billkiller

OOC Information

Player: Lexil
Contact: Plurk is Lexil, email is [mephistophilesgirl@gmail.com], aim is [tinmaiden].
Age: 26
Current characters: Lazarus Lawliet and Luca "Nux" Dantonio!

IC Information

Name: Preincarnation is Beatrix Kiddo, known as The Bride until her name is revealed in Kill Bill Vol. 2. Her reincarnation's name is Arlene Machiavelli.
Canon: Kill Bill Vol. 1, and the sequel Kill Bill Vol. 2.

Preincarnation Information

Appearance: Beatrix is tall, thin, and blonde. She's described by another character as having "big eyes" and "hay-colored hair"; she is considered beautiful, if some of her features are unconventionally so.

History: Very little is known about Beatrix's past on account of her career requiring a lot of confidentiality and secrecy. The names of her parents were Marc and Michelle Kiddo, and they died of an unspecified cause at an unspecified time. What is known (if still unspecified) is that at some point following their deaths, Beatrix got involved with a very deadly man who headed a team of assassins known as the "Deadly Vipers." His name was Bill, and Beatrix (codename "Black Mamba") was, for awhile at least, his right-hand lady. Beatrix, a talented martial artist and swordsman, traveled to China during their relationship and studied under Bill's own teacher, the cantankerous and notoriously bigoted and misogynistic Pai Mei, under whose tutelage she flourished in ways that even Bill hadn't managed to approach. As Bill put it, though Pai Mei was a miserable old bastard, he was lonely, and Beatrix's patience and willingness to work hard eventually won the kung-fu master over enough for him to teach her some of his most prized techniques.

Several years after her apprenticeship with Pai Mei ended, something unexpected befell the accomplished and deadly assassin. She fell pregnant with Bill's baby, and made the decision that being under constant threat from other assassins was no way to try to raise a child (she was even under attack moments after her pregnancy test turned up positive, and spared because the would-be killer was able to read the test results and was assured that Beatrix would give up her profession that day.) Beatrix cut Bill out of her life without a word by faking her own death, moved to Texas, and started going by the name Arlene Machiavelli. She quickly met a happy-go-lucky young man named Tommy Plympton, with whom she started a relationship. She started working at his record store, and eventually accepted his marriage proposal.

During their wedding rehearsal, the very pregnant Beatrix heard a flute's dulcet tones drifting from the back of the chapel. Stepping outside, she found Bill, who had managed to track her down. Even though the circumstances were hardly ideal from Bill's perspective, he seemed to be at peace with Beatrix's decision, even agreeing to attend the wedding as the much younger Beatrix's "father". He stated that walking her down the aisle wasn't something that he was comfortable with, but he would be content to sit on the bride's side of the chapel, making him the only member of her family in attendance to give their blessing. Beatrix was overjoyed to the point of tears, but it was fleeting; moments after the official beginning of the wedding rehearsal, the other members of the Deadly Vipers marched into the chapel with semiautomatic rifles and gunned down everyone in attendance... except for Bill. This brought the death toll to 9. It would have been 10, but despite being shot in the skull and put in a coma for four years, Beatrix survived.

When she woke up, she discovered that her unconscious body had been prostituted regularly by an unethical orderly named Buck. Her first act after waking up to the horrific realization that she was in a hospital and her baby was gone was killing her pimp and stealing his Pussy Wagon (a van with that literally emblazoned on it). After managing to wake up atrophied limbs and drive away from the hospital parking garage, Beatrix started planning her revenge.

The first order of business was going to Okinawa, Japan and finding Hattori Hanzo, a man known for the superb quality of his folded steel samurai swords. He retired from the business of making objects that could kill people, instead running a quiet and often-deserted sushi restaurant, but Beatrix found him and demanded that he make her a sword. Though he initially refused, his guilt at having taught Bill everything the man knew about swordsmanship won out, and Beatrix stayed with him and trained while he worked on her sword. When he presented it to her, he told her that if she were to encounter God on her travels, God would be cut.

Sword in hand, Beatrix had a list of 5 she intended to kill, all of whom were involved with the massacre that robbed her of her baby and her new life. The first was O-ren Ishii, a half-Japanese half-Chinese American military brat who had, despite being female and her mixed heritage, managed to climb to the top of the Tokyo Underground and become a respected Yakuza boss. Constantly flanked by bodyguards and her own personal army known as the Crazy 88, O-Ren was certainly the most high-profile name on Beatrix's list and possibly one of the harder ones to take down, so much that Vol. 1 is largely devoted to the task. O-ren felt both respect and contempt for Beatrix which made their final face-off tense and charged, but Beatrix humbled O-ren after slicing through her bodyguard's and army, ultimately killing her by slicing the top of her skull off and scalping her. In the aftermath of Beatrix's bloody rampage, she allowed one to survive: O-ren's confidante, translator and best friend, Sophie Fatale. Minus an arm, she was tasked with telling Bill all that had happened that night and to tell him that she was coming for him.

The next name was Vernita Green, who had, in the last four years, built the life that Beatrix wanted for herself. She lived in the suburbs, married a doctor, and most significantly, had a four-year-old daughter named Nikita. Beatrix's assassination attempt was interrupted by Nikita's arrival home from school, and circumstances required Beatrix to do what she was trying to avoid: killing the girl's mother right before her eyes. She told Nikita that her mother had it coming, and if she was still sore about it when she was older, she could come find Beatrix and settle the score the same way.

The third name on Beatrix's list was Budd, Bill's brother, the only man on the assassination squad. Portly and no longer in top form, he lived in a trailer just outside of El Paso, chewing tobacco and working as a bouncer at a strip club (a job he loses shortly after he's introduced.) He had a Hattori Hanzo once and claimed to have sold it to a pawn shop for $200 when Bill arrived to warn him that she would be coming for him, and in one of the film's more insightful moments, he told his brother that Beatrix deserved her revenge, and they deserved to die. He laughed and amended that so did she, and that they would just have to wait and see how it all turned out. While stalking the outside of Budd's trailer, he proved to not be as washed-up as he appeared, going from peacefully sitting in a rocking chair and listening to Johnny Cash to blasting his door open with a shotgun in seconds at just the opportune moment. He shot Beatrix's chest full of rock salt, rendering her in too much pain to act against him, and knocked her unconscious. When she came to, she was being buried alive, and before nailing her into her coffin, bound and with a flashlight, Buck told her it was for breaking his brother's heart. Beatrix manages to literally punch her way out of her coffin by recalling the grueling training of Pai Mei and his insistence that she master the seemingly useless technique of punching a hole through wood from only three inches away.

She escaped, but Budd held onto her Hattori Hanzo and contacted the fourth name on Beatrix's list, Elle Driver. Elle was also blonde and blue-eyed, and also desired a relationship with Bill, seeing Beatrix as a professional and romantic rival. She also studied under Pai Mei with very different results; he plucked out one of her eyes for her disobedience and insolence, and in retaliation she poisoned and killed him before completing her training. She brought a million dollars in a briefcase to Budd for Beatrix's sword, but there was a Black Mamba coiled in wait as he pawed excitedly through the cash. It struck and bit him several times while Elle sadistically read facts about the snake to the dying man, saying that she was disgusted that Beatrix met her end at the hands of someone like him. Shortly after, Beatrix burst through the door and started to fight Elle in Budd's trailer. During the violent and vicious struggle, she found Budd's Hanzo sword, which he'd lied to Bill about selling. Even after the emotional turmoil upon hearing Elle laugh about killing Pai Mei, Beatrix had the advantage in the fight because she, unlike Elle, had actually completed her training under him, and the fight ended when Beatrix plucked out Elle's other eye and squished it under her foot. Elle had the distinction of being the only name on Beatrix's list who didn't end up definitely dead by the end of the movie; Beatrix simply shuts the trailer door on a flailing, furious and clumsy blinded opponent who is in an enclosed area with a very deadly snake. Elle's fate remained unknown by the film's end.

Finally, Beatrix went after Bill, the fifth and final name on her list. An 80-year-old pimp and father figure of Bill's named Esteban pointed Beatrix his direction after she paid him a visit in Mexico, saying that in spite of his affection for Bill, he's sure that the man would have wanted him to tell her where she could find him. Stalking through his lavish southeastern estate, she was prepared to kill the man who started all of it... until she saw a four-year-old girl. Raised by Bill, "B.B." was precocious and cute and Bill knew that it was the quickest way to cut Beatrix to the quick. He greeted her warmly, introducing her to B.B. as "Mommy", forcing Beatrix to keep up the illusion of civility while she bonds with her long-lost daughter. She took a few hours to talk and watch movies with B.B., but was disquieted when she learned that the little girl was already picking up a chilling callousness toward death as Bill's next student. Once B.B. was asleep, she headed downstairs to confront Bill, who shot her with a truth serum and forced her to admit that she still had feelings for him, taking the opportunity to vent some of his own. Rather than engaging in a swordfight, Bill's death was quiet; she killed him with Pai Mei's most coveted technique, the "Five-Point-Palm Exploding Heart Technique", where five strikes to a man's chest will cause his heart to explode after the next five steps he takes.

Though Beatrix had conflicted feelings about killing Bill, she took B.B. and left the estate with her, optimistic about finally getting to start a new life with her child and making up for lost time.

http://killbill.wikia.com/wiki/Beatrix_Kiddo
Personality: A tragedy of Quentin Tarentino movies in general is that while there is no shortage of strong female characters who kick a lot of ass, strong (read: well-developed) female characters are sparse. Beatrix Kiddo is sadly no exception; she is more a vehicle for the events of Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2 than a colorful and well-defined personality in her own right. That being said, there are extrapolations that can be made based on the context of her relationships, reactions and attitudes that can be fleshed out into a series of reasonable assumptions.

The first of these is that Beatrix is resourceful, intuitive and street-smart. Evidence abounds since her enemies are all cunning and powerful and she needs sterling social skills and sharp wits to take them on and prevail. She is perhaps not booksmart, however, and it's possible that she never even finished highschool if the length of her relationship with Bill started when she was very young. At least once, she misuses a word, saying "entropy" instead of "atrophy" in her narration. When asked in an interview if she misspoke the line, Uma Thurman (Beatrix's actress) said that they left it in because it seemed like the kind of thing Kiddo would mix up/say. So though Beatrix excels at her chosen crafts and speaks Japanese fluently, Mandarin and "a little Spanish" passably, and Cantonese badly, she's probably not a genius. In fact, her intelligence may well be in the average to marginally above-average territory, and this view seems to be shared at least to some extent by the minds that conceptualized Beatrix and brought her to life in the first place.

It can be inferred that Beatrix has excellent social skills. She's shown to be able to affect a friendly, personable and cheerful demeanor that lowers the guard of those she needs to charm, as she does when she plays the dumb blonde foreigner to disarm and endear herself to Hattori Hanzo before daring to demand that he make her a sword. She also is able to make Tommy fall in love with her within what appears to be the span of just a few months, since it happened sometime between the point where she found out she was pregnant and she was nearly due to deliver, and the personality she projects as the young woman in love contentedly working in her hubby's record store is astoundingly different from the bristly and vengeful personality we see for the most part when she's onscreen. Furthermore, she has a group of close and devoted friends/bridesmaids at the wedding rehearsal, who call her a little angel and are willing to cover for her when her future mother in law is getting on her nerves. So clearly, she's able to forge fast and convincing friendships very swiftly. It's possible that the sweet, bubbly and charismatic personality was all her before the traumatic experiences that made her revenge-bent, but it's also possible that it's just the results of a superb actor able to discern what will win people over the fastest at a time that can benefit her and ensure her survival. And if there's one thing Beatrix is determined to do, it's survive.

Beatrix has tremendous conviction when she sets her mind to something and discipline that is almost superhuman. She was able not only to become Bill's top assassin but to make it through the punishing and grueling tutelage of Pai Mei. Whether a task is as small and seemingly simple as wiggling her big toe after four years in a coma, as big as punching her way out of her own coffin, or as intense as murdering five lethal and cunning assassins, her ambition is her law, and she follows it no matter how torturous or difficult her path becomes. This is probably her character's greatest and most admirable strength; she's talented, of course, but she works so hard that it's difficult not to want to root for her. Her will to live is stupendous; so many times during the Kill Bill movies, she could have easily given up and embraced death, but she kept fighting even past her physical and mental limits.

Beatrix is not without her weaknesses, though, and her most notable is the man she chose to let into her life. Though she is the embodiment of a woman scorned, every single one of her actions, reactions and decisions are dictated by the mark that Bill left on her. Whether she's driven by love or revenge, Bill's influence is ultimately the one behind the wheel, and even though she eventually succeeds at killing him, she sobs about it for hours and grapples with her choice after she's made it. She is also rebellious, but only to an extent; though she dislikes Pai Mei's degradation and insults, she recognizes that she has more to gain from the bitter old man than to lose, and endures it until she has earned his respect. The opposite of this is when she kills Buck; having nothing to gain from her pimp and rapist, she doesn't hesitate to kill him once she's ascertained that he knows nothing about Bill's whereabouts.

Beatrix is a combination of strong and fragile. She's lethal, charming and her wits are as sharp as her sword, but she was perhaps taken under Bill's wing before she could develop an identity of her own to the fullest possible extent. He has formed, shaped and controlled her personality, which might be why she seems to be stunted in that regard when she cuts him out of her life (ie, almost all the time we see her onscreen).

Abilities:
-Languages- Beatrix speaks American English, Japanese, Spanish, and Mandarin. She also speaks Cantonese, but her grasp of this language is decidedly worse, as Pai Mei does not hesitate to tell her.
-Conditioning and Strength: Beatrix's fantastic discipline is apparent in her slender but well-muscled frame. She's light, quick, and surprisingly powerful for her build.
-Kung-Fu- She studied under Pai Mei, completed her tutelage, and is one of the most skilled in her universe. Her most deadly technique under this banner is the "Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique," which, following five strikes to the chest, makes a person's heart explode after a mere five steps.
-Swordsmanship-She's proficient in Japanese sword techniques, even prodigious.
-Social Skills- Very good. Equally adept at intimidating others and earning their friendship.
-Acrobatics: Beatrix is in top physical form and moves quickly, agilely and easily. She can do backflips and a variety of aerial maneuvers to aid in her fighting.

Reincarnation Information

Age: 31
Species: Human
Appearance: No differences! Arlene is a woman in her early 30s who is beautiful, even if life has tired her out some and maybe aged her slightly beyond her years.

Starting Location: Gateway City

History: Arlene Machiavelli was born in a small town in Nebraska. From an early age, she was pretty and well-liked and had lots of friends. All of them suggested that she should think about acting or modeling or a related career, which she seriously considered and even idealized since she didn't much care for the academic aspects of school. She ran away from home at the age of 15 after a fight with her parents about her grades, hitchhiking to Las Vegas and not looking back. Naturally blonde and all legs, she lied about her age, got into clubs, and made connections by merit of her naive charm. She was a hick, but she was an adorable hick. By the time she was 16, she met Mack, a charismatic drug dealer who frequently came in and out of Vegas on business. He told her about the glamor of his life and talked a big game about the people he knew who could get her into "the industry", and like any trusting small-town girl, she trusted him pretty implicitly.

It started simply enough. Arlene was told to introduce herself as Amber, which she rolled with easily, rationalizing that Arlene is something you'd call your aunt and not a vivacious hot young thing ready to take on the world. But it wasn't long before she was doing things she didn't want to for Mack and his friends. She worked as a stripper and eventually as a prostitute in Sin City, with Mack telling her the whole time that she would be a star if she just paid her dues like everyone else.

Then she got pregnant. She kept working until she started showing, and that's when she finally broke down and told Mack, whose approval she desperately craved despite the discouraging turns her life had taken. He reacted with anger, blaming and ultimately abandoning her. Her immediate instinct was to get an abortion, but she was a slim, lanky woman already who was working hard to keep her figure even while pregnant, and she neglected to realize just how far along she was. She bit the bullet and decided to give her baby up for adoption, getting a job as a cocktail waitress and downgrading to an all-night diner waitress when she was deemed no longer "hot" enough. She delivered her child a few months later and immediately fell in love with the little girl, almost renegging on her agreement with her adoptive family but electing to let go even though it broke her heart. The adoptive family was sympathetic, saying that they would keep in touch and send letters and photographs so that Arlene could remain updated on the good life they would give her daughter.

After the little girl's birth, Arlene went back to work as a waitress in the same Las Vegas diner, where she remained for the next odd decade. Then the invasion happened, and she was forced to flee the city. She made her way to Gateway City. Several months later, she heard that the family that had adopted her child half of her lifetime ago had been killed in the invasion, and that her daughter was also presumed dead. Many tears were shed, but Arlene was a survivor, if nothing else. She grit her teeth, kept pouring coffee, and worked the same sorts of jobs she was comfortable with until (and after) she received her first echo.

Personality: Arlene and Beatrix share a few key similarities. They both look and dance like Uma Thurman. Both put their love and trust in the kinds of men their mothers warned them about, both carried pregnancies to term and could not raise their children. Both grieved their daughters as if they were dead, and both are (or were at one point) ambitious. But there are many more differences between them.

The first and probably the most notable is that Arlene is unskilled. Though she's learned some important life lessons through experience, she dropped out of high school and has very little formal education. By hitching her wagon to a star reliant on being pretty and not much else, she never bothered to consider night classes or trade school, learning a second language or even something like art or music lessons. She has no distinctive or notable "talents", in other words; she wasn't even a very good stripper, despite being encouraged given evey opportunity to learn how to be impressive and develop the athleticism characteristic of accomplished exotic dancers. Simply put, though she's ambitious like Beatrix, Arlene lacks her preincarnation's discipline. Though she works hard, long hours, it is not mentally taxing work. Her feet ache at the end of the day, but she does not push herself to extremes and is far happier to settle for a comfortable middle ground. She spends a lot of time wondering what happened and why she's so washed up already and feels a lot like she was cheated out of a glamorous career, even though that's actually a pretty entitled attitude given her actual talent and potential in the acting and modeling fields (none to speak of, but she believed Mack's lies with all her heart and still kind of does.)

Arlene doesn't have or pursue relationships outside of work; she mostly keeps to herself. She is a bus rider and a simple dresser; she rarely wears makeup and owns few clothes outside of her work uniform, putting her very far from glamorous and flashy Tarentino territory. She does a good job at work but is kind of awkward with customers, focused on getting them out the door quickly rather than schmoozing for good tips. On the rare occasions she tries to strike up conversations with patrons she thinks are sadder than she is, she tends to come across as over-interested and off-putting, so she pretty clearly lacks Beatrix's social skills. She is especially frosty toward smooth-talking, confident men, and is more likely to crack a smile at and trust women as a general rule (as an exception, she'll gravitate toward men who seem lonely and withdrawn who don't feel threatening.) She doesn't consider herself a lesbian or even bisexual, but if she accepts an impromptu coffee date, it will be an invitation from a friendly and kind woman. She's drawn to matronly types but younger and prettier women she tends to look away from.

She's largely ambivalent to the Numbered stuff; relocating was a reason to leave behind a city where she keeps a lot of sad memories, and though she glances up at the news from time to time while pouring coffee, she doesn't seek out information about them. She does seek out tabloids and celebrity gossip, perhaps holding out a shred of hope that she'll see her name or Mack's mentioned. It's fantasy and delusion, but it's the only thing that gets her heart beating fast anymore.

Starting Echoes:
1. Tier 1- A Hattori Hanzo sword
2. Tier 2- A memory of standing outside a chapel in a wedding dress somewhere out in the desert and hearing the tones of a flute, as well as the feelings of dread and anticipation she had upon hearing them.

Goals for RtE: Arlene is a woman largely defined by her life turning out not as exactly as she'd hoped or planned. She wanted fame, attention and the love of everyone she encountered, and she ended up becoming a relatively anonymous waitress who resents those who have made it big in the modeling and acting industries. I want her to not only learn to be a hero, but also to be a decent human being with some depth. Since she's one of the older Numbered (in her thirties, as opposed to her teens or twenties like many of our character), I want her to eventually take on kind of a mama-bear role to some of the younger characters, since that's an instinct Beatrix possesses and Arlene could conceivably echo back and feel compelled to act on.

Samples

Third-Person Sample
The clock seems to get slower every day. Arlene knows that it's not, that if any of those magazines are right about aging and experience, time gets faster the older you get. She's pretty sure there's some truth to that; summers used to seem to last forever, endless hours blending into days as she sat on the curb in her small Nebraska town. Sometimes her coltish, long legs were scraped and bruised while a firecracker popsicle melted down her wrist. Sometimes, boys would whistle and wave as they drove by, and she'd whoop and wave right back.

Now, she doesn't know where the years have gone, let along the hours and days. She heard a song once about measuring a life in "midnights and cups of coffee", but she doesn't remember where that's from, and she knows she'll be too tired to google it when she's off her shift. Her feet hurt in their nurse's shoes; forget high heels, when was the last time she wore a pair of those?

"Hey, sugar. What time do you start serving breakfast?" a patron asks without looking up at her. He's middle-aged and hasn't shaved in a few days, and he smells like cigarette smoke.

"It's a 24-hour diner, cowboy," she says. "The second your order's out of your mouth, it goes on the griddle."

"Then I want an omelette with hash browns, two pieces of dry toast."

Arlene takes out her notepad. Despite working as a waitress for years, she's never gotten good at taking down orders by memory, all but the shortest and simplest ones. "Bad night at the tables?" she asks, topping off his coffee.

"Something like that. The wife's not going to like hearing about it."

Arlene pauses, then slides into the booth across from him. "Well, you can talk my ear off about it, if you want. This is one of our slow times, between midnight and the asscrack of dawn."

"I'd really rather just get my breakfast, thanks."

"Yeah, of course..." Arlene averts her eyes, forcing a slight laugh to hide her embarrassment. "I'll get that to the kitchen right away."

First-Person Sample
[Arlene's never been comfortable with internet forums. She's not actually very computer literate, and the Network reminds her of those faceless posts anonymously sharing and judging opinions. But the draw was impossible to resist; once she knew about her Number, just knowing what she does about this group of special, interesting and unique people was enough to make her contact them.

Cameras seem to follow them, after all, and she's spent the last 15 odd years being practically invisible.]

Hello! Um, hi. Can you see me? Hear me? I'm Arlene Machiavelli, maybe you've heard of me.

[She grins, brightly at first, but it fades quickly. It's unlikely that she'll be recognized, and she knows it.]

Or maybe not. I, uh... did some modeling back in the day, though. People ask that all the time, if I did, so it must be kind of obvious.

[She laughs again. Her smile's broken. She knows damn well that as soon as a person is talking herself up more than others are, she's in trouble, coming off as big-headed rather than accomplished.]

So now that I'm a part of this secret society, do I have to pay membership or booking fees or anything? I want to do it right but I also want to make sure it's not some kind of scam. Only idiots fall for those.

Additional Information

Arlene has a daughter who was thought to have died during the invasion. Exact age and location were left intentionally vague, just in case someone wants to app a character as her biological daughter at some point!