combat platform capable of causing enormous damage. Although some investigators believed his account, others feared he remained compromised. The government ultimately placed him in indefinite national-security detention while experts attempted to determine whether he was safe to release.

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Charles understood their reasoning.

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He hated them for it anyway.

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From his point of view, the Atlantic Kingdom had stolen control of his body, and Canada had responded by deciding that his freedom was too dangerous. Once again, someone else had chosen what would happen to Charles Coddly.

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The United Canadian Empire found him while he was still in custody.

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Around 2006–2007, UCE intelligence identified Charles as both a valuable combat asset and an obvious recruitment opportunity. He possessed advanced Atlantic Kingdom technology, considerable battlefield capability, a legitimate grievance against the Canadian government, and a cybernetic system that immediately caught the attention of Doctor Phlebotinum.

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A UCE extraction team removed Charles from detention and transported him to Wolfe Island.

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Charles expected another prison.

Instead, he was given a room.

He expected interrogation.

Instead, he was fed.

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He expected technicians to begin dismantling his armor.

Instead, they asked permission.

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Those details mattered more to Charles than the political speeches that followed. Wolfe Island was the first place since his transformation where people routinely called him Charles rather than “subject,” “asset,” “detainee,” or “security risk.” The UCE did not initially earn his loyalty by convincing him that the Empire was right. It earned his loyalty by treating him like a person.

Doctor Phlebotinum became central to that process.

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Eugene Hazard was fascinated by the Atlantic Kingdom's engineering, but his first significant act was not to modify it. He asked Charles whether he was allowed to touch it.

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That question changed their relationship immediately.

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Working with Charles's consent, Phlebotinum systematically removed the surviving Atlantic Kingdom remote-control architecture, isolated the neural interfaces, rebuilt the life-support systems, improved the exoskeleton's actuators, strengthened pressure protection, integrated UCE communications, and redesigned the external combat shell into a modular platform Charles could control completely.

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For the first time, the armor belonged to him.

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Charles chose the name Canadian Crab shortly afterward. “Crab” came partly from the old Bilge Crab nickname and partly from the crustacean-shaped weapon the Atlantic Kingdom had forced upon him. By choosing the name himself, Charles turned both histories into something he owned.

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His loyalty to the UCE deepened during Operation IRON LANTERN in 2008, when Canadian and allied forces attempted to retake Wolfe Island. Canadian Crab became one of the Empire's most effective amphibious defenders. He operated from harbor approaches, breakwaters, underwater defensive zones, and hardened coastal positions, using his enormous strength and pressure-rated systems to disable landing equipment, reinforce damaged fortifications, clear wreckage, and engage troops attempting to establish beachheads.

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Iron Lantern permanently changed Charles's relationship with the Empire. Wolfe Island was no longer simply the place that had taken him in. It was his home, and he had defended it.

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By the time of Operation: Gambit in February 2012, Canadian Crab had become an established UCE Enforcer heavy-assault specialist. During the invasion of New England, he was deployed against hardened transportation hubs, military staging areas, reinforced government facilities, communications sites, and industrial infrastructure. His role was straightforward: break open what refused to open and hold what the UCE could not afford to lose.

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When the Gambit Relay Network collapsed and Enforcer Alpha I initiated Plan B, Charles was redirected to physical defense of strategic positions and WMD-related sites. The broader campaign ultimately failed, but Canadian Crab returned to Wolfe Island convinced that his loyalty had been tested rather than disproven.

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The defeat did not turn him into an ideologue.

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Charles still has little patience for political theory, ceremonial speeches, or anyone expecting him to quote the Imperial Manifesto. His loyalty remains stubbornly personal. Wolfe Island gave him autonomy when other institutions feared it. Phlebotinum returned control of his body. The Enforcers became the closest thing he had experienced to a reliable family.

That distinction explains much of Canadian Crab's modern behavior. He can criticize the UCE privately, argue with teammates, mock officials, and remain deeply suspicious of authority while still fighting ferociously when he believes the Empire itself is threatened. His loyalty is not obedience.

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It is attachment.

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The Atlantic Kingdom remains another matter entirely. Charles resents the Canadian government for imprisoning him, but he hates the Atlantic Kingdom for something far more fundamental.

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Canada took his freedom.

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The Atlantic Kingdom took his body.

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Today, Canadian Crab serves as one of the UCE Enforcers' primary heavy assault, breaching, amphibious, defensive, and engineering specialists. Beneath the enormous armor remains the same blunt, suspicious, mechanically inclined man who once crawled into fishing-boat machinery spaces because nobody else could reach them.

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The difference is that now, when the machine moves, it moves because Charles Coddly decided that it would.

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