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Sep. 5th, 2016 10:49 pm
travailed: (than I thought it would be)
[personal profile] travailed
PLAYER INFO
Name: Pi
Contact: [plurk.com profile] pineappamatic and/or PM
Are you over 18?: oui!

CHARACTER INFO
Character Name: Beth Greene
Canon: The Walking Dead (TV series)
Canon Point: 5.08, "Coda" | After Rick requests the hostage exchange but before it actually takes place.

Appearance:

Age: 18

Setting: Walkers & the zombie pathogen. Ignore the part where that's not how meningitis works.

It's important to note that the pathogen spread so quickly and wiped out such a large percentage of the population that government collapsed almost literally overnight. The remaining survivors have more or less separated into their own groups with their own rules, hopping from place to place looking for supplies and shelter to survive. Sometimes these groups cooperate with each other; a lot of times they don't. The walkers themselves can be dangerous, but even then they're more of a backdrop— it's people pushed beyond their limits and their humanity that are the biggest threats to survival.

History: bonk
Personality:

CW: attempted suicide

By all expected rules of the End of the World, Beth should have died a long time ago. She's young, petite, and physically weaker than most of the monsters, living and dead, that the apocalypse created. She's not a sharpshooter, she isn't impressive at hand-to-hand combat, and she isn't about to command a room with the force of her personality. No matter how you slice it, the evidence says she's weak, and she should have been one of the first to go.

But here's the thing: she's still alive.

Before the End of the World, Beth grew up as a shy and soft-spoken girl, shielded (perhaps too much) by her father and older brother, and somewhat caught in her sister's long, rebellious shadow. (Contrast Maggie, who snuck a birth control prescription behind her father's back, against Beth, who couldn't bring herself to even hold an empty red solo cup at a high school party on the off chance her father might catch her and be disappointed in her.) Her father instilled a strong Christian faith in her and her siblings, and while she's never been as vocal about it as her father, she believed deeply in the saving grace of God, and in a peaceful afterlife. She believed that everyone was deserving of compassion and respect, good or evil, living or dead. She was kind, polite, passive, and a little naive.

At her core, Beth is still a lot of those things: she tends toward the quiet side, she is compassionate and empathetic, as well as resolutely hopeful. But, like with most people, the apocalypse forged those traits into a very different picture than the person she used to be. Nowadays, she can sometimes be reserved to the point of stoicism, following a mantra of her father's ("We don't get to be upset, we all got jobs to do") to an extreme logical conclusion and shoving her negative emotions down until she can't feel them anymore. "Passive" is no longer a term that applies, though she lets hostile people assume it if it means they'll underestimate her; in reality she'll always hold her ground when she believes someone else is wrong or treating her unfairly (eg, one time she fired a gun into the ceiling because everyone was being stupid and she wanted to shut them up). She can understand how someone is feeling and why they act the way they do, and still hate them for it.

Even her characteristic hope and optimism is tempered by the reality of the world (in her own words: "Yeah, I'm happy. I'm just not blind.") She believes that there are good people left in the world— not that everyone has goodness left in them. She knows that's she's strong, and that she has what it takes to survive— but she also knows that her clock is ticking, and that one day her best won't be enough to keep her alive. She believes walkers should be treated with respect, and that it's important to remember that they were people before they were monsters— but she won't hesitate to kill them by whatever means necessary.

Case in point: that same unshakable faith came out of the darkest period in her life, after the "deaths" of her (undead) mother and brother. The world then was empty, bleak, and pointless, a painful struggle that could only end in a painful death. The only logical course of action, to her, seemed to be just to end it, peacefully and on her own terms. And she tried— she got far enough to cut open one wrist before she realized that her life and her family were too important to let go of just yet, and that death was going to be painful no matter how it happened.

From that point forward, she became determined to focus on the good over the bad, and to never let herself feel that hopeless again (another piece of wisdom from her father: "If you don't have hope, what's the point of living?") In that sense, her hopefulness is almost an overcorrection— it is the tightrope that keeps her suspended over her despair at the state of the world and everything she's lost. After her father's death, that rope almost snaps, and we see her backslide into grief and desperation (demanding that she and Daryl go look for the others after the prison raid in the middle of the night, insisting over and over again that the tracks they find could point to survivors, then eventually breaking down when all they find is bodies). She clings to her various hope spots in order to keep herself and the people she loves afloat, but all the things that made her want to die in the first place still exist. She just copes with them as well as she can.

All that said, it's true that Beth has had a wide support network of skilled, loyal people to help her keep going (like many of the others, she considers all of the people in Rick's group to be her family, not just her blood relatives). It's not until she's separated from Daryl and taken to Grady Memorial Hospital that she's forced to truly rely on herself and no one else. It's a sink or swim moment, one in which Beth finally commits to being independent and keeping herself and her priorities alive. While at first she resigns herself to just "paying her debt" until Dawn releases her, she refuses to do anything else that might add to that debt (like taking the hospital's food)— and once she realizes that there will never be a point where Dawn considers the debt "paid", she takes initiative to break both herself and another kidnappee out.

The hospital is also the first time that Beth is forced to kill the living— directly or indirectly, she's responsible for the deaths of two officers at the hospital (allowing Gorman to be eaten alive and pushing O'Donnell down an elevator shaft). It's a critical moment where it becomes clear that even sweet, gentle Beth has the capacity to do whatever needs to be done to stay alive.

Canon Abilities/Skills:
○ The daughter of a farmer who spent most of her life pre-apocalypse on said farm, she's comfortable outside and around animals, including horses.
○ Decently proficient with hunting knives and handguns, and some limited experience with automatic rifles and crossbows. Instinctively she'll always go for a headshot if she can; that's the only way to survive.
○ Survival skills in general— building a fire and securing a camp, scavenging, etc.
○ Basic knowledge of tracking & first aid. Spent a few weeks as the zombie apocalypse equivalent of a nurse.
○ She is infected with a disease that will cause her body to reanimate after death, provided her brain isn't significantly damaged. As much as you can call that an "ability," anyway.

ON STATION 72
Symbiote Specialization: Rho
Symbiote Ability:

SELECTIVE ATTENUATION

Beth is able to lower people and/or things in her immediate vicinity (including herself) beneath the attention threshold of anyone nearby, allowing them to go unnoticed. The ability is not a true cloak, in the sense that Beth does not actually make anything invisible when using it, and it only works on living things with the capacity for attention (ie, she can fool a guard, but not a camera).

rank i. ( ✔ ) Beth's attenuation cloak can be applied to living targets (people or animals) as well as inanimate objects up to the size of an armoire. Her area of influence is a 50 meter radius from her location. ( ✖ ) The illusion is fragile and easily disturbed; targets (in particular living targets, but it also applies to objects) must be stationary in order to maintain the cloak without breaking it. It may also be difficult to control, the cloak being too large or too small for the target if Beth doesn't concentrate hard enough. Extended use will cause a headache to form behind her temples, and can also negatively impact her own ability to focus for up to 30 minutes after use.
rank ii. ( ✔ ) Over time and with practice, the cloak becomes more robust, allowing for larger inanimate objects to be hidden (up to the size of an average four door sedan), and living targets to move freely while still cloaked (so long as it's kept to a fast walk, max). The precision of the cloak improves, and requires less concentration. Beth's area of influence widens to 100m. ( ✖ ) Beth's loss of focus after extended use becomes more severe after maintaining the cloak on large or moving targets; she may become dizzy and disoriented, and may become more vulnerable to sensory overload (a cafeteria of people talking at once may feel to her like a football stadium).
rank iii. ( ✔ ) Beth can keep even complicated tasks from attracting attention, including attacking while cloaked, significantly disturbing or destroying objects, and talking quietly. She can cloak inanimate objects up to the size of a small airplane. Her area of influence widens to 200m. ( ✖ ) Cloaking complicated tasks takes a significant amount of mental effort, and doing so repeatedly or for too long can cause Beth to become completely unresponsive to outside stimuli until her body is able to recover, potentially for several hours at a time. Repeated incidents of mental exhaustion in this manner may lead to her becoming permanently catatonic.
Inventory:
○ A yellow polo shirt, grey knit sweater, ripped jeans, and cowboy boots. All recently washed, but there's only so much you can do with blood stains once they set.
○ A wrist cast covering her right hand and forearm.
○ A pair of surgical scissors, hidden inside the cast.
○ A simple string necklace with a silver heart.
SAMPLES
Samples: kablammy

Rescue Write-up:

She wasn't expecting it to be there. That's how she tells herself she missed it, even though she knows that's bullshit. There's no part of her that's complacent, not in this place. Not when it's so close to being over, and definitely not with her people, her family just a few minutes and a few floors away. She'll berate herself later for being stupid enough to think any part of this was simple.

But right now, she turns the corner and it's just there. A walker at the end of the hallway, silent and motionless, where it should be impossible for a walker to be. She skids backwards until her back hits the door jamb, knees dropping her down into a half-crouch by instinct alone. By then it's already seen her and angled its way back towards her, but it's a long corridor and there's only one, she has time, if she can just get the scissors—

It sprints at her.

She's never seen them move that fast before, never, not even in the early days when they were still intact enough to run. She isn't ready for it, and one swinging, rotten arm catches her in the gut and throws her to the ground. It's heavy, and it's aggressive; it takes all her strength just to keep its head tilted back enough to keep it from taking a bite out of her shoulder then and there. She kicks her heel deep into its abdomen; it doesn't help. The walker's too solid to be a walker, barely decayed at all, and Beth realizes this is probably the moment she finally dies.

She reaches up blindly with her good hand, desperate for anything— a weapon, an exit, anything... and feels someone else's hand around her forearm, dragging her out from under the walker's scratching hands and into one of the adjacent corridors. It's a man, one she's never seen before, not one of the wards or any of the officers. He kicks the door to the hall shut behind her and hauls her to her feet.

She should feel relieved, but he squeezes her hand tight instead of letting it go, and there's nothing comforting about a stranger. She lashes out, aims her elbow at his head, but he catches that too. "I'm not going to hurt you." Quiet, but urgent. "I'll get you out. We have to go, now."

She can't. Her friends are here, downstairs. They're so close, and they need to be warned, they need her help, she needs their help. But the door is thumping and rattling in its frame, and the only help she has is standing in front of her.

She swallows, and nods.

She runs.

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