Whoa....I see absolutely no logic in your request. You want to know if they're gone... Well just think about that. There's two things that can happen. One: They'll never answer you to say they're gone, so you can never truly verify that...or Two: If they do answer you, then they're not gone, so the request is rendered pointless. :)

But that's neither here nor there. Regardless, their characters are theirs alone, and can't technically be either killed or "inherited" without specific permission of the player, or the player has been gone so long it's virtually assured they're never showing up again.

Lately I've been roleplaying several characters that never started out as mine: Maraxus, Gandalf, Siran Drauka, Master Sunset, Coag the Mighty, and now Fuer Grisse ost Drauka. Why am I allowed to do this? Not technically because I'm horribly ancient compared to most of you and can do what I want. :) Gandalf and Livonya have expressly given me permission to role-play their characters (Gandalf, Siran Drauka, Fuer Grisse ost Drauka - yes, the last names are the same...), and I've also inherited the characters *they* inherited before they left: Maraxus and Master Sunset. Coag the Mighty I last ran into contact with right around the time of the Armageddon story and told him I was killing his character and he didn't mind then, so after the character was resurrected I picked it up as a relic.

The point of the matter is that *most* people here (Shadow and Thrak are about the only exceptions, a couple of lurkers like NBS and Cvp too) won't or don't remember most of those characters; their players have been gone literally for years now. Just because these newer character's players have apparently abandoned them does not mean their automatically public domain, either. If they're tied into a story right now (probably RBS or GBS), the most reasonable thing to do is drop them out of it via the story without killing them, so their players are free to come back to them at any time.

On another note, it's a really bad idea to change the names of characters on a whim just because you don't like them. I'm a big fanatic of valuing personal creations, and even if a name choice isn't original (yes, Elrohir IS stolen from LotR, and is an anachronistic throwback to a less-developed time in my own life - a lot of the reason I changed characters was to get rid of that anachronism), the person who chose the name had a purpose, whatever it may be. If I recall correctly there are still technically characters running around named Pinwheel and Wooden-Butt (or something along those lines) which are never used because their players disappeared (or chose not to use the characters anymore).

Anyhoo, that's about enough for now, since I'm hungry and also have homework yet to do...