Application;}

[newlymodern]

ᴇxᴘɪᴀᴛɪᴏɴ


Player: Ashley
Contact: formallyintroduced
Age: 30+
Current Characters: N/A

Character Name: Hetty Woodstone
Character Canon: Ghosts
Canon Point: Post S3
Age: 174ish, but she died at around 45.

Crime: Negligence. This can be applied to Hetty in a couple different ways. Of course, when she was living, there were any number of people who were injured or killed while working in her and her husband's factories. Similarly, household staff who were injured or died - she mentions a footman who was once crushed by a trunk full of china, for instance. Then, there is the fact she wasn't there to raise her son. She wasn't a particularly present mother when she was alive, then she died. While her presence throughout her son's life may ultimately have made little difference, Hetty believes the fact she wasn't there is the reason he, as an adult, ended up killing Alberta.

Background: (cw: reference to suicide) History

Personality: At first glance, Hetty Woodstone looks like a wealthy woman just stepped out of the Gilded Age. She has the right dress, carries herself in the right manner. It gives an air of both respectability and superiority.

She has spent her life, and indeed, a good deal of her afterlife with the attitude of one who believes she is above others, afforded that opinion by her wealth and status. Being very wealthy, the wife of a robber baron, she is partly a product of her time and partly a product of her circumstances. Hetty is who she has been taught to be.

Her parents were also wealthy and neglectful, her father not particularly kind. He taught her wealth mattered above all, and she took the lesson to heart. She came to believe you didn’t need kindness or love or joy or friendship. No, wealth was all you needed to succeed in life. Money could buy you happiness, or cocaine, which was basically the same thing, wasn’t it?

Then she was married off to her second cousin to close a land deal, reinforcing the notion. Marriage was merely a business proposal, not uncommon in her time. Like so much else, it was transactional. It was a very unhappy marriage. Elias was not kind, and he was not faithful. Like most women of the era, she believed that was simply how it was. It was not her place to be truly upset with him, no matter how she despised him.

Even in her afterlife, she still often struggles with the idea that, as a woman, she is allowed to express herself. She can have her own opinions and speak them aloud! But in many ways, she remains reserved. She deflects often, wanting to keep others from getting too close to her truths.

As she was in life, Hetty can be selfish. She isn't above manipulating people and events to her own ends. In fact, she loves scheming, and she'll take any opportunity to have even the illusion of power.

However, since her death, she has changed. She has made realizations about herself, about the life she lived. This is because of her time spent with Alberta and Flower and now Samantha. She knows that, in life, she was not a good person. She knows she treated others badly. She lied, she cheated, she exploited. Sometimes, she still treats others badly, and she doesn’t always have the self-awareness to realize it. Hetty can be fickle, you see, and she has a habit of taking a step forward only to take three more back. But progress has been made!

She now understands that she is allowed to have a voice, and that other women can be her friends rather than her competition. She's learned that she has control of her own body and her own pleasure, and not only because her husband is dead but because it has always been her body. There has even been very small movement on the understanding that the Irish are, indeed, people too.

Perhaps most importantly, she has found a group of people who genuinely care about her, who love her. And she has come to care about them as well, more even than wealth. They’ve made her see that it's possible to care about others and for others to care about her. They've made her a better Hetty, not perfect, but better.

Abilities: As a ghost, Hetty is typically invisible and intangible to the living world, though furniture and floors still work as expected, thank goodness. While anyone living would pass right through her, ghosts in her world interact with one another as they would if they were still living. They still sleep. Who can say why? They're also able to smell. And obviously they feel what they can touch, which mostly means one another. Most ghosts have a power somewhat unique to them, but Hetty has yet to discover hers.

Ghosts remain how they died, at least to a degree. This means Hetty is bound to wear the clothing in which she died. She may make slight adjustments, but if she removes something from her person and then stops touching it, it snaps back into its rightful place again within seconds. (cw: reference to suicide) This means she also still bears ligature marks and has a telephone cord circling her neck and hidden beneath the layers of her clothing and her lace collar.

Inventory: Hetty possesses only the clothing she is wearing and her wedding ring. (cw: reference to suicide) She does also have on her person a yellow telephone wire which is, under ordinary circumstances, nearly always concealed beneath her clothing.

Samples: TDM thread w/ Edwin, Second Sample

Questions: If possible, I would like to handle Hetty's ghostliness a little more like the Dead Boys, just in the sense that I think it would probably be helpful for events and such if she could be willfully tangible enough to interact with things sometimes. I think this is something that she'll probably have to discover and will take her some trial and error still!

Also, of course, I think it would be helpful if she can be seen and heard. I think it would be really fun if she could interact with player characters similarly to how she interacts with her fellow ghosts, but still be intangible to most locals (unless they're plot important npcs or something!). But if that's too complicated, I understand and that's totally fine!