TLV app
User Name/Nick: Rycca
User LJ: OF
AIM/IM: OF
E-mail: OF
Other Characters: Severus Snape, Rooster Cogburn, Randal Graves, Sarah Harding, The EMH
Character Name: Abigail Williams
Series: The Crucible
Age: 19
From When?: 1694
Inmate/Warden: Inmate
Abilities/Powers: Lying. Really, really good lying.
Personality:
Abigail has been described as having “an endless capacity for dissembling”. She has what is called a cocktail personality: she is able to read what will appeal to the onlooker, and change from a God-fearing Christian to a coquettish flirt to a murderous bully at the drop of a hat. She can pretend to be the a victim of an invisible attack of witchcraft when the need suits her (and depending on the audience), going so far as to turn her skin pale and ice cold with her fits. She is an excellent actress.
When one tactic seems to be failing, she will quickly change to another and another again until it seems to be working in her favor. She is very intelligent (though uneducated) and has a seemingly endless catalog of personalities upon which she relies to achieve her ends. She is not a sociopath; she is able to empathize with others, but she is extremely selfish and this prevents her from making the effort to place herself in another person’s shoes. She uses the small capacity for empathy that she does have to choose what side of her personality she will present.
She is a rebellious young woman who chafes against the rules of a Puritan society. She has no compunctions against sleeping with the husband of another woman or accusing innocent people of witchcraft to save her own hide, and no moral reservations about lying. When she is caught in a lie, she will not back down; she will, instead, continue to build upon it until it has become an entirely different story, or she will turn the situation around so that her accuser is at fault.
Abigail is also extremely conniving and charismatic. John Proctor, Reverend Parris, the court presiding over the witch trials, and the girls who followed her lead were all taken in by her personality, whether out of fear or love. She was able to convince an entire village that she was the finger of God, a lie which resulted in twenty deaths. She has the right personality to convince others to do what she wants.
She is characteristically hyper-sexualized. She views the act of sex as a source of freedom and rebellion, and liberation from the constraints of her godly society. She thinks people who are restrained or prudish about sex are hypocrites, and has come to believe that the act itself is a source of power: it is something men will pay for and women fear. In some cases, she has fooled herself into thinking that sex can be equated to love - most specifically, the incident with John Proctor - but knows that is not always the case. Sex is a bartering tool and a weapon.
True friendships for Abigail are few and far between. There are people that she will use for her own devices, but there are not many who know her for the dissembler that she is and still like her.
She will react quite well to the Barge: she will experience a good deal more freedom and acceptance than she did in Salem. One of the big perks for her will be that she will be considered an adult (an honor that was not given to girls her age if they were unmarried.) She will probably behave herself while everything is shiny and new. However, after a while she will eventually get up to her old tricks again.
She is power-hungry and will gravitate toward the more dangerous inmates or the less respectable wardens - in short, people who have little regard for rules and who seem either willing to form alliances or who can be easily manipulated. In a Puritanical setting, her behavior led to lynchings. In a setting where magic (or science) is real and available to her, she will go downhill very quickly.
She has been aboard the Barge before, but I feel no significant progress was made with regards to her Path to Redemption. The only changes in her personality were a marked attraction to Edward Sexby (as a surrogate John Proctor) and a new-found penchant for reading and the use of electronics. Other changes included her attempt to emulate the speech patterns of the others aboard to sound more like modern women and a request for denim jeans.
I'll be bringing her back with only vague, dream-like memories of her last time aboard - she won't remember specifics, and will treat the entire thing like an overwhelming case of deja-vu. Basically, I'm resetting her to canon as much as I can without undermining CR she developed (she was particularly good friends with Parker, for example).
Path to Redemption: To be redeemed, Abigail needs to do the following, specifically:
1. Stop lying.
2. Stop viewing sex as a weapon.
3. Empathize with others.
4. Express remorse over the deaths she caused.
Mostly, it’s just a lot of time and consistency - there’s no specific trigger to get her to change. Just keep chipping away.
History:
Abigail Williams was born on July 12, 1675 in Salem, Massachusetts. At seven years of age, she witnessed the murder of her parents in the bed they shared: their heads were smashed by Algonquians during the first conflict of the French and Indian Wars. She was sent to live with her uncle, Reverend Samuel Parris, and his daughter, Betty, in Boston. When Betty’s mother, Elizabeth, passed away, Betty and Abigail were placed into the care of Tituba Indian, a Carib slave who came away from Barbados with Parris.
At the age of sixteen, Abigail entered the service of the Proctor household. During this time, she entered into an adulterous relationship with John Proctor. When his wife suspected, Abigail was turned out of the house and the rumor of her termination spread through the village. Abigail denied these accusations; however, she never lost her desire for Proctor. Her desire would lead to the downfall of an entire village.
In February of 1692, Abigail and a number of other girls (including her younger cousin) played at witchcraft in the woods near Salem, conjuring charms to make men love them. Abigail called for John Proctor, and drank the blood of a freshly-killed chicken to kill the man’s wife, Elizabeth. The girls then began to dance, at which point they were discovered by Reverend Parris. In a fright, Betty Parris and Ruth Putnam fell into a seemingly unconscious state. The town began to whisper of witchcraft, and Parris elicited a confession from Abigail that the girls did nothing but dance - “It were only sport!”
Not long after, when it was announced that Reverend Hale of Beverly would come to Salem to ensure that the devil was not in the village, Abigail tried to rouse Betty from her stupor. Betty awoke, and accused Abigail of witchcraft before trying to fly out the window. This drew the attention of the entire village, and during the commotion, Abigail spotted John Proctor and went to meet him in private. She confessed to him that Betty was only playing, and there was no witchcraft. However, when she tried to seduce him, he pushed her away, inciting her wrath. She returned to Betty’s room, and Tituba was accused of witchcraft. The woman was whipped until she confessed to signing the Devil’s book, and Abigail, seeing the attention Tituba received for her confession (and also a way to have John Proctor’s wife murdered), confessed to the same sin. The rest of the girls soon followed, accusing the most likely women of witchcraft first: Bridget Bishop, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osbourn.
Over the next sixteen months, the girls, with Abigail Williams at the helm, were used as divining rods to ferret out the witches in Salem. Their accusations were based upon seeing the spirits of the accused come to torment them. During this time, Abigail accused Elizabeth Proctor of making a doll in her likeness and sticking it with pins. Mary Warren, who made the doll, denied the accusation and said it was she who place the pi in the doll for safekeeping. John Proctor forced her to speak out against Abigail; however, she was unable to explain how she and the other girls went into hysterics so easily.
John Proctor came forward and admitted to the adultery committed, and stated to the courts that Abigail was only trying to punish him for rejecting her. His wife was called into court to testify whether this was the truth, and she lied to save him, stating that he had never committed the crime of lechery. Abigail then took the opportunity to re-establish her sway over the court by accusing Mary Warren of witchcraft. Mary then panicked and accused John himself of it, saying he had forced her to testify against Abigail.
John was arrested and Abigail, fearing for his life, stole half her uncle’s annual salary and went to John in the prison where he was kept. She offered to barter him passage on a ship bound for Barbados, but John replied that the next time they met, it would be in Hell. Abigail left, running away to Boston.
She raised money through prostitution to buy passage on the ship for Barbados; however, in 1694, after reaching the island, she died an unimpressive death from complications due to a common sexually transmitted disease.
In the infamous witch trials for which Abigail was partly responsible, 19 men and women were hanged, and one man (Giles Corey) was crushed to death.
Abigail has been aboard the Barge before, and during that time experienced a forgetfulness flood and a kids flood, as well as learning to embrace such things as modern clothes and electronics. She also briefly "married" Kurt Wagner and tried to move in with him, though he soon after left the ship, leaving Abigail to admit it hadn't been a valid union. Her obsession with John Proctor became focused instead on Edward Sexby, and she thrived, as she does, on the attention given to her by her warden and other men such as Luigi Largo. No progress towards rehabilitation was made.
Sample Journal Entry:
I have finished the first of the books which are called by similar titles, Lord of the Rings. I like it not. The language were not strange to me - not as conversation here in this prison - but it were still a hardship to read. I did often feel tired, and wished to sleep or find some other occupation.
Perhaps if it were not so tedious, I would feel some note of warmth for it, but each person of whom I did wish to read at goodly length did disappear or leave all too quickly, and those left behind were strange men of small stature and hairy feet.
Aye, and they walked. It were a book about walking. Why wish I to read a book in which naught occurs but an unending journey on foot? Why had they not enough horses? Why took they not a carriage? Why took they not a car? I have read of cars, and heard tell of them, and how quickly they may speed across the land at seventy mile in a single hour with the power of four hundred horse.
It were a much better book, I think, if Frodo Baggins did have a car.
...
Aye, I would take a car to Mordor.
Sample RP: [3-5 paragraphs, 3rd Person POV]
Abigail peered out of her room, a look of bewilderment on her face. The door did not lead to other rooms in her uncle’s home in Salem, but to a long corridor lined with many doors - some of them unlike any doors she had ever seen before in her life. She peered left and right, then stepped out, half expecting the hall to dissolve and leave her in a waking state as had happened so often before. On those nights, she had searched for John Proctor.
But that was long ago; John Proctor was dead and buried by now, and, if Abigail knew herself well enough, so was she. So what, then, was this place? Hell? No, this was nothing like the fiery pit her uncle had so often preached at Sunday service. This was just a hallway. She saw nothing of interest, nothing to point her in any particular direction, and so she turned back to her room once more.
It was then that a little sign caught her attention. She closed the door gently, decisively following the direction indicated by the arrow on the sign, and came to a large, open room filled with strange structures. On one of these structures was a woman, dressed so scantly it made Abigail blush at the sight; she seemed to be running, though she remained in one place. Abigail stole glances at the woman from time to time from the doorway, trying to remain inconspicuous.
A previous TLV thread in which Abigail and Kurt argue, and she enlists Luigi Largo to kill her "husband".
Special Notes: Updates since the last time she was aboard have been added to the personality and history sections.