ATARAXION: application

[youdieinreallife]

PLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: Zero
OOC Journal: expletives
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope.
Email + IM: birdslut@gmail + hatoful girlfriend@aim
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Vreille Cox.

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Justine Florbelle.
Canon: Amnesia: the Dark Descent.
Original or Alternate Universe: Canon.
Canon Point: Post-canon, from the best possible timeline.
Number: Anything's cool, yo.

Setting:

While Justine takes place within the Amnesia universe, during the context of the game one does not end up encountering a great deal that ties it to the game proper. Justine was released as DLC by Frictional as part of a publicity campaign for Portal 2, and Frictional released it as a short glimpse of 'what Portal could be like if it was a horror game and also in France'. The wiki page could tell you what you need to know (and a lot more if you sniff around the Half Life Wiki -- the publicity campaign in question got really fucking complex).

Meta aside, Justine comes from a world where magic is indeed real, and defined in pretty vague ethereal terms. There are these orbs, you see, and they... Uh. Are really powerful?

That's actually about the extent of what Justine herself knows.

Her father has closer ties to the plot of the main game than she does. He was a close friend of a certain British dude named Herbert, who was a friend and mentor to Daniel of Mayfair (before he got his ass killed by otherworldly revenge beasts). All that Justine knows is what her father left behind, and that she wants to find out more.

History:

There were rules to be abided within the Florbelle household: do not mingle with the help, do not upset them, do not go into the basement, and honour thy father.

Justine turned out not to be very good at the last one.

Monsieur Florbelle had everything a man could want: a loving wife, a beautiful daughter, and a high class French pedigree. Most of those resources, money, and connections went towards his search for an ancient treasure. The man wanted to find one of the fabled orbs, objects of great power and even greater mystery. Their manor accumulated papers, documents, maps and artifacts, all revolving around locating one of the orbs.

Justine grew up immersed in this lore, hearing all about the search that her father would never complete.

When she was only an infant, her mother died (presumably of chronic plotpointitis), leaving her father bereft and her without a female role model. Master Florbelle was devastated, and consoled himself rereading his dead wife's poetry and writing letters to her about how much his daughter was starting to creep him out. It was 19th century France, apparently there wasn't much else to do.

Nothing too severe, but Florbelle subjected his daughter to daily tests and queries, trying to pin down and comprehend her frame of mind. He always needed to know what she was thinking, which was all well and good. The greater issue comes from the distance that it drove him from his daughter; because he regarded her as more of a test subject than a family member, he was inadvertently cold and uncaring with her. Whether she thought this was normal or not aside, Justine harboured a great deal of resentment towards him for both his attitude and his tests. This came to a head in her preteens, when she killed him stone dead. With a paperweight. She had also been repressed as shit, which she started to leave behind after her father's death.

Presumably, the next few years passed with her in the care of her father's help staff and the company of all that money he left behind to her.

Many years later, Justine had come into her own and entered society. A young adult by the 1850s, she took a keen interest in the sciences -- particularly psychiatry. She has other interests, obviously. Intellectual pursuits, poetry, music, and la vie bohème. Also, partying hardcore.

Justine didn't have a great deal of trouble making friendly acquaintances, but most of her time was spent with her three closest friends: Alois Racien (possibly Racine??), Basile Giroux, and Malo De Vigny. The quartet was quite close, and all of them were deeply emotionally invested in each other. Except for Justine, but the others didn't seem to know that. They hit the town and discussed politics and philosophy and drank quite a bit (Malo the most) and probably did opium or something too, that was probably something that they did. Furthermore, Justine made a point of leading all three of the men on -- nothing explicit, nothing obscene, but all of them individually thought that they were an item in her books, when in truth, none of them were. This was, for the record, exactly the way that Justine wanted it.

Alois' father, however, did not approve of what he assumed was going steady. Mister Racine went down to the local police station to have a word with one of the officers, because his son was obviously a gigantic wuss that couldn't make life decisions or something. Alois' father actually had some pull, and was prepared to have Justine put away for hysteria. Easy enough, since in that era the diagnosis for hysteria was essentially "being uppity and also a woman".

These steps were possibly too little too late, however. Given that she'd already kidnapped and imprisoned her three suitors (important video game terminology alert!), and proceeded to keep the police officer sent to her doorstep captive as well. And a priest. And some dude she just didn't like. A lot of men end up trapped in Justine's basement, apparently.

And while this had the added benefits of getting rid of a few people she wasn't overly fond of, the true purpose was this: constructing a test for herself, a handmade crucible for her endurance and humanity. The Florbelle estate sits above a series of stone cells, studies and storage rooms, sewers and flooded tunnels, and a graveyard -- all of these strewn with various torture devices. These were all inherited from her father, and the major reason that she was forbidden from the lower levels.

With her father out of the way, Justine planned to put the catacombs to good use. Her father's tests and her own scientific mind brought her to the belief that any question can be answered by an empirical method -- even ethical conundrums.

She'd been slipping, so to speak, falling out of touch with her morals. Even more than killing her dad before puberty, so she arrived at the question: was there any good in her?

Clearly, the solution was to kidnap a bunch of officials, and put them in strange sorts of traps: ones that could only be unlocked by her, from the outside with some difficulty. The idea was to present herself with a set of tasks which could be solved in one of two ways: heartless and expedient, or moral and difficult. To give the test a little extra spice danger, she would need some real pressure, a sense of danger. This is where the suitors came in; blinded, mutilated, starved, and really fucking angry, she let them loose in the underground and set up grammaphones with recordings of herself with hints and guidelines. Finally, she took a potion of unknown origin and function which gave her temporary amnesia (see? it IS connected to maingame!), and woke up nameless and frightened in the cell furthest from the comforts of home.

Since this is good end, she jumped through the hoops that her past self erected for her, left the inspector and the priest and her former friends alive... And... Still trapped in the basement. Without food or water or in many cases, clothing.

... It's a start.

Personality:

Orb fragments have an unfortunate side effect: they 'leak madness'. Visions, nightmares, empathic feelings of terror and loneliness, who can put a label on it? But proximity to the shattered pieces drives human beings crazy, and no one tries to argue that point.

Justine Florbelle grew up with one of these fragments never more than a few rooms away.

Although it's totally passé to diagnose fictional characters with any kind of illness, Justine shows pretty clear signs of an extreme case of antisocial personality disorder. In all likelihood, she would have grown into a young lady with a far milder case and far better empathic skills were it not for the shard, but what's done is done, and Justine is very, very bad at thinking of anyone but herself.

Justine does not see other people as people. At best they are objects, possibly tools, at worst they are obstacles. Having been raised in fairly high society, she knows the manners and the social rules to follow in order to appear trustworthy, gentle and harmless. After all, she's just another innocent lady of the arts. This applies to anyone that isn't her, though it is worth noting that people who remind her of herself are valued as slightly less expendable.

Her own experiences lend to this: her father objectified her as a test subject, why would it be strange to her to think of others in the same way?

Now and then, under extreme duress, Justine can crack. The giggly, dainty veneer can be broken and expose her for what she is: unsympathetic, ruthless and not really all that stable. Real, physical danger scares her. Unexpected complications frustrate her. If things start to get scary or go wrong, she might accidentally drop the mask.

The darkness does not scare her. Helplessness, however, does.

But, apart from all that. She's flamboyant, teasing, and more than a little flippant. And bonus, she's artistic too! Did we mention she writes poetry? There's no final answer on whether or not it's any good, but apparently she considers it better than her prose.

And just because I feel like mentioning it: she can be prone to the vapors and will lose consciousness under situations of extreme stress.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:

Inventory:

A lantern, a few tinderboxes, and a wax cylinder for a grammaphone.

Appearance:

Dark, well kept, and conventionally attractive (what, did you think Basile really liked her for her sharp mind? Pfft). I use Regina George Rachel McAdams from the Sherlock Holmes films as a PB, which I know is fashionably innaccurate, but she just has the best bitchfaces.

Age:

Unknown, but likely somewhere in her midtwenties.

SAMPLES
Log Sample:

Something instinctive within her had been set off, and she'd reacted before she had a chance to think about it.

At least it's bright here had crossed her mind unbidden, prompting her to freeze, to turn the words over in her mind, examining them from every angle. Why should she be grateful for light? It was as common as air, really, so why should she give thanks for one common concession?

Of course, now she knows why. Having settled in to her new quarters, she takes stock of what's available to her (it isn't very much), and examines her own actions of the last few hours.

Losing her memories -- her self -- twice in one day? She hopes that this isn't the start of a trend, then chuckles at the thought.

Justine looks herself up and down in the mirror, tilting her head with a judgmental air. The provided uniform is strange, but not terribly uncomfortable, and... Well, it hugs her form rather a bit more than what a lady should wear, but she supposes that has its advantages.

Like the advantage of anything strange (but not terribly uncomfortable), this entire situation reeks of possibilities. If she is to understand it properly, she's not alone on this vast, metal... thing, and that means not just company, but potential. Raw materials, one might even say.

There's just ever so much to learn, out here in the black.

Comms Sample:

Salut! My, my, my. I certainly hope that this is not too forward to ask, but I find myself curious.

Just how many of we fine folk have left behind someone of a -- tch, j'aucune idée le mot en anglais -- romancing? romantic? Ah, yes! Someone of a romantic persuasion. Is that how one says it politely?

I wonder, not just how many broken hearts we have on this vessel with us, but how many aren't here. Of course, wouldn't it be interesting if there were more passengers missing their dear ones than there were being missed... Or the reverse! Most tragic, if you ask me.

Ah, as for myself? I must say, I find myself lacking only my closest friends. Tragic in its own right, of course, but hardly the substance of great novels.