villagemod Application

[ghosthuntuk]

PLAYER INFO

Name: Kayla
Age: 32
Contact: HMD | loyalwolf#3540 @ discord

CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: Melanie King
Canon: The Magnus Archives
Canon Point: Ep #189
Appearance: x. Melanie is described as skinny; she has a scar on her right shoulder from being sliced by a scalpel; another scar on her left leg, above the tibia, from a backalley style surgery to remove a ghost bullet; eyes damaged from blinding herself with a bookbinding awl.
Age: 29

Character snapshot: Forever an angry disaster. Former ghost hunter/YouTube host. Former archival assistant at The Magnus Institute. Former agent of The Slaughter.

World description: In Melanie's world, there are 14 Fear Entities that exist in a realm alongside our own; they cannot truly be a part of our reality, but they can influence it, in various supernatural and unexplainable phenomena. The Entities feed off of the fear of both animals and humans, and are those fears made manifest.

The Magnus Institute is an academic organization dedicated to researching the esoteric and paranormal, established by Jonah Magnus in 1818. The Institute is associated with one of these Entities, called The Eye.

Melanie and her co-workers are the unfortunate lot that realize there is a lot more insanity going on behind the scenes and they have to stop these Fears from completing their rituals, which will give them purchase in our reality, able to change it to their liking.

History: Melanie, a former paranormal investigator and YouTuber, found herself with a dissolved team. Alone and in desperate need of a job she rashly accepts a job offer at The Magnus Institute, an academic organization dedicated to researching the esoteric and paranormal, established by Jonah Magnus in 1818. The Institute is associated with a number of weird occurrences that are later explained to be the work of roughly 14 Fear-based Entities that live in a realm adjacent to our own; the Entities influence and infect our world via supernatural and unexplainable situations or artefacts.

Eventually, she learns her contract of employment magically binds her to the Institute, as well as the Head of it, Elias Bouchard. Attempts to quit don't work, extended leave keeps a person fatigued and sick, and attempts on his life will kill anyone connected to him (didn't stop her from trying a few times anyway, though). She's stuck with a load of people she doesn't particularly like, and oh, by the way, the circus is going to end the world. Hooray.

With one Apocalypse averted and the stakes growing ever-higher, Melanie is desperate to find a way out. When her boss, Jon Sims, finds a way, she takes to blinding herself with a bookbinding awl just to get away.

Despite her escape from The Institute, when the Watcher's Crown ritual was complete and the whole of reality was changed on a cosmic level to become a feeding ground for the Entities, Melanie and girlfriend Georgie Barker were largely unaffected (Melanie for her blindness and Georgie for an encounter that left her without the ability to feel fear). The pair escape to a set of underground tunnels that offer some protection from The Eye; they accidentally formed a cult with other survivors of nearby domains. The others think them special due to both of their immunity to The Eye.


What are your character’s mental/emotional strengths? Direct: Melanie doesn't mince words, no one ever has to worry or wonder about where they stand with her. She is upfront and to the point, sometimes to the end of being too sharp and harsh in that candor.

Determined: She has always been a resolute sort of person. Once her mind is made up, she'll fight tooth and nail to get whatever she is out to achieve.

Resilient: Melanie has been through a lot, but despite it and the trauma she's collected along the way for it all, she persists. Stubbornly and full of anger, but she stands firmly where she is, away from The Eye, The Institute and everyone attached to it.

Observant: It's always been a part of her job, as an investigator of a sort. She has to be good at noticing things. Patterns are a particular interest to her.

What are your character’s mental/emotional weaknesses? Stubborn/Assertive: Melanie's directness can easily slip into sharp assertiveness and a heels-dug-in-deep sort of stubborn. She's hard to make budge once her mind is made up, and she's not easily wavered when she's chosen a path.

Prone to anger: She has carried her anger with her for years, it's part of what made it so easy for The Slaughter to take her in; it held onto her, and her anger, and told her it was okay, gave her anger a bloody, violent purpose. Though she is no longer an agent of The Slaughter, Melanie is still prone to snappish remarks and awful attitudes, and could probably be influenced by something similar relatively easily again.

Impulsive/reckless: Melanie can be the type to throw herself into danger. She also has no problem breaking laws, moral codes, or bones to achieve her objectives.

Paranoid/Distrustful: Due to the events back home, Melanie finds trust harder than ever to come by. The people she was closest to betrayed her over and over, and it makes it nearly impossible to bother letting anyone new in. She's also highly paranoid, which doesn't help matters. She'll be more quick to assume people are working for an Entity, or know more than they claim, or any other number of assumptions before she will allow anyone to be part of her inner circle.

What events or circumstances in your character’s past have impacted them the most? Her dad's death impacted her quite hard; he was the parent she seems closest to, and he never did forget her, despite his dementia.

Losing her research team left her alone, isolated and jobless. She also lost all respect from her peers in the process.

Jon's surgery on her leg to remove the ghost bullet that had infected with her with The Slaughter. Since he drugged her, and performed the surgery unwanted and unknown to her, it broke her trust in him and made sure she will be paranoid of even those closest to her.

Her entire time with The Magnus Institute was just one trauma and betrayal after another for two years straight.

What impressions do others tend to have of your character and how do those impressions differ from who your character truly is? Brash, snarky, & angry are the first three words that come to mind to describe Melanie in a nutshell. She hides behind that attitude as a protection to herself. Melanie definitely is all of those things, but a lot of it is long-built defense mechanisms to hide the softer parts of her that could still be hurt. She cares deeply and the loss of people she cares about shakes her foundations quite massively.

What motivates your character? Anger. It's been her defining motivation since her dad died. She realized her anger powered her, and it has fueled her in everything she has done and worked for.

How does your character handle crisis or adversity? Head-on, even if it means danger coming to her.

Alternatively: Recklessly. She's not above doing whatever it takes to get what she wants. The law, morals, injury to herself, none of it matters as long as the end justifies the means. Occasionally may jump to murder as a solution a little too quickly.

Skills, abilities, and physical weaknesses: Skills: She's got good investigative skills from her time as both a ghost hunter and an employee at the Magnus Institute. Good luck getting her to use them readily; she really was trying to leave all that behind, you know.

Abilities: No supernatural or otherwise esoteric powers to speak of. Though, she was one of a very rare few that could tell the difference in Not-Them and those they replace. Not-Them is a sort of shapeshifter creature that replaces people and have the ability to alter memories of those that knew the person they replaced.

She was also a temporary agent of the Entity known as The Slaughter, which is the fear of unpredictable violence that has strong ties to war (which could be part of why she was so strongly pulled toward following leads on war ghosts).

Physical weaknesses: Well, she's blind, so there's that going against her, though you won't catch her treating it as a handicap at all. She's gotten used to it over time, but it's not an overly old thing-- probably less than a year (but what is time in dystopia anyway).

Otherwise, she's just your basic human, in a soft and squishy package with no real superpowers, magic, or anything of the like on her side.

Inventory: Only the clothes and boots she's wearing and her walking cane.

HORROR INFO

What aspects of your character are you most interested in exploring in a horror setting?
Melanie is a pretty resilient type of character, she's lived in a world of horror for years now and she will be a tough nut to crack in terms of getting under her skin. It'll be interesting to see just what it takes to break her.

What is your character’s mental state upon entering the game?
Melanie managed to escape The Magnus Institute, only to be dragged into a fear hellscape ruled by The Eye she so desperately tried to leave. Needless to say, she's none too pleased with this turn of events. She's also spent an unknown amount of time playing the role of a survivor in a fear-based dystopian world, her only saving grace being that she's personally unaffected by The Eye since it cannot See the blind.

She'll arrive and be suspicious of whatever is going on, and assuming it's some part of The Lonely she's found herself in.

What unsettles and frightens your character? What sort of encounters would chip away at your character’s psychological stability?
The sense of being watched; mind control/loss of agency; digging into her paranoia/sense of distrust in people; being actually, utterly alone;

What horrifying events or genre elements would you like to see utilized in the game?
All that slow, creeping psychological trauma. Questioning what's real/what's not. I'm game for almost anything!

SAMPLES

Test Drive: Here.
Log Sample: Here.
Log Sample: Here.