sidle | + application (the pines)

PLAYER

NAME: trace
CONTACT: yodel into your own asshole
OTHER CHARACTERS IN THE PINES: does dennis count

CHARACTER

NAME: winifred burkle
CANON: angel: the series
CANON-POINT: season 3, episode 5: "fredless"

DOSSIER

HISTORY:

right here

WHAT ARE YOUR CHARACTER'S STRENGTHS?:

BASICALLY A DISNEY PRINCESS: She may not be entirely 'together' as a whole, but there's not a single person on Earth who can say Fred's not a complete and total sweetie. She's just - she's so ready to be friendly and helpful even if it makes her nervous, and she's always giving people compliments she genuinely believes - how heroic they are, how smart they are, etc. She's just so impressed by even the most normal people around her, and she lets them know it.

She's also incredibly positive, all the time. Even when Angel found her in Pylea, after five years of being hunted in a hell dimension, after watching Angel turn into a big blue demon and tear a dude limb from limb, everything he tried to say about being a monster was met with some kind of reassurance or turn-around to spin it positive instead of negative. She's just... sunshine, once you get past the sketchy bits.

On top of all that, Fred's prone to romanticizing everything she can get her hands on. Her first line is right after Angel saves her: "Handsome man comes and saves me from the monsters." As if it's from some kind of storybook. When she sees Cordelia and Groo in love, she looks awed by what they share, despite still being in a hell dimension and surrounded in people who tried to kill her. Later, she tells a fairy tale to explain her situation to Angel.
BLISSFULLY(?) SIMPLISTIC (AT TIMES): Interpersonal relationships (once she's comfortable around the people) are actually ridiculously simplistic with Fred, in a way that few things are. Chick-flick goobery simplistic, at times. Take her super hardcore doki doki crush on Angel, for example. Literally everyone knows she has it even though she's pretty sure it's a secret because she doesn't realize how totally obvious her compliments and goo-goo eyes and eagerness to make him happy are. There's also no internal debate re: personal space in her mind. If you're not her friend, don't touch her. If you're her friend, she'll get right all up in your personal space - especially when she's anxious about something. That's when she'll position herself about 3/4 of the way behind the shoulder of someone she trusts, because she definitely wants to be there to face whatever the gang faces but she also is nervous as fuck about it.

This will probably complicate as the more difficult shit she's working through seems to sort out with time, but for now, it seems to work to her benefit.
ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT: Not only is she smart, but Fred is clever and ingenious too. She was the smartest student her mentor had, back when she was in grad school for Physics, enough so that he arranged her banishment to Pylea to keep her from doing better than him. Once she was there, she was the only human out of hundreds to figure out how to disable her own collar, not to mention keeping hidden right under their noses until Angel swooped to the rescue.

It seems like way too much of the time, her brilliance is lost in the mess of thoughts rushing through her mind at Audubon speeds, because even if she figures something out it's almost impossible for her or anyone she's explaining it to to coherently grasp it (see 'weaknesses'). But every so often, something slips through in a flash of brilliance - whether that be in a bit of innovation (take the gadget she invented in the latest episode before her canonpoint, which the others claimed was "either a spring-loaded decapitation device or it made toast") or the insight it takes to solve whatever problem they've got on their hands. Speaking of the decapitation device - which it turned out to be, for the record - it's a perfect example of how her brilliance ties into her crazy. Because why did she build that device? "That was just a random thought I had. What if you had to do battle with your arms cut off? Sure, you'd hemorrhage to death pretty quick, but at least you could take your enemy with you!"

Ahaha... ha.
UNEXPECTEDLY PRAGMATIC: Fred works through everything she faces with the utmost rationality - whether or not that rationality is based on an utterly skewed worldview is beyond the point. She has a systematic process for dealing with her life, much of which can be found spelled out pretty clearly(?) on the walls of her room. It's honestly why she managed to deal with Pylea for five full years: Someone driven by emotion would have fallen into incurable despair, living that life. Fred though, she broke it down day by day, found edible food, found a place to hide, and she dealt with it, each part in turn.

When faced with a situation, she immediately tries to approach it objectively,
READY TO FIGHT: Before Pylea, she never would've considered working with Angel Investigations. After the shit she's been through, though, she's pretty much completely desensitized to any kind of gore or disturbing imagery. The decaptiated head of their buddy up and started talking to them straight out of the basket it was sitting in, before they returned to LA, and Fred was the only one who didn't flinch even slightly. Not to mention keeping a shirt with crystallized bug guts on it 'for good memories'.

So while she's good with the books, Fred won't at all hesitate to get involved in fighting too... Especially if people she cares about are in danger. She might not know how to use all that many weapons (unless she built them herself anyway), but she's willing to learn and to try. This will only become more and more true as she sorts through her own mind and comes out of her shell a bit more.
TRIES HER BEST, ALWAYS: All in all, if you want someone you can count on in absolutely any situation, it's Fred. If you're hurt, she'll clean it up for you. If you're sick, she'll hold back your hair and maybe even clean the toilet after. If you're sad, she'll hug you and try to tell you how okay it is, even if her rationale doesn't always make coherent sense. She'll be there for you and if you're in trouble she'll try her hardest to find a way to fix it. Even if she doesn't succeed, it'll be because she actually can't fix it, not because she's scared. As strong as her survivalist instincts are, being there for someone is even more important than hanging back where it's safe.

WHAT ARE YOUR CHARACTER'S WEAKNESSES?:

SUPER SKITTISH: She's jumpy as hell. It's not cowardice so much as an intensely survivalistic mindset. Like a hunted animal, one which takes very little to feel very exposed and vulnerable. Though this will fade with time, she isn't big on new experiences - in fact, they kind of terrify her, albeit less so now than when she first got back to our dimension. Still, she feels most comfortable spending the vast majority of her time in... well, a cave. Not literally anymore, but definitely metaphorically. Her room in the Hyperion where the gang has their HQ is small, dim, and messy. It's almost enough to be considered a nest, and it makes her feel safe. If she's not in her room, she's often found under a table rather than sitting at it, or maybe curled up in a corner somewhere with a book. Ideally, the bare minimal number of people will even notice she exists - even once she's pretty comfortable with the gang in the Hyperion, she looks hella alarmed when Cordelia suggests she go out in public once in a while.

(It's worth noting that while she's nervous about monsters, she'll leap pretty readily into facing them if it realistically seems like the better option - entirely unlike her reaction to the concept of facing actual people.)

VERY UNRELIABLE NARRATOR: See, one key thing to know about Fred's time in Pylea is that over the course of those five years, she managed to fall into such a deep denial that even her memories were deluded by it. Sometime after she realized she couldn't figure out a way back home, almost without realizing it she came to believe that Pylea was all there had ever been. When Cordelia and then Angel first ask her how long she's been there, she says 'I was born here.' / 'Always.' and then has to correct herself with a little head-shake and give them the real answer. Meanwhile, the series of nonsense syllables (actually some form of language, not that she's aware of it) that she read aloud to accidentally fall into Pylea to begin with were no longer some kind of portal-opening spell in her mind, but rather, a series of important "consonant representations of a mathematical transfiguration formula" that came to her in a dream. "I used to think that if you said them out loud and in the right order the quaking and quivering would-..." Open a portal. At this point, she no longer believed that, in the same way she no longer believed she was from our dimension.

All of this leads up to the fact that the inside of her head is no longer familiar terrain. It's like she left it unattended and everything ran amok while she was gone. The walls of her cave - and subsequently, her room in the Hyperion - were covered wall to wall in writing and numbers and hieroglyphics, looking nothing short of chaotic. A pretty big chunk of one wall just says, Listen, listen, listen, listen, listen..., and when Angel asks what she's listening for, she tells him it's 'the click'. "When it all comes together and makes sense... There's like a click in your brain and then you understand things again." Writing on the walls is a quiet but desperate attempt to lay out and subsequently try to organize the contents of her mind. It doesn't much help, but that almost doesn't even matter anymore. She can't not. She has to at least try.

LOW SELF-ESTEEM: In a lot of ways, Fred's kind of starved for attention even if she doesn't actually consciously want noticed. Whenever anyone compliments her or even just goes out of their way to be around her or invite her along somewhere, she's just so completely overjoyed. It's like she can't imagine why anyone would put up with her. In fact, those are her exact words to Angel at one point, referring to herself as 'boring ol' Fred' and then 'Nutty-ol'-goonie-bird-up-in-her-room-doin'-nothin'-but-moochin'-off-Angel Fred'. She also apologizes a lot for taking up anybody's time, or being a bother. Her self-esteem isn't the best, and even when she's brilliant at something, she's super modest to the point of self-depreciation. Instead of accepting credit as part of the group, she says something like, "I'm mostly just here for the ice cream."
ATTACHES HARD: Basically, Fred does this thing where she picks a person (typically a hero-type, someone she can really look up to and even crush on in this hopelessly futile sort of way) and kind of depends on them for her entire sense of progress and stability outside of whatever cave she's created for herself.

In canon, this was Angel. He found her in Pylea, and upon realizing Angel was in fact not a figment of her imagination, she absolutely lit up. When he had to leave, it was like ripping a lollipop out of a child's hand, the way she deflated - and that was less than a day after meeting him. Fast-forward 'til they've got her back in our dimension, and she spends three months basically holed up in a single hotel room, all because Angel disappeared directly after she got there and he was basically all of the courage she had. Then he came back, and in the same breath that she shrugged off his absence ("Hey, no, you had things you had to take care of. And it's not like I need a babysitter or..."), she made painfully clear how much of an impact his absence made ("You're sticking around now, right??"). And all of a sudden, with Angel back, she started making progress toward stability again.

It won't be quite so bad in Wayward Pines - Angel pulled her through the initial steps, the most fundamental crucial effort to try and help her become okay, and that's not something that she'll need from anyone else in the future. That doesn't mean she won't need help, and it definitely doesn't mean she won't pick some poor heroic sap to attach to, but at least she'll be able to kinda-sorta function without them?
KINDA OBNOXIOUS: Though very few people will ever see the state of her walls in-game, it really doesn't take more than a few seconds in her company to pick up on the gist of it. She's scattered at best, switching from topic to topic in a series of run-on sentences. Cordelia, the 'flighty one' before Fred came along, says, "Next to me, you're downright linear." (Which, in her defense, was in response to: "I-, I never understood that saying 'right as rain.' How is rain right? Or wrong, for that matter. Okay, I suppose if there's a flood it's wrong. And speaking of floods, or maybe just being overwhelmed - what's it like to have a vision?" EXAMPLE RIGHT THERE.) She doesn't seem to realize she's talking out loud half of the time, or that some of the stuff she rambles about is off-putting or overbearing. So, uh. Sorry Pines. :')

All in all, most of the things detailed here have been improving a ton over the past few episodes... But arriving in a new place, especially one like The Pines in which residents' concept of reality is a bit fucky anyway, is going to kick her back into old habits in a big way.

WHAT EVENTS OR CIRCUMSTANCES IN YOUR CHARACTER'S PAST HAVE IMPACTED THEM THE MOST?:

PYLEA: There's something to be said for spending the entirety of the last five years in a hell dimension in which your options as a human were to do impossible manual labor until your body broke down or to refuse and end up losing your head. Literally. It's not pretty. Or at least it wouldn't be, if the special effects team didn't work for minimum wage and a seasonal bus pass. Either way, despite the fact that Fred managed to disable her collar and escape relatively early on, she still lived a life of fear and starvation in a remote cave outside of the 'kingdom' for nearly half a decade.

Basically every single 'weakness' he has today came from her time in Pylea, but they're here to stay.
RESCUE: While her time in the hell dimension shaped her weaknesses, her rescue and her time with Angel & co. since she's been back have been absolutely crucial in helping her dig her strengths back out of the chaos in her mind. When her parents finally find her just before her canonpoint, she almost went home to Texas with them but turned back because she realized that Angel Investigations and all of the chaos and danger that goes with it are right where she belongs.

WHAT MOTIVATES YOUR CHARACTER?:

SURVIVAL: Honestly, whether or not she's in physical danger does not change the fact that a really intense part of her psyche is 100% motivated by Staying Alive. In her head, she's still in Pylea - she's still fighting for her life, hiding, barely socializing because socializing still triggers a fear response in the safety of the hotel.
OVERCOMING HER ISSUES: Look, I'm gonna level with you here. Fred knows she's crazy. She does, and as easy as it is to hide in her room and her thoughts, a part of her is always searching for the moment when things 'click' and suddenly make sense. That's her baseline, is hiding but still hoping for a way out of the mental disarray. Then once she starts actively trying to re-achieve some sense of 'normal', every little sign of progress is a Big Deal to her.
ANGEL & CO.: Her friends are everything she fights for, and they're what she aspires to be. She wants to be brave like them, smart like them (well - smart like Wesley, she's pretty smart in general but he's the one who impresses her there), good at being okay like them. She really looks up to basically everyone in their group, and if they're in trouble, she'll put aside even her most ingrained apprehension to charge into battle for them. The same goes for any close friends she might latch onto here.

WHAT IMPRESSION DO OTHERS TEND TO HAVE OF YOUR CHARACTER?:

SWEETHEART: She's pretty much the sweetest human being to ever exist. Like, at the very least she's in the Top 10. She's always just so genuine with everyone, all the time. (see: "basically a disney princess")
NERVOUS: Fred is just. So anxious, all the time. She's always in the smallest space she can find - preferably small and dark, but just small works fine. Closets are great to hide in, and even when she's out with the rest of the group, you'll find her under a table or at the very least curled up in a tiny ball in an armchair. She seems to feel safer curled up with her knees to her chest, or hiding behind her hands. (see: "super skittish")
CRAZY: She's most definitely at least somewhat out of her mind. Really, you don't even have to meet her to pick up on it. Just listen to her talk to someone else, or even notice her from afar. ...Assuming she's outside for once, which at this point isn't terribly likely. (see: "very unreliable narrator")

IN WHAT WAYS DOES THAT IMPRESSION DIFFER FROM WHO YOUR CHARACTER REALLY IS?:

HOW DOES YOUR CHARACTER HANDLE CRISIS OR ADVERSITY?:

(see: unexpectedly pragmatic)

alone

Angel

WHICH 5 THINGS WILL YOUR CHARACTER REMEMBER UPON ARRIVAL, AND WHY DID YOU CHOOSE THEM?:

THE PHRASE TO OPEN THE HELL DIMENSION (BUT NOT WHAT IT IS): It's basically a series of nonsense syllables, or "consonant representations of a mathematical transfiguration formula" as she puts it. (How the fuck will I ever bullshit physics at a grad school level?) Basically, it's something for her to repeat obnoxiously until she remembers what it does and then is suddenly horrified with herself for saying even one time, let alone how many times she said it.
ANGEL: She won't remember his name or maybe even his face properly (I'm undecided), but she'll sure as fuck remember that there's somebody who saved her from either metaphorical or literal hell and she owes them everything and has no idea what to do without them.
THE NAMES "CORDY", "WESLEY", and "CHARLES": Basically an 'if found, return to (these names)' stamp in memory format. She has no idea who these people are. Just that finding them is important and means things are okay. Possibly that finding them will help her reach the above person whose name escapes her. This and the above memory, I picked because they connect her to other people - even if none of these names are the people in Wayward Pines, it's at least proof that safety lies with others instead of alone.
SHE LIVED IN A CAVE FOR LIKE... A BUNCH OF YEARS: Enough that it blurred together. Enough that she doesn't know who she was before the cave. She knows it was safer in the cave, but not why. I picked this because it's kind of important for her to have at least a tiny frame of reference for why she's so fucked up. Having none whatsoever I think would screw her up even worse.
TACOS: They're fucking amazing. She wants them like... all the time. I picked this because I'm craving tacos.

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU FEEL WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER?:

"Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived all alone in a horrible cave, so far from home that it made her chest hurt. And every day in that horrible cave, the girl tried to figure out a way to escape. None of her plans ever succeeded of course and she'd almost given up hopin' when one day, just like in a fairy tale, a handsome man rode up on a horse and saved her and took her back to his castle. Now, you'd think that was the end, wouldn'tcha? Dumb old fairy tales and their 'happily ever afters'. But, see, the minute they got back to the castle, the handsome man went away again. And even though she didn't mean to - didn't want to - high up in that castle the girl just built herself another cave, hoping that he would save her again. But you can't save me this time, can you?"

SKILLS, ABILITIES, & PHYSICAL WEAKNESSES:

INTELLIGENCE: Her "brilliant mathematical mind, immense knowledge of quantum physics and science, and a natural ability in designing inventions", quoted from the Wiki. Wes at one point says she's "smarter than the rest of them put together". She was specifically sent to a hell dimension by her grad school professor for potentially being smarter and better at physics than he was, so. There's that. Also, inventing. She can invent the fuck outta shit, very mechanically inclined. She could probably even fix a car or something of that scale, given it's something she's physically strong enough to do and she has enough time to think it through.
DEXTERITY: She's alarmingly good at stealth. (In Pylea, it was shown that she sneaked up on a group of armed men as effectively as an actual literal vampire.) Additionally, when she runs the hell away from danger, she's pretty nimble at it.
CONSTITUTION: She's pretty great at dealing with extreme starvation situations, not to mention being able to metaphorically or even literally stomach almost any combination of things. (There was a 'tree-bark enchilada' phase. It wasn't so great, but it fed her?? so.)
CHARISMA: Passing right over the shit mentioned up in strengths & weaknesses: A semi-strength is the fact that, being small and innocent-seeming, the majority of people underestimate her in general. In an active hostage situation, she managed to get ahold of a crossbow specifically because she was so strongly underestimated. (This also plays into INT, because she uses it to her advantage.)
DEXTERITY (again): She may be nimble and quiet and quick, but until she calms the fuck down as a general rule, her fine motor control is mildly fucky. Her hands jitter about as badly as the rest of her if she's even remotely worked up (excited counts), so asking her to do precision shit is probably a no-go unless she can focus strongly enough to distract from her jitters.
STRENGTH: Physically, she's a little bitty totally-human girl whose muscle is geared toward survival rather than combat, and she has finally regained a decently healthy weight but that doesn't mean she hasn't lived on absolutely godawful nutrition for the past fifth or so of her life. Her body's not in great shape. Additionally, almost all of her skills and physical strengths come after her canonpoint, including pretty much all fighting ability. Something to work toward, I guess?

INVENTORY:

A shirt covered in crystallized bug goop.
The rest of her outfit.
A shin-height square device, self-built, which apparently throws small axes with decent accuracy.
A small axe.

SAMPLES

PROSE-HEAVY:

three weeks, two days, six hours, and fifty-nine minutes. that's how long it's been since she woke up in the glaring fluorescence of the hospital. there weren't really any clocks handy, but once she found one she did the math - y'know, with the position of the sun and how long the halls were and how long it would've taken to walk down them and also how far she walked before she found the sheriff, which wasn't very far but it was still a couple of minutes and even a couple of minutes are important. some people don't have a couple of minutes left.

well, maybe here they do. people get to live a life in paradise here, that's what everyone keeps saying, and fred didn't really believe them but then this morning she saw a couple just walking down the street with an arm full of veggies from the farmer's market, smiling and holding hands like they didn't have a problem in the world. she almost asked them if it was real. hell, she almost just plain said hi, but fred couldn't quite do it. she just watched them until they disappeared around the corner, then she headed down to the river.

that's where she's at now, is the river. she spent the first twenty minutes scrambling to dig and pack down a pretty decent hole in the rocky sand, not a hole-hole so much as an indent dip in the bank to curl up in where she can't be spotted from back in the woods. despite that, her hands linger curled up by her face, arms tucked in between her knees and her chest. part of her itches to go back inside, the call of the little bitty spare room closet in the house they say is hers is tugging at her like she's positively charged and that dark little corner is negative. or maybe it makes more sense, she reasons, to say she's negatively charged and the closet is positive. it sure does feel positive, and she feels a little negative herself.

but angel told her, not just once but again and again and again that she needs to get out in the world sometimes... and as easy as it'd be to say that he's not here so it doesn't count, she still can't help but want to do this right by him.

DIALOGUE-HEAVY: network post from the box