Ten Forward App

[feellikeibelong]

Your name or online alias: Anne
Your email: buriedandreset@aol.com
Another preferred means of contact: buriedandreset
Character's Full Name: Helena G. Wells
Character's Canon: Warehouse 13
Character's Canon Point: Season 5 Episode 6 - "Endless"
Character's Journal Name: feellikeibelong
What would you like your character's tag to be?: h.g. wells

Answer the following questions in no less than 300 words but no greater than 1000 words put together...
Character's background (their past and present): Previously written app for the Throne of Shadows game And if needed/wanted for a less tl;dr: Wikia page Though she is specifically from before she met Giselle.

Character's personality: Helena is a genius, first and foremost, and she will not hesitate to flaunt her intelligence where she can. But being a genius, she does need a constant challenge otherwise she will bore easily and sometimes bad things may result. In this, her genius is both a blessing and a curse. She has invented many things, including a psychometric time machine, as well as written science fiction novels. Hers is an active imagination, one that she cannot turn off even if she wishes too. There's always ideas bouncing around in her mind for better or for worse. She can be susceptible to becoming obsessed with her projects, such as time travel used to be an unhealthy obsession of hers. She has a great love of the sciences and mathematics, though much of what she knows about them she taught to herself or learned from friends who had knowledge in those fields.

Patience, however, is not exactly Helena's virtue. She can exercise patience, but it is certainly not something she has an endless supply of. Her patience has a limit, which can be shortened if she's dealing with someone whom she does not like or get along with for one reason or another. She does, however, have a large amount of patience when it comes to those she cares for. She isn't typically quick to anger, but if she does become angry, it is best to get out of her way. Helena can have quite a nasty temper when it is roused, and she is most certainly not the forgiving type. She will hold grudges for quite a while, and she is notorious for holding onto her anger and hate.

Extremely charismatic, Helena knows how to talk to people. She is a social creature and it takes little effort on her part to earn favorable opinions from others. Helena knows the importance of a well placed compliment or coy smile. Out-going more often than not, Helena has a very charming smile and a glint in her eye to match. Helena is flirtatious by nature. Also having been born and raised in Victorian England, Helena has extremely proper manners. Even in the modern day, she can still act quite Victorian in her mannerisms. Another thing she enjoys about the modern day is how sexual orientation is, at least for the most part, accepted and not kept completely quiet as it was in Helena's day. She herself identifies as bisexual and has had many lovers of both genders.

She was a woman born far ahead of her time, and she is bit of a dual person because of it. She feels more comfortable in modern times with intelligent women being far more accepted in society than they were in her day. Yet at the same time, she feels so very out of place in the modern world. Ever since she was unbronzed, Helena has been playing catch up in learning about the things she missed during the one hundred and ten years she spent in the Bronze Sector. She hasn't really found anywhere to truly call "home" since she awoke in the 21st Century. Inwardly, she does want to be able to put down roots, so to speak, and have a home somewhere, to feel as though she belongs somewhere. As it stands, she doesn't feel as though she really has a place she belongs, and it tends to make her feel disquiet. Though these aren't exactly things she has expressed to anyone, at least not until very recently to Myka.

However, Helena has a dark side. She is a cold-blooded murderer, though this did not come about until after her daughter was murdered. Helena sought vengeance, hunted down, tortured and killed the men who had killed her daughter. The act left her forever tainted with darkness, and she has since taken the lives of other people, both directly by her own hand, or indirectly because of her actions. She has killed both the innocent and the guilty. In the present day, she carries the weight of guilt for these actions on her shoulders, though she will never regret what she did to Christina's murderers. Everything else, she feels deep guilt and regret for. She makes a conscious choice every day to not be that person any longer, and the psychological effects from her anger and hate will always be with her. This is something she has started to come to terms with and accept about herself. She is forever changed by the events of her life, and after spending time being both psychotic and deeply regretful, she has finally found some balance within her between the dark part of herself and the lighter part. She is neither black nor white, she is, by her own view, a dark shade of grey.

Christina's death has also left her with a deep-seeded grief that she had largely been unable to let herself feel. Grief was not something she knew how to handle, and in the 1890s she buried her grief and embraced her hate and anger. While she has come to terms and let herself grieve for her daughter, Helena will always carry the pain of loss that is easily seen by others who know that similar pain of loss. Also despite progress she has made in accepting her grief and who she is, Helena does, at times, still possess a highly negative and extremely critical view of herself. While she has a great capacity for love, Helena can still feel as though she ruins the lives of everyone she comes in contact with.

Emotions can be both Helena's undoing and her salvation. When she feels strongly, her emotions can control her if she is not careful. Her anger and hate controlled her when she didn't keep them under control, and that ultimately led to her trying to destroy the world. However, she also has given up her life selflessly to save her friends, though that particular event was erased when Artie used Magellan's Astrolabe. She has come to a more emotionally stable ground recently, which was helped by her deciding to retire from the Warehouse and making personal connections outside of the Warehouse. To an extent, Helena does fear her emotions, but she now has a far better grasp on them so she can keep herself balanced instead of going to extremes.

Even though she is a deeply emotional person, Helena very rarely lets others see her softer emotions. She will hide her pain and sadness, all of the emotions that make her feel vulnerable and weak. While this is partly just who she is by nature, it is also what she was raised to do. Victorians were not open about their emotions, so Helena learned early on to keep her emotions close to her heart and put on a mask. Helena does not let people in easily and she does not show her vulnerabilities to everyone she chooses to open up to. She strongly dislikes feeling weak, and expressing her sadness and pain makes her feel weak. This, however, is something she can get past if someone is patient enough and understands her well enough to know when to push her to talk and when not to. She is innately stubborn and if she is pushed when she doesn't want to be, she will push back and dig her heels in on the matter.

Character's skills/abilities/powers: Helena is a genius and is a prolific inventor. She's also got quite the deduction skills and an eye for detail and logical thinking. She's also an author, of course. Helena is also highly skilled in the martial art of kenpo (which she is teaching to Zoey). Despite having a dislike of guns, she is an excellent marksman. Helena also has a knack for languages, speaking German, French and Russian of the modern languages. But she also speaks and reads Latin, reads Demotic, speaks Coptic and a smattering of other dead languages. She is also more than a little bit of a scientist. Biology and Chemistry are her main branches of science that she enjoys pursuing. She's also insanely good at math. And for anything that she doesn't know, she can learn it very easily. She is a quick learner.

Any special equipment your character is bringing along? This includes weaponry, magic items, etc.: She'll have the earbud communication device given to her upon her arrival in Throne of Shadows. Her trunk also has clothing, the baby blanket she made for her daughter, a book written in a language only the earbud can translate, some tools for mechanical and electrical engineering, some technological devices (including things such as a clock (purchased in Gebo) and some Star Trek-verse tech from a brief visit to Orion), her original, unedited, hand-written manuscript for The Time Machine, as well as some jewelry acquired over the course of her stay in Throne of Shadows.

Are you bringing your character to ten_fwd from another game? If you are, which game?: Yes. She'll be coming from Throne of Shadows, found at shadowmods

If you answered yes above, briefly summarize how they were changed by and what challenges they faced in the climate of their previous game(s): Her initial canon point in this game was season 4 episode 15 "Instinct" in which the Grasp took her from standing in Nate's driveway. Initially, she was a bit depressed and stand-off-ish given the events that had transpired shortly before her arrival. However, she quickly made friends, notably with Zoey Westen and Dorian Carver. When she first arrived in game, the setting was in a temple of a sort, though she was only there for a couple IC weeks before the game setting moved. Helena, who had issues with being uprooted in such ways, didn't take well to moving to a new setting, which was an underwater metropolis city called Gebo. The characters were all more or less forced to work there (Helena viewed it as indentured servitude), and it was incredibly trivial. Not to mention they all were assigned rooms and roommates. Everything was regimented and Helena was irked more and more by the setting. Then one day, it was a feast day for the Nysgods, so the characters each received one gift from home. Helena received the baby blanket she'd made for her daughter, which sent her into an emotional dip.

A week after that, a series of events happened. First, supernatural wolves appeared in Gebo and attacked people. Helena and Zoey were fighting when Zoey got bit and began to hallucinate. So Helena fended off the wolf, killing it, then called for a doctor to come help Zoey. Later on, Helena had an encounter in her room with one of her roommates as they were caught by a sandstorm and echoes of the past, throwing their faults and past misdeeds back in their faces. Then, ultimately, a woman in white, who was more a demon than anything else, appeared and attacked Helena and one of her friends. In the fight, Helena took a wound while saving her friend, the wound being claw marks across her back. They ultimately became scars.

Not long thereafter, the game setting changed again, though while the characters were being moved, the NPC antagonist appeared, killed one of the Nysgods traveling with the characters, and stranded them in a place called the Wylds. It was, in essence, the place between realities, and it didn't like the characters or the Grasp being there. As there were no buildings, characters had to either build their own if they had the tools, or use magic to construct buildings. Helena spent at least the first day or two sleeping outside until she talked to Zoey and they ended up sharing the hut one of Zoey's magical friends had created for her. During their time in Gebo, Helena and Zoey had grown closer. Indeed, Helena had developed feelings for Zoey, though as tended to happen with her she didn't realize this. Not until she was talking to Dorian in the Wylds and he could see it, so he pointed it out. But being both jaded and stubborn, Helena didn't think Zoey could return the feelings. So she simply kept silent on the matter despite Dorian's prodding that Zoey returned the feelings. It was a couple weeks after their arrival in the Wylds when Zoey came to find Helena in the rainforest portion of the place and asked if Dorian was correct, if she had feelings for Zoey. Finally, Helena told Zoey of her past. She'd told her she was H.G. Wells the first time they'd met. But now, she trusted Zoey enough to tell her, and Zoey's reaction would also factor into Helena deciding if she'd tell Zoey how she felt about her. Zoey responded more than positively, which gave Helena some hope, but she didn't confess her feelings yet. That came about a week later when Zoey came to find her and pointedly asked if Dorian was right that she had feelings for her. Helena finally confessed her feelings and Zoey and Helena began a relationship.

Not long thereafter, Zoey fell into a coma, which distressed Helena, but she split her time between watching over Zoey and keeping herself busy. Which had turned into her working with Tony Stark to build a device that could attempt to communicate with the Nysgods and help get them out of the Wylds. Lightning tended to randomly strike in the Wylds, and Helena had the idea of building a device to capture the lightning and reflect it back up into the sky, attaching a message to it that would hopefully be heard by the Nysgods. But when she tested the device, she ended up being struck by lightning instead of the device and she fell into a coma for one full day. This was her canon update, going from her season 4 canon point to the series finale canon point. When she woke up, her memories were hazy, but they came back to her. Dorian reminded her about Zoey, and not long after Zoey woke up and they were reunited. Also as part of her canon update, the scars on her back disappeared as her body changed to fit the new canon point.

Helena also combined her efforts with several other characters to build a new engine and power source for a ship the Nygods had sent to rescue the characters. After several days, the efforts were successful, the ship was powered and the characters boarded and were escorted to a new setting. Or, well, settings to put it more precisely. The ship made stops in several different worlds, including a stop to Orion in the Star Trek universe. Helena had a couple unpleasant encounters during the time they were on the ship, called the Egime, but she did let herself open up to people more. Frigga had become a close friend as well, one that understood what it was to be a mother and to even lose a child, in a way. Dorian understood that pain as well, and both went a long way to helping Helena work through some of her issues. And she was letting herself be happy with Zoey. As much as the setting of the Egime became stagnant, Helena found herself settling into simply living as opposed to existing. There was one hiccup during a docking event in a place called the City of Sin. Helena met another version of Zoey while exploring the city, initially mistaking her for her Zoey. Soon after that, she got bitten by one of the demons in the city and infected with Wrath. She got into a nasty fight with another man who had been infected by Wrath as well, but he used magic and Helena eventually ran off. She ran into her Zoey, who noticed something was wrong and physically fought Helena until Helena finally collapsed and fell unconscious. Helena carried guilt over having hurt Zoey, but they made their peace. Eventually, the setting changed again and this time ended up in Mannaz Hall. Helena quickly and hopelessly fell in love with the immensely huge library that could fit two football fields inside of it. It was simply incredibly dusty and cob-webby as the Nysgods didn't precisely need books. So Helena and Zoey had taken to cleaning the library themselves. And Helena felt her feelings for Zoey deepen further. She wasn't quite aware of it, but Helena had fallen in love by now.

The last thing that had happened to Helena in Throne of Shadows was her body had been possessed, so-to-speak, for two days by a woman known as Gaia who was a Roman woman with a particular liking for sex and opium. Needless to say, Helena was more than mortified about that experience considering she had full memory of that event.

Why do you want to play this character in Ten Forward, and what do you plan to do with them? With Throne of Shadows effectively closing, I want to continue playing Helena alongside her girlfriend in a game setting. I also think Helena would utterly and completely thrive in Ten Forward. I would like her to get a job on the Enterprise doing something tech-related once she learns how to use the future-tech on board. I also think she'd make some excellent cross-canon CR with some of the current cast. There's also the fact Helena's dreamt of the stars since she was a child, so being on a space ship in space with the opportunity to visit other worlds whenever there are docking events would just make her day. It would be the proverbial kid in the candy store effect for a bit. Though she knows better than to just willy-nilly go around touching things she doesn't understand yet. But it would be fulfilling a dream she's had most of her life, especially since she never got to test her own rocket she helped to build in 1893.

Writing Sample #1: Here Content warning for discussion of the murder of a child
Writing Sample #2 (optional): And here