Gabriel Fan Liu, from This Damned Town, a roleplay on RPG

Gabriel Fan Liu

Role: Female 6
Name: Gabriel Fan Liu
Birthdate: January 14, 1998
Sexuality: Asexual Panromantic
Gender: Female
Theme Songs:Young Blood by Bea Miller | Migraine by twenty one pilots |
Bad Apple by Vocaloid & Cristina VeeLikes: Movies, the Internet, technology, magic, sleep
Dislikes: Bad movies, crowds, noisy things, conflict, cliches
Phobias: Spiders, rejection, losing control over certain
things
Quirks: Doesn’t take good care of herself, gets intensely
focused when it’s something she likes, perceptive when it comes
to others, dense when it concerns herself

”Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor.”
-Rick Blane, Casablanca

But in dark times when we close our eyes
It’s a nightmare, it’s a nightmare
When the sun don’t shine we lose our minds
But I swear, we can get there
-Bea Miller, Young Blood

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Appearance

:T H E M A S K:

Height: 5’ 4”
Physique: Thin, almost bird-like
Eye Color: Black
Hair Color: Dark Brown

Gabriel has dark brown hair that's almost black in the right light. It's naturally straight, and pretty soft to the touch. She has a round face, with big black eyes--a typically Asian face. She has a pretty 'underdeveloped' figure, which is at least in part because of her lack of selfcare. Since her face and body are so ambiguous, she could pass for a boy if she wanted to. That's how, er, flat she is. She has pretty smooth skin, and a birthmark on her right leg that looks a bit like a dragon chasing its tail, if you tilted your head and sainted long enough.

Gabriel typically has a rather unkempt appearance, simply because she’s bad at taking care of herself. She keeps her hair short because it’s easier that way and usually has a neutral expression on her face. Because she skips meals but exercises fairly regularly, she has a very thin physique. She tends to wear whatever’s in her closet, which is generally made up of thrift store and secondhand goods.

Gabriel always wears two bracelets on either hand. They’re both sturdily made. One side has a padlock on it, and the other has the key. These bracelets serve multiple purposes. Ostensibly, it’s both a fashion statement and a defense system (in case she’s attacked, the padlock acts as a weight and the key can be used to stab). But she also has a nervous habit of locking and unlocking the padlock when there aren’t other things she can do the same with. There’s something deliciously symbolic about her being ‘locked up’ by her OCD, too.

Gabriel’s voice is rather low pitched and soft, and very smooth. She’s a good singer if she tries. She has a tendency to hum or sing under her breath when she’s working, which really hasn’t helped her social situation at school much since it just sounds like she’s talking to herself.

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
-Gandalf, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings

Will tomorrow ever come? Will I make it through the
night?
Will there ever be a place for the broken in the light?
Am I hurting? Am I sad? Should I stay, or should I go?
I've forgotten how to tell. Did I ever even know?
Can I take another step? I've done everything I can
All the people that I see I will never understand
If I find a way to change, if I step into the light
Then I'll never be the same, and it all will fade to
white
-Vocaloid & Cristina Vee, Bad Apple

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Personality

:THE INSIDE :

Myers-Briggs Type: INFP
Mental Disorders/Illnesses: OCD
Optimist or pessimist?: Optimist, surprisingly
Bad Traits: spacy, doesn’t show emotion well,
awful at self-maintenance, dense about things
that concern herself, messy, somewhat
eccentric, hates “noisy things”
Good Traits: dedicated when she wants to be,
a good listener, an optimist, idealist,
perceptive when it comes to people other than
herself

At first glance, Gabriel seems like a complete and utter flake. She doesn’t take care of herself, she spaces out easily, doesn’t show emotion well, and her grades are a mess of all types of letters. But when she’s driven to finish a task, she hyperfocuses on it, shutting out the outside world to the point where she forgets to eat or sleep, sometimes for days.

Despite her silence and her appearance, Gabriel is actually a very good listener. This is partially because she doesn’t talk much, so she doesn’t give off the impression that she’s judging you, and also partially because she’s very good at remembering things and keeping secrets. She doesn’t express much herself, but when she’s concerned about someone she’ll do something (e.g. anonymously writing them a nice note or leaving something they like on their desk).

Gabriel also has a sort of childlike element to her. This includes her difficulty with expressing emotions. She has a high verbal IQ in that she can understand speech and written words very well, and she expresses herself well through art and writing, but she can’t seem to find the words when she has to say them. So, her solution is not to express much at all, in fear that she’ll upset someone. When she does try to express it, she’s childishly clumsy and gets easily frustrated by her inability to just say the right words. As a sort of idealist, she isn’t cynical at all, and believes in inherent good. She also retains a sense of childish wonder.

I’ll take the time here to also explain the nature of Gabe’s OCD-invoked intrusive thoughts. Generally, intrusive thoughts brought on by OCD include topics such as violence, sexuality, responsibility, religiosity and health. Gabriel is not particularly religious, so she rarely has any blasphemous thoughts. Nor is she preoccupied with sexuality. Gabriel is asexual, and so is usually released from panicking about heterosexual or homosexual thoughts. Most of her intrusive thoughts center around violence, including anything from murder and rape to self harm and suicide. Gabriel does not, I repeat DOES NOT, have suicidal nor homicidal tendencies. However, her OCD first presents these ideas vividly, and then has her obsess over whether or not she’s psychopathic, sociopathic, or suicidal. Why do her intrusive thoughts focus mainly on violence, when she’s equally likely to envision herself dying from a papercut, or because she dropped her pencil Marcilla broke her arm later that week? No one’s quite sure. Maybe, as her mother thinks, it could be because of all the violence in the movies she watches. Maybe it’s something completely different. Maybe it’s connected to the asylum visit she can’t remember. Who knows?

One question has mystified several of her classmates: has Gabriel actually ever gotten angry? See, Gabriel is actually not timid as movie bully victims tend to be. Rather, she prefers to be passive, passive-aggressive, or sarcastic when dealing with her tormentors. Very few people have seen her become honestly angry, but they were pretty surprised by it. Gabriel seems to have inherited her mother’s temper but her father’s patience, so it takes a lot to make her lose her temper, but once she has there’s no going back. She gets pretty violent when she’s angry, and sort of flies into a rage. She doesn’t rampage around, but she’ll lose her composure, her voice will jump a few octaves, and she’ll be much, much louder than she usually is. When she’s angry, Gabriel can be very vengeful, planning her moves with cold calculation. If she’s left alone, the anger will probably consume her, and she’ll only calm down once her vengeance is acted out, or she’s satisfied that the other person has paid, or if someone else intervenes (preferably someone she considers a friend, to ensure minimal damage).

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
-Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

“Do they expect for me to be cured? No, they expect me to take my therapy and listen to them, like a good little sick girl.”
-Gabriel, paraphrased from James Bond’s Goldfinger

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▌History

: THE PAST :
Parents: Fredrick (Fred) Liu and Cassandra Ai Zhu
Religion: Unofficial “Weak” Agnostic
School: Batteridge High School, junior

To her Chinese mother, Gabriel’s birth was surrounded by misfortune. Her birthdate was full of inauspicious numbers (1 being considered a “lonely” number, and “14” as a combination of 1 and 4 [4 in Chinese sounds like the word for “death”] being considered one of the most unlucky numbers), and she was born with a full head of downy baby hair. Additionally, she was a girl, instead of the boy that she’d hoped for.

To her Asian American father, Gabriel came as a surprise. Since his wife had been so certain that their child would be a son, they had decided not to ask a doctor. Still, as his wife cried in the hospital room, he decided to give her his favorite angel name, in hopes that it would offer some sort of protection, and somehow appease his wife, who had, in a fit of morbidity, given their daughter the Chinese name Fan, meaning mortal.

Gabriel’s first few years were reasonably happy. While her mother had buried herself in her job, her father worked at home and offered her plenty of love. Her mother was still haunted by omens and her Chinese beliefs, while her father didn’t take any stock in them at all. Her parents often fought about her, her mother’s voice climbing decibels and octaves and her father’s voice staying cold and calm. In an effort not to trouble her parents, Gabriel closed in on herself and was determined not to bother her parents with her own problems. One notable thing about her childhood was that Gabriel liked checking locks, locking them twice over before being satisfied with the job. Her parents noted this behavior, but wrote it off as childish play. Her father even praised her for double-checking, saying that he’d never have to worry that someone might come in, since Xiaofan (a nickname that disappeared after adolescence) always checked for them.

At school, Gabriel was teased pretty mercilessly for having a boy’s name. At first, she told her parents and tried to follow their advice (“just ignore it, Gabe”), but of course that didn’t work. She closed up even more, especially when her plan to make everyone call her by her middle name, Fan, backfired since that invited even more teasing. Eventually she settled on Gabby, and the bullying subsided somewhat. Even so, few people wanted to associate with a sort-of former victim, so she had few friends. Her teachers noted her ability to fixate on certain things (one week, she’d refused to read any book other than those on sea otters, but by the next she was asking the librarian, one of the few adults she liked outside of her family, dozens of questions about bridges) and discussed ADD and ADHD, but eventually agreed that she just had normal childish flightiness and attention span.

She doesn’t remember how she merged into the group of 14 children, the largest group she’d ever known. Maybe it had been so gradual that there was little and less to remember, only that they were as thick as thieves, not just tolerating each other but accepting each other. And sometimes they got in trouble, carried away because just behind the fence was a pirate’s treasure, one more branch up the old oak tree would reward them with an old bird’s nest. Their imagination ran wild with each other, building what was already there in the town that they could somewhat sense but never understood (how would children understand, after all). Her father was indulgent, only happy that she’d found friends her age, but her mother worried and got frustrated by her daughter’s willfulness and the family’s reputation in the community.

Gabriel remembers the Book vividly. Maybe a bit too vividly, but she remembers how it spoke about fairies (they all knew about those, it was hard not to when your house had been designed by them) and singing dragons (she was pretty sure she’d seen some before) and ghosts and everything else that haunted Batteridge. She remembers the soft giggles and gasps and the warm body heat of each other as they huddled around it, eager to catch glimpses of the text, and she remembers the strange and tiny, almost decorative designs that ran around some of the pages, as if to protect the information inside.

She doesn’t remember why they went into Old Town. Had they been driven by curiosity, to find some of the reputed creatures? Was it childish arrogance, armed with toy swords of knowledge and understanding that drove them to try and storm the castle? Had it been something outside of their minds, reaching out and calling? She didn’t know. All she knew was that they ended up at the old asylum. That’s where her memory stops. When she found out, Gabe’s mother forbid her from meeting up with any of her friends, and from the back corner of the school rooms she could see those who attended East Hills with her splintering apart, anyway. Gabriel kept an eye on them for a while, as much as she could, but as they grew older and were assigned to different classrooms or moved out of elementary school altogether, she slowly forgot them, as well.

It was after the asylum incident that her compulsions and obsessions spiked tremendously. Now, instead of locking her bedroom door and window twice, she’d spend half an hour with the constant clicks, counting under her breath until her heart rate slowed and the frightening, intangible grip on her mind loosened somewhat. Frightened by increasing intrusive thoughts (“I could take this pencil and ram it into Anna’s eye right now. Wait, shit, does that make me a psychopath? Oh God, I’m a psycho. Am I going to be locked up? Does anyone else know? I gotta look this thing up, maybe there’s something on the web that says I’m not God I hope I’m not”) and her compulsions, she’d spend hours looking up different mental illnesses online. Her parents noticed too, and consulted a few of their friends. That was how she found out that she had OCD.

They tried therapy after her mother screamed at her, slapped her, driven to blinding rage from the incessant clicking and mumbling that Gabriel made as she counted and locked the front door for the 342nd time in a row. Always even numbers, always had to be even numbers. Even numbers were good, they would be split without leftovers. Even numbers were safe. Odd numbers were not safe, odd numbers were dangerous. Always one left over, always one that was lonely and left alone and left to die.

They shuffled her around the few therapists in The Golden Triangle, but none seemed to fit. Something was missing, they said, she wasn’t opening up properly, she was cooperative but there was no initiative on her part. They would try, but there might not be much they could do, especially when her mother refused to let her take medication.

One day her father walked into his workshop and spent half the day there. He walked out with two bracelets Gabriel’s size, one with a lock and one with a key. Peace returned to the house as his wife had a break from door locks clicking, and his daughter had an outlet she could carry with her.

Middle school was a different animal in many ways, but somehow she made it through with no friends and few acquaintances. Almost all of them had been with her since kindergarten, and they still knew her as the girl with the boy’s name, and still avoided her even though most of the bullies had moved on to juicier targets. This was when Gabe started watching movies in real earnest, transfixed by the weaving plots and the characters. She had loved movies since she was a kid and dressing in the old curtains that her father pinned onto her, singing high-pitched renditions of Part of Your World, Beauty and the Beast, and I’ll Make a Man Out of You. But now it was an obsession, an escape route. In movies, she had friends. In movies, she may be quiet but she had a hitherto hidden charisma and her friends and her went on grand adventures to defeat Voldemort or destroy the Ring or confront Loki or the aliens or Hannibal or murderers or fairies or anything anything at all. In movies she was beautiful and terrible and powerful and never ever ever lonely, in movies she lost herself amongst plot twists and character development and settings and high speed chases and slow romances.

So middle school passed in a blur, and she entered high school. There was only one, Batteridge High, and everyone had to go. This was her chance: she could break away from the stifling 500 child population, away from people who knew her in kindergarten. Gabriel opens a fresh sheet of her notebook and starts writing down nicknames she finds acceptable. She barely has two down and a whole column of crossed out ones. High school gives her kindergarten flashbacks. It’s the first week and already she’s washing spitballs out of her hair. When she gets her backpack again, she grabs the sheet of paper with nicknames on it and rips it apart.

Something’s always been broken between Gabriel and her mother, but that doesn’t mean that sometimes she doesn’t wish it wasn’t.

It took a while, but she gets used to the environment. She mastered the technique of blending into the hallways back at East Hills, but she’s still a favorite target for the cliques. It’s OK. All the movies start like this, anyway, and maybe this’ll be her sympathetic background. Some days, though, she thinks that it’s sympathetic enough for her to end up as the villain. But she gets through somehow, with a combination of noise-cancelling headphones, passive-aggressive remarks, sarcasm, and working on her film ideas.

On her 16th birthday her father gives her a Netflix account under a solemn promise that she won’t watch anything not rated for her. She crosses her fingers in hope that he won’t find Game of Thrones too graphic.

Gabriel paused on the sidewalk on her way home from Fairchild’s Nirvana and read the Now Hiring sign with thirsty, desperate eyes. She’s already 16 she can work she has good grades and time after school. She hands her father a page from the classifieds with several red circles, and explains that she wants to get a part time job. She lies through her teeth, saying that she wants to start saving up for college. Her father considers slowly, looking at the ads asking for new people. He calls them, asks around. Gabriel is both touched and annoyed by the concern he shows. Finally, he accepts. She calls The Singing Dragon and gets an interview. Her palms are sticky with the thought of being able to be so close to movies, even if it’s manning the concessions desk.

Netflix is a gift from the gods, and her homework is easy. But some days, especially overcast and rainy ones, she walks to either one of the theaters and soaks up the movies with the grandiose loudness that only they can muster.

The guidance counselor calls her in during junior year, looks over her therapy and her track record and frowns. She asks Gabriel what she wants to be when she grows up. Gabriel tells the counselor she wants to go to Hollywood. At her incredulous look (what happened to being professional, hm?), she trips over herself to explain. Not to become an actress, she says, leaning forward in the uncomfortable chair. To be a screenwriter, a producer, a director. The counselor calms, looking at her grades again. In the uncomfortable silence that ensues, Gabriel finds herself using her bracelets again. The counselor finally sighs and prefaces her usual swath of advice with warnings that her mental problems will probably hurt her chances of getting into a good college. Gabriel leaves the office with a fistful of flyers and papers, her bracelets momentarily forgotten for this new focus.

There’s a new elective this year: Filmmaking. Gabriel’s eagerness is manifested in the form of a tear on the checkbox next to the name.

Her latest therapist looked over her fashionable Ray Bans and shifted her face into a kindly look. She asked what Gabriel though about group therapy. Group therapy. She would have preferred having a therapy dog, but somehow none of her therapists had offered. She agrees to group therapy, and notices with dull surprise that it’s at her high school.

She gets the job.

Maybe things are looking up.

Favourite...

Movie: Too many to count, but some include Spirited Away,
The Avengers, The Thing, Nightmare on Elm Street,
Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Joyeux Noël, Alien,
Frozen, and movie versions of her favorite books.

Book: Game of Thrones by George RR Martin, The Giver
by Lois Lowry, Perfect by Ellen Hopkins, burned by Ellen Hopkins,
The Lord of the RIngs by JRR Tolkien, Harry Potter by JK Rowling

TV show: Supernatural, Parks and Recreation, Orange
is the New Black, Star Trek, Game of Thrones, Agents of
SHIELD, Hannibal, How to Get Away With Murder

Color:Dark reds

Season: Winter

Animal: Orcas, dolphins and barn owls

Clothing: Loose, flowy, silky clothes

Hobby: Watching movies

Subject: Filmmaking, PsychologyThis or that?

bold the one you prefer.

East Coast or West Coast?

Pop Music or Rock Music?

Night or Day?

Star Wars or Star Trek?

Classic or Modern?

~~Pepsi or Coke?~~ Dr. Pepper

Horror or Comedy?

Psychological Horror or Slasher Films?

“Hope...is the only thing stronger than fear.”
-President Snow, The Hunger Games

Behind my eyelids are islands of violence
my mind's shipwrecked, this is the only land my mind could find
I did not know it was such a violent island
Full of tidal waves, suicidal crazed lions
They're trying to eat me, blood running down their chin
and I know that I can fight or I can let the lion win
I begin to assemble what weapons I can find
'Cause sometimes to stay alive you got to kill your mind
-twenty one pilots, Migraine

Gabriel Fan Liu

0 · 672 views · located in Batteridge, Colorado

a character in “This Damned Town”, as played by mortalcreator

Description

So begins...

Gabriel Fan Liu's Story