abrightboy | The Village

PLAYER INFO

Name: Sarah
Age: 44
Contact: lost_together@hotmail.com ; plurk/personal DW journal are magicom

CHARACTER INFO

Character Name: Malcolm Bright
Canon: Prodigal Son
Canon Point: End of S1E14 'Eye of the Needle'
Appearance: 5'7”, tidy and expensively well dressed, designer stubble, brilliant blue eyes and a slightly manic energy.
Age: 32

Character snapshot: Malcolm Bright is a former FBI profiler, now working as a consultant for the NYPD. He's highly skilled at reading people. His birth name is Malcolm Whitly, son of notorious serial killer Dr Martin 'The Surgeon' Whitly. That albatross has been hanging around his neck since his father's high profile arrest, even though Malcolm was the one that turned him in. Suffering from a variety of mental health disorders related to childhood trauma, Malcolm just tries to get through each day, catch killers so they can't kill again and dig into the fragments of his own repressed memories of his final weeks living with his father. For all that, he's a remarkably positive person, though his mentor - police lieutenant Gil Arroyo - would suggest that he could have a better sense of self-preservation.

World description: Malcolm lives in New York city, taken from the spring of 2020. The world is very much like we know it, though his world is largely contained to his spacious loft apartment, the 16th police precinct and the most difficult and twisted crime scenes of New York as he helps the NYPD bring killers to justice. He also spends a fair amount of time at the maximum security psychiatric facility where his father has been incarcerated for the last 20 years, Clairmont Psychiatric, alternately being frustrated in his efforts to find out more about his missing memories and getting advice on murderers from a man who knows about killing.

History: Malcolm's early life was one of extraordinary privilege. His mother was the heiress of one of the oldest and richest families in New York and he was sent to the best private schools. That shroud of exorbitant wealth was how his father hid so easily for so long. Malcolm was ten years old in 1998, when he called 911 to tell police that his father killed people. He'd found a woman in a trunk in the basement of their house, in his father's 'hobby room'. His father found him there and chloroformed him, continuing to do so for an unspecified amount of time to make Malcolm forget what he saw. The amnesia effect of the chloroform only worked to a certain degree. Malcolm lost time and has only regained fragments of memories from that period in the 20 years since – including hazy pieces of a camping trip his father took him on with another serial killer named John Watkins – but he remembered the girl in the box. It was when the haze lifted enough that he called the police, but they didn't take the report that seriously and sent a beat cop named Gil Arroyo around to the luxurious Upper East Side townhouse where a prominent doctor and his socialite wife lived with their two children. The nice doctor offered Officer Arroyo a cup of tea, which he accepted, and – while he waited in the posh entrance hall – the doctor's young son came up to him and said, very calmly, “You should take your gun out. My father's going to kill you.” And, by being the one to take ten year old Malcolm seriously, Gil Arroyo managed to get the biggest bust of the century under his belt and also stay alive.

The Surgeon sedated his victims using tea laced with ketamine before he tortured them to death.

Before Martin's arrest, Malcolm looked up to him a lot – 'worshipped' him, according to his mother – and discovering the Surgeon's gruesome secret changed everything. Would Malcolm have pursued a career in medicine, like his father? Perhaps. He was certainly fascinated by it. But once Martin was in prison, Malcolm spent his formative years being mentored by Gil Arroyo, who was rising through the ranks at the NYPD. Gil had told Malcolm from the night of the arrest that he was a hero and that he had saved countless people from the gruesome fate of the Surgeon's victims, but Malcolm had a hard time seeing it that way. In his mind, if he had caught on to his father's proclivities sooner, he could have saved more of them. By pursuing a career in law enforcement with a specialty in understanding how monsters like his father thought and worked, he sought to save people from becoming their victims.

Around 2008, Malcolm Whitly, the little boy who famously testified at his own father's circus of a murder trial, changed his name to Malcolm Bright and applied to Quantico, intent on joining the FBI. It was a series of hurdles for him even without his father's name and – once his lineage became an open secret at the FBI – they were looking for a reason to get rid of him. He produced results but he was unconventional and, frankly, his colleagues found him strange. In the autumn of 2019, he tracked down a serial killer named Claude Springer to an abbatoir in Tennessee. The bust proceeded with the backup of the local sheriff's department, but it was Bright who found Springer within the facility, only to be knocked out by the killer with a cattle prod. Waking up on the floor next to some other still-alive victims, he shone his flashlight around the room only to find Springer's trophy shelf: the faces of his victims preserved, pickled, in mason jars. When Springer came into the room with a shotgun, Malcolm talked him down, promising to help him understand why he was so broken that he would do these things. As Springer put the shotgun down, the sheriff came into the room and shot Springer in the back. Malcolm pointed out that Springer had lowered his weapon and that the sheriff had murdered him. The sheriff snapped back that he had saved Malcolm's life and was a goddamn hero.

Malcolm punched him in the face.

After that incident, the FBI and DoJ had what they needed to get rid of him and he was fired. They told him they felt he was too unstable to continue working in federal law enforcement and that he showed signs of potential latent psychopathy and narcissism like his father, before contradicting themselves and saying he ran into the abbatoir without any regard for his own life. Regardless, he was out of a job and he left his ten years in Washington DC behind, moving back to New York.

Gil Arroyo was a lieutenant in Major Crimes at the NYPD by then and, when he heard Bright was in town, he asked him to come consult on a case. The case turned out to be a copycat of his father's murders and it ended up sending him to speak with his father for the first time in ten years. His father, delighted to have him drawn back into his web and loathe to lose him again, promised he could help with more investigations. He said he didn't resent his career choice anymore and only wanted to help.

Malcolm didn't really believe him – Malcolm never really believes him – but he did want answers about the Girl in the Box, whom he'd been told all his life was something he'd imagined. However, when he regained a fragment of memory about the car they'd taken on the camping trip he couldn't really remember, he went looking for it and, when he found it, he crossed paths with John Watkins again. Watkins remembered Malcolm very well and – in passing – mentioned the girl Malcolm found. It was the first real evidence that she was real and both Gil and his mother regretted pushing so hard on trying to convince him she wasn't. Tracking down her identity became a fixation for him and the ways that she appeared in his nightmares changed to her violent insistence that he find her.

Right before his entry point to the game, a murderer was blackmailing his mother with an endgame of getting her to stab Martin Whitly in the heart. Malcolm wouldn't let her do it, but when it was clear it was the only way to save the victim the man had kidnapped, Malcolm did it himself – with some direction from Martin – thinking he might be able to manage it without actually killing his father. He won't know, when he arrives in Mathias, that he succeeded.

What are your character’s mental/emotional strengths? Malcolm has high emotional intelligence. He's good at analyzing what people are feeling and – often – even what they're thinking from their faces and body language. He's extremely smart and has a nearly eidetic memory, so he has a lot of facts and figures at his finger tips. Because he's been on a lot of medication for a long time, he's almost a walking pharmaceutical dictionary. He's extremely well-versed on anything he's ever had a lot of interest in, from the works of Dumas, to ballet to the psychology of murder. He's also extremely resilient for someone who's living with what could be a debilitating amount of trauma.

What are your character’s mental/emotional weaknesses? Malcolm suffers from CPTSD (complex post traumatic stress disorder) and related psychosis, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, clinical depression, chronic insomnia and pavor nocturnes, or 'night terrors'. While he is used to living with these issues and has developed extensive coping mechanisms for them, he will be more susceptible to them without access to the medications he takes on a daily basis, which include benzodiazapines for his anxiety (which he has descibed himself as 'dependant' on), antidepressants and antipsychotics. He occasionally hallucinates even when on these medications, especially when his insomnia is particularly bad. Also, his therapist is concerned his obsession with recovering repressed memories could lead to a psychotic break, where he would lose his sense of what's real and what isn't. An environment where it feels like it's not always clear what's real and what isn't could make him question whether that's happening.

What events or circumstances in your character’s past have impacted them the most? The single event that has impacted Malcolm's life more than anything was finding the Girl in the Box in his father's hobby room at the age of ten. She's in many of his nightmares, he hallucinates her, he's desperate for answers as to what happened to her. When he called police, he didn't understand why she wasn't still there when they arrived because he didn't know time had passed. He didn't realize, at that time, that his father was drugging him. Those memories only started returning in fragments twenty years later, mostly starting in his nightmares.

What impressions do others tend to have of your character and how do those impressions differ from who your character truly is? Most people find him a little strange, or a little hyper, or a little macabre. It generally puts them off from getting to know him better than that, but truly he's a deeply sensitive person who cares a lot about protecting other people.

What motivates your character? Malcolm is largely motivated by stopping killers from killing. Some people probably think he's facinated by serial killers and murderers because he knows so much about them, but those are just the weapons in his quiver. He's interested in making sure people don't become victims.

How does your character handle crisis or adversity? Malcolm is capable of defending himself physically and he's capable of using a gun, but he doesn't carry a gun and his go-to is always to try to talk an aggressor down. He doesn't always succeed, but he succeeds more often than not, sometimes managing to even break into the minds of the seemingly unremorseful. In the midst of crisis, he almost always manges to keep a cool head and be resourceful. It's after the crisis is over that he can succumb to the darkness inside his own mind. That's why he prefers to keep working.

Skills, abilities, and physical weaknesses: He's a good critical thinker, he's charming and a persuasive talker, if occasionally blunt and often odd. Good at solving puzzles. Good at solving people. He's physically fit (he does a lot of yoga and exercises daily) but he's only 5'7” so he is often at a size disadvantage in a physical conflict. That being said, he got beat up at school a lot, so even before his FBI training, he took self-defence to hone his hand to hand skills, using his core strength and speed to his advantage. He also has a lot of food issues to do with his mental health problems and, as he puts it, 'most food makes me sick'.

Inventory: Charcoal grey suit, white shirt with faint grey pattern on it, burgundy tie. The only things he carries in his pockets are his wallet and his phone.

HORROR INFO

What aspects of your character are you most interested in exploring in a horror setting? I'm interested in how he takes the supernatural element and how he overcomes his issues to be helpful in the problem-solving and survival side of things.

What is your character’s mental state upon entering the game? Thoroughness is appreciated here. Malcolm has just stabbed his father for The Greater Good and doesn't know if he's going to survive it. It's complicated because he wants to just hate Martin Whitly and be done with it, but he remembers what his childhood was like, when Martin was A Great Dad, before he found out what he really was. He's in a difficult place when he arrives because he wants to know if Martin will survive. Also his mother took the blame for the stabbing, even though Malcolm wouldn't let her actually do it, so he wants to know that she's okay and whether she's going to be prosecuted or not. Basically, on top of his normal issues, which is a sort of edge of mania, he's very worried about his family.

What unsettles and frightens your character? What sort of encounters would chip away at your character’s psychological stability? Malcolm's own hallucinations already freak him out. They involve things like his father attacking him, the girl in the box attacking him and visions of himself as a dead ten year old. Things that trigger his emotional problems, that make him think of his childhood or his father's crimes can get to him. He's more afraid of the things inside his own head than anything outside of it. He faces vicious killers all the time without blinking much, but he is genuinely afraid of his father.

What horrifying events or genre elements would you like to see utilized in the game? I like the idea of hearing voices or seeing things in the fog that are manifested by the characters' own fears. Even sharing each other's fears.

SAMPLES

Test Drive: https://villagememes.dreamwidth.org/323.html?thread=111427#cmt111427
Log Sample: https://abrightboy.dreamwidth.org/264.html
Log Sample: https://abrightboy.dreamwidth.org/960.html

The Village - Application