TLV App: Inmate!Arthur

[lestercraft]

User Name/Nick: Maniette
User DW: maniette
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact: Maniette
Other Characters Currently In-Game: Hunter, Doug Eiffel, Richter Belmont

Character Name: Arthur Lester
Series: Malevolent (Podcast), gently AU'd with mod permission
Age: 29 but he's spent time on the Barge, technically 30
From When?: Episode 23, as Uncle throws him into the pit leading to the mines. He'll be coming as he falls, before he hits the ground (which canonically he survives).

Inmate Justification: Arthur has hit rock bottom and kept digging. He's got like six new kinds of trauma since he first arrived on the Barge, and no more will to live. Someone please hold his hand and help him get back to his feet.

Arrival: He's already on the Barge; this is a demotion via canon update. On arrival his room will be updated to match his new canon point, and his warden item will be reduced to its canon-typical lighter status.

Abilities/Powers: Arthur continues to be just a regular human dude from the 1930s, a detective and a musician. He is relentlessly stubborn, and appears to have the ability to survive anything that doesn't outright kill him (and even then there's a few concerning calls that leave that up for debate). He's strongly implied to have some sort of lowkey healing factor that he's not consciously aware of, since most people don't just toddle through the snow on three compound fractures as they're actively bleeding out, or climb cliffs with a recently-relocated shoulder and broken ankle.

His sense of smell in particular has been persistently noted to be quite sharp, he has an extremely intense eye for details, and he's implied to be somewhat musically prodigious, which implies a fantastic sense of hearing, tone and rhythm (disregarding his occasionally lacklustre situational awareness). All his other senses are presumably baseline human.

--however, he is coming from a point where he is not possessed by John or Yellow. His foot and hand have been already been restored by Kayne, but his eyes are no longer occupied and thus will be back to normal within a few days, perfectly unharmed; this therefore removes his immunity to visual-based abilities like hypnosis or hallucinations, meaning he's as vulnerable as anyone other normal human.

ALSO: as he is still eldritchly touched, he keeps the ability to touch a recently-deceased person and see the last few minutes of their lives; he just no longer requires John's presence for this to function.

Inmate Information: Arthur lost his parents to suicide at a young age, lost his lover in childbirth, lost his child to his own negligence, lost his partner to John, and just lost John to the King in Yellow. He has lost, quite literally, everyone he has ever cared about, or loved. There's a part of him that believes he's cursed, or the cause for people dying around him, and there's enough genuine truth to it on a case-by-case basis that it's a thought he can't readily dismiss; certainly Bella couldn't have gotten pregnant without him, his hyper-focused state while writing music caused him to fail to notice Faroe's bath overflowing, and Parker's death was because he let himself be was manipulated by John into opening the book and releasing him.

He is haunted by the deaths he has directly committed, and explicity thinks that the killing of Kellin, a man who could hear voices and only tried killing Arthur when he encouraged Kellin to listen to said voices and didn't like what he heard, was the start of his descent into what he considers evil; especially since Kellin is the first person he has killed by himself (disregarding that Kellin was going to kill them first, what do we need convenient things like facts for). The Widow on the island as well, since there's blatant information to suggest she was largely innocent before she was manipulated by a cult and turned into a monster; Arthur still beat her head in with a rock (to the point of turning it to pulp) while very unsubtly projecting his insecurities and trauma onto her.

The next day, in following the clues dropped by the King in Yellow's cult to find the underground city and enter the temple, Arthur was strapped to a table and very nearly sacrificed to the King in order to give John full control of his body. Hooray for more religious trauma! As well as being taunted and kidnapped by the King to the Dreamlands so he can be tortured into releasing John.

His and John's journey through the Dreamlands was also horrifying in any number of ways - but in this instance, while Arthur doesn't remember having been to the Dreamlands before, John does (thanks to the December 2022 flood that showed them their future) which allows them to avoid some of the more physically damaging confrontations in their future; however, avoiding some of them doesn't mean all of them, so the boys still experience the Forest in which Arthur has to bite John's finger off for safe passage, crossing the desert and the myriad of more minor hazards involved, being manipulated and tricked by the King in Yellow when they encounter his temple, and time spent in his prison pits - though this time, they manage to escape in a more timely manner, without the sanity damage of having to kill and eat Faust (though Arthur will get those memories all back when he's back on the Barge).

When they escape the pits, Arthur is further tormented by Kayne, another eldritch being of unknown allegiance with a wild interest in Arthur, by luring Arthur through the scene of a bloody massacre with the lullaby he wrote for his daughter, and then giving him a knife - which Arthur subsequently uses on himself, when the King takes John and he can't do anything to stop it. Arthur would rather kill himself than give up - and this is a marked change from his previous stance, on never wanting to ever put that pain of his death on someone else, even a stranger.

Unfortunately, he doesn't die. And the King throws him out of the Dreamlands and into the snow, where he has to set his own leg, now broken in three places (thanks again KiY) and makes a deal with Kayne to return John: only instead Kayne gives him Yellow, a new and unsympathetic splinter of the King that doesn't remember anything of their time together. When they venture out into the snow to find answers, and a way to separate them, an invisible beast attacks them; they get rescued by Jack Larson, and recover in the Larson estate - and when the patriarch Wallace Larson (pretending to be his own grandson named Andrew, to cover the fact of his immortality) catches them snooping, Wallace reveals that he knows about eldritch gods like the King in Yellow, and in fact worships them - and sacrificed his own daughter to one to gain immortality and power. It's this fact that, combined with Yellow screaming at him that he's a monster, causes Arthur to finally, fully snap. Before he can act out any sort of revenge, however, he gets thrown down a pit to be fed to the invisible monster that nearly killed him earlier.

(While in the show itself, Arthur would proceed to go on a single-minded murderous rampage that ends with him sobbing over the corpse of his latest kill in misplaced self-loathing, he's not getting that here. He can get therapy like a normal person.)

One of Arthur's most defining features as a person is that he does not give up. Not when his wife and daughter died, not when he lost his vision, not through every single time he's been stabbed or shot or tortured specifically because of John. This is a double-edged sword, in that he will continue to power through no matter what he is currently suffering through, both physically and emotionally; essentially, as long as Arthur is able to keep moving and focused on literally anything else, he'll actively ignore whatever he's currently suffering in favour of his latest fixation.

He's someone who actively seeks to perform kind actions, and even though his current path has implicitly shown him that these will always get him hurt, he does still want to try. And he'll willingly offer anyone kindness and sympathy - up until he's wronged by them for it, and then he'll be a sharp, resentful bastard to them. And paradoxically, despite knowing how valuable it is to receive it, he will actively fight pretty much any attempts to give him those same kindnesses, convinced he doesn't deserve them for the evil he's committed.

Thanks to the previously mentioned Wallace 'sacrificed his daughter for power and tried to use that to relate to Arthur' Larson, Arthur is in an extremely fraught emotional state, and having been denied the catharsis of hunting down and killing Wallace and/or Uncle himself by being brought back to the Barge, he's going to be extremely reactive and short-tempered, feeling most of his emotions in extremes when he feels anything through his self-loathing and brand new funky-fresh suicidal tendencies. He's always been readily self-sacrificing, but at least he used to be able to pretend there was a reason for it - a part of him that's too large to deny now simply wants to die.

Path to Redemption: Arthur wants to die. Arthur, less than 48 hours ago, slit his own throat rather than live with the thought that John would be torn away from him; the last person he had in the whole world, after losing his family, his partners, his daughter, his sight and agency. It didn't work, but for someone who refused to commit suicide even after the death of his daughter because he doesn't want anyone else to feel the way he did after his parents' own suicide, even tangentially, it shows a massive shift in attitude that desperately needs addressing.

Primarily, Arthur is here for three simple reasons: to begin to forgive himself, not just for the harm he has caused others and refuses to let go of, but also for the actions he performed in dire circumstances with no other options; to learn how to acknowledge that his situation has been well and truly outside of his control, and to differentiate between the things he did control and fucked up, and the things he couldn't and had no better options; and to reignite his will to live. Watching his life fold out nearly the exact same way as he saw from the future flood from December '22 has cemented the idea in the back of his mind that there's no point to anything he does because it'll all be for nothing.

Overall, Arthur is going to be an absolute bitch to try and warden with a heavy hand. He's contrarian and stubborn, even knowing better, and can become varying degrees of hostile when he's pushed on a topic he doesn't want to talk about. In a best case scenario, he'll simply shut down the line of inquiry and change topics; but with his extremely tenuous grip on his composure currently, this could lead to actual violence if he's pushed even a little bit too far. Knowing that his permanent warden will read his file and learn everything anyway is going to cause him to be extremely unhelpful on purpose, as he's someone who tends to keep his secrets very close to his chest and will react badly to those being used against him, or even acknowledged in the open. He has carried most of his old griefs with him for significant parts of his life - Faroe's death for more than six years, and his parents for over twenty - and some of those are going to be difficult for him to move on from.

On the other hand though, he'll react with hostility to anything he perceives as pity. Now more than ever he is ferociously independent, and if he thinks he catches even the slightest whiff of someone feeling sorry for him he will nope right out of the conversation with both middle fingers raised. He's had enough of being pitied in his life, and that won't earn anyone a positive reaction. Empathy works better, if you can catch him off-guard and make him realise it's actually relating to him on an equal emotional level; but that'll be a bit trickier to employ, especially because he is hyperaware of and actively resistant to attempts at manipulation, and is no position to understand whether it's coming from a good place or not.

Any Warden who actively uses religious ideals is right out; boy's got some fierce Catholic trauma and having someone try to get him to actively engage with religion will almost certainly be detrimental. But a nonhuman or younger warden might actually go fairly well with him; he is almost chronically incapable of hurting a minor, and would hate himself even more for doing it. Regardless, it's going to need to be someone who can take the heat from his cruel or suicidal arguments.


History: Arthur @ Malevolent Wiki; changes to his timeline per the discussed AUing are included here, relevant through eps 13-20 and not affecting s3.

Sample RP: He's still active in-game, so he has plenty of threads currently!

Special Notes: John (greatoldjohn) and Arthur are still metaphysically entangled, and as such Arthur will ping as supernatural (specifically eldritch, low-key King in Yellow vibes for those who aren't familiar with John specifically) to anyone with the ability to sense that. To normal humans he's totally mundane.

Arthur also does remember the canon version of events up until Episode 25, on the Barge.

Comments

Timeline Changes

[lestercraft]

Arthur and John(?) get dropped back in the Dreamlands at the point in time they were taken from. However, John retains prior knowledge of their time on the Barge - Arthur doesn't.

Ep 13:

The boys enter the forest: it's too close to their starting point to avoid, and it takes John a fraction too long to realise Arthur doesn't remember to stop him from entering it. John tries to explain the situation, but Arthur doesn't trust him so immediately after the King in Yellow's ritual, and John is forced to play along to the best of his ability, quietly deciding to try and steer Arthur clear of their greater dangers where possible. Wooden pinky finger is retained.

Deal with Trader goes unchanged, as the Trader won't accept less for the yellow stone. Glass of Leng acquired. John also tries to ask if the Trader has been to the city yet, but the Trader doesn't answer.

Ep 14:

Canyon remains unchanged; no items or events of note.

Encounter with soldiers remains: John prompts Arthur to use the mask sooner, and they approach the first one they see, but due to it being a fucking desert still require directions to Frank's apartment. Coin acquired. Attempt is made to interrogate them about the Order of the Fallen Star, but due to their inability to speak is largely fruitless.

With time to kill until the blue star appears, the boys collect the tinned food and changed clothes, and John tries to broach the topic more tactfully, advising that he is only trying to help Arthur if he is going to suggest alternate paths. Arthur is doubtful, but willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Ep 15:

Vanguard returns; Arthur resolves not to use it until they're back on the Barge, despite John suggesting they ditch it for good measure.

They attempt to time the blue star better to avoid the worst of the storm; Arthur points out that John said a map and supplies exist on the ship, and they could possibly find a different entrance that doesn't alert the snake monster. They manage to find a second break in the hull, and take time while they wait for the storm to pass to discuss merits of continuing south to "bulb" to collect lantern. Sandstorm scars + lightning burns avoided; Hooks and alcohol flask acquired.

While Arthur tries to argue the merit of investigating the bulb, John points out that the risk of the creature winning next time, plus their completely random chance of finding it given the maze and that they literally stumbled upon it makes the lantern too dangerous to safely reacquire. Guiding lantern lost

Ep 16:

The boys reach the obelisk. They discuss the merit of going over the cliffs instead of beneath, but the risk of a sandstorm with the unknown components puts them back on the elevator and into the Underworld.

They find the salamander; John laments not having a camera, but John advises him to avoid the campsite by emphasising the continued path, and relates the encounter with the Gug that nearly killed them.

Arthur pushes the merits of going to the campsite anyway to retrieve Frank's journal, reasoning that he doesn't know these things yet and there's no guarantee he'll relearn them or go back to the Barge, but John argues against it, pointing out that they're trying to leave, not just survive. Broken ankle avoided

Ep 17:

Gug and maze avoided entirely due to not falling down cliff. Dislocated shoulder avoided

Ep 18:

Taking recommended path leads to disused, deep maze, eventually stumble across glowing fungus caves; Arthur uses the lighter to help prevent them from falling into multiple more traps until they are clear of pitfalls. John brings up knowing that the King will manipulate them, and try to plan a way around the use of "Frank".

Instead, however, thanks to overhearing this, the King pretends to be John. By blocking his voice sporadically and giving Arthur incorrect directions, or letting him run into objects or danger, it builds mistrust and paranoia regardless, especially with his maddening influence.

John realises first, when Arthur begins to take obviously wrong directions and stops responding to his railing against it. Arthur takes longer, when the King tries to trick him into drinking selenine and he realises that he's been too calm, having stopped arguing or being irritated about the situation.

At this point the King dumps Arthur into the trauma conga to try and make him forget Faroe, but Arthur defies it as expected.

The boys are thrown into the prison pits again.

Ep 19:

Since they're on good terms this time, and Arthur feels able to trust John this time, they can work a lot more efficiently on escaping the pit, especially knowing it's possible.

John knows they are on a timer for Faust, something he keeps to himself; towards the end of their first month, they get a chance to attack a guard, as it refills their water bucket. Arthur kills it with a deeply concerning amount of enthusiasm. Once they're sure the coast is clear, they use its corpse to climb out of the pit.

Arthur still rescues the cana. Because do kindness where you can.

Lilly is there when they escape, and after she gets them the waxy tuber they lead her away from their intended path, so she doesn't follow them to the city.

When they meet the Trader, Arthur is pushy but less threatening. Arthur still reacts extremely poorly to discovering the music box. Bag, all items and music box reacquired.

Ep 20:

Because Kayne has been watching them and sees them escape early, he slaughters the city shortly before they arrive explicitly to prove John wrong about being able to control the story.

John tries to prompt Arthur to ignore Kayne in the city, that they know Faroe isn't there, but Arthur doesn't listen. However, they do try and leave the conversation early at John's prompting, causes Kayne to follow them and harass them, proclaiming frustration at them just ignoring his clever trap, at surprising him with the things they've done and avoided because that is certainly not how things were supposed to proceed. Arthur tries to give him the cold shoulder, as he realises John is very much correct about Kayne, but Kayne is persistent, and forces the dagger on Arthur as a "reward" for the extra entertainment.

Due to previous Lilly absence, is not present for the do-over.

Meeting with the King essentially unchanged. When he speaks privately with Arthur, he tries to offer Arthur the chance to go back to Parker, before he was killed, or to Faroe. To not have to remember anything he's done or will do to them, to be safe and happy - all he asks for in exchange is John.

Arthur doesn't give in, despite the massive damage that does to his sanity.

So the King just breaks his leg again.

And Arthur pulls the knife out again. John realises what he's doing this time and tries to stop him, but Arthur is Arthur.

It still fails, John goes with the King because he has to believe the Admiral will grab Arthur from there in time, and the King dumps Arthur back into the snow.

At this point, clear from the King, the Admiral does pick Arthur up again.

Intermission

Arthur gets taken back to the Barge, rescued by ??? from the deck and taken to the Infirmary to be stitched back together.

As soon as he's able to, without consulting anyone, Arthur asks the Admiral to send him back so he can get John himself.

Unfortunately, he goes straight to the cabin and forgets the Barge again immediately.

Coda:

Arthur, not knowing any better, makes the deal with Kayne for Yellow.

Arthur agrees; s3 proceeds as canon until 23 where Arthur is dropped down the pit and returned to the Barge as an inmate.