( counted_stars app ; illyria ; angel: the series )
Player Information:
Name or Handle: Amber
LJ: bentley
Email: escapism @ gmail
AIM/ MSN / Plurk name: aim: fistbumps | plurk: subjugglator
Any current characters here?: Arthur Pendragon of Merlin (supercilious)
Character Information:
Character Name: God King Illyria
Age: Fred died at 29. Illyria is immortal and has been around for thousands of years. It has possessed Fred’s body for approximately three months before the events of After the Fall, which add a remembered but not lived year. Give or take a few weeks between Angel 23 and 28.
Canon: Angel: The Series.
Appearance:
PB: Amy Acker. Fred was once a skinny girl with long brown hair, brown eyes, a pointy nose and a mouser look about her. Illyria hollowed out her human body, disintegrating her organs and changing and hardening her skin to make a shell for her consciousness. Illyria's inhabitation flushed a blue through Fred: into her hair, creeping like scales across her temples and lips, changing her irises. Illyria can change her form at will, including adding the appearance of clothing: typically she wears dark, skintight leather. She has a warrior's grace and moves with inhuman fluidity, often staring or cocking her neck like a bird or reptile. Most of she has a proud, haughty bearing.
Personality:
Fred Burkle is best described as "bright". Not just because of her genius intellect; she has a charm that shines through, and seems to enchant those around her.
Though she had the confidence to move out of home and pursue her dreams, Fred’s parents loved her unconditionally but they babied her a little and she often felt misunderstood. Growing up as a nerd didn't exactly gain her a plethora of social skills, and nor did her years living in a cave. During and for some time after Pylea, Fred was nervous and paranoid, often non-linear, fond of small enclosed spaces, prioritizing and hoarding means of survival (e.g. food) and confused by everyday objects.
Once Angel Investigations took her under their wing, Fred discovered she enjoyed being a girly girl with Cordelia, but also being one of the boys. She had a brief and shy crush on Angel, followed by a far more serious relationship with Charles Gunn, both of which could make her fluttery and a little silly. However being a smart girl, Fred has a sharp tongue on her and can be sarcastic, though not usually malicious, and while she started out gullible she quickly became more street smart and it grew harder to pull the wool over her eyes.
As she matured and gained confidence Fred grew assertive. Her time as head of Research and Development put her organizational skills to use and drew out the steely spine that had only rarely been glimpsed before. Fred, once too shy to ask for anything without a please, discovers she thrives as authority and can use a combination of hard-ass task master and encouragement to get boundless productivity from her team.
In fact, despite the fact that she initially comes off as vulnerable, due to her madness, and then her sweetness, Fred has a lot of strength. She is able to make difficult decisions and has made it through countless terrible situations unbroken. Whether it's going after her Professor, or Jasmine, or a covert of demonspawn, Fred is willing to fight for what she believes in.
This fighting can also be not of the weapons-and-kicking variety: Fred believes in her friends and supports them unwaveringly. She will give people second chances, even if it takes her a while to come around, and she will see the best in those she cares for. (For example, refusing to give up on Spike.)
That said, her own intense loyalties are something she projects on everyone else, and if someone disillusions or betrays her she can be shattered; not only does she refuse to forgive Wesley’s betrayal, she tortures him with a stun gun. Though, being human, she makes mistakes and has experienced a moral crisis or two, when it comes down to the line Fred is a good person and tries to do the right thing.
When speaking, her Southern friendliness gives her a lot of cute "gee, gosh" styles of speaking, and she has a tendency to ramble about a topic or babble when she's nervous. When she was a teenager she smoked a lot of pot and was a bit of a conspiracy theorist. She laughs easily, freely, and sometimes for too long. Though she can dress up for business, she is at heart a casual person, whether that means hoodies and jeans or simply kicking off her shoes under her desk. She enjoys simple, fun things like ice-cream or Chinese or tacos (and can eat much more than you'd expect from her size.) Her favourite book is "The Secret Garden" and she has a stuffed toy rabbit named after a physicist.
Illyria, on the other hand, is everything Fred is not. Mostly because Illyria isn’t human.
As a god-like being, Illyria is cold. Though it may get angry, it deals with its anger through swift and furious destruction. It is a thing of action rather than words. The words it uses are self-aggrandizing and melodramatic, almost purple. Used to constant worship, it has a large ego and a lot of pride. It sees itself as above humans, used to having every minutiae of its will obeyed and with no issue in belittling those around it. Having been all-powerful, it has very little in the way of fear, and because of this does not seem to function with regular human social regulators such as shame or embarrassment or guilt. Illyria speaks abruptly, in short, declarative sentences. It does not laugh except in derision, and it finds sadness disgusting.
To start with it does not care for anything but regaining its own power, which it defines itself by. When its powers are subdued Illyria nurses its wounds and plots vengeance, but out of a combination of boredom and curiosity, begins to involve itself in the affairs of Wolfram and Hart. Illyria required very little and thus had everything: in losing everything and starting from scratch in a vastly more complicated world and futuristic world than its own, it by necessity begins to change and adapt.
Time in the human world “mellows” Illyria to the point where it seems to care at least for Wesley, and experiences residual human emotions such as grief. Occasionally Illyria will become invested in something pointless and human (such as a video game, or learning to drive) and wound its own pride. It has very little knowledge of the human world, particular human motivations and emotions, which it always deemed as below its notice. It often demands to know the purpose of things and/or dismisses them as irrelevant and ridiculous.
Its anger becomes a complicated emotion that can cause it to rampage, with often devastating results. Illyria’s reaction to negative feelings is usually to forcibly remove their cause.
When Illyria pretends to be Fred, she is more voluptuous and much darker, all of Fred’s steel and little of her passion, and a lot of sarcasm in her cutesy-pie moments. Her memories (at first from the possession of Fred’s body, then later given by Wesley and Spike) mean she can do a creditable impersonation, but there is always something inhuman in the way Illyria looks at the world, regardless of its shell’s appearance.
While still at Wolfram and Hart, Illyria uses Fred’s appearance primarily to examine Wesley’s feelings for her (and therefore the cause of his anger at Illyria) but she finds more and more reasons to be curious about the human experience. Primarily she focuses on remorse, as Wesley tells her that remorseless killing is what separates monsters from humans. Illyria studies the life of her “shell” and finds she does have remorse for killing Fred.
Illyria believes she can not “live up” to what Fred was, and eventually stops trying to totally re-become her, instead developing a middle ground that gives Illyria a far more active participation in the world. She begins to develop a stronger sense of identity as a human.
Further time spent as “Fred” gives Illyria some element of moral depth; she begins to question her nature, philosophically, and simultaneously seeks to be “good” (as in, the opposite of evil) and questions why seeking to be such a thing is important at all.
She decides to experience many different things in life, including the parts that involve being human, such as time with Fred’s family, reasoning that she is immortal and has time to do so.
Background:
Thousands of years before loving Texan couple Roger and Patricia Burkle had a baby girl, before the time of man, when demons walked the Earth, there was a large tentacled monstrosity that called itself the God King Illyria.
A member of a pantheon of “Old Ones”, pure-blooded demons of great power and influence, Illyria ruled over the area that would later become California, from its temple “Vahla ha’nesh”. Most beloved and feared of these arrogant beings, it lead an army of thousands of demons to wage war on different the rest of creation, until the time of these Old Ones passed and their strength waned. As this period of weakness began, Illyria was murdered by its enemies, who drained its powers and entombed its spirit in a stone sarcophagus. This was placed in the Deeper Well, a hole through the center of the earth that was a mortuary for the Old Ones, their tombs guarded by warriors of good.
But Illyria was capable of resurrection, and had made plans for its demise. It transported its temple and army out of the flow of time, waiting in a bubble until its devoted followers could bring about its return.
Smash cut to San Antonio, Texas, 1995. Winifred Burkle, who preferred to be called Fred, was leaving for her UCLA graduate program at the gifted age of twenty-one. Though she had supportive parents, Fred had always been an outsider, a side-effect of her great intelligence. She dreamed of one day making a great discovery. Though her program was a history one, a physics class with renowned Professor Seidel sparked a passion for science that would carry through the rest of her life. Unfortunately, though her professor ostensibly took her under his wing, he was jealous of her natural gift for his subject and organized to dispose of her. While working her day job at the Stewart Brunell public library, Fred found a book and innocently read aloud the strange language within: co-ordinates to activate the dimensional portal she was unknowingly standing on.
Sucked through the portal, Fred was transported to a land called Pylea, where demons ruled and humans were called “cows” and treated like slaves. Clapped in a collar that could be used to give her pain or kill her, Fred was forced to work constantly until one day she managed to escape. She took up residence in an isolated cave, where she quickly began to lose her grip on reality. Though Fred started out trying to work out how to get back to Earth using mathematical forumae she scribbled on the walls, she began to question whether Earth was real at all, and started forgetting important details of her old life. That is, until Angel showed up.
“Handsome man. Saved me from the monsters.” Angel was in Pylea chasing his friend Cordelia, who had also been sucked through the portal and made into a Pylean slave. He had a camaraderie with some demons of a village who had managed to capture Fred during one of her brief trips into the town, and was expected to have the dubious honour of executing her. Angel refused, and helped Fred to escape. In payment, when the nature of the world caused him to turn into a savage demon form, she drew him to her cave and soothed him back to being a human. When Angel left Pylea, he took Fred with him.
Since Angel Investigations was based in the Hyperion Hotel, Fred was able to take a room and avoid returning to her old life. Though at first she had problems letting go of her life in a cave (scribbling on her bedroom walls, eating under tables) eventually she overcame her survival instinct and PTSD with significant fortitude. When her parents finally track her down, though at first she’s afraid to let them see what she’s become, she’s able to tell them about the terrible things that happened and move on. Though they wish to take her home with them, Fred elects to stay with Angel because she feels as though she has a purpose in the team, and together they paint over the walls of her room.
Fred initially has an infatuation with Angel, but she soon decides she can never get in the way of what he has with Cordelia. Two other members of the team, Charles Gunn and Wesley Wyndam Pryce, both develop feelings for her. Gunn likes Fred’s easy-going attitude, her tomboyishness, her appetite, her sense of humour. Wesley seems to enjoy her more cerebral qualities. Fred dates Gunn for a year, and Wesley takes the higher ground and steps aside, though his love for her does not fade. In fact, right before Fred and Gunn break up, she and Wesley share a kiss.
What causes the end of her and Charles Gunn’s relationship is her discovery of her old Professor’s responsibility for her time in Pylea. When she realizes she is not the only student he has murdered by using the portals, she teams up with Wesley to kill him. She keeps Gunn in the dark: the fact that he wouldn’t be capable of helping with her revenge is also what she loves about him. When he snaps the Professor’s neck to save Fred from having to do it, and later realizes she chose Wesley’s help over his, their relationship goes cold.
Then there’s that thing with Cordelia’s apocalypse baby who is Zoe from Firefly and eats people with a green glow. She charms the whole world into liking her but Fred catches sight of her maggots due to an unfortunate Infection Control incident and takes on the whole damn world to free Angel from her thrall. Once Angel kills Jasmine, who would have brought about world peace, he gets put in charge of the evil law-firm Wolfram and Hart’s L.A. branch. Yeah. This is pretty much the best paragraph in the app, face it.
Wolfram and Hart matures Fred. It gives everyone on Angel’s team their wildest dreams come true: Gunn becoming a high-powered lawyer to really hit the bad guys where it hurts, Wesley with information at his fingertips and a position to be respected, Lorne schmoozing with the A-list, Fred head the Research and Development team, and Angel gets to alter the memories of everyone so they forget about the terrible babyplot that drove the last couple of seasons. Obviously since Wolfram and Hart are evil, this all comes with a catch, and the catch is pretty straight forward: they can’t be out there on the streets, they have to be in the boardrooms, getting a birds eye view of the cesspit that is L.A., and if they want to stay in business, they can’t fix all of it.
Three important relationships develop for Fred in this short time. Firstly, the vampire Spike haunts a talisman sent to the Wolfram and Hart offices, and Fred focusses a significant amount of her time and budget to make him corporeal again. When everybody else gives up, she continues to believe in him. Secondly, Fred dabbles in dating one of her research team, a nerdy but likable young man by the name of Knox. He likes her more than she likes him, and it doesn’t work out. Finally, Fred and Wesley, unencumbered by their memories of Wesley’s betrayal and Fred’s desperate fight against Jasmine, finally work out their feelings for each other and manage about two weeks of happiness.
Of course, since this is a Joss Whedon show, Fred dies.
See, Illyria’s devoted followers included a nerdy but likable young man by the name of Knox. Part of the catch of Wolfram and Hart, for Gunn, was to sign off on a sarcophagus being transported into California. A sarcophagus delivered to Fred’s laboratory, because Knox had chosen her as the perfect vessel. When she opens it, Illyria infects her, and after a protracted illness and a fruitless search for a cure, Winifred Burkle exists as nothing more than a spark inside the vast engulfing power of an Old One.
Illyria’s first point of business in its new shell is to open a portal so as to raise its army. Knox, who is Illyria’s Qwa Ha Xahn, or High Priest, worships and assists it until Wesley shoots him for killing the woman he loved. When he goes to do the same to Illyria, he cannot. Not while it wears Fred’s face. It is broken upon discovering its army and temple are ashes and dust, and it is alone in a new and frightening universe. It asks Wesley to teach it what is “right”.
So begins a time where Illyria wanders the corridors of Wolfram and Hart, terrifying interns, talking to plants, and beating the shit out of Spike as he attempts to “study” it in a hilarious reversal of his first interactions with Fred. At night, it follows an increasingly alcoholic Wesley home. To cement its ties with Angel’s group, it chooses to rescue Gunn from Wolfram and Hart’s hellish holding dimension so as to incur a debt.
Unfortunately, Illyria’s shell cannot hold the extent of its powers. It fragments and explodes, distorting a backwash of time and causing Illyria to stop experiencing its life linearly. It sees that Angel and company appear to be attacking it and strikes first, killing all of them, but also drags an alternate version of Angel to witness that confrontation, thus going back and stopping it. The “attack” was merely the use of a Mutari generator to capture and diminish Illyria’s power, thus preventing its explosion. Unfortunately Illyria defines itself with power, and having its godhood taken away leaves it none too pleased.
After a period of bitterness and resentment, Spike’s dignified treatment of it and its continued curiosity in regards to Wesley keep it at Wolfram and Hart. When Fred’s parents come to visit the offices, Illyria, disgusted by the thought of more grief, proves it can maintain the fiction that Fred is still alive. Wesley’s reaction to the charade interests Illyria, and it states it wishes to further explore the relationship. Wesley refuses, unable to see even Illyria’s best channelling of the memories it has as anything other than a lie.
When Wesley designates her as protector of the man who once kept her coffin captive in the Deeper Well, Wolfram and Hart’s representative beats her down. Humiliated, unable to comprehend anyone triumphing over itself, even someone as inhuman as Hamilton, Illyria agrees to join in Angel’s fight against the mightily demonic Senior Partners.
Illyria’s own conflict is swift, but it chooses to help Wesley, finds him mortally wounded. It takes the form of Fred and he dies in her arms. The demon warlock who had been Wesley’s target mistakes her for human and tauntingly offers Illyria a free blow, for vengeance. He realizes his error too late as, overwhelmed by grief, it punches through his skull.
Cue the big final battle. The survivors of Angel’s little band regroup and face off against all of hell’s armies. Except hell hasn’t so much been raised as L.A. has been relocated. Nobody back on Earth is aware that the City of Angels and all of its occupants have been transported to a hell dimension.
This sent Illyria’s powers out of control. It began to occasionally revert entirely into Fred, especially in times of great stress or when seeing a familiar face such as Spike... or the ghost of Wesley, used by the Senior Partners against his will. Spike attempts to keep Illyria in blue form. In turn, it gets possessive of Spike. Everything starts to get a bit timey wimey wibbly wobbly again as Illyria’s powers become more and more chaotic, and Illyria becomes similarly less stable.
Gunn, now the vampiric big bad, organizes events so he can injure Illyria badly while it is in the form of Fred, causing it to revert to its monstrous primordial form. Half mad, suffering from a massive identity crisis based in its desire to live up to Fred’s face, to have what Fred had, without seeming weak, Illyria begins to rend the entire city, physically and temporally.
Fortunately a psychic betta fish is able to plant Spike and Wesley’s memories of Fred into Illyria’s mind, showing it that what it was trying to do was the furthest thing from what it wanted to become. With Illyria momentarily stunned, the Senior Partners' army took the opportunity and brought it down. The dying Illyria was restored when the Senior Partners reversed time to undo Angel's death at the hands of Gunn.
So basically, ignore all of that because the comics make no sense. Illyria is sent back to before L.A. was sent to hell, though she retains her memories of the experience as well as the memories implanted in her head. Grieving for Wesley once more, she begins to protect the comatose Gunn. When he wakes up, she says it is because she wants to be the one to kill him, and she wants him to know why.
But Illyria can’t do it, though she does write a list of grisly murders she might enact if she changes her mind. “I am infected with humanity,” she tells Gunn. Together they leave the city, Gunn to find his humanity now that he has the memories of being the thing he hated, and Illyria to find hers.
The quintessential moment comes when Illyria must fight one of her old “pets”, a demon who has also escaped the Deeper Well and used Illyria’s power stored in the Mutari generator to become stronger. Unfortunately his new shell isn’t strong enough to hold them either, and he is overcome by them. Overwhelmed by ceaseless pain, he begs her as Illyria the Merciless. Begs her to kill him.
Illyria realizes she is “only human”. She does so with one blow.
She also resolves that in future she will get a more maintainable pet.
Perhaps a cat.
Canon point:
Probably from the Angel comics. Specifically the end of the spinoff Angel: Only Human (which is set post-Angel: After the Fall, which continues from the end of S5.) This is because Illyria is far more stable from this point and her journey coming to terms with her humanity is more interesting to me. But I'm willing to be flexible depending on what castmates want, as I'm aware some people do not consider the comics to be "true" canon / enjoy their development.
Special Abilities:
OKAY I NEED HELP
Illyria has godlike power, including teleportation, time control, talking to plants, mild empathy, the ability to sense the "nature" (human, vampire, etc) of a person in person, the ability to shapeshift her appearance and clothing into Fred or her "true" demon form, immortality, invulnerability and punching-over-buildings strength and speed.
The Mutari generator took her power so as not to damage her body and left her only able to:
- Has the strength and speed far exceeding a normal human, or even the vampires and other demons seen in the series, but no longer insanely godmodey.
- Remains immortal but her invulnerability is not total; while stabwounds and bursts of flames seem to merely irritate her she does have significant damage dealt to her by characters in both show and comics. Nevertheless, her skin is a hardened “shell”.
- Cannot open portals, alter time, sense emotions, or talk to plants.
- Can shift her “shell”, including clothes, between the form of normal human Fred and leather-clad blue-skinned Illyria.
- Can distinguish between humans and non-humans.
What, of these, can be translated into the Force? Will her body still be endangered if she grows stronger? Help me Obi Wan ker modlies!
Sect:
Civilian (unsure)
Job:
No.
Samples:
First Person:
AUDIO
This place is built on the ashes and bones of gods.
Once I strolled through worlds as it pleased me. Now I am discarded to this charnel house, my body soft and weak.
[There is the sound of something breaking. Glass, maybe? The noise of destruction continues unabated - that last crash sounded as though someone kicked through a wall. ]
Is this what it means to be human? Powerless, able only to watch as everything is important is torn from you? Why is that something anyone would seek? Why do I care when caring only brings fresh gouts of oily grief.
[ Each sentence brings the noise of cloth tearing, wood snapping, stone crumbling. ]
Your tiny lives like maggots, breeding on the dead, devouring everything to live, and gone before you even realize your own nature. My attachment to you disgusts me.
If I were my true self again I would raze this planet bare and the survivors would sow salt in the fields in my name, simply for the audacity of calling me to this place. In your ignorance you have torn me from-
From something more valuable than you could ever hope to-
Idiots! Puerile, senseless troglodytes! I will feed you your own internal organs before you die.
[ The maelstrom of violence in the background stops. Illyria’s breathing is even despite her scourging words. There is the sound of broken glass crunching underfoot. ]
Enough. I am required elsewhere.
If I cannot find a way to get there, prepare yourselves.
Third Person:
Illyria is having a tantrum.
She throws the man across the room. Even in her weakened state it's enough that the wall and his body both crumple upon their introduction to one another. Stepping over the ruination and chaos that was once his desk, Illyria stands over him, a furious blue destroyer backlit by fluorescent light.
"I was the Primordial shaper! Long before you existed I would cast the unworthy down into the muck at my feet, and after centuries of evolution you are still not fit for anything but my leavings."
She is furious, and when Illyria is angry she rediscovers how to be pompous, draws to herself the ego of ruling worlds and all-consuming power. The man cowers. Sweat trickles down the sides of his neck and into the tight collar of his shirt.
Illyria should kill him for daring to suggest what he did, but she still has a vested interest in clothing herself in the tattered raiment of humanity, wearing a mask that staves off the loneliness her shell has infected her with. Illyria should kill him, but she will not. Instead she leans in and down. There is a trickle of blood running out of the side of his grimacing, jowly mouth. The smell of it still disgusts her.
"I am Illyria, who was once God-King. Men feared my name in seven tongues. Gaunt horrors sacrificed to me their unborn children that I might favor them with a moment of my gaze."
She pauses, to let her majesty sink in to his terrified monkey-sludge brain.
"Who are you that you would require an offering of currency that I may bless your halls with my presence?" Her eyes narrow and her neck tips, reptilian, waiting to strike. "You will consider which you value more: my credits?" She straightens with a flick of her blue-streaked hair. "Or your life."
Anything Else:
That's all she wrote!