app.

[astronomer]

TW: murder, suicide, statutory rape.

▲ OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION

Name: Orla

Username: comptometress

Current characters in Juncture: Sherlock Holmes.

▲ IN-CHARACTER INFORMATION

Character Name: Alice Morgan

Username: astronomer

Original Character, Canon, or Alternate Universe: Luther; between s2 and s3.

Played By: Ruth Wilson..

Concept: Malignant narcissist who unfortunately believes in love.

Physical Description: Alice is 5’ 6”, 29, white and red-haired with bright blue-green eyes. Her facial features are strong, with arched eyebrows and a wide mouth; above all, she is striking, and she dresses to exaggerate this. She tends towards a sharp, professional look, and is meticulous about her clothing—and everything about her self-presentation, in fact. Her movements are strangely definite, and she never stammers or rethinks her words—it seems to almost go beyond confidence.

History: Alice Morgan was born in 1982 to Laura and Douglas Morgan, the former a surgeon and the latter a published poet; the Morgans were casually well-off, moved in firmly upper-middle class, academic circles, and could be no prouder of their genius child. Considering their friends liked to bray about little Cassandra’s horse-riding skills and Timothy’s ability on the piano, Alice’s genius—obvious, already, in her speech and her almost unnerving skill with numbers—proved something like the perfect accessory. Which isn’t to say her parents didn’t love her, and isn’t to say she didn’t enjoy the attention in some ways, and isn’t to say that her upbringing wasn’t enormously privileged; she was taken to every museum, every lecture, every gallery that Dr and Mr Morgan could find, was taken swimming with sharks for her fourteenth birthday, had book upon book upon book, was a member of MENSA—her parents spoiled her, encouraged her, paraded her, used her to further their own self-esteem and, according to her, made her a freak. Not that Alice ever wanted to fit in, precisely. This judgement of her parents is something she put into words later in life, and more a symptom of her distaste for the rest of humanity than any fear of being ‘a freak’. Nonetheless, she was aware that while she was The Child Genius, capital letters and all, she was a novelty rather than a force to be reckoned with; the attention she got wasn’t admiration for her brainpower so much as interest in her oddness.

Alice had a mix of home education (from tutors rather than her parents) and more formal schooling, and entered Oxford at the age of thirteen. Luther notes that she mustn’t have had any friends her own age, no boyfriends—Alice is quick to correct him and says she “matured very early” in that area. As a young teen, she had repeated sexual contact with men in their twenties and older; despite supposedly consenting to and often initiating these encounters, they were statutory rape, and contribute to her attitude of disgust to a number of the people she sleeps with as an adult. At the time, these encounters made her feel powerful, prestigious, ‘grown-up’; they gave her something to feel superior about, and something outside the scope of her parents’ control—she felt they had very much orchestrated her life, and sleeping with much older men felt like a rebellion. Aside from that, after all, she was very much a good girl—she’s never smoked, even as an adult rarely drinks, was always studious and in conversation sweet and charming, if prone to occasionally unnerving people with her intelligence.

And occasionally fantasising about murder. She can’t remember when that started, really; she isn’t sure she believes it started anywhere, because to give it a start date begins to pathologise it and heaven forbid one pathologise homicidal tendencies. As far as she’s concerned, it is a personality trait, not an illness. She found herself fascinated not necessarily with death but with endings, emptiness, cold and clean destruction; the idea of nothing was, to her, beautiful. The concept of human life being extinguished like a candle being snuffed out, the fragility of it, was terrifying and permissive and wonderful. She nurtured an extremely nihilistic worldview and a generally misanthropic attitude; other people, even people close to her, were slow and primitive, vicious and antagonistic, out to compete with her, to irritate her, to disgust her, to lessen her shine, to eclipse, destroy, reduce her to nothing.

Alice completed her BA and her MPhys in two years (the answer to ‘...a BA in Physics?’ is ‘Oxford is weird’), followed it up with a one-year Master’s in Mathematics and, having reached the age of sixteen when she could wield the weapon of ‘I’m moving out legally whatever you do, so you should probably give me funding for that’ returned to London to study for her PhD at University College London. Her research centred upon dark matter distribution in distant galaxies, and she achieved her doctorate at the age of eighteen.

In the ten years between then and the day she killed her parents, her career was a glowing success; while remaining associated with UCL, she also performed research in Edinburgh and across the pond in the States, was widely published in academic journals and wrote three books on cosmology and astrophysics—her age and charm made her briefly of interest to the more mainstream media, but she never became a Brian Cox figure through a general lack of patience and an unwillingness to cater to the layman. Her personal life remained free from any real personal connections; she had colleagues, was not exactly an introvert, went out on dates and had long conversations and managed to skillfully avoid actually forging emotional connections with people nonetheless.

She was twenty eight when she killed her parents. It was the result of a lifetime of work and of planning; again, like her fascination with the ending of human life, she can’t pinpoint a beginning to the desire and is tempted to say it was always there. It felt like a natural culmination, like it had to happen.

She was, of course, taken into custody, where she met DCI John Luther, who couldn’t prove a thing. Upon realising that her act was being seen through, she promptly dropped it and felt free to taunt him with her obvious, invisible guilt (--as opposed to remorse). In the course of his attempts to prove her part in the murder of her parents, she found herself fascinated by him. She attempted her usual methods of control; trying to frighten him, trying to seduce him; she even attempted to knife him. She was only stopped—and only briefly—when he threatened to pin the blame on someone else, removing the glamour from her little murder mystery; the press had been quick, after all, to pick up on the story of Dr Alice Morgan at the centre of the whole mess.

Their relationship, however, shifted quickly to what Alice called friendship—for the first time in her life. She ‘investigated’ John and his attempt to kill Henry Madsen, a child murderer and rapist whom he had been chasing; she attempted to fix his relationship with his estranged wife Zoe. These attempts to help took typically Alice-esque forms; one included sending young girls to beat up Mark North, Zoe’s partner. Mark blamed Luther, but Alice then threatened him into retracting his official complaint, causing Zoe to feel even more conflicted, guilty at having doubted her husband, and resulting in Zoe and Luther starting an affair.

Friendship! That’s how you do it.

It took a turn for the even worse when Henry Madsen woke from his coma, and Luther told Alice he could no longer speak to her due to the surveillance he would be put under. Alice—revelling in his attention, his interest, feeling prestigious and favoured and clever—was furious, and solved their problem by setting the hospital on fire (as a distraction, though the element of destruction pleased her) and murdering Madsen with her bare hands while disguised as a doctor.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, this action—not nearly as smooth, polished or planned or unsolvable as the murders of her parents—wasn’t met with the approval she expected and wanted from Luther. When he told her as much, she instantly erupted in fury, because in her mind it had been a selfless act: she’d risked her liberty for him. Vindictive and hurt, she informed Mark of Zoe and Luther’s affair.

Nonetheless, later and calmer, she actually seemed prepared to forgive him; she even informed him that he had convinced her of the presence of love in the world—her murder of Henry Madsen was apparently a turning point. Not that this made her any more moral.

After Zoe was murdered by an old friend of Luther’s, Ian Reed, Luther enlisted her help. She was only too happy to oblige.

She was convicted of the murder of Ian Reed and given a life sentence in a women’s prison. She was a model prisoner—polite, quiet, self-contained, co-operative, right up until she attempted, or appeared to attempt, suicide in order to get moved to a secure psychiatric facility. Luther then proceeded to break her out of said facility, using no less poetic a device than an apple in a garden. Oh my.

Later, she attempted to convince him to run away with her; when he refused, she ran away with herself.

And one day, getting off the plane in New Mexico, she put her foot on the ground, turned her head, blinked; and wasn’t where she was meant to be anymore. Was, instead, looking at the walls of the bathroom in the Oasis Diner.

World: For all intents and purposes, the world Alice lives in is a modern-day Earth, very similar to our own. ‘Luther’ as a show enjoys playing on the mundane and the stylistically horrible, often juxtaposing the two; Alice will make Looney Tunes references, but she’ll also kill your enemies for you, and dunk her biscuits in tea while she plans a serious crime. Not to mention take tweezers from her bathroom cabinet with the intention of using them as a weapon. Thematically, the show is also rather tragic, in the good old-fashioned ‘oh God, there’s blood everywhere!’ way.

Talents/Abilities:
I’m not going to list Alice’s academic and intellectual talents and accolades here because I’m unsure they’re ever going to be rolled for, but naturally I can add ‘em if need be. For the record, though: two master’s degrees, one PhD, a published book, six languages. She’s an accomplished and well-respected scientist, mathematician, astrophysicist and cosmologist.

b&e, lockpicking 7

And otherwise being where she should not be.

stabbing 8

You might think it’s not a skill, but with how much accuracy and confidence can you hit the jugular?

research (...stalking) 9

Alice is very good at finding out about people. Maybe she’ll find out about you.

strength 7

For a very average-sized person, Alice is a little too strong. This is chiefly a matter of having absolutely no mercy.

hand-to-hand combat 6

Strength and ruthlessness aside, she’s never had any formal training in any kind of combat. If she has the element of surprise on her side, however, she can be pretty terrifying, because she’s a surprising lady with lots of tricks up her sleeve. Like tweezers and nails and things. And pins.

observation & deduction 7
manipulation 8
firearms, 6
strategy, 8

Personality: Alice is termed a ‘malignant narcissist’—this is not a medical term, but some psychologists believe it to be a position on a spectrum of narcissism, with classic psychopathy (subtly distinct from ASPD in that ASPD is diagnosed via behavioural patterns and a diagnosis of psychopathy involves assessing personality characteristics) at one end and narcissistic personality disorder at the other. Personality disorders are not uniform and do not always manifest in consistent ways; in Alice’s case she has symptoms of both psychopathy and narcissism. This overlaps in, for instance, her lack of empathy and almost total self-centredness.

While Alice claims—and truly believes—that her murder of Madsen was a selfless act, it doesn’t mean she has any consistent empathy for the rest of the human race; she’s simply expanded her borders somewhat to include Luther’s well-being as important to her. She will never learn to be goodand she has no wish to. She can fake empathy in conversation and she can care for people in a very twisted and obsessive fashion, but that is the limit.

Psychopaths are known for their charming exterior; Alice certainly has that. She’s also, as stated, capable of presenting whatever personality she feels will get her furthest at any given moment. She is acting, constantly; she’s studied how people intuitively move, how they react in social situations, and she’s reproduced it. In her first scene with Luther, however, he discovers her lack of empathy when she doesn’t respond to him yawning—yawning is associated with the part of the brain capable of empathy.

This is not the only slip Alice is likely to make. Another symptom of psychopathy is an emotional shallowness—emotions, particularly fear, can be felt but are often numbed. This often means that in order to fit in, she is acting. Tiny facial expressions and reflexes don’t come intuitively to her; for instance, she’s studied the way other people blink and replicated that to avoid unsettling people when it would be inconvenient to do so. She doesn’t fidget, or if she does it’s put-on; she is often very, very still without being tense in a way that is actually quite rare—making ‘busy movements’ doesn’t come naturally to her. Her movements are clean and decisive, she never stammers, is always perfectly sure in what she’s doing. Her only real habit is touching her lips when planning something.

Alice’s narcissistic traits are just as pronounced as her psychopathic ones; she is vain, self-obsessed, and demanding of attention, feeling cheated if she doesn’t receive it. Criticism and a lack of respect inspires her quickly to violent anger, as does a removal of attention. She is obsessed with her own power and tries to exercise it over other people through manipulation.

There is a certain childishness in her emotional interactions with people; her temper whiplashes when she doesn’t get her way, for instance. She is quick to adopt Luther as her friend, announcing “we’re friends” with no apparent care for his opinion on the matter, or the fact that she very recently tried to knife him. She still uses sex as an emblem of her own superiority and power, brings it up seemingly out of the blue to gloat or shock despite often finding a deep disdain for her partners; she is quick to show off to Luther about killing Henry Madsen and, when he reacts badly, immediately resorts to screaming insults and promptly informs Mark of Zoe’s return to Luther—it’s all very tit-for-tat.

Alice’s murders are personal things. She doesn’t pick strangers off the street to kill them; so far she has killed her parents, Henry Madsen and Ian Reed, people connected to her in one way or another.

The murder of her parents was distinct to that of Madsen and Reed, as it was a murder for herself rather than for Luther. Her motivation, she says, is that she wanted to do it. This is true. Essentially, Alice knew she wanted to commit murder, but not just any murder—killing a stranger would seem cheap, too easy. On some level, she wanted to exact revenge on her parents for parading her as a novelty, for not understanding, for not giving enough, for giving too much—her close emotional relationships are characterised by a mix of intensity and childishness—but it was secondary.

However, she shot her mother while she was sleeping, and her father from behind while he was listening to music; neither of them saw her coming. There was no sadism or power-play, as one might expect from a murder supposedly based in revenge. Any revenge she was exacting was mathematical rather than emotional; it was enough that they ceased to exist, the emotional ramifications were, as ever, less important. But primarily Alice was curious, fascinated, wanted to feel human life snuff out at her command and wanted it to be special while she did it—she wanted to know exactly who she was making not exist.

Notably, she kept the gun she used to kill them—by killing the dog, hiding it inside the carcass and collecting the cremated remains, including the few pieces of the gun. It couldn’t be used as evidence against her, but Luther says she needs it to remind her of who she really is; keeping the gun was a compulsion. She takes trophies—they remind her of her own power—but because her later murders weren’t so personally significant, there was no compulsion to keep souvenirs.

Madsen and Reed were different stories entirely to the murder of her parents, and it is worth noting that as Alice’s murders get progressively less ‘selfish’ they also become less carefully planned-out and more likely to end her in prison—which is precisely what happens after she kills Reed. Madsen and Reed she killed for Luther, because she felt it was right and because she wanted to. She enjoys the rush of power that murder brings—not enough to seek out strangers as victims, but enough to use circumstances such as Madsen waking up as an excuse. Basically, when solving a problem = murdering the problem, more than once, you can’t really argue ‘selflessness’ and convenience—by the time Alice had a shotgun in her hands and pointed at Ian Reed, there was no real chance of her not shooting.

Much is made of Alice’s nihilistic worldview—it takes Luther to convince her that “there is love in the world”. Before, she believes that the universe is essentially evil, but then modifies this to believing that it is indifferent—which still isn’t overly positive. She believes that life is essentially meaningless and random; she doesn’t find this depressing so much as liberating.

She informs John that people lie to themselves about three broad areas: they believe they have much more control over their lives than they really do, they have a higher opinion of themselves than is warranted and they believe that the future will be better than the present simply by merit of being the future. Alice considers herself free of such self-deception. Interestingly, at least in the case of the first point—control over one’s own life—she attempts to compensate. She knows that life and death are often laughably random, but she attempts to control herself by being firmly her own, hostile to outside influences attempting to change her. She makes life and death significant with her murders, even while fascinated by the easy transition between the two.

Chaos and order are both concepts that fascinate her. She is meticulous in every aspect of her life—her clothes, her home, her (planned) murders are all perfect; she is a scientist who believes in logic and rationality, the cold perfection of mathematics, but also in the unavoidable randomised chaos of the universe. In many ways, she attempts to impose order on chaos; when she kills people, she often feels like she’s restoring some kind of balance, righting some kind of wrong—more existential than moral.

Sexuality: While willing to sleep with people of any gender, Alice is not so much pan- or bisexual as simply sexual; she has a vague preference for men, but isn’t particularly enamoured of any of her sexual partners. They’re a means to an end rather than particularly attractive to her in their own right. She often finds herself disgusted by them sooner or later. While she enjoys sex as an act, she often uses it as a status symbol; her attitude to it is almost juvenile, and certainly unhealthily bound up power plays. She has experienced statutory rape, which has coloured her sexual experiences as an adult.

She is capable of experiencing something akin to romantic attachment to people, it’s just not pretty. Romantic attachment and her sexual needs and wants are not necessarily linked for her; they might coincide at some point, but can exist independently of each other.

Reason for playing: I think Alice can offer something really terrible to the game.

I’d like to see her, too, with a purpose and an arc not defined solely by ‘finding someone and killing people for them’, though, well, not that I wouldn’t enjoy that too. I enjoy the idea of her Object forcing her into communication with others, and giving her a bit of a quest.

Object: JUST HORRIFY ME

▲ WRITING SAMPLES

log; eek eek eek

narrative;

Hum! The air on the Tube feels thick with leftover sweat, rigid with heat, and Alice has to seize the bar in front of her because no one will give her a seat; nonetheless, she’s not unhappy. She has seen today’s entertainment.

He’s one of the commuters who reads. Of course, she has already craned her neck to establish what books and newspapers are being read in this particular compartment, and most of the material on offer is completely tedious; a few Metros, one Daily Mail, one Times; one much sticky-noted A-Z, tourists; one La Symphonie Pastorale, boring. And him. Standing up. One hand on the rail and one hand holding The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe up to his nose. When the train bumps and his hand wavers and the book fails to obscure his face properly, she can see a furrowed brow, a stern-looking nose, wonderful urgency in his expression. He turns pages anxiously, quickly, taking his hand away from the rail to do so.

Alice rocks on her heels a bit—hum!—and smiles, and watches him without fear he’ll look up; though if he were to look up, she wouldn’t mind either.

She’s misses her planned stop and follows him out onto his, putting on her sunglasses. They’re more for her benefit than anyone else’s, she admits; it’s just fun to act like a criminal sometimes. She puts her Oyster card down at a different barrier, walks beside him rather than after him; takes a chance and crosses the road, keeping him in her peripheral vision as she walks. She’s building up fantasies. He’s never read any CS Lewis before; she’d like to introduce him to the Screwtape Letters, read them to him—over the phone. While he’s in the same room as his fiancée. Smiling, and trying to answer her like it’s a friendly call. And the curious thing would be that it wouldn’t really be a matter of infidelity; she doesn’t want to sleep with him, oh, emphatically not; just wants him to think about it, on occasion, and feel a little sick with himself for it.

Oh, no, quick, catch him, catch him—!

She hurries after him, aware now that she’s getting into obvious territory, but she’s very good at remaining unseen and knows how to vary her shortcuts, flitting in and out of the shadows so that he’s never out of her sight for very long. She hunches her shoulders, pushes her sunglasses further up her nose and bites down on the lower lip of her smile, walking on, on, on—on—on—where is he going, the little—

—oh, well, home, of course. He’s headed for the entrance to a block of flats with the weary step of someone who’s been out all day, wants a cup of tea and a biscuit, wants to put his feet up. She’s still walking, cutting across the street so they’re in the same stretch of pavement, and they’re drawing close, close; she thinks, I could have read you The Screwtape Letters, I could have made your life brighter, I could have made it much much worse. Laughable, all the things she could have done to him. He’s holding the door; thinks she’s going in, thinks she lives in the building. “Oh, no,” she says, laughing at him, making him blush, but groan good-naturedly. “Thanks, though.”

He shuts the door after him, after a quick, laughing apology. Her lip hitches up as, though the glass panel, she watches him recede into mundanity, never again to come so close to anything like her; look at that, pitiful.

▲ TICKY BOXES

Are you over the age of eighteen? Aye.

Are you aware of the skillcheck system and comfortable with the fact that while your character cannot die without your express permission, they may get into some serious trouble? Ayyye.

Are you ready to rumble? Ayyyyyyyyyyye.