Apocalypse How: Application

[cotgraveseffigy]

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Name: Gail
Age: 41
Contact: cacophony @ plurk
Character(s) in game: Bucky/Winter
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→ CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: Frederick Cotgrave
Age: 86
Canon: The Twisted Ones
Canon point: Midway through the book, after starting work on his own effigy, but before his granddaughter disappears into the otherworld


History:
In life, Frederick Cotgrave was a Welsh soldier in World War II who happened to have a grandparent who was not of this world, but another, nearby world-- faerie, maybe, or the spirit world, whatever humans called it. It drew the other people to him, called the White People in Wales and the holler people in America.

Following Ambrose, one of his friends from the war, home, Frederick joined the Society of the Embers of Dawn, where they endorsed purity from magical temptation, historical study, and an understanding of the other world-- so as to best avoid it, of course. Frederick may have been a bit in love with Ambrose, more than actually believing in anything he said, but after the horrors of the world war, he supposed anything was possible. He read the Green Book, a diary account of a teenage girl who met the White People, and at first considered most of it dreams or ramblings, until he first stumbled upon the White People himself.

He doesn't detail what happened in his journal or his notes about the Green Book, but it was bad enough to send him fleeing to a whole new continent to attempt to escape them. He drifted around for a while, chased by dreams even in the most crowded of cities, corresponding through the mail and occasional phone call with Ambrose and the other members of his Society, who he missed dreadfully. Finally in the late 70s he met a widow in North Carolina whose presence, he discovered, kept the dreams of the White People at bay for longer than he'd ever experienced alone. As he spent more time with her, he realized that her presence kept not only the dreams away for longer periods, her presence kept their servants, their poppets, away, as well. He recognized the stone in her backyard as one of theirs, a warning to their kind that this house was unpleasant to them.

So he did the logical thing: he married her. Unfortunately, she was also the most cruel, petty, angry woman he'd ever met, so the marriage was tantamount to slow torture. She hid his car keys. She needled him. She banged on his bedroom door (he had his own room rather than sleeping with her) to keep him from napping. She read his journal behind his back. When Ambrose died in the late 80s and sent his notes and the Green Book to Frederick as part of his will, she even stole that and hid it.

Frederick had been using that book to stave off dreams and intrusive thoughts about the White People, ever since he'd stumbled on the entrance to the otherworld behind his house, and the carved stones there, exactly like the carved stones described in that book, like the marker stone at the house. Without it, his thoughts wandered more than he liked. He tried to recreate the book in the hopes of keeping the White People at bay, but in the end, a couple years after he finished transcribing what he could, he wandered out into the woods, lay down for a nap, and let them have him.

The creations of the White People found him and scavenged him for parts, making another effigy, another poppet, like them. It turned out that the city beyond the stones was largely empty, with only a pair of people with the blood of the White People in their veins, and the effigies were simply creating more and more of themselves, forming their own strange society. Frederick, even with their magic in him, kept drifting back out into the human world, checking on his house and collecting materials, disappointed by the company of the other effigies. He watched his horrible wife finally leave to live in a care facility. He watched his granddaughter, Melissa AKA Mouse, finally return to start cleaning the house up, and that's when things got a little weird.

Frederick couldn't resist checking in on Mouse, and accidentally scaring her. He'd been so isolated from humanity for so long that he kind of... forgot... that he was now a horrifying collection of bones, stones, and wire. He tried to get her to let him in, to find his things and maybe find out what she'd been doing with her life since she grew up, but all she did was scream and pile things up against the doors and windows to keep him out. How disappointing!


Personality:
x Steady: It's pretty hard to rattle Frederick's nerves. He is, after all, dead. Even before that, he lived through World War II and, with the help of fellow soldiers and his studies, came out of it with a zen-like acceptance. He doesn't write of his experiences with the White People directly, but despite fleeing them, he never seems traumatized or actually afraid, as if he merely understands that joining them would be a bad idea for himself and others, and seems more bothered by his dreams about it in regards to the temptation rather than the fear.
x Patient: Frederick will wait a long time to get what he wants, and put up with a lot in the meantime. It took him years to decide he’d really had enough of his cruel wife, and give in to the calls of the otherworld. He painstakingly transcribed everything he remembered from a long and confusing manuscript, the Green Book, without complaint. He put up with his wife's maliciousness for twenty-five years, with nothing more than a few annoyed insults in his journal.
x Friendly: Frederick likes people, in general, and they tend to like him... when he’s not a scary skeletal monster, anyway. He's the type to happily people-watch all day, or strike up a conversation with a stranger. It was clear that his friends in the army were fond of him, that his friends in the order thought of him kindly, that Ambrose trusted him with the Green Book after his death, despite knowing Frederick had the interest of the White People described in it. His granddaughter by marriage remembered him as the gentle man who taught her how to draw Kilroy.
x Inhuman: Frederick only kind of remembers what it was like to be human. He's had no company but that of other effigy creatures for a long time. He's forgotten a fair bit about how to interact, and about what exactly counts as moral and good. While in life he had not quite avoided any "sin" to do with magic and the otherworld as much as he should have, once built into an effigy, the magic of the other poppets twisted his brain around as well. It seems to surprise him, in fact, that his monstrous appearance frightens people.
x Gullible: Though he's not necessarily stupid-- he's rather "book smart"-- Frederick is also not hard to convince of things if it's presented by a nice enough person. He joined a secret society largely because he liked the person who invited him. He married a terrible woman thinking she couldn't be that bad if the White People and their creations avoided her. He probably met the White People because he thought that they'd be interesting to talk to, before he realized what a bad idea it was to interact with them.

Suitability:
There aren't a lot of places a bag of animated bones and stones and deer hide can go without living in hiding, or being shot and torn apart. ADI at least will give him a chance, and that whole magical body thing when he's out in the world. Frederick has missed interacting with actual people, over the past two decades or so, and he'll stick around if just for that. He's also not terribly keen on the end of the world, having kind of seen that already, given the death of the White People and its effect on the otherworld.

Powers/Abilities:
Frederick has exactly two magical powers. One, the ability to move around despite being very dead, and to sustain himself off that power without needing to eat or drink, though he does need to sleep, or perhaps more accurately go dormant, for short periods of time. Two, the ability to imbue other constructs he makes with that same power. In this world, he can't draw on the power of the stones or the otherworld to give life to other effigies, but he instead will have to use power from the Flesh.

Entity Affinity: The Flesh. As he is made up entirely of bones and stones held together by wire, twine, and deer hide, he seems to exemplify the fear of having one's body mutilated, and of being merely "animated meat and bones". Throw in the fact that half his skeleton comes from a deer and you even get parts of the animal slaughter, as well.

Inventory: Nothing but his skin and bones and wires and stones. Frederick's effigy never really needed much, after all.

Samples:
Dialogue
Thought processes