application for dioskouroi

[imprinted]

Player Name: Tiffany
Player Journal: kinetic
Player Age: 20

Character Name: Echo (a.k.a. Omega, real name: Caroline Farrell)
Canon: Dollhouse
Medium: TV

Character Age: mid-20's (I'll say 26)
Canon Point: mid-1x04, just after she's remote-wiped

Why did you choose this character?:

In most pan-fandom game settings, Echo would be nearly impossible to play. She couldn't be imprinted and she's shown some serious breakdowns without anything imprinted on her. However, because the dollhouse can not only be worldbuilt into the setting in Geminus, but also incorporated into the plot, I think Echo has a lot to bring to the table.

Not only that, but I really enjoy the idea of getting Echo CR with people that's very one-sided because it'll involve them meeting a variety of her imprints and never the real girl. It sounds like a fun thing to play with, because eventually she'll start having flashes of memories of them and not understand it.

Give a brief idea of how your character will react to the setting:

When Echo arrives in Minneapolis, she'll be in doll state, which means she'll have the mind of an infant. She has absolutely no way to combat the city and survive, or even exist outside of the dollhouse. This is because she's been remote-wiped by Alpha immediately prior to her arrival.

She'll wander around aimlessly, starve, likely injure herself, possibly become a stray dog. She may even repeatedly run into a dumpster because, in doll-state, prior to Omega, she is too dumb to exist.

Luckily, she has a GPS encoding that will allow the L.A. Dollhouse that has been worldbuilt into the setting to find and retrieve her.

History: Here is a link to Echo's page on the Dollhouse Wiki.
Personality:

As a doll, Echo has a lot of personalities, but for the most part, a few basic traits that seem to be shared with the real Caroline Farrell are kept across her identities. She's driven and competent. She's very take-charge and she's the gal with the plan and big ideas. She's got initiative, and she's not afraid to throw herself into the thick of things. She's also the kind of person who makes the first move instead of cowering scared.

Another primary attribute that Echo displays in all of her imprints, and that Adele has repeatedly mentioned actually transcends the imprint process as she evolves, is that she's a protector. Many times she will circumvent her programming and go against her prime directive in order to protect someone that has been deemed important to her (Boyd or Sierra, for example).

Beyond her programming, there's a lot more to Echo -- or, rather, Caroline. She's constantly evolving beyond her programming, something that's considered highly uncommon and dangerous for dolls to do. It's a trait that she shares with only 3 or 4 other dolls (Alpha, Victor, Sierra, and arguably November). She's had flashes and glitches that give her memories of not only her life as Caroline, but previous missions as Echo, indicating that her mind has somehow subverted the imprinting process.

But, that's not all that makes Echo special. Not only will she veer off prime directive entirely in order to protect someone, but she'll also use ingenuity and divergent thinking to find solutions to it that aren't in her programming sequence. For instance, despite being programmed to protect a diva at all costs, she put the girl's life in danger and dangled her off scaffolding just to save her from herself and her juvenile thought that she actually wanted to die. She took out the real threat to the diva's safety -- herself -- through actions that any other doll would have been inhibited from doing.

Caroline herself is a girl who had hit rock bottom. The reason Echo has this protector instinct stems from Caroline's perpetual desire for activism, to help people. She wants to save the world. She was an activist and an extremist who was highly opposed to animal testing and other things that Rossum Corporation was doing extensively. However, when her actions got her boyfriend, Leo, killed, she wound up with survivor's guilt that she couldn't live with.

Basically this is because her goal was to save people--to help them. When she failed that, she broke. She couldn't handle the knowledge that in her attempt to save the world, all she'd done was get people killed. She showed herself, in conversations with Adele, to have turned from a bright and optimistic girl with vision and drive to a cynic. She was a bitter curmudgeon who was angry with the world because she was angry with herself.

However, without those memories, she is inclined to still be the Caroline she was before her boyfriend died. She's strong, brave, and above all wants to help other people. It's her primary driving attribute and it guides her, no matter who she's imprinted with at the time. She's also got a lot of snarkiness and attitude to her. She's bossy, takes control of situations, and she's very resourceful. More than anything, though, she's optimistic--she's an idealist who believes in positive outcomes when she doesn't have the burden of knowing she caused Leo's death on her mind--and she fights back. When she knows something's wrong, when she knows people or animals or anything that can't defend itself is being taken advantage of, she fights it, because that's what she's always been about, and it can't be written out of her.

In Omega some interesting stuff is opened up in the identity fracture between Caroline and Echo. Echo seems to identify that Caroline is who she is, and no matter who else she is, she's just nobody unless she's Caroline. However, she also establishes an identity separate from Caroline in that moment, admitting that Caroline more or less abandoned her when she signed her contract with Dollhouse. When talking to Senator Perrin in a later episode, she makes it clear that she's developed an idea of how she feels about Caroline. She's afraid of her. She's afraid of her because she knows that she's the real person and Echo is just a fragmented reflection of other people, but she doesn't want to die (a.k.a. stop existing by Caroline being reimprinted into her body).

Caroline is who she could be, yet because of this identity, she expresses no intense desire to go back to being Caroline other than to bring Caroline back to where she belongs and bring her back to life. It's not about her needing her identity, it's about her idealism and her protection of other people--her want to look out for Caroline. She has a sense of identity as Echo now rather than simply being a tabula rasa, Caroline, or whatever imprint she possesses, and this is what leads to her full self-awareness that dawns.

Since the composite event that Alpha forced on her, there are remnants of all her personalities that can't be wiped from her, which means all 38 of them are up there somewhere. Luckily, it's demonstrated that she can remain stable and sane, unlike Alpha, despite juggling these multiple people in one. She is fully self-aware as of 1.12, but uses skills drawn from those personalities to imitate a blank slate for her own self-preservation.

Another interesting aspect that Omega and Alpha's attempt to turn them into higher beings brought to the table for Echo is that while she isn't on Team Dollhouse, she's not on Team Alpha, either. She stands apart from both. She doesn't consider them above the rest of humanity, or ubermensch, as Alpha does. She considers them nobody. She considers them everybody.

She's sorting out who she is and trying to dig it out now that she's realized she's not Caroline and has a separate identity, but she knows it doesn't make them better. It just makes the Dollhouse worse. As she puts it, "no one of [her thirty eight brains] thinks you can sign a contract to be a slave."

First Person Sample:

Whole damn city and, what, this is my one contact? Thought the whole hostage kidnapping package usually came with a big black van, stuffy room with one light on the ceiling, swinging around?

Look, you want information, I gotta tell ya, you're not getting it outta me. So, whoever you are, how's about you come and find me and we talk this out with our fists like a coupla adults.

'Cause, I'm gonna tell you right now, you're not gonna love it if you make me come find you. Ever see those cartoons? You know the ones with the cat and the canary? Yeah. Somethin' like that.

Third Person Sample:

"You're not pullin' me out."

The expression on Echo's face made it clear there wasn't room for argument on that one. Narrow and commanding. The kind of look she was best at--the kind of look that made it even more unsettling that as a doll, she could give looks instead of just agreeing to go for her treatment.

"I'm telling you, I can do this. Get me back in there, and I'll finish it." Her tone was almost out of breath, like she couldn't stumble over her words fast enough and keep him from arguing long enough. She was passionate. That was the best part of Echo--the part that still rang true to what Caroline had been, from what Ballard knew of her.

"I thought you wanted to take the Dollhouse down?" His tone, on the other hand, was judge-y. Even and challenging. Still, she didn't miss a beat.

"Yeah, well I'm not about to start with this little girl. Are you gonna put me back in or what?" It made him cave. She could see the cave in his shoulders and his sigh and she immediately inflated with triumph, chest puffing out, shoulders broadening. She reached out to clap a hand on his shoulder, using her other to unholster her gun. The contact lasted for only a minute before she backed off, making hand signals to their SWAT comrades and drawing her weapon, turning back towards the hostage situation that was unfolding.

Just another day on the job.