Mods of BTR (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beyondriftmods) wrote2015-01-02 08:27 pm
beyondriftmods) wrote2015-01-02 08:27 pm
Entry tags:
Application
Please, fill out the following and comment to this post with it. If you'd prefer, you can send in your application via e-mail (mods@beyondtherift.com) where the entire process will remain private. Refer to this post for an explanation of what we're looking for. Remember when applying, you have a week from your acceptance to intro within the game.
Please, add the name of your character in the subject line. You can place part #s beside the name in the subject if you'd like but make certain the name is there.
This is for AU applications only. Please check our AU Guidelines before applying.
We will wait two weeks before processing applications in casts that are over the size of ten. In addition, there is now a two week wait between applications for the same mun. You apply for one and get accepted, but then have to wait two weeks to apply for another character.
When you have two active characters in game, you can apply for a cameo character. Information about what kind of characters qualify for cameo status is here.
If you've been on hiatus, please, don't apply until you have returned to full activity (there's a two week wait generally).
Please, direct any questions regarding the application to this post or to the mod e-mail.
APPLICATIONS ARE CLOSED
Please, add the name of your character in the subject line. You can place part #s beside the name in the subject if you'd like but make certain the name is there.
This is for AU applications only. Please check our AU Guidelines before applying.
We will wait two weeks before processing applications in casts that are over the size of ten. In addition, there is now a two week wait between applications for the same mun. You apply for one and get accepted, but then have to wait two weeks to apply for another character.
When you have two active characters in game, you can apply for a cameo character. Information about what kind of characters qualify for cameo status is here.
If you've been on hiatus, please, don't apply until you have returned to full activity (there's a two week wait generally).
Please, direct any questions regarding the application to this post or to the mod e-mail.
APPLICATIONS ARE CLOSED
Winifred 'Fred' Burkle - Angel the Series
Name: Megan (Megs)
Age: 30's
Contact: mhethington@gmail.com
Past Role Playing Experience: I have been roleplaying through journal sites for over eight years now. (Fred's original LJ journal was created in 2004. I have played in small fandom settings, prompt communities as well as the larger panfandom games.
New Players (completely optional), if you'd like tell us how you found BTR: It was recommended to me by several members of your current cast.
The Character
Name: Winifred 'Fred' Burkle
Age/Birthdate: Approximately 27 years old/ September 30th
Species: Wanderer
*Type: Rift Change : Ability to become invisible
Canon:
*Pre-existing powers: None other than extreme intelligence.
*Rift Change, if applicable: Ability to become invisible.
Dreamwidth:
Played By: Amy Acker
Icon:
Appearance: At this canon point, Fred is in her mid twenties. She possesses a small frame, one that can often lead people to mistake her for being 'little' -- when she is actually 5'9" and can look most members of Angel Investigations square on. She has wide brown eyes, a clear completion long brown hair that is often curled when it isn't piled on her head and willed into compliance by a pencil or pen. There is an unintentional grace about her when she moves -- not something that is really born of thought or intent. Not that she isn't capable of considering such things, more than her mind is often already fully occupied elsewhere.
If one were to examine her more fully, they would note she also carries multiple scars aged to various degrees -- all remnants from her time in Pylea. However they are mostly always concealed by her clothing and thus not often the subject of conversation. Or common knowledge.
Personality: Fred is a complex blend of light and dark, and even though more attention is given to her lighter, brighter aspects -- it would do her a disservice to ignore the rest.
It is important to note that Fred had an extremely positive, stable childhood -- what many would identify as 'normal'. She had two present, loving parents that encouraged her growth and supported her decisions. From the choice to shorten her own name, to her ultimate choice to leave home to enter a graduate physics program in California. Partly from her own nature, but also from her home environment Fred places a high value on love and friendship. She is fiercely loyal to those she commits herself to, and views them as part of her chosen family. She would do anything for them.
Fred is also insanely curious -- sometimes to her own detriment. It is that curiosity that would ultimately contribute to her death. But before then it presents itself in other ways. In high school she gravitated towards complex conspiracy theories and explored illegal drugs. She feels compelled to touch and explore things, to know them for herself. She asks a great deal of questions -- both verbally and internally -- and is the sort who's mind never stops. She also enjoys building things with her hands, creating something that did not exist before. All this contributed to her changing her major from history to physics.
Her time in Pylea (unknowingly banished there by the professor she adored and idolized) affected her on a deep, emotional level. This was a girl that truly grew up surrounded by love, confident in her parents support and comfortable in her own skin. Even in the AtS comic series, well after Fred's death deeper flashbacks continue to give evidence of that. She had her steady high school boyfriend who carved their name into the oak in the backyard. Took dance lessons. Had a mother who drove the school bus and understood her love of the library, often picking her up there at the end of her route. She intended to study history in college but ultimately found her true calling in physics -- a change she trusted her own heart enough to follow. All after one guest lecture.
But in Pylea --- all that was taken away. She went from a complete immersion in love to a complete lack of it. At first, when she arrived in Pylea is was jarring -- but still something to be explored. Her curiosity was always fierce (and would eventually contribute to her death) and that was no less the case there. She walked. Touched. Explored. And eventually stumbled directly into her captor's hands.
Human were cattle. Degraded. Abused. Forced into literal slavery. The silver necklace her father had given her at graduation was literally ripped from her neck and taken away -- only to be replaced with a collar literally designed to bring pain and death. If could induce a simple shock. Or? Explode, and kill the wearer. And that never left her. She wore it always. Watched friends suffer with theirs, some ultimately die. She was able to explain to Cordelia very thoroughly what that kind of death looked like -- and undoubtedly lost people she cared about that way.
Ultimately, despite her delicate physique, Fred was strong. And able to manage the work. It was the emotional isolation that took the most brutal toll. She was eventually able to disable her collar and to escape her owners. But the isolation only grew that much more extreme when she was forced into dark caves to survive, and to scavenge the countryside to eat. After growing up in a home full of love and sound she spent years with no one to speak to. Literally no one. Other than the occasions she would shout and carry on into the caves, her only reply a dull echo. Eventually Fred forgot her own name. Put away all the smaller, finer details that made her her. Because the very things that infused her with the strength to survive -- family, love, their unwavering support -- also had to be forgotten so that she could continue on doing so. Because if not the loss of them could become crippling. She became the 'girl that dreamed she had a name'. The wild one standing on the hill. The woman that wrote her thoughts on the walls because it was the only medium left to her when conversation and companionship was taken away.
But ultimately? She did survive.
She initially, at least, remains that girl after she is rescued and brought to LA. She still hides under tables and writes on walls. Because that was easier than facing just how much Pylea had changed her. Again, this wasn't shyness. It was a woman forced to surrender much of who she was to survive, and still not quite able to own just how deep that ran. Fred wasn't prepared to just how bright and hollow and foreign the world she once openly walked in had become. And the changes that place had wrought in her. But the woman from before still existed, and the arrival of her parents were the spark that initiated her revival.
"I got lost. I got lost, and they did terrible things to me, but, but it was just a storybook. It was just a story with monsters, not real. Not in the world but - but if you're here and you see me then - then it's real! And it did happen. If you see what they made of me... I - I didn't mean to get so lost!"
Who she is now? Is clearly not who she was. And Fred knows it.
But she starts to come out of it the same way Fred ultimately makes decision to be strong and supportive for her friends. She chooses to do so. In same same episode just referenced, the foundation for the choice is made is a speech she gives about everyone's role within Angel Investigations.
"It's what he does. Angel's the champion, and Wesley's the brains of the operation, Gunn's the muscle and Cordy's the heart, and I'm..."
At that moment she is unable to identify her role, and that directly contributes to her initial decision to leave and return back to Texas with her folks. But after a demon mystery solved, and the realization of where her future lies? Fred starts to answer that question.
And finds her place.
She is going to be 'the glue'.
Considering the darkness witnessed in Pylea, and the pain and torture she certainly suffered there? It isn't always easy. But because of her past, and the strong foundation provided by her parents Fred is perhaps better suited to serve in that role than anyone. Angel's father is seen in canon to be distant and demeaning (even if Liam did antagonize him). Cordelia's parents non existent in their role and her father's tax evasion eventually forced her to LA with nothing. Wesley's father was verbally abusive and perhaps physically as well. And Lorne's parents openly hated him and his choices. Fred, on the other hand, knows and understands the importance of family. How beneficial, how needed it can be. Fred would not openly give up her family at home if she did not sense the opportunity to find and build a new one in LA. And she is fiercely protective of it. We see this in her conversation with Wesley in his hospital room where she tells him never to return after the kidnapping of Conor -- she is distraught at his lack of faith in them, and the family the had built together. We need it further still when she tasers Conor himself after they discover his duplicity in sending Angel to the bottom of the ocean -- and threatening the family's patriarch.
But through all her seasons Fred makes the active choice. To be better. To be stronger. To fiercely support her friends and family and hold them together as best she can. It isn't easy. But it is also everything she knows.
Though Fred suffered some very real, very serious traumas in her time in Pylea, she ultimately survives them with her mind intact. This is a great testament to her strength. She was physically tortured there and forced into hard labor, and the horrors of her life there forced her to mentally withdraw for a while. Her life before became a fairy tale and place of forgotten words and names. While this allowed for her survival, it also painted the image of a girl that was seen to be delicate and in need of protection. But is cannot be forgotten that ultimately she is a survivalist. She hid bodies and foraged for food and and survived a life that killed countless others before her. There is a core strength that is important, and she survives with her ability to love intact. Though it takes some time to find herself again she emerges not afraid of life, but simply more aware of its possibilities. Both good and bad.
'I'm so sick and tired of my chin being up.'
Removed from her labs and her sciences and her school, Fred was initially at a loss what she could bring to her new home at Angel investigations. Everyone else there seemed to have something key they could contribute. Eventually she came to feel compelled to be the support system to everything else. The importance she places on loyalty and family compels her to create a safe and positive places for the friends she has come to love -- something she senses they did not have. It is in her nature to stay positive even when things are falling apart, and to be as supportive as possible. She will keep her smile in place in the worst of time, holding on to that determination until she quite literally shatters. She is strong until the small moment she is not -- and then she demands of herself that she pull herself back together again. Until her chin is again up. She has self-identified this as something she can bring to the team and almost she almost desperately clings to it.
Fred also had a strong sense of justice -- though one that was somewhat warped be her time in Pylea. She is more than willing to not simply kill the professor that sentenced her to Pylea, but to send him there himself, knowing he would suffer and eventually die painfully. Her sense of right and wrong has been altered through her experiences. There is darker, harder edge to her that most of her friends do not see. This fault is two-sided. It is not what they want or expect from Fred, but it is also Fred sensing those expectation and doing her best to fit within them. But the harder, darker aspects of herself are always still there -- just beneath the surface.
why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting? Despite being nothing but human, Fred has experienced a great many extremes in her life. From her traditional childhood to her five years in a demon dimension, to then working for Angel and finally agreeing to be employed at Wolfram and Hart Fred continues to seek and explore. And ultimately? To understand? The puzzles and mysteries of this new environment will challenge her, as well as potentially expose some of the darker corners of her personality.
History: NA
Events: 1. Being sent to Pylea by Professor Seidel : Being pulled into a demon dimension and treated essentially as disposable livestock challenged every Fred on every level, especially mentally. She was eventually able to escape and find some level of shelter and protection in caves, but the isolation would eventually take its toll as she started to forget things as simple as her own name. However she was eventually rescued by Angel and his team -- who pulled her out and surely saved her from eventual death. The meeting also set Fred on the path she would chose to walk for the rest of her life, committing herself to Angel's cause.
2. The events of the Magic Bullet --With the rest of her friends under the thrall of a creature that sought to brainwash first LA, then the country and eventually the planet ; an odd collision of events allowed Fred to see the truth of Jasmine and what she meant to do. After attempting to gain Wesley's help only to realize he meant to turn her over to Jasmine, Fred struck out on her own and once again struggled with the isolation that almost broke her in Pylea. However she battled back, figured out how to free Angel from Jasmine's thrall and eventually how to rescue her friends. Though she still did not see it completely, Fred very much came into much of her own strength.
Writing Sample: http://paradisalogs.livejournal.com/631538.html
Accepted!
Also, since you're a new mun, we invite you to introduce yourself at our OOC community so we can welcome you!
If you have any questions or need any help at all, the mods are here to help.