ST EDELWEISS APPLICATION // complete
Warning: There are totally spoilers for season 5 here. I kept it vague where I could, but there are some I couldn't miss out.
PLAYER
NAME: Jessi
AGE: 19
PREFERRED PRONOUN: She
PERSONAL LJ: jessi_malfoy
TIMEZONE: GMT+10, East Coast Australia.
EMAIL ADDRESS: jess [dot] piggin [at] gmail [dot] com
AIM SCREENAME: jessihoney18
EXPERIENCE RPING: Five years, give or take, including an embarassing amount of time playing in a real person fandom comm which I'm not going to share, a few months at a short-lived Discworld game, a few months at milliways_bar as Shadow from American Gods and a year and four months over at lastvoyages as various different characters over the time, including Giles from Buffy, Tony Soprano from the Sopranos, Brian Moser from Dexter and of course, Prentiss.
CHARACTER
NAME: (Supervisory Special Agent) Emily Prentiss, Prentiss, Em
AGE: 36 or thereabouts, there are discrepancies in information from canon
HEIGHT: 173 cm, or 5' 8''
WEIGHT: Total guess... she's pretty skinny. 60 kgs, roughly? That's around 132 lbs for you strange Imperial people.
GENDER: Female
NATIONALITY: American
ROLE IN CANON: Protagonist; one of the main ensemble
FANDOM: Criminal Minds
FANDOM MEDIUM: Television
TIMELINE PERIOD: After the car-crash in season 5, episode 11 'Retaliation'
ABILITIES: She has skill with various weapons, particularly her Glock. She’s fluent in Arabic, Italian and Spanish and can speak some Russian and French. She's literate, well-read and smart to the point of geekery. She’s very focused, tends to be able to stay on task under pressure; she might break down and/or question everything after it's all over, but she's great during a dangerous situation. Probably her most important and useful skill is that she can read people well; she’s a criminal profiler and therefore very good at reading nuances of body language, expression and word choice. This allows her to predict fairly accurately what a person will do and also gain insight into their lives and personalities.
CHARACTER HISTORY: Prentiss grew up travelling. Her diplomat mother worked as an American Ambassador in Ukraine for much of her childhood, and was stationed in Italy when Prentiss was a teenager. The family moved a lot throughout the Middle East and various parts of Europe. As a result, Prentiss is familiar with Middle Eastern culture, fluent in Arabic, Italian and Spanish and has some knowledge of Russian and French. Her childhood was pretty lonely and disjointed, she felt out of place a lot, but it did help her learn to adjust to new situations without showing her weakness. Her mother’s job caused friction between them, as Prentiss shows when she says that politics “tears families apart” and “makes people distrustful” and that she has never seen her mother with her guard down.
When she was fifteen, living in Italy, Emily fell pregnant and had an abortion despite disapproval from the church. After this, and returning to the USA, Prentiss used teenage forms of rebellion against her parents, such as smoking and dressing as a Goth, but despite this, she was still driven to get good grades and do good work. She went on from Garfield high school to graduate from Yale. After college, she held a desk job in the FBI for just under ten years before receiving a transfer to the Behavioural Analysis Unit. Neither Agent Gideon or Agent Hotchner signed off on her transfer and they both believed there must have been some mistake, or that her parents had pulled strings to get her the job. However, Prentiss insists she’s a capable profiler and she is given the job on her own merit; she is ultimately accepted on a probationary basis and she spends the first few episodes she's in proving to the team and herself that she's good enough for the job. She handles the stress of the BAU job surprisingly well, and goes on to become an integral part of the BAU team. Her proficiency in languages comes in useful numerous times over the next few years and she develops a close friendship with the entire team. Prentiss works extra hard to show that she's a capable member of the BAU and that she deserves to be working with them.
At the start of the third season, it becomes clear that Emily was planted in the BAU without her knowledge as someone who could eventually spy on Hotch and his team after the debacle with Elle Greenaway. This backfires on the higher-ups when Prentiss quits the BAU rather than spy on her teammates. Hotch convinces her to return, her resignation having never been lodged due to technical interference by Agent Garcia. After she returns to the team, Strauss makes it clear that because of the whole situation, Prentiss will never be able to gain a higher position in the FBI.
Lalala, for some background, have some specific cases from the later seasons that particularly affected Prentiss:
Early in season 4, in a routine undercover investigation into a child abuse claim, Prentiss and Reid are held hostage by religious cult. When the cult leader finds out that there is at least one federal agent in the child abuse investigators, Prentiss steps forward and tells him she’s with the FBI, mainly because she feels she has to protect Reid. The cult leader beats her mercilessly, throughout which Prentiss insists that she “can take it”, antagonising the leader for the benefit of Hotch and the team, who are listening through bugs sent into the cult. Later, she insists to Reid that it wasn't his fault at all and that he couldn't blame himself because she made the choice.
Midway through season 4, Prentiss' old best friend is found dead in what looks like an exorcism gone-wrong. This brings up a number of issues for her, particularly as this was the friend who held her hand during her teenage abortion and supported her through the whole 'frowned up severely by the Church' thing, and the friend that after that, became a drug addict and got pretty messed up, which she blames herself for. She and the team find the killer, rescue another old friend (totally the dude who knocked her up) and everything is great, except that she comes out of it emotionally all over the place.
At the end of season 4, the team deal with a seriously mass murderer in Canada, who happens to be a quadriplegic who uses his mentally handicapped brother to do his dirty work and kill people so he can watch. It's gruesome, the death toll is somewhere over 100 people, and understandably it affects the entire team in a pretty bad way. They all just want to get home, get some sleep and try to block the horrific memories out of their heads... Unfortunately, at the start of season 5, it's been less than a day, none of them have had any sleep, there's another case and worst of all, Hotch is missing. You can see all their spirits crashing, but Prentiss is the one that goes to Hotch's apartment, finds blood and glass all over the place and Hotch's abandoned PDA under a table. She's the one who carries the load of that almost alone (divulging the information to Garcia and Reid only and insisting that the others don't find out until they've solved the case at hand) and who sticks with Hotch in hospital after they find him. She's pretty shaken by this, both internally and to a lesser degree externally. She keeps calm, but she's not in a good place mentally, really, especially because the Reaper is still out there.
The next few episodes are full of spectacularly depressing cases, including one where a man rapes women to get them pregnant, then kills them after their children are born, one where people are killed and their eyes removed and another where a group of young men are picking victims at random and killing them just for the fun of it, which ends in a group suicide-by-cop that Prentiss, Hotch and Rossi walk away from. They then stay up together drinking, which is totally understandable. After those cases, the Reaper re-immerges, and there's an utterly soul-crushing final showdown between him and Hotch, which all the team is privy to and depressed by equally.
At the point I'm taking her, Prentiss has just been in a car crash. She and another agent, Bunting, were taking an apprehended unsub named Dale Shrader into custody when Schrader's partner slammed a truck into their car. Schrader escaped, but not before killing Bunting brutally with his bare hands two feet away from a confused and concussed Prentiss, who was trapped in her seat by her seatbelt and unable to do anything. She's probably going to have nightmares about this and feel irrationally guilty, as I'm totally not taking her from before the point Morgan takes her to hospital and makes a point of telling her not to beat herself up about it, because I feel like being a dick to her. :c
CHARACTER PERSONALITY: Prentiss is capable and brave. A very driven woman, she works hard to be accepted into the BAU team, and keeps a high standard of work even after her superiors express to her that she’s good enough. She tends to seek out moments in which she can prove herself, whether it's to herself or her teammates, though that might not come up so much in St Edelweiss, because she's not here of her own accord. She's a very strong woman and is absolutely not a pushover, even when dealing with a higher-up. She will show respect (though at times 'sir' out of her mouth sounds more insulting than a lot of harsh words she could have used) but she will not back down, stating her point of view in a totally iron-clad tone of voice and not giving an inch.
Emily is, in canon, generally good-humoured and tries to see the bright side as a way of coping with all the terrible things her job entails, however, her fun-loving side is kind of diminished at the point I'm taking her, so... yeah. It might take a while for her to get that back. When she's in a good place, she likes to make jokes and is a total nerd about various things (aka Vonnegut). She’s loyal to her friends and cares deeply for them, willing to put herself recklessly in harms' way to protect them, to the point of endangering her own life as we see in season 4, episode 3 'Minimal Loss'. She also has a pretty strong mothering instinct, tending to be affected by cases involving children and teenagers slightly more than others; this stems from the abortion she had at age fifteen and her own mother issues. If something affects her emotionally or personally, she tends to be even more fierce in her desire to solve the case or do whatever it is that's necessary to resolve the issue, as we see in a bunch of episodes: season 3, episode 4 'Children of the Dark'; season 4, episode 17 'Demonology'; season 5, episode 1 'Faceless, Nameless', to name a few.
Prentiss has a strong moral compass and a need to do what’s right; for example, when Reid is struggling with drugs Prentiss refuses to let his odd behaviour slide as it is affecting their work, not to mention the detrimental effect it's having on him. Another example of this is when she steps down from the BAU rather than spy on the team. She's usually one of the first on the team into action, driven by a need to keep people safe. In season 3, episode 2 'In Birth and Death', even after stepping down from the BAU briefly, Emily goes into an unsub's house without backup, because there is a woman in danger and she is the only one who can bypass the red tape. She’s highly motivated and hates an unsolved mystery, at least when it's something harmful. She will niggle at little hints and notice the smallest details about people.
In season 2, episode 15 'Revelations', she says that she “compartmentalises better than most”, explaining how she manages to remain mostly unaffected by the horrific crime scenes the BAU investigate, but despite this, after the case is over, she sometimes questions her friends' and even her own personal motives and the nature of humanity in general. She is very empathetic, connecting closely with numerous victims and identifying with them. She also often identifies with the unsubs the team investigate on a level that is further than the job requires, which sometimes makes her question the good she's doing and how easily she and others around her could be driven to breaking point. She shows occasional signs of hyper-vigilance and wariness that almost all the BAU members experience, and she has a “list of things which she's never going to do again” that have stemmed from the job, implying that it affects how she behaves at home.
HOW IS THIS CHARACTER APPROPRIATE FOR THIS SETTING: Prentiss has to deal with a lot of the dark side of human behaviour and personality, and she copes well for the most part. She's tough, and can keep herself focused on her job when it counts, but she also questions herself and her and the team's decisions after the case is over. I want to explore the more messed-up stuff she's seen and how it affects her and I think St. Edelweiss is a pretty good setting to do that. She can't be cool and collected all the time, and I'm a sadist and enjoy the CR you can build through shared suffering. … That sounds really messed up. Sorry. :c
WHAT WILL THEIR DIAGNOSIS BE: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, and Cyclothymia (if you need me to cut down, just say the word). Prentiss doesn't actually show many of these symptoms, just some mild ones from PTSD, but I think that the whole 1890s diagnosing thing would make it likely that they would apply these terms to her. Especially the stuff about inappropriate seductiveness and attention-seeking behaviour because she's a woman, dammit and a woman's place is most certainly not in law-enforcement. And she shouldn't be wearing those ridiculous low-cut form-fitting clothes. SCANDAL. >CCC
PREDICTED PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS: Denial, depression and anger, with a hint of paranoia - totally a combination of these. She'll be in denial about the whole being crazy thing and will stubbornly cling to her memories, raging against the whole ridiculous place, and the tests and experiments? They're going to make her increasingly depressed and reckless and paranoid.
PREDICTED BEHAVIOUR/PLANS: She'll start by denying all possibility of her crazyness all public-like, then when she realises that doesn't work, she probably will get angry and start lashing out at guards a little. Then after a while of being in trouble for that, she's just going to settle in and wait for opportunities, suffer the indignities and ~compartmentalise~.
Also, if her team-mates are around, she's going to clinnnng to them majorly because they are clearly proof of her sanity. If they're not around, she's going to be a little paranoid of people until she can make a judgement of them. If they seem trustworthy or friendly or don't try to kill her or her mates, then she'll try to make friends with them. Also, if there are young or particularly vulnerable characters, she has a mother instinct thing going, so she could very well get in there and try to take care of them.
DANGER LEVEL: One to start with. She could be bumped up if it works out that way.
SAMPLES
THIRD PERSON: Emily didn't have her watch and there was no other way of telling the time, but she estimated it had been about an hour and a half since she'd woken up in this room, this cell. She had never been claustrophobic, but the walls felt oppressive and there was something that looked like blood on the floor. She'd woken up, taken a look around, and for a moment, every nerve in her body had prompted her to scream for help, to scream for the team, for Morgan, Hotch, Reid, anyone. She immediately squashed that urge down inside her. It would be better to know what she was dealing with. There was something that looked like a medical chart hanging from the end of her bed. She read it through once, mouth open. She swallowed, put it down for a moment, then picked it straight back up to read over again. The words were about her. The diagnosis was her own.
It was crazy. This situation was crazy.
Taking a deep breath and holding it, Emily looked through the chart a third time. No. She was sane. What the hell was she doing in an asylum? The only thing she could think was that somehow she'd fallen into an unsub's hands, and this was some sort of sick fantasy. But that was ridiculous and unlikely. The last thing she could remember, she'd been driving, with Schrader and- oh god, with Bunting- and the truck had come out of nowhere...
She shook those thoughts from her head; they wouldn't help her right now. Placing the chart carefully back with fingers that might have been shaking, she turned to the door. Maybe there was a way to unlock it. If there wasn't, if there was nothing else she could do, she would bang on it until someone came. Someone who could answer her questions.
FIRST PERSON: [At first there are some really, really faint gasping sounds that build gradually into:] I can't- I- This... [There's some deep breathing, like she's trying to stop herself panicking, then a long silence, then the sound of fingers tapping on metal.] What is this? Is this some kind of- Oh.
Um. [A deep inhale.]
[More fingers moving over metal, a slightly longer pause and her voice suddenly becomes calmer and more authoritative.]
Is there anyone listening? If anyone can hear this, I need you to tell me what's happening. Where- [She clears her throat.] Where am I? My name is Agent Emily Prentiss and I'm with the FBI. I need to know what's going on here.
(This is kind of the intro post that I would be doing if she wasn't coming directly out of the car crash. As it is, she's going to be way less coherant than this. Also, here's a thread from over at TLV, because I'm just hating everything I'm writing for first person sample, so enjoy some other game bitchfighting.)
NOTES: I literally started university like, yesterday, I shit you not. BEST TIME EVER TO BE JOINING A NEW GAME? I THINK SO. Also, like, I feel like this application is a bit lame, so if I've done anything wrong, srry guise.
PLAYER
NAME: Jessi
AGE: 19
PREFERRED PRONOUN: She
PERSONAL LJ: jessi_malfoy
TIMEZONE: GMT+10, East Coast Australia.
EMAIL ADDRESS: jess [dot] piggin [at] gmail [dot] com
AIM SCREENAME: jessihoney18
EXPERIENCE RPING: Five years, give or take, including an embarassing amount of time playing in a real person fandom comm which I'm not going to share, a few months at a short-lived Discworld game, a few months at milliways_bar as Shadow from American Gods and a year and four months over at lastvoyages as various different characters over the time, including Giles from Buffy, Tony Soprano from the Sopranos, Brian Moser from Dexter and of course, Prentiss.
CHARACTER
NAME: (Supervisory Special Agent) Emily Prentiss, Prentiss, Em
AGE: 36 or thereabouts, there are discrepancies in information from canon
HEIGHT: 173 cm, or 5' 8''
WEIGHT: Total guess... she's pretty skinny. 60 kgs, roughly? That's around 132 lbs for you strange Imperial people.
GENDER: Female
NATIONALITY: American
ROLE IN CANON: Protagonist; one of the main ensemble
FANDOM: Criminal Minds
FANDOM MEDIUM: Television
TIMELINE PERIOD: After the car-crash in season 5, episode 11 'Retaliation'
ABILITIES: She has skill with various weapons, particularly her Glock. She’s fluent in Arabic, Italian and Spanish and can speak some Russian and French. She's literate, well-read and smart to the point of geekery. She’s very focused, tends to be able to stay on task under pressure; she might break down and/or question everything after it's all over, but she's great during a dangerous situation. Probably her most important and useful skill is that she can read people well; she’s a criminal profiler and therefore very good at reading nuances of body language, expression and word choice. This allows her to predict fairly accurately what a person will do and also gain insight into their lives and personalities.
CHARACTER HISTORY: Prentiss grew up travelling. Her diplomat mother worked as an American Ambassador in Ukraine for much of her childhood, and was stationed in Italy when Prentiss was a teenager. The family moved a lot throughout the Middle East and various parts of Europe. As a result, Prentiss is familiar with Middle Eastern culture, fluent in Arabic, Italian and Spanish and has some knowledge of Russian and French. Her childhood was pretty lonely and disjointed, she felt out of place a lot, but it did help her learn to adjust to new situations without showing her weakness. Her mother’s job caused friction between them, as Prentiss shows when she says that politics “tears families apart” and “makes people distrustful” and that she has never seen her mother with her guard down.
When she was fifteen, living in Italy, Emily fell pregnant and had an abortion despite disapproval from the church. After this, and returning to the USA, Prentiss used teenage forms of rebellion against her parents, such as smoking and dressing as a Goth, but despite this, she was still driven to get good grades and do good work. She went on from Garfield high school to graduate from Yale. After college, she held a desk job in the FBI for just under ten years before receiving a transfer to the Behavioural Analysis Unit. Neither Agent Gideon or Agent Hotchner signed off on her transfer and they both believed there must have been some mistake, or that her parents had pulled strings to get her the job. However, Prentiss insists she’s a capable profiler and she is given the job on her own merit; she is ultimately accepted on a probationary basis and she spends the first few episodes she's in proving to the team and herself that she's good enough for the job. She handles the stress of the BAU job surprisingly well, and goes on to become an integral part of the BAU team. Her proficiency in languages comes in useful numerous times over the next few years and she develops a close friendship with the entire team. Prentiss works extra hard to show that she's a capable member of the BAU and that she deserves to be working with them.
At the start of the third season, it becomes clear that Emily was planted in the BAU without her knowledge as someone who could eventually spy on Hotch and his team after the debacle with Elle Greenaway. This backfires on the higher-ups when Prentiss quits the BAU rather than spy on her teammates. Hotch convinces her to return, her resignation having never been lodged due to technical interference by Agent Garcia. After she returns to the team, Strauss makes it clear that because of the whole situation, Prentiss will never be able to gain a higher position in the FBI.
Lalala, for some background, have some specific cases from the later seasons that particularly affected Prentiss:
Early in season 4, in a routine undercover investigation into a child abuse claim, Prentiss and Reid are held hostage by religious cult. When the cult leader finds out that there is at least one federal agent in the child abuse investigators, Prentiss steps forward and tells him she’s with the FBI, mainly because she feels she has to protect Reid. The cult leader beats her mercilessly, throughout which Prentiss insists that she “can take it”, antagonising the leader for the benefit of Hotch and the team, who are listening through bugs sent into the cult. Later, she insists to Reid that it wasn't his fault at all and that he couldn't blame himself because she made the choice.
Midway through season 4, Prentiss' old best friend is found dead in what looks like an exorcism gone-wrong. This brings up a number of issues for her, particularly as this was the friend who held her hand during her teenage abortion and supported her through the whole 'frowned up severely by the Church' thing, and the friend that after that, became a drug addict and got pretty messed up, which she blames herself for. She and the team find the killer, rescue another old friend (totally the dude who knocked her up) and everything is great, except that she comes out of it emotionally all over the place.
At the end of season 4, the team deal with a seriously mass murderer in Canada, who happens to be a quadriplegic who uses his mentally handicapped brother to do his dirty work and kill people so he can watch. It's gruesome, the death toll is somewhere over 100 people, and understandably it affects the entire team in a pretty bad way. They all just want to get home, get some sleep and try to block the horrific memories out of their heads... Unfortunately, at the start of season 5, it's been less than a day, none of them have had any sleep, there's another case and worst of all, Hotch is missing. You can see all their spirits crashing, but Prentiss is the one that goes to Hotch's apartment, finds blood and glass all over the place and Hotch's abandoned PDA under a table. She's the one who carries the load of that almost alone (divulging the information to Garcia and Reid only and insisting that the others don't find out until they've solved the case at hand) and who sticks with Hotch in hospital after they find him. She's pretty shaken by this, both internally and to a lesser degree externally. She keeps calm, but she's not in a good place mentally, really, especially because the Reaper is still out there.
The next few episodes are full of spectacularly depressing cases, including one where a man rapes women to get them pregnant, then kills them after their children are born, one where people are killed and their eyes removed and another where a group of young men are picking victims at random and killing them just for the fun of it, which ends in a group suicide-by-cop that Prentiss, Hotch and Rossi walk away from. They then stay up together drinking, which is totally understandable. After those cases, the Reaper re-immerges, and there's an utterly soul-crushing final showdown between him and Hotch, which all the team is privy to and depressed by equally.
At the point I'm taking her, Prentiss has just been in a car crash. She and another agent, Bunting, were taking an apprehended unsub named Dale Shrader into custody when Schrader's partner slammed a truck into their car. Schrader escaped, but not before killing Bunting brutally with his bare hands two feet away from a confused and concussed Prentiss, who was trapped in her seat by her seatbelt and unable to do anything. She's probably going to have nightmares about this and feel irrationally guilty, as I'm totally not taking her from before the point Morgan takes her to hospital and makes a point of telling her not to beat herself up about it, because I feel like being a dick to her. :c
CHARACTER PERSONALITY: Prentiss is capable and brave. A very driven woman, she works hard to be accepted into the BAU team, and keeps a high standard of work even after her superiors express to her that she’s good enough. She tends to seek out moments in which she can prove herself, whether it's to herself or her teammates, though that might not come up so much in St Edelweiss, because she's not here of her own accord. She's a very strong woman and is absolutely not a pushover, even when dealing with a higher-up. She will show respect (though at times 'sir' out of her mouth sounds more insulting than a lot of harsh words she could have used) but she will not back down, stating her point of view in a totally iron-clad tone of voice and not giving an inch.
Emily is, in canon, generally good-humoured and tries to see the bright side as a way of coping with all the terrible things her job entails, however, her fun-loving side is kind of diminished at the point I'm taking her, so... yeah. It might take a while for her to get that back. When she's in a good place, she likes to make jokes and is a total nerd about various things (aka Vonnegut). She’s loyal to her friends and cares deeply for them, willing to put herself recklessly in harms' way to protect them, to the point of endangering her own life as we see in season 4, episode 3 'Minimal Loss'. She also has a pretty strong mothering instinct, tending to be affected by cases involving children and teenagers slightly more than others; this stems from the abortion she had at age fifteen and her own mother issues. If something affects her emotionally or personally, she tends to be even more fierce in her desire to solve the case or do whatever it is that's necessary to resolve the issue, as we see in a bunch of episodes: season 3, episode 4 'Children of the Dark'; season 4, episode 17 'Demonology'; season 5, episode 1 'Faceless, Nameless', to name a few.
Prentiss has a strong moral compass and a need to do what’s right; for example, when Reid is struggling with drugs Prentiss refuses to let his odd behaviour slide as it is affecting their work, not to mention the detrimental effect it's having on him. Another example of this is when she steps down from the BAU rather than spy on the team. She's usually one of the first on the team into action, driven by a need to keep people safe. In season 3, episode 2 'In Birth and Death', even after stepping down from the BAU briefly, Emily goes into an unsub's house without backup, because there is a woman in danger and she is the only one who can bypass the red tape. She’s highly motivated and hates an unsolved mystery, at least when it's something harmful. She will niggle at little hints and notice the smallest details about people.
In season 2, episode 15 'Revelations', she says that she “compartmentalises better than most”, explaining how she manages to remain mostly unaffected by the horrific crime scenes the BAU investigate, but despite this, after the case is over, she sometimes questions her friends' and even her own personal motives and the nature of humanity in general. She is very empathetic, connecting closely with numerous victims and identifying with them. She also often identifies with the unsubs the team investigate on a level that is further than the job requires, which sometimes makes her question the good she's doing and how easily she and others around her could be driven to breaking point. She shows occasional signs of hyper-vigilance and wariness that almost all the BAU members experience, and she has a “list of things which she's never going to do again” that have stemmed from the job, implying that it affects how she behaves at home.
HOW IS THIS CHARACTER APPROPRIATE FOR THIS SETTING: Prentiss has to deal with a lot of the dark side of human behaviour and personality, and she copes well for the most part. She's tough, and can keep herself focused on her job when it counts, but she also questions herself and her and the team's decisions after the case is over. I want to explore the more messed-up stuff she's seen and how it affects her and I think St. Edelweiss is a pretty good setting to do that. She can't be cool and collected all the time, and I'm a sadist and enjoy the CR you can build through shared suffering. … That sounds really messed up. Sorry. :c
WHAT WILL THEIR DIAGNOSIS BE: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, and Cyclothymia (if you need me to cut down, just say the word). Prentiss doesn't actually show many of these symptoms, just some mild ones from PTSD, but I think that the whole 1890s diagnosing thing would make it likely that they would apply these terms to her. Especially the stuff about inappropriate seductiveness and attention-seeking behaviour because she's a woman, dammit and a woman's place is most certainly not in law-enforcement. And she shouldn't be wearing those ridiculous low-cut form-fitting clothes. SCANDAL. >CCC
PREDICTED PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS: Denial, depression and anger, with a hint of paranoia - totally a combination of these. She'll be in denial about the whole being crazy thing and will stubbornly cling to her memories, raging against the whole ridiculous place, and the tests and experiments? They're going to make her increasingly depressed and reckless and paranoid.
PREDICTED BEHAVIOUR/PLANS: She'll start by denying all possibility of her crazyness all public-like, then when she realises that doesn't work, she probably will get angry and start lashing out at guards a little. Then after a while of being in trouble for that, she's just going to settle in and wait for opportunities, suffer the indignities and ~compartmentalise~.
Also, if her team-mates are around, she's going to clinnnng to them majorly because they are clearly proof of her sanity. If they're not around, she's going to be a little paranoid of people until she can make a judgement of them. If they seem trustworthy or friendly or don't try to kill her or her mates, then she'll try to make friends with them. Also, if there are young or particularly vulnerable characters, she has a mother instinct thing going, so she could very well get in there and try to take care of them.
DANGER LEVEL: One to start with. She could be bumped up if it works out that way.
SAMPLES
THIRD PERSON: Emily didn't have her watch and there was no other way of telling the time, but she estimated it had been about an hour and a half since she'd woken up in this room, this cell. She had never been claustrophobic, but the walls felt oppressive and there was something that looked like blood on the floor. She'd woken up, taken a look around, and for a moment, every nerve in her body had prompted her to scream for help, to scream for the team, for Morgan, Hotch, Reid, anyone. She immediately squashed that urge down inside her. It would be better to know what she was dealing with. There was something that looked like a medical chart hanging from the end of her bed. She read it through once, mouth open. She swallowed, put it down for a moment, then picked it straight back up to read over again. The words were about her. The diagnosis was her own.
It was crazy. This situation was crazy.
Taking a deep breath and holding it, Emily looked through the chart a third time. No. She was sane. What the hell was she doing in an asylum? The only thing she could think was that somehow she'd fallen into an unsub's hands, and this was some sort of sick fantasy. But that was ridiculous and unlikely. The last thing she could remember, she'd been driving, with Schrader and- oh god, with Bunting- and the truck had come out of nowhere...
She shook those thoughts from her head; they wouldn't help her right now. Placing the chart carefully back with fingers that might have been shaking, she turned to the door. Maybe there was a way to unlock it. If there wasn't, if there was nothing else she could do, she would bang on it until someone came. Someone who could answer her questions.
FIRST PERSON: [At first there are some really, really faint gasping sounds that build gradually into:] I can't- I- This... [There's some deep breathing, like she's trying to stop herself panicking, then a long silence, then the sound of fingers tapping on metal.] What is this? Is this some kind of- Oh.
Um. [A deep inhale.]
[More fingers moving over metal, a slightly longer pause and her voice suddenly becomes calmer and more authoritative.]
Is there anyone listening? If anyone can hear this, I need you to tell me what's happening. Where- [She clears her throat.] Where am I? My name is Agent Emily Prentiss and I'm with the FBI. I need to know what's going on here.
(This is kind of the intro post that I would be doing if she wasn't coming directly out of the car crash. As it is, she's going to be way less coherant than this. Also, here's a thread from over at TLV, because I'm just hating everything I'm writing for first person sample, so enjoy some other game bitchfighting.)
NOTES: I literally started university like, yesterday, I shit you not. BEST TIME EVER TO BE JOINING A NEW GAME? I THINK SO. Also, like, I feel like this application is a bit lame, so if I've done anything wrong, srry guise.