Esther Coleman (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beingdifferent) wrote2013-07-21 11:13 am
beingdifferent) wrote2013-07-21 11:13 am
Entry tags:
Application for The Last Voyages
CW: Child abuse, incest
User Name/Nick: Shankill
User DW:![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
huddle
AIM/IM: mintyfreshevil
E-mail: whiskeybythepint@gmail.com
Other Characters: Beatrix Kiddo, Mark Lilly
Character Name: Esther Coleman/Leena Klammer
Series: Orphan
Age: Esther presents herself as a nine-year-old girl. In reality, she is a 32-year-old woman.
From When?: From the end of the movie, just after Kate breaks Esther's neck and lets her body sink into the pond.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Esther is a serial killer, driven to her actions through a mixture of extreme jealousy and desperation to be loved. She is scheming, manipulative, duplicitous, and brutal in achieving her ends. If the veil of secrecy is removed from her life, as it may be when she's assigned a warden, she could be able to make real progress forging a proper identity for herself and coming into her own as an adult. That said, the way there will most likely be long, emotionally difficult, and littered with dead bodies.
Item: Not applicable.
Abilities/Powers: Human, but exceptionally skilled at deception. Speaks English, Russian, Estonian, and American Sign Language.
Personality:
Esther seems to be the perfect child for an adoptive family: intelligent, creative, sweet, and talented. When she first appears in the film she is sitting alone in an American children's home, happily singing a song from an old musical as she paints a picture of a lioness in a jungle. John Coleman's enquiry about the painting leads to her telling a story about the lioness and her lost cubs, showing her optimism that families can always be brought together. Considering her troubled past as an orphaned Russian child she is hearteningly well-adjusted and appears to have taken to life in the U.S. quite happily, speaking fluent English with a light accent. She is a bit eccentric, however: she wears ribbons around her neck and wrists, accessories to the old-fashioned dresses she favors. When the Colemans adopt her their son Daniel immediately denounces her as weird, but she gets along very well with their young hearing-impaired daughter Max and devotes herself to learning ASL. She wants to get closer to Kate Coleman, and already has a special bond with John. Despite Danny's discomfort and jealousy, they are determined to make her a part of the family.
And it appears to work, for a time, although it does not come easily. As the nun who handled the adoption case says, "Wherever Esther goes, trouble follows." At first it's relatively small, if worrying, events; When a girl picks on her at school and nearly tears the ribbon from Esther's neck, she begins screaming in rage. When Kate and John have an impromptu late-night quickie and Esther sees, not only does she seem unfazed but her casual knowledge of sex disturbs Kate. While playing with a paintball gun Danny shoots a pigeon, which Esther urges him to put out of its misery. When he doesn't have the heart to do it, she performs the coup de grace with a rock. Kate becomes more concerned upon hearing that Esther's bully fell from a tall slide on the schoolyard and broke several bones, although John trusts Esther's word that she didn't push the girl.
We begin to see the extent of Esther's sociopathy when a nun from the children's home she was placed in, Sister Abigail, hears of the playground accident and goes to warn the Colemans that something may be wrong with Esther. Fearing for her future with the family, she immediately enlists Max to help with the "mean lady who wants to take me away." They hide in the woods and when Sister Abigail drives into view Esther pushes her five-year-old sister in front of the car. Naturally the nun brakes and goes to check on the girl, at which point Esther leaps out of hiding and begins beating the woman with a hammer. Stunned and terrified, Max immediately begins crying only for Esther to berate her and make her pull the body off the road and into the trees. As she hides the bloodstained hammer in Danny's treehouse, she demands Max tell no one then comforts her tenderly, saying "I won't let anything happen to you. You're my little sister and I love you." This does not keep her from trying to tie up loose ends, however, and while Kate drops Esther and Danny off at school she puts the car in neutral with Max inside. When it rolls down the hill and into a snowbank there's no damage or injury, so Esther threatens to shoot Kate if Max tells.
But her manipulative and shamelessly violent nature goes deeper than that, and it becomes more and more apparent that Esther will not stop until she gets what she wants no matter who she has to hurt. When Kate begins to suspect Esther rigged the car, she goes looking for ammunition and taunts Kate into grabbing her arm quite hard. That night, she sneaks downstairs to the garage and puts her arm in a vice, breaking it in order to frame her adopted mother. When Kate confronts her, she begins to drop the child guise and further taunts the woman with mistakes from her past, culled from her diary – "What are you going to do? Hit me?" Knowing she can't trust Daniel either, Esther catches him in the treehouse looking for the hammer. Before setting it on fire and locking him inside, she calmly squirts lighter fluid over the hammer, the floor, and Daniel's shoes while explaining that Max is her accomplice and will be equally culpable for the murder. When Daniel is taken to urgent care, she charms her grandmother into allowing her to go off and then begins suffocating him, causing him to go into cardiac arrest. Kate loses her cool entirely at this and slaps Esther across the face in the crowded hospital hallway, further cementing her reputation as a child abuser and prompting John to leave her.
It's exactly what Esther wants. With Daniel in critical condition, Kate kicked out of the house, and Max too terrified to say anything, she is free to move in on her prize. Finally, abruptly, she drops the child charade, makes herself up like a grown woman, and attempts to seduce John. Of all the things wrong with her, this is perhaps where she is least responsible; due to childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father, she can't tell the difference between romantic and fatherly love. This is when she is most honest, truly putting her heart on her sleeve for the man she's come to love so much. Realizing Kate had been right to suspect Esther's insanity, John rebuffs her and threatens to tell – it's perhaps understandable when she becomes furious and stabs him to death. After scheming and working and risking so much in order to be with the object of her affection he not only refused but betrayed her, and her anger, while twisted, makes a sort of sense.
In her defense, Esther is a creature of passion and acts out of the desire to be loved and valued the only way she understands. She views herself as a woman trapped in a child's body, unable to live like an adult, wife, and mother, and this belief tortures her. She is very patient, very creative, and very willing to sacrifice anything or anyone to get what she wants. This, however, hardly changes the fact that her wants extend to homicide and calculated manipulation. She does not feel guilt or shame for her actions, at several points even smiling as she commits her crimes. She exhibits all the signs of sociopathy, including impulsiveness, manipulation, dishonesty, and a lack of remorse, as well as delusion. Those who merely drift through her life are likely to be perfectly fine in her presence, usually permanently, but getting on her bad side means risking ruination or death and her getting close to you almost certainly signals an ulterior motive.
Barge Reactions:
Esther isn't sane. She's spent a significant amount of time in a mental hospital after her first murder sprees, so being institutionalized is going to upset her. That said, the assortment of species and abilities on board would immediately catch her interest, and she'd begin studying and perhaps manipulating them. Once again she would pose as a nine-year-old girl and would do all she could to continue her charade. Given her past record of fooling people, it's likely Esther can keep this up until she's assigned a warden (or someone reads her mind). The child guise can allow her immunity from adults' ire and turn suspicion off her. The real wild card here is going to be floods and breaches – they're going to be rather extreme events for her whether good or bad.
Path to Redemption:
In many ways Esther has been waiting for her Prince Charming all her life, hoping for that one perfect lover to sweep her up and make everything perfect. She is so focused on this idea that she's neglected to create an adult life for herself, her twisted childhood convincing her to stay in her little girl guise until she finds the right man and eliminates all competition for his affection. While she's never going to be the remorseful sort (she may be incapable of feeling guilt), it would be possible to guide her along to the point where she realizes that murder makes things unnecessarily complicated and that she is a real woman, no matter her appearance. Helping her prepare for future romances would be both incredibly valuable and a great motivator for her, and of course she'll need some form of therapy or outlet for explosive anger episodes.
History:
A summary of Esther's background (CW: sex abuse, child abuse) and the story of her time with the Coleman family/the events of the movie. (CW: Fire.)
Sample Journal Entry:
Excuse me. [The little girl is posed like a Victorian portrait, hands folded in front of her, an endearingly hopeful expression on her face.] I am sorry for the interruption but I was curious. Some of the other people have explained that there is a high school on board. As far as I've heard no one is teaching classes for younger students. No teachers for the third grade.
Does this mean that I don't have to go to school?
Sample RP:
As usual, Esther had little trouble getting what she wanted. Once the redemptive purpose of this multidimensional magic prison Barge had been explained to her she'd gone very quiet until a friendly warden had felt sorry for her and offered to show her around. The art room intrigued her most, but there were so many other places to explore that she couldn't help acting dazzled. "You have a pool?" she'd asked, starry-eyed. By the time the warden escorted her to her cabin she had a bounce in her step and a smile on her face.
Esther's cabin was exactly the same as her room at the Colemans'. The aquarium by the door, the two windows framing the canopy bed decorated with stuffed animals. Even a few of her paintings remained on the walls. She turned, and as she closed the door to the hallway her smile grew. "It's good to be home," she said. As soon as she locked it her mood instantly changed, smile turning into a scowl as she stalked to the bed.
She grabbed one of the teddy bears and ripped at the head, throwing it across the room. No! Not again! This couldn't be happening again! After she'd worked so hard and done so much to escape the last institution, here she was in a prison? She'd never even been arrested, just murdered! Except for Kate and Max Coleman nobody even knew who she was!
"It isn't fair!" she screamed, pounding a fist on the wall. Her cry turned into a wordless wail, punctuated by pain as she threw herself at the wall and began kicking at it. She ripped the pillows from the bed, tore paintings off the wall, pulled drawers from her bureau and overturned them, crushing whatever toys she found inside. Anything that she could break or beat, she did.
When she'd sated herself with destruction, Esther looked down at her bleeding hands and took a deep steadying breath. She quietly picked herself up from the debris, wiping her knuckles on the bedsheets. So they'd brought her back to where she began? Fine. Let them. She would play the game again.
Special Notes:
Esther is a very dark and potentially triggering character. Because of this, I will obviously be making gratuitous use of content warning labels on posts and will provide an "opt-out" page to keep track of anyone who is uncomfortable playing with her.
User Name/Nick: Shankill
User DW:
huddleAIM/IM: mintyfreshevil
E-mail: whiskeybythepint@gmail.com
Other Characters: Beatrix Kiddo, Mark Lilly
Character Name: Esther Coleman/Leena Klammer
Series: Orphan
Age: Esther presents herself as a nine-year-old girl. In reality, she is a 32-year-old woman.
From When?: From the end of the movie, just after Kate breaks Esther's neck and lets her body sink into the pond.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Esther is a serial killer, driven to her actions through a mixture of extreme jealousy and desperation to be loved. She is scheming, manipulative, duplicitous, and brutal in achieving her ends. If the veil of secrecy is removed from her life, as it may be when she's assigned a warden, she could be able to make real progress forging a proper identity for herself and coming into her own as an adult. That said, the way there will most likely be long, emotionally difficult, and littered with dead bodies.
Item: Not applicable.
Abilities/Powers: Human, but exceptionally skilled at deception. Speaks English, Russian, Estonian, and American Sign Language.
Personality:
Esther seems to be the perfect child for an adoptive family: intelligent, creative, sweet, and talented. When she first appears in the film she is sitting alone in an American children's home, happily singing a song from an old musical as she paints a picture of a lioness in a jungle. John Coleman's enquiry about the painting leads to her telling a story about the lioness and her lost cubs, showing her optimism that families can always be brought together. Considering her troubled past as an orphaned Russian child she is hearteningly well-adjusted and appears to have taken to life in the U.S. quite happily, speaking fluent English with a light accent. She is a bit eccentric, however: she wears ribbons around her neck and wrists, accessories to the old-fashioned dresses she favors. When the Colemans adopt her their son Daniel immediately denounces her as weird, but she gets along very well with their young hearing-impaired daughter Max and devotes herself to learning ASL. She wants to get closer to Kate Coleman, and already has a special bond with John. Despite Danny's discomfort and jealousy, they are determined to make her a part of the family.
And it appears to work, for a time, although it does not come easily. As the nun who handled the adoption case says, "Wherever Esther goes, trouble follows." At first it's relatively small, if worrying, events; When a girl picks on her at school and nearly tears the ribbon from Esther's neck, she begins screaming in rage. When Kate and John have an impromptu late-night quickie and Esther sees, not only does she seem unfazed but her casual knowledge of sex disturbs Kate. While playing with a paintball gun Danny shoots a pigeon, which Esther urges him to put out of its misery. When he doesn't have the heart to do it, she performs the coup de grace with a rock. Kate becomes more concerned upon hearing that Esther's bully fell from a tall slide on the schoolyard and broke several bones, although John trusts Esther's word that she didn't push the girl.
We begin to see the extent of Esther's sociopathy when a nun from the children's home she was placed in, Sister Abigail, hears of the playground accident and goes to warn the Colemans that something may be wrong with Esther. Fearing for her future with the family, she immediately enlists Max to help with the "mean lady who wants to take me away." They hide in the woods and when Sister Abigail drives into view Esther pushes her five-year-old sister in front of the car. Naturally the nun brakes and goes to check on the girl, at which point Esther leaps out of hiding and begins beating the woman with a hammer. Stunned and terrified, Max immediately begins crying only for Esther to berate her and make her pull the body off the road and into the trees. As she hides the bloodstained hammer in Danny's treehouse, she demands Max tell no one then comforts her tenderly, saying "I won't let anything happen to you. You're my little sister and I love you." This does not keep her from trying to tie up loose ends, however, and while Kate drops Esther and Danny off at school she puts the car in neutral with Max inside. When it rolls down the hill and into a snowbank there's no damage or injury, so Esther threatens to shoot Kate if Max tells.
But her manipulative and shamelessly violent nature goes deeper than that, and it becomes more and more apparent that Esther will not stop until she gets what she wants no matter who she has to hurt. When Kate begins to suspect Esther rigged the car, she goes looking for ammunition and taunts Kate into grabbing her arm quite hard. That night, she sneaks downstairs to the garage and puts her arm in a vice, breaking it in order to frame her adopted mother. When Kate confronts her, she begins to drop the child guise and further taunts the woman with mistakes from her past, culled from her diary – "What are you going to do? Hit me?" Knowing she can't trust Daniel either, Esther catches him in the treehouse looking for the hammer. Before setting it on fire and locking him inside, she calmly squirts lighter fluid over the hammer, the floor, and Daniel's shoes while explaining that Max is her accomplice and will be equally culpable for the murder. When Daniel is taken to urgent care, she charms her grandmother into allowing her to go off and then begins suffocating him, causing him to go into cardiac arrest. Kate loses her cool entirely at this and slaps Esther across the face in the crowded hospital hallway, further cementing her reputation as a child abuser and prompting John to leave her.
It's exactly what Esther wants. With Daniel in critical condition, Kate kicked out of the house, and Max too terrified to say anything, she is free to move in on her prize. Finally, abruptly, she drops the child charade, makes herself up like a grown woman, and attempts to seduce John. Of all the things wrong with her, this is perhaps where she is least responsible; due to childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father, she can't tell the difference between romantic and fatherly love. This is when she is most honest, truly putting her heart on her sleeve for the man she's come to love so much. Realizing Kate had been right to suspect Esther's insanity, John rebuffs her and threatens to tell – it's perhaps understandable when she becomes furious and stabs him to death. After scheming and working and risking so much in order to be with the object of her affection he not only refused but betrayed her, and her anger, while twisted, makes a sort of sense.
In her defense, Esther is a creature of passion and acts out of the desire to be loved and valued the only way she understands. She views herself as a woman trapped in a child's body, unable to live like an adult, wife, and mother, and this belief tortures her. She is very patient, very creative, and very willing to sacrifice anything or anyone to get what she wants. This, however, hardly changes the fact that her wants extend to homicide and calculated manipulation. She does not feel guilt or shame for her actions, at several points even smiling as she commits her crimes. She exhibits all the signs of sociopathy, including impulsiveness, manipulation, dishonesty, and a lack of remorse, as well as delusion. Those who merely drift through her life are likely to be perfectly fine in her presence, usually permanently, but getting on her bad side means risking ruination or death and her getting close to you almost certainly signals an ulterior motive.
Barge Reactions:
Esther isn't sane. She's spent a significant amount of time in a mental hospital after her first murder sprees, so being institutionalized is going to upset her. That said, the assortment of species and abilities on board would immediately catch her interest, and she'd begin studying and perhaps manipulating them. Once again she would pose as a nine-year-old girl and would do all she could to continue her charade. Given her past record of fooling people, it's likely Esther can keep this up until she's assigned a warden (or someone reads her mind). The child guise can allow her immunity from adults' ire and turn suspicion off her. The real wild card here is going to be floods and breaches – they're going to be rather extreme events for her whether good or bad.
Path to Redemption:
In many ways Esther has been waiting for her Prince Charming all her life, hoping for that one perfect lover to sweep her up and make everything perfect. She is so focused on this idea that she's neglected to create an adult life for herself, her twisted childhood convincing her to stay in her little girl guise until she finds the right man and eliminates all competition for his affection. While she's never going to be the remorseful sort (she may be incapable of feeling guilt), it would be possible to guide her along to the point where she realizes that murder makes things unnecessarily complicated and that she is a real woman, no matter her appearance. Helping her prepare for future romances would be both incredibly valuable and a great motivator for her, and of course she'll need some form of therapy or outlet for explosive anger episodes.
History:
A summary of Esther's background (CW: sex abuse, child abuse) and the story of her time with the Coleman family/the events of the movie. (CW: Fire.)
Sample Journal Entry:
Excuse me. [The little girl is posed like a Victorian portrait, hands folded in front of her, an endearingly hopeful expression on her face.] I am sorry for the interruption but I was curious. Some of the other people have explained that there is a high school on board. As far as I've heard no one is teaching classes for younger students. No teachers for the third grade.
Does this mean that I don't have to go to school?
Sample RP:
As usual, Esther had little trouble getting what she wanted. Once the redemptive purpose of this multidimensional magic prison Barge had been explained to her she'd gone very quiet until a friendly warden had felt sorry for her and offered to show her around. The art room intrigued her most, but there were so many other places to explore that she couldn't help acting dazzled. "You have a pool?" she'd asked, starry-eyed. By the time the warden escorted her to her cabin she had a bounce in her step and a smile on her face.
Esther's cabin was exactly the same as her room at the Colemans'. The aquarium by the door, the two windows framing the canopy bed decorated with stuffed animals. Even a few of her paintings remained on the walls. She turned, and as she closed the door to the hallway her smile grew. "It's good to be home," she said. As soon as she locked it her mood instantly changed, smile turning into a scowl as she stalked to the bed.
She grabbed one of the teddy bears and ripped at the head, throwing it across the room. No! Not again! This couldn't be happening again! After she'd worked so hard and done so much to escape the last institution, here she was in a prison? She'd never even been arrested, just murdered! Except for Kate and Max Coleman nobody even knew who she was!
"It isn't fair!" she screamed, pounding a fist on the wall. Her cry turned into a wordless wail, punctuated by pain as she threw herself at the wall and began kicking at it. She ripped the pillows from the bed, tore paintings off the wall, pulled drawers from her bureau and overturned them, crushing whatever toys she found inside. Anything that she could break or beat, she did.
When she'd sated herself with destruction, Esther looked down at her bleeding hands and took a deep steadying breath. She quietly picked herself up from the debris, wiping her knuckles on the bedsheets. So they'd brought her back to where she began? Fine. Let them. She would play the game again.
Special Notes:
Esther is a very dark and potentially triggering character. Because of this, I will obviously be making gratuitous use of content warning labels on posts and will provide an "opt-out" page to keep track of anyone who is uncomfortable playing with her.