Ellie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
epundemiology) wrote2017-11-05 11:52 pm
epundemiology) wrote2017-11-05 11:52 pm
Entry tags:
Application
〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: Batty
AGE: 26
JOURNAL:batty_chan
IM / EMAIL: battypichugirl@gmail.com
PLURK: goodluckmodes
RETURNING: y
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Ellie (Williams is the fanon surname, but unconfirmed by canon)
CHARACTER AGE: 14
SERIES: The Last of Us
CHRONOLOGY: post-game
CLASS: Hero-ish? Probably closer to neutral/vigilante, but aligned Good generally
HOUSING: Random pls
BACKGROUND: Ellie was born roughly six years after the apocalypse happened. Half the population was decimated by an outbreak of what became known as the Cordyceps Brain Infection, which turned people into aggressive, shambling monsters driven to mindlessly attack anyone around. As society rapidly collapsed, martial law took over and Quarantine Zones were created in what was left of the country. However, oppressive tactics and corruption in the military (e.g. withholding food for themselves) quickly led to growing dissent, and a revolutionary militia group calling themselves the Fireflies sprang up amidst it, calling for an end to military rule and the return of all branches of government. In turn, the military cracks down even harder, killing any known Firefly on sight, and even aiding a Firefly or being a known sympathizer could get you into trouble.
Ellie grew up an orphan in this atmosphere of fear in the Boston Quarantine Zone, going from one military school to another, constantly getting in trouble for “fighting, theft, running away... fighting, disobeying orders... and more fighting." When arriving at one of these schools, she comes to know another girl by the name of Riley, and though they initially get on like a house on fire, they soon get to be friends. Riley harbors a desire of becoming a Firefly, instead of simply accepting the inevitable of joining the military at sixteen and shooting people on command. She and Ellie even try sneaking out one night, in which they ultimately run into not only infected, but also Marlene, the head of the Fireflies, who reveals she knew Ellie’s mother and has been watching out for her all her life. They’re told to go back home, but we learn that Riley doesn’t stay at the military school for long. At some point, Riley and Ellie have a falling out, after which Riley manages to convince Marlene to take her on as a Firefly, and she returns to the school to have one last day with Ellie before the Fireflies take her elsewhere. It’s during this day that she and Ellie work some things out between them and Riley agrees not to go, but before they can plan what to do next, they’re attacked by infected and both bitten. Devastated by the sudden apparent loss of their future, they decide to simply wait it out and “lose their minds together” as the infection took its course.
Only, Ellie didn’t turn. By some manner of miracle, she was immune. She tells Marlene, and preparations are made to have her taken to a Firefly base to reverse-engineer a cure from her immunity. Marlene runs into trouble on the way, though, and she makes a deal with smugglers Joel and Tess to take her to the rendezvous at the Capitol building in her stead when she gets injured. But on the way, Tess gets bitten. In her final moments, she insists to Joel that he complete the journey, a task he only very reluctantly takes on out of loyalty to Tess.
This begins a months-long cross-country journey for Joel and Ellie, who travel from Boston to Wyoming in order to locate Joel’s brother Tommy, a former Firefly who may have information on their current whereabouts. They face numerous struggles during this journey, from scores of infected to Hunters who kill other survivors for their supplies, and slowly find a sort of comfort and safety with each other over time. This bond only intensifies after Joel is severely injured during a fight with Hunters after Tommy points them to an old university in Colorado, leaving Ellie to take care of him. She finds herself entangled in a twisted cannibalistic group of survivors in the process, culminating in her hacking their psychopathic leader in the head repeatedly with a machete after he pins her down in a burning restaurant and is implied to have intended to rape and kill (and potentially eat) her.
She’s traumatized by this experience and becomes somewhat more quiet and withdrawn, to the point of active concern from Joel, but she manages to push through, insistent on getting to the Fireflies so that everything they’ve been through up to that point and all those who have died for her sake haven’t died in vain. They do find them, in the end, while Ellie’s unconscious from nearly having drowned in the final stretch to the Fireflies’ base at a hospital in Salt Lake City. But there’s a catch--they need to extract her brain entirely in order to work on a cure. In other words, kill her. Which Joel isn’t about to let happen, after spending nearly a year constantly fighting to survive and beginning to see her as a daughter of sorts, and having lost his own daughter twenty years ago. Joel murders all of the doctors and Marlene and takes off with Ellie, telling her when she comes to that the Fireflies have actually found dozens of other immune people, and ultimately given up on finding a cure. She has some doubt, though, and asks him to swear to her that it’s true. He hesitates, before telling her he does. She accepts it, and that’s where the game ends, though it’s clear that she still doesn’t really believe him.
http://thelastofus.wikia.com/wiki/Ellie
PERSONALITY:
Ellie is a child, and a survivor. These two things intertwine to define who she is and how she relates to the harsh and often unforgiving world she must live in. Having been born years after the outbreak, she never knew what the world was like before; things for her have always been a matter of perseverance and endurance in difficult conditions. She’s a kid that doesn’t really get to be a kid, being raised in military schools where you enlist once you’re sixteen and you start shooting Fireflies and anyone that causes too much trouble. The idea of children to be protected and taken care of no longer really exists; as soon as you’re capable of doing work, you need to pull your weight, or be thrown out of the Quarantine Zone to fend for yourself amidst the infected and the Hunters.
Cooperation largely exists only this context of mutual survival, too; an orphan with no family, the world has quickly taught Ellie that she must be able to fend for herself, because nobody is going to take care of her. This fierce independence is a point of personal pride to Ellie, as well; she frequently insists that she can handle herself, that she doesn’t need to have things done for her. The first time she meets Riley, with the older girl beating up some bullies that had ganged up on her, she shows no gratitude, insisting “she had it covered,” and further rebuffs her suggestion of making friends at the school, to which Riley rightly notes that she has “trust issues.” She also clashes with Joel early on over the latter’s dismissiveness of her capability, often expressing her frustration at not being allowed to help.
Part of this fierce independent streak manifests in her heavy rejection of authority and adult figures. Ellie will mouth off to absolutely anyone and everyone who happens to piss her off, from flipping off the man whose help she and Joel need to procure a vehicle, to breaking the finger of her psychopathic captor and calling him an animal even when directly at his mercy. She threatens Joel with a knife the first time she meets him, and her general “Fight Me, Motherfucker” attitude reflects someone who’s long had to compensate for her relatively slight physical stature with both perceived toughness and actual, tooth-and-nail scrappiness.
Ellie isn’t one to be babied, but she is a child, despite her maturity beyond her years. She has the general interests one might expect of a teenage girl (comic books, a fascination with video games, pop music, etc), and she can sometimes be bratty and overly dramatic, like fake-whining to Joel that she’ll starve to death if she has to wait longer before they can go scavenging for food. She’s full of endless questions and curiosity about the world as it was, and she feels joy in the little things for their own sake, like a still-functioning photo-booth or a working water gun. This boundless enthusiasm, especially early on, reflects the difference between her upbringing in a Quarantine Zone versus having gone through the horror and loss of the initial outbreak and watching everything you know and love crumble beneath your fingertips.
Her youth is also reflected by her general naivete that’s revealed in the earlier parts of the game, such as when the Hunters set up an ambush for them in Pittsburgh by pretending to be injured, and she completely takes it at face value, telling Joel they should stop to help. It’s not that she hasn’t seen the ugliness of people before leaving the Quarantine Zone (the first time she met Marlene and the Fireflies, a bunch of smugglers started shooting at them for not paying the toll to use ‘their’ tunnel), but it takes her treacherous journey with Joel to come to be suspicious of people by default. Survivors outside the Quarantine Zones were ready to shank a person for their clothes or a can of soup, which is a level of viciousness she had never experienced before, even as she’s seen soldiers shoot people just for the mere suspicion of infection. It’s through her experience with that world that she comes to learn that those to really fear are the ones that aren’t infected, the monsters that still wear their human veneer, like David.
But even with the horrors she’s seen straining her faith in humanity to nearly the breaking point, Ellie still feels a deep and desperate obligation to the world, and the people who live within it, and even moreso the people who died within it. Ellie has very severe and deeply rooted survivor’s guilt, stemming from the time she and Riley were supposed to die together, but she retained her mind and sanity while Riley didn’t. She had a miracle happen to her, and as her journey continues and more people around her die, she feels more and more strongly that she owes it to not only them, but humanity at large to give herself over to the Fireflies so they can engineer a cure, and she doesn’t mind dying for that cause if that’s how it has to be; as she tells Joel at the end of the game, she’s “still waiting for her turn”. It’s clear how much this haunts her from a dream she tells Joel about, toward the end of the game, where she has a nightmare about being on a plane full of people screaming because they’re going to crash, and struggling to use controls she doesn’t know to land it when the cockpit turns out not to have a pilot.
She feels the burden of the lives of all the people who’ve died because of cordyceps, the burden of all the people who will die from it, and she doesn’t really know how to handle that beyond offering herself up to the Fireflies for their research. Ultimately, she’s afraid of the deaths she’s seen (and feels, to some extent, to have caused) having been in vain, and in the end, for all her independence, she’s afraid of surviving alone.
POWER:
In canon, Ellie has no supernatural abilities, though she is the only known individual in her world with a natural immunity to the Cordyceps Brain Infection. In game, she will have the following powers:
Decontamination - The ability to essentially be a toxin sponge. Ellie will be able to draw toxins out of both her environment and the people around her without doing harm to herself. Her body will effectively have a heightened ability to process toxins; for example, if she were to use her power on someone suffering from severe alcohol poisoning, she would at most experience a light buzz for a minute or two before returning to normal. Similarly, she can absorb the toxins out of a water source to make it safe to drink. There will be limits to how much of this she can do at one time; at maximum, for instance, she might be able to absorb the smoke inhalation of a room full of people before her body can no longer keep up with the toxicity.
Switch - Ellie will be able to trade locations and physical condition with another person, with player permission. For instance, if the person she switches with has a broken leg, switching with them will give her the injury instead. This can go both ways; she can give her injuries to someone attacking or threatening her, as well. At first, she will only be able to trade places with those actively in her line of sight but eventually if her connection with someone is strong enough, she will be able to switch places with them wherever they are.
What a Punderful World - With player permission, Ellie will passively induce those around her to speak in more puns. This effect can be as strong or subtle as other players would like, and will be heavily modulated by her emotions. At times of high stress or anxiety, this power will be dampened, while times of strong enthusiasm or excitement will heighten it.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[Hello imPorts, there’s a little girl on your feed today. She looks a bit scrawny and grungy, as if she hasn’t had a decent meal in a very long time and only just gotten acquainted with the concept of running water.]
Hey, soooo. Hypothetical question for you guys. Say a bunch of space aliens landed on this planet like, tomorrow, and you had to convince them not to blow it up into a million pieces by showing them all the cool shit they’d be wrecking. Where would you start?
[Hypothetically. It’s just a thought experiment and the aliens are totally not supposed to be a metaphor for her feeling totally lost and overwhelmed in this place and how much it has, when she’s used to so very little. She’s way too subtle for that, obviously.]
Lists are acceptable and highly encouraged. It’s um….for a school project. Yeah.
[She looks totally convincing. Even as she scrunches up her nose a little at the thought of school. Totally.]
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: https://etcelsior.dreamwidth.org/59896.html?thread=40905976#cmt40905976
FINAL NOTES: She’ll be coming in with her backpack, containing a letter from her mother, her mother’s switchblade, Riley’s Firefly pendant, three joke books, and a toy robot she picked up for Sam. She’ll also have her handgun.
NAME: Batty
AGE: 26
JOURNAL:
batty_chanIM / EMAIL: battypichugirl@gmail.com
PLURK: goodluckmodes
RETURNING: y
〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: Ellie (Williams is the fanon surname, but unconfirmed by canon)
CHARACTER AGE: 14
SERIES: The Last of Us
CHRONOLOGY: post-game
CLASS: Hero-ish? Probably closer to neutral/vigilante, but aligned Good generally
HOUSING: Random pls
BACKGROUND: Ellie was born roughly six years after the apocalypse happened. Half the population was decimated by an outbreak of what became known as the Cordyceps Brain Infection, which turned people into aggressive, shambling monsters driven to mindlessly attack anyone around. As society rapidly collapsed, martial law took over and Quarantine Zones were created in what was left of the country. However, oppressive tactics and corruption in the military (e.g. withholding food for themselves) quickly led to growing dissent, and a revolutionary militia group calling themselves the Fireflies sprang up amidst it, calling for an end to military rule and the return of all branches of government. In turn, the military cracks down even harder, killing any known Firefly on sight, and even aiding a Firefly or being a known sympathizer could get you into trouble.
Ellie grew up an orphan in this atmosphere of fear in the Boston Quarantine Zone, going from one military school to another, constantly getting in trouble for “fighting, theft, running away... fighting, disobeying orders... and more fighting." When arriving at one of these schools, she comes to know another girl by the name of Riley, and though they initially get on like a house on fire, they soon get to be friends. Riley harbors a desire of becoming a Firefly, instead of simply accepting the inevitable of joining the military at sixteen and shooting people on command. She and Ellie even try sneaking out one night, in which they ultimately run into not only infected, but also Marlene, the head of the Fireflies, who reveals she knew Ellie’s mother and has been watching out for her all her life. They’re told to go back home, but we learn that Riley doesn’t stay at the military school for long. At some point, Riley and Ellie have a falling out, after which Riley manages to convince Marlene to take her on as a Firefly, and she returns to the school to have one last day with Ellie before the Fireflies take her elsewhere. It’s during this day that she and Ellie work some things out between them and Riley agrees not to go, but before they can plan what to do next, they’re attacked by infected and both bitten. Devastated by the sudden apparent loss of their future, they decide to simply wait it out and “lose their minds together” as the infection took its course.
Only, Ellie didn’t turn. By some manner of miracle, she was immune. She tells Marlene, and preparations are made to have her taken to a Firefly base to reverse-engineer a cure from her immunity. Marlene runs into trouble on the way, though, and she makes a deal with smugglers Joel and Tess to take her to the rendezvous at the Capitol building in her stead when she gets injured. But on the way, Tess gets bitten. In her final moments, she insists to Joel that he complete the journey, a task he only very reluctantly takes on out of loyalty to Tess.
This begins a months-long cross-country journey for Joel and Ellie, who travel from Boston to Wyoming in order to locate Joel’s brother Tommy, a former Firefly who may have information on their current whereabouts. They face numerous struggles during this journey, from scores of infected to Hunters who kill other survivors for their supplies, and slowly find a sort of comfort and safety with each other over time. This bond only intensifies after Joel is severely injured during a fight with Hunters after Tommy points them to an old university in Colorado, leaving Ellie to take care of him. She finds herself entangled in a twisted cannibalistic group of survivors in the process, culminating in her hacking their psychopathic leader in the head repeatedly with a machete after he pins her down in a burning restaurant and is implied to have intended to rape and kill (and potentially eat) her.
She’s traumatized by this experience and becomes somewhat more quiet and withdrawn, to the point of active concern from Joel, but she manages to push through, insistent on getting to the Fireflies so that everything they’ve been through up to that point and all those who have died for her sake haven’t died in vain. They do find them, in the end, while Ellie’s unconscious from nearly having drowned in the final stretch to the Fireflies’ base at a hospital in Salt Lake City. But there’s a catch--they need to extract her brain entirely in order to work on a cure. In other words, kill her. Which Joel isn’t about to let happen, after spending nearly a year constantly fighting to survive and beginning to see her as a daughter of sorts, and having lost his own daughter twenty years ago. Joel murders all of the doctors and Marlene and takes off with Ellie, telling her when she comes to that the Fireflies have actually found dozens of other immune people, and ultimately given up on finding a cure. She has some doubt, though, and asks him to swear to her that it’s true. He hesitates, before telling her he does. She accepts it, and that’s where the game ends, though it’s clear that she still doesn’t really believe him.
http://thelastofus.wikia.com/wiki/Ellie
PERSONALITY:
Ellie is a child, and a survivor. These two things intertwine to define who she is and how she relates to the harsh and often unforgiving world she must live in. Having been born years after the outbreak, she never knew what the world was like before; things for her have always been a matter of perseverance and endurance in difficult conditions. She’s a kid that doesn’t really get to be a kid, being raised in military schools where you enlist once you’re sixteen and you start shooting Fireflies and anyone that causes too much trouble. The idea of children to be protected and taken care of no longer really exists; as soon as you’re capable of doing work, you need to pull your weight, or be thrown out of the Quarantine Zone to fend for yourself amidst the infected and the Hunters.
Cooperation largely exists only this context of mutual survival, too; an orphan with no family, the world has quickly taught Ellie that she must be able to fend for herself, because nobody is going to take care of her. This fierce independence is a point of personal pride to Ellie, as well; she frequently insists that she can handle herself, that she doesn’t need to have things done for her. The first time she meets Riley, with the older girl beating up some bullies that had ganged up on her, she shows no gratitude, insisting “she had it covered,” and further rebuffs her suggestion of making friends at the school, to which Riley rightly notes that she has “trust issues.” She also clashes with Joel early on over the latter’s dismissiveness of her capability, often expressing her frustration at not being allowed to help.
Part of this fierce independent streak manifests in her heavy rejection of authority and adult figures. Ellie will mouth off to absolutely anyone and everyone who happens to piss her off, from flipping off the man whose help she and Joel need to procure a vehicle, to breaking the finger of her psychopathic captor and calling him an animal even when directly at his mercy. She threatens Joel with a knife the first time she meets him, and her general “Fight Me, Motherfucker” attitude reflects someone who’s long had to compensate for her relatively slight physical stature with both perceived toughness and actual, tooth-and-nail scrappiness.
Ellie isn’t one to be babied, but she is a child, despite her maturity beyond her years. She has the general interests one might expect of a teenage girl (comic books, a fascination with video games, pop music, etc), and she can sometimes be bratty and overly dramatic, like fake-whining to Joel that she’ll starve to death if she has to wait longer before they can go scavenging for food. She’s full of endless questions and curiosity about the world as it was, and she feels joy in the little things for their own sake, like a still-functioning photo-booth or a working water gun. This boundless enthusiasm, especially early on, reflects the difference between her upbringing in a Quarantine Zone versus having gone through the horror and loss of the initial outbreak and watching everything you know and love crumble beneath your fingertips.
Her youth is also reflected by her general naivete that’s revealed in the earlier parts of the game, such as when the Hunters set up an ambush for them in Pittsburgh by pretending to be injured, and she completely takes it at face value, telling Joel they should stop to help. It’s not that she hasn’t seen the ugliness of people before leaving the Quarantine Zone (the first time she met Marlene and the Fireflies, a bunch of smugglers started shooting at them for not paying the toll to use ‘their’ tunnel), but it takes her treacherous journey with Joel to come to be suspicious of people by default. Survivors outside the Quarantine Zones were ready to shank a person for their clothes or a can of soup, which is a level of viciousness she had never experienced before, even as she’s seen soldiers shoot people just for the mere suspicion of infection. It’s through her experience with that world that she comes to learn that those to really fear are the ones that aren’t infected, the monsters that still wear their human veneer, like David.
But even with the horrors she’s seen straining her faith in humanity to nearly the breaking point, Ellie still feels a deep and desperate obligation to the world, and the people who live within it, and even moreso the people who died within it. Ellie has very severe and deeply rooted survivor’s guilt, stemming from the time she and Riley were supposed to die together, but she retained her mind and sanity while Riley didn’t. She had a miracle happen to her, and as her journey continues and more people around her die, she feels more and more strongly that she owes it to not only them, but humanity at large to give herself over to the Fireflies so they can engineer a cure, and she doesn’t mind dying for that cause if that’s how it has to be; as she tells Joel at the end of the game, she’s “still waiting for her turn”. It’s clear how much this haunts her from a dream she tells Joel about, toward the end of the game, where she has a nightmare about being on a plane full of people screaming because they’re going to crash, and struggling to use controls she doesn’t know to land it when the cockpit turns out not to have a pilot.
She feels the burden of the lives of all the people who’ve died because of cordyceps, the burden of all the people who will die from it, and she doesn’t really know how to handle that beyond offering herself up to the Fireflies for their research. Ultimately, she’s afraid of the deaths she’s seen (and feels, to some extent, to have caused) having been in vain, and in the end, for all her independence, she’s afraid of surviving alone.
POWER:
In canon, Ellie has no supernatural abilities, though she is the only known individual in her world with a natural immunity to the Cordyceps Brain Infection. In game, she will have the following powers:
Decontamination - The ability to essentially be a toxin sponge. Ellie will be able to draw toxins out of both her environment and the people around her without doing harm to herself. Her body will effectively have a heightened ability to process toxins; for example, if she were to use her power on someone suffering from severe alcohol poisoning, she would at most experience a light buzz for a minute or two before returning to normal. Similarly, she can absorb the toxins out of a water source to make it safe to drink. There will be limits to how much of this she can do at one time; at maximum, for instance, she might be able to absorb the smoke inhalation of a room full of people before her body can no longer keep up with the toxicity.
Switch - Ellie will be able to trade locations and physical condition with another person, with player permission. For instance, if the person she switches with has a broken leg, switching with them will give her the injury instead. This can go both ways; she can give her injuries to someone attacking or threatening her, as well. At first, she will only be able to trade places with those actively in her line of sight but eventually if her connection with someone is strong enough, she will be able to switch places with them wherever they are.
What a Punderful World - With player permission, Ellie will passively induce those around her to speak in more puns. This effect can be as strong or subtle as other players would like, and will be heavily modulated by her emotions. At times of high stress or anxiety, this power will be dampened, while times of strong enthusiasm or excitement will heighten it.
〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[Hello imPorts, there’s a little girl on your feed today. She looks a bit scrawny and grungy, as if she hasn’t had a decent meal in a very long time and only just gotten acquainted with the concept of running water.]
Hey, soooo. Hypothetical question for you guys. Say a bunch of space aliens landed on this planet like, tomorrow, and you had to convince them not to blow it up into a million pieces by showing them all the cool shit they’d be wrecking. Where would you start?
[Hypothetically. It’s just a thought experiment and the aliens are totally not supposed to be a metaphor for her feeling totally lost and overwhelmed in this place and how much it has, when she’s used to so very little. She’s way too subtle for that, obviously.]
Lists are acceptable and highly encouraged. It’s um….for a school project. Yeah.
[She looks totally convincing. Even as she scrunches up her nose a little at the thought of school. Totally.]
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE: https://etcelsior.dreamwidth.org/59896.html?thread=40905976#cmt40905976
FINAL NOTES: She’ll be coming in with her backpack, containing a letter from her mother, her mother’s switchblade, Riley’s Firefly pendant, three joke books, and a toy robot she picked up for Sam. She’ll also have her handgun.