Post by WINIFRED BURKLE on Apr 21, 2010 15:45:17 GMT -5
WINIFRED LOUISE BURKLE
IN-CHARACTER
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FULL NAME: Winifred Louise Burkle
NICKNAMES: Winifred almost exclusively goes by Fred, although Lorne has a variety of nicknames for her, and she’s pretty sure that some people call her Crazy Girl behind her back
DATE OF BIRTH: 12th October, 1978
AGE: Twenty-two
SPECIES: Human
ABILITIES: Fred has no abilities per se, but she has genius-level intelligence, and can solve mathematical and physics-related problems in her head. She's also extremely talented at inventing things, in particular, weapons.
FANDOM: Angel
PERSONALITY:To the casual observer, Fred seems, to put it politely, crazy. She wasn’t always that way; brought up in Dallas, Texas, Fred had a very nice, normal life until she left to go to Los Angeles for grad school. She lived with her parents and was a history major for her under-grad, despite having a love of mathematics from a very early age; it wasn’t until she took a physics class in grad school that she realised quite how much she loved the mathematical sciences. She’s good at them, too; even with her mind not quite being straight yet, it’s clear to anyone who talks to her for more than five minutes (when she’s likely to ask about food and then Angel, and then possibly go and talk to a plant) that Fred is highly intelligent…she just doesn’t have the right outlet for it yet. She wouldn’t admit it, since she’s extremely grateful to Angel for saving her life and letting her tag along, but Fred misses physics a lot; in the lab was where she felt at home when in LA, and there are a lot of breakthroughs that she’s missed out on, what with being a cow-slave in a cave for the past five years. She might not come out of her room particularly often, but she’s devouring any physics or mathematics journal she can get her hands on. Fred also seems a lot more innocent than she really is; she’s been through a lot in her life, despite only being in her early twenties, but those experiences have left her with a wide-eyed view of the world – things are all so new, still, and she’s likely to get distracted by an ice cream stall or a bookstore—at least, she would if she went out in the world, definitely giving the impression that she’s very childlike. That’s just the crazy talking, though. And speaking of talking, Fred likes to do that. A lot. She only had herself for company for the last five years of her life and she still narrates almost everything she does in long, run-on sentences; she realises that it probably gets on people’s nerves when she takes five minutes to get to her point, but she can’t help it. Talkin’ too much is better than not talkin’ at all, in her opinion.
However much she talks, though, people still seem to underestimate Fred. Whether it’s because they know she spent the last five years in a kind of hellish dimension or simply because she’s a not particularly large girl, she’s noticed that people seem to be surprised when she does something that’s perfectly sane, or pulls out a crossbow and shoots the damn vampires in the heart (if all vamps were like Angel, the world would be a whole lot better off). Sure, Fred knows that she’s crazy – she’s trying so hard not to be, but she can’t quite let go of her past – but is it really so strange that she can kinda fight? She’s never going to be a slayer or anything, but that’s okay; as long as she doesn’t die, she’s happy. Fred survived another dimension; she’s not going to die just yet, thanks very much. Perhaps it’s because she’s unassuming that people underestimate her; Fred doesn’t think very much of herself at all, and especially on something that she’s never done before (she knows she’s good at physics, but stopping a ghostly boyfriend from killing his still-alive girlfriend, not so much), she’s liable to talk herself down. It’s a survival technique, really; if she doesn’t expect too much of herself, if she has no real dreams and no high self-esteem, then it won’t matter when everything crumbles and she’s sucked back through a portal and she loses it all again. That’s what she’s scared of, really; Fred doesn’t know where she belongs anymore, and it shows in the way that she behaves. She clings to the people that she knows like a limpet, and when they’re not there, she hides away in her little room. She’s still waiting to be saved; she just doesn’t know who’s going to save her anymore.
Fred isn’t one of those people who puts on a huge façade and is completely different internally; what you see is pretty much what you get. However, even she has some things that she doesn’t want broadcast to the world, or perhaps are just facets of her personality that people don’t tend to see when they look at the small, crazy girl from Texas. The biggest thing that Fred has inside is strength; sure, she’s not physically particularly strong and would probably be killed in five minutes if she didn’t have Angel or Gunn around, but there’s no denying that courage is something that she has in bounds. She doesn’t realise it, most of the time, given that she spends her time around proper world-saving hero types, but there’s no way that she would have survived Pylea without it—it’s not the same kind of bravery that Angel, say, has, but it’s a good kind to have, all the same. She also has a huge survival instinct: she is not going to die. Fred doesn’t mean ever, because everybody dies eventually, unless you happen to be a vampire in which case you’re already technically dead and now undead so actually, it doesn’t count, but she can survive a lot of adversity even when the odds are stacked against her. Sure, surviving made her a little crazy, but she’s still alive; having survived Pylea, Fred feels like she can get through anything. When you’ve been a starving fugitive slave, nothing else seems particularly major, especially when you’ve not quite managed to reintegrate yourself with normal society yet. Pylea changed her a lot; not just in regards to her sanity, but in her whole outlook on life. It opened her eyes up to the demon world, for a start, something that she’d not previously considered (aliens, yes, but not demons), but it’s also made her scared. She doesn’t show it, hiding behind her smile and her willingness to do anything so that she’s accepted, but Fred is really scared. She feels so lost, and though she tries to tell herself that it was a story – it was all something that happened in a story – she hasn’t managed to reconcile herself with the new Fred yet. It’s why she can’t go back to her old life; her parents and friends knowing what happened will make it all real, and it can’t be real because it’s so horrible and she’s so lost. She’s trying so hard to not be scared anymore, but the truth is Fred thinks she’s always going to be a little lost. But then, they all seem a little lost at Angel Investigations; Fred likes the idea of it being a place for lost souls to fight evil together, though she’d like it even better if she counted herself among those souls.
Fred’s interests and strengths lie generally in the same area; it makes sense, logically, given that you are more likely to excel at something that you enjoy doing. For Fred, these are the things that got her the ‘nerd’ label at college; physics, mathematics, design. She first fell in love with physics at grad school and hasn’t looked back since; if she’d not fallen into the portal that took her to Pylea, Fred would definitely have been a top physicist by now. She finds it fascinating, and adores problem solving; wrapping her head around things that seem extremely complicated at first but have their basis in what is essentially a simple mathematical formula or the basics of quantum mechanics always leaves her feeling successful. She likes plants; she’s always found them a great source of information, and better at holding a conversation than a lot of people, and it’s nice to be back in a place where she knows what’s safe to eat and what’s poisonous—not that she has to eat plants or anything, ‘cause Angel’s always real good with bringing her ice cream or tacos or pizza or all three. Fred likes conspiracy theories; she doesn’t always believe them, but she likes investigating the truth and finding out how plausible a scenario is; she always liked the idea that there was a whole load of secret stuff going on that the government never knew about. She guesses that she was closer to the mark that she realised, what with now living in a world where her boss is a demon, and it’s certainly true that the theories have less interest for her now; the real world has enough for her to learn about, and Fred finds demonology extremely interesting, even if she’s never going to be as good at research as Wesley is.
Since coming back, the things Fred likes have become far more real and important to her than before. She loves to spend time with her friends – at least, she thinks they’re her friends, Angel, Cordy, Gunn, Wes and Lorne, but even if they’re not they’re all nice to her and she likes Angel especially because he saved her from the monsters and is real good looking and makes her go all giggly whenever she’s around him – although, ‘spending time’ usually equates to creeping along the landing of the Hyperion and listening to their conversations. That’s enough for now. She writes on any surface she can find, trying to make what happened to her into a story so that she can deal with it, and she loves the idea of having a home. She’s not quite found it yet, but she’s sure it’ll come; it has to come, because otherwise she spent five years trying to stop being a cow and get back home only for there not to be a home for her anymore, and that would just be terrible. If she sticks with her friends long enough, Fred’s sure she’ll find a place to call home. She’s very near to it already. Perhaps the biggest material pleasure in her life, though, is food; Fred will eat anything, and she’ll eat it in huge quantities. She thinks she has an excuse (which also works well as her excuse for being so thin) – she spent five years starving in a hell dimension; anything that America can offer is so tasty that she just wants more of it. For someone as small as she is, Fred really can eat a horse, and she doesn’t feel guilty about it, either; she sees no reason to. Food tastes good.
The things that Fred dislikes are much less obvious; aside from the vampire population at large (excluding Angel, seeing as how he’s got a soul and is good and saved her life), and demons that try to kill people and pretty much everything that they deal with on a daily basis, she is so happy to be back in this dimension that she likes everything, or at least is neutral about it. Even things she didn’t like before she accidentally opened the portal, like poetry or sad movies or practical jokes, don’t seem so bad anymore; she guesses her definition of dislike has changed—she really doesn’t like being called a cow, or having nothing to eat, or living in a cave with nobody but herself to talk to, or electric shock collars or…well, Fred could probably write a book on the bad things about Pylea. Lorne would probably help her. She also has a hugely rational hate of dimensional portals and a fear of what lies within them, given that the last time she saw one, it ruined her life; she cannot believe that any alternate dimension would be a good place to go, and to be honest, she has no idea what she would do if she happened to come across another portal (and avoided being sucked in). But it’s not going to happen; she’s just got her life back, she’s not about to lose it again. She also hates crowds, and people she doesn’t know; when faced with strangers, Fred’s just as likely to hide under a table or run back to her room as she is to actually say hello fairly lucidly – there’s no predicting what her reaction will be, however. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t like new people, but she guesses it’s because she was alone for so long; she’s still getting used to a handful of people, and anything more than that is a little overwhelming for her.
Mostly, though, Fred hates what happened to her. Not the dimension, specifically (although, Pylea? She’s never going back there), but rather how it made her; she doesn’t like being crazy. Nobody would, but she knows her brain’s addled and she can’t be who she was—Fred misses that Fred. She misses going to classes and being top and having Professor Seidel give her harder things to do and telling her that she’s the best student he’s ever had…she missed hanging out with her friends or in the library and going home for the holidays…she’s yet to reconcile herself with the new Fred, even though there’s good things about her too. She finds it very hard to accept what happened in Pylea; she’s made it into a story so it doesn’t have to be real, so that it’s just some girl called Fred and not something that really happened to her, but it’s not working. She’s lost, and she hates being lost but she doesn’t know how to find herself or her place in the world; she hates what Pylea made her into.
Fred is worried that she’s never really going to have a home; she can’t go back to her parents because that would make everything that happened in Pylea too real for her (plus she likes working with Angel and everyone and fighting evil with them, even if she’s not too good with the fighting just yet), and there was the hotel for a while but that didn’t really count, and now they’re in Sunnydale and that’s not home either—Fred doesn’t want the only place she’s felt comfortable in the last five years to be a cave, of all places; she wants to find a home. Not just in a roof-over-her-head sense, but somewhere she belongs. She wants to be accepted, really, by Angel and Angel’s team and just by people, actually. It’s been hard for Fred to reintegrate herself with society, but she’s trying; she just doesn’t like too many people. She’s not anything much, really; she’s not a champion like Angel, not brave like he is or good at fighting, but she dreams of being able to do real good in the world – stopping demons, fighting vampires who want to suck people’s blood and then take over the world, closing up all the dimensional portals in existence…Fred knows that she’s not going to be a champion, not like Angel, but she’d like to matter, somehow, so she’s not just the crazy girl who spend five years as a cow in another dimension. Really, though, so long as she doesn’t get sucked into another portal and have to spend a chunk of her life in a cave in a place where her kind are cow-slaves and have to wear a collar that gives them all electric shocks, she’s happy; Fred doesn’t have any great ambitions or dreams anymore. She’s seen how easy it is for them to be snatched away by some bad magic-slash-luck. Although it would be great if there was an abundance of tacos; Fred loves tacos.
But now...now things are different. Fred’s found herself in another strange world, and she doesn’t know how to deal. There’s no Angel, and she needs Angel; she’s only just got here, but Fred’s already pretty sure that any progress she made in Los Angeles has been scrapped. She swore she was never going to go to another dimension again and it wasn’t like she said weird words this time so there was no portal as such—and Angel promised he’d protect her from that, and now she’s here, and it’s scary and she doesn’t know anybody, and Fred does not want to have to be a slave again! She wants to go home, and until she does, she’s just looking for somewhere to hide herself away so she doesn’t have to talk to anybody and can figure out where she is and how to get back—being in this place probably won’t kill her, because Pylea didn’t kill her, but it’ll make her crazy again. Well, crazier; she was already pretty crazy.
HISTORY:Fred was a clever child. She found school a breeze, and though she never really had any clear idea of what she wanted to do, there was no doubt that she would go on to college and then grad school. Being academically talented meant that Fred got teased a lot at school, as well as for her too-large glasses, but if she was honest, it never really bothered her; she usually had her nose in a book and didn’t hear what was going on around her, anyway. She had a very happy home life, and it wasn’t an easy decision for her to decide to go away to grad school; she made lists of the pros and cons, but eventually they realised that she needed to go somewhere where she’d be challenged intellectually, and where she could start to learn to fend for herself (it was because she was so bored at school that she started smoking weed in eleventh grade, and it still didn’t appear to affect her standard of work any). She majored in history; it wasn’t that she had a particular interest in it, but more that she didn’t have a clue what she wanted to be and it seemed like a good choice to give her options once she graduated. It was two weeks into her first semester that she took her first physics class with Professor Seidel, though, and immediately afterwards, she went straight to the student admissions person and switched her major to physics; it had lit something in side her that she’d not known was there before, and although she’d always had a vague interest in science and engineering, Fred was suddenly sure that it was what she wanted to do.
She was good at it. Really good at it. The fact that she’d never shown a real interest before didn’t matter, as she not only caught up with her peers but overtook them, never getting below an A on any of her work. She was fast-tracked through a lot of the work, and she spent her spare time working in the library, finding herself surrounded by books as a comforting environment away from the lab. They were the two places she felt happiest, until May 7th. It’s a date she’s not likely to forget in a hurry. It was her curiosity that was at fault, really; Fred saw these strange words in a book and simply had to try and pronounce them, and it was that which opened the portal and sent her to Pylea. Her past there isn’t something she particularly wants to think about. She was a slave, wearing a shock collar that sent electricity through her every time she did something ‘wrong’, and then she was a fugitive, and then she was a crazy fugitive in a cave, writing out her dreams on a wall ‘cause there was no way that a place like Los Angeles, where she wasn’t a cow-slave, actually existed outside of her mind. There were no such things as tacos or science or libraries, just crazy ol’ Fred writing on walls and trying to make sense of something that couldn’t be untangled. She was alone for so long that she forgot what talking to other people was like, how to be in a social environment. She was just Fred in her cave, trying not to get executed.
And then there was Angel. Sometimes Fred thinks of her life as ‘before Pylea’, ‘Pylea’, and ‘after Pylea’, but sometimes she thinks of it in terms of the handsome man who saved her from her death. He gave her hope again, when she thought that her ideas about another world were just crazy talk, and she looked after him when he couldn’t fight his own demons. He’d fought hers for her, so even if she couldn’t fight his, she could at least show support. Fred isn’t scared of Angel. She’s not even scared of the monster he became in Pylea, and so his bumpy vampire face in this world isn’t terrifying in the slightest—and given how many things scare Fred, even the smallest, seemingly insignificant of things, this is a note of significance. To be honest, she’s a little fuzzy on what happened after Angel recovered from discovering what his demon-self looked like, what with all the fighting the demons and Cordy being queen – since the only thoughts running through her head were about the handsome man who’d saved her, and how she hoped that her hopes of finally getting out of Pylea to the place she thought she’d imagined but now seemed to be a memory rather than a figment of her imagination weren’t going to be dashed – but anyway, they ended up back in LA. It was weird; she’d spent so long believing that it couldn’t exist, and then she was there. Just like that; five years of scribbling on her cave walls and convincing herself that it was only a dream, because the idea of being stuck in Pylea when there was a world that she actually belonged to out there was too terrible to comprehend, and then this group of people sweeps in and saves her, hardly breaking a sweat. It would have been almost annoying, if she hadn’t been so grateful to be back.
She trusted them all, but Fred still couldn’t leave her room; she missed the safety of her cave, and especially when Angel took off and wasn’t there to protect her, she knew it wasn’t safe out there. They were all very good at bringing her food, and trying to entice her to come out, and a couple of times she even got as far as the top of the stairs with them before scurrying back inside her room, but most of the time, if she had a conversation, Fred had it through the door. She couldn’t even have the door open. It wasn’t safe with the door open, and then they’d be able to see all her craziness all over the walls and Fred really didn’t want that. However, she was beginning to think that things were beginning to get better – she’d stopped writing on the walls so much, although that might have been because she’d run out of available space, and she could stand on the balcony and watch Angel Inc going about its business, and she asked every day if Angel was back that – and then she was whisked away from the world, the thing that scared her more than anything. There might not have been a portal, and she might not have read from a strange-looking book, but it was another dimension alright. And she’s only just got here, but Fred already know she can’t stand it; she’s got nobody she trusts around and she’s terrified. She has no place to live and no nice caves to secret herself in, and all the progress she was making – and even if it wasn’t obvious, there was progress – has been erased, just like that. The last time she felt this lost, she’d just landed in Pylea. This time, Fred isn’t sure there’s going to be a knight in shining armour to save her. That kinda thing only happens once.
ROLEPLAY SAMPLE:Sunnydale was weird. Alright, so Fred thought Los Angeles had been weird, as different as it had been to Pylea, but, if possible, Sunnydale was stranger. It was smaller, which was definitely a plus for someone who could just about walk to the end of the street on their own, if it was daylight and they had a stake up their sleeve, but there were definitely more demony creatures around. That wasn’t such a good thing. Lorne was okay, and Angel of course, but other than them, Fred would have been perfectly happy never to see a demon again. Not all of them were bad, although vampires certainly set the bar pretty low when it came to that, but it was still weird that there were creatures that weren’t human on Earth. Out in space, sure, there were aliens, but they were highly sophisticated and wouldn’t be coming to Earth because everything here was far too primitive; occasionally they sent scouts to check it out, but the majority of the time, aliens left well alone. There had been the Roswell incident, of course, but that was a rare occurrence; they were too smart to get caught. Demons seemed to be the opposite; Fred had noticed that they were almost exclusively thick (and that was a technical term, of course, although if it was anything like those government tests she’d had to do, they wouldn’t have even got past the first page), but that didn’t make them any the less dangerous, or even less scary. She might have been able to beat them at a game of chess, but Fred had yet to meet any demons who played board games. They just seemed to like those games where they chased you through cemeteries until you couldn’t run any longer and had to be saved by Gunn or Wesley, and really, Fred wasn’t a fan of those games in the slightest.
All this, then, didn’t explain why Fred was currently walking down the streets of Sunnydale, arms wrapped tightly around herself and a stake in hand, not bothering to try and hide it from those people who were passing by; they probably weren’t even looking at her, just another girl trying to sneak by in the shadows. Except that Fred was avoiding the shadows; she purposely stepped in every sodium coloured patch of light from the street lamps, looking all around her before hurrying into the next puddle of orange light. She had to get to the Magic Box; she had heard a noise in the house and she was pretty sure it wasn’t just the creaking of the wind, and there would be someone in the shop who could make sure that she wasn’t about to become some vampire’s dinner. Fred didn’t want to be dinner. She didn’t think she’d taste particularly nice, because she was all skin and bones, but that probably wouldn’t stop someone who was hungry. They tended not to be picky, at least from what she had seen – and Fred did everything she could to avoid seeing dead people. They freaked her out, and for Fred that meant hiding in a small, dark space and having to be coaxed out with Chinese food or chips. “Nothing’s gonna eat you,” she told herself as she hopped from one lit area to the next, huddling in on herself so that she was as small and inconspicuous as possible, “you’ve got a stake.” Fred looked down at the stake in her hand, twisting it around nervously. “Like you’re gonna help. You’re just a pointy bit of wood, an’ I’m just Fred, an’ it’s gotta be really hard to get you into a vampire’s heart even though Angel an’ everyone makes it look all easy ‘cause you’ve got to get through all the layers of skin an’ then—”
She stopped talking. Actually, that was a lie; Fred carried on talking, but no sound came out of her mouth. Huh. She had been talking, she knew she had, because Fred often talked to herself in an attempt to make herself less lonely or scared, and...now she wasn’t. That was weird. She tried to clear her throat and speak again, but still nothing. She looked around her, and the other people on the street seemed to be having the same problem. Okay, so now it had stopped being weird, and was just freaky. And scary. And she had nowhere to hide because she thought it had been a good idea to come out and find someone to sit with her, and now Fred really, really wished she could crawl under a table and wait until somebody found her voice for her. She was running now, stake gripped tightly in her hand, raised in case this was somehow the fault of an errant vampire playing with magic, and she reached the Magic Box in record time now that she was more worried about not being able to speak and less about staying in the light spots on the pavement. She burst through the doors, not even looking around as she ran through the shop and half-dived under the table, knocking over a chair as she wriggled herself underneath. The sound of it clattering to the ground was loud against the silence of the world.
Now that she felt safer (and okay, so maybe the crazy hadn’t completely worked itself out of her head yet), Fred crawled forward slightly, taking a look at the shop directly in her line of sight. Two pairs of legs. Two pairs of men’s legs. Okay, that wasn’t bad; there were lots of men who came in here, and maybe one of them was Charles or even Angel himself, back from wherever it was he disappeared to, and they could tell her why she couldn’t talk now and kill the thing that was doing it and make sure everything went right again. She liked it when it was right; she liked this world a lot. It got less fun when her voice disappeared for no good reason, especially when it was at night and she didn’t know where anyone was and she didn’t think she could really use her stake – she should probably get Gunn to train her a bit, so she was more effective with something other than the crossbow (because really, that was far too conspicuous to just carry around casually. People’d ask questions). One of her hands curled around the leg of the table, the other still held the stake raised, Fred peered up at the people in the Magic Box.
OUT-OF-CHARACTER
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NAME/ALIAS: Becca
AGE: Eighteen
ROLEPLAY EXPERIENCE: Six years, approx
CONTACT: PM please
FUN FACT! Uhh...I read books about quantum physics for fun. Seriously.[/BLOCKQUOTE]
