application; lifeaftr

[postictal]

Player Information
Name: Zero
Age: 18+
Contact: arrpee, zero#8942 on discord
Current characters: N/A



Character Information
Name: Tim Wright
Series: Marble Hornets
Appearance:

Male, ambiguously brown, about 5’5”, brown eyes, thick eyebrows. Perpetually looks as though he doesn't get enough sleep. Thick brown hair with incredibly visible sideburns. Said hair is fairly long and easily grows to the point of unkemptness, and his facial hair will periodically swing between scruffy, full-bearded, and clean shaven based on how shitty his week’s been. He's built very solidly - sturdy and stocky. His facial structure follows that pattern, with very pronounced features, a firm jaw, and a slight underbite.

Tim's body language is fairly consistent: hunched shoulders, arms either crossed or hugging himself, often fiddling with his hands unless he's smoking. It's not an effort to look small so much as simply stay out of the way. He doesn't have any problem with eye contact but it won't last for very long; the ground will get most of his attention.

He favors a simple wardrobe. T-shirts and flannels with jeans usually suffice. He generally sticks to solids and plaids. He grew used to wearing a camera strapped to his chest during the series, though for obvious reasons that won't fly here.

Age: ~26 years of age
Canon Point: Mid-August 2014, about two months after Entry #87
Transferring From: sol_raveh
Canon History: Tim's entry on the Marble Hornets wiki. However, since it's pretty bare-bones, I'll be supplementing it with my own explanation.

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 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.

Canon Personality:

Tim is heavily introverted, surly, and fairly antisocial. He doesn't reach out toward others willingly as evidenced by his history of interaction, in which he cites the existence of exactly one single friend that he met in college. He’s quick to express irritation, though more out of a sense of preemptively driving people away than any genuine frustration with them. He’s quiet and introspective and while he does prefer 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.

As someone who suffers from anhedonia, Tim has difficulty experiencing and expressing genuine happiness, even if he can be deadpan and sarcastic enough to make up for that. 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, compassion, and sense. He earnestly 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 goes both ways, as he's both paranoid of others and of his own capacity for hurt, largely viewing 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. Despite those roadblocks and his intense self-denial, Tim cares far more for others than he wishes to admit. He's either oblivious to or simply refuses to acknowledge his compassion for those who have endured anything close to what he has (i.e., offering help to Alex even after everything he's done to hurt Tim, desperately trying to get Jay to see a doctor, helping Jessica escape the entire mess).

Personality Shifts:

Tim was not exactly enthused to end up in a confined castle in the mist, and his initial plan was simply to lie low and not draw any attention to himself. Unfortunately, the castle had other plans. In the handful of months Tim spent in Sol-Raveh, a castle-generated shadow ended up revealing some of Tim's history with arson, he shared a soul with both Chara and Asriel Dreemurr of Undertale fame, and he found himself trapped in a cage with two other unwilling sorts, playing an impromptu game of "Who's that Pokémon?" before the cage dipped underwater and drowned everyone inside. His experience with the cages at least taught him that he wasn't alone as far as mental health problems went, but a fight against the elements was the wrong time to try setting about to relating to anyone.

Tim's survival instinct was tested drastically in those few months, mostly as it came up against the barrier of his own panic and suicide ideation - an overdose of his medication nearly proved fatal but for the intervention of other castle residents, namely Chara and Wade Wilson. Tim's first few encounters with the Undertale cast mostly involved infrequent brushes against Sans the skeleton, who was paradoxically both nonchalant and judgmental. Due to the castle's machinations, many of Tim's secrets ended up bared to the skeleton without his consent to start with, making him perpetually uneasy.

The most notable change Tim endured was in the wake of his resonance with two suicidal children. He found that he had entirely too much in common with either of them, but despite knowing full well what they were capable of, agreed to keep their secrets. However, it was the aftermath of the resonance that truly lasted longer than he anticipated, as he ended up more or less appropriating the mindset he recalled from his resonance with Chara in order to power through his ordeal in the cages. With this came a sense of guilt that, for once, succeeded in getting him to confess to the wronged party, admitting to Chara that he used what he could remember of their soul to help him survive.

Unfortunately, this admission would lead to his death, as Chara attempted to more or less cut the remnants of themself out of his soul. He was grateful for their efforts nonetheless, and admitted as such prior to his death. He refused to be responsible for more guilt, but in the end, it's doubtful he succeeded.

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 probably counts as one nonetheless. He has a second consciousness that shares his body on occasion. 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, even if they're 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. They are 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.

Inventory:

- one (1) box of cigarettes
- one (1) lighter
- one (1) Castle-issued cell phone, now useless
- one (1) GoPro chest camera, now useless
- one (1) small switchblade
- 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
- one (1) mostly full box of cigarettes
- assorted blank tapes
- the clothes on his back

Sample
Thread Sample: Here let's look at the day Tim died.