betenoire_rp app
1. Player Information
Name (or internet handle): Brynn
Current characters in Bete Noire: none
2. Character Information
Name: Mellie (except for really she’s Madeline Costley. And sometimes November.)
Livejournal Username: all_myheart
Fandom: Dollhouse
Image: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/105143386/31413024
Reserve: http://magistrated.livejournal.com/1299.html?thread=1370899#t1370899
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: Twentysomething (twenty-eight to be exact, but you never ask a lady’s age). About five-six and definitely curvaceous, which after years of living in skinny Minnie L.A. has made her discount her own attractiveness. But between practically porcelain skin, thick shiny hair, and blue eyes to die for, she’s actually very pretty.
History: http://dollhouse.wikia.com/wiki/Mellie
Personality: Mellie is without fail a friendly, giving sort of person. She’s a bit self-deprecating, but she compensates for what she believes are her flaws by offering a listening ear and friendly favors wherever she can. It’s also possible that she’d take a generous role in others’ lives just because she enjoys it, and enjoys the feeling of being helpful. No matter her motivation, she’s very devoted to the people she cares about and very willing to put her own problems aside to help deal with others.
As said above, she’s got a streak of self-loathing, especially in regards to her appearance. She’s lived in L.A. long enough to be affected by its stereotype of beauty, and as a healthily curvy woman, often feels out of place or “less than.” She’s quick to joke about it, at least to others’ faces, though it really does bother her. (It's interesting this tendency was part of Mellie's design, as it was always part of Madeline, too, though born less of pure insecurity and more of finding herself easy to joke about. Madeline had always been confident in herself, and known that anyone who would judge her for not fitting the skinny bitch ideal wasn't worth her time instead of the other way around.)
Said streak also stems from a history of bad relationships, or at least relationships that were mediocre and ended badly, and it’s left her feeling undesirable to the opposite sex. (This wasn't entirely unlike Madeline, either, though her list of exes was shorter, and the relationships' ends much less dramatic. She knew better than to blame herself for these failings.)
Of course, as of very, very recently she now understands that this is all a construction, that her entire personality and history, down to those memories of bad boyfriends and physical insecurities, is something someone created. She’s a program, and she doesn’t entirely know how to feel about it. Certainly, she’s taken a better approach to it than she could have, and even though she knows her tendencies towards sarcasm at her own expense are just a part of the design, she’s quick to fall back on them. It’s safer that way, and keeps her from getting too emotional (she does try, generally, to avoid this; a few people have seen her lose it, but only when she’s really at the bottom of the barrel, and since she doesn’t want one of those people to see her lose it again, she’s trying to hold it together).
If she ever learned about who she really originally was, Mellie would probably be jealous of Madeline, quite honestly. Jealous of her confidence and the success she'd had in life. She'd feel sorry for her, too, feeling like what she'd been through put things in perspective, but that would shift into more of that self-deprecation after a while.
Reason for playing: I’ve really always had a thing for Mellie, ever since the series beginning, and her(/Madeline’s/November’s) story arc is just beautiful. I was persuaded to app by a friend. I'm always very interested in darker sorts of games, and I think what in particular I'm curious about (more as I think about it more) is the idea of Mellie at that particular point in her story sort of having a chance to deal with being not-real and attempting to build herself or accept herself as best she can. I can see her going through a minorly self-destructive phase, almost the way teenagers can do when they're distancing themselves from their parents; she's not going to let herself wallow, but she's got to come to grips with it somehow, and she'd likely look for different ways until she found one that fit.
4. Original Character Supplement
World History: The world of Dollhouse isn’t anything unlike our own, really, except for the Dollhouse itself, the Rossum Corporation and its illicit underground enterprises and sinister motives. Mellie herself didn’t know of it, or have that knowledge programmed in, but as her relationship with Paul progressed, she learned more of it, finding it a somewhat macabre fact of life.
Character History: Madeline Costley was never particularly exciting, but she liked it that way. She'd always had a creative eye and a math aptitude, and her choice to become an architect reflected that; her specialty was buildings that mixed the old with the new, offices or hotels or such things. A San Francisco native, she thrived off of being surrounded by culture but didn't feel compelled to push into the more ostentatious parts of it.
She was only twenty-two when she got pregnant. She wasn't seeing the man regularly and didn't want to; she didn't expect anything to come of telling him, and didn't want him to feel like he had to stick around just out of some sense of duty. So she never actually told him. With no family to speak of, Madeline resolved to do it on her own, and it wasn’t by any means easy. But they were doing all right, her and little Katie. Katherine Maura, who was a redhead like her father, but Madeline in every other way.
Until Katie got sick, and it was just one of those things. It seemed harmless at first, then suddenly it wasn’t, it was cancer, and it wasn’t going to get better. It was six months after the diagnosis that Katie passed away; she’d been in an L.A. children’s hospital, and Madeline couldn’t stand to leave. The Dollhouse came into the picture around then, and they promised to be the big fix. Madeline sincerely thought it would be, and, grief-stricken, frankly verging on desperate, and not really thinking too hard about what it would actually entail, she signed the contract.
With that, the Active known as November was born. Technically the second November in the house, she was the sort of Doll favored for repeat engagements. She usually filled the sweeter, sexier roles, not the seedier underworld ones, usually someone’s fantasy, not someone’s criminal mastermind or detective. (Madeline would have rolled her eyes at that, more likely than not.) There was the socialite computer genius, the geek-fetishy lawyer, the neo-hippie. And then there was Mellie. Created to spy on Paul Ballard, an FBI agent hot on the Dollhouse’s trail, she was an in-house long-term engagement, one not originally designed to be romantic but one that just couldn’t help it.
Melanie Sophia Jameson, who opted for Mellie to avoid sounding like a valley girl, who was one of the thousands named for Gone With The Wind, had always lived life for others more than herself. (She appreciated the irony of being a Mellie and not a Scarlett.) Mellie grew up in northern California, graduated from UCLA in 2001 (and was fully willing to admit that her degree in history was somewhat aimless)and after a bit of also-aimless puttering around, got a job working the desk at an upscale bakery. This was satisfyingly interesting, though never meant to be permanent. She had one boyfriend and another, to little success. After the bakery went bust, she did more secretarial work for a small upstart, but upon her father’s passing in 2007, she inherited enough money to cover her rent for a while and allow her to think seriously about what she actually wanted to do with herself.
What she ended up doing was trying with all her power to woo her across-the-hall neighbor Paul Ballard. At first, all she expected of it was friendship; he certainly had prettier and more interesting girls falling over him. This didn’t stop her from running little errands for him or baking for him, though. She’d always been the sort to devote herself to someone else and he was certainly a good candidate. Tall, handsome, kind, noble, he was sort of a fairy tale perfect man, something refreshing to her after a long string of losers. She liked how devoted he was to his work, even though it meant she doubted that he could ever be devoted to her.
Things evolved, though, eventually it became exactly the romance she’d wanted. She was doubtful of it, thinking he was hung up on a girl named Caroline. This girl wasn’t even someone he knew, just a picture and a videotape, the idea of a girl he thought was part of an illegal organization called the Dollhouse that he was investigating, but soon came to realize he was, at least for now, genuinely interested in her. Those were easily the happiest times in her recent past.
But for whatever reason, Paul soon broke it off. (Really, he’d discovered that she was a Doll; he couldn’t say as much, and so Mellie was left to dither over it, heartbroken.) She seemed to contemplate suicide over the matter. Mellie went back on the shelf, and November filled the body for a time. When he discovered the Dollhouse in its actuality, Paul bargained with Adelle Dewitt, who ran it, for November who he knew as Mellie’s contract to end, and he met the woman that was Madeline before she was released into the world. Madeline never knew what Paul had done for her.
Adelle had probably never regretted an Active’s release more, though; Madeline was soon roped into a plan (actually masterminded by the D.C. Dollhouse) that threatened to expose the Dollhouse and set to testify. She’d been a bit doubtful about it at first, but when they showed her proof that she’d killed a man she was horrified enough to go through with it. But as the Active that was Caroline, now Echo, unraveled and ruined this plan and the D.C. Active, Senator Perrin, changed mission enough that Madeline was no longer needed, she found herself again adrift. It was to be her last time as herself, because she was soon brought to the D.C. house and forcibly entered in, now Hestia and going on many of the same sorts of engagements as before. She became little more than a pawn as Paul and Echo worked to take down the Dollhouse from the inside, and when she was rescued, Adelle insisted that the body be one that would trust Paul implicitly.
So Mellie found Paul again (or rather, the Mellie imprint was revived) and tried to be happy that he’d found Caroline too. She was a little bit surprised that they weren’t in the throes of an epic romance, it would have suited, but it wasn’t like that. It was explained to her soon enough: she wasn’t real, she was just a program, and Paul wasn’t real anymore either. Even knowing that she wasn’t, and confused by knowing that, she tried to swallow her anxieties and help him and the others take down the Dollhouse once and for all. After all, she still did care about him, no matter how real or unreal she was.
5. Samples
First-Person: It’s kind of like writing a story, isn’t it? The thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, of someone who isn’t real.
All right. I’m not real.
Or, at least, I’m -- not really real, but I still feel things that are real, the things I do are real, the things I say are real. They are. Thinking otherwise would just get hideously existential, and I don’t nobody needs that.
Third-Person: When Mellie opened her eyes, triggers were going off in her head. She didn’t know why or what they meant or any of that. She wasn’t sure she was supposed to. But there was Paul, Paul -- and he didn’t look angry, he was smiling sort of sadly. She’d take it, it was a smile.
Then downstairs they went -- and there was Caroline, the dream girl. He’d found her. She was happy for him, happy -- sure it meant everything else was up in the air, but he could breathe easier. That was really what mattered. Even after -- how long had it even been?
How long had it really been? They explained it to her, not entirely without tact but also without overt sympathy (that would have been a waste of time). She wasn’t real, she was entries in a computer, a guest in someone else’s brain, she was exactly what Paul had been fighting. What he was now part of.
Well, on the smile would go. Invented though she may have been, it was still no reason to be an obvious downer. Maybe when she was alone she’d get emotional about it, but she didn’t know when that would be. All she knew was that she was here for -- well, for whatever reason, and she was going to do what was needed of her.
Third-Person #2: Lots to love.
Something extra to hold onto.
A whole lotta woman.
Mellie had heard these things over and over (sometimes in her head, sometimes not); even when they thought they were being nice, it stung. A backhanded compliment that served as a reminder of her insecurities, that’s all it was.
Paul had never even hinted at that. He called her beautiful, in a rushed way maybe, a way like he wasn’t entirely thinking about it, but beautiful. She wasn’t one to get picky about how he’d said it when he’d said it, period. He was a gentleman, and gentlemen had always made her want to act very unladylike.
So when they kissed, she wasn’t about to waste time. Sure, she may have been startled by his hands on her body at first, but it was a good startled. She adored the feeling. She parted her lips, her tongue dancing with Paul’s. This she could do. This she was good at.
She’d unbuttoned his shirt by the time they fell into bed, throwing it aside. This was no time to play coy and silly, blush like a teenager; she could already feel him stiff against her. She wasn’t harboring delusions that he’d dreamed about this like she had, but he was enjoying himself now, and that’s what mattered most.
Name (or internet handle): Brynn
Current characters in Bete Noire: none
2. Character Information
Name: Mellie (except for really she’s Madeline Costley. And sometimes November.)
Livejournal Username: all_myheart
Fandom: Dollhouse
Image: http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/105143386/31413024
Reserve: http://magistrated.livejournal.com/1299.html?thread=1370899#t1370899
3. Character Information II
Age/Appearance: Twentysomething (twenty-eight to be exact, but you never ask a lady’s age). About five-six and definitely curvaceous, which after years of living in skinny Minnie L.A. has made her discount her own attractiveness. But between practically porcelain skin, thick shiny hair, and blue eyes to die for, she’s actually very pretty.
History: http://dollhouse.wikia.com/wiki/Mellie
Personality: Mellie is without fail a friendly, giving sort of person. She’s a bit self-deprecating, but she compensates for what she believes are her flaws by offering a listening ear and friendly favors wherever she can. It’s also possible that she’d take a generous role in others’ lives just because she enjoys it, and enjoys the feeling of being helpful. No matter her motivation, she’s very devoted to the people she cares about and very willing to put her own problems aside to help deal with others.
As said above, she’s got a streak of self-loathing, especially in regards to her appearance. She’s lived in L.A. long enough to be affected by its stereotype of beauty, and as a healthily curvy woman, often feels out of place or “less than.” She’s quick to joke about it, at least to others’ faces, though it really does bother her. (It's interesting this tendency was part of Mellie's design, as it was always part of Madeline, too, though born less of pure insecurity and more of finding herself easy to joke about. Madeline had always been confident in herself, and known that anyone who would judge her for not fitting the skinny bitch ideal wasn't worth her time instead of the other way around.)
Said streak also stems from a history of bad relationships, or at least relationships that were mediocre and ended badly, and it’s left her feeling undesirable to the opposite sex. (This wasn't entirely unlike Madeline, either, though her list of exes was shorter, and the relationships' ends much less dramatic. She knew better than to blame herself for these failings.)
Of course, as of very, very recently she now understands that this is all a construction, that her entire personality and history, down to those memories of bad boyfriends and physical insecurities, is something someone created. She’s a program, and she doesn’t entirely know how to feel about it. Certainly, she’s taken a better approach to it than she could have, and even though she knows her tendencies towards sarcasm at her own expense are just a part of the design, she’s quick to fall back on them. It’s safer that way, and keeps her from getting too emotional (she does try, generally, to avoid this; a few people have seen her lose it, but only when she’s really at the bottom of the barrel, and since she doesn’t want one of those people to see her lose it again, she’s trying to hold it together).
If she ever learned about who she really originally was, Mellie would probably be jealous of Madeline, quite honestly. Jealous of her confidence and the success she'd had in life. She'd feel sorry for her, too, feeling like what she'd been through put things in perspective, but that would shift into more of that self-deprecation after a while.
Reason for playing: I’ve really always had a thing for Mellie, ever since the series beginning, and her(/Madeline’s/November’s) story arc is just beautiful. I was persuaded to app by a friend. I'm always very interested in darker sorts of games, and I think what in particular I'm curious about (more as I think about it more) is the idea of Mellie at that particular point in her story sort of having a chance to deal with being not-real and attempting to build herself or accept herself as best she can. I can see her going through a minorly self-destructive phase, almost the way teenagers can do when they're distancing themselves from their parents; she's not going to let herself wallow, but she's got to come to grips with it somehow, and she'd likely look for different ways until she found one that fit.
4. Original Character Supplement
World History: The world of Dollhouse isn’t anything unlike our own, really, except for the Dollhouse itself, the Rossum Corporation and its illicit underground enterprises and sinister motives. Mellie herself didn’t know of it, or have that knowledge programmed in, but as her relationship with Paul progressed, she learned more of it, finding it a somewhat macabre fact of life.
Character History: Madeline Costley was never particularly exciting, but she liked it that way. She'd always had a creative eye and a math aptitude, and her choice to become an architect reflected that; her specialty was buildings that mixed the old with the new, offices or hotels or such things. A San Francisco native, she thrived off of being surrounded by culture but didn't feel compelled to push into the more ostentatious parts of it.
She was only twenty-two when she got pregnant. She wasn't seeing the man regularly and didn't want to; she didn't expect anything to come of telling him, and didn't want him to feel like he had to stick around just out of some sense of duty. So she never actually told him. With no family to speak of, Madeline resolved to do it on her own, and it wasn’t by any means easy. But they were doing all right, her and little Katie. Katherine Maura, who was a redhead like her father, but Madeline in every other way.
Until Katie got sick, and it was just one of those things. It seemed harmless at first, then suddenly it wasn’t, it was cancer, and it wasn’t going to get better. It was six months after the diagnosis that Katie passed away; she’d been in an L.A. children’s hospital, and Madeline couldn’t stand to leave. The Dollhouse came into the picture around then, and they promised to be the big fix. Madeline sincerely thought it would be, and, grief-stricken, frankly verging on desperate, and not really thinking too hard about what it would actually entail, she signed the contract.
With that, the Active known as November was born. Technically the second November in the house, she was the sort of Doll favored for repeat engagements. She usually filled the sweeter, sexier roles, not the seedier underworld ones, usually someone’s fantasy, not someone’s criminal mastermind or detective. (Madeline would have rolled her eyes at that, more likely than not.) There was the socialite computer genius, the geek-fetishy lawyer, the neo-hippie. And then there was Mellie. Created to spy on Paul Ballard, an FBI agent hot on the Dollhouse’s trail, she was an in-house long-term engagement, one not originally designed to be romantic but one that just couldn’t help it.
Melanie Sophia Jameson, who opted for Mellie to avoid sounding like a valley girl, who was one of the thousands named for Gone With The Wind, had always lived life for others more than herself. (She appreciated the irony of being a Mellie and not a Scarlett.) Mellie grew up in northern California, graduated from UCLA in 2001 (and was fully willing to admit that her degree in history was somewhat aimless)and after a bit of also-aimless puttering around, got a job working the desk at an upscale bakery. This was satisfyingly interesting, though never meant to be permanent. She had one boyfriend and another, to little success. After the bakery went bust, she did more secretarial work for a small upstart, but upon her father’s passing in 2007, she inherited enough money to cover her rent for a while and allow her to think seriously about what she actually wanted to do with herself.
What she ended up doing was trying with all her power to woo her across-the-hall neighbor Paul Ballard. At first, all she expected of it was friendship; he certainly had prettier and more interesting girls falling over him. This didn’t stop her from running little errands for him or baking for him, though. She’d always been the sort to devote herself to someone else and he was certainly a good candidate. Tall, handsome, kind, noble, he was sort of a fairy tale perfect man, something refreshing to her after a long string of losers. She liked how devoted he was to his work, even though it meant she doubted that he could ever be devoted to her.
Things evolved, though, eventually it became exactly the romance she’d wanted. She was doubtful of it, thinking he was hung up on a girl named Caroline. This girl wasn’t even someone he knew, just a picture and a videotape, the idea of a girl he thought was part of an illegal organization called the Dollhouse that he was investigating, but soon came to realize he was, at least for now, genuinely interested in her. Those were easily the happiest times in her recent past.
But for whatever reason, Paul soon broke it off. (Really, he’d discovered that she was a Doll; he couldn’t say as much, and so Mellie was left to dither over it, heartbroken.) She seemed to contemplate suicide over the matter. Mellie went back on the shelf, and November filled the body for a time. When he discovered the Dollhouse in its actuality, Paul bargained with Adelle Dewitt, who ran it, for November who he knew as Mellie’s contract to end, and he met the woman that was Madeline before she was released into the world. Madeline never knew what Paul had done for her.
Adelle had probably never regretted an Active’s release more, though; Madeline was soon roped into a plan (actually masterminded by the D.C. Dollhouse) that threatened to expose the Dollhouse and set to testify. She’d been a bit doubtful about it at first, but when they showed her proof that she’d killed a man she was horrified enough to go through with it. But as the Active that was Caroline, now Echo, unraveled and ruined this plan and the D.C. Active, Senator Perrin, changed mission enough that Madeline was no longer needed, she found herself again adrift. It was to be her last time as herself, because she was soon brought to the D.C. house and forcibly entered in, now Hestia and going on many of the same sorts of engagements as before. She became little more than a pawn as Paul and Echo worked to take down the Dollhouse from the inside, and when she was rescued, Adelle insisted that the body be one that would trust Paul implicitly.
So Mellie found Paul again (or rather, the Mellie imprint was revived) and tried to be happy that he’d found Caroline too. She was a little bit surprised that they weren’t in the throes of an epic romance, it would have suited, but it wasn’t like that. It was explained to her soon enough: she wasn’t real, she was just a program, and Paul wasn’t real anymore either. Even knowing that she wasn’t, and confused by knowing that, she tried to swallow her anxieties and help him and the others take down the Dollhouse once and for all. After all, she still did care about him, no matter how real or unreal she was.
5. Samples
First-Person: It’s kind of like writing a story, isn’t it? The thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, of someone who isn’t real.
All right. I’m not real.
Or, at least, I’m -- not really real, but I still feel things that are real, the things I do are real, the things I say are real. They are. Thinking otherwise would just get hideously existential, and I don’t nobody needs that.
Third-Person: When Mellie opened her eyes, triggers were going off in her head. She didn’t know why or what they meant or any of that. She wasn’t sure she was supposed to. But there was Paul, Paul -- and he didn’t look angry, he was smiling sort of sadly. She’d take it, it was a smile.
Then downstairs they went -- and there was Caroline, the dream girl. He’d found her. She was happy for him, happy -- sure it meant everything else was up in the air, but he could breathe easier. That was really what mattered. Even after -- how long had it even been?
How long had it really been? They explained it to her, not entirely without tact but also without overt sympathy (that would have been a waste of time). She wasn’t real, she was entries in a computer, a guest in someone else’s brain, she was exactly what Paul had been fighting. What he was now part of.
Well, on the smile would go. Invented though she may have been, it was still no reason to be an obvious downer. Maybe when she was alone she’d get emotional about it, but she didn’t know when that would be. All she knew was that she was here for -- well, for whatever reason, and she was going to do what was needed of her.
Third-Person #2: Lots to love.
Something extra to hold onto.
A whole lotta woman.
Mellie had heard these things over and over (sometimes in her head, sometimes not); even when they thought they were being nice, it stung. A backhanded compliment that served as a reminder of her insecurities, that’s all it was.
Paul had never even hinted at that. He called her beautiful, in a rushed way maybe, a way like he wasn’t entirely thinking about it, but beautiful. She wasn’t one to get picky about how he’d said it when he’d said it, period. He was a gentleman, and gentlemen had always made her want to act very unladylike.
So when they kissed, she wasn’t about to waste time. Sure, she may have been startled by his hands on her body at first, but it was a good startled. She adored the feeling. She parted her lips, her tongue dancing with Paul’s. This she could do. This she was good at.
She’d unbuttoned his shirt by the time they fell into bed, throwing it aside. This was no time to play coy and silly, blush like a teenager; she could already feel him stiff against her. She wasn’t harboring delusions that he’d dreamed about this like she had, but he was enjoying himself now, and that’s what mattered most.