application; entranceway

[postictal]

Name: Zero
DW username: n/a
E-Mail: arcaneswearwords [at] gmail [dot] com
IM: arcaneswearwords on AIM
Plurk: arrpee



Other Characters: Frisk (determinedest), formerly Alex Kralie (rosswood) who I’ve since dropped

Character Name: Tim Wright
Series: Marble Hornets
Timeline: Mid-August 2014, about two months after Entry #87
Canon Resource Link: Over hereaways
Character History:

Tim was admitted to a mental hospital at a very young age due to preexisting mental health issues, issues that would invariably pursue him through the rest of his life. His father was conspicuously absent and his mother was "never really around," visiting him only rarely. He grew up in a state of prolonged suffering, largely alone but for the preternaturally-thin, business-suit-clad, otherworldly abomination known as the Operator. The Operator's presence exacerbated Tim's already-existing mental health issues and became the primary subject of Tim's nightmares and hallucinations.

He was initially admitted into the hospital when he began expressing early signs of insomnia, seizures with unknown stimuli, night terrors, and depression, even evaluated for a high risk of suicide and self-harm. However, the addition of the Operator made diagnosis difficult since the doctors dismissed it as a simple hallucination, and not a tangible force that was continuously acting upon Tim. While Tim displayed symptoms reminiscent of depression and panic disorders, he also often succumbed to seizures that seemed epileptic in nature, had intense trouble sleeping, had multiple run-ins with and hallucinations of the Operator, had frequent nightmares, lapsed into fierce and painful coughing fits, and lived much his life through a haze of sporadic blackouts and headaches and nosebleeds. He made several attempts to run away from the hospital and into the neighboring forested area, Rosswood Park, but his successes never lasted.

However one could categorize Tim’s illness - as doctors had trouble determining an accurate diagnosis for something of unknown and supernatural etiology - eventually they got the right prescription of anticonvulsant that made some of the symptoms easier to bear. He wasn’t blacking out anymore, his headaches were no longer debilitating, he could actually sleep more than four hours a night on occasion, and the seizures almost went away completely. Whatever was in that medication could suppress the Operator’s influence as long as Tim took them regularly. It didn't matter so much that his old hospital burned down, or that his room contained the source of the fire, or that he might have been present during that moment when it all began to catch fire, because now he could attend school and eventually college. It was in college that he met his first real friend, an easygoing sort named Brian Thomas.

His friend circle expanded upon meeting Brian until he was acquainted with one Alex Kralie, who desperately needed people to work with him on his student film project, Marble Hornets. Tim agreed to help with Brian's urging, even if the film was a poorly-written, poorly-directed mess with a tiny, unpaid cast. Said cast included a guy named Jay, who would become very prominent in Tim's life in the future. For now, he was little more than Alex's hapless script supervisor. Alex, meanwhile, was a pretty awful director and scriptwriter from the start, and things would only worsen. Over the course of the shoot, the Operator's influence began to permeate his personality, spread by his interactions with Tim, until he went from "kind of an asshole" to "actual murderer and arsonist in his spare time". Unbeknownst to everyone else, he murdered most of the cast and crew of Marble Hornets through a mix of subterfuge and deceit.

Tim was unaware of the fact that the director the shoot was actually killing everyone off one-by-one like this was a slasher flick of the highest caliber, nor was he aware that during this time Tim had begun to develop a secondary consciousness that had a certain fondness for running off with his body whilst clad in a white mask. The Operator, it turned out, had begun to affect nearly everyone on the cast. When it wasn't mnemonically blinding them, giving them intense headaches and/or blackouts, or rewriting their entire personalities, it was influencing Alex Kralie into straight-up murdering them. Eventually, however, Alex halted the project due to "unworkable conditions" - after secretly killing most of the cast and believing to have killed Tim, Jay, and Brian (though all three survived, albeit with the former two lacking memories of the incident).

After that, Tim parted ways from most of that group, and fell off everyone's collective radar. For a couple years Tim heard nothing from Brian or Alex or any of the original crew. He was unaware of the fact that the project's former script supervisor, Jay Merrick, had dug up some of the tapes from the Marble Hornets shoot and was beginning to investigate just what caused Alex to shut the project down. As Jay learned that he had next to no memories of the shoot (along with Tim, as a matter of fact) and began to uncover more and more pieces of the puzzle, Tim's symptoms that had previously gotten so much better now started to steadily worsen. It got to its worst when he woke one day miles from home, blood sticking in his hair and one leg broken, unable to recall the previous three weeks. And weirdly enough, this only happened after Jay showed up with a camera and a lot of questions about the Marble Hornets shoot - questions which Tim couldn't exactly answer, since he lacked memories of most of the events himself.

Fast forward a couple years, and Jay was back after several nightmarish escapades, pursuing Tim as the only lead he had left. He sold Tim on the story that he was just trying to finish Alex's film. Tim expressed vague interest, but Jay continued acting suspicious the more Tim interacted with him, asking uncomfortably specific questions about tall business suit-wearing men without faces. Tim reached his limit after Jay insisted on chasing an anonymous person in a hood while allegedly "location-scouting" at the remnants of Tim’s old hospital. Now thoroughly suspicious, Tim did an Internet search for "Marble Hornets". He discovered a YouTube channel to which Jay had been uploading videos of his years-long investigation regarding what exactly happened to Alex Kralie, who vanished shortly after canceling his project. The more recent videos involved Jay following and filming Tim without his consent. And as Tim continued to binge-watch every entry, the reawakening of his old symptoms and the source of his mysteriously broken leg became horribly, sickeningly clear. Not only had he been a part of this mystery without knowing, but the consciousness sharing his body had cast him as an antagonist. And Jay had known the entire time, and elected not to tell him.

Tim flew off the handle. He was furious at Jay for not only following him but also for publicly disclosing everything he learned online, including Tim’s old, private medical files. He decked Jay in the face and tore into him for just making everything worse even with the best intentions. However, at the root of the problem Tim’s anger with Jay was simply misdirected. After he'd cooled down somewhat, the two resolved to work together since they were the only leads each other had, and Tim's problems weren't going away now that Jay had unintentionally reawakened them. Tim eventually confessed to Jay that he felt that everything must be his own fault, since he was the one who grew up with the Operator lingering over his shoulder. He must have spread it to everyone he knew, like a memetic virus. He’d unintentionally spread the Operator’s influence just by making friends. After the man in the hood - the entity known as "totheark" - broke into Tim’s house and stole his pills, forcing him to regress to his secondary state and brutally attack Jay, the two agreed they were safest looking out for each other and would see this through to the end. Their relationship was strained at best. But they knew that Alex was still out there and now actively looking for the pair of them since he'd become convinced that to destroy the Operator he had to destroy everyone it influenced, Jay and Tim included.

Then things went from "manageable" to "really goddamn bad" after Tim withheld a vital piece of information from Jay, whose mental state had already begun to decohere thanks to the Operator's shenanigans. Jay, to put it professionally, "fucking lost it" and ended up attacking Tim, who was forced to incapacitate and ziptie Jay for his own safety while he went to try and track down Alex. Jay managed to free himself only for Alex to murder him in cold blood. In the effort to avenge Jay’s death, Tim not only accidentally killed "totheark" - who he learned retroactively was actually his old friend Brian, who'd been attempting to lead Tim and Jay to some answers - but he was forced to kill Alex to save his own life and anyone else who remained.

Tim is now one of two individuals who survived the whole ordeal, and the only one who remembers everything. He left Jay's YouTube channel standing. With his final entry, he left the viewers with three ambiguous words:

Everything is fine.

About two months after that final entry goes up, Tim shows up in Wonderland during the Fourth Wall Event, in which he learns of the world he's in and reluctantly accepts it.

Abilities/Special Powers:

Average physical prowess. Good sense of intuition, fairly intelligent, a skilled liar, and a good learner who never finished college, though mostly due to extenuating circumstances. He can read music and is an amateur musician but it never became more than a hobby. He has incredibly high pain tolerance, both physically and mentally. While he almost certainly has a form of panic disorder, he’s able to keep a very level head in the center of conflict to act quickly and rationally. His body has sustained an impressive amount of wear and tear over the years but has physically recovered every time, though that not might be an entirely natural process.

But most important is something that's not exactly an ability and Tim certainly wouldn't call it that, but he has a second consciousness that shares his body on occasion. For the sake of convenience we will dub this second self "Sparky," though they probably haven’t developed the concept of their own name yet. Very little is known about this other consciousness other than when they’re using Tim’s body they’re able to imbue it with slightly increased speed, reflex, and strength. They will, if possible, cover Tim’s face in an eerie white mask for an unknown purpose. At one point Tim’s body got its leg broken while they were using it and while the injury has long since healed, they still walk in his body with a pronounced limp. They display limited intelligence, curiosity, and awareness and are capable of very rare vocalization but are more likely to tackle and subdue someone into unconsciousness than hold any sort of discussion. If they have an agenda, they don’t disclose it, though during the series they were implied to be following the agenda of the cryptic YouTube user 'totheark'. They're fond of puzzles and cryptic messages. Sparky is likely a by-product of Tim’s experiences with the Operator and emerged a few years before the series began. Tim actively loathes them. He blacks out when they take over and recalls nothing of whatever they do, often waking up miles from where he was with a headache, a nosebleed, and a fresh round of frustration for the shitshow that is his life. He’s able to suppress the emergence of this consciousness with the same pills that keep his Operator-induced illness at bay.

The process of moving between the two consciousnesses isn’t completely clear but there are a number of consistent catalysts: proximity to the Operator and not continuously medicating are the primary two. If he medicates directly before confronting the Operator he can remain in his central mind state. The “shift” between himself and his masked counterpart is initiated by two things: an intense coughing fit that usually leaves Tim physically unable to stand, then a series of convulsions resembling a tonic-clonic epileptic seizure that lasts for two to three minutes. By the postictal period, Tim’s consciousness has receded and the second tenant in his head has control of the station. They can remain active for weeks at a time. The impetus for their retreat from Tim’s mind is unclear but eventually he’ll wake up, mental faculties restored to relative normalcy.

(A more coherent write-up of the Masked Man's abilities can be located HERE if necessary.)

Third-Person Sample:

The place is burning. The trees have become beacons, great towering columns of disintegrating wood and flame, the burned-blackened husks ensconced in orange and red, mercilessly raking the sky. Tim's vision has become a spectrum of black and orange and yellow, and the heat makes it feel like his skin is blistering. His face feels numb. But it's still his.

There should be more voices calling, he knows, Sarah and Brian and Seth and Alex are here somewhere, but the surging smoke tears his throat as he coughs and splutters and folds to his knees.

It's in the corners of his vision, all the places he can't see.

Black and white fluttering specters printed against a myriad of oranges, and Tim's eyes are lidded against the thick, oily haze pouring out from between slits in crumbling bark. He can only lie where he is, curled and coughing, like the boy in the windowless room who stole a lighter because It told him to. Trees or bars - both vertical, both have him trapped, and it always slides cleanly in the spaces between. It knows him. It knows how to keep him where it likes. Maybe it just likes him. Can it like things? Is liking things a thing it's capable of doing? It's capable of terrible things. It's capable of things that don't exist. It's like someone tried to seal a stitch in reality and something else poked its way through the needle.

Is that voice out of memory or something worse.

The air around Tim's skin abruptly solidifies into something that feels icy in comparison. He gasps in the shock of it - or would, if his lungs weren't trying to writhe their way out of his chest cavity. It's not cold but compared to the way the heat seared his skin and singed his hair, it feels like it. His hands scrabble at his shoulders briefly, something tightens around his chest and forces out a fresh round of ragged coughs.

Tim opens his eyes to blue sky and grass, the air thick with shivering heat. He coughs, hoarse and rough over the drone of concealed insects. Something about the humidity is unmistakably summer-like.

Oh, god.

How much time has he lost? How much is gone, carved away?

His head's on fire and his legs still work, so Tim gets on hands and knees. Standing makes him sway and sends an uncomfortable tautness rushing to his head, but the coughing's faded away. Thank fuck.

"Great," he mutters warily, scrubbing smudges ash from his face with the heel of one palm.

First-Person Sample:

[The video feed clicks on to feature a lovely shot of the cloudless blue sky, accompanied by the restless crunching of footsteps drawing closer. Abruptly, someone picks up the thing and spins it around with a faint flare of static that's gone as quickly as it flickered up.

There is, briefly, a face visible on the screen, dark hair and dark eyes and brows knit together in an expression puzzlement and concern. Then the feed flips around again and starts panning around the area in a slow sweep, handled in the same way someone might a handheld camera.]

...weird.

[He doesn't seem to realize he's actually broadcasting publicly. He's just taking video in the same way - how Jay would, and even now the memory is painful and sends a pang of regret thrumming all the way to his bones.]

Hello? Can anyone - ?

[Abruptly, the feed snaps off.]