Application
Player Name: Kelly
Player LJ: magicnme
Player Instant Messenger Type and Handle: AIM: Magicnme4E
Player Email: magicnme@gmail.com
Character: Grace Holloway
Fandom: Bioshock
Survival Horror Test:
Grace is unofficial "governor" of one of the worst neighborhoods in Rapture, Pauper's Drop. As one resident of the flophouse district has said: "Survival of the fittest. That's the rule in the Drop, the only rule." As for horror, she's seen her share of humanity's downslide and deterioration for over ten years of Rapture's degeneration. It's a dog-eat-dog city, and she's seen young girls snatched up to be turned into blood guzzling monsters, the hulking "Tin Daddies" that brutally slaughter any who try and take the children back, and desperate ADAM junkies so genetically spliced they've become like savage, rioting animals.
Personality:
Grace is a woman who has lived a hard and gritty life, therefore she's grown to be tough-as-nails. She is tenacious, but has seen her share of bad luck and bigotry, and while she tries her best, she's not ruthlessly ambitious enough to rise to the top of Rapture. Some might consider her a hard-eyed skeptic; she knows the rules of the game are usually bent against her, and she's had her low times of heavy depression. She's also realist before a romantic, and has only been in true love once.
However, she does put her full soul into all that she does and says, so that whether she's talking or nightingalin', people listen. She has a powerful voice which is worn down but still toughened with age and experience. For an aging woman, she carries herself with a remarkably dignified presence.
Standing tall and unarmed while looking death in the face, Grace has never resorted to using Plasmids to modify her body of give herself enhanced abilities. She has seen the devastating effects of "Splicing", junkies violent and desperate for their next hypodermic hit. Very few remain "unspliced" in Rapture by the time of Bioshock 2, so this is something of a testament to her values, that she has stayed true to the self she was born with. She may also refrain from splicing because she finds the city's dependence of little-girl ADAM gatherers especially repulsive.
Grace is not without her share of regrets: She is a barren woman; has never had children of her own and this has been a private point of grief she's only shared with Sophia Lamb. She has a special fondness for Eleanor, and for the innocence of children in general. That she lost Eleanor to kidnappers remains her deepest guilt. She harbors a wicked grudge against the Big Daddies, particularly Subject Delta, and she has only begun to realize her misjudgement and prejudice.
Finally, it is important to note that her values rest with the people from the wrong side of the tracks. She has grown up knowing the plight of the poor, and she embraces The Rapture Family's collectivist values of standing for one another, doing your share and helping those in need. She knows that extended Family will always be her backbone of support.
Timeline: Several hours after Subject Delta spares her life in Pauper's Drop.
Powers/Abilities: Grace never spliced, so she has no plasmid powers. She does, however, have a smoky singing voice born for the blues.
History:
Grace Holloway was born into poverty in St. Louis, Missouri, in the 1920s. She and her folks struggled through the worst of the depression era, and she grew up in her Hooverville shack with the radio on, listening to the best of the blues.
She later started singing at the local jazz clubs, and became something of a local celebrity. In the late 1940's she was invited down to the underwater "Free-minded city" of Rapture, she leapt at the opportunity to live among progressive-minded people, to sing and a start a family in a city of hopeful new enterprise.
For the first few years of Rapture's golden age, life was sweet. She performed in Fleet Hall beside stars like Anna Culpepper and Sander Cohen, although the elites who came to see her sing at the top dollar venues didn't really understand a word of the blues. Disheartened but determined, she kept to her style, until "times got hard, and all our old bigotries bubbled right back up." Paranoid Andrew Ryan, founder and tyrant of Rapture, blacklisted her and several other artists critical of Rapture's failing social strata.
Cast out of Fleet Hall and the hoity-toity nightclubs, Grace landed in the Drop. Pauper's Drop, the worst housing in Rapture, where she spent every saved penny to open up her own Jazz club, The Limbo Room. Blues singing was well received among Rapture's laboring poor, and Grace finally felt at home, albeit somewhat defeated. Still, she found her only love in a stage door John, a labor organizer named James who "liked hearin' songs about what it's really like to live in this town." Then one day he went missing, rounded up by Ryan's men. She began to grow even more bitter and hateful towards exploitative men like Andrew Ryan, Frank Fontaine and Augustus Sinclair.
Enter Dr. Sophia Lamb, a social-psychologist with a radically different vision for Rapture. A firm preacher of a socialist agenda and selfless altruism, Lamb began offering free counseling sessions down at the Drop's clinic on Sundays. When Grace's pride finally broke and her depression drove her to seek help, Dr. Lamb became a trusted confidante. She invited Grace to join with her and "The Rapture Family," a cult of collectivists. With newfound faith in a brighter, fairer future, they began a subversive movement that would eventually take over the city when Andrew Ryan's vision failed and fell.
Dr. Lamb herself was jailed by Ryan for her outspoken stance against him, but not before leaving her daughter Eleanor Lamb in Holloway's hands. Grace was overjoyed to be gifted the role of caretaker, barren and childless herself, and so she felt even more deeply indebted to The Family. Riots uptown and the resultant economic crash forced Grace to close The Limbo Room, but she managed to scratch together barely enough to get by.
But then came the hardest blow of all. One moment her back was turned, and in the next Eleanor was "babysnatched" by sleezy news reporter and Ryan's mole, Stanley Poole. Grace despaired that she'd lost Lamb's child for good, until she saw the girl one day, transformed into an ADAM harvesting Little Sister, accompanied by one of the "Big Daddies". This was a man who would come to be known as Subject Delta. When she tried to approach the girl and take her hand, Delta flung the woman to the floor and broke her jaw.
When Lamb's followers broke her out of prison, following Ryan's death, she knew Poole had kidnapped Eleanor and gave her to the orphanage, but she never told Holloway, allowing her to sit with the blame or transfer it onto the monster who'd taken her place as Eleanor's caretaker. After the girl was recovered, Grace remained a loyal follower of Sophia Lamb and The Family...it was the least she could do.
Grace was well into her 50's when Subject Delta reawakened, a well-respected local leader of The Family in Pauper's Drop after she kicked that poorhouse-leeching baron Augustus Sinclair out of his own hotel. When Delta shows up on the Atlantic Express, he found the station on lockdown. Unable to go further, he was forced to progress through the flophouse district while Grace threatened and goaded him venomously over the Public Announcement System for showing up on her doorstep. She sent the local splicers his way, to give him all the trouble she could muster.
When he finally found her alone in the safe house at the Sinclair Deluxe, she was ready to face down the Tin Daddy proud, cold and unarmed, with only her righteous bitter grudge and a daring staredown. She tells him to take the override gatekey to the train station and "finish the job" of ending her, sure in faith of The Family that they will not let him "stroll out alive". To her dismay, the 'monster' does not stoop to the latter.
With her life spared, she has a change of heart and comes to an understanding that Subject Delta is not a babysnatching monster but good, "thinking" man, not cruel but desperate to find his surrogate daughter. After sending him on his way with two security turrets for aid, Grace begins to doubt Dr. Lamb's word.
Appearance: http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/bioshock/images/b/be/Grace_Holloway.JPG
I'll also be using jazz singer Bessie Smith, the real person this character was modeled on, as a PB.
She'll be coming with her cane and an Accu-Vox voice recorder.
Sample log entry:
Gotta put a few questions to Dr. Lamb.
Huhn. And that was easier said than done. The Voice of Rapture tended to keep herself hidden away down in Persephone, these days. Grace hadn't seen her in person for a few months now, though her pictures and slogans covered every wall.
If this monster-who-was-a-man kept going like he did, storming through...he might even reach her first.
Grace set down her cane, snuffed out her last cigarette, unpinned her hair and reached over to set the needle to one of her old records, a slow favorite, a drag-footed crooning saxophone filling the silence of her apartment. The streets still crackled with gunfire and all other sorts of demoralizing noise, but no more than the everyday...
She closed her eyes and slid off.into dreams of the surface world, under a brighter sun that made the day heavy with heat and sticky with sweat. Down here in the drop it was always damp, always chilly. After thirty one years,you got used to it. But you did wonder sometimes in the pipe dreamin', wandering thoughts, if life got any better up there instead of plowing steadily downhill like things had been going for Rapture.
Some days, the days she reached for her gin and forgot to sing to herself in the mirror, she didn't even believe in the Family's promise of Imago-deliverance.
But knowing a Tin Man had a heart? ,Now that changed damn near everything around.
When Grace Holloway opened her tired eyes, the skies were blinding blue, and she could have sworn she'd up and died easy in her sleep, in her chair, record scratching smooth at its end against the label. It would have been a much prouder way to go, than under Delta Daddy's drill.
Sample journal entry:
I hear them out there,groaning down there in the street sometimes, almost as if they know pain...them clunky monsters, those tin daddies, rattling their rivets fierce at anybody who dare try and,take their ADAM guzzling girls someplace safe. Sure, there's the man who would do one of those girls wrong, but then there are folks like me, holding on to the last scraps our respectability, who would see those poor little things let go from their sorry work.
But that's how Rapture runs now, even Dr. Lamb says we don't have a choice. Fontaine's legacy, still moaning through the streets. Is there really any hope for us, if even The Family keeps this dirty old business going?. Our hope rests in Baby Eleanor now. Maybe her dream, when it rises, will be the one to see us through.
Player LJ: magicnme
Player Instant Messenger Type and Handle: AIM: Magicnme4E
Player Email: magicnme@gmail.com
Character: Grace Holloway
Fandom: Bioshock
Survival Horror Test:
Grace is unofficial "governor" of one of the worst neighborhoods in Rapture, Pauper's Drop. As one resident of the flophouse district has said: "Survival of the fittest. That's the rule in the Drop, the only rule." As for horror, she's seen her share of humanity's downslide and deterioration for over ten years of Rapture's degeneration. It's a dog-eat-dog city, and she's seen young girls snatched up to be turned into blood guzzling monsters, the hulking "Tin Daddies" that brutally slaughter any who try and take the children back, and desperate ADAM junkies so genetically spliced they've become like savage, rioting animals.
Personality:
Grace is a woman who has lived a hard and gritty life, therefore she's grown to be tough-as-nails. She is tenacious, but has seen her share of bad luck and bigotry, and while she tries her best, she's not ruthlessly ambitious enough to rise to the top of Rapture. Some might consider her a hard-eyed skeptic; she knows the rules of the game are usually bent against her, and she's had her low times of heavy depression. She's also realist before a romantic, and has only been in true love once.
However, she does put her full soul into all that she does and says, so that whether she's talking or nightingalin', people listen. She has a powerful voice which is worn down but still toughened with age and experience. For an aging woman, she carries herself with a remarkably dignified presence.
Standing tall and unarmed while looking death in the face, Grace has never resorted to using Plasmids to modify her body of give herself enhanced abilities. She has seen the devastating effects of "Splicing", junkies violent and desperate for their next hypodermic hit. Very few remain "unspliced" in Rapture by the time of Bioshock 2, so this is something of a testament to her values, that she has stayed true to the self she was born with. She may also refrain from splicing because she finds the city's dependence of little-girl ADAM gatherers especially repulsive.
Grace is not without her share of regrets: She is a barren woman; has never had children of her own and this has been a private point of grief she's only shared with Sophia Lamb. She has a special fondness for Eleanor, and for the innocence of children in general. That she lost Eleanor to kidnappers remains her deepest guilt. She harbors a wicked grudge against the Big Daddies, particularly Subject Delta, and she has only begun to realize her misjudgement and prejudice.
Finally, it is important to note that her values rest with the people from the wrong side of the tracks. She has grown up knowing the plight of the poor, and she embraces The Rapture Family's collectivist values of standing for one another, doing your share and helping those in need. She knows that extended Family will always be her backbone of support.
Timeline: Several hours after Subject Delta spares her life in Pauper's Drop.
Powers/Abilities: Grace never spliced, so she has no plasmid powers. She does, however, have a smoky singing voice born for the blues.
History:
Grace Holloway was born into poverty in St. Louis, Missouri, in the 1920s. She and her folks struggled through the worst of the depression era, and she grew up in her Hooverville shack with the radio on, listening to the best of the blues.
She later started singing at the local jazz clubs, and became something of a local celebrity. In the late 1940's she was invited down to the underwater "Free-minded city" of Rapture, she leapt at the opportunity to live among progressive-minded people, to sing and a start a family in a city of hopeful new enterprise.
For the first few years of Rapture's golden age, life was sweet. She performed in Fleet Hall beside stars like Anna Culpepper and Sander Cohen, although the elites who came to see her sing at the top dollar venues didn't really understand a word of the blues. Disheartened but determined, she kept to her style, until "times got hard, and all our old bigotries bubbled right back up." Paranoid Andrew Ryan, founder and tyrant of Rapture, blacklisted her and several other artists critical of Rapture's failing social strata.
Cast out of Fleet Hall and the hoity-toity nightclubs, Grace landed in the Drop. Pauper's Drop, the worst housing in Rapture, where she spent every saved penny to open up her own Jazz club, The Limbo Room. Blues singing was well received among Rapture's laboring poor, and Grace finally felt at home, albeit somewhat defeated. Still, she found her only love in a stage door John, a labor organizer named James who "liked hearin' songs about what it's really like to live in this town." Then one day he went missing, rounded up by Ryan's men. She began to grow even more bitter and hateful towards exploitative men like Andrew Ryan, Frank Fontaine and Augustus Sinclair.
Enter Dr. Sophia Lamb, a social-psychologist with a radically different vision for Rapture. A firm preacher of a socialist agenda and selfless altruism, Lamb began offering free counseling sessions down at the Drop's clinic on Sundays. When Grace's pride finally broke and her depression drove her to seek help, Dr. Lamb became a trusted confidante. She invited Grace to join with her and "The Rapture Family," a cult of collectivists. With newfound faith in a brighter, fairer future, they began a subversive movement that would eventually take over the city when Andrew Ryan's vision failed and fell.
Dr. Lamb herself was jailed by Ryan for her outspoken stance against him, but not before leaving her daughter Eleanor Lamb in Holloway's hands. Grace was overjoyed to be gifted the role of caretaker, barren and childless herself, and so she felt even more deeply indebted to The Family. Riots uptown and the resultant economic crash forced Grace to close The Limbo Room, but she managed to scratch together barely enough to get by.
But then came the hardest blow of all. One moment her back was turned, and in the next Eleanor was "babysnatched" by sleezy news reporter and Ryan's mole, Stanley Poole. Grace despaired that she'd lost Lamb's child for good, until she saw the girl one day, transformed into an ADAM harvesting Little Sister, accompanied by one of the "Big Daddies". This was a man who would come to be known as Subject Delta. When she tried to approach the girl and take her hand, Delta flung the woman to the floor and broke her jaw.
When Lamb's followers broke her out of prison, following Ryan's death, she knew Poole had kidnapped Eleanor and gave her to the orphanage, but she never told Holloway, allowing her to sit with the blame or transfer it onto the monster who'd taken her place as Eleanor's caretaker. After the girl was recovered, Grace remained a loyal follower of Sophia Lamb and The Family...it was the least she could do.
Grace was well into her 50's when Subject Delta reawakened, a well-respected local leader of The Family in Pauper's Drop after she kicked that poorhouse-leeching baron Augustus Sinclair out of his own hotel. When Delta shows up on the Atlantic Express, he found the station on lockdown. Unable to go further, he was forced to progress through the flophouse district while Grace threatened and goaded him venomously over the Public Announcement System for showing up on her doorstep. She sent the local splicers his way, to give him all the trouble she could muster.
When he finally found her alone in the safe house at the Sinclair Deluxe, she was ready to face down the Tin Daddy proud, cold and unarmed, with only her righteous bitter grudge and a daring staredown. She tells him to take the override gatekey to the train station and "finish the job" of ending her, sure in faith of The Family that they will not let him "stroll out alive". To her dismay, the 'monster' does not stoop to the latter.
With her life spared, she has a change of heart and comes to an understanding that Subject Delta is not a babysnatching monster but good, "thinking" man, not cruel but desperate to find his surrogate daughter. After sending him on his way with two security turrets for aid, Grace begins to doubt Dr. Lamb's word.
Appearance: http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/bioshock/images/b/be/Grace_Holloway.JPG
I'll also be using jazz singer Bessie Smith, the real person this character was modeled on, as a PB.
She'll be coming with her cane and an Accu-Vox voice recorder.
Sample log entry:
Gotta put a few questions to Dr. Lamb.
Huhn. And that was easier said than done. The Voice of Rapture tended to keep herself hidden away down in Persephone, these days. Grace hadn't seen her in person for a few months now, though her pictures and slogans covered every wall.
If this monster-who-was-a-man kept going like he did, storming through...he might even reach her first.
Grace set down her cane, snuffed out her last cigarette, unpinned her hair and reached over to set the needle to one of her old records, a slow favorite, a drag-footed crooning saxophone filling the silence of her apartment. The streets still crackled with gunfire and all other sorts of demoralizing noise, but no more than the everyday...
She closed her eyes and slid off.into dreams of the surface world, under a brighter sun that made the day heavy with heat and sticky with sweat. Down here in the drop it was always damp, always chilly. After thirty one years,you got used to it. But you did wonder sometimes in the pipe dreamin', wandering thoughts, if life got any better up there instead of plowing steadily downhill like things had been going for Rapture.
Some days, the days she reached for her gin and forgot to sing to herself in the mirror, she didn't even believe in the Family's promise of Imago-deliverance.
But knowing a Tin Man had a heart? ,Now that changed damn near everything around.
When Grace Holloway opened her tired eyes, the skies were blinding blue, and she could have sworn she'd up and died easy in her sleep, in her chair, record scratching smooth at its end against the label. It would have been a much prouder way to go, than under Delta Daddy's drill.
Sample journal entry:
I hear them out there,groaning down there in the street sometimes, almost as if they know pain...them clunky monsters, those tin daddies, rattling their rivets fierce at anybody who dare try and,take their ADAM guzzling girls someplace safe. Sure, there's the man who would do one of those girls wrong, but then there are folks like me, holding on to the last scraps our respectability, who would see those poor little things let go from their sorry work.
But that's how Rapture runs now, even Dr. Lamb says we don't have a choice. Fontaine's legacy, still moaning through the streets. Is there really any hope for us, if even The Family keeps this dirty old business going?. Our hope rests in Baby Eleanor now. Maybe her dream, when it rises, will be the one to see us through.