app for sol-raveh

[postictal]

Player Name: Zero
Contact: arcaneswearwords on AIM, arrpee
Referred by: the wonderful Bird
Other characters: N/A



Character Name: Tim Wright
Series: Marble Hornets
Canon Point: Mid-August 2014, about two months after Entry #87
Summary/History: Tim’s entry on the Marble Hornets wiki is fairly insufficient, so I’ll be adding a summarized version of the series events from Tim’s perspective.

Since being admitted to a hospital at age eight, that’s where Tim has spent the majority of his life. His father was never in the picture and his mother visited him only rarely. Neither his mother or any doctors or Tim himself knew it, but practically since birth Tim has been a personal target of the Operator, a preternaturally thin, business-suited, faceless eldritch abomination that’s been the primary subject of most of Tim’s nightmares and hallucinations - essentially the Slender Man.

He was admitted into the hospital when he began expressing early signs of insomnia, seizures with unknown stimuli, night terrors, and depression. He was evaluated for a high risk of suicide and self-harm. His condition would only worsen as Tim’s illness was a product of being a subject of the Operator’s long-term interest, but its supernatural origin made diagnosis difficult. He displayed symptoms reminiscent of depression and panic disorders, 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.

In short, Tim was miserable.

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 that made some of the symptoms easier to bear. He wasn’t blacking out anymore, the headaches weren’t half as bad, 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, because now he could attend school and eventually college, where he met his first real friend: Brian.

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. On Brian’s urging Tim agreed, and both helped Alex with his admittedly very shittily made film and its small cast. Said cast included Jay, who would become very prominent in Tim's life in the future. Alex, meanwhile, was a terrible director and scriptwriter from the start, but over the course of the shoot his personality went from “well-intentioned but mostly incompetent loser” to “antagonistic jackass who, unbeknownst to everyone else, actually murdered several people including most of the cast and crew of Marble Hornets.” Tim was unaware of the murdering thing or of the fact that during this time he’d developed a secondary consciousness that had a certain fondness for running off with his body whilst clad in a white mask. Both Tim and Alex had begun to black out periodically due to the Operator’s influence at this point. Alex stopped the shoot 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 - and fell off Tim’s radar. For a couple years Tim heard nothing from Brian or Alex or any of the original crew, though his 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.

Come a few years later, an inquisitive guy with a camera showed up - it was Jay, one of Alex's old acquaintances and one of the few survivors of the disastrous student film shoot. Tim remembered him vaguely from the Marble Hornets shoot but honestly couldn’t help with many of Jay’s questions about Alex’s whereabouts. So Jay departed, and the two once again went their separate ways.

Another couple years later Jay was back under the insistence that he wanted to finish Alex’s film for him, and would Tim be interested in helping him out? Tim expressed some halfhearted interest but Jay continued acting suspicious the more Tim interacted with him, asking uncomfortably specific questions about tall businessmen without faces. Tim reached his limit after Jay insisted on chasing an anonymous person in a hood while allegedly “location-scouting” at the burned-out husk of Tim’s old hospital. Now thoroughly suspicious, Tim did an Internet search for “Marble Hornets” and found the YouTube channel to which Jay had been uploading videos of his years-long investigation into what happened to Alex Kralie, who vanished shortly after canceling his project. The more recent videos involved Jay following and filming Tim without his consent. The reawakening of his old symptoms and the source of his mysteriously broken leg became horribly, sickeningly transparent. 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.

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 and PRIVATE medical files. Like Tim, Jay had a propensity for making things worse even with the best of intentions. His investigation had just made everything worse. However, at the root of the problem Tim’s anger with Jay was simply misdirected. Tim eventually confessed to Jay that the entire debacle was actually his own fault simply by virtue of knowing the people he did in college. 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. It violently crumbled after Tim hid a significant piece of information from Jay. Before either could repair their relationship, Alex tracked Jay down and murdered him, having during the original film shoot become convinced that to destroy the Operator he had to destroy everyone it influenced, Jay and Tim included. 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 the town and everything else with Alex’s final words burning in mind: “If there’s anyone left you have to kill them. And then yourself.”

Good talk, Kralie.

Personality:

Tim is heavily introverted, occasionally bordering on surly and antisocial. Weary accommodation seems his default setting when dealing with other people. He’s quick to express irritation, though more out of a sense of preemptively driving them away than any immediate genuine frustration with them. He’s quiet and introspective but while he does need his solitude, he doesn’t like being defined by it. Unfortunately he’s self-isolating enough for this to be exactly the case. He is intensely lonely but furiously barricades himself off due to a mixture of his fundamental self-loathing and a semi-justified terror that anyone he dares get close to will suffer some unknown horrible fate, because that’s exactly what’s happened to everyone he’s ever met. His life to this point has been fraught with doubt and a complete lack of trust in everyone and everything, including himself.

Let it not be said that Tim lacks humor, however. He’s a textbook deadpan snarker but the man himself rarely smiles or expresses genuine mirth. He has a medical predisposition for anhedonia - difficulty experiencing happiness or pleasure. He hates himself. He underestimates himself. He has severe trust issues that go both way, as he's both a hypocritical jerk and a pathological liar. His gruff if composed exterior masks a very deep-seated anger at life in general for dealing him such a shit hand. When he lashes out, he'll lash out extremely harshly, often physically, at whomever is closest. Despite the marked presence of better qualities, he continuously undermines his own notable courage, caution, and sense. He genuinely doesn’t mean any harm and doesn’t mean to make things go wrong, but due to his history of causing more problems than he solves, he’s understandably wary. That suspicion extends more generally - he doesn’t “other” other people so much as he “others” himself and sees himself as something inferior, maybe something to be avoided or a tumor to be cut out. Since Tim was the inadvertent catalyst for most of the series' events, this fear might well be justified. The amount of stress he’s dealt with has made him a heavy smoker.

Aloof and deeply cynical he may be, reclusive and remorseful, Tim is still very much the terrified lonely boy who set fire to his hospital room out of fear of the tall faceless man inside. Mostly he just wants to keep himself breathing. Sometimes he doesn't even want to do that anymore.

Powers/Abilities:

Average physical prowess. Good sense of intuition, fairly intelligent, a worryingly 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.

Most importantly is the "ability" that Tim would certainly not call an ability, but is one nonetheless. 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.

Sparky displays limited intelligence, curiosity, and awareness, and is capable of very rare vocalization but is 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 medication 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.

For more information on this secondary consciousness and Tim's illness, I have written an information post HERE

Items on your character:

- one (1) box of cigarettes
- one (1) lighter
- one (1) cellphone, now useless
- one (1) wallet with some seventy bucks in cash and assorted identification cards
- one (1) bottle of prescription medication with about fifty days’ worth of capsules
- the clothes on his back