ooi.

Character Information
Name: Winifred ‘Fred’ Burkle
Fandom: Angel
PB: Amy Acker
journal: soothingcrazy
powers: None

Relationships: Single and fully unprepared to be otherwise.
Friendships: The ensemble at Angel Investigations: Cordelia, Gunn, Wesley, Lorne and, of course, Angel
Sexuality: Half the time, she’s not very well ‘oriented’ at all. However, the other half the time, she’s looking for her (male) knight in shining armor.

Strengths: Inventing things, watching other people play video games, reading, concocting unequivocally weird recipes (some of which are inexplicably delicious, too). In the spirit of The Breakfast Club, her weirder talents include a basic fluency in Pylean, and baiting demons.
Weaknesses: Short attention span, horribly insecure, easily lied to and manipulated, innocent as the day she was born (sorta), in a fragile mental state, rides difficult-to-follow trains of thought, oblivious to hints- i.e. socially awkward and ill at ease. She also reallyreally likes tacos.
Habits/Quirks: Honestly, Fred’s entire personality is constructed of ‘quirk.’ She talks to plants, changes subjects mid-sentence, uses words that might not actually exist and seems convinced that bacon plus peanut butter plus chocolate is a masterfully delicious culinary invention. Mm.
Personality: At one point in time, Fred was quite the prolific little conspiracy theorist- an example of a girl who had seen The Matrix one too many times and taken it to heart. However, her true nature, one of a rather quiet and insecure individual, was compounded in Pylea, as well as warped somewhat into someone who was, in the most generous terms, a bit nutty.

Though slightly unstable mentally, Fred is not at all dangerous, though she can be a bit confusing at times. Fred’s attention span knows no middle ground- she is either engrossed totally in something or hardly engaged at all, which has been known to make conversing with her something of a difficulty. However, she has a very strong memory, and an eye for detail that has come in handy plenty of times.

In many ways, Fred is childlike, in that she sees the world with perpetually innocent eyes and has a playful side. She also still takes most people’s words with a youthful literalism, and takes things to heart quickly and frequently ultra-personally, making her very easy to hurt as well as flatter. Unfortunately, Fred has never established herself as a skilled communicator, instead becoming a master of the ‘information dump,’ which can frequently be overwhelming and not terribly conducive to furthering conversation. She’d been working on that in LA, sort of, but the self-improvement project might be getting shelved until further notice.
What was your character doing before they arrived on the island? Fred’s family was, at the end of the day, just another middle-class suburban family unit in her hometown of San Antonio, Texas. However, it became apparent early in their daughter’s life that they had unwittingly produced a specimen of above-average intellect. Fred was full of questions from the get-go, and experimented to find answers if the ones she was given weren’t satisfactory. Fred excelled in the public schools where her parents sent her, and graduated high school two years early.

Fred was offered science scholarships to trans-national colleges, and while her parents rallied for Texas A&M, Fred chose to leave Texas (for the first time ever, really) for UCLA. The socially awkward and insecure Fred once again found academic success in UCLA’s halls, and was a vastly promising beacon in the Physics department. While at her work-study assignment in the school’s library, however, that all went vastly awry, and Fred was snatched through a portal into a parallel dimension called Pylea, a land of two suns ruled by demons that enslaved the human minority.

Almost immediately upon arrival, the lost and confused college student was caught and collared with an explosive shock collar the Pyleans had devised to ensure human obedience. After almost a year in captivity, Fred was finally able to successfully disable the collar, though this success had been predicated by many, many failures of varying degrees of disaster. Winifred spent the next four years completely alone, hiding for her life in a cave. Not pulling any punches here, but that period of her life (if you could call that living, really, was debatable) was beyond horrific, as a four-year span of solitary isolation made necessary for survival would be.

When Fred was nearing her fifth anniversary in Pylea (not that she was counting), she had nearly convinced herself her life on Earth among people had not been real, merely an invention of her mind that she’d tricked herself into believing somehow. Her days were consumed with finishing the equation that would prove her theory and thusly convince her that her past was all in her mind, as well as trying to survive.

Then, almost out of the sky, Angel appeared in her life, followed shortly by his friends and co-workers. Angel and the others saved Fred from Pylea (in the process ensuring that Fred would fall hopelessly in love with Angel, for however brief a time), and brought her back to the headquarters of their PI service in LA. Despite their best efforts, Fred stowed herself in her hotel room for an entire summer and then some, attempting to use mathematic equations to cope with everything that had transpired since she’d been sucked in Pylea.

It took the appearance of Roger and Trish Burkle in LA (funny how things went full circle like that) to pull Fred back from whatever half-real pseudo-life she’d constructed around herself. Since reuniting with her parents, but deciding to stay in LA with Angel Investigations (where she needed to be and was needed), Fred has been on a more even keel. That is, prior to her sudden and inexplicable relocation to yet another previously unknown universe. That's enough to drive a sane girl 'round the bend, and Fred's not exactly in the driver's seat of this particular handbasket. (Fred is from mid-Season 3, anywhere between 'Billy' and 'Waiting in the Wings.')

Writing Example: “Don’t worry, I think y’all look just lovely,” Fred said as she stroked a fuzzy brown frond affectionately. “Just as soon as summer’s over and things are a little cooler, you’ll be back to your old selves.” She grinned cheerfully, crossing her arms over the book she held before her as she bounced slightly on the balls of her feet. From the lobby of the Hyperion, her giggle could be heard faintly through the French doors, as if the cattails were flirting with her or told a particularly funny joke.

Fred sat down on the stone bench in the hotel’s garden and opened her book- today it was Wind in the Willows, which she’d read as a child, but there was no rule that said you couldn’t read a good book twice. Or if there was, Fred certainly hadn’t heard about it and she would be very unhappy if it was true. Anyway, as Fred opened the novel up to return to Rat and Mole’s search for Otter’s son, she felt compelled to reflect on the sunlight that fell across the page.

The plants that surrounded Fred loved sunlight. Some of them (aptly named sunflowers) even followed it across the sky. Angel, though, he couldn’t have sunlight. It made him all ‘splodey, Fred had come to understand. She, though, was somewhat between the two extremes. Even though she was now more than capable and willing to leave her room, she still found the darker, shadowy places more comfortable- homey. Fred sighed wistfully, briefly recalling her jaunt through the sewers with Angel. That had been nice.

When Fred looked back down at the book in her lap, she blinked, surprised to find that there was, in fact, no book in her lap. How very peculiar. Had she put it aside without thinking about it? Surely not! Fred turned her head, looking for the wayward book, and just barely registered that she wasn’t even in the Hyperion’s garden any longer when she found her vision swimming, and then going entirely over to black.