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halfwitch[PLAYER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Gretel | n/a
SERIES: Hansel’s Eyes; the Garth Nix short story
CHRONOLOGY: At the end of the story, after the first Hagmom died but before their father marries the second
CLASS: Morally confused anti-hero
BACKGROUND:
The world Gretel lives in is not very unlike our own. Magic and magic users exist in this world, but operate under the radar and are largely unknown to the general populace. The magic in this world is accessed through word play, wand work and herbal based potions. Witches in this world have familiars; animal companions who are connected to and created by magic and capable of acting as extensions of the witch. Their use as an extension means that the witch can connect their organs to the familiar. For example, the witch can connect their eyes to the familiar and see everything the familiar sees. Everything else about the world is the same that you would expect from Australia in the late 1990s.
Hansel and Gretel grew up in an unstable household. Their stepmother, whom had been with them since their childhood as their birth mother was MIA, had been verbally and physically abusive to them since early childhood, attempting several times to abandon the children in public places. Their father eventually got into the act, going so far as to leave the kids in the middle of the woods without food or shelter. After this event, the children realized that their lives were at stake and began to get prepared for the next attempt on them by the stepmother.
One night Gretel had a dream that the stepmother was going to drug them, but before she could act on the information, the Hagmom attacked the children. She drugged them, had the father take the children across town, and leave them. The children woke in the bad side of the city, one that had been roped off after a riot took place there weeks before. Realizing that they had been left their in hopes someone would kill or kidnap them, Gretel made a makeshift knife from broken glass and prepared to fight her way back to safety.
Unfortunately, safety is not what they found. Hansel spotted a game shop, and against his sister’s wishes entered and began to play with the consoles within. Gretel sensed upon entering that there was something very wrong with the place and tried in vain to get her brother to leave. As she was attempting to physical force him out the door, she was confronted by a dark woman whom would only introduce herself as a witch and the witch’s familiar, a large cat called Lazarus. The witch was an organ thief who specialized in selling children’s body parts on the black market and whom used her magic to lure children into the game shop. She had already placed a mind control spell on Hansel to make him complacent, but saw potential in Gretel, whom could resistant and recognize the presence of the dark arts.
The witch made a deal with Gretel. If Gretel agreed to become an apprentice magic user to the witch, than Hansel would only lose his eyes. If Gretel refused, both children would be harvested for their organs. Gretel, fearing for her brother’s life, agreed to the terms as long as her brother would be kept otherwise safe.
Gretel lived an unspecified amount of time in the witch’s cavern under the shop. There she kept the organ freezer clean and organized, and learned spells from the witch. Her brother, who was locked in a cage in the cavern, remained under the witch’s spell for many weeks. Gretel spoke to him every night, trying what power she had to wake him. Her attempts would prove successful, but at the wrong moment. Hansel revealed his spell was broken just as the witch had entered the cavern. Enraged that the children had been trying to deceive her, the witch decided to take one of Hansel’s eyes that very night and to do it in the most horrifying way she knew. She cast a spell upon Gretel to take control of her body, using the girl to do the surgery. Hansel was not given any sort of medication to put him to sleep or numb the pain.
After this horrifying event, Gretel knew that she must kill the witch before either of them went through anymore. She and Hansel devised a plan to freeze the witch, using the nitroglycerin that was kept to help work the freezer. Gretel pretended that the freezer had broken and ruined the organs to trick the witch into entering. Once she had, Gretel pushed her into the vat of chemicals and shut her up in the room until she died. As the witch froze to death, Lazarus attacked the girl. It took both her and her brother to beat the creature and free Gretel from its jaws.
As the children recuperated from the event, Gretel made the announcement that Hansel should not have to go through life half-blind. She cut out one of Lazarus’s eyes, and it should be noted the creature was still alive at the time, and used her powers to attach it to Hansel. Afterwards, the pair went back home.
When they arrived, their stepmother was so frightened by their sudden reappearance and her stepson’s unusual eye that she died of a heart attack on the spot. The story goes on to tell us that their father was planning to remarry and that the children planned to prevent their being another evil stepmother in their lives, leaving the wording off in such a way that implies the siblings were plotting murder.
PERSONALITY:
While the story itself is short and gives us details mostly about the happenings rather than the feelings involved, we can deduce whom Gretel is as a person from those details given.
Gretel is a product of the environment she was raised in. The siblings have spent most of their lives being abused and neglected by their parents, and generally being made to feel as they were unwanted and unloved. Despite having been to the police after several abandonments, the children had received no sort of outside help for the obvious abuse. This sort of environment has given Gretel a reason to be distrustful of people outside her immediate circle, which is closed off to her brother, and to be wary of adults. She’s more likely to dismiss someone’s words as lies rather than believe them due to the amount of lies told to her by her stepparent. Specifically, she’s unlikely to believe someone cares about her or her wellbeing without suspecting them of having ulterior motives.
Gretel has the capacity to show cruelty far beyond that of a normal child. Gretel is quick to go for weapons when left alone in the city and contemplates murdering the witch shortly after meeting her. She cuts out Lazarus’s eye while the creature is alive, and by the end of the story is planning to murder her new stepmother. She doesn’t think twice about whether her actions are wrong or do not fit the crime, she believes herself to be justified.
She doesn’t see her actions as bad, only the actions against her or the people she cares about are considered wrong doing. Her idea of ‘wrong’ can greatly vary and can be disproportionate to what actually occurred. She plans to kill her step mother without any real cause, the only lines we’re given is that the woman didn’t care for children. On the flip side, she gets over the witch’s primary occupation (harvesting organs from children) very quickly and doesn’t seem to mind working in the organ freezer. Any sort of unfavorable opinion or action against her brother garners a bad reaction from Gretel and will usually lead to her attempting to punish the ‘wrong doer’.
Gretel is an extremely loyal person. She acts very protective of the few people she does care about and puts their wellbeing above her own. This is illustrated in how she acts with Hansel. She won’t leave him alone with the witch and gives up her freedom to ensure he’ll live. However her determination, even the kind that comes with her loyalty to someone, can be derailed at times. Gretel can be very focused on immediate tasks, but can lack focus for long term undertakings. This means she can be distracted by the things around her and by anything that seems interesting to a child. This is evident in how she lapses in her task to save Hansel when she begins to enjoy her magic lessons.
Gretel is also very resourceful and intelligent for a child. She makes makeshift weaponry, thinks up complex plans with the aid of her brother, and is capable of learning complex spells quickly and often with little instruction. She’s able to think quickly on her feet if the situation calls for it and absorbs information that she finds interesting like a sponge. That said, she still is only eleven and isn’t always prepared to deal with large, complex situations. At times, she gets frustrated or frightened by what she’s facing and needs encouragement to keep going.
Gretel is generally very brave for someone in her situation. She faces the witch and the deal with more courage than many adults could muster. This doesn’t mean the child is not afraid of things. On the contrary, Gretel admits to herself that she’s terrified of the witch. She is afraid of getting hurt, of letting Hansel get hurt, and shows fear when they wake up in the riot zone. She instead takes her fear and shoves it aside when she sees the need to rise to the occasion.
She tends to stop and think out all possibilities of an action before doing it, if she feels she has the time to do so. Since she has the ability to sense intent from spells, when she is faced with evil intent Gretel would much rather turn the other way than investigate it. From this, her preparedness when being abandoned and her actions with creating the makeshift knife, it can be deduced that Gretel has a very high sense of self preservation that can only be dampened by a situation that pits her well being against that of someone she cares about.
POWER:
In canon, Gretel is shown to posses several magical abilities. The three main abilities are premonition, a sixth sense that allows her to ‘sense’ the nature of and the presence of magic, and the ability to use magic via chanting, wand work, and herbal based spells. For the purposes of the game, I’d like her to keep the last two.
1) The sixth sense: With this ability Gretel can tell when some object has had a spell placed on it and can tell the intent behind the spell. This means she can tell if the intent was evil or destructive, or if it was meant to be helpful. Canonically this ability extends to people, as Gretel can tell when someone is under a spell, but to keep the ability better for the game she’ll only be able to use this over objects.
2) Magic: By using the wands she stole, chant/word based spells, and herbs in a potion manner, she can perform several spells. Most of the spells Gretel knows are either domestic in nature, such as spells for cleaning, nature based, such as being able to conjure fire, or dark, such as her ability to remove organs via magic. In canon, Gretel is taught several dozen spells but only uses a few. The majority of her spells are either domestic or nature based, and aren’t very dangerous. The only actual ‘dark’ spell she knows is the organ spell, which is difficult for her to use.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[Gretel appears on the screen, expression surly. She brushes some curls out of her face with the back of one hand, turning her head up so she’s peering down into the camera disapprovingly.]
That thing said it brought us here to be heroes, but I don’t think you guys are acting like heroes. Heroes are supposed to go and slay all the evil things and save everyone like in the story books. They don’t let the bad guys get away. You guys keep putting them in jail and then letting them out and then they go back to being bad guys. You can’t call yourself a hero if you can’t do it right.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
Gretel, her arms full of supplies, walked to the center of the old parking lot. She dropped her load, chalk and old books falling with a loud thud, and pulled the wind breaker closer to her body. She didn’t really like doing this out in the open, but she was afraid she’d get caught in that big apartment building with all those noisy people running around the hallways. Sighing, Gretel knelt in the center of her supplies and started flipping through the first spell book in the pile. The weird lady at the book store had told her that these texts were the best way to get home, and though she didn’t know if she should trust someone who kept talking to a little black earpiece, the printed words looked a lot like how the Spider-witch’s chants sounded. Slowly she tried to draw out a circle and symbols with the chalk, pausing every now and again to check the books to make sure she was copying it right.
She was anxious to get this over with and go back. Gretel didn’t mind being away from home and she did think that this place was rather neat, with all the strange people and new technologies. But being here without her brother made the adventure an empty one and made her heart ache. She couldn’t leave him there, not when their father was planning another marriage and she had all the wands here. He’d almost died when it had been the two of them against everything, and she didn’t want to think about leaving him alone to deal with someone who was shaping up to be a second Hagmom.
She sat back on her knees, surveying her handiwork with the critical eye of an eleven year old. Satisfied with the wobbly lines and smudges, she pulled out the horn wand from her wind breaker and cleared away the books. Standing in the center of her drawing, Gretel waved the wand in jerking motions, mumbled a few words, and hoped.
FINAL NOTES:
If possible, I’d like for her to bring the wands she stole from the witch with her. There are three wands, one of jet, one of horn, and one of ivory.
CHARACTER NAME: Gretel | n/a
SERIES: Hansel’s Eyes; the Garth Nix short story
CHRONOLOGY: At the end of the story, after the first Hagmom died but before their father marries the second
CLASS: Morally confused anti-hero
BACKGROUND:
The world Gretel lives in is not very unlike our own. Magic and magic users exist in this world, but operate under the radar and are largely unknown to the general populace. The magic in this world is accessed through word play, wand work and herbal based potions. Witches in this world have familiars; animal companions who are connected to and created by magic and capable of acting as extensions of the witch. Their use as an extension means that the witch can connect their organs to the familiar. For example, the witch can connect their eyes to the familiar and see everything the familiar sees. Everything else about the world is the same that you would expect from Australia in the late 1990s.
Hansel and Gretel grew up in an unstable household. Their stepmother, whom had been with them since their childhood as their birth mother was MIA, had been verbally and physically abusive to them since early childhood, attempting several times to abandon the children in public places. Their father eventually got into the act, going so far as to leave the kids in the middle of the woods without food or shelter. After this event, the children realized that their lives were at stake and began to get prepared for the next attempt on them by the stepmother.
One night Gretel had a dream that the stepmother was going to drug them, but before she could act on the information, the Hagmom attacked the children. She drugged them, had the father take the children across town, and leave them. The children woke in the bad side of the city, one that had been roped off after a riot took place there weeks before. Realizing that they had been left their in hopes someone would kill or kidnap them, Gretel made a makeshift knife from broken glass and prepared to fight her way back to safety.
Unfortunately, safety is not what they found. Hansel spotted a game shop, and against his sister’s wishes entered and began to play with the consoles within. Gretel sensed upon entering that there was something very wrong with the place and tried in vain to get her brother to leave. As she was attempting to physical force him out the door, she was confronted by a dark woman whom would only introduce herself as a witch and the witch’s familiar, a large cat called Lazarus. The witch was an organ thief who specialized in selling children’s body parts on the black market and whom used her magic to lure children into the game shop. She had already placed a mind control spell on Hansel to make him complacent, but saw potential in Gretel, whom could resistant and recognize the presence of the dark arts.
The witch made a deal with Gretel. If Gretel agreed to become an apprentice magic user to the witch, than Hansel would only lose his eyes. If Gretel refused, both children would be harvested for their organs. Gretel, fearing for her brother’s life, agreed to the terms as long as her brother would be kept otherwise safe.
Gretel lived an unspecified amount of time in the witch’s cavern under the shop. There she kept the organ freezer clean and organized, and learned spells from the witch. Her brother, who was locked in a cage in the cavern, remained under the witch’s spell for many weeks. Gretel spoke to him every night, trying what power she had to wake him. Her attempts would prove successful, but at the wrong moment. Hansel revealed his spell was broken just as the witch had entered the cavern. Enraged that the children had been trying to deceive her, the witch decided to take one of Hansel’s eyes that very night and to do it in the most horrifying way she knew. She cast a spell upon Gretel to take control of her body, using the girl to do the surgery. Hansel was not given any sort of medication to put him to sleep or numb the pain.
After this horrifying event, Gretel knew that she must kill the witch before either of them went through anymore. She and Hansel devised a plan to freeze the witch, using the nitroglycerin that was kept to help work the freezer. Gretel pretended that the freezer had broken and ruined the organs to trick the witch into entering. Once she had, Gretel pushed her into the vat of chemicals and shut her up in the room until she died. As the witch froze to death, Lazarus attacked the girl. It took both her and her brother to beat the creature and free Gretel from its jaws.
As the children recuperated from the event, Gretel made the announcement that Hansel should not have to go through life half-blind. She cut out one of Lazarus’s eyes, and it should be noted the creature was still alive at the time, and used her powers to attach it to Hansel. Afterwards, the pair went back home.
When they arrived, their stepmother was so frightened by their sudden reappearance and her stepson’s unusual eye that she died of a heart attack on the spot. The story goes on to tell us that their father was planning to remarry and that the children planned to prevent their being another evil stepmother in their lives, leaving the wording off in such a way that implies the siblings were plotting murder.
PERSONALITY:
While the story itself is short and gives us details mostly about the happenings rather than the feelings involved, we can deduce whom Gretel is as a person from those details given.
Gretel is a product of the environment she was raised in. The siblings have spent most of their lives being abused and neglected by their parents, and generally being made to feel as they were unwanted and unloved. Despite having been to the police after several abandonments, the children had received no sort of outside help for the obvious abuse. This sort of environment has given Gretel a reason to be distrustful of people outside her immediate circle, which is closed off to her brother, and to be wary of adults. She’s more likely to dismiss someone’s words as lies rather than believe them due to the amount of lies told to her by her stepparent. Specifically, she’s unlikely to believe someone cares about her or her wellbeing without suspecting them of having ulterior motives.
Gretel has the capacity to show cruelty far beyond that of a normal child. Gretel is quick to go for weapons when left alone in the city and contemplates murdering the witch shortly after meeting her. She cuts out Lazarus’s eye while the creature is alive, and by the end of the story is planning to murder her new stepmother. She doesn’t think twice about whether her actions are wrong or do not fit the crime, she believes herself to be justified.
She doesn’t see her actions as bad, only the actions against her or the people she cares about are considered wrong doing. Her idea of ‘wrong’ can greatly vary and can be disproportionate to what actually occurred. She plans to kill her step mother without any real cause, the only lines we’re given is that the woman didn’t care for children. On the flip side, she gets over the witch’s primary occupation (harvesting organs from children) very quickly and doesn’t seem to mind working in the organ freezer. Any sort of unfavorable opinion or action against her brother garners a bad reaction from Gretel and will usually lead to her attempting to punish the ‘wrong doer’.
Gretel is an extremely loyal person. She acts very protective of the few people she does care about and puts their wellbeing above her own. This is illustrated in how she acts with Hansel. She won’t leave him alone with the witch and gives up her freedom to ensure he’ll live. However her determination, even the kind that comes with her loyalty to someone, can be derailed at times. Gretel can be very focused on immediate tasks, but can lack focus for long term undertakings. This means she can be distracted by the things around her and by anything that seems interesting to a child. This is evident in how she lapses in her task to save Hansel when she begins to enjoy her magic lessons.
Gretel is also very resourceful and intelligent for a child. She makes makeshift weaponry, thinks up complex plans with the aid of her brother, and is capable of learning complex spells quickly and often with little instruction. She’s able to think quickly on her feet if the situation calls for it and absorbs information that she finds interesting like a sponge. That said, she still is only eleven and isn’t always prepared to deal with large, complex situations. At times, she gets frustrated or frightened by what she’s facing and needs encouragement to keep going.
Gretel is generally very brave for someone in her situation. She faces the witch and the deal with more courage than many adults could muster. This doesn’t mean the child is not afraid of things. On the contrary, Gretel admits to herself that she’s terrified of the witch. She is afraid of getting hurt, of letting Hansel get hurt, and shows fear when they wake up in the riot zone. She instead takes her fear and shoves it aside when she sees the need to rise to the occasion.
She tends to stop and think out all possibilities of an action before doing it, if she feels she has the time to do so. Since she has the ability to sense intent from spells, when she is faced with evil intent Gretel would much rather turn the other way than investigate it. From this, her preparedness when being abandoned and her actions with creating the makeshift knife, it can be deduced that Gretel has a very high sense of self preservation that can only be dampened by a situation that pits her well being against that of someone she cares about.
POWER:
In canon, Gretel is shown to posses several magical abilities. The three main abilities are premonition, a sixth sense that allows her to ‘sense’ the nature of and the presence of magic, and the ability to use magic via chanting, wand work, and herbal based spells. For the purposes of the game, I’d like her to keep the last two.
1) The sixth sense: With this ability Gretel can tell when some object has had a spell placed on it and can tell the intent behind the spell. This means she can tell if the intent was evil or destructive, or if it was meant to be helpful. Canonically this ability extends to people, as Gretel can tell when someone is under a spell, but to keep the ability better for the game she’ll only be able to use this over objects.
2) Magic: By using the wands she stole, chant/word based spells, and herbs in a potion manner, she can perform several spells. Most of the spells Gretel knows are either domestic in nature, such as spells for cleaning, nature based, such as being able to conjure fire, or dark, such as her ability to remove organs via magic. In canon, Gretel is taught several dozen spells but only uses a few. The majority of her spells are either domestic or nature based, and aren’t very dangerous. The only actual ‘dark’ spell she knows is the organ spell, which is difficult for her to use.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[Gretel appears on the screen, expression surly. She brushes some curls out of her face with the back of one hand, turning her head up so she’s peering down into the camera disapprovingly.]
That thing said it brought us here to be heroes, but I don’t think you guys are acting like heroes. Heroes are supposed to go and slay all the evil things and save everyone like in the story books. They don’t let the bad guys get away. You guys keep putting them in jail and then letting them out and then they go back to being bad guys. You can’t call yourself a hero if you can’t do it right.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
Gretel, her arms full of supplies, walked to the center of the old parking lot. She dropped her load, chalk and old books falling with a loud thud, and pulled the wind breaker closer to her body. She didn’t really like doing this out in the open, but she was afraid she’d get caught in that big apartment building with all those noisy people running around the hallways. Sighing, Gretel knelt in the center of her supplies and started flipping through the first spell book in the pile. The weird lady at the book store had told her that these texts were the best way to get home, and though she didn’t know if she should trust someone who kept talking to a little black earpiece, the printed words looked a lot like how the Spider-witch’s chants sounded. Slowly she tried to draw out a circle and symbols with the chalk, pausing every now and again to check the books to make sure she was copying it right.
She was anxious to get this over with and go back. Gretel didn’t mind being away from home and she did think that this place was rather neat, with all the strange people and new technologies. But being here without her brother made the adventure an empty one and made her heart ache. She couldn’t leave him there, not when their father was planning another marriage and she had all the wands here. He’d almost died when it had been the two of them against everything, and she didn’t want to think about leaving him alone to deal with someone who was shaping up to be a second Hagmom.
She sat back on her knees, surveying her handiwork with the critical eye of an eleven year old. Satisfied with the wobbly lines and smudges, she pulled out the horn wand from her wind breaker and cleared away the books. Standing in the center of her drawing, Gretel waved the wand in jerking motions, mumbled a few words, and hoped.
FINAL NOTES:
If possible, I’d like for her to bring the wands she stole from the witch with her. There are three wands, one of jet, one of horn, and one of ivory.
