Reverend Abraham Gray (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
divinesight) wrote2020-02-21 08:00 pm
divinesight) wrote2020-02-21 08:00 pm
Application - Prismatica
▶ PLAYER
HANDLE: Dal
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
InstantEternity | Dal#6219 on Discord
OVER 18? Yes
CHARACTERS IN-GAME: Albert Wesker | Resident Evil |manufactured
▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Reverend Abraham Gray
CANON: Angels of Death
CANON POINT: Post-series
AGE: Unknown; however, he's very clearly middle-aged in terms of both physical and mental age.
BACKGROUND: Very little is known about Reverend Gray's past; what is known, however, is that he was raised in a strict religious household. It appears to have been within some sort of commune or other cult settlement, in which the members participated in bizarre rituals and murder in the name of God – while he claims to have seen many demonstrations of faith that he considered beautiful, he also personally witnessed at least one person being tied to a cross and burned alive after having been condemned as a witch. As he became an adult, seeing such things led him to wonder how one in the position of "God" would feel, seeing people carrying out such acts in the name of love and worship; it's this line of thinking, along with a general fascination with people and the concept of faith as a whole, that led him to the idea of running a social experiment – to test the faith of others, to see what would inspire them to maintain their belief (or drive them to nonbelief) in their deities, and to better understand the human condition as a whole.
This social experiment involved locking innocent people in a building with a bunch of serial killers and seeing how incredibly dead they ended up, because nobody in this game's universe solves problems like a normal human being. And so here we are, murdering people in the name of the Lord.
Despite his...odd outlook on God and faith, Gray is a legitimate priest who served for some time in a small community, where he was held in high regard by his congregation; he was said to have a talent for seeing through to the true natures of his flock, and advising them on how to achieve enlightenment based on what he saw in each of them. In reality, Gray was using hallucinogenic drugs on the people he encountered. The drugs he uses are meant to be inhaled; upon breathing them in, the drugged individual sits on the floor or paces around a little, talking to themselves or interacting with things that aren't there. The hallucinations alternate between things the individual would find frightening and things that they find encouraging or curious, in order to encourage them to "confess" their inner workings to Gray and give him an idea of what they're like as a person. He used these drugs to help him recruit the first of the serial killers he convinced to join his project – the first of his "angels", Dr. Daniel (Danny) Dickens. Through Danny, he was able to find several other "angels" to populate the building – people who would kill without restraint, and who would not question Gray's role in the entire process. Gray positioned himself as "God" of the building and of the project, one whose omnipotence and authority was not to be questioned, as well as one who could pass judgement on others based on what he saw of them through their behavior while within the building itself.
Some time before the series began, Gray was introduced to the protagonist, Rachel; Danny brought her to him and asked that he make her one of the angels of the building, with her own floor in which to kill people as she saw fit. Danny was obsessed with Rachel in a way that Gray didn't care for; he allowed her floor to be built and installed her there as the floor master of that area, but he intentionally left a Bible there for her to read. Upon reading the Bible, Rachel became aware that her behavior would see her condemned as a sinner and marked her as "unclean", convincing her that no God would ever want her; she had a breakdown that led to Gray deeming her unfit to stay in the building as one of his angels, casting her down to the lowest level of the building and rebranding her as a sacrifice to be hunted and killed, using some of his drugs on her to ensure that she didn't remember her time spent as one of the angels to prevent her from having an unfair advantage.
His actions over the course of the game itself are well-described here; in a nutshell, the whole serial-killer-social-experiment-religious-batshittery thing doesn't really work out the way he'd planned it to, given that Rachel manages to throw a tremendous wrench in everything that he was doing in one way or another. His angels don't fare well against her; she manages to kill two of them and make the other two behave in ways that he hadn't planned for, and he eventually ends up putting Danny out of his misery himself before deciding to literally just let himself die in a fire. He learns next to nothing while acting as though he received some sort of deep revelation regarding human nature; the revelation itself boils down to "humans are just kinda like that, I guess," though he does end up acknowledging that he was wrong to try to force others to fit his ideal of what constitutes perfection – people are just going to be people regardless of what's done to them, and in the end that's apparently what matters because this game is really pretentious and not half as deep as it thinks it is.
PERSONALITY: Reverend Gray is a person that is at once simple and difficult to talk to; he isn't a "warm" person – his demeanor tends to be rather strict and taciturn, difficult to read and unemotional to the point of seeming uncaring – but he is one that undeniably has a vested interest in what people have to say. He's inquisitive, often noted by others in canon for asking several questions and not liking to answer questions that are asked of him; he also likes to observe people and their behavior, and to try to form as complete an understanding as he can of any given individual that catches his interest. He isn't quick to condemn, nor is he quick to forgive; when it comes down to it, his primary goal is not judgement, but rather comprehension – of individuals, of people as a whole, of faith as a concept. Everything he does comes down to this desire for understanding and comprehension, and he's willing to go to extents that are neither rational nor reasonable to obtain it. Drugging people with hallucinogens is merely an efficient way to see what lies beneath people's outward appearances and pretenses; putting them in immediate danger of being murdered in various horrifying ways will prove what will get them to hold firm and what will get them to shatter.
In the end, Gray is a self-serving and manipulative individual; people matter little outside of what they can provide for him, whether those provisions are intellectual or practical. Most people are nothing more than objects of study, creatures that can sate his curiosity and are to be used and discarded as his whims dictate; he holds no inherent dislike for them – he doesn't hate humanity – but he doesn't place any value on their lives and fails to see why they shouldn't be used to serve what he considers to be a higher purpose. He says himself that he finds humanity to be ugly and generally disappointing, but he admits that people can be unspeakably beautiful; he can appreciate qualities that people hold (such as honesty, steadfastness, and dedication) while having no real feelings one way or another toward those people as individuals.
Honesty in particular is something that's deeply important to Gray; despite his manipulative nature, he does not lie, and he makes a point of stating as much on multiple occasions. He isn't completely honest in that he's willing to omit or withhold information when it suits him, but he holds it as a point of merit that he does not speak untruths, and following through on statements and promises is important to him. He also greatly values honesty in others; he claims that one of the serial killers in his building, Zack, is pure and the closest thing to a legitimate angel that he's seen due to the fact that he is entirely honest. Furthermore, Gray considers dishonesty above all else to be the mark of a witch, condemning Rachel to die for her deception and calling it "witchcraft" and "sorcery;" he also later tells Rachel that God detests liars, and makes it plain that those that deceive others are destined for Hell.
Seeing as Gray is implied to have been raised in a religious cult and became a priest later in life, it's perhaps unsurprising that he invokes the name of God so much; even his floor of the basement is a church, with a sanctuary, confessional booths, an organ and stained glass windows. What likely is surprising is the fact that despite all this, Gray does not believe in God; whether he lost his faith at some point or never had it to begin with is unclear, but while he does not seem to begrudge others their faith (finding it to be yet another focus of his curiosity rather than a point of contention), his personal thoughts on the matter are that God as an entity does not exist. Rather, Gray has placed himself in the position of God, using it as his justification for running the experiment to begin with – he's spent all of his life wondering what it must be like to watch others kill and destroy and offer love and devotion, all in the name of their God, and what that must feel like for one in such a position. This way he can know; he can feel it for himself, again and again and again, for as long as the experiment is running.
For all of his cold inquisitiveness, however, Gray isn't entirely unfeeling; he harbors no hatred toward people, and once he's decided that a set few people are worth his time, he does seem to care about them in his own way. He does seem to love his "angels," the serial killers that reside within his basements; while his caring does have a severe element of manipulation and he isn't above tormenting those he cares about (e.g., encouraging Danny to kill someone out of jealousy and instability, telling a pair of twins that they're "incomplete" as long as there are two of them and ordering them to sort it out before he's willing to take one of them in), he is still incredibly displeased with their deaths and transgressions and blames Rachel for harming them or leading them astray, condemning her to die for it with a fervor that he doesn't display anywhere else in the series. He notices when their behavior patterns change, and he shows concern accordingly; a large part of the reason he dislikes Rachel is because of her effect on both Danny and Zack – he sees her as the reason they've become self-destructive, in his eyes.
Unfortunately, he doesn't figure out any of this regarding how he feels about anything or anyone until right before he dies - something that might have been avoided if he'd found a slightly saner way to observe people from the start. Maybe.
POWERS/ABILITIES:
As Gray himself notes at the end of the series, he was never anything more or less than human - he has no supernatural abilities or powers to his name, and everything he's capable of is made possible through mundane means. He has extensive functional knowledge of psychotropic substances and hallucinogens, including how to create and administer them effectively to a third party, and once someone is under the influence he's capable of manipulating the sort of trip they're having, guiding them through the experience with words and visual stimuli and ensuring they see and experience what he wants them to. He has a large amount of life experience with religion and religious subjects; otherwise, his general knowledge base is comparable to your average educated layman (e.g. he isn't a doctor but he knows what hemostatics are; he isn't an expert on working with animals but he keeps snakes).
INVENTORY:
- A red leatherbound copy of the Bible
- One canister of hallucinogens
- A crossbow
- A set of 15 crossbow bolts
- A glass holy water vial, empty
- A white snake, approximately the size of an adult boa constrictor. Venomous.
MOONBLESSING: Cordis.
▶ SAMPLES
link #1
link #2
HANDLE: Dal
CONTACT:
OVER 18? Yes
CHARACTERS IN-GAME: Albert Wesker | Resident Evil |
manufactured▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Reverend Abraham Gray
CANON: Angels of Death
CANON POINT: Post-series
AGE: Unknown; however, he's very clearly middle-aged in terms of both physical and mental age.
BACKGROUND: Very little is known about Reverend Gray's past; what is known, however, is that he was raised in a strict religious household. It appears to have been within some sort of commune or other cult settlement, in which the members participated in bizarre rituals and murder in the name of God – while he claims to have seen many demonstrations of faith that he considered beautiful, he also personally witnessed at least one person being tied to a cross and burned alive after having been condemned as a witch. As he became an adult, seeing such things led him to wonder how one in the position of "God" would feel, seeing people carrying out such acts in the name of love and worship; it's this line of thinking, along with a general fascination with people and the concept of faith as a whole, that led him to the idea of running a social experiment – to test the faith of others, to see what would inspire them to maintain their belief (or drive them to nonbelief) in their deities, and to better understand the human condition as a whole.
This social experiment involved locking innocent people in a building with a bunch of serial killers and seeing how incredibly dead they ended up, because nobody in this game's universe solves problems like a normal human being. And so here we are, murdering people in the name of the Lord.
Despite his...odd outlook on God and faith, Gray is a legitimate priest who served for some time in a small community, where he was held in high regard by his congregation; he was said to have a talent for seeing through to the true natures of his flock, and advising them on how to achieve enlightenment based on what he saw in each of them. In reality, Gray was using hallucinogenic drugs on the people he encountered. The drugs he uses are meant to be inhaled; upon breathing them in, the drugged individual sits on the floor or paces around a little, talking to themselves or interacting with things that aren't there. The hallucinations alternate between things the individual would find frightening and things that they find encouraging or curious, in order to encourage them to "confess" their inner workings to Gray and give him an idea of what they're like as a person. He used these drugs to help him recruit the first of the serial killers he convinced to join his project – the first of his "angels", Dr. Daniel (Danny) Dickens. Through Danny, he was able to find several other "angels" to populate the building – people who would kill without restraint, and who would not question Gray's role in the entire process. Gray positioned himself as "God" of the building and of the project, one whose omnipotence and authority was not to be questioned, as well as one who could pass judgement on others based on what he saw of them through their behavior while within the building itself.
Some time before the series began, Gray was introduced to the protagonist, Rachel; Danny brought her to him and asked that he make her one of the angels of the building, with her own floor in which to kill people as she saw fit. Danny was obsessed with Rachel in a way that Gray didn't care for; he allowed her floor to be built and installed her there as the floor master of that area, but he intentionally left a Bible there for her to read. Upon reading the Bible, Rachel became aware that her behavior would see her condemned as a sinner and marked her as "unclean", convincing her that no God would ever want her; she had a breakdown that led to Gray deeming her unfit to stay in the building as one of his angels, casting her down to the lowest level of the building and rebranding her as a sacrifice to be hunted and killed, using some of his drugs on her to ensure that she didn't remember her time spent as one of the angels to prevent her from having an unfair advantage.
His actions over the course of the game itself are well-described here; in a nutshell, the whole serial-killer-social-experiment-religious-batshittery thing doesn't really work out the way he'd planned it to, given that Rachel manages to throw a tremendous wrench in everything that he was doing in one way or another. His angels don't fare well against her; she manages to kill two of them and make the other two behave in ways that he hadn't planned for, and he eventually ends up putting Danny out of his misery himself before deciding to literally just let himself die in a fire. He learns next to nothing while acting as though he received some sort of deep revelation regarding human nature; the revelation itself boils down to "humans are just kinda like that, I guess," though he does end up acknowledging that he was wrong to try to force others to fit his ideal of what constitutes perfection – people are just going to be people regardless of what's done to them, and in the end that's apparently what matters because this game is really pretentious and not half as deep as it thinks it is.
PERSONALITY: Reverend Gray is a person that is at once simple and difficult to talk to; he isn't a "warm" person – his demeanor tends to be rather strict and taciturn, difficult to read and unemotional to the point of seeming uncaring – but he is one that undeniably has a vested interest in what people have to say. He's inquisitive, often noted by others in canon for asking several questions and not liking to answer questions that are asked of him; he also likes to observe people and their behavior, and to try to form as complete an understanding as he can of any given individual that catches his interest. He isn't quick to condemn, nor is he quick to forgive; when it comes down to it, his primary goal is not judgement, but rather comprehension – of individuals, of people as a whole, of faith as a concept. Everything he does comes down to this desire for understanding and comprehension, and he's willing to go to extents that are neither rational nor reasonable to obtain it. Drugging people with hallucinogens is merely an efficient way to see what lies beneath people's outward appearances and pretenses; putting them in immediate danger of being murdered in various horrifying ways will prove what will get them to hold firm and what will get them to shatter.
In the end, Gray is a self-serving and manipulative individual; people matter little outside of what they can provide for him, whether those provisions are intellectual or practical. Most people are nothing more than objects of study, creatures that can sate his curiosity and are to be used and discarded as his whims dictate; he holds no inherent dislike for them – he doesn't hate humanity – but he doesn't place any value on their lives and fails to see why they shouldn't be used to serve what he considers to be a higher purpose. He says himself that he finds humanity to be ugly and generally disappointing, but he admits that people can be unspeakably beautiful; he can appreciate qualities that people hold (such as honesty, steadfastness, and dedication) while having no real feelings one way or another toward those people as individuals.
Honesty in particular is something that's deeply important to Gray; despite his manipulative nature, he does not lie, and he makes a point of stating as much on multiple occasions. He isn't completely honest in that he's willing to omit or withhold information when it suits him, but he holds it as a point of merit that he does not speak untruths, and following through on statements and promises is important to him. He also greatly values honesty in others; he claims that one of the serial killers in his building, Zack, is pure and the closest thing to a legitimate angel that he's seen due to the fact that he is entirely honest. Furthermore, Gray considers dishonesty above all else to be the mark of a witch, condemning Rachel to die for her deception and calling it "witchcraft" and "sorcery;" he also later tells Rachel that God detests liars, and makes it plain that those that deceive others are destined for Hell.
Seeing as Gray is implied to have been raised in a religious cult and became a priest later in life, it's perhaps unsurprising that he invokes the name of God so much; even his floor of the basement is a church, with a sanctuary, confessional booths, an organ and stained glass windows. What likely is surprising is the fact that despite all this, Gray does not believe in God; whether he lost his faith at some point or never had it to begin with is unclear, but while he does not seem to begrudge others their faith (finding it to be yet another focus of his curiosity rather than a point of contention), his personal thoughts on the matter are that God as an entity does not exist. Rather, Gray has placed himself in the position of God, using it as his justification for running the experiment to begin with – he's spent all of his life wondering what it must be like to watch others kill and destroy and offer love and devotion, all in the name of their God, and what that must feel like for one in such a position. This way he can know; he can feel it for himself, again and again and again, for as long as the experiment is running.
For all of his cold inquisitiveness, however, Gray isn't entirely unfeeling; he harbors no hatred toward people, and once he's decided that a set few people are worth his time, he does seem to care about them in his own way. He does seem to love his "angels," the serial killers that reside within his basements; while his caring does have a severe element of manipulation and he isn't above tormenting those he cares about (e.g., encouraging Danny to kill someone out of jealousy and instability, telling a pair of twins that they're "incomplete" as long as there are two of them and ordering them to sort it out before he's willing to take one of them in), he is still incredibly displeased with their deaths and transgressions and blames Rachel for harming them or leading them astray, condemning her to die for it with a fervor that he doesn't display anywhere else in the series. He notices when their behavior patterns change, and he shows concern accordingly; a large part of the reason he dislikes Rachel is because of her effect on both Danny and Zack – he sees her as the reason they've become self-destructive, in his eyes.
Unfortunately, he doesn't figure out any of this regarding how he feels about anything or anyone until right before he dies - something that might have been avoided if he'd found a slightly saner way to observe people from the start. Maybe.
POWERS/ABILITIES:
As Gray himself notes at the end of the series, he was never anything more or less than human - he has no supernatural abilities or powers to his name, and everything he's capable of is made possible through mundane means. He has extensive functional knowledge of psychotropic substances and hallucinogens, including how to create and administer them effectively to a third party, and once someone is under the influence he's capable of manipulating the sort of trip they're having, guiding them through the experience with words and visual stimuli and ensuring they see and experience what he wants them to. He has a large amount of life experience with religion and religious subjects; otherwise, his general knowledge base is comparable to your average educated layman (e.g. he isn't a doctor but he knows what hemostatics are; he isn't an expert on working with animals but he keeps snakes).
INVENTORY:
- A red leatherbound copy of the Bible
- One canister of hallucinogens
- A crossbow
- A set of 15 crossbow bolts
- A glass holy water vial, empty
- A white snake, approximately the size of an adult boa constrictor. Venomous.
MOONBLESSING: Cordis.
▶ SAMPLES
link #1
link #2