Alessa Application
OOC Information:
Name: Smurf
Age: 20
AIM: smurfheartstrong@aim.com
E-MAIL: Aquamarine.from.ocean@gmail.com
IC Information:
Name: Alessa Gillespie
Fandom: Silent Hill
Timeline: I’m going to go with post-Origins and pre-Silent Hill 1, but the games are vague about how things work in Silent Hill, and it’s implied Alessa has psychic abilities, so she may or may not know about what will happen in the future.
Age: She looks seven, is chronologically thirteen, and probably has the mind and maturity of a thirty-four-year-old. The games are vague about the specifics.
Appearance: When she looks normal, she is a little girl with long dark hair (sometimes worn loose, sometimes in a bun) and she has blue eyes. Some of these things change because of strange continuity, but it’s basically the same. When she’s Silent Hill-ized, she’s either on fire or covered completely with third- and fourth-degree burns.
Abilities: The game’s also really vague about it. At the very least, we know that, as a child, she was psychic, had telekinesis, and she could make people die just by wishing for it. After she was burnt alive by her mother (long story), she was impregnated with God, so she developed more powers-among them being power over the town of Silent Hill (implying she can make the world switch to the Otherworld-a nightmarish place designed by the victim’s tortured psyche-make monsters based on the victim’s or her own nightmares, dragging people into Silent Hill, being able to know everything that is mentally dragging a person down, projecting her soul into the world as an ethereal or physical being, be empathic, turn people into monsters, split her soul in two, and getting her telekinesis jacked up like hell). She can also do illusions, get set on fire with minimal damage, make people see her as a girl on fire or burnt alive, and look creepy as hell.
Personality: We only know a little bit of what she was like before she was burned, but afterwards, she’s too heavily shrouded in mystery to tell that well. She was abused and neglected by her mother, so she has a general expectation that adults are going to hurt her in some way (though she is willing to trust if they show her she can trust them), and she has a similar expectation of children, since she was viciously bullied at school. Because of all the awful things that have happened to her, she can be extremely cruel and unforgiving (and she overestimates how much trauma someone can deal with before they develop life-long PTSD). On some level, I think she resents other people for their happiness, because the happiest people can sometimes also be the cruelest-they’ve never known real pain, so they don’t know what they do to others.
She gravitates towards kind-hearted people in pain and makes them prove themselves in some way by forcing them through Silent Hill and the trials the town provides, and if they get through it, she’s given them an opportunity to set themselves free. Silent Hill, in her view, is hell, and if you survive hell, you have atoned for your sins and left your deep-seated traumas behind you. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. It works like that at times, but at other times it leaves the survivor a broken shell. She doesn’t really know what it means to be happy, so I think she probably sees the shells as successes too-they’re alive and have atoned.
Although just because she can be cruel doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a soft side. If someone is kind to her, she is theirs, completely and utterly. All she wants in life is to be loved, and if someone provides for that need, she is willing to lie down and let them burn her alive (she’s done it before). She’s fiercely loyal and will put up with all kinds of abuse just so long as she feels she is loved.
She has an amazing well of inner strength, though. Her entire life has been marked by abuse, culminating in being burned alive (her skin was 100% third- and fourth-degree burns) and being forced to live for seven years in that charred body. And then she was reincarnated just to suffer all over again, and it’s implied that this will continue on forever. Even though she has developed a very cruel way of dealing with things, she has been able to keep hold of her senses throughout and continues to fight against the terrible things her mother is trying to do, no matter how much pain it causes her.
She is also religious, so that’s recently gone downhill since her mother forced her to become pregnant with their cult’s God. She used to view God as the only way to true happiness-to Paradise-but her pregnancy gave her a view of what God really was-a monster born of hate and pain. It’s caused her to fight against her mother, probably the first time she has betrayed her loyalty to the woman, and now she is in a constant struggle to keep God from being born and to find a way to die peacefully.
In short, she’s a little girl who’s known nothing but pain and all she wants is love.
History: Alessa and her mother are part of a cult called The Order, and before Alessa was born, The Order had a long history of kidnapping little girls and attempting to impregnate them with God (God had died a long time ago and, when She was reborn, She would usher everyone into Paradise). All the girls died either during the ceremony or soon afterwards.
There’s no mention of Alessa’s father, but it’s theorized that her mother, Dahlia, and a local doctor, Kaufmann, made a deal to get Dahlia pregnant and use the child to harvest God’s power, so Kaufmann could be her biological father.
Alessa was born with power that’s never fully explained. She was telekinetic and had the ability to make people die just by wishing for it, and the powers were evident enough to lead to her being called a witch at school and getting bullied. She was abused by Dahlia (partially because Dahlia’s absolutely nuts), abused by her classmates, and ignored by the school authorities, even when it was obvious how awful people treated her. The only person she was ever friends with was a fellow abuse victim named Claudia, whose family also belonged to The Order. She thought of Claudia as her little sister.
When she was seven, her mother carried out the ritual to impregnate her with God, which involved lying her on the ground in the middle of a lot of cult symbols, then setting the house on fire. In the middle of the ritual, Alessa realized the true nature of God and summoned a trucker, Travis, who happened to be driving by. Travis sees the burning house and breaks in, fighting through the flames to find Alessa, by now distinctly resembling human-shaped charcoal. Alessa told him to let her burn, probably because she would die and God would die with her, but Travis refused and carried her out of the house, thus kicking off the events of the Silent Hill: Origins game.
Travis fell unconscious by smoke inhalation and Dahlia came back to take Alessa to the hospital where Kaufmann worked. Kaufmann arranged for Alessa to be kept in secret and told the world that she had died. The only non-cult member to know about Alessa’s presence was her waiting nurse, Lisa Garland, who was forced to take care of Alessa quietly because she was addicted to drugs only Kaufmann could hook her up with. The experience drove Lisa insane, but Alessa viewed Lisa’s daily duties as genuine kindness and love to the point where she takes an imprint of Lisa into the world she creates, but we’re not at that part yet.
Alessa used astral projection to lead Travis into finding a cult artifact that helped focus her power and bring it to her, all the while forcing him to face the horrible things that happened in his childhood. When he used the artifact on her, she split her soul in half, putting the innocent half in a newborn baby, and her astral projection left the baby on the side of the road where a man and his wife find it. She released Travis because there was nothing more he could do, but kept alive by a ritual her mother had performed, she stayed in that sickroom, tended to by the increasingly unhinged Lisa and in constant pain as the embryo inside of her fed and grew from her pain, suffering, and hatred. She stayed there for seven years and eventually came to wish for death, but she kept fighting nonetheless, and she focused on mastering her power until she was able to bend the darkness of Silent Hill to her will, making it a part of her and she of it (she is referred to as The Empress for a reason).
She molded the world, putting her own nightmares in it, then forced it to change from form to form (there are about four Silent Hill incarnations: the normal tourist town, the fog world, the Otherworld, and Nowhere) to keep her mother at bay. But that comes at a price: now, the town’s darkness runs in her blood. No matter how many times she dies or runs away, she’ll always be pulled back. And she knows that. And that’s where the Alessa I’m playing comes from-there’s more to canon, but that’s not relevant beyond her catching glimpses of her own future, which basically involves getting reincarnated a lot and pulled back into Silent Hill.
This is heavy stuff for a seven-year-old to deal with.
Roleplay Sample - Log: Alessa didn’t pay much attention to all the people talking. She didn’t like listening to what people said, because she always got an inkling of what was behind those words. A flash of regret. A drop of resentment. A tightening string of patience.
She didn’t like looking at people’s nightmares. Always so dark and evil and slimy and sad. There was always pain. Hadn’t she dealt with enough pain?
No, she supposed. She had never dealt with enough pain. Mommy said so. She said her pain was what nurtured God.
She absently hugged her arms around her abdomen and closed her eyes, an aura of calm coming over her.
God shifted in her womb.
It wouldn’t come out yet. Not without the other half of her. They were safe.
Roleplay Sample - Journal: The pain isn’t as intense as before. I miss Lisa, but I don’t miss that room.
I don’t like how the blank walls remind me of the hospital. Sometimes, in my dreams, I see those walls darken and rust and I see those nurses staggering through the hall, bludgeoning and cutting and beating and smashing and-
No. Can’t think about that stuff. Can’t imagine a person that’s being hurt.
I don’t know if it’ll happen or not.
Extra Notes: Since Silent Hill is so heavy on the vagueness and symbolism--stuff that's great for a horror atmosphere but awful for someone trying to get an accurate description of one of the non-protagonist characters--a lot of the things that Alessa does and acts like is a product of my own interpretation of the games and the mythology behind them. So it's hard to say with conviction that I'm confident in the way I play her and her abilities, but I think that's part of the fun--there's interpretation involved. If you see inconsistencies, I'd love for you to tell me, but most of the stuff I do in regards to Silent Hill itself and how things work there is a matter of interpreting the facts the player's given and can't be marked with consensus from the whole fandom.
Name: Smurf
Age: 20
AIM: smurfheartstrong@aim.com
E-MAIL: Aquamarine.from.ocean@gmail.com
IC Information:
Name: Alessa Gillespie
Fandom: Silent Hill
Timeline: I’m going to go with post-Origins and pre-Silent Hill 1, but the games are vague about how things work in Silent Hill, and it’s implied Alessa has psychic abilities, so she may or may not know about what will happen in the future.
Age: She looks seven, is chronologically thirteen, and probably has the mind and maturity of a thirty-four-year-old. The games are vague about the specifics.
Appearance: When she looks normal, she is a little girl with long dark hair (sometimes worn loose, sometimes in a bun) and she has blue eyes. Some of these things change because of strange continuity, but it’s basically the same. When she’s Silent Hill-ized, she’s either on fire or covered completely with third- and fourth-degree burns.
Abilities: The game’s also really vague about it. At the very least, we know that, as a child, she was psychic, had telekinesis, and she could make people die just by wishing for it. After she was burnt alive by her mother (long story), she was impregnated with God, so she developed more powers-among them being power over the town of Silent Hill (implying she can make the world switch to the Otherworld-a nightmarish place designed by the victim’s tortured psyche-make monsters based on the victim’s or her own nightmares, dragging people into Silent Hill, being able to know everything that is mentally dragging a person down, projecting her soul into the world as an ethereal or physical being, be empathic, turn people into monsters, split her soul in two, and getting her telekinesis jacked up like hell). She can also do illusions, get set on fire with minimal damage, make people see her as a girl on fire or burnt alive, and look creepy as hell.
Personality: We only know a little bit of what she was like before she was burned, but afterwards, she’s too heavily shrouded in mystery to tell that well. She was abused and neglected by her mother, so she has a general expectation that adults are going to hurt her in some way (though she is willing to trust if they show her she can trust them), and she has a similar expectation of children, since she was viciously bullied at school. Because of all the awful things that have happened to her, she can be extremely cruel and unforgiving (and she overestimates how much trauma someone can deal with before they develop life-long PTSD). On some level, I think she resents other people for their happiness, because the happiest people can sometimes also be the cruelest-they’ve never known real pain, so they don’t know what they do to others.
She gravitates towards kind-hearted people in pain and makes them prove themselves in some way by forcing them through Silent Hill and the trials the town provides, and if they get through it, she’s given them an opportunity to set themselves free. Silent Hill, in her view, is hell, and if you survive hell, you have atoned for your sins and left your deep-seated traumas behind you. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. It works like that at times, but at other times it leaves the survivor a broken shell. She doesn’t really know what it means to be happy, so I think she probably sees the shells as successes too-they’re alive and have atoned.
Although just because she can be cruel doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a soft side. If someone is kind to her, she is theirs, completely and utterly. All she wants in life is to be loved, and if someone provides for that need, she is willing to lie down and let them burn her alive (she’s done it before). She’s fiercely loyal and will put up with all kinds of abuse just so long as she feels she is loved.
She has an amazing well of inner strength, though. Her entire life has been marked by abuse, culminating in being burned alive (her skin was 100% third- and fourth-degree burns) and being forced to live for seven years in that charred body. And then she was reincarnated just to suffer all over again, and it’s implied that this will continue on forever. Even though she has developed a very cruel way of dealing with things, she has been able to keep hold of her senses throughout and continues to fight against the terrible things her mother is trying to do, no matter how much pain it causes her.
She is also religious, so that’s recently gone downhill since her mother forced her to become pregnant with their cult’s God. She used to view God as the only way to true happiness-to Paradise-but her pregnancy gave her a view of what God really was-a monster born of hate and pain. It’s caused her to fight against her mother, probably the first time she has betrayed her loyalty to the woman, and now she is in a constant struggle to keep God from being born and to find a way to die peacefully.
In short, she’s a little girl who’s known nothing but pain and all she wants is love.
History: Alessa and her mother are part of a cult called The Order, and before Alessa was born, The Order had a long history of kidnapping little girls and attempting to impregnate them with God (God had died a long time ago and, when She was reborn, She would usher everyone into Paradise). All the girls died either during the ceremony or soon afterwards.
There’s no mention of Alessa’s father, but it’s theorized that her mother, Dahlia, and a local doctor, Kaufmann, made a deal to get Dahlia pregnant and use the child to harvest God’s power, so Kaufmann could be her biological father.
Alessa was born with power that’s never fully explained. She was telekinetic and had the ability to make people die just by wishing for it, and the powers were evident enough to lead to her being called a witch at school and getting bullied. She was abused by Dahlia (partially because Dahlia’s absolutely nuts), abused by her classmates, and ignored by the school authorities, even when it was obvious how awful people treated her. The only person she was ever friends with was a fellow abuse victim named Claudia, whose family also belonged to The Order. She thought of Claudia as her little sister.
When she was seven, her mother carried out the ritual to impregnate her with God, which involved lying her on the ground in the middle of a lot of cult symbols, then setting the house on fire. In the middle of the ritual, Alessa realized the true nature of God and summoned a trucker, Travis, who happened to be driving by. Travis sees the burning house and breaks in, fighting through the flames to find Alessa, by now distinctly resembling human-shaped charcoal. Alessa told him to let her burn, probably because she would die and God would die with her, but Travis refused and carried her out of the house, thus kicking off the events of the Silent Hill: Origins game.
Travis fell unconscious by smoke inhalation and Dahlia came back to take Alessa to the hospital where Kaufmann worked. Kaufmann arranged for Alessa to be kept in secret and told the world that she had died. The only non-cult member to know about Alessa’s presence was her waiting nurse, Lisa Garland, who was forced to take care of Alessa quietly because she was addicted to drugs only Kaufmann could hook her up with. The experience drove Lisa insane, but Alessa viewed Lisa’s daily duties as genuine kindness and love to the point where she takes an imprint of Lisa into the world she creates, but we’re not at that part yet.
Alessa used astral projection to lead Travis into finding a cult artifact that helped focus her power and bring it to her, all the while forcing him to face the horrible things that happened in his childhood. When he used the artifact on her, she split her soul in half, putting the innocent half in a newborn baby, and her astral projection left the baby on the side of the road where a man and his wife find it. She released Travis because there was nothing more he could do, but kept alive by a ritual her mother had performed, she stayed in that sickroom, tended to by the increasingly unhinged Lisa and in constant pain as the embryo inside of her fed and grew from her pain, suffering, and hatred. She stayed there for seven years and eventually came to wish for death, but she kept fighting nonetheless, and she focused on mastering her power until she was able to bend the darkness of Silent Hill to her will, making it a part of her and she of it (she is referred to as The Empress for a reason).
She molded the world, putting her own nightmares in it, then forced it to change from form to form (there are about four Silent Hill incarnations: the normal tourist town, the fog world, the Otherworld, and Nowhere) to keep her mother at bay. But that comes at a price: now, the town’s darkness runs in her blood. No matter how many times she dies or runs away, she’ll always be pulled back. And she knows that. And that’s where the Alessa I’m playing comes from-there’s more to canon, but that’s not relevant beyond her catching glimpses of her own future, which basically involves getting reincarnated a lot and pulled back into Silent Hill.
This is heavy stuff for a seven-year-old to deal with.
Roleplay Sample - Log: Alessa didn’t pay much attention to all the people talking. She didn’t like listening to what people said, because she always got an inkling of what was behind those words. A flash of regret. A drop of resentment. A tightening string of patience.
She didn’t like looking at people’s nightmares. Always so dark and evil and slimy and sad. There was always pain. Hadn’t she dealt with enough pain?
No, she supposed. She had never dealt with enough pain. Mommy said so. She said her pain was what nurtured God.
She absently hugged her arms around her abdomen and closed her eyes, an aura of calm coming over her.
God shifted in her womb.
It wouldn’t come out yet. Not without the other half of her. They were safe.
Roleplay Sample - Journal: The pain isn’t as intense as before. I miss Lisa, but I don’t miss that room.
I don’t like how the blank walls remind me of the hospital. Sometimes, in my dreams, I see those walls darken and rust and I see those nurses staggering through the hall, bludgeoning and cutting and beating and smashing and-
No. Can’t think about that stuff. Can’t imagine a person that’s being hurt.
I don’t know if it’ll happen or not.
Extra Notes: Since Silent Hill is so heavy on the vagueness and symbolism--stuff that's great for a horror atmosphere but awful for someone trying to get an accurate description of one of the non-protagonist characters--a lot of the things that Alessa does and acts like is a product of my own interpretation of the games and the mythology behind them. So it's hard to say with conviction that I'm confident in the way I play her and her abilities, but I think that's part of the fun--there's interpretation involved. If you see inconsistencies, I'd love for you to tell me, but most of the stuff I do in regards to Silent Hill itself and how things work there is a matter of interpreting the facts the player's given and can't be marked with consensus from the whole fandom.