CONTENT WARNING: This app involves reference to murder, character death (including child death), mind control, mental illness; psychological torture, physical torture, severe injuries and surgery, surgery without consent; and cannibalism.
Player Name: Kathryn
Preferred Pronouns?: she/her
Player Contact: ![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
yawningdodoOther characters in play? Peter Vincent (
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fucking_ebay) and Stephen Strange (
thewarningafter)
Character Name: Ecks (Subject 437)
Canon: Original
Game Transplant: Snowblind
Original App: HereGame Summary: Snowblind is a survival-horror game set in the post-apocalyptic town of Norfinbury, Alaska. The nuclear winter that rests over the town is barely survivable thanks to the nanomachines injected into the characters on arrival, which stave off death from radiation. Though long-abandoned, the town is maintained by an overseer called the Administrator and her legion of robot spiders. Dragged in from across the multiniverse by a malfunctioning AI to fulfill a population quota, the characters eke out survival on an otherwise dead Earth as they work to solve the town’s puzzles and reach its center in the hope they can at least end the system’s millennia-long cycle of death.
Characters are isolated from each other as well as the rest of the world by the need to constantly keep moving to avoid cabin fever and to stay alone or in small groups to prevent attacks from creatures called anomalies. Malfunctions in the computer system that operates Norfinbury exposed the characters to states of altered perception; on top of making it difficult to discern reality from hallucination, those events themselves were often deeply traumatic. The characters eventually confirmed that everything they’d suffered was the result of human and computer error, that all of the NPCs they’d met along the way were non-sapient AIs, and that there had been no greater purpose behind any of it. They ultimately succeeded in locating and operating the portal that had brought them to Norfinbury, setting up a bomb to destroy the main computer and shut down the town behind the last person to depart.
How long was your character in Game: 361 days (IC); about 3 years OOC
History of Character in their Game: 86 - 115: Arrival. Learning to Trust; Learning not to TrustEcks was quick to figure out the basic functions of the tablet computer foisted on her upon arrival, though it would take her some time to learn it was not a magical device. She immediately started attempting to gather information about where she was and how she had been brought there while withholding information about herself from the other users of the network, using only text to communicate. The early results were very poor; several users lied to her in a joking manner and she took their statements at face value, leading her to believe for a time that Nathan was the Administrator, Terezi was a god, and that there was a necromancer named Mary Shelley roaming Norfinbury and shaming people to death. This pattern of gullibility would continue for some time.
She eventually found a traveling companion in Franken Stein (his erratic, potentially dangerous behavior was familiar and normal to her), only to abruptly part ways after he kidnapped Borderlands!Rhys to perform a lobotomy on him and give the AI in his brain control over his body.
116 - 139: Revenge for SciencedadEcks traveled alone until day 123, when she encountered House and more or less forced him to accept her as a traveling companion. The two had been corresponding on the network, as House would pass the time by acting as an impromptu science tutor while prying details about Ecks's personal history out of her. This was the point at which Ecks glommed onto House as a surrogate father figure; she continued to be devoted to him over the months to come, though the two often fought and would part ways for weeks at a time.
She rapidly became a liability in her efforts to help him, getting in fights on his behalf and squabbling with Kesara during their efforts to assist Kesara in digging a snow tunnel to a buried passage to another part of town. She gave House a harmonica before they parted ways, and House died soon after. When Ecks found out he had been murdered by Royce, she sought Royce out and murdered him in revenge when he wouldn't apologize.
140 - 185: Friends and Stuffed AnimalsEcks began to branch out and make other friends, and came clean on the public network about what she was and where she had come from. She became closer friends with Clint, and met Davesprite, who would also become a very good friend of hers.
By this time, MN poisoning had set in, giving Ecks an ongoing obsession with stuffed animals. It came to a head when she stole a plot-relevant ragdoll from House's pack; after he banished her from his presence she destroyed most of her collection; with Clint's help she later stitched her favorite stuffed animal, Red Cat, back together using the remains of the others. Over her time in Norfinbury her obsession would only continue to grow; by the time she stepped through the portal she had an entire duffel bag full of stuffed animals, having abandoned many of her more useful supplies to make room for them.
186 - 206: ALFIE SOLOMONS STOLE DOCTOR HOUSE'S HARMONICA!!Alfie Solomons stole House's harmonica while House was under the effect of a death price that made him compulsively obedient, kicking off a months-long feud as Ecks tried endlessly to get it back. Alfie had taken the harmonica to punish House; because it was a gift she had given to her friend, Ecks found the situation entirely unacceptable, regardless of House's feelings on the matter.
Also during this time, Ecks and House were murdered by the Joker in the aftermath of an unusual anomaly attack that had left House severely injured. From this point on Ecks feared and loathed the Joker beyond anything she'd felt against any other person.
207 - 269: Gain a Friend, Lose a HandEcks met an angel named Castiel and took an instant liking to him. The two of them assisted in a group effort to hack the network when a large number of characters destroyed their tablets all at once as a distraction. When a robed figure came for the pieces of the tablet they made the mistake of fighting it; Castiel was killed and Ecks's right hand was severely wounded. She blamed herself for his death, second-guessing all the choices she had made that night.
Her plans to meet up with Watson for medical treatment were delayed by her fruitless efforts to help characters who had been kidnapped into a sealed tower and made to torture each other; by the time they met up gangrene had set in and Watson had to amputate her hand.
270 - 305: You Can't Always Get What You WantWhile recovering from surgery, Ecks finally had a chance to negotiate/threaten with Alfie face to face regarding the harmonica. Her efforts were entirely unsuccessful; he gave her a teddy bear and allowed her to punch him, but she came away unsatisfied and rattled by the encounter. It echoed her earlier inability to force Royce to apologize for killing House even under threat of death; Ecks would continue to struggle with the fact that she can't always have her way and with her own propensity for violence.
Shortly after, Ecks was forced to kill Watson when a glitch in the system caused him to murder their traveling companion, Quark, along with Luna. She felt extreme guilt over her inability to stop Watson without killing him as well as her failure to correctly assess the situation and kill him before he had killed the others. When, perhaps a week or two later, she caught wind that Mycroft had put a hit out on House, Ecks tried to wrest control of the situation and prevent yet another death of a friend; she murdered Mycroft when he refused to rescind the order only to learn that her actions probably hadn't made any difference in the final outcome.
In a way, it was almost a reprieve when a glitch in the nanomachines caused characters to experience alternate memories of their time in Norfinbury. Ecks remembered a version of events in which she had befriended Royce, not House. Even when the initial effects wore off and they were able to differentiate between real memories and false ones once again, she and Royce resolved to remain friends, rekindling a relationship that had never truly been.
306 - 342: Generally Having a Bad TimeFor a while, Ecks developed paranoia as an offshoot of her MN poisoning, making her high strung and (more) difficult to live with. She continued to help off and on with attempts to contact the data ghosts and get closer to the center of town, but generally displayed increasingly erratic behavior. She did befriend incubus!Rhys during this time, though, and he helped her talk through some of her feelings about House and to recognize that she could have those feelings without making herself responsible for his bad life choices.
Also, when she and others were gathered into an underground space thanks to another glitch in the system, she finally stole the harmonica back from Alfie.
343 - 390: All My Friends Keep DyingGiving the harmonica back to House was a hollow victory; in the larger scheme of things Ecks found herself surrounded by death. She'd had to deal with people dying around her throughout all her time in Norfinbury, but at this stage she became more and more distraught as her friends continued to die at what seemed like an increasing rate, many of them not returning. By this point she became quite certain that all of them would die rather than ever leave Norfinbury.
391 - 440: Life with Gangster DadsEcks took up with Alfie and Royce for the remainder of her time in Norfinbury. Her largely antagonistic relationship with Alfie had mellowed out into a friendship, partly due to his proximity to Royce, partly due to her decreasing energy for maintaining grudges.
After Robert Miller created anomaly copies of many of the characters and unleashed them on the town, the three of them fought off the duplicate Ecks only to be ambushed by the anomaly copy of House, who caught, killed, and ate Ecks. She was deeply hurt by House’s refusal to apologize to her on its behalf when she came back from the dead.
441 - 447: The EndWhen Robert Miller appeared on the network to inform all of them that the town would power down in one week, causing them all to die with one last sealed door between them and the center of the town, it was only confirmation of what Ecks had already expected. That night, however, Winter made one final appearance on the network to provide them with an application that would turn one of their tablets into a bomb and allow them to break through the final door...on the condition that they would activate a second app that would cause her server to short circuit, effectively killing her. Ecks was heartbroken at the thought of losing yet another person (or non-person) she saw as a friend, but along with many others, she agreed to the condition.
In the final week, all the residents of Norfinbury gathered at the center of the town, where they were able to heal themselves of injuries and sickness; House was even able to reprogram the nanomachines to make Ecks's hand grow back. Ecks was happy but struggled to comprehend their sudden change in fortune, half expecting that it would be taken away from them again. Others successfully reprogrammed the portal that had brought them to Norfinbury and set up a self-destruct program to destroy the computer and shut the town down. 361 days after she had awoken alone and friendless in a frozen wasteland, Ecks stepped through the portal with Royce and Alfie, expecting to make a life with them in Royce's home world.
How did they change from their canon personality wise (Please explain what caused it to happen?)Ecks began her time in Norfinbury as a paranoid but curious youngster, interested in learning but distrustful of all the people around her. She learned to open up and forged many close relationships over the course of the game; for the first time in her life she had real friends, and had to learn how to be a friend in return. She also had to learn how to cope with loss, as death constantly loomed over all of them; despite her despair she continued to turn toward her remaining friends rather than push them away. By the end of the game, though, she had self-isolated with only Alfie and Royce for regular contact, lacking the will to do more.
While Ecks remains literal-minded, she did grow in her ability to discern meaning. She has learned many idioms, can now discern the use of sarcasm at least some of the time, and has even learned how to crack jokes…and how to craft an insult. She’s not particularly
good at jokes and insults, but she does try. She has picked up speech patterns and sayings from many of the people around her, sometimes as a natural outcome of her tendency to imitate others and sometimes when others have deliberately taught her new words and phrases. She had initially vacillated between typing with proper grammar and punctuation and wholly imitating the typing styles of others, but eventually settled into a lazy typing style of her own, which was heavily influenced by House’s style.
Ecks has grown more comfortable in making her own decisions and expressing her opinions, though she does still experience the impulse to obey commands, particularly in times of stress. Where for a long time she would cave to the desires of others, she has developed a stubborn streak—when something really matters to her, she can be tenacious in the most obnoxious ways. She has gained confidence in herself in general; where early on she would devolve into repetitive declarations of her own personhood, she is no longer so insecure on this point and no longer feels the need to state it aloud.
Ecks has strayed from her earlier system of writing down rules for herself in a book and following them religiously. She has not written new rules in her book for quite a while, and operates on a much more organic system of morality, only using her initial rules as the foundation to which she’s added all the things she’s learned. She still believes that she relies on the book of rules, but in reality she has violated those rules on multiple occasions and does not actively refer to them. She has struggled with her own propensity for attempting to solve problems with violence only to feel remorse afterward.
How did they change from their canon physically (Please explain what caused it to happen?): Like others in Norfinbury, Ecks is underweight and malnourished; her skin is pale (some patches paler than others) from lack of sunlight and coarse from the cold and wind. Despite her best attempts to keep it clean and combed, her hair is long and unkempt; it hasn’t been cut in a year and inconsistent hygiene routines have left it damaged.
She bears small scars on her face and arms from her fight with the robed figure, when its blood splashed on her and disappeared parts of her flesh. Her amputated hand has grown back just days ago; in contrast to the rest of her body the skin is unblemished apart from its patchwork nature, and baby-soft.
Powers: Ecks has the ability to function perpetually without sleep; she also has the ability to see in the dark like a cat.
Possessions: Possessions from Norfinbury (scroll down for inventory)
Please provide three samples from your previous game, at least one will have to be third person with context: Sample One:
Pretty sure you're not allowed to sell peopleSample Two:
Hey, Davesprite? Please stop dyingSample Three:
I am unsure whether I am going to hit you with this shovelNotes: Full disclosure, I forgot to note her ability to see in the dark on her original Snowblind app; I'm okay with not including that if having her regain it now is a problem.
