Theme Song: "Breath of Life," by Florence and the Machine
GENERAL INFORMATION
Role: Ghost 2.
Nickname(s)/Alias(es): Elly.
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Love Interest: No one ever caught her fancy in life, and death hasn't exactly been easy. That doesn't mean she doesn't have any love interests, it just makes everything that much more complex.
APPEARANCE
Height: 5'4"
Weight: 120.
Build: Thin, almost too thin, with small curves.
Eye Color: Green.
Hair Color: Chestnut brown.
Scars/Tattoos/Piercings: Ears pierced, small, faint line scars on her forearms.
Preferred Clothing: Eleanor wears a green dress with a full, flared skirt, under which is black lace petticoats. The dress is sleeveless and fitted at the top, with a sweetheart neckline, and she wears it with elbow-length black gloves and a black hat with a short net veil that covers her eyes. Emerald earrings and an onyx choker accessorize the outfit, along with matching green pumps. Bright red lipstick and kohl around her eyes, because why not? Her mother's dead, isn't she?
MENTALITY
Oddities: Doesn't really like to look anyone in the eyes, prefers to look at the floor or the ceiling. Plays with her skirts when she's nervous--swishes them around, fists the cloth, etc.
Fears/Phobias: Doctors, being confined, being trapped once again in a cell on the island as she was in life.
Likes: Party dresses, any kind of music, dancing, any kind of slang, and playing games.
Dislikes: Rules, silence, the island on which she's trapped, most current fashions, and being alone.
Personality: Before her death, Eleanor was a snobbish, materialistic young girl. Her only focus was on getting what she wanted, more freedom from a house and a culture that she could feel choking her with every breath. Everyone she met was a tool for that goal, and while she did have genuine friends she would have dropped them in a second to escape from her situation. Pretty things were a priority for her, looking good a necessity, and manipulation a tactic she would not hesitate to use. That is not to say that Eleanor was completely without feeling, as she did genuinely want her parents' affection and didn't attempt to break any hearts in her many flirtations, and in fact she went out of her way to make sure that the everyone knew she was never serious about them. It blackened her name even more, but she just couldn't do it. Freedom was her every thought, her every need, and it blinded her to the truth that what she was doing would only end in misery, not what she most desired. Because in her mind, why shouldn't she get it? She had gotten everything else in her life by hook or by crook, and she believed that this would be no different.
The facility at North Brother Island changed Eleanor dramatically. A spoiled child comes into a situation where all her machinations mean nothing, where any action she takes ends in more pain? It's either give up or adapt. Eleanor found a steel spine under all her shiny clothes and wild child persona, and used it to keep what she could of her sanity. Manipulation didn't work, so she became sneakier about getting what she wanted by theft. Flirtation was dangerous, and her fear ever great, so a garrulous girl became a quiet shadow. Isolation made her self-reliant, but it also taught her that if she didn't keep her her spirits and look at least for a little sunshine, then she would lose what hope she had left. Music was her comfort, and as she hummed to pass the days she hoped for a way to escape. With every failed attempt, she had to hum louder, hope harder, and hold herself even tighter. Eventually, when she had lost all hope of her parents' rescue, she saved herself from a breakdown by stealing a scalpel and beginning to count the weeks of her incarceration in scars on her arm. Oddly enough, the thought of her mother's disgust at the practice gave her strength, and the butterfly grew steel tipped wings.
That is Eleanor in a nutshell. She plays and sings and dances to keep every shred of hope alive, even after death when all hope seems lost. The island couldn't be the end--there has to be something beyond it. She fears many things, and catches herself jumping at shadows (which is odd to see, in a ghost) but she has to keep dancing. Keep living, even without life, even when she is forced to do things she finds unforgivable. Admittedly, some of her snobbishness at people below her class has transmuted into a slight disdain for the living, mixed with envy, but Eleanor will not give in to either. She has to be better than she was, because she fears if she is not, she will be lost again.
COMBAT
Fighting Style: Eleanor is a guerrilla fighter by nature, hiding and running before making a sneak attack with her trusty scalpels. She'll take hits if she has to but she won't stay to exchange blows. Fast and furious cuts before disappearing into the shadows, hiding from the light.
HISTORY
Relationship Status: To be determined.
Family: All dead, of course. Alive, her mother was a socialite and her father a white collar businessman. No siblings.
Personal History/Background: Eleanor was raised an upper class child of a domineering mother. The debutante circuit, socialite parties, miss manners, the whole works. Until she was fifteen she went along with it, after all, she had nothing against parties or pretty dresses. But the endless rules, the constant constraint, and her mother's non-stop micromanagement of her life wore thin, and Eleanor started to act out in an attempt to get some freedom. First in little ways, like accidentally "forgetting" a piece of jewelry or a single glove, or a hat that didn't quite match. It didn't quite elicit the reaction she wanted, because her mother was perfectly willing to be late rather than have her daughter shame her in front of fashionable society. When that didn't work, Eleanor bought a pair of pants with money that her father gave her one day for "something pretty," which was the extent of any socializing she had with her father. At first she wore them to school, hiding them under her skirts until she got there and changing in the bathrooms. Her mother never noticed, and her friends never told, so she started blatantly wearing them around the house. Her mother was appalled, but her father was easily manipulated with a pout and celebrity examples--especially Marilyn Monroe--and told her mother not to worry about it, it was just a phase.
Bright lipstick came next, with more pants and edgier slang. Same reaction. Her mother, appalled, and her father uncaring or easily manipulated. More rules came, more parties with even more boring dresses, and her mother started talking marriage. At sixteen, Eleanor decided enough was enough. She refused to go to the parties, "lost" the dresses that were bought for her, and started wearing tighter shirts and fitted pants with flats. She began hanging out with a group of upper class girls who were quite vocal in their criticism of anyone who they viewed as less than they, which was pretty much everyone. Then there were the boys to flirt with, who were of course in her social stratus, but willing to walk just over the line with her anyway. When her father stopped giving her money, in an attempt to curb his wild child, she started bumming cigarettes off of her friends at school and staying out past curfew. Eleanor never would have predicted that in the summer of 1957 her parents, instead of letting her go to college and have her freedom, or even marrying her off to a well-to-do boy in the neighborhood, they would send her to North Brother Island. For her "rehabilitation," they said. "The doctors will know what's wrong with you," her mother hissed angrily as they dropped Eleanor off. "You are a lady, not a... a... roundheell!" Her father said nothing, having pulled the strings to get her in there with a judge who was a regular at his poker game. Eleanor sat, shocked, looking at the prison in front of her. She was only sixteen, and she'd gotten the royal shaft--her life was over. She would never see her parents again.
What happened at the facility was something a pampered child could never have been prepared for. Isolation was the favored treatment of the staff, and even though Eleanor had never touched anything harder than tobacco they treated her as if she had tracks scarred into her arms. After a few months, Eleanor couldn't tell what day it was anymore, and when she started refusing to talk and attempting to escape the island she was locked into a cell alone with complete sound deprivation. Months passed between complete isolation and doctors trying to analyze her rebellious behavior and "rehabilitate" her in ways that wounded rather than healed. Food was a reward and sometimes a punishment, as she lost the curves she'd been so proud of between starvation and vomiting. She began to steal scalpels when they brought her out and marked her arms in isolation, counting the weeks as best she could in delicate lines on her forearms. Eleanor would hum to herself in her room, keeping away the dark in an attempt to bring a little peace into a situation that was breaking her apart. A few months after her seventeenth birthday, or what she believed was a few months after her seventeenth birthday, an orderly she didn't recognize came into her cell with a smile that chilled her to the bone. He locked the door behind him and came at her, arms outstretched, toying with a needle in his hand. What followed was a blur of screams and blood, scalpel in hand, bloodpainscreamshelpmesomeonehelpmeplease, more blood. Then there was only darkness. What came after, well, that was quite... different.
