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godandhermother) wrote2012-07-21 01:34 am
A-Facility Application
Name: Smurf
Age: 21
AIM: smurfheartstrong
E-MAIL: Pming this account works
IC Information:
Name: Alessa Gillespie
Fandom: Silent Hill
Timeline: At the very end of SH1, after she’s given the baby to Harry and he’s run away.
Age: Chronologically fourteen, biologically seven (since her body itself can’t exactly age and grow when it’s burnt to a crisp), and psychologically a couple hundred years old. (Possibly older, but gdit, Silent Hill is really vague.)
Appearance: Complicated question. What she looked like pre-burning was a normal pretty girl with blue eyes and black hair (though SH canon switched that around sometimes due to different designs). After being burned, she was literally covered head to toe with third- and fourth-degree burns. At the end of the game, she turned into a young, glowing woman dressed all in white, who’s implied to be the manifestation of God (or the Devil or both).
Practically, she looks like what she wants to look like. She has powers over illusions and can astral project, so she picks what she’s comfortable with and keeps at it.
Abilities: The game’s really vague about it. At the very least, we know that she’s psychic, has telekinesis, and she can make people die just by wishing for it. After she was burnt alive by her mother, she was impregnated with God, so she developed more powers—among them being power over the town of Silent Hill (implying she can make the world switch to the Otherworld—a nightmarish place designed by the victim’s tortured psyche—make monsters based on the victim’s or her own nightmares, dragging people into Silent Hill, being able to know everything that is mentally dragging a person down, projecting her soul into the world as an ethereal or physical being, be empathic, turn people into monsters, split her soul in two, taking souls damned to the town unto herself, and getting her telekinesis jacked up like hell). She can also do illusions, levitate, get set on fire with minimal damage, make people see her how she wants them to, and look creepy as hell.
Post-God transformation, she developed pyrokinesis and some kind of power over lightning (in all versions of the ending, she set her mother on fire and then attacked the protagonist with lightning one way or another) and became a part of the town, sort of (when she/the demon within was defeated, the entire place began to collapse). She also apparently has much greater control over her power (and/or just plain more power) since she was able to tear her soul apart a second time without any need for a focusing agent, which she required the last time.
She also has the power to bring a person’s nightmares to life. When she lured Travis Grady into the town, she forced him to run around his own nightmare world and fight his own demons, but when Harry Mason came to town, she had given life to her own nightmares in hopes that it would deter Dahlia.
Also, somehow, she can go inside mirrors. She did it in Origins and again in SH3—she hides away inside them especially when she is wounded (probably because they have a link to the Otherworld) and she can influence the world within them. In short, her power is versatile and vague.
Also worth mentioning is her horrifying pain tolerance and extreme intelligence for her age. At age seven, she was able to manipulate a man while bedridden and outsmart her mother and every cult member working to birth God. She’s clever and understands concepts that should be beyond her, possibly because she’s absorbed adult souls from the town.
Personality: This will reflect more on how she developed in the facility last time and how that affects her, since that is how I’ll be playing her.
Alessa is cruel. There’s no doubt about it. Sometimes she’ll try to hide it for her family’s sake, but she revels in causing people she dislikes pain and punishing the guilty. Being abused her whole life has given her a lot of anger to resolve, and she often takes it out on others when they give her an excuse to. The way of the Order (her cult) is the way of brutality, and Alessa has grown to be very brutal.
That’s not to say she’ll just randomly torture whoever. She considers herself a judge of people, so she’ll be ‘fair’—they have to do something to deserve what they get. (Ideally. She has a nasty temper on her, and if someone pushes her too far, she can sometimes hurt people who she normally wouldn’t.) Keep in mind that she has a massive double standard; if you’re someone she likes, she’ll put a blind eye to nearly anything you do. Yet that does not and will not hold up inside Silent Hill—in Silent Hill, she is either the town’s puppetmaster or another of its monsters (she can’t really tell), and she will come down with the fury of God on the sinners who wander inside of it, regardless of her own feelings.
In a weird juxtaposition, she loves affection of any type. Pet names, hugs, kisses, snuggles, you name it. She was deprived of it for her whole life, so she craves contact and positive attention. She’ll do a lot to get it, even manipulate people. (She’s very manipulative, but she generally keeps a lid on it.) Luckily, she usually doesn’t have to do much more than open up her arms in the facility, because she’s adorable and people like giving her hugs. She wants people to like her.
Even though she is fully capable of loving people, she has issues understanding what it means for people to love her back. She’s had it drilled into her head that she’s not worthy of love and, without God, she’s worthless. Slowly, she’s been learning differently at the Facility, but it’s hard to undo a lifetime of brainwashing.
Speaking of brainwashing, she’s very religious. She’s quiet about it since people don’t like having weird human sacrifice cults being foisted on them, but it’s very important to her.
She has an amazing well of inner strength. Her entire life has been marked by abuse, culminating in being burned alive and being forced to live for seven years in that charred body. And then she was reincarnated just to suffer all over again, and it’s implied that this will continue on forever. Even though she has developed a very cruel way of dealing with things, she has been able to keep hold of her senses throughout and continues to fight against the terrible things her mother is trying to do, no matter how much pain it causes her.
After being in the facility and then being put back in Silent Hill, she would be colder than she had been. She had everything she ever wanted, and just as she feared, it was ripped away from her. She had to lie alone in a hospital bed in indescribable pain again, unloved and forgotten. After that, she’s even more cynical than before, and she has convinced herself that she is above what little humanity is left after she ‘gave birth to’ Heather. Her goal is to stop the apocalypse and do her job as a deity of Silent Hill, and she will continually tell herself and others that she isn’t ‘Alessa’ anymore. The trauma of being torn away from the only people who loved her has affected her deeply, and it’s hard to tell how she’ll develop from there.
History: Alessa and her mother are part of a cult called The Order, and before Alessa was born, The Order had a long history of kidnapping little girls and attempting to impregnate them with God (God had died a long time ago and, when She was reborn, She would usher everyone into Paradise). All the girls died either during the ceremony or soon afterwards.
There’s no mention of Alessa’s father, but it’s theorized that her mother, Dahlia, and a local doctor, Kaufmann, made a deal to get Dahlia pregnant and use the child to harvest God’s power, so Kaufmann could be her biological father.
Alessa was born with power that’s never fully explained. She was telekinetic and had the ability to make people die just by wishing for it, and the powers were evident enough to lead to her being called a witch at school and getting bullied. She was abused by Dahlia (partially because Dahlia’s absolutely nuts), abused by her classmates, and ignored by the school authorities, even when it was obvious how awful people treated her. The only person she was ever friends with was a fellow abuse victim named Claudia, whose family also belonged to The Order. She thought of Claudia as her little sister.
When she was seven, her mother carried out the ritual to impregnate her with God, which involved lying her on the ground in the middle of a lot of cult symbols, then setting the house on fire. In the middle of the ritual, Alessa realized the true nature of God and summoned a trucker, Travis, who happened to be driving by. Travis sees the burning house and breaks in, fighting through the flames to find Alessa, by now distinctly resembling human-shaped charcoal. Alessa told him to let her burn, probably because she would die and God would die with her, but Travis refused and carried her out of the house, thus kicking off the events of the Silent Hill: Origins game.
Travis fell unconscious by smoke inhalation and Dahlia came back to take Alessa to the hospital where Kaufmann worked. Kaufmann arranged for Alessa to be kept in secret and told the world that she had died. The only non-cult member to know about Alessa’s presence was her waiting nurse, Lisa Garland, who was forced to take care of Alessa quietly because she was addicted to drugs only Kaufmann could hook her up with. The experience drove Lisa insane, but Alessa viewed Lisa’s daily duties as genuine kindness and love to the point where she takes an imprint of Lisa into the world she creates, but we’re not at that part yet.
Alessa used astral projection to lead Travis into finding a cult artifact that helped focus her power and bring it to her, all the while forcing him to face the horrible things that happened in his childhood. When he used the artifact on her, she split her soul in half, putting the innocent half in a newborn baby, and her astral projection left the baby on the side of the road where a man and his wife find it. She released Travis because there was nothing more he could do, but kept alive by a ritual her mother had performed, she stayed in that sickroom, tended to by the increasingly unhinged Lisa and in constant pain as the embryo inside of her fed and grew from her pain, suffering, and hatred. She stayed there for seven years and eventually came to wish for death, but she kept fighting nonetheless, and she focused on mastering her power until she was able to bend the darkness of Silent Hill to her will, making it a part of her and she of it (she is referred to as The Empress for a reason).
She molded the world, putting her own nightmares in it, then forced it to change from form to form (there are about four Silent Hill incarnations: the normal tourist town, the fog world, the Otherworld, and Nowhere) to keep her mother at bay. But that comes at a price: now, the town’s darkness runs in her blood. No matter how many times she dies or runs away, she’ll always be pulled back. And she knows that.
Seven years after she split her soul apart, her other half, Cheryl, sensed her pain and begged her adoptive father, Harry Mason, to take her to Silent Hill without fully understanding why she wanted to go. When they came to Silent Hill, Harry thought he saw a girl on the road (apparently Alessa’s astral projection), and he crashed the car trying to avoid her, leading to him going unconscious and Cheryl to leave the car and run after her original.
Alessa attempted to use her power to place the Seal of Metatron—basically, a mark that suppresses and/or controls the power of God—around the town in order to stop the birth of God, but Dahlia (now old and gray) manipulated Harry into stopping her. She indirectly guided Harry since he became her final hope, and in his search for Cheryl, he found Alessa and Dahlia.
Unfortunately, he was too late. Alessa and Cheryl joined once more, transforming into/’giving birth to’ God, who apparently looks like a floating glowy woman dressed all in white. Luckily, Kaufmann (remember him?), discovered that Dahlia had been using him the whole time and decided to throw a wrench in everything by dumping a bottle of Agloaphotis (a special tonic that could abort God) on God!Alessa.
This made some sort of demonic form of God come out of Alessa (and she disappeared right after it did, so I think it was more like the demonic part of Alessa shedding its skin), which set Dahlia on fire and started trying to kill Harry with lightning. Once Harry shot it to death, it screamed (noticeably, it was screaming with Alessa’s and Cheryl’s voice) and then fell to the ground, turning back into God!Alessa.
The whole place started collapsing, Alessa handed a reincarnated version of herself to Harry who he would name Heather. A part of her was left behind in the town—a part with all her memories, pain, and power. The woman who the protagonist left behind is who becomes a monster called the ‘Memory of Alessa’ in Silent Hill 3, but we’re not concerning ourselves with that right now.
The point is, Alessa is now coming from right after she ‘gave birth to’/reincarnated Heather and handed her off, and she’s the part that’s left behind.
Roleplay Sample - Log: She wasn’t allowed to die, was she?
Alessa—she maintained that name because she lacked any suitable alternative—shook the thought off. Any time she thought that, she started down the road of self-pity. Self-pity wasn’t an acceptable thing for a god to feel.
She tacked up another piece of paper covered in tiny illegible handwriting on her wall. Each page had jumbled wording, visions of horrible memories that invaded her dreams and plagued her during the day. She was recording them. Sorting through them in a physical manner so that she could help herself sort through them mentally. So that she could find out what belonged to whom. The guilty had to be punished.
Righteous fury was the only acceptable thing for a god to feel.
Roleplay Sample - Journal: Someone left this behind in my room. <small>[Alessa holds up a teddy bear to the camera, a slight frown of irritation flickering over her otherwise neutral expression.]</small> I’d appreciate it if they came back to get it. And while they’re here, I’d like them to take back their marbles, flowers, painting kit, jump rope, chalk, and doll.
<small>[She drops the teddy bear.]</small> I don’t have use for these things. Please stop trying to convince me that I do.