Gertrude Robinson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
archivisnt) wrote2020-12-04 07:53 am
archivisnt) wrote2020-12-04 07:53 am
Entry tags:
App - TLV
User Name/Nick: Kira
User DW:tinwateringcan
E-mail: swordwithasmile AT gmail
Other Characters: Zhao Yunlan,wildguardian
Character Name: Gertrude Robinson
Series: The Magnus Archives
Age: Late 70s/early 80s
From When?: Approximately March 2015, when Elias Bouchard shot her in the tunnels beneath the Magnus Archives
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Gertrude has spent her life fighting a lonely battle to defeat and control the fears of humanity, preventing any of them from coming through into the world and fully manifesting there. From a certain point of view, she is a hero, but she is keenly aware that despite her many successes she has sacrificed the greater part of her humanity to her quest. She has no loved ones, no close friends, no family. She has committed terrible atrocities. She has flayed the corpse of a young man in order to bind his tormented soul into a necromantic tome. She has murdered, dismembered corpses, set bombs in busy cities, betrayed her own assistants to use them as pawns in her plans; when one of her assistants who she trusted proved to be a murderer, she burned the woman alive in her home and never allowed herself to trust again. As an inmate, she needs to let go of her need for power and control, regain her ability to make meaningful connections with others, and move beyond living for her quest.
Arrival: Brought in against her will after her death.
Abilities/Powers: Gertrude Robinson is an avatar of the Ceaseless Watcher, holding the role of The Archivist. Unlike Jonathan Sims, she resists fully accepting the powers of the Archivist and dislikes employing them -- the avatar of the Unknowing describes her as "not as good an Archivist."
Compulsion: Gertrude has the ability to compel others to answer her questions. She is said to dislike doing this, but she has no compunctions about using it against other avatars or those who she is working against. This ability will be significantly reduced in power, working unreliably (and at the discretion of the players whose characters she attempts to use it against.)
Language: This is a passive ability. She is able to understand all languages, written or spoken, as though they were her native language, although she cannot speak them unless she has learned them herself.
Taking Statements: This is a passive ability. When someone gives her a statement about a supernatural event that happened to them, they are able to tell a well-organized story in precise and accurate detail. They often feel as though they are reliving the events as they relate them. After giving a statement, they will suffer from flashbacks and nightmares, as well as a feeling of being watched, as the Ceaseless Watcher feeds on their fear and paranoia. Taking statements is not optional for the Archivist; failing to do so will lead to exhaustion and debilitation.
Although she can compel answers to questions (at player discretion) she is unable to compel a statement; statement givers must willingly offer their story.
Knowing: The Archivist can spontaneously become aware of facts about the world or about the things and people surrounding her. This ability is fully nerfed.
Seeing: The Archivist is able to see through deception or illusion and accurately perceive the true nature of things, especially when it comes to seeing supernatural influence. This ability is fully nerfed.
Personality: Gertrude Robinson has made it her life's mission to win at Call of Cthulhu. Pitiless, driven, fierce and extremely careful, she has personally foiled rituals meant to call at least five separate eldritch manifestations of living terror into being in the real world, and attempted to finish off her career by destroying the place of power linked to her very own patron, the Eye or the Ceaseless Watcher. She holds no loyalty whatsoever to the Eye, despises the powers it gives her, and refuses to accept an ageless, immortal body in favor of hanging on to every scrap of humanity that she can maintain while existing as an avatar of cosmic terror.
Gertrude has a hatred for the Entities that burns so brightly that she has willingly fed her entire life into that flame. She never fully explains what sparked her drive, although, once, when her assistant Tim asked, she told him that the Desolation (the power that controls loss, devastation, destruction of potential, and the embodiment of the destructive power of fire) ate her cat.
The Desolation generally does not just take one thing from those it targets, and Gertrude did come to the Magnus Institute already marked by another power. She has no family and no friends outside of her assistants at the Magnus Institute. Did she lose the things she loved to the Desolation? Did it drive her to research the Entities, to seek a career in an organization devoted to cataloguing and investigating supernatural events, to pledge herself to an Entity bound to knowledge and surveillance in order to position herself to find and thwart the Desolation? She's never said, and yet, when as a new Archivist she began her crusade to find and stop the rituals of each Entity in turn, it was the Desolation's cult that she targeted first. She formed a supernatural bond between herself and a woman born to embody the Desolation's "Lightless Flame," Agnes Montague, that endured until Agnes predeceased her in the 2000s and prevented the Desolation's cult from using Agnes as a focus to bring their power into the real world.
Although she was manipulated into it -- she believed that the ritual would stop Agnes' use as a focus, but did not know that it would bind them together -- she seems to have been willing to accept the bond as the cost of stopping the Desolation's plans. In fact, it's possible that her spiritual sympathy with an avatar of the Lightless Flame inspired an increasingly marked interest in using fire and explosives to accomplish her aims over the decades, culminating in the one time she spoke directly to Agnes and asked for her help in murdering Gertrude's traitorous assistant Emma in a house fire.
The first person that Gertrude was willing to use as a sacrifice in the pursuit of her cause was herself; she knowingly gave herself over to the position of the Archivist, avatar of the Eye. She did not, however, stop there, and her sacrifices of others were both more brutal and more final. There is no doubt that any Entity gaining the ability to enter into the real world would be a disaster of cosmic proportions, destroying life as we know it and plunging all survivors of the human race into a waking nightmare of sheer terror. Gertrude, fully aware of this, had no compunctions whatsoever about the loss of a few innocent bystanders -- or even the need to murder and dismember innocents with her own hands -- in order to stop the rituals. She describes herself as not having the luxury of compassion, although it's clear she is aware of the shocking nature of her actions. She does not allow herself to have regrets, even when she is sacrificing her own assistant, Michael Shelley, a man she willingly kept in the dark in order to use him as a pawn in her own plans. Sometimes, such as when she has successfully condemned a servant of the Desolation to a horrifying living torture as an object lesson, she even revels in the pain and fear that she can cause.
Despite her efforts to remain separate from her patron, there is no doubt that she has also fallen deep into the trap of taking joy in power, and taking power from the ability to inspire terror. She is somewhat unusual in that those who she most wishes to make fear her are those who are the avatars of other Entities, not mere helpless human beings, but she still enjoys it.
It is one of her only joys. Beyond her cause, Gertrude has very little in her life. Although it was the Desolation that marked her before she chose to pursue her career destroying it and others, the entity besides the Eye with which she is most in sympathy is the Lonely: a fear whose image is that of standing in the cold street, alone, watching light and joy in distant windows. Gertrude is intensely self-isolating and focused on her cause to the extent that her successor, Jonathan Sims, suggests that she would be unable to cope if her cause were to fail. She would have nothing to live for.
At the end of her life, not long before her canon point, she had begun to doubt the necessity of her actions. Since no ritual had ever succeeded in all of human history, was it even possible for a ritual to succeed? Or would they all collapse even without her murderous interventions? She planned to test this theory by allowing a ritual of the Dark to proceed, using the ritual itself as cover for her attempt to set a fire in the tunnels beneath the Magnus Archives that would destroy the building and avert the ritual that would empower the Eye. The fact that she was willing to make such a gamble suggests that she was almost certain that the rituals could not succeed, or at least that she saw the Dark as far less of a threat to the survival of humanity than her own patron and its primary avatar, the head of the Magnus Institute. The power she herself had served and fed with the suffering and terror of others for fifty years was the one she believed to be the greatest threat -- and she was not wrong.
Ironically, it is her own successful test (and her own failure at destroying the Archives) that empowers the Eye to conduct the first successful ritual in human history and bring the world as we know it to an end. Discovering this will likely be crushing for her, although discovering that her efforts to stop the other rituals were meaningless is also something that she will be struggling with for some time to come. At the end of her life, her certainty and determination have been badly shaken, leaving her more open to changing her ways than she has perhaps ever been.
Barge Reactions: Gertrude will be angry and frustrated at finding herself confined to a prison after her death, especially one that she would see as soft and coddling (compared, certainly, to the existential horrors that she expects from any supernatural force.) Since one of her primary issues is an inability to trust and form affectionate bonds with others, although she will be perfectly willing to interact, she is unlikely to make close friends without a fair amount of character development. She will be dealing with a fair amount of anger, betrayal and shock over the circumstances of her death, which may make her unpredictable and prone to lash out. Although she is very capable of deception and can play the sweet, slightly daffy old lady with great skill, she's not likely to rely on this, as there are few reasons for her to do so on the Barge. She is more likely to be herself: cold, calculating and manipulative.
Path to Redemption: There are three main things that Gertrude needs to work on.
Letting go of her need for revenge and tendency to avenge herself brutally on those who threaten or betray her. She tends to see maintaining her power through fear as a life and death matter, and being able to accept that it is possible to navigate disappointment, betrayal and conflict without going to nuclear solutions will be an important part of her growth.
Finding people who are worthy of her trust and who will not betray her, and accepting that they are worthy of trust. Having a Warden who she can trust implicitly will be vital for this process, although it's likely that she will take some time to truly give her trust and will certainly try to control them through manipulation and intimidation in the meantime.
Gaining the ability to make meaningful connections with others. She has seen herself as essentially alone for most of her life. This is connected to her difficulty with trust, but distinct from it: her trust issues are connected more to her professional life and betrayals she's experienced there, whereas her difficulty feeling and expressing affection is rooted in fifty-plus years of habitual avoidance of personal connection.
History: Here
Sample Journal Entry: Here
Sample RP: Here
Special Notes: Since the Barge already has an Archivist, if there are any existing nerfs/game specific conventions for the use of Archivist powers, Gertrude's abilities will follow that precedent.
User DW:
tinwateringcanE-mail: swordwithasmile AT gmail
Other Characters: Zhao Yunlan,
wildguardianCharacter Name: Gertrude Robinson
Series: The Magnus Archives
Age: Late 70s/early 80s
From When?: Approximately March 2015, when Elias Bouchard shot her in the tunnels beneath the Magnus Archives
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Gertrude has spent her life fighting a lonely battle to defeat and control the fears of humanity, preventing any of them from coming through into the world and fully manifesting there. From a certain point of view, she is a hero, but she is keenly aware that despite her many successes she has sacrificed the greater part of her humanity to her quest. She has no loved ones, no close friends, no family. She has committed terrible atrocities. She has flayed the corpse of a young man in order to bind his tormented soul into a necromantic tome. She has murdered, dismembered corpses, set bombs in busy cities, betrayed her own assistants to use them as pawns in her plans; when one of her assistants who she trusted proved to be a murderer, she burned the woman alive in her home and never allowed herself to trust again. As an inmate, she needs to let go of her need for power and control, regain her ability to make meaningful connections with others, and move beyond living for her quest.
Arrival: Brought in against her will after her death.
Abilities/Powers: Gertrude Robinson is an avatar of the Ceaseless Watcher, holding the role of The Archivist. Unlike Jonathan Sims, she resists fully accepting the powers of the Archivist and dislikes employing them -- the avatar of the Unknowing describes her as "not as good an Archivist."
Compulsion: Gertrude has the ability to compel others to answer her questions. She is said to dislike doing this, but she has no compunctions about using it against other avatars or those who she is working against. This ability will be significantly reduced in power, working unreliably (and at the discretion of the players whose characters she attempts to use it against.)
Language: This is a passive ability. She is able to understand all languages, written or spoken, as though they were her native language, although she cannot speak them unless she has learned them herself.
Taking Statements: This is a passive ability. When someone gives her a statement about a supernatural event that happened to them, they are able to tell a well-organized story in precise and accurate detail. They often feel as though they are reliving the events as they relate them. After giving a statement, they will suffer from flashbacks and nightmares, as well as a feeling of being watched, as the Ceaseless Watcher feeds on their fear and paranoia. Taking statements is not optional for the Archivist; failing to do so will lead to exhaustion and debilitation.
Although she can compel answers to questions (at player discretion) she is unable to compel a statement; statement givers must willingly offer their story.
Knowing: The Archivist can spontaneously become aware of facts about the world or about the things and people surrounding her. This ability is fully nerfed.
Seeing: The Archivist is able to see through deception or illusion and accurately perceive the true nature of things, especially when it comes to seeing supernatural influence. This ability is fully nerfed.
Personality: Gertrude Robinson has made it her life's mission to win at Call of Cthulhu. Pitiless, driven, fierce and extremely careful, she has personally foiled rituals meant to call at least five separate eldritch manifestations of living terror into being in the real world, and attempted to finish off her career by destroying the place of power linked to her very own patron, the Eye or the Ceaseless Watcher. She holds no loyalty whatsoever to the Eye, despises the powers it gives her, and refuses to accept an ageless, immortal body in favor of hanging on to every scrap of humanity that she can maintain while existing as an avatar of cosmic terror.
Gertrude has a hatred for the Entities that burns so brightly that she has willingly fed her entire life into that flame. She never fully explains what sparked her drive, although, once, when her assistant Tim asked, she told him that the Desolation (the power that controls loss, devastation, destruction of potential, and the embodiment of the destructive power of fire) ate her cat.
The Desolation generally does not just take one thing from those it targets, and Gertrude did come to the Magnus Institute already marked by another power. She has no family and no friends outside of her assistants at the Magnus Institute. Did she lose the things she loved to the Desolation? Did it drive her to research the Entities, to seek a career in an organization devoted to cataloguing and investigating supernatural events, to pledge herself to an Entity bound to knowledge and surveillance in order to position herself to find and thwart the Desolation? She's never said, and yet, when as a new Archivist she began her crusade to find and stop the rituals of each Entity in turn, it was the Desolation's cult that she targeted first. She formed a supernatural bond between herself and a woman born to embody the Desolation's "Lightless Flame," Agnes Montague, that endured until Agnes predeceased her in the 2000s and prevented the Desolation's cult from using Agnes as a focus to bring their power into the real world.
Although she was manipulated into it -- she believed that the ritual would stop Agnes' use as a focus, but did not know that it would bind them together -- she seems to have been willing to accept the bond as the cost of stopping the Desolation's plans. In fact, it's possible that her spiritual sympathy with an avatar of the Lightless Flame inspired an increasingly marked interest in using fire and explosives to accomplish her aims over the decades, culminating in the one time she spoke directly to Agnes and asked for her help in murdering Gertrude's traitorous assistant Emma in a house fire.
The first person that Gertrude was willing to use as a sacrifice in the pursuit of her cause was herself; she knowingly gave herself over to the position of the Archivist, avatar of the Eye. She did not, however, stop there, and her sacrifices of others were both more brutal and more final. There is no doubt that any Entity gaining the ability to enter into the real world would be a disaster of cosmic proportions, destroying life as we know it and plunging all survivors of the human race into a waking nightmare of sheer terror. Gertrude, fully aware of this, had no compunctions whatsoever about the loss of a few innocent bystanders -- or even the need to murder and dismember innocents with her own hands -- in order to stop the rituals. She describes herself as not having the luxury of compassion, although it's clear she is aware of the shocking nature of her actions. She does not allow herself to have regrets, even when she is sacrificing her own assistant, Michael Shelley, a man she willingly kept in the dark in order to use him as a pawn in her own plans. Sometimes, such as when she has successfully condemned a servant of the Desolation to a horrifying living torture as an object lesson, she even revels in the pain and fear that she can cause.
Despite her efforts to remain separate from her patron, there is no doubt that she has also fallen deep into the trap of taking joy in power, and taking power from the ability to inspire terror. She is somewhat unusual in that those who she most wishes to make fear her are those who are the avatars of other Entities, not mere helpless human beings, but she still enjoys it.
It is one of her only joys. Beyond her cause, Gertrude has very little in her life. Although it was the Desolation that marked her before she chose to pursue her career destroying it and others, the entity besides the Eye with which she is most in sympathy is the Lonely: a fear whose image is that of standing in the cold street, alone, watching light and joy in distant windows. Gertrude is intensely self-isolating and focused on her cause to the extent that her successor, Jonathan Sims, suggests that she would be unable to cope if her cause were to fail. She would have nothing to live for.
At the end of her life, not long before her canon point, she had begun to doubt the necessity of her actions. Since no ritual had ever succeeded in all of human history, was it even possible for a ritual to succeed? Or would they all collapse even without her murderous interventions? She planned to test this theory by allowing a ritual of the Dark to proceed, using the ritual itself as cover for her attempt to set a fire in the tunnels beneath the Magnus Archives that would destroy the building and avert the ritual that would empower the Eye. The fact that she was willing to make such a gamble suggests that she was almost certain that the rituals could not succeed, or at least that she saw the Dark as far less of a threat to the survival of humanity than her own patron and its primary avatar, the head of the Magnus Institute. The power she herself had served and fed with the suffering and terror of others for fifty years was the one she believed to be the greatest threat -- and she was not wrong.
Ironically, it is her own successful test (and her own failure at destroying the Archives) that empowers the Eye to conduct the first successful ritual in human history and bring the world as we know it to an end. Discovering this will likely be crushing for her, although discovering that her efforts to stop the other rituals were meaningless is also something that she will be struggling with for some time to come. At the end of her life, her certainty and determination have been badly shaken, leaving her more open to changing her ways than she has perhaps ever been.
Barge Reactions: Gertrude will be angry and frustrated at finding herself confined to a prison after her death, especially one that she would see as soft and coddling (compared, certainly, to the existential horrors that she expects from any supernatural force.) Since one of her primary issues is an inability to trust and form affectionate bonds with others, although she will be perfectly willing to interact, she is unlikely to make close friends without a fair amount of character development. She will be dealing with a fair amount of anger, betrayal and shock over the circumstances of her death, which may make her unpredictable and prone to lash out. Although she is very capable of deception and can play the sweet, slightly daffy old lady with great skill, she's not likely to rely on this, as there are few reasons for her to do so on the Barge. She is more likely to be herself: cold, calculating and manipulative.
Path to Redemption: There are three main things that Gertrude needs to work on.
Letting go of her need for revenge and tendency to avenge herself brutally on those who threaten or betray her. She tends to see maintaining her power through fear as a life and death matter, and being able to accept that it is possible to navigate disappointment, betrayal and conflict without going to nuclear solutions will be an important part of her growth.
Finding people who are worthy of her trust and who will not betray her, and accepting that they are worthy of trust. Having a Warden who she can trust implicitly will be vital for this process, although it's likely that she will take some time to truly give her trust and will certainly try to control them through manipulation and intimidation in the meantime.
Gaining the ability to make meaningful connections with others. She has seen herself as essentially alone for most of her life. This is connected to her difficulty with trust, but distinct from it: her trust issues are connected more to her professional life and betrayals she's experienced there, whereas her difficulty feeling and expressing affection is rooted in fifty-plus years of habitual avoidance of personal connection.
History: Here
Sample Journal Entry: Here
Sample RP: Here
Special Notes: Since the Barge already has an Archivist, if there are any existing nerfs/game specific conventions for the use of Archivist powers, Gertrude's abilities will follow that precedent.